subject: [Textbook-l] history texts

body:
Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
> I don't see why NPOV is so absolutely necessary. As
> you said, NPOV is impossible for textbooks.

NPOV is not impossible for textbooks.  Why should it be?  It's the
easiest thing in the world.  I don't agree with Alex's comments on
history being necessarily POV at all -- I think that his comment
misunderstands the social evolution of consensus embodied in an NPOV
policy.

Suppose it is true that at any point in time, a history text will be
imperfect, biased in some way.  Does that mean we have good reason to
celebrate this flaw?  And to enshrine it?  I think not.  If someone
comes along to improve the text by making it neutral, that's great,
and that's what NPOV is all about.

Consider, what is the alternative?  Suppose someone comes along and
finds a biased or inaccurate statement in a textbook, a statement
which puts forward a particular point of view.  Now, someone clicks
on "edit this page" and changes the statement to make it neutral,
i.e. to make it so that both sides of a dispute could agree to it.

Are you suggesting that such behavior should be frowned upon?  Perhaps
subject to banning?  Can you imagine the result?  "Jimbo, I think you
should ban Mr. Reasonable because he keeps coming in and making our
biased text less biased.  We don't disagree with what he's writing,
it's actually NPOV, but we are opposed to neutrality."

> Why not a creationist textbook? Sure, there's no scientific basis
> for it, but who's to judge whether scientific things are better than
> religious things?

NPOV is the answer.  The point is, if there is legitimate controversy,
then the text itself need take no particular stand, but rather present
the conflict in a way that all parties can agree.

>IMHO DPOV would solve all of these problems, making it so that
>different textbooks could have different prestated POVs and not have
>to worry about making every sentece NPOV.

Ack!  This is a total misunderstanding of NPOV.  There is no
requirement that we make "every sentence NPOV", as if we have to treat
the text as a series of statements rather than a flow of discussion.
It's perfectly appropriate to set a context, and then talk within that
context.

I think this is all a very misguided conversation, an attempt to solve
non-existent problems with NPOV.

--Jimbo


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Server ordered, I'm going away

body:
The big boss server has been ordered and should be arriving at Jason's
house within a few days.  When it comes in, he'll drive down to San
Diego and install it.

I am going to a wedding, leaving tomorrow morning and returning Sunday
but probably not really logging in until Monday.

I *should* have some kind of network access via a borrowed laptop and
dialup, but you know how that is...

I can try to mediate any huge disputes, but of course a wiser course
would be for peace and joy to prevail everywhere simultaneously so
that there's no major disputes.

I'll have my cell on me at all times, of course, and so the people who
have that number and call and request me to do something in an
absolute emergency.

--Jimbo


list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] Server ordered, I'm going away


subject: [Wikitech-l] Time estimate for new server

body:
Penguincomputing just told me that the production lead time on the new
server will be 7-10 days from now.  So I would anticipate that the new
server will be shipped, oh, I guess next Wednesday or so.  Possibly
Jason will install it next Friday.

At that time, he'll also be attempting -- yet again -- to successfully
finish the upgrade to the existing machines.  The problems we've had
there are mysterious and complex, and I guess Jason or Brion could
explain it better than I can.  To my knowledge, though, we don't yet
have a solution, but possibly I will be buying some more parts (power
supplies, different RAM?) to help resolve that.

When all is said and done we should end up with 2 Dual Athlon MP 2800
frontend webservers with 4 gig of RAM each, and the Dual Opteron 246
DB server with 4 gig of RAM as well.

For load balancing across those two machines, we have a number of
options, but my guess is that just serving en from one machine and
everything else from the other will be an acceptable first pass.

When the mood strikes us, we can use just about any kind of simple
machine to do iptables based load balancing.  I've done this before,
and it works amazingly well.  Probably a simple $1500 machine would be
overkill for this.  Maybe Bomis can dig something up to give to us, a
hand-me-down from the ongoing Bomis upgrade program.

The Opteron is going to have 5 73 gig 10,000 RPM SCSI drives in a RAID
10 configuration, which means as I understand it, data striping on 2
disks on one controller channel with mirroring on the other controller
channel, and then there will be 1 hot spare drive in the machine.

So that's performance and redundancy.

Anyhow, the logical capacity is 140 gig.

The machine is shipping with SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for AMD64
preloaded.  We don't have to keep that, although it'll be super easy
to just keep it and I personally prefer that we do.  But if there's a
huge outcry to switch to Debian or Redhat, I'll defer to the most
active developers, although we should be aware that installing a
different OS is likely to slow down our installation by a day -- or
more, if there's any kind of disaster.

--Jimbo


list: wikien-l

from_name: Louis Kyu Won Ryu

subject: [WikiEN-l] Discussion of Wikipedia content issues

body:
Recently, Adam Carr contributed a well-researched writeup about
Wikipedia article quality.  It has since been moved to the meta.
I am concerned that it will receive little attention on the meta,
because relatively few Wikipedians read the meta, and those few that do
are not representative of the community.

I believe such discussions should take place in the Wikipedia: or
Wikipedia_talk: article spaces, now that these are available, so that
the discussion appears in recent changes, and so that it is seen by
everyone who may be interested.  Apparently there is a standing policy
against such discussions in those article spaces.  I believe the policy
should change.

The meta is useful for discussing the technical arcana, interlanguage
issues, and nuts-and-bolts issues of logos and press releases and so
forth.  But I believe it is a mistake to send general-interest
discussions about article content there.  All they get is a decent burial.

Louis


from_name: Kurt Jansson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikimedia, MediaWiki logos uploaded

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

> Oh and I like the Wikimedia logo /exactly/ the way it is. The only thing I
> would change on the MediaWiki logo is to obtain a photo of a more perfect and
> healthy flower (unless that is supposed to be somehow symbolic ;).

I uploaded a sunflower photo intended for the logo a while ago:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sonnenblume.jpg

It's from my parents' garden.

Kurt


list: textbook-l

from_name: Sanford Forte

subject: [Textbook-l] history texts

body:
Jimmy Wales:
> I think this is all a very misguided conversation, an attempt to solve
> non-existent problems with NPOV.
-------
Absolutely 100% correct.

Essentially, in taking this thread to its reductionist (or logical) extreme,
one would have to concede that *all* points of view, including NPOV, *are
points of view*.

We should note that going too far in the direction of NPOV - which is where
this thread is heading - is *exactly* the process engaged by commercial
textbook publishers in an attempt to please everyone. We need only look an
90% of the K-12 textbooks out there to see the kind of pedagogical
medoicrity that this approach has led to.

Thus, following this line of argument, obsessive NPOV (ultimately, within
the contect of the Wikipedia project) = *NO* point of view = no text or
texts worse than what we see from the commercial sector. That's where this
argument - accurately characterized as "misguided", is headed.

Further thoughts:

There is *no* way to escape the subjective bias of *any* author(s). However,
some authors, and books, work hard to present material in a way that
presents all sides *without* burdening the *purpose* of the book with side
issues that divert it from it's primary goal. I think that's the point that
Jimmy was making when he says "The point is, if there is legitimate
controversy, then the text itself need take no particular stand, but rather
present the conflict in a way that all parties can agree." With respect, I
would slightly alter Jimmy's end statement to read as follows: "....but
rather present the conflict in a way that all parties can *agree to
disagree*."

The goal of the Wikipedia textbook project is to take the best state
framework structures, and build content around those structures. The
curriculum specifics of those frameworks are *very* specific. They're meant
to be. One can be NPOV within the context of curriculum frameworks, but be
assured that working within any framework is POV. It's simply unavoidable.
Pick your poison.

In the case of textbooks built around state-approved frameworks, there *is*
an *implicit purpose* built in. That purpose is to create a tool (the
textbook) that will help a teacher present material in a way that the
groups - those approving the textbook frameworks in the first place -
'approve' of. Those groups have - to the best of their ability (with
respect, these efforts vary in quality from state-to-state) - *already* gone
through their own NPOV process!

In California's case, for example, the curriuculum frameworks committees
have sought the input of hundreds of teachers, topical experts, the general
public, educational researchers, cognitive development experts, private and
home schoolers, and many other groups to try to find ways to create a
comprehensive 'general' frameworks that 'work'. These frameworks are
comprehensive, and very thorough, but are they *perfectly* NPOV? Of course
not. They're general guides set up to help those creating textbooks to build
content that is thought-provoking, informative, and hopefully
well-presented.

[note: one of the great opportunities present to any teacher who doesn't
agree with what's stated in a textbook is to use that same textbook as a
foil in presenting elternative arguments. This is called "teaching against
the text". It's a technique that's widely used, at all academic levels]

Thus, per Jimmy's argument, I suggest we forge ahead with the best
frameworks out there, build good open source textbooks, and trust that as a
part of that process, those who want to add modules to counterbalance what
they see as bias in the frameworks can do so. This gives everyone the best
of open source. On the one hand we end up with *better* books that are based
on curriculum frameworks, as well as alternate materials to be used in
addition to, instead of, or in tandem with the approved curriculum framework
materials for those that want to point their educational efforts in a
different direction that those proposed by one or another state framework.

