subject: [Wikipedia-l] I'm seeing a trend here or How to keep drivingaway good contributors

body:
The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> writes:

> I think that most people would agree that in an ideal situation, banning
> would be unnecessary

I think everyone would agree.
However, since our situation is less than ideal, I don't see the relevance.
--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
 are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Gareth Owen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> writes:

> How do they clutter the "worthwhile" entries? Wikipedia is not paper.

RandomPages
RecentChanges

> And though I'm not a huge fan of the entries, they are well done.

What is the point of well done bad articles?
--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
 are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
Jeroen Heijmans <J.Heijmans at stud.tue.nl> writes:

> Why would we do that?

Because they're not encyclopedia articles.
They're entries from a gazetteer.

One could dump a PD dictionary into wikipedia, and each article would be more
informative than many stubs.  But wikipedia is not a dictionary.

Its not a gazetteer, either.
--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
 are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
I don't think we should count as "articles" any page that was generated by a script. Okay, if someone (i.e., a human contributor) edits such a page, even slightly, we can count it. But as of now I am entirely discounting our "working on X number of articles" blurb. It should say that we wrote Y articles and ran a SQL script to generated Z articles for a total of T. Or better yet, just say we wrote Y articles.

Either delete Ram-Man's crap or be honest about it. (Darn it, I'm starting to sound as curmudgeonly as Cunctator and LDC. Must be due to seeing a gray hair in the mirror the other day.)

Or why can't the SQL script serve up a page on request? That is, when the reader clicks on the link (or enters the URL):
* If there is no "real" page already there, run the script, generate the page, and show it to the user. If they click on edit, let them edit the script results; and if they click save, then save the article with the REAL_PAGE flag set to TRUE.
* If there is already a "real" page there, return that page as usual.

Ed Poor


from_name: Stephen Gilbert

body:
--- lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
> > There's a rich history from older wiki communities
> > and projects that we can, and should, draw upon,
> just
> > as we draw upon existing sources for encyclopedia
> articles.
>
> >> Maybe.  I'm not actually sure that that's true;
> Wikipedia
> >> is a completely new thing.  It's a wiki, but it's
> a lot
> >> more than a wiki.
>
> > Perhaps, but we're still building on a foundation
> > that's largely wiki, and many of our problems have
> > also been faced by other wikis.
> > There are lots of other sources to learn from too:
> > older encyclopedia projects (why did they fail?),
> > commercial encyclopedias (is there anything we can
> > leverage from them in our project?) and the
> rise(s)
> > and fall(s) of other great Internet experiments
> > (Usenet, Slashdot).
>
> I think it's important to realize that we are on the
> bleeding edge here, and that the experience of
> others in
> other online communities, even wiki, doesn't
> necessarily
> apply.

Yes, but it doesn't necessarily *not* apply, which is
what I'm getting at.

> First, the idea that there is a "rich
> history"
> of wikis in particular is laughable, unless there's
> some
> definition of "rich history" that includes things
> created
> in 1995, none of which has ever produced a product
> even
> vaguely resembling what we're trying to produce.  I
> might
> apply the term "rich history" to things like mailing
> lists,
> Usenet, IRC, and MUDs; everything else is new
> ground.

"Rich" doesn't necessarily equate with "long". There
are examples of many different people trying to do
different things, and that qualifies as "rich".

> We also differ greatly from a lot of those earlier
> communities
> in that we have a goal: building an encyclopedia.
> We are not
> here /for the purpose/ of building a community; the
> community
> is just a /means/ to the end of building an
> encyclopedia.

Only MeatBallWiki exists solely for the purpose of
community-building and discussion. Ward's Wiki, for
example, was originally a repository for programming
patterns, shifted into extreme programming, and it's
now pretty much a free-for-all. If we want to avoid
that, we can look to avoid and/or counter the factors
that pushed Wiki in that direction

> If
> those other communities teach us something about
> building
> communities, that may or may not apply here, because
> if the
> community gets in the way of the goal, the goal
> comes first.

This is a false dichotomy. If the community falls
apart, so does the project. But I'm glad you recognize
that lessons from other communities may apply here,
just as I recognize that they may not.

> I think Wikipedia has more in common with things
> like open
> source software projects, in that the community
> itself is just
> a secondary concern to producing a product.  In
> other words,
> we should take our lessons not from MUDs or
> Everything2, but
> from Linux kernel development, the Apache project,
> Mozilla,
> etc.  I think it's worth noting that in all of those
> projects,
> there are security and control mechanisms.

If Wikipedia is different from previous wiki projects,
it's certainly different from open source software
projects.

I think it's a combination of both, with differences
thrown into the mix. Why can't we take our lessons
from all comers?

Everything2 is a great example. It started out as an
encyclopedia project, just like us. Now it's... not.
It had (and has) many "security and control
mechanisms": police forces, banning, permanent
deletion of nodes, experience points, granting of
privileges by the privileged. If we, out of ignorance,
do the same things that Everything2 has done, we could
end up the same way.

> So don't tell me what other Wikis have done--it
> doesn't matter.
> Tell me what other /successful productive projects/
> have done.

What other *unsuccessful* projects have done is just
as important. In fact, I say it's more so. Trying to
copy other's successes is more difficult than avoid
other's mistakes.

> Don't tell me how to build a community; tell me how
> to make
> the community build an encyclopedia.

Ok, here's one way. Don't treat "the community" and
"the project" as separate entities; they are tightly
entwined. To focus on building a community and losing
sight of the goal is extremely harmful, but so is
forgetting that it's the community that works together
toward the goal.

Stephen G.

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] I'm seeing a trend here or How to keep drivingaway

body:
koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com writes:

> All I meant was that Cunc, of all of us,
> seems most concerned with abuses of authority.

We're all concerned with abuses of authority.
Cunc merely has a different definition to everyone else.
--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
 are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)


from_name: The Cunctator

references:
<200210251834.g9PIY3J11632@ross.bomis.com>
	<r5iwuo6xtb2.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>
	<1035580251.19347.11.camel@mercury.mit.edu>
	<r5ihefa168p.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>

body:
On Fri, 2002-10-25 at 18:52, Gareth Owen wrote:
> The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> writes:
>
> > Oh, really. How does my definition seem to differ from everyone else's?
>
> You've been the sole voice of objection on so many issues upon which literally
> everyone else on the list agrees, that I'm amazed you even have the gall to ask

Name the issue on which I have been the sole voice of objection, rather
than the most vociferous.

You might want to try toning down the heightened rhetoric.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Sysop available

body:
Is there a sysop who can ban 193.251.9.132 *right now*
Coninually posting the goatsex image...

Cheers


from_name: Jeroen Heijmans

subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
> Would it be possible to move the fantastic-waste-of-space that is Ram-Man's
> latest datadump to gazetteer.wikipedia.com, or somesuch, so they don't clutter
> up the *worthwhile* *encyclopedic* entries?

Why would we do that? Of the remainder of the articles, there's really a lot that are not
*worthwile* either - for now. In fact, there's many country articles that contain less information
than [[Grasshopper Junction, Arizona]] (oh, well, I see now that article doesn't exist (yet)). I
agree, they're just stubs, but then again, there's virtually no complete article on Wikipedia.

In fact, I've been contributing - also automated - all Dutch and Swedish municipalities lately, be
it with somewhat less information than Ram-Man's work.

Jeronimo


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] on a lighter note: lists

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>I didn't agree to this. It depends on what the reader is looking for.
>

I knew it!
I raised this *ages* ago. some people agreed. LDC had objections; Toby
said "do we even need a standard? but if there is one, forward"

I waited a good 2 weeks, and raised it again, adressing both of of their
comments. I said "any objections before I make it Manual of Style policy.
check the archive, but I think it's been *another* 2 weeks since then!

>
>Chrono order (earliest first) -- when you care about the complete list, from first to last
>* List of US presidents - Washington, Adams, Jefferon, ...
>* Lists of states that joined the union
>* Nobel prizes
>
>Reverse chrono (latest first) -- when you care about the last few more than the first
>* Academy Award (Oscar) winners
>* Emmy Awards
>* Sports champions -- World Series (baseball), World Cup (soccer), Stanley Cup (hockey)
>
>Some awards like Pulitzer Prizes could go either way. Nobel Peace Prize, which is politically motivated and topical, could also go either way.
>
>Ed Poor
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: tarquin [mailto:tarquin at planetunreal.com]
>Sent: Friday, October 25, 2002 12:10 PM
>To: wikipedia-l at nupedia.com
>Subject: [Wikipedia-l] on a lighter note: lists
>
>
>A while back we agreed that most chronological lists should go forward,
>from past to present reading down. (prizes, incumbents, lists of works,
>and chronologies themselves)
>
>since there are many list pages that go the other way, and reversing by
>hand is tedious, I've put up a perl script:
>
>    * http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/cgi-bin/reverser.cgi
>
>I'll link it to it from the manual of style when I get round to updating
>it to mention lists.
>
>
>
>[Wikipedia-l]
>To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
>http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>[Wikipedia-l]
>To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
>http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] www.wikipedia.org design

body:
Tom Parmenter wrote:

>|From: tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com>
>|Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 11:40:38 +0100
>|
>| > 1. A page like this is useful exactly once for any user. After that
>|it becomes useless.
>|
>|The Main Page is just the same -- I haven't bookmarked it & I only ever
>|visit it if I see it has been edited. I expect most regular visitors are
>|like me & bookmark Recent Changes.
>|
>
>No no, it is only us addicts who do that!  Recent Changes is not for
>normal people.  Normal people come first via Google and then use the
>Main Page, if for no other reason, to access the search facility.
>
Surely the "Main Page" button on the English pedia will go to the
English main page, which would be as it is now? -- and likewise the
French "main page", etc etc
So googlers who arrive to articles would never see the multi-lingual
central station.

or have we all been talking cross-purposes?


subject: [Wikipedia-l] I'm seeing a trend here or How to keep driving away good contributors

body:
On Fri, Oct 25, 2002 at 12:44:26PM -0700, Zoe wrote:
>  mattheww+wikipedia at chiark.greenend.org.uk wrote:
>>Then he was under a misconception. He did not have to deal with them.