Sanford


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
>Recently, Adam Carr contributed a well-researched writeup about
>Wikipedia article quality.  It has since been moved to the meta.
>I am concerned that it will receive little attention on the meta,
>because relatively few Wikipedians read the meta, and those few that do
>are not representative of the community.
>
>I believe such discussions should take place in the Wikipedia: or
>Wikipedia_talk: article spaces, now that these are available, so that
>the discussion appears in recent changes, and so that it is seen by
>everyone who may be interested.  Apparently there is a standing policy
>against such discussions in those article spaces.  I believe the policy
>should change.
>
>The meta is useful for discussing the technical arcana, interlanguage
>issues, and nuts-and-bolts issues of logos and press releases and so
>forth.  But I believe it is a mistake to send general-interest
>discussions about article content there.  All they get is a decent burial.
>
>Louis

I have wasted a bit of time looking for this but can't, could you kindly
provide a link?

Fred


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [Wikitech-l] FW: "Auto Extraction from WWW"

body:
Could someone take over this question? I don't know what to tell these
guys.

Thanks.

Ed Poor

-----Original Message-----
From: Don Rameez [mailto:rameezdon at hotmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, October 18, 2003 3:00 PM
To: Poor, Edmund W
Subject: RE: "Auto Extraction from WWW"

Dear Edmund;

thanx for ur reply
i have installed MySql on Windows & i did try to open  the SQL dump but
somehow was unable to do so
could u plz guide me regarding the same (i m a novice as far as Mysql is
concerned)
hope to hear from u soon

regards

Don Rameez

-

-------Original Message-------

From: Poor, Edmund W <mailto:Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com>
Date: Wednesday, October 15, 2003 01:06:19 AM
To: Don Rameez <mailto:rameezdon at hotmail.com>
Subject: RE: "Auto Extraction from WWW"

I don't know how to convert SQL tables into plain TEXT. Why not use a
SELECT statement? Like:

SELECT cur_text FROM cur

Ed Poor

	-----Original Message-----
	From: Don Rameez [mailto:rameezdon at hotmail.com]
	Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2003 9:33 PM
	To: Poor, Edmund W
	Subject: RE: "Auto Extraction from WWW"

Dear Edmund,

thanx for acknowledging soon &  answering to my queries
i appreciate ur concern for the Knowledge base

i would like to ask u one more query ....

 Q) We now have the SQL dump,  apart from MySQL is there any possibility
that we can
      access the data in some other format ( say plain TEXT ....)

regards

Don Rameez

-------Original Message-------

From: Poor, Edmund W <mailto:Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com>
Date: Tuesday, October 14, 2003 11:27:37 AM
To: Don Rameez <mailto:rameezdon at hotmail.com>
Subject: RE: "Auto Extraction from WWW"

Your questions are best put to our senior developers, but I'll give you
some preliminary answers.

1. All our articles are stored as plain English text. There is a bit of
markup used for links.
2. We are not encouraging direct server-to-server links. Rather, we
invite users to edit articles via the web interface.
3. You can get a SQL dump, if you want the entire database. It's much
less than one GB in size, and could possibly fit on one CD (we are
planning to publish a CD eventually).

The difference between our project and yours is that we are a
non-encoded encyclopedia. We just have a collection of articles.

You are trying to "encode" knowledge, which is Very Difficult. Many
attempts have been made in the past; I can't think of a single success,
but I can think of half a dozen spectacular failures. It's harder than
it looks!

I applaud the attempt, but this task involves artificial intelligence
(AI), and AI has not progressed beyond the so-called "expert system" or
"neural net". These are the toys of AI and have not produced reliable,
comprehensive results.

What do you really hope to accomplish, in the next 5 to 10 years?

Sincerely,

Ed Poor
Developer & Sysop
Wikipedia

	-----Original Message-----
	From: Don Rameez [mailto:rameezdon at hotmail.com]
	Sent: Saturday, October 11, 2003 11:35 PM
	To: JeLuF at gmx.de; ts4294967296 at hotmail.com;
maveric149 at yahoo.com; Poor, Edmund W; wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org;
JeLuF at gmx.de; ts4294967296 at hotmail.com; maveric149 at yahoo.com; Poor,
Edmund W; wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
	Cc: nagarjun at hbcse.tifr.res.in
	Subject: "Auto Extraction from WWW"

Dear Sir,
  We are a group of 3 students currently pursuing our B.E - IT
(Bachelor of Engg. Information Technology)from the Mumbai University,
INDIA.
As of now we are working on a project titled " AUTO EXTRACTION OF
CONTENTS FROM THE WORLD WIDE WEB" as a part of our BE project, in the
renowned institute of HBCSE-TIFR
( Homi Bhabha Center for Science Education - Tata Institute of
Fundamental Research)
under the guidance of Scientist Dr.Nagarjuna.G.

 Our project is based on :
    OS      - GNU/LINUX
    Language     - Python
    Server       - Zope
    Application  - GNOWSYS

GNOWSYS, Gnowledge Networking and Organizing System, is a web
application for developing
and maintaining semantic web content developed in Python and works as an
installed product in Zope.  Our project involves automatically
extracting data from the (WWW) World Wide Web) &
use GNOWSYS for handling this vast amount of data. This will not only
help us
store data in the Gnowledge base in form of meaningful relationships but
also see its
handling of huge amount of data.
The URL for our site is http://www.gnowledge.org

With this regards we could think no one but Wikipedia, which in itself
is a phenomenon.

We would be glad if u could answer to few of our queries :

1] What is the format in which the data is stored in Wikipedia ???
2] Apart from http or ftp are there any other specific protocols that
are in use,
   which will be required to communicate to the Wikipedia Server ???
3] How can we utilize the SQL dump ???

We hope you will answer our queries at the earliest
With warm regards

                           Thanking You

      [ Rameez Don , Jaymin Darbari, Ulhas Dhuri ]

____________________________________________________
 <http://www.incredimail.com/redir.asp?ad_id=309&lang=9>   IncrediMail -
Email has finally evolved - Click Here
<http://www.incredimail.com/redir.asp?ad_id=309&lang=9>
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from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Textbook-l] history texts

body:
Jimmy-
> Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
>> Do you mean to say that people are not allowed to
>> write textbooks that advocate for a certain religion?

> Not under the Wikimedia Foundation auspices, no.  NPOV is an absolute
> non-negotiable requirement of everything that we do.

> I know there was some discussion about NPOV and textbooks awhile back,
> but I really should make clear that I think that discussion wound up
> with a definitive answer: under the Wikimedia Foundation, everything
> we do is required to be NPOV.

I believe the consensus was that textbooks should be written from the
"POV" of experts on the subject in question. So, for example, a textbook
about evolution would not include a Kansas-style disclaimer because the
creationism POV is largely irrelevant among experts on evolution. It might
include a short segment about the controversy, but would probably tend to
end with something like "There is virtually universal agreement among
biologists that .."

Wikibooks could, in my opinion, be somewhat more expert-centric than pure
NPOV would allow. In case of controversies, we should try to decide
whether this is a legitimate controversy among experts on the subject, or
whether we are dealing with "crackpot" theories which have no place in
serious textbooks. On Wikipedia, we would always try to include the
opposite POV, if only as a link to a separate page. On Wikibooks, we may
sometimes have to decide to remove it entirely.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Deletion policy needed

body:
Louis Kyu Won Ryu wrote:

> Jimmy Wales wrote (regarding VfD):
>
>>
>> The process actually works reasonably well now, so it would be wrong
>> of me to try to decree some huge change to the process.  This is a
>> process that has grown up 'organically' over time.  All we need *right
>> now* is just the tiniest bit of formulation of what the final decision
>> rule should be.
>
>
> Are you sure?  I think it's true that VfD works well in the clear-cut
> cases.  Probably 80% of the cases are clear-cut, in that there is a
> clear consensus in favor of deleting or retaining the article.

80% sounds like pretty good results to me. :-)   There's no need to
become obsessive about deleting the others.  If there is any reasonable
argument for keeping an article, it should be given the benefit of the
doubt.

> For the other 20% it works poorly.  These are cases where we end up
> discussion what Wikipedia is, or how the article space should be
> organized.  Most of these conversations end up deadlocked, and the
> outcome is that the articles are kept.  The many "List of," "Slogan,"
> and "biography" discussions are examples of this.  The quality of the
> decision making was low, and the number of Wikipedians made upset in
> the process was high.

The "List-of" articles certainly have a place.  As much as there are
people who like to create these, there is likely a similar proportion of
viewers who are fascinated by simply reading lists.  What harm is done
by keeping them?

Who judges the quality of the decision making?  I agree that it is often
low, but getting Wikipedians upset by deleting their contributions isn't
going to solve that.

> A good deletion process should meet three goals: it should produce
> high-quality decisions, it should require minimal effort, and it
> should stress out Wikipedians as little as possible.

Yes and no.  High-quality decisions are an ideal.  If you perceive that
someone is making low quality decisions, simply deleting his efforts is
a decision of equally low quality.  You need to begin from the position
where that person is, and respecting it.  If you accomplish something
with User:A you also need to accept that on the day after tomorrow when
User:B appears you'll have to start the whole process all over again.
 We would all like every article to be perfectly accurate and consistent
with NPOV, but it ain't gonna happen so easy.  If one starts using his
status as a university professor to justify an action that won't be
broadly acceptable.  Much of the educational process is geared to
developping that good citizenship skill called conformity with accepted
views.  Those who have left the sysstem somewhere along the way have
never had to write examinations  about it.  They sometimes have unique
ideas about a subject.  Some of the ideas are downright goofy, but
others can also exhibit the creative genius that conformity suppresses.

>> As such, while I'm sympathetic to the notion of excluding votes from
>> mysterious users who have only edited 1 time, I think that unless it's
>> a huge huge problem, we can safely ignore it.
>
> It is only going to get worse, and if we actually have _votes_ rather
> than a consensus system, we will have to address the matter of who is
> entitled to vote.  The project has greater public prominence than it
> once did, making such questions more relevant than they once were.

If we can accomplish things without votes, we can accomplish them
without the problems that votes bring.  If we need to determine who is
qualified to vote, then we are setting up hierarchies.  The challenge in
the up-scaling process is how to maintain the same broad openness that
got the project there in the first place.

Ec


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Stats broken on en: ?

body:
On Monday, Oct 20, 2003, at 15:33 US/Pacific, Nils Kehrein wrote:

> ... last report was generated on the 14th of October.

Yes, updates to that are disabled temporarily until I get a chance to
sort out the log files from larousse getting back online. (I did run
updates from pliny's logs while larousse was completely offline, which
is why they make it up to the 14th.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Alex Rosen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Deletion policy needed

body:
>For the other 20% it works poorly.  These are cases where we end up
>discussion what Wikipedia is, or how the article space should be
>organized.  Most of these conversations end up deadlocked, and the
>outcome is that the articles are kept.  The many "List of," "Slogan,"

>and "biography" discussions are examples of this.  The quality of the

>decision making was low, and the number of Wikipedians made upset in
the
>process was high.

Yes. But I think this shows that the biggest problem is not with the
deletion policy but with the deletion criteria policy (i.e. What
Wikipedia is Not).

Most of the contentious items on VfD are not *really* arguments about
the particular article, but about the general criteria for including or
deleting certain types of articles. For example, the debate over whether
a certain elementary school should be deleted is not a debate over how
famous that school is - everyone acknowledges that it's not any more
famous than any other school. But some people feel that only
famous/important/notable subjects should be included in Wikipedia, so
they vote for deletion; others think that any true fact should be
included, so they vote to keep it. So the vote gets contentious. Then
the next day (or next hour) another item gets listed, and the same
debate happens again, without ever getting resolved.

Now imagine that we came to an "official" decision that only "notable"
subjects belonged on Wikipedia.* Now the only debate would be whether
this particular elementary school was notable or not, which would
probably not be much of a debate.

I think we need a better process for turning the recurring debates over
individual articles into policy decisions. We have a standard system for
deciding on a particular article (that's what we're debating now), but
to my knowledge there's no standard system for deciding on policies for
entire classes of articles, which I think would have a much bigger
positive impact.

--Alex (axlrosen)

* Although what would really be needed would be a general idea of *how*
notable the subject should be. Of course this would be impossible to
define precisely, but there are a number of ways I can think of that we
could pin it down fairly well. Certainly much better than now, where
there's not even a policy that says whether or not the subject needs to
be notable at all. Also, we'd need to settle the whole "list" question
as soon as possible, and more...


subject: [WikiEN-l] Warning to RK

body:
I agree with Jimbo. Much as I'd hate to see RK leave the project, I feel
that if he can't follow Jimbo's civility guidelines we'll be better off
without him.

For every brilliant but anti-social writer we lose, five or ten will
breathe a sigh of relief and thus stay with us and feel confident to
recruit others.

There's also the uncounted (silent majority?) who lurk for a while, see
the unpleasantness and duck out of the tavern before getting brained
with a stray tankard.

I feel Jimbo's put-the-foot-down policy will help our community to
lighten up and become a happy, congenial place to work together.

Ed Poor


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Discussion of Wikipedia content issues

body:
> I have wasted a bit of time looking for this but can't, could you kindly
> provide a link?

Sorry.

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Quality_Survey

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia_Quality_Survey

Louis


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Eric's abuse of his sysop powers

body:
Thank you, Erik, for your eloquent report. Clearly, you are doing your
best to avert an edit war.

Although I "side" with the POV that Mother Theresa is a saint -- and
disagree with all that nasty Hitchens stuff -- there is something else I
side with which must take priority: our mutual commitment to the Neutral
Point Of View.

James, I do hope you will look to me as a role model. As you know, I
love Rev. Moon but I have a near-perfect record of avoiding edit wars on
Moon-related articles. Please, take a look at the history of the last 2
months. Some anonymous IP added a whole bunch of slanted stuff to [[Sun
Myung Moon]], [[Moonies]], etc. You will note that I didn't revert. I
just have been slowly making NPOV corrections and adding new info.

It pains me to move so slowly, but I value my reputation as a
fair-minded sysop.

I'm confident that Eloquence (Erik) and JTD (James) can work this out,
and I'm already looking forward to bragging to all my off-line friends
about what a congenial bunch of on-line colleagues I've found here!

"Uncle Ed" Poor


from_name: Alex R.

subject: [Textbook-l] history texts

body:
 From: "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com>

>
> NPOV is not impossible for textbooks.  Why should it be?  It's the
> easiest thing in the world.  I don't agree with Alex's comments on
> history being necessarily POV at all -- I think that his comment
> misunderstands the social evolution of consensus embodied in an NPOV
> policy.

The problem with historians is that they see the story of history as
being about belief systems, ways of organizing knowledge and
coming to conclusions.  It is a debate in academic circles that has
been going on for years. History, as an "academic discipline" (as
oppposed to what most people call historical facts) is based upon
interpretation. Most historians will, at some point recognize the
relatively validity of another historical method or interpretive approach,
but ultimately the reasons things happen are mysterious. Take the
French Revolution, hundreds of books have been written from it
from different points of view, even writing a book that fairly documents
such different points of view would be daunting; are these historians
searching for the one "right" way of looking at the FR and going to
discard all the other approaches as "flawed" only the most closeminded
historians do not see the merits in the approaches of other historical
methods having a multiplicity of POVs is good.

The point is that historians would not agree with a social consensus
because the data that they use is always open to interpretation.
It is not about inaccuracy or flaws, it is just that when people
interpret events they do so in differing ways with differing ideas
about what is right or wrong. Even the data that is recorded (primary
sources) can be looked at in different ways, unlike other areas of the
social sciences (though some mind disagree with this) the data
varies and what the significance of that data might be.

Perhaps I am wrong but I thought NPOV was large enough to
incorporate all this differences without putting the "flawed"
judgement upon the valuable work of scholars that contributes
to some understanding of the past without trying to create one
total "objective" history, which most historians already agree is
inpossible to create in a world filled with a diversity of cultures,
beliefs and opinions about the meaning and signficance of events.

My undertanding of NPOV is that it requires a recogition that
there are multiple points of view; the historical approach to
"narrative" (which is what this discussion is really about) is
that it is based upon the "objective" narrator. Today we know
that events can be interpreted, recorded and understood in
a variety of methods, according to different cultural norms
and expectations. It is not a matter of determining what is
right or wrong, but relevant or irrelevant.  All the differing
opinions can be respected. (I am not talking here about
inaccuracies or situations where individuals obviously have
an overt agenda they are trying to push; we are talking about
sophisticated differences in approaches; valid epistimological
issues).

> Suppose it is true that at any point in time, a history text will be
> imperfect, biased in some way.  Does that mean we have good reason to
> celebrate this flaw?  And to enshrine it?  I think not.  If someone
> comes along to improve the text by making it neutral, that's great,
> and that's what NPOV is all about.

Once again, I don't think that differing historical methods are necessarily
flawed or imperfect. These are questions of interpretation that
require a detailed analysis of the analytic methods of one historian
and his/her data. Rarely will the critique of an approach uncover a flaw,
usually it will be a differing opinion, which reasonable people are
all allowed to have; Lefevre has one idea about the role of peasants
in the French Revolution, Braudel another, and Schama might practically
discount their influence almost all together seeing the revolution as an
revolution in ideologies and "mentalities".

Braudel might see Schama as being a right wing apologist and Schama
might state that Lefevre is a warmed over communist (and they all
might be right about such things to a particular extent), but they will
all recognize the work of the other as being of interest, significant
and of merit to the development of a historical discourse and the
evolution of historical analysis. The study of history is not about
coming to one final analysis of events, but to review the events from
differing perspectives and to allow such differences in approach to
highlight different factors and possible causes for the development
of events. There is no one theory of the French Revolution just an
evolution of theories as they are developed by new schools of
historical research and methodology. de Toqueville's work on the
"ancien regime" is not flawed because it was displaced by later,
more analytic historical methods. It has its own place, its own voice,
and a significiance that most people would not question even today.
It is another secondary source that adds to the historical dialogue.

Alex756


from_name: Rick

subject:
[WikiEN-l] ALERT: Idea for new feature: "Who's watching this
	page?"

body:
Nope, this is DEFINITELY not a good idea.  Where is this suggested?

RickK

Graham Burnett <grahamburnett at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
Idea for new feature: "Who's watching this page?"

This got mooted on the Village Pump today- I'm STRONGLY against this, to the
extent that I'd withdraw from wikipedia with a demand that any history of
pages I'd watched be deleted from public record if it were to be implemeted.
Suffice to say many of us watch certain pages for many differing reasons
which are nobody elses business.

Nuf said i hope.