> So we just let the obnoxious ones run roughshod over all of the work
> and ignore their ridiculous changes?

No. We fix them when we have the energy to do so. When we get tired, we
trust that others will pick up the slack, rather than assuming that the
only solution is to ban.

-M-


subject: [Wikipedia-l] how to deal with uncooperative users

body:
On Fri, Oct 25, 2002 at 11:48:33AM +0200, elian wrote:
> Just my experiences from the German wikipedia where we had almost no edit
> wars at all up to now. We have questionable contributions, some are
> silently moved to talk pages, some are rewritten. Discussion is tried
> once, after this fails the person is simply ignored.

This seems a much better idea than getting ban-happy. I worry that
forming an active cabal will put off more good people than
uncooperative users will.

-M-


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Demo front page

body:
I merged my little script with the fine layout from the other page.
Please try again
    http://mitglied.lycos.de/manske/wiki/test.php    (Sorry for the
banner, I can't help it)

I included the English and German intro, as well as the localized search
function. The word "Search" and the intro will appear in English for all
other browser settings, as English is the default for languages that
don't have an intro text of their own.

Known problems:
* Neutral or localized logo is needed
* Maybe an unobstrusive link in or close to the intro to the English
wikipedia, as an anchor for anyone who is stuck on a foreign PC ("This
page in English")
* Works only for Phase III wikipedias (.org)

Magnus


from_name: elian

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Demo front page

body:
Hi Magnus,

Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at epost.de> writes:

> I merged my little script with the fine layout from the other
> page. Please try again
>     http://mitglied.lycos.de/manske/wiki/test.php    (Sorry for the
> banner, I can't help it)

I would suggest to emphasize the language wikipedia preferred by the
browser simply by coloring the link in a nice, dark red instead of the
green of the other ones, no table border. Maybe add also an <hr>-tag
between introduction and language section.

Meanwhile I updated http://www.djini.de/Uploads/wikipedia/wikipedia2.html
(stylesheet also updated) to show the "working"-sentences in italic, I
think this is better.

greetings,
elian


from_name: Karen AKA Kajikit

subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
tarquin wrote:
>
> The Cunctator wrote:
>
> >By the way, with Ram-Man's automatic article addition, we've just hit 80.000 English entries
>
> Yes. We're big like a telephone directory is big.
> Please let's not celebrate this milestone.
> When we got to 50k articles we were saying "but so many are stubs", and we're in a worse situation now, as I don't see how we can exclude these town pages from article counts.
> They really are stubs, maybe not in terms of length but in terms of content and usefulness.
>
> It's not that I don't care about one-horse US towns (well, okay, I don't) but I feel the entire Wikipedia has tilted.
> We shouldn't delete them, but to balance we should maybe work on, say, adding 10,000 articles to the Tree of Life project?

It's seriously tipped the balance of the wikipedia. Five times out of
ten hitting the 'random' button takes me to one of these new entries...
I'm sure they're very useful if you need to find information on 'Dead
Horse, Arizona', but they're not very relevant in the grand scheme of
things. I'll be glad once they're all in and the recent changes menu can
return to usefulness. Out of curiosity, what existing entries are these
new articles linked to?

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

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

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


body:
mattheww+wikipedia at chiark.greenend.org.uk wrote:
> We fix them when we have the energy to do so. When we get tired, we
> trust that others will pick up the slack, rather than assuming that the
> only solution is to ban.

Zoe wrote:
> And when they show no signs of getting tired?

If it turns out that there aren't enough people who are happy to fix
breakage, _then_ we should start thinking of banning people. But we
shouldn't assume that there aren't before we try.

Here's my personal guess: if it comes to the point that the only way to
keep Wikipedia healthy is to have a policy under which we frequently
ban people, Wikipedia will not be viable in any case. Nonetheless, if
we do reach that point, I would support trying such a policy. I am sure
we have not reached that point yet.

-M-


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Cunc, tell us what you want?

body:
The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> writes:

> 1) There doesn't seem to be any major philosophical objection to a browser
> localization redirect of "http://www.wikipedia.org/".

I have nine browsers on my computer (needed for webdesign and some other
purposes). Some don't even have a localize-option and do you think I
bother to configure the rest? So I get english all the time.

My mother doesn't even know that her browser has a localize-option and she
doesn't speak english and - yes, she thinks also that webadresses always
start with www. However, she would be a great contributor to the
German wikipedia. Have you ever watched non-computer experienced people
using their computer? Just ask how many know their browser preferences.

Esperanto is not available as language option in all of my browsers. De
facto, by depending only on browser settings, we would deprive the
Esperanto wikipedia of many possible contributors (who would be
enthusiastic discovering an esperanto encyclopedia but have no interest at
all in contributing to yet another english encyclopedia)

Next, I want to see the progress of all wikipedias at one central place
and not somewhere hidden at an obscure statistics page somewhere at the
english (Main?) wikipedia where nobody of the non-english contributors
bothers to look for regularly. The version I proposed stimulates
competition.

Lastly, I want to have a simple, not crowded page to search wikipedia
where I am not disturbed by masses of text and I have to look very sharply
to discover the small "search" field in one corner.

If we want to be an encyclopedia, we should offer people an attractive
interface for quick and easy searching wikipedia - and where could this be
better placed than on the Main Page www.wikipedia.org? If I am somewhere
and I simply want to know something, I don't want categories,
introductions and masses of links: I want a search box, cursor already
placed in it, type in something and get my results.

> I only see a secondary philosophical objection. The objection is based on
> the argument that first people should be encouraged to contribute to the
> Eng-lang Wikipedia before others, not from the principle that English is
> better, but from the principle that "from a strict efficiency point of
> view, the goal of a comprehensive and neutral encyclopedia would benefit
> from dealing with issues in only one central article with as many actors as
> possible debating/working together rather than several different articles
> with only a couple of persons in each place, even though they are updating
> their own articles from the other wikis", as Anthere eloquently put it. (I'm
> not claiming she advocates this position. She just described it well.) This
> objection would be pretty much obviated with better backend integration and
> interlanguage tools.

If this is the case I vote for abandoning the other language wikipedias,
but I am not sure if I understood you right: you build sentences of German
length.

Besides, I am no philosopher, my objections are not philosophical
but practical. If you like to engage in philosophical discussions I
suggest a philosophy forum, not wikipedia-mailinglist.

We have one thing in common: we both object balcanization,
however our interpretation seem to vary.

I think a wikipedia, each language on a separate URL without a centralized
- and a really centralized - main page is a bundle of balkanized
projects. If this remains like this, I prefer to stay in the nice,
peaceful, balkanized German wikipedia without having to think about the
others around - at least we have www.wikipedia.de. Maybe the dutch, the
french, the polish and so on could also reserve .nl, .fr, .pl...

greetings,
elian
--
"Computer games don't affect kids, I mean if Pacman affected us as
kids, we'd  all be running around in darkened rooms, munching pills
and listening to repetitive music." ~unknown


from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Demo front page

body:
elian wrote:

>Hi Magnus,
>
>Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at epost.de> writes:
>
>
>
>>I merged my little script with the fine layout from the other
>>page. Please try again
>>    http://mitglied.lycos.de/manske/wiki/test.php    (Sorry for the
>>banner, I can't help it)
>>
>>
>
>I would suggest to emphasize the language wikipedia preferred by the
>browser simply by coloring the link in a nice, dark red instead of the
>green of the other ones, no table border. Maybe add also an <hr>-tag
>between introduction and language section.
>
>Meanwhile I updated http://www.djini.de/Uploads/wikipedia/wikipedia2.html
>(stylesheet also updated) to show the "working"-sentences in italic, I
>think this is better.
>
>greetings,
>elian
>
>
>
Elian,

That's a ''really'' nice design for the multi-lingual-portal page.
However, I suggest that page should not be the front page
http://www.wikipedia.org/, which I think should be consist of

* a thin welcome banner with links pointing to the multi-lingual-portal
page (eg http://www.wikipedia.org/index1.html) and the multi-lingual
Wikipedia foundation page.
* a drop-down language-selection menu
* a search bar
AND MOST IMPORTANTLY:
* the front page content of the localised Wikipedia of the user's or
browser's choice, as per my previous comments

-- Neil


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Demo front page

body:
elian wrote:

 >Hi Magnus,
 >
 >Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at epost.de> writes:
 >
 >
 >
 >>I merged my little script with the fine layout from the other
 >>page. Please try again
 >>    http://mitglied.lycos.de/manske/wiki/test.php    (Sorry for the
 >>banner, I can't help it)
 >>
 >>
 >
 >I would suggest to emphasize the language wikipedia preferred by the
 >browser simply by coloring the link in a nice, dark red instead of the
 >green of the other ones, no table border. Maybe add also an <hr>-tag
 >between introduction and language section.
 >
 >Meanwhile I updated http://www.djini.de/Uploads/wikipedia/wikipedia2.html
 >(stylesheet also updated) to show the "working"-sentences in italic, I
 >think this is better.
 >
 >greetings,
 >elian
 >
 >
 >
Elian,

That's a ''really'' nice design for the multi-lingual-portal page.
However, I suggest that page should not be the front page
http://www.wikipedia.org/, which I think should be consist of

* a thin welcome banner with links pointing to the multi-lingual-portal
page (eg http://www.wikipedia.org/index1.html) and the multi-lingual
Wikipedia foundation page.
* a drop-down language-selection menu
* a search bar
AND MOST IMPORTANTLY:
* the front page content of the localised Wikipedia of the user's or
browser's choice, as per my previous comments

-- Neil


from_name: Paul Ebermann

subject: [Intlwiki-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Cunc, tell us what you want?

body:
"elian" skribis:

[...]
> Esperanto is not available as language option in all of my browsers. De
> facto, by depending only on browser settings, we would deprive the
> Esperanto wikipedia of many possible contributors (who would be
> enthusiastic discovering an esperanto encyclopedia but have no interest at
> all in contributing to yet another english encyclopedia)

[eo]
Vi povas uzi (almenaux en IE kaj Opera) novaj
lingvoj ("uzante difinita"), kaj tie skribi "eo".
Sed praktike mi pensas, ke multaj esperantistoj
ne scias pri tiu.