Graham (Quercus Robur)

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from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikitech-l] French and German versions of the fundraising page

body:
Repost:

I haven't seen any objections about the page names, so could somebody export
the output of

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobilisation_de_fonds

and

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geldbeschaffung

to, respectively

http://wikimediafoundation.org/Mobilisation_de_fonds

and

http://wikimediafoundation.org/Geldbeschaffung

Very important note: These pages, for now, will NOT be protected, so please do
not link them from anywhere important or seemingly official (such as the
sidebar or current wiki donation pages). I expect that these pages will go
through some more basic development before they are protected and go live
(for example; some explanation needs to be added that at least in France and
Belgium new PayPal users need two credit cards and some type of access
number).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

body:
> Why can't we have a user preference that says "Hide
> my watchlist from
> other users"?
> Then, on the "Who's watching this page?" page, there
> would be a note to
> the effect
> that there are X additional users that are watching
> the page, but whom
> do not want
> to be identified.  This seems like a balanced
> solution to me -- users
> who value their
> privacy could choose not to be identified, but the
> useful statistic of
> how many people
> there are that are watching the page would still be
> available.
>
> Just a thought :-)
>
> --
> Benjamin D. Esham

OK, but the default preference should be to keep it
private by default, and the new feature would mainly
be used just to see how many people are watching it.
LDan

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from_name: Audin Malmin

body:
On Tue, Oct 21, 2003 at 01:25:22AM +0100, Graham Burnett wrote:
> Idea for new feature: "Who's watching this page?"
>
> This got mooted on the Village Pump today- I'm STRONGLY against this, to the
> extent that I'd withdraw from wikipedia with a demand that any history of
> pages I'd watched be deleted from public record if it were to be implemeted.
> ...

	I've actually wished this feature existed several times.  It'd be a
nice way to move from article to article in ones own area of expertise when
looking for articles to edit.

--
                                            Audin Malmin - audin at okb-1.org

Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them
quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.  -- Steve Jobs


subject: [WikiEN-l] Flamewars in triplicate

body:
Guys, could you please trim the to: and cc: lists on your messages?
Some recent messages have been coming through both on wikien-l and
twice on wikipedia-l (once on wikimedia.org and once on wikipedia.org).
It's bad enough to wade through it once.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
On Mon, Oct 20, 2003 at 06:02:22PM -0700, Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
> OK, but the default preference should be to keep it
> private by default, and the new feature would mainly
> be used just to see how many people are watching it.

	I disagree.  That default will make the feature useless.  Make the
default Public and place a good notice on the edit page next to the watchlist
chechbox.

	Why is making a watchlist public any worse than ones contributions?

--
                                            Audin Malmin - audin at okb-1.org

They that can give up essential liberty for a little temporary saftey deserve
neither liberty nor safety.	-- Benjamin Franklin, 1759


from_name: Toby Bartels

body:
[I'm replying both to the list and directly to Louis.]

Louis Kyu Won Ryu wrote:

>Recently, Adam Carr contributed a well-researched writeup about
>Wikipedia article quality.  It has since been moved to the meta.
>I am concerned that it will receive little attention on the meta,
>because relatively few Wikipedians read the meta, and those few that do
>are not representative of the community.

Time was, people put this stuff on subpages of their user page.
That should still be kosher; and it's more accessible than [[meta:]].

I'm assuming that his write-up really was specific to [[en:]].
If it was general, then [[meta:]] may yet be the best place for it.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Eric's abuse of his sysop powers

body:
> BTW - this is Eric's latest threat:
>
> I have to say at this point that a ban of Jtdirl
> is no longer out of the question for me.
> -Eloquence 22:07, Oct 20, 2003 (UTC)

No, Erik would never do that -- no more than I would. In a moment of
anger, anyone might 'think aloud' and talk about doing something. But
that is not a threat.

Saying, "I wish Bush was dead" or even "Someone ought to kill the
president" is NOT THE SAME as an assassination threat. Sheldon Rampton's
wish that the software would give him the ability to send a million
volts through my chair is not a murder threat.

Erik and I both spoke (rashly, perhaps) of a DESIRE to temporarily block
or even permanently ban contributors who use Wikipedia in ways we didn't
like.

But Jimbo knows we wouldn't really do that. If I blocked someone whom I
shouldn't block, someone else would simply un-block him. One of the
other developers might even de-op me. There's no way Tim or Brion would
permit an abuse of power like that.

Let this thing blow over, so Jimbo can take his day off and attend that
wedding, okay?

Ed Poor


subject: [Wikitech-l] Stupid database tricks: images?

body:
Just thinking in terms of minimizing the number of directions we've got
to go when mirroring and synchronizing things across servers... We
currently keep page data in a database, but also cache some rendered
pages on the local filesystem. We keep information about TeX fragments
in a database, but cache the rasterized images in the local filesystem.

Uploaded files are a little different: we keep track of them in a
database, but the essential files themselves cannot be reconstructed
from the database alone. Thus if we run multiple web servers from one
database, they fight over the files, needing either a shared networked
filesystem -- inaccessible if the server dies -- or for all but one to
be read-only and periodically update from the live site.

Transparent load-balancing will require that any web server that you
stumble upon should be as good as any other and provide the same stuff,
so locking off all but one (as we've done from time to time when
experimenting with a second 'en2' access point) is less than ideal.
Hypothetically we could have a notification system where the server
that makes a change sends updates to all other servers, but this raises
a question of resynchronization if a member of the cluster is taken out
of service and brought back in -- or if two make conflicting changes
simultaneously.

It might be the simplest thing to just store uploads directly as blobs
in the database. When a request comes to serve an uploaded file, we can
cache it in the local filesystem (or memory) if we like to speed access
and allow read-only access with the db server down. This allows
resynchronization by checking cache time validity, and lets images be
backed up along with the rest of the db.

Terrible idea? Good idea? Anyone have experience doing this kind of
thing?

Typical files are in the tens or low hundreds of kilobytes, with some
ranging up to the maximum allowed 2MB.  The total size of uploads we
have is comparable to the total size of the current-version page texts,
and much smaller than the total old-revision page texts we've already
got in the db.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Stevertigo

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: FW: "Auto Extraction from WWW"

body:
--- Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> wrote:

> I'm too nice. I should just tell them to do their
> own homework.

Yes --maybe. If they are intending to make an Arabic
fork.

~S~

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Deletion policy needed

body:
Alex Rosen wrote in part:

>Now imagine that we came to an "official" decision that only "notable"
>subjects belonged on Wikipedia.* ...

>* Although what would really be needed would be a general idea of *how*
>notable the subject should be. Of course this would be impossible to
>define precisely, but there are a number of ways I can think of that we
>could pin it down fairly well. Certainly much better than now, where
>there's not even a policy that says whether or not the subject needs to
>be notable at all. Also, we'd need to settle the whole "list" question
>as soon as possible, and more...

I still vote for "verifiable".
Someday we'll have all of the elementary schools, and good for us.
But we shouldn't let crap slip in because of our generosity either.
This is what "verifiable" does.

Is that criterion still in use on VfD?

-- Toby


subject: [Textbook-l] history texts

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Jimmy Wales wrote:

>>I know there was some discussion about NPOV and textbooks awhile back,
>>but I really should make clear that I think that discussion wound up
>>with a definitive answer: under the Wikimedia Foundation, everything
>>we do is required to be NPOV.

>I believe the consensus was that textbooks should be written from the
>"POV" of experts on the subject in question.

Back in the early days, mav was pushing for DPOV "discipline POV".
But even he agreed that NPOV, together with focussed content, was sufficient.

To be sure, I haven't been paying good attention recently,
so perhaps some other consensus was reached a while later.
But I for one would oppose and "expert POV" even more than DPOV --
since the latter is (IMO) merely a different name for NPOV + focus,
while EPOV favours the opinions of certain /people/ or others, a bad idea.

>So, for example, a textbook
>about evolution would not include a Kansas-style disclaimer because the
>creationism POV is largely irrelevant among experts on evolution. It might
>include a short segment about the controversy, but would probably tend to
>end with something like "There is virtually universal agreement among
>biologists that .."

That is a perfectly NPOV statement anyway, so what's the problem?

>Wikibooks could, in my opinion, be somewhat more expert-centric than pure
>NPOV would allow. In case of controversies, we should try to decide
>whether this is a legitimate controversy among experts on the subject, or
>whether we are dealing with "crackpot" theories which have no place in
>serious textbooks. On Wikipedia, we would always try to include the
>opposite POV, if only as a link to a separate page. On Wikibooks, we may
>sometimes have to decide to remove it entirely.

This is determined by the /focus/ of a textbook on specific content.
For example, a book on Einstein's theory of gravitation (general relativity)
need not mention the quite respectable -- but also decidedly minority --
Dicke-Brans-Jordan theory of gravitation, much less any random crackpottery.
At best, a GR text could compare GR to DBJ in a section on experimental tests;
but even there, only experimentally tested crackpot theories (that is, none)
will be able to slip in.  (I switch to physics for my own familiarity.)

Still, when the evolution textbook makes passing mention of creationism,
it can link to the Wikipedia article on that topic, or that controversy.
In this way, we avoid the "bias of inclusion", since Wikipedia covers all.
It is because Wikipedia does this that Wikibooks can have focussed content
without allowing any bias to come in.  Thus, NPOV + limited scope.

-- Toby


subject: [Textbook-l] Re: history texts

body:
Karl Wick wrote:

>This issue has not yet come up in any textbook. However, my
>hope is that, on occasion, Wikibooks could be home to
>textbooks advocating a certain point of view. In cases such
>as these, the POV of the book could be explained in a
>mission statement at the beginning of the book. That way a
>creationist textbook could be written and prepared on the
>site by and for creationists.

I'm not convinced that this requires POV either.
We should be able to write an NPOV text about creation science theories,
limited in scope to the views of mainstream creation scientists --
not evolutionary biologists, whose views like outside this book's focus
(but well inside that /other/ biology textbook!).

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Jtdirl ban (was : Eric's abuse of his sysop powers)

body:
I think the hardest thing of all is to "let someone else be wrong".

I have tried very hard this last week, to be extra cooperative with
William Connolley. You should check out my User Contributions,
especially the talk pages: follow me around, and see how I'm doing. I
could use some pointers.

It's not easy to BOTH (a) totally disagree with someone and (b) pledge
to write neutrally about your disagreement with that person.

Usually, one states one's own case as forcefully as possible. It's also
common to minimize, distort or dismiss the case that other make: even to
discredit them, so no one will listen. Imagine how hard it is for me to
curb my tongue about global warming or about that kooky 'cult' I'm in!!
^_^

I think you and I, my eloquent friend, have shown an excellent example
of WikiCooperation of late.

Ed Poor


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Eric's abuse of his sysop powers

body:
> Not so. NPOV requires balence in content. The critique in such detail
> clearly violated wikipedia's NPOV policy. It doesn't matter if it was
> 70% glorification or 70% demonisation of MT or anyone else. Making an
> article overwhelmingly one sided where the vast majority of the text is
> putting forward one view  [...]

JT, Eric, everyone, this doesn't belong here; please see my comments on
the talk page for the Mother Teresa article.  I suggest that the
discussion be continued there, as I note in those comments.

Louis


body:
On Monday, Oct 20, 2003, at 19:03 US/Pacific, Stevertigo wrote:
> --- Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I'm too nice. I should just tell them to do their
>> own homework.
>
> Yes --maybe. If they are intending to make an Arabic
> fork.

Speaking of which, has there been any progress on an Arabic interface
translation for the wiki? The mixture of scripts always makes things
trickier, and I suspect that the RTL issues would be simpler if this
were finished so the screens would display as they're supposed to.

I'd love it to be up and running, but I don't speak, read, write, or
type the language, so beyond noting that parentheses are often
backwards I can't tell what looks right and what doesn't.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: James Duffy

body:
Eloquence is normally a reasonable contributor (except in the area of
religion, where he mounts POV campaigns that RK would be proud of). But his
behaviour on [[Mother Theresa]] amount to an abuse of his powers as a sysop.
He has now removed a protection on a page that had been placed to stop an
edit war he had been a participant of, all to preserve a large segment he
added to the article that breaches NPOV standards in terminology, structure
(it dominates a biographical article in a way that would not be tolerated in
any other encyclop?dia), headlines, use of agenda-laiden captions, and
elementary biographical standards. Any attempt to remedy the many NPOV
deficits in the article (which involves correcting the 'she was the greatest
human being in existence' glorification tone in other parts of the article,
the 'she was the devil incarnate' tone in his add-in, which covers nearly
70% of the text and is based on a book called ''Hell's Angel'' ) are
attacked as 'pro-catholic bias' and a simple move of the large accusationary
text to a linked article and replacing it with a smaller summary that allows
for a more readable and less polemic text, leads to screams of censorship.

As an example of the supposed 'censorship' compare my one draft opening
paragraph Eloquence kept reverting

Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, best known as Mother Teresa (27 August 1910 - 5
September 1997), was a Roman Catholic nun, missionary, peace advocate and
anti-abortion activist who set up a world-wide network called the
Missionaries of Charity. This network engages in Christian missionary
activity and to some extent in local charity. Mother Teresa is most famous
for her work with the poor in Calcutta. Critics however questioned the
standard of medical care received by those she cared for and questioned her
association with some right wing dictators.

with what preceded it in the earlier version

'''Blessed Teresa of [[Calcutta]]''', best known as '''Mother Teresa'''
([[August 27]], [[1910]] - [[September 5]], [[1997]]), was a revered
[[Christian]] [[nun]], missionary, peace advocate and anti-abortion activist
who set up a world-wide network called the ''Missionaries of Charity''. This
network engages in Christian missionary activity and to some extent in local
charity. Mother Teresa is most famous for her work with the poor in
Calcutta.

Yet Eloquence's defence of a version that included the above POV stuff, and
his own writing based on a 'neutral' commentator who called MT a 'presumed
virgin', is to say, when efforts to do a professional editing job are made

You can play up your oh-so-critical "lapsed Catholic" attitude as much as
you want, that does not change the fact that you are trying to stow away
very substantial and very important criticisms of this soon-to-be "saint".

Eric has a very bizarre comprehension of censorship and 'stowing away'
criticisms if he thinks that mentioning them in the very opening paragraph
and later in the article, and creating a linked article where all the detail
can be published in a way that it cannot in a biographical entry without
turning the article into a polemic, is hiding criticism. Apart from
copyright questions about quoting large paragraphs of books (most publishers
tolerate a line or two, but large paragraphs are seen in many jurisdictions
as crossing the line into breaching copyright), it is a gross abuse of sysop
powers for a sysop involved in an edit war to choose to remove protection
from a page. Promising that you wouldn't edit it for an hour or two is no
defence.

The result is that that the article is an utter mess, veering from
glorification of MT in some bits to demonising MT in others. It is
amateurish, POV and reads like the sort of polemic that wouldn't last twenty
seconds in front of an editor in any other encyclop?dia. But attempts to fix
the article and provide a proper NPOV article  runs into a brick wall of
Eric's agenda, including abusing his powers as a sysop to get what he wants.

JT

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body:
James-

this does not belong on wikipedia-l. I have therefore copied it to
wikien-l, and all replies should go there.

1) There was an edit war on the "Mother Teresa" page after you moved away
about 20K of text to a separate "criticism" page in clear violation of our
neutrality policy, which states that no preference should be given to any
side.

2) I have warned you repeatedly not to make any substantial changes to the
article while the major issue of whether the text was to be moved to a
separate page was not settled. You ignored these warnings and pushed
forward to edit the text, including your movement of 20K of text to a
separate page, and complain that these edits were reverted together. This
is simply disingenuous and you know it.

3) A sysop protected the page in an attempt to cool down the edit war.
This was a largely symbolic gesture since we are both sysops, but we chose
not to edit the page while it was protected. However, this precluded non-
sysops who had announced that they wanted to make edits to the page from
doing so. To prevent this unfortunate situation, I unprotected the page
with the comment:

        "removing protection for now (I was involved so I won't edit for
         another few hours if Jtdirl won't, but others should be able to)"

I did not edit the page for the next few hours and nor did you, the edit
war seems to be over and I considered the matter settled. To call an
unprotection to allow *others*, non-sysops, to continue editing the page
while I myself refrained from doing so an abuse of sysop power is, again,
very disingenuous.

The important facts in this matter are this:

You moved virtually all the criticisms of Mother Teresa to a separate page
without discussing this on the talk page first. Three users (myself, Bryan
and Jiang) disagreed with this. I and Bryan Derksen reverted your changes.
It might be argued that it would have been "wiser" to just wait a day or
two and then address the matter again, but that is clearly wrong -- had we
done so, you would have reorganized the entire article(s) according to
your idea of NPOV, making it very difficult to reach any kind of consensus
on the matter.

In addition to that, you continue to play your usual games, which consist
of
- personal attacks (always singling out one contributor, even though
several users have expressed disagreement with your actions)
- false accusations of abusive behavior
- disingenuous tactics like your behavior in the edit war, piling changes
upon changes to bully your way through
- making false claims (e.g. repeatedly claiming that the criticism section
was merely based on "a single TV show", whereas I have shown you the
multitude of sources on which it was based, including several books and
newspaper articles and an editorial in "The Lancet")

I chose to ignore your continuous stream of attacks against me, but other
users would not have shown the same amount of patience and be driven away
by your behavior, which resembles that of a schoolyard bully.

In spite of this unacceptable behavior on your part, I have repeatedly
offered to seek a cooperative, consensual solution for the alleged or real
NPOV problems on the page in question. In fact, I was working on reaching
a consensus with Bryan and other contributors while you continued
reverting to your style. Everyone can see this by taking a look at
[[Talk:Mother Teresa]].

It is time for you to stop playing strategic games against other
contributors, and to start working in the spirit of mutual cooperation.
Now is a good moment to do so -- I fully approve of your recent edits of
the article (provided you haven't again started moving away the criticism
section). Yet you continue your bullying tactics against other
contributors. You do not want peaceful cooperation, you want to pick
fights and win. That is not how Wikipedia works.

I can and will work with you on this article, provided you make a serious
commitment to seeking consensus on your changes. That cannot always be
done, of course, but there are reasonable courses of actions in the cases
where it can't (act based on established precedent, hold a vote, ask Jimbo
etc.). Just trying to get "your way or the highway" will not lead to any
kind of solution.

So here's my offer: Make the changes to the criticism section you find
important. I will edit the parts which I don't like and if we can't agree,
we'll go to the talk page. Once the criticism section is edited, we will
take a look at the entire article and if it is too long (32K), we will
summarize individual sections and split them away, regardless of their
content. If it is still below that size, we won't do that. If the
criticism section is still too dominant, we will together try to expand
the other sections of the article. How about some wiki-cooperation for a
change?

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Benjamin Esham

body:
On Monday, October 20, 2003, at 08:25  PM, Graham Burnett wrote:

> Idea for new feature: "Who's watching this page?"
>
> This got mooted on the Village Pump today- I'm STRONGLY against this,
> to the
> extent that I'd withdraw from wikipedia with a demand that any history
> of
> pages I'd watched be deleted from public record if it were to be
> implemeted.
> Suffice to say many of us watch certain pages for many differing
> reasons
> which are nobody elses business.