[de]
Du kannst (zumindest in IE und Opera) neue Sprachen
hinzuf?gen ("benutzerdefiniert") und dort "eo" angeben.
Ich nehme allerdings an, dass die meisten Esperantisten
das nicht wissen.

[en]
You can (at least in Opera and the IE) add new
languages ("user defined") and there type "eo".
But I think that most Esperantists do not know
this ...

Paul


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Demo front page

body:
"Magnus Manske" skribis je "wikipedia-l"

> I merged my little script with the fine layout from the other page.
> Please try again
>     http://mitglied.lycos.de/manske/wiki/test.php    (Sorry for the
> banner, I can't help it)

If one don't want to see the ads, simply switch
off JavaScript. (Yes, I also use a lycos-page ...)

> I included the English and German intro, as well as the localized search
> function. The word "Search" and the intro will appear in English for all
> other browser settings, as English is the default for languages that
> don't have an intro text of their own.

Please do not use simply English whenever the first
language of the user is not known.
Look forward in the list of the user languages,
the second one might be available.

(In my case, German was at place 2, (eo at one),
 but I got an English page (English is only at
 place 3 in my list).)

Paul


subject: [Wikipedia-l] New list

body:
"Jason Richey" skribis:

> Please let me know if you have any trouble with the new system.  Also,
> I will be moving a few other wikipedia specific lists in the coming
> hours/days.  If you have a list that you think needs moved, please
> feel free to let me know.

Please re-setup the reply-to to the list.
It seems not to work since the change.

Paul


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] on a lighter note: lists

body:
tarquin wrote:

> A while back we agreed that most chronological lists should go
> forward, from past to present reading down. (prizes, incumbents, lists
> of works, and chronologies themselves)
>
> since there are many list pages that go the other way, and reversing
> by hand is tedious, I've put up a perl script:
>
>    * http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/cgi-bin/reverser.cgi
>
> I'll link it to it from the manual of style when I get round to
> updating it to mention lists.

After doing a few of the Academyh Awards by hand, I became familiar with
the tedium.  Now I cut and paste to an Excel spreatsheet, resort there,
and copy back to the article.

Eclecticology


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Demo front page

body:
"Magnus Manske" skribis:

> I merged my little script with the fine layout from the other page.
> Please try again
>     http://mitglied.lycos.de/manske/wiki/test.php    (Sorry for the
> banner, I can't help it)

Did you ever looked at it by Opera?
http://www.mathematik.hu-berlin.de/~ebermann/vikipedio/magnus.jpg

(Elian's page has the same problems.)

Paul


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
Zoe <zoecomnena at yahoo.com> writes:

> What space are they wasting?

Have you looked at RecentChanges recently?

> What things would be in that space if Ram-Man's articles weren't there?
> Why does it bother you so much?

Because they're not encyclopedia articles, they're distorting the article
counts and, as anyone who's hit RandomPage recently will tell you, they're
giving a skewed view of the project to anyone who's looking at it.

All this information is already available online from the correct places --
US census dept et al.  Being informations does not make it worthwhile
information.   There is little encyclopedic worth in knowing the elevation
above sealevel of Shithole, Indiana.

If you want wikiatlas.org or wikicensus.org, or wikidomesdaybook.org, I
recommend buying the domain name and setting the damn thing up.  And I thought
-- after discussion about The Jargon File, the Catholic Encyclopia and
Britannica PD -- that we didn't want datadumps.
Its the sellout of quality to quantity, with seemingly no human editing.

On top of that, its slowing down responses and is contributing to the
overloading of the server.

--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
 are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)


references:
<200210251834.g9PIY3J11632@ross.bomis.com>
	<r5iwuo6xtb2.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>
	<1035580251.19347.11.camel@mercury.mit.edu>

body:
The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> writes:

> Oh, really. How does my definition seem to differ from everyone else's?

You've been the sole voice of objection on so many issues upon which literally
everyone else on the list agrees, that I'm amazed you even have the gall to ask
--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
 are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Demo front page

body:
Paul Ebermann wrote:

>Please do not use simply English whenever the first
>language of the user is not known.
>Look forward in the list of the user languages,
>the second one might be available.
>
>(In my case, German was at place 2, (eo at one),
> but I got an English page (English is only at
> place 3 in my list).)
>
>
I a "live" version, you'd have gotten the eo text anyway. There'd be no
problem to go through the languages like that, but I just didn't bother
on the test page.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Demo front page

body:
Paul Ebermann wrote:

>Did you ever looked at it by Opera?
>http://www.mathematik.hu-berlin.de/~ebermann/vikipedio/magnus.jpg
>
>(Elian's page has the same problems.)
>
That looks more like an Opera problem with SmallCaps. It should wrap the
lines at the space, as IE and Mozilla do.

Anyway, that's a stylesheet issue. The only question right now is, would
a page /like that/ acceptable as the project main page? Cunc?


body:
Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> writes:

> elian wrote in small part:
>
> >Next, I want to see the progress of all wikipedias at one central place
> >and not somewhere hidden at an obscure statistics page somewhere at the
> >english (Main?) wikipedia where nobody of the non-english contributors
> >bothers to look for regularly. The version I proposed stimulates
> >competition.
>
> I'm not sure why you use the word "competition" here.
> It seems to me that having a central page to look at each language
> will promote cooperation rather than competition.
> And furthermore, I think that that's exactly what *should* be promoted.
> So you seem to use the wrong word, but replace it with "cooperation"
> and the argument is exactly right.

Not the right wording, you are right. What I meant is both, cooperation
and competition. It ranges from "Oh, the spanish have 4000 articles now -
I should go over and add interlanguage links" and "hello, the french added
in one week over 1000 articles - how did they do that? Let's have a
look..." to "Oh, no - the x-ish are
outrunning us, let's try to get some more contributors."

greetings,
elian
--
Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw.
It was its tendency to bend at the knees.
- Terry Pratchett


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Demo front page, enhanced

body:
I uploaded a slightly enhanced version, again at

 http://mitglied.lycos.de/manske/wiki/test.php

Please test it with Esperanto as first browser choice, it should say
"Esperanto test" or something in the title.

I left the smallcaps in for now, as I like them, and Opera needs fixing ;-)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Demo front page

body:
"Magnus Manske" skribis:

> Paul Ebermann wrote:
>
> >Please do not use simply English whenever the first
> >language of the user is not known.
> >Look forward in the list of the user languages,
> >the second one might be available.
> >
> >(In my case, German was at place 2, (eo at one),
> > but I got an English page (English is only at
> > place 3 in my list).)
>
> I a "live" version, you'd have gotten the eo text anyway. There'd be no
> problem to go through the languages like that, but I just didn't bother
> on the test page.

My Esperanto was only an example. Some people may use
an exotic language, for which we don't have a wikipedia
(x-klingon?) at first place and another "popular"
language at second place (f.i. german), for which a
wikipedia exists. Why should those people get an english
page instead of the german one?

I think, the problem (and the solution) is clear now ...

Paul


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Demo front page, enhanced

body:
"Magnus Manske" skribis (je wikipedia-l):

> I uploaded a slightly enhanced version, again at
>
>  http://mitglied.lycos.de/manske/wiki/test.php
>
> Please test it with Esperanto as first browser choice, it should say
> "Esperanto test" or something in the title.

Jes, it works.

I seem having missed the point:
If you don't have the first language,
use the second (or following) languages
of the user _before_ falling back to
english. (You may test this yourself using
any other unknown language at first place.)

Good night
Paul


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:

>Imran wrote:
>
>>To avoid giving a skewed view of the pedia we need some sort of
>>classification systems so that the RandomPage function first randomly
>>chooses a topic and then returns a random article from that topic.
>>
>
>Actually, RandomPage gives an accurate view of wikipedia: we have far more of Ram-Man's articles than anything else, so they turn up more than anything else.  A year ago we had far more Atlas Shrugged articles than anything else, so *those* would always turn up.  The solution?  Write more articles on other topics.
>
At some point in between the same was happening for the "year" pages.  I
agree to KQ's solution to the problem cased by Ram-Man's good work.
Eclecticology


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
Imran wrote:
>To avoid giving a skewed view of the pedia we need some sort of
>classification systems so that the RandomPage function first randomly
>chooses a topic and then returns a random article from that topic.