Why can't we have a user preference that says "Hide my watchlist from
other users"?
Then, on the "Who's watching this page?" page, there would be a note to
the effect
that there are X additional users that are watching the page, but whom
do not want
to be identified.  This seems like a balanced solution to me -- users
who value their
privacy could choose not to be identified, but the useful statistic of
how many people
there are that are watching the page would still be available.

Just a thought :-)

--
Benjamin D. Esham      {      http://bdesham.net
bdesham at iname.com      }      AIM: bdesham 1 2 8
Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - wikipedia.org


subject: [WikiEN-l] ALERT: Idea for new feature: "Who's watching thispage?"

body:
The Cunctator wrote:
>> Actually, it's a good idea. In no way is it a invasion of
>> privacy. Anyone who wants to get some idea of a contributor's
>> interests can look at his edit record. There's no good reason
>> not to have watchlists be public.

By that logic there's no good reason to have watchlists be public,
since as you say you can already see a person's editing interests from
their recent edits.

On Monday, Oct 20, 2003, at 21:01 US/Pacific, Andrew Lih wrote:
> Edit history does not equal watch list.  I can watch something without
> having edited it.  And other people being able to see my watch list is
> an invasion of privacy of sorts,

It's essentially equivalent to automatically uploading your browser's
bookmarks file for public viewing. Maybe you're expecting that and make
sure you're only bookmarking pages you want your grandma and your boss
to see you like, maybe you're not.

>  so this should be "opt-in" only, not
> the default, if implemented.

I've suggested an opt-in "public watchlist" myself, actually, but I'm
not sufficiently interested to program it.

You can do this yourself by simply creating a page of links as a
subpage to your userpage; it'll show up in "what links here" on the
'watched' pages and anyone can use the "related changes" function to
use your list as a recentchanges filter. Further, you can have multiple
lists according to category, topic, or whim.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Dante Alighieri

subject: [WikiEN-l] Who's Watching My Watchlist?

body:
At 08:51 PM 10/20/2003, The Cunctator wrote:
>Actually, it's a good idea. In no way is it a invasion of privacy. Anyone
>who wants to get some idea of a contributor's interests can look at his edit
>record. There's no good reason not to have watchlists be public.
>
>If you don't want people to know what your watchlist is, then don't have
>one.
>
>Wikipedia benefits the more open the actions and behavior of its
>participants are to each other and to the outside world.
>
>Qui custodiet custodies? Omnia mundi in Wikipediam.
>
>Don't confuse this with actual invasions of privacy.

Well, I wouldn't go quite as far as to say that it's in no way an invasion
of privacy, but I think that as long as the default is to private there's
no reason we can't give people an OPTION to make their watchlists public.

I am opposed, in principle, to any decision that limits peoples' options
with no good cause. Just because YOU (editorial you) don't want your
watchlist public is no reason to keep others from making theirs' public.

Also, the "who watches the watchers" comment raises the old point that
sunshine is, in general, a good cure for many ills.. but still, there ought
to be a certain amount of privacy for things that are, in fairness, private.

P.S. Will there also be a feature "Which Users Have Viewed My Watchlist"? ;)

-----
Dante Alighieri
dalighieri at digitalgrapefruit.com

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their
neutrality in times of great moral crisis."
    -Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321


body:
--- Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:

> Speaking of which, has there been any progress on an
> Arabic interface
> translation for the wiki? The mixture of scripts
> always makes things
> trickier, and I suspect that the RTL issues would be
> simpler if this
> were finished so the screens would display as
> they're supposed to.
>
> I'd love it to be up and running, but I don't speak,
> read, write, or
> type the language, so beyond noting that parentheses
> are often
> backwards I can't tell what looks right and what
> doesn't.

Its a pain -- and Mozilla's poor Bidi complicates
matters -- we have to assume that people will simply
use IE. See link for some responses to your statments
before:
http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tech_problems_with_ar.wikipedia

*If* there are such people who *could* be contributing
to ar.wikipedia.org, that are instead putting energies
towards a fork, I would like to make them aware of
certain things --most importantly; the "island unto
itself" problem --isolated and non-interlinked
"Wikipedias" tend to flounder all things considered.

They can take a look at how the Spanish and Russian
forks have fared on their own.

~S~

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from_name: Anthere

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: ALERT: Idea for new feature: "Who's watching
	this	page?"

body:
Perhaps other opinions than english people only could
be relevant to a general software change ?

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body:
>From: "James Duffy" <jtdire at hotmail.com>
>Reply-To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>To: wikipedia-l at Wikipedia.org
>Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Eric's abuse of his sysop powers
>Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2003 19:36:10 +0000
>
>
>Eloquence is normally a reasonable contributor (except in the area of
>religion, where he mounts POV campaigns that RK would be proud of). But his
>behaviour on [[Mother Theresa]] amount to an abuse of his powers as a
>sysop. He has now removed a protection on a page that had been placed to
>stop an edit war he had been a participant of, all to preserve a large
>segment he added to the article that breaches NPOV standards in
>terminology, structure (it dominates a biographical article in a way that
>would not be tolerated in any other encyclop?dia), headlines, use of
>agenda-laiden captions, and elementary biographical standards. Any attempt
>to remedy the many NPOV deficits in the article (which involves correcting
>the 'she was the greatest human being in existence' glorification tone in
>other parts of the article, the 'she was the devil incarnate' tone in his
>add-in, which covers nearly 70% of the text and is based on a book called
>''Hell's Angel'' ) are attacked as 'pro-catholic bias' and a simple move of
>the large accusationary text to a linked article and replacing it with a
>smaller summary that allows for a more readable and less polemic text,
>leads to screams of censorship.
>
>As an example of the supposed 'censorship' compare my one draft opening
>paragraph Eloquence kept reverting
>
>Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, best known as Mother Teresa (27 August 1910 - 5
>September 1997), was a Roman Catholic nun, missionary, peace advocate and
>anti-abortion activist who set up a world-wide network called the
>Missionaries of Charity. This network engages in Christian missionary
>activity and to some extent in local charity. Mother Teresa is most famous
>for her work with the poor in Calcutta. Critics however questioned the
>standard of medical care received by those she cared for and questioned her
>association with some right wing dictators.
>
>with what preceded it in the earlier version
>
>'''Blessed Teresa of [[Calcutta]]''', best known as '''Mother Teresa'''
>([[August 27]], [[1910]] - [[September 5]], [[1997]]), was a revered
>[[Christian]] [[nun]], missionary, peace advocate and anti-abortion
>activist who set up a world-wide network called the ''Missionaries of
>Charity''. This network engages in Christian missionary activity and to
>some extent in local charity. Mother Teresa is most famous for her work
>with the poor in Calcutta.
>
>Yet Eloquence's defence of a version that included the above POV stuff, and
>his own writing based on a 'neutral' commentator who called MT a 'presumed
>virgin', is to say, when efforts to do a professional editing job are made
>
>You can play up your oh-so-critical "lapsed Catholic" attitude as much as
>you want, that does not change the fact that you are trying to stow away
>very substantial and very important criticisms of this soon-to-be "saint".
>
>Eric has a very bizarre comprehension of censorship and 'stowing away'
>criticisms if he thinks that mentioning them in the very opening paragraph
>and later in the article, and creating a linked article where all the
>detail can be published in a way that it cannot in a biographical entry
>without turning the article into a polemic, is hiding criticism. Apart from
>copyright questions about quoting large paragraphs of books (most
>publishers tolerate a line or two, but large paragraphs are seen in many
>jurisdictions as crossing the line into breaching copyright), it is a gross
>abuse of sysop powers for a sysop involved in an edit war to choose to
>remove protection from a page. Promising that you wouldn't edit it for an
>hour or two is no defence.
>
>The result is that that the article is an utter mess, veering from
>glorification of MT in some bits to demonising MT in others. It is
>amateurish, POV and reads like the sort of polemic that wouldn't last
>twenty seconds in front of an editor in any other encyclop?dia. But
>attempts to fix the article and provide a proper NPOV article  runs into a
>brick wall of Eric's agenda, including abusing his powers as a sysop to get
>what he wants.
>
>JT

BTW - this is Eric's latest threat:

I have to say at this point that a ban of Jtdirl is no longer out of the
question for me.?Eloquence 22:07, Oct 20, 2003 (UTC)

_________________________________________________________________
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subject: [WikiEN-l] The "Who's watching this page," business

body:
It strikes me that when things change, they might be
called something different. So while a "watchlist" is
understood as a private affair --( I never use the
damn things myself, anyway --part of what prompted me
to start comment on the potential drag they might have
on the servers --I was right somewhat.)

But anyway it seems to me that there are two distinct
things: *private lists, and *public lists --and having
one of each *might be *better than simply having an
option of "open" or "closed."  "Watchlist" would refer
to the private list --the public list would be called
something else.  Continuing along these lines could
open up a whole new way to look at WP and how people
interact --conference calls, etc, outside of
attached-to-article talk.

Eh?
~S~

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] The "Who's watching this page," business

body:
<<From En wiki: (General discourse should be here)>>

It strikes me that when things change, they might be
called something different. So while a "watchlist" is
understood as a private affair --( I never use the
damn things myself, anyway --part of what prompted me
to start comment on the potential drag they might have
on the servers --I was right somewhat.)