Actually, RandomPage gives an accurate view of wikipedia: we have far more of Ram-Man's articles than anything else, so they turn up more than anything else.  A year ago we had far more Atlas Shrugged articles than anything else, so *those* would always turn up.  The solution?  Write more articles on other topics.

kq


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Intlwiki-l] voting on www.wikipedia.org

body:
>
>
>That reminds me of the referendum we had to vote for
>quite many years ago when we had lots of problems with
>our colony New Caledonia.
>The vote proposition was basically "do you want to do
>something for New Caledonia"
>* yes
>* no
>
>"wellllllll....yessssss of course"
>There was an unwritten codicil.
>
It reminds me of the question that appeaed oin an insurance company form
some years ago.  It asked, "Are you single, married, widowed or
divorced?"  One individual simply answred "Yes".

>So of course, I vote "other"
>Well being aware that in *this* voting system, "other"
>means "white" and that "white" is never counted in the
>final results.
>Undefined "other" can not be anything else than
>"white".
>
>"Other" could have been a proposition, as was
>announced by tc *yesterday*.
>
Hmmm!  "Blanc" in this context would be "blank" instead of "white".  You
are right that a blank ballot would not be counted, and would suggest an
abstention, or often that you don't care which way a vote goes.
 Nevertheless, a lot of abstentions would be noticeable.  Voting "other"
(sometimes the same as "none of the above" but with a place to write in
an alternate suggestion) means that you really don't like any of the
other options.  A strong "other" vote often means that we want to keep
on talking about this.  Mercifully, let's hope that the "other"s don't
win this time.
Eclecticology


from_name: Anthere

body:
--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> The Cunctator wrote:
>
> >People have been talking about the difficulty of
> decision-making. So I
> >invite people to vote on how decisions should be
> made.

slowly and incrementally

----

In my country, we don't vote by crossing.
We deliberately choose the paper with the option we
tactically prefer, and we put that specific paper in
the ballot box.

And I don't like voting much.

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] voting on www.wikipedia.org

body:
On 10/26/02 9:11 AM, "elian" <elian at gmx.li> wrote:
> Mmost arguments in favor or against different
> solutions seem to have been presented now, but I must say I lost track who
> wants
> what. Furthermore it's a useless waste of energy to work on different
> solutions without knowing which is wanted.

It's never a total waste. But it certainly does make sense to expend effort
in the best direction.

Some important considerations that have been lacking in the proposals for
new designs:
1) scalability
--How does the design handle adding new languages? What if the number of
languages is 30? 100? Is the design still fine? Or is the rule that only the
top n languages are listed on the front, and the others are at "Other
languages"? If that is the case, then isn't that essentially the same
problem as the current situation (language minorities not getting identical
representation as the majority)?
2) neutrality
--The ordering of entries is not neutral. Should it be randomly rearranged
every time someone comes to the front page? Should it be by size?

> So I invite people to give their vote..
>
Unfortunately, voting is not really a good way of running things. See
Meatball:VotingIsEvil.

http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?VotingIsEvil
and
http://www.shef.ac.uk/~puremath/theorems/gibbard.html


body:
Just to point out the problem with voting:

People have been talking about the difficulty of decision-making. So I
invite people to vote on how decisions should be made.

Decisions about Wikipedia should be made
 [] based on votes on choices picked by one person

 [] slowly and incrementally

 [] only by qualified individuals

 [] other ______


from_name: lcrocker at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] US law - copy-rights query

body:
> Hello Wikipedians,
> Is a book published in 1917 in the US still covered by
> copyright?

1923 is the magic number, so no, your 1917 book is
in the public domain.


body:
> >www.wikipedia.org should:
> >
> >[] not be changed at all.
> >
> >[] redirect depending on the browser's language
> setting to the wikipedia
> >in the prefered language.
> >
> >[x] be a multilingual portal (1)
> >
> >[] other ______

Hi,

Of course, everybody is aware that the little codicil
(1) is meaning that one is not *only* voting for the
"multilingual portal" proposition, but roughly for the
proposition detailed in (1). That should cut any
further discussion short.

That reminds me of the referendum we had to vote for
quite many years ago when we had lots of problems with
our colony New Caledonia.
The vote proposition was basically "do you want to do
something for New Caledonia"
* yes
* no

"wellllllll....yessssss of course"
There was an unwritten codicil.

-----

So of course, I vote "other"
Well being aware that in *this* voting system, "other"
means "white" and that "white" is never counted in the
final results.
Undefined "other" can not be anything else than
"white".

"Other" could have been a proposition, as was
announced by tc *yesterday*.

Anthere

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


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Elian:

> I have nine browsers on my computer (needed for webdesign and some other
> purposes). Some don't even have a localize-option and do you think I
> bother to configure the rest? So I get english all the time.

I would think that you could at least bother to configure your main browser,
if you have one. If you don't, you're very far from the typical user.

Also:

> My mother doesn't even know that her browser has a localize-option and she
> doesn't speak english and - yes, she thinks also that webadresses always
> start with www. However, she would be a great contributor to the
> German wikipedia.

Her browser should respect the operating system's locale settings and not
require her to configure anything. I don't use IE/Windows so I can't check, but
if it doesn't do that, it's broken.

Besides, in both cases, I really don't see what the big deal is. You can
still click the language link which is *clearly visible* on the wikipedia
frontpage and bookmark your language Wikipedia. I think a state of things where
Wikipedia immediately works for those who have configured their browsers
properly and requires them to click a link for those who haven't is completely
acceptable. Your start page, on the other hand, requires *every* user to click an
entrypage link. And someone who so insists on the laziness of users should
know that many users will immediately close the Wikipedia browser window the
moment they notice they still have to click another time to get somewhere.

> Esperanto is not available as language option in all of my browsers.

I have just checked, it's available in both Mozilla and Opera. It's not
available in IE by default, but you can add it by simply adding "eo" to your
language list. Besides, if you speak Espearanto, I think you would be
intellectually independent enough to use a non-MS browser.

> De facto, by depending only on browser settings, we would deprive the
> Esperanto wikipedia of many possible contributors

Those people who have not set their browser to prefer Esperanto, which they
can with all major browsers, can still easily click the Esperanto link. Your
extra page adds absolutely nothing to the user experience.

> Next, I want to see the progress of all wikipedias at one central place
> and not somewhere hidden at an obscure statistics page somewhere at the
> english (Main?) wikipedia where nobody of the non-english contributors
> bothers to look for regularly.

Then create a translation of this page for your Wikipedia of choice. You'll
have to do that anyway, or do you want the "central place" information to be
English? I agree that the link (which would read "About the non-English
Wikipedias" on the English page, "..non-German.." on the German page etc.) could
be placed more prominently, perhaps right below the language bar.

> Lastly, I want to have a simple, not crowded page to search wikipedia
> where I am not disturbed by masses of text and I have to look very sharply
> to discover the small "search" field in one corner.

The search field is both in the upper right and lower left, which is good
design from a usability perspective because it makes it likely that the eye
notices it. I can't remember having ever searched for the search because I
intuitively looked in that place. Since we already have lots of links in the
sidebar, I wouldn't recommend adding another one there, but if you insist, that
would be the best place to put it. This link could lead to a more formal search
page.

Besides, I can think of very very few instances where I would want to search
language-neutrally, and many many cases where this would be highly annoying.
So the multi-language search, if we need it at all, should not be the
default.

> I think a wikipedia, each language on a separate URL without a centralized
> - and a really centralized - main page is a bundle of balkanized
> projects.

By the same argument, if I translate my website into many different
languages and redirect the reader to his language by default, I create a balkanized
website. That doesn't make any sense. Balkanization comes from lack of
communication between the different language maintainers and contributors, lack of
consistent policies, use of different software etc. We're making good progress
in that area.

Regards,
Erik

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


body:
On 10/26/02 11:10 AM, "elian" <elian at gmx.li> wrote:

> The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> writes:
>
>> Unfortunately, voting is not really a good way of running things. See
>> Meatball:VotingIsEvil.
>
> I don't intend to put any more effort in a design when it's dubious that
> a multilingual international page will ever get realized - and for knowing
> this it is essentially to find out what a majority of people wants.

But it's not a way to find out what a majority of people wants. It's a way
to find out how many people there are who subscribe to the list, agree with
your way of defining the issues, and like putting X's in boxes.

And what's the point in finding out what a majority of people want? You
should want to do the right thing.

In the United States, the majority of people want (according to polls) the
death penalty, more spent on education and other social services, fewer
taxes, more surveillance, bigger cars, cleaner air, war in Iraq, etc. So?

> And I think it is neither useful to engage in discussions how future detail
> problems can be solved (they can be solved - esperanto.net integrates 57
> languages, a number that Wikipedia will reach maybe far in the future).
>
One thing to recognize that people seem to be losing sight of is that
Wikipedia's primary purpose is not as a language portal. I say this because
http://europa.eu.int/ and esperanto.net/ are being used as comparative
examples. The European Union is prima facie an international coalition.
Esperanto was explicitly designed to be a synthetic international language.
Wikipedia's primary purpose is not to be an international coalition, or to
solve the issues of multilingualism.

That said, multilingualism is certainly  crucial to the central purpose of
Wikipedia, which is to build a complete encyclopedia.

And that is the perspective from which this issue should be considered.


from_name: Tom Parmenter

body:
||
|> www.wikipedia.org should:
|>
|> [] not be changed at all.
|>
|> [x] redirect depending on the browser's language setting to the wikipedia
|> in the prefered language.
|>
|> [ ] be a multilingual portal (1)
|>
|> [] other ______


body:
On 10/26/02 11:54 AM, "Magnus Manske" <magnus.manske at epost.de> wrote:

> The Cunctator wrote:
<snip>
> Elian and I both think that the "dynamic" multilingual page is the
> /right thing/. We are pretty sure many other people on this list think
> that as well. Elian is trying to back that up with numbers. Of course,
> that might put an end to vague discussions. No wonder you're so scared
> of votes ;-)

I'm not scared of votes, they're just a bad idea. It's not a healthy
longterm policy.

>> In the United States, the majority of people want (according to polls) the
>> death penalty, more spent on education and other social services, fewer
>> taxes, more surveillance, bigger cars, cleaner air, war in Iraq, etc. So?
>>
> The alternative is doing what the cabal (R) says. Funny thing you've
> become an elitist advocate.

That's a false dichotomy. Rather, what we have now, if we're going to bring
up the "cabal" (TINC) bugbear, is cabal decision-making. Voting makes it
even more specific, by not even trying to make decisions that reflect the
consensus will of the entire community (which includes readers, future
editors, infrequent editors, future readers, etc.) but by making decisions
based on the formal agreement of about 10-30 individuals, given a finite
number of choices by a single individual.

>> That said, multilingualism is certainly  crucial to the central purpose of
>> Wikipedia, which is to build a complete encyclopedia.
>>
>> And that is the perspective from which this issue should be considered.
>>
>>
> It seems to boil down to one question: Is wikipedia a project of
> encyclopedias in many languages, or a big English encyclopedia with
> spin-offs in other languages?

There are other options: a big encyclopedia with entries in many languages,
a multinational coalition, etc.

Also there are many many ways of implementing each of these ideas.

In other words, coming to a consensus on the purpose of Wikipedia is
distinct from agreeing with a design change for www.wikipedia.org. It would
be a good first step, though.

I'm sure we have different individual priorities for Wikipedia (what's
important to us individually) but I suspect that we share a common vision of
what Wikipedia at its core should be, whether or not we agree on particulars
of implementation.


from_name: Pierre Abbat

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Bot code?

body:
I'd like to try writing a taxobot. Does anyone have some bot code he can
share with me? Where can I try out the taxobot without messing up the real
Wiki?

phma


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
Magnus wrote:
>BTW, I recently read that the Encarta atlas contains 1.8 million
>entries. 35000 single-cow-places will vanish in the long-term expansion
>of wikipedia. That is, if it continues to grow as we all wish.

We have a long way to go.  :-)

I don't mind Ram-Man's bot so much, but I'd like to find an equivalent resource for towns *outside* of the U.S.

kq


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
--- koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
> Magnus wrote:
> >BTW, I recently read that the Encarta atlas
> contains 1.8 million
> >entries. 35000 single-cow-places will vanish in the
> long-term expansion
> >of wikipedia. That is, if it continues to grow as
> we all wish.
>
> We have a long way to go.  :-)
>
> I don't mind Ram-Man's bot so much, but I'd like to
> find an equivalent resource for towns *outside* of
> the U.S.
>
> kq

40.000 french postal codes ???

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
Imran wrote:
>Additionally consider how RandomPage is used,
>
>* By people looking for interesting topics.
>* By people looking for pages to edit
>* By people who want to see the scope of wikipedia.
>
>For the first two categories of people, if they find a page interesting
>they're likely to follow up links from it, if not they'll just hit
>randompage again. What these people don't want is to be given another
>article which is very similar to the article they didn't want to read, so
>this will put off both contributors and casual readers.

This is a different matter entirely from what you said, and I'd agree with it.  :-)

>The third category will likely come away with a highly skewed view as to
>the kind of article in Wikipedia.

I still disagree with this.  2/3 of our articles are on small towns in the U.S.  Finding a lot of them gives an accurate representation of what we have.  However, it does not give an accurate representation of what we *want* to have: we want to have articles on a broad range of topics, from film to physics.  And, as you've pointed out, it's not very useful for most people who click on "random page": they're looking for an article they can edit somehow, and most of the cities are not what they're looking for.

>For virtually all uses of RandomPage people do not want or expect to see a
>series of related articles in rapid succession.

I would agree with this too.  Another thing I've noticed about it is that it keeps returning the same "random pages".  You can see this if you click on it more than a few dozen times.

kq


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
Anthere wrote:
>> I don't mind Ram-Man's bot so much, but I'd like to
>> find an equivalent resource for towns *outside* of
>> the U.S.
>>
>> kq
>
>40.000 french postal codes ???

You'll have to explain that to me.  What's a postal code?  Is that the same as a city?  In the U.S. we frequently have a dozen or more postal codes in a single city.  Anyway, if the entries would be more than a paragraph apiece and they seem like information that somebody might reasonably look for, then I don't see what's wrong with including it.

Wikipedia has been growing unevenly since it started; I don't see how we could possibly stop it from growing unevenly now, especially since it's run by volunteers.  I just hope that some day all the basic topics are covered accurately, neutrally, and in depth.  :-)

kq


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
On 10/26/02 12:28 PM, "koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com"
<koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com> wrote:

> Imran wrote:
>> To avoid giving a skewed view of the pedia we need some sort of
>> classification systems so that the RandomPage function first randomly
>> chooses a topic and then returns a random article from that topic.
>
> Actually, RandomPage gives an accurate view of wikipedia: we have far more of
> Ram-Man's articles than anything else, so they turn up more than anything
> else.  A year ago we had far more Atlas Shrugged articles than anything else,
> so *those* would always turn up.  The solution?  Write more articles on other
> topics.
>
That's one of the big problem with bots--the only reasonable way to keep up
with the small-town-bot entries is to use your own bots.

What are the pros and cons of the small-town bot?
+ Provides a good template for someone who wants to write an entry about a
small town (such as [[Newton, Massachusetts]])--actually, it's a good start
for any town, but entries for larger cities have mostly written
- Adds thousands of entries to Wikipedia that are unlikely to see a human
edit any time soon (in fact, we could probably extrapolate the nearly exact
rate at which they will get edited by seeing how many have been edited so
far)

Any graceful solution would provide the automatic functionality of the first
without the negative consequence of the second.

One example would be there to have a reasonably limited number of pages
listing all the possible towns (perhaps by state), with links. If someone
clicks on that link, they have the option of importing the small-town-bot
entry.

An equivalent solution is one that others have mentioned--tag the entries as
"bot entries" that are marked as ? pages (or at a minimum, ! pages), aren't
listed on default RecentChanges, don't appear on default RandomPage, but do
show up under searches-by-name and will appear if someone clicks on a link
to the entry.

When someone clicks on that link, they would get an entry clearly marked as
an automated addition, with the note that if they edit it, it will be
untagged.

In fact, it would make more sense for the tag not to be "bot" but
"imported". People who want to hand-import entries from public/GFDL sources
would use the same tag.


body:
--- Tom Parmenter <tompar at world.std.com> wrote:
> |From: Anthere <anthere5 at yahoo.com>
> |Sender: wikipedia-l-admin at wikipedia.org
> |Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> |Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2002 10:34:52 -0700 (PDT)
> |
> |
> |--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> |> The Cunctator wrote:
> |>
> |> >People have been talking about the difficulty of
> |> decision-making. So I
> |> >invite people to vote on how decisions should be
> |> made.
> |
> |
> |slowly and incrementally
> |
> |----
> |
> |In my country, we don't vote by crossing.
> |We deliberately choose the paper with the option we
> |tactically prefer, and we put that specific paper
> in
> |the ballot box.
>
> When I first voted in Georgia (U. S. State) we
> marked out the ones we
> *didn't* want.  Very satisfying.

I am sure it was. Among the 80% who voted Chirac a few
months ago, a lot would have found a lot of
satisfaction in marking out the one they *didnot*
want. That's a very nice idea.

I absolutely don't want automatic redirection based on
the langage on a browser. I think it very intrusive.

I have been looking a bit around on the "Troph?e du
Libre" these past two days in case we decide to run
for it.

To register, we must provide an url for the project we
are working on. It seems very natural (obvious) that
the url should be www.wikipedia.org, don't you think ?
Then, when the jury will look at the project, since
they will be probably french, and very likely on a
french computer, with french brower set up, if they
type www.wikipedia.org, they could be automatically
redirected to the french wikipedia.
Honestly, do you think a better view of the project
will be given on the fr.wiki or on the en.wiki ???
So, what should we do then ? provide en
en.wikipedia.org adress instead for a better
assessment of what wikipedia is ?
That, for sur, would be a big blow to the
internationals wikis.

So, in case redirection is chosen, which url would you
prefer we give ? Let's think a bit about promotion
also in this decision.

> |
> |And I don't like voting much.
> |
> |
> We aren't voting.  We're canvassing.
>
> This is the easiest cabal in the world to get into,
> just write some
> articles, act reasonably, don't be *too* self
> centered and sarcastic,
> join the mailing list, and presto-chango, another
> member of the
> cabal.

So ?
I probably didnot get what you meant/implied
here....sorry

peace

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


body:
 > >So of course, I vote "other"
> >Well being aware that in *this* voting system,
> "other"
> >means "white" and that "white" is never counted in
> the
> >final results.
> >Undefined "other" can not be anything else than
> >"white".
> >
> >"Other" could have been a proposition, as was
> >announced by tc *yesterday*.
> >
> Hmmm!  "Blanc" in this context would be "blank"
> instead of "white".

Sure, blank

You
> are right that a blank ballot would not be counted,
> and would suggest an
> abstention, or often that you don't care which way a
> vote goes.
>  Nevertheless, a lot of abstentions would be
> noticeable.