But anyway it seems to me that there are two distinct
things: *private lists, and *public lists --and having
one of each *might be *better than simply having an
option of "open" or "closed."  "Watchlist" would refer
to the private list --the public list would be called
something else.  Continuing along these lines could
open up a whole new way to look at WP and how people
interact --conference calls, etc, outside of
attached-to-article talk.

Eh?
~S~

__________________________________
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The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com


body:
Poor,-
>> BTW - this is Eric's latest threat:
>>
>> I have to say at this point that a ban of Jtdirl
>> is no longer out of the question for me.
>> -Eloquence 22:07, Oct 20, 2003 (UTC)

> No, Erik would never do that

No, I would not ban Jtdirl myself, and I have never said that I would. But
it is beginning to look like a necessity. I will look at this again when
Jimbo is back and if I deem it necessary, supply the evidence to him that
would support a temporary ban.

Oh, and this still belongs on wikien-l.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Robot code: open source or lock away in safe?

body:
On Monday 20 October 2003 19:06, Louis Kyu Won Ryu wrote:
> > Now, I could just start an open source project at sourceforge to
> > collaboratively develop it further. BUT: I am afraid of the power of
> > this software, and the damage it could do if it ends up in the wrong
> > hands (vandals).
>
> My two cents:
>
> 1.  Change your bot so that it adds a User-agent header to the HTTP
> requests that identifies the request as coming from a bot (unless you've
> already done this).
>
> 2.  Ask Brion or someone to add a check for the "User-agent: Bot" and
> then check the already-exising "bot" flag in the user record, and toss
> out the edit if it is made from other than a "bot" user.
>
> 3.  Once this is done, release your source.
>
> Quick and easy.  Now, to be sure, anyone with software skills can change
> the source so that it doesn't produce the header.  But then, anyone with
> software skills can write their own bot.

Yes, but one is much easier then other.

I propose that critical part of source (one that reads and writes data on
Wikipedia), with the enhancements that Louis proposed, should be stored in a
library which would be freely distributable but closed source. Then the rest
of the bot code could be released open source.


subject: [Wikitech-l] visited links and empty links in red

body:
A couple of days ago, I noticed the visited links
color changed. It is now red, of a color that is quite
similar to the missing links red.

Is this due to my browser and if so, how can I change
that ?

If it is software related, why was it changed ? Where
was it discussed ? Can it be reverted please ? Or
changed to another color ? For poor sighted people,
the two reds are confusing; I had to switch to the
feature ? for empty links again.

(I am in cologne blue)

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body:
Ed-
> I think you and I, my eloquent friend, have shown an excellent example
> of WikiCooperation of late.

Well, let's not pat each other on our shoulders too much just yet. I
believe there is a fundamental differences between your rows with William,
and the problems I and other users have repeatedly had with Jtdirl's
bully-like behavior. I have never seen William behave like a bully. You
usually do a good job of accommodating others, and if they are reasonable,
they try to accommodate you as well. That is the way of the wiki. But this
kind of bullying is what Jtdirl does all the time when he does not get
what he wants. It is very, very sad.

I am not a "turn the other cheek" kind of guy. I am a person who feels
that someone needs to stand up to the bullies, or they will soon run the
entire playgrund.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Brian Corr

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: ALERT: Idea for new feature: "Who's watching this
	page?"

body:
This is absolutely a terrible idea. It's perfectly sufficient that we can
look at who has edited a page and what they have done. The only reason I
can see to know who's watching a page is to be better able to track what
someone may decide to edit.

Between [[Problem users]] and [[Vandalism]] and the aforementioned page
histories, that seems to provide more than enough resources for tracking
things. I imagine that developers can look at someone's Watchlist, and
that's fine, but I don't want folks with an axe to grind to be able to
"watch my watching." And the idea of having the default be that people
can't see one's watchlist is better, but I think the whole idea still
undermines Wikifaith and adds an unwelcome level of surveillance.

And one more thing, I noticed this a couple of hours ago on Village Pump
page because the person who suggested it, User:Paul_Klenk, had just been
adding fuel to the flame on the Mother Teresa talk page
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mother_Teresa#Something_we_can_all_agree_on>,
although he has also added some constructive comments. He's new, so this
isn't meant to trash him, but this is a perfect example of where it would
*not* be helpful to have the ability to see other people's watchlists.

Thanks, Brian

  At 02:15 AM 10/21/03 +0000, you wrote:
>From: "Graham Burnett" <grahamburnett at blueyonder.co.uk>
>Idea for new feature: "Who's watching this page?"
>
>This got mooted on the Village Pump today- I'm STRONGLY against this, to the
>extent that I'd withdraw from wikipedia with a demand that any history of
>pages I'd watched be deleted from public record if it were to be implemeted.
>Suffice to say many of us watch certain pages for many differing reasons
>which are nobody elses business.
>
>Nuf said i hope.
>
>Graham (Quercus Robur)


body:
On Monday, Oct 20, 2003, at 23:29 US/Pacific, Anthere wrote:

> A couple of days ago, I noticed the visited links
> color changed. It is now red, of a color that is quite
> similar to the missing links red.
>
> Is this due to my browser and if so, how can I change
> that ?
>
> If it is software related, why was it changed ? Where
> was it discussed ? Can it be reverted please ? Or
> changed to another color ? For poor sighted people,
> the two reds are confusing; I had to switch to the
> feature ? for empty links again.

Please see ongoing discussion at:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cologne_Blue_skin_problems

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: The Cunctator

body:
On 10/20/03 7:05 PM, "Erik Moeller" <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:

> Poor,-
>>> BTW - this is Eric's latest threat:
>>>
>>> I have to say at this point that a ban of Jtdirl
>>> is no longer out of the question for me.
>>> -Eloquence 22:07, Oct 20, 2003 (UTC)
>
>> No, Erik would never do that
>
> No, I would not ban Jtdirl myself, and I have never said that I would. But
> it is beginning to look like a necessity. I will look at this again when
> Jimbo is back and if I deem it necessary, supply the evidence to him that
> would support a temporary ban.
>
> Oh, and this still belongs on wikien-l.
>
Sounds like a threat to me.


body:
Actually, it's a good idea. In no way is it a invasion of privacy. Anyone
who wants to get some idea of a contributor's interests can look at his edit
record. There's no good reason not to have watchlists be public.

If you don't want people to know what your watchlist is, then don't have
one.

Wikipedia benefits the more open the actions and behavior of its
participants are to each other and to the outside world.

Qui custodiet custodies? Omnia mundi in Wikipediam.

Don't confuse this with actual invasions of privacy.


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] wfMsg enhacement tested for speed

body:
I finally got around to doing a proper test of my wfMsg() enhancement.
When using memcached, it's fast enough for some applications (say, low
traffic wikis), but I'm not satisified that it is sufficiently fast for
our site.

On my Celeron 466, it takes about 215 ms to load the messages needed to
display an article. That's not much better than loading from the small
local database (~280 ms). In comparison, doing it the old way took
somewhere around 10-50 ms. I'm not sure of the exact figure, because the
timer is not sufficiently accurate.

Instead I think I might try rolling all the messages into one memcached
object and retrieving that. Failing that, I will try shared memory.

I've also written a simple memcached command line client and improved
the profiling code slightly.

-- Tim Starling.


body:
>James-
>
>this does not belong on wikipedia-l. I have therefore copied it to
>wikien-l, and all replies should go there.
>
>1) There was an edit war on the "Mother Teresa" page after you moved away
>about 20K of text to a separate "criticism" page in clear violation of our
>neutrality policy, which states that no preference should be given to any
>side.

Not so. NPOV requires balence in content. The critique in such detail
clearly violated wikipedia's NPOV policy. It doesn't matter if it was 70%
glorification or 70% demonisation of MT or anyone else. Making an article
overwhelmingly one sided where the vast majority of the text is putting
forward one view, expecially when when the text isn't about the person the
article is about at all but about her religious order, is unambiguously
against NPOV. I did not remove the criticism. I put it up front in the
opening paragraph. I moved the main complex text to a link article, linked
/in/ the text of the article, and was in the process of summarising the
criticism in a couple of paragraphs, so that the information would be there,
expressed unambiguously, without turning the entire article on Mother Teresa
into 'Christopher Hitchens on Mother Teresa's order and how they washed
their bed linen and used needles', which is what chunks of the stuff you
added in was about. Doing that makes perfect sense and absolutely in keeping
with wikipedia's 'be bold' editing policy. But your response was to
/immediately/ place the link article on the VfD page, dump the text and keep
reverting the article back to the over long, badly written, biased and
frequently off-topic article in place of a properly written, NPOV, balanced
piece that covered the pluses and minuses of MT without letting one side,
/either/ side, dominate. That is the basic definition of NPOV.
>
>2) I have warned you repeatedly not to make any substantial changes to the
>article while the major issue of whether the text was to be moved to a
>separate page was not settled. You ignored these warnings and pushed
>forward to edit the text, including your movement of 20K of text to a
>separate page, and complain that these edits were reverted together. This
>is simply disingenuous and you know it.

Again, not so. All I did was try to NPOV a POV mess of an article. Most (but
not all) of the problem was with that 20K text, which did not belong there,
and you know it.
>
>3) A sysop protected the page in an attempt to cool down the edit war.
>This was a largely symbolic gesture since we are both sysops, but we chose
>not to edit the page while it was protected. However, this precluded non-
>sysops who had announced that they wanted to make edits to the page from
>doing so. To prevent this unfortunate situation, I unprotected the page
>with the comment:
>
>         "removing protection for now (I was involved so I won't edit for
>          another few hours if Jtdirl won't, but others should be able to)"
>
>I did not edit the page for the next few hours and nor did you,

You know I am not on during the daytime. So I didn't have a choice, just
came back to find you were editing away again, having unprotected a
protected page in clear breach of sysop rules.