It is very unusual blanks are taken into account.

Voting "other"
> (sometimes the same as "none of the above" but with
> a place to write in
> an alternate suggestion) means that you really don't
> like any of the
> other options.  A strong "other" vote often means
> that we want to keep
> on talking about this.  Mercifully, let's hope that
> the "other"s don't
> win this time.

I like your comment. It shows very clearly that the
vote "other" has several meanings and might not be
interpretated the right way. You will also notice
there is no place to say we would maybe agree with one
of the proposition, but absolutely not with another.
Which is different from "other".

I am *strongly against* automatic redirection as I
already stated with an example of why.

As for the portal, I think I already gave my feelings
enough for it to be understood I think it not
necessarily wrong, but of little interest right now,
and mostly very empty. In any case, that will not
solve some of the problems we may have on the fr.wiki.
I dearly hope it will have a good impact for the
others should it be the final choice. They seem to
think so.
Sorry.

Peace Anthere

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


from_name: Imran Ghory

subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
On 25 Oct 2002, Gareth Owen wrote:

> The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> writes:
>
> > How do they clutter the "worthwhile" entries? Wikipedia is not paper.
>
> RandomPages

RandomPages is one reason for which we really need article classification
by topic, as at the moment it roughly assumes that articles are going to
spread across all topics equally. If that ever was true it certainly isn't
true now. Even if autogenerated articles were excluded, in the long
term we would get certain topics having far more articles than others.

To avoid giving a skewed view of the pedia we need some sort of
classification systems so that the RandomPage function first randomly
chooses a topic and then returns a random article from that topic.

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


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: voting on www.wikipedia.org

body:
www.wikipedia.org should:

[] not be changed at all.

[] redirect depending on the browser's language setting to the wikipedia
in the prefered language.

[x] be a multilingual portal (1)

[x] other:This should be done only /after/ all languages are on the same
database. IMO a static portal page is a very bad idea. We are a wiki and a
static page is very unwiki. The frontend should also reflect the backend.
Right now there are a bunch of separate Wikipedia wikis. At the /very/ least,
all the current active language wikis should be upgraded to Phase III - then
at least we will be interlinked with lanuguage links.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Zoe

body:
Check out all of Lir's edits in Christopher Columbus and her comments in Talk:Christopher Columbus.
Zoe
 Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:Zoe wrote:

>Toby wrote:

>>Ed Poor wrote:

>>>Should I go back,
>>>say, 15 edits ago (to yesterday's "clean" version) and edit that? I can't
>>>figure out whether that's bending over to accommodate anti-social behavior
>>>-- or that's anti-social in itself.

>>[Yes.]

>So what do you do when you've gone back 15 edits, reverted to a clean version,
>incorporated all of the "good" changes that have happened since then, and the
>original perpetrator then comes along and adds his/her "bad" changes again?
>How long are you supposed to keep doing that?

So that I can understand better where you're coming from,
is there an article whose history I should look at
where you've had bad experience with uncooperative editors?

BTW, I don't think that you should feel obligated,
when dealing with a demonstrably recalicitrant person,
to seek out the good edits and keep them in your reversion.
You should only need to do that, IMO,
when dealing with somebody that (so far at least)
appears to be acting in good faith,
but has nevertheless made some bad edits that require reversion.

Of course, if I disagree with you about whether the person is recalcitrant,
then *I* can seek out the good edits. But I wouldn't insist that you must,
so long as you are acting in good faith (which you, Zoe, do).

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

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Y! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your web site
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/attachments/20021026/e213c57f/attachment.htm


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Brion VIBBER

subject: [Wikitech-l] Behavior on deleting images

body:
Giskart wrote:
> Brion VIBBER wrote:
> [cut]
>  > * "(del)" deletes the image file, any old revisions, the entry from the
>  > images list, *and* the description page.
> [cut]
>
> That is not so, at least not on Wikipedia NL.
> If you detetes a image/file by use of the (del)-link that file is gone
> but the description page and the talk page still exist (if the where
> actieve of cource)

Talk pages are always retained separately. I think that's the correct
behavior, as the talk may describe why a deletion was made (and in some
cases should be still available if the page/image is recreated).

However, it's certainly a bug that the description page isn't deleted;
it was hard-wired to the English word "Image" (gaarg!), so didn't work
on other languages. That I've fixed.

I'll hold off on making page delete == image delete until someone gives
me feedback or I get bored.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Working toward a truely multilingual Wikipedia will take time

body:
On Saturday 26 October 2002 08:57 am, Elian wrote:
> Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> writes:
> > Besides, in both cases, I really don't see what the big deal is.
>
> The big deal is: Do you see Wikipedia as a bunch of separate language
> projects which don't need a common frontpage or do you see it as a
> multilingual united project?

We are a multilingual project, but we aren't at the "multilingual _unified_
project" stage yet. However, we are moving in that direction. When we do
become such a project by combining the separate encyclopedia databases and
wikis into one encyclopedia database and one wiki that is just organized by
language, then it would make perfect sense to have one page for the whole
project. A static front page for a wiki also sends the wrong message in
general (this is different and IMO much more harmful than having a protected
wiki front page).

So as we continue to work on the eventual layout of a unified multilingual
front page for the whole project and work towards a multilingual Phase IV, we
should implement the browser language "sniffer and redirect" idea.

The next thing we could do is enhance the language sniffer idea with the
previous suggestion for a HTML heading frame that allows for enhanced
interlanguage navigation for anybody entering through www.wikipedia.org.

Then by the time Phase IV rolls out we should have a pretty neat and very
useful multilingual front page, a combined Recent Changes, search, random
page function and login all at  www.wikipedia.org. We could even write-up a
multilingual press release stating "Wikipedia goes fully multilingual".

www.wikipedia.org is very important and valuable real estate. We should work
towards the best use for it and not do anything too hastily.

Patience grasshopper.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Demo front page, enhanced

body:
OK, new version is up. It will go through the browser languages until it
finds one. It doesn't use quality checking, though.

I also put up Brion's eo text.

Magnus


body:
Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> writes:

> Besides, in both cases, I really don't see what the big deal is.

The big deal is: Do you see Wikipedia as a bunch of separate language
projects which don't need a common frontpage or do you see it as a
multilingual united project?

> > Next, I want to see the progress of all wikipedias at one central place
> > and not somewhere hidden at an obscure statistics page somewhere at the
> > english (Main?) wikipedia where nobody of the non-english contributors
> > bothers to look for regularly.
>
> Then create a translation of this page for your Wikipedia of choice. You'll
> have to do that anyway, or do you want the "central place" information to be
> English? I agree that the link (which would read "About the non-English
> Wikipedias" on the English page, "..non-German.." on the German page etc.) could
> be placed more prominently, perhaps right below the language bar.

This is currently being done by Magnus. The new draft checks language
settings equally and prints the welcome message in the prefered
language. with the difference that it is still one page for all wikipedias
and not the redirected Polish with links to some others.

> > I think a wikipedia, each language on a separate URL without a centralized
> > - and a really centralized - main page is a bundle of balkanized
> > projects.
>
> By the same argument, if I translate my website into many different
> languages and redirect the reader to his language by default, I create a balkanized
> website.

If you are a company wanting to satisfy your customers, this makes perfect
sense. However I don't see Wikipedia as a company, I see it as something
like an international organization and international organizations, see
UN, EU, Vatican etc., don't use automatic redirects - and they don't
seem to loose visitors because of this.

> That doesn't make any sense. Balkanization comes from lack of
> communication between the different language maintainers and
> contributors, lack of consistent policies, use of different software
> etc.

and the lack of one common frontpage where all languages are equally
and prominently represented.

> We're making good progress in that area.

No. The embassies are as dead as they can be. The Spanish didn't rejoin
and after this discussion I can perfectly understand their feelings.

what keeps you from bookmarking your language wikipedia?
You don't have to start at the frontpage. What is so terribly wrong in
showing prominently that we are a multilingual project instead of forcing
a visitor directly in his presumed favorite language wikipedia without
showing him that there is more to the project than the handful of articles
in his language?

It's a questions of priorities. If you don't value true internationality,
keep it like it is. An automatic redirect doesn't change one jota of the
current situation of separate projects linked together by "other
languages".

greetings,
elian
--
I possess a fortuitous surplus of the three chief virtues
of a programmer: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris
- Larry Wall


from_name: Giskart

body:
Brion VIBBER wrote:
[cut]

 > * "(del)" deletes the image file, any old revisions, the entry from the
 > images list, *and* the description page.
[cut]

That is not so, at least not on Wikipedia NL.
If you detetes a image/file by use of the (del)-link that file is gone
but the description page and the talk page still exist (if the where
actieve of cource)

If you wants to delete clean a image/file you have to do this;

1)go to the description page
2)If actieve, open the talk page in a new window and delete it
2)On the discription page; clik on (del) while opening it in a new window.
3)delete the image/file
4)go back to the window whit the discription page and delete it. (if you
hit reload you see that the file is gone but the discription is still there)

Now the are all gone whitout orphans.

Giskart


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Demo front page, enhanced

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> OK, new version is up. It will go through the browser languages until it
> finds one. It doesn't use quality checking, though.
>
> I also put up Brion's eo text.

Thanks! A couple small corrections:

"Vikipedia" -> "Vikipedio"
"Esperanta Vikipedio" -> "Esperanto-Vikipedio" (Chuck's recommendation
is right; it's better for search-engine whoring ;)
and "We are working on 12345 articles" ->
     "Ni [[eo:Lastaj Sxangxoj|verkadas]] 12345 artikolojn"

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia software upgrade status

body:
Just a reminder...