>You moved virtually all the criticisms of Mother Teresa to a separate page
>without discussing this on the talk page first. Three users (myself, Bryan
>and Jiang) disagreed with this. I and Bryan Derksen reverted your changes.
>It might be argued that it would have been "wiser" to just wait a day or
>two and then address the matter again, but that is clearly wrong -- had we
>done so, you would have reorganized the entire article(s) according to
>your idea of NPOV, making it very difficult to reach any kind of consensus
>on the matter.
>
No I didn't. I moved a body of text, much of which was about her order, not
about her, to a separate article and attempted to put a shorter summary in.
Others on the page had already complained about what you had added in but
you went ahead regardless.

>In addition to that, you continue to play your usual games, which consist
>of
>- personal attacks (always singling out one contributor, even though
>several users have expressed disagreement with your actions)

I have to say at this point that a ban of Jtdirl is no longer out of the
question for me.?Eloquence 22:07, Oct 20, 2003 (UTC)

Given that he is editing a page about a person that is supposedly all about
love, he carries a great deal of hate inside him.

You can play up your oh-so-critical "lapsed Catholic" attitude as much as
you want

Here you have Jtdirl, the valiant defender of truth and neutrality who makes
all people happy and contented.

I have big doubts that you would engage in an edit war over Sun Myung Moon,
but of course with your proven pro-Catholic bias it seems obvious that you
would want to defend the fiction that has been built around Mother Teresa,
without any substantial arguments to support your edits.

Who made all those attacks, Eric?

>- false accusations of abusive behavior

And what were those comments above then?

>- disingenuous tactics like your behavior in the edit war, piling changes
>upon changes to bully your way through
>- making false claims (e.g. repeatedly claiming that the criticism section
>was merely based on "a single TV show", whereas I have shown you the
>multitude of sources on which it was based, including several books and
>newspaper articles and an editorial in "The Lancet")

All of which I mentioned in the short summary which you called censorship.
>
>I chose to ignore your continuous stream of attacks against me, but other
>users would not have shown the same amount of patience and be driven away
>by your behavior, which resembles that of a schoolyard bully.

What was that again about personal attacks?
>
>In spite of this unacceptable behavior on your part, I have repeatedly
>offered to seek a cooperative, consensual solution for the alleged or real
>NPOV problems on the page in question. In fact, I was working on reaching
>a consensus with Bryan and other contributors while you continued
>reverting to your style. Everyone can see this by taking a look at
>[[Talk:Mother Teresa]].
>
>It is time for you to stop playing strategic games against other
>contributors, and to start working in the spirit of mutual cooperation.
>Now is a good moment to do so -- I fully approve of your recent edits of
>the article (provided you haven't again started moving away the criticism
>section).

So why then accuse me of a 'pro-catholic bias' and censoring criticism of
MT, when I was doing nothing of the sort, merely trying to NPOV an article
and give stuff not about MT its own article?

>Yet you continue your bullying tactics against other
>contributors. You do not want peaceful cooperation, you want to pick
>fights and win. That is not how Wikipedia works.

Which is why, I suppose, every edit I made for ages tonight was screwed
around when you went in and began changing past tense to present tense while
I was trying to save NPOV changes. So much for co-operation. And throwing
accusations of 'pro-catholic bias' really is constructive and non-bullying,
I  suppose?
>
>I can and will work with you on this article, provided you make a serious
>commitment to seeking consensus on your changes.

Others users earlier criticised your constant adding in of more and more
detractors' claims and said that it unbalanced the article. Here and
elsewhere your usual approach has been 'be bold' when you think you can get
away with it, cry 'consensus' when someone stops you.

>That cannot always be
>done, of course, but there are reasonable courses of actions in the cases
>where it can't (act based on established precedent, hold a vote, ask Jimbo
>etc.). Just trying to get "your way or the highway" will not lead to any
>kind of solution.

More threats from 'The User Who Does Not Make Threats', eh?
>
>So here's my offer: Make the changes to the criticism section you find
>important. I will edit the parts which I don't like and if we can't agree,
>we'll go to the talk page. Once the criticism section is edited, we will
>take a look at the entire article and if it is too long (32K), we will
>summarize individual sections and split them away, regardless of their
>content. If it is still below that size, we won't do that. If the
>criticism section is still too dominant, we will together try to expand
>the other sections of the article. How about some wiki-cooperation for a
>change?

I have co-operated with many people on wikipedia. The only fights I have had
here in ages have been with you, when you tried to POV not one but a series
of articles on religion. Each time you accused me of a 'pro-catholic bias'.
Others said the edits were perfectly NPOV. Bias has no place in a wikipedia
article, whether it is bias for or against RCism, protestantism, Islam, the
Jewish faith, etc. How is it that it is your edits on religious matters that
draw criticism from people and accusations of bias.

You are perfectly entitled to hold humanist views and be critical of
organised religion, but what you cannot do is go around turning articles
into polemics for your opinion. I have been accused of bias for and against
Australian republicanism, the British monarchy, Israel, communism, etc often
simultaneously, for standing up to both sides and saying 'that is not NPOV'.
I have turned religious articles that were seen as unsalvageable into
articles that were praised as NPOV. What makes you think I want to turn an
article on Mother Teresa into a POV polemic. I don't. If I was trying to
'silence the facts' I would have simply deleted them, not moved them up to
the opening paragraph and given them their own article. But I am sick and
tired of wild accusations of 'pro-catholic bias' for trying to do a
professional editing job on sloppily written one sided articles, whether
they are pro- or anti- catholic, pro- or anti- MT.

On this article, comments made on your massive add-in include

In this article, 1/3 described her life and work, and 2/3 described
detractor's claims. And this is for someone who won the Nobel Prize for
Peace. Is this NPOV? --Kaihsu 16:35, 26 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Why is there such a long DIATRIBE against this person in an aricle which is
supposed to have a neutral POV? The criticisms are written with such bias
that even as a stand-alone article it currently violates NPOV.205.188.208.72
21:38, 19 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I think the best solution would be to summarize the controversies here, and
move the whole text to another article. This one has gotten way too long in
my opinion. Dori 19:06, 26 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Who said anything about hiding. Like most other people, I see an article
that long (which looks more like a book report) and I shy away. I said
summarize and link to the long article. If you want to write your PhD thesis
here, then go ahead. Dori 21:43, 26 Aug 2003 (UTC)

In moving the text, I was doing no more than reflecting the will of those
users you ignored and told " It is not a place for apologetics" as if they
too were part of some big pro-catholic conspiracy to stop you telling 'the
truth'.  If you want to lecture people on NPOV, start practising it. If you
want to accuse everyone else of bias, start looking just how neutral /you/
are in your edits, and just how many facts as opposed to opinions you have.
And don't lecture everyone else on your behaviour when your approach is to
break sysop rules if you can't get your own way, accuse everyone else of
bias if you can't get your own way, and throw around POV allegations like
confetti against those trying to fix a poorly written article that veers
between glorification and demonisation of the subject and misses NPOV by a
mile.

JT

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from_name: Sascha Noyes

body:
I also don't think that this is a good idea. What would be the purpose of this
feature other than "gathering statistics"? What kind of statistics do you
hope to gather?

Best,
Sascha Noyes
aka snoyes

On Tuesday 21 October 2003 12:01 am, Andrew Lih wrote:
> Edit history does not equal watch list.  I can watch something without
> having edited it.  And other people being able to see my watch list is
> an invasion of privacy of sorts, so this should be "opt-in" only, not
> the default, if implemented.
>
> Wikipedia is trying to get more people to join, so it would be a tragedy
> if this privacy issue kept folks away.
>
> -Fuzheado
>

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from_name: Nils Kehrein

subject: [Wikitech-l] Stats broken on en: ?

body:
... last report was generated on the 14th of October.

Regards,
Nils.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Big brother...

body:
It depends on the goal of the feature

* More information on an article :

It could at any time provide the number of editors
"watching" the page. It could be just a number at the
bottom of the page, and would likely help to measure
the interest there is in the article (for editors,
especially since we can now easily remove items from
our watchlist)

This feature would be at the same level than the
previous "hit counter". For those of you newer on
Wikipedia (Jesus, do I sound old saying this !), the
hit counter was a number displayed at the bottom of
each page, and incrementing each time the page was
displayed. It gave information about the global
interest for the article (for editors and readers).
That feature was disabled several months ago to help
the struggling server. I think it was the first of a
very lengthy list of features to be removed. I suppose
that if we think of providing a counter for the
"watch", we could also get back the hit counter, which
was also very informative. The two counters would
nicely complete each other.

* More information on an editor :

This is not a technical feature to help editing, this
is a protection feature to help against vandal, or a
feature to help against antagonistic editors. There
should be no confusion. This will be seen as invasion
of privacy. The drawbacks will be to madden quite a
number of people, a reduction of liberty rights, will
perhaps lead some to create false accounts to create a
second watch list. I also see a possible slipery
slope, where only those "trusted" will be offered that
feature, further setting classes among editors.

I hope people who agree with this feature, will also
understand WELL what they agree for, and support it in
all knowledge. Do you support a technical feature or a
security feature ?

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