The French localization is ready to go, I can do a final upgrade to the
new server and software whenever is convenient. (Anthere, Aoineko, vous
?tes pr?ts ?)

Polish and Esperanto are still waiting on Unicode search fixes and
X-system editing for eo. I will try to get these working soon.

Of the middle-tier somewhat active wikis (over 200 pages), Norwegian,
Swedish, and Portuguese are still yet to have the new interface
localized, and I'm loathe to convert them without doing so. However, of
these only Swedish has the current UseMod interface localized; if
someone asks to have the others moved soon and localized later, that's okay.

A number of languages are currently virtually unusable on the
Latin-1-hardwired old server. (Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hebrew...) If
anyone expresses interest I can set them up in Unicode on the new
server; though there are presently problems with the search function,
you can edit and link so it's better than nothing!

More at:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_software_upgrade_status

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Chas Brown

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: 80000

body:
Just a note - the [[Wikipedia talk:Bots]] page has a nice summary of the
discussion of pros and cons of the bots, and seems to be developing a
consensus solution.

Cheers - Chas [[User:Chas_zzz_brown]]


body:
|From: Anthere <anthere5 at yahoo.com>
|Sender: wikipedia-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2002 10:34:52 -0700 (PDT)
|
|
|--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
|> The Cunctator wrote:
|>
|> >People have been talking about the difficulty of
|> decision-making. So I
|> >invite people to vote on how decisions should be
|> made.
|
|
|slowly and incrementally
|
|----
|
|In my country, we don't vote by crossing.
|We deliberately choose the paper with the option we
|tactically prefer, and we put that specific paper in
|the ballot box.

When I first voted in Georgia (U. S. State) we marked out the ones we
*didn't* want.  Very satisfying.

|
|And I don't like voting much.
|
|
We aren't voting.  We're canvassing.

This is the easiest cabal in the world to get into, just write some
articles, act reasonably, don't be *too* self centered and sarcastic,
join the mailing list, and presto-chango, another member of the
cabal.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88


from_name: elian

body:
Hello,

Mmost arguments in favor or against different
solutions seem to have been presented now, but I must say I lost track who wants
what. Furthermore it's a useless waste of energy to work on different
solutions without knowing which is wanted.

So I invite people to give their vote..

www.wikipedia.org should:

[] not be changed at all.

[] redirect depending on the browser's language setting to the wikipedia
in the prefered language.

[] be a multilingual portal (1)

[] other ______

(1) draft to be further improved at
http://mitglied.lycos.de/manske/wiki/test.php
with language of the welcome message derived from the browser settings and
prefered language highlighted.

this message is crossposted to intlwiki-l and wikipedia-l and to metawikipedia [[What to
do with www.wikipedia.org]]

greetings,
elian


body:
elian <elian at gmx.li> writes:

> www.wikipedia.org should:
>
> [] not be changed at all.
>
> [] redirect depending on the browser's language setting to the wikipedia
> in the prefered language.
>
> [x] be a multilingual portal (1)
>
> [] other ______

greetings,
elian


body:
The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> writes:

> Unfortunately, voting is not really a good way of running things. See
> Meatball:VotingIsEvil.

I don't intend to put any more effort in a design when it's dubious that
a multilingual international page will ever get realized - and for knowing
this it is essentially to find out what a majority of people wants.

And I think it is neither useful to engage in discussions how future detail
problems can be solved (they can be solved - esperanto.net integrates 57
languages, a number that Wikipedia will reach maybe far in the future).

So invite you to give your vote instead of endless discussions.

greetings,
elian
--
Software is like sex - it's better when it's free.


from_name: Erik Zachte

subject: [Wikipedia-l] multilingual portal

body:
I vote for the multilingual portal. It emphasizes the international
scope of the project. It is also a nobrainer that everyone understands.
People can bookmark the main page that they prefer.

Automatical redirection reminds me of the 'helpful' attitude of
Microsoft Word, which makes all kinds of decisions for me, that are
seldom what I want, and difficult to disable.

Erik Zachte

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/attachments/20021026/b12958d1/attachment.htm


from_name: Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz

subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
On 26-10-2002, Imran Ghory wrote thusly :
> On 25 Oct 2002, Gareth Owen wrote:
> > The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> writes:
> > > How do they clutter the "worthwhile" entries? Wikipedia is not paper.
> > RandomPages
> RandomPages is one reason for which we really need article classification
> by topic, as at the moment it roughly assumes that articles are going to
> spread across all topics equally. If that ever was true it certainly isn't
> true now. Even if autogenerated articles were excluded, in the long
> term we would get certain topics having far more articles than others.
> To avoid giving a skewed view of the pedia we need some sort of
> classification systems so that the RandomPage function first randomly
> chooses a topic and then returns a random article from that topic.

There was some discussion about classification, metadata and solutions
to tackle the growing volume of information.
Then there were 10,000-15,000 articles.
It was either rebuked or the importance was minimized. To classify
was thought unwiki and impracticable ("who will classify, according
to what criteria, what about multiple categories and wrongly assigned
articles who would correct them").
Manning was in favour and I think it is thanks to him we have
Wikiprojects.
Long ago I created metadata subpages for a few articles as an excercise
in this direction but probably they got votes for deletion as a
search engine whoring.

Have you worked out some solutions ? How do you think it could
be accomplished ?

Regards,
Kpjas.


body:
The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> writes:

> But it's not a way to find out what a majority of people wants. It's a way
> to find out how many people there are who subscribe to the list, agree with
> your way of defining the issues, and like putting X's in boxes.

I don't propose it for decision making but just as a indicator which
direction we should work on and which should we abandon. If you don't like
this interpretation, see it as a survey.

> And what's the point in finding out what a majority of people want? You
> should want to do the right thing.

I admire your idealistic expectation to find out what is "right" in a
social system - an enterprise in which almost all social scientists and
politicians in history (except Marx, Plato, Rousseau, Mao, Ghaddafi etc)
failed. Wikipedia's international  community is a social system, after all.

> That said, multilingualism is certainly  crucial to the central purpose of
> Wikipedia, which is to build a complete encyclopedia.

in as many languages as possible. Cut this goal and we can finish this
discussion.

greetings,
elian
--
turing, adj.
Mindless, stupid. "I've seldom heard such a turing lecture."
"You have to take a lot of turing tests to get into college."
Hence turing machine, n. a machine.


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>>>Unfortunately, voting is not really a good way of running things. See
>>>Meatball:VotingIsEvil.
>>>
>>>
>>I don't intend to put any more effort in a design when it's dubious that
>>a multilingual international page will ever get realized - and for knowing
>>this it is essentially to find out what a majority of people wants.
>>
>>
>
>But it's not a way to find out what a majority of people wants. It's a way
>to find out how many people there are who subscribe to the list, agree with
>your way of defining the issues, and like putting X's in boxes.
>
>And what's the point in finding out what a majority of people want? You
>should want to do the right thing.
>
Elian and I both think that the "dynamic" multilingual page is the
/right thing/. We are pretty sure many other people on this list think
that as well. Elian is trying to back that up with numbers. Of course,
that might put an end to vague discussions. No wonder you're so scared
of votes ;-)

>In the United States, the majority of people want (according to polls) the
>death penalty, more spent on education and other social services, fewer
>taxes, more surveillance, bigger cars, cleaner air, war in Iraq, etc. So?
>
The alternative is doing what the cabal (R) says. Funny thing you've
become an elitist advocate.

>That said, multilingualism is certainly  crucial to the central purpose of
>Wikipedia, which is to build a complete encyclopedia.
>
>And that is the perspective from which this issue should be considered.
>
>
It seems to boil down to one question: Is wikipedia a project of
encyclopedias in many languages, or a big English encyclopedia with
spin-offs in other languages?

Magnus


from_name: Stephen Gilbert

body:
With the understanding that this is a survey and not
an official vote...

> www.wikipedia.org should:
>
> [] not be changed at all.
>
> [x] redirect depending on the browser's language
> setting to the wikipedia
> in the prefered language. (but see below)
>
> [] be a multilingual portal (1)
>
> [] other ______

With the redirection page, I think the contributors
should rework their front pages to make the existance
of the other language project more prominant. Also,
there should be an option in your Wikipedia
preferences to set your default language.

Stephen G.

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
On Sat, 26 Oct 2002, Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz wrote:

> Have you worked out some solutions ? How do you think it could
> be accomplished ?

Whoever did [[Wikipedia:Category_experiment]] seems to have found a
reasonably good solution, at least well enough for the purpose of random
article selection.

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
On Sat, 26 Oct 2002 koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:

> Imran wrote:
> >To avoid giving a skewed view of the pedia we need some sort of
> >classification systems so that the RandomPage function first randomly
> >chooses a topic and then returns a random article from that topic.
>
> Actually, RandomPage gives an accurate view of wikipedia:

It depends on what you mean by accurate, if you mean it returns the
modal type of article then you are right, but if you are talking about the
range than you're not.

Related pages turn up on random search fairly often anyway (because of the
[[Birthday paradox]]), the US city articles are just going to make the
situation worse.

Additionally consider how RandomPage is used,

* By people looking for interesting topics.
* By people looking for pages to edit
* By people who want to see the scope of wikipedia.

For the first two categories of people, if they find a page interesting
they're likely to follow up links from it, if not they'll just hit
randompage again. What these people don't want is to be given another
article which is very similar to the article they didn't want to read, so
this will put off both contributors and casual readers.

The third category will likely come away with a highly skewed view as to
the kind of article in Wikipedia.

For virtually all uses of RandomPage people do not want or expect to see a
series of related articles in rapid succession.

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


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [Wikipedia-l] 194.117.133.196

body:
On 10/26/02 6:38 PM, "Rob Brewer" <rob at rbrwr.org> wrote:

> At 23:27 26/10/02 +0100, Rob Brewer wrote:
>
>> 194.117.133.196 (cache-haw.cableinet.co.uk) which has been blocked in the
>> last hour or so is a transparent proxy cache for users of the Blueyonder
>> cable modem service in Bristol, England. The IP block is affecting me even
>> though I'm logged in.
>>
>> Any ideas?
>
> To answer my own question, I've managed to force my HTTP traffic through a
> different cache for the moment. So I'm back on line and the vandal is
> still blocked. Other useful contributors (the person who wrote [[South
> Gloucestershire]] for example) may still be blocked, too.
>
Actually, I unblocked the IP. We can revert vandalism from that IP. It's
better than losing contributors.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:

>Actually, RandomPage gives an accurate view of wikipedia: we have far more of Ram-Man's articles than anything else, so they turn up more than anything else.  A year ago we had far more Atlas Shrugged articles than anything else, so *those* would always turn up.  The solution?  Write more articles on other topics.
>
>
So true.

BTW, I recently read that the Encarta atlas contains 1.8 million
entries. 35000 single-cow-places will vanish in the long-term expansion
of wikipedia. That is, if it continues to grow as we all wish.


body:
Hello Wikipedians,

Is a book published in 1917 in the US still covered by copy-right ?

Your help will be much appreciated.

Regards,
Kpjas.


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Demo front page

body:
[Note:  The message that I'm replying to wasn't sent to <intlwiki-l>.
        Or maybe it went under separate cover; I'm not sure.]

Neil Harris wrote:

>[...] I suggest that [...] http://www.wikipedia.org/ [...] should be consist of

>* a thin welcome banner with links pointing to the multi-lingual-portal
>page (eg http://www.wikipedia.org/index1.html) and the multi-lingual
>Wikipedia foundation page.
>* a drop-down language-selection menu
>* a search bar
>AND MOST IMPORTANTLY:
>* the front page content of the localised Wikipedia of the user's or
>browser's choice, as per my previous comments

This is an interesting idea.
It combines the best of the multilingual portal front page idea
(the existence of such a page, the choice of language selection)
with the best of the browser sniffing idea
(a language specific front page that is most likely what they want).

I don't suppose that you have a mock up of your own?  ^_^

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] The Cunctator (Was: I'm seeing a trend here or How to keep drivingaway)

body:
Gareth Owen wrote:

>The Cunctator wrote:

>>Oh, really. How does my definition [of abuse of authority]
>>seem to differ from everyone else's?

>You've been the sole voice of objection on so many issues upon which literally
>everyone else on the list agrees, that I'm amazed you even have the gall to ask

I don't know that he defines it differently from everybody else.
I would say that he's more *sensitive* to abuse of authority.
This is not necessarily praise; you would argue that he's *overly* sensitive.
But I think that it's a fair characterisation of the difference.

-- Toby


body:
Anthere wrote:

>Let's see...we could do better by setting up a
>automatic generator for our zipcodes...we have about
>40000 of these...

>But... if the british decide to do the same, I believe
>they have the amazing number of about 3.000.000
>areacodes

"We are already working on 3127159 articles."
Hey, that'll beat Britannica any day!
^_^

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Behavior on deleting images

body:
[Note:  The message that I'm replying to didn't appear on <wikipedia-l>.]

Brion Vibber wrote:

>It strikes me as violating the principle of least astonishment that
>"Delete this page" and the little "(del)" link next to the current image
>revision do different things on an image description page, namely:

>* "Delete this page" deletes only the image description page, leaving
>the image file and its revisions intact, and the image remains in the
>images list

>* "(del)" deletes the image file, any old revisions, the entry from the
>images list, *and* the description page.

>User expectation seems to be that "delete this page" should perform the
>second function.

I agree with Brion.

But I think that the change should appear on the main list too,
since presumably some people have acclimated themselves to the old way.
Hence I am crossposting this reply.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Demo front page, enhanced

body:
>OK, new version is up. It will go through the browser languages until it
>finds one. It doesn't use quality checking, though.

It doesn't seem to do this for me.
I tried Basque-German-English and got English text.
OTOH, the English wikipedia wasn't highlighted either.
So maybe there is a Basque version but the text hasn't been translated yet?
Fair enough, but in the real version, we should make sure
that we don't count as recognised any language
whose text we haven't yet gotten around to writing.

(For the record, lest there be any confusion, I chose Basque at random,
since all of the languages that are normally in my browser preferences
are already listed on the test page.)

-- Toby


body:
On 26-10-2002, lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote thusly :
> > Hello Wikipedians,
> > Is a book published in 1917 in the US still covered by
> > copyright?
> 1923 is the magic number, so no, your 1917 book is
> in the public domain.
Thanks a lot. Watch out for a brand-new bot adding thousands of new pages !
Well, only joking ;-)

Regards,
Kpjas.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
Gareth Owen wrote:

>The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> wrote:

>>How do they clutter the "worthwhile" entries? Wikipedia is not paper.

>RandomPages

An idea:
Can Randompage weight the articles that it picks by their length?
This will make *any* stub less likely to be chosen,
arguably without giving a distorted picture of what Wikipedia is like.

-- Toby


body:
Anthere <anthere5 at yahoo.com> writes:

First, as I said already to Cunctator, see it as a survey and not an
election.

> Of course, everybody is aware that the little codicil
> (1) is meaning that one is not *only* voting for the
> "multilingual portal" proposition, but roughly for the
> proposition detailed in (1). That should cut any
> further discussion short.

No, everyone is welcome to propose other drafts for a multilingual
portal. I only want to know if it makes sense to engage in further
discussion about it or if  we can stop discussing and give up developping
drafts for it. I don't like wasting energy.

> So of course, I vote "other"
> Well being aware that in *this* voting system, "other"
> means "white" and that "white" is never counted in the
> final results.
> Undefined "other" can not be anything else than
> "white".

other, as the line following it shows, is to give everyone the possibility
to add further proposals I forgot to include.

greetings,
elian
--
War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.
                                 -Ambrose Bierce


body:
Anthere wrote in part:

>I have been looking a bit around on the "Troph?e du
>Libre" these past two days in case we decide to run
>for it.

>To register, we must provide an url for the project we
>are working on. It seems very natural (obvious) that
>the url should be www.wikipedia.org, don't you think ?
>Then, when the jury will look at the project, since
>they will be probably french, and very likely on a
>french computer, with french brower set up, if they
>type www.wikipedia.org, they could be automatically
>redirected to the french wikipedia.
>Honestly, do you think a better view of the project
>will be given on the fr.wiki or on the en.wiki ???
>So, what should we do then ? provide en
>en.wikipedia.org adress instead for a better
>assessment of what wikipedia is ?
>That, for sur, would be a big blow to the
>internationals wikis.

>So, in case redirection is chosen, which url would you
>prefer we give ? Let's think a bit about promotion
>also in this decision.

I think that Anthere has a very good argument here.

OTOH, if we browser sniff with Neil Harris' modification,
which puts international stuff at the top of <www.wikipedia.org>
and then put <xx.wikipedia.org> after it, this would still work.

-- Toby


body:
[Note:  The post that I'm replying to wasn't sent to <intlwiki-l>.]

Mav wrote:

>www.wikipedia.org should:

>[] not be changed at all.

>[] redirect depending on the browser's language setting to the wikipedia
>in the prefered language.

>[x] be a multilingual portal (1)

>[x] other:This should be done only /after/ all languages are on the same
>database. IMO a static portal page is a very bad idea. We are a wiki and a
>static page is very unwiki. The frontend should also reflect the backend.
>Right now there are a bunch of separate Wikipedia wikis. At the /very/ least,
>all the current active language wikis should be upgraded to Phase III - then
>at least we will be interlinked with lanuguage links.

Now that it's been established that this is a survey, not a decision vote,
I'll join in and vote for the multilinguagl portal, among these choices.
But I've already said that Neil's mixture of the two changes is a good idea.
*And* I agree with mav that it's more important to integrate the back end.
OTOH, I disagree with mav's claim that an integrated front end is useless
until the back end is integrated -- it's just *less* useful IMO.

-- Toby


body:
Zoe wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>Zoe wrote:

>>>So what do you do when you've gone back 15 edits, reverted to a clean version,
>>>incorporated all of the "good" changes that have happened since then, and the
>>>original perpetrator then comes along and adds his/her "bad" changes again?
>>>How long are you supposed to keep doing that?

>>So that I can understand better where you're coming from,
>>is there an article whose history I should look at
>>where you've had bad experience with uncooperative editors?

>Check out all of Lir's edits in Christopher Columbus and her comments in
>Talk:Christopher Columbus.

I see that there was a nasty edit war early Sunday morning (UTC),
as well as some further controversy on other dates.
I also see that there was discussion on the talk page during this edit war.
In this discussion, Lir refused to provide any evidence
for her assertion that Colombo was primarily a slave trader
(and related matters).  Once it was clear that she had nothing
to back up her claim, then nobody should have to explain themselves
when reverting Lir's actions any longer.

However, I don't see what purpose that edit war served.
It last for 4 hours, which is not very long in the scheme of Wikipedia.
It ended when Tokerboy put up a compromise version,
essentially the version that survives today.
For the vast majority of time, Lir's version
was not the version that would be presented to a newcomer.

Without banning Lir and the people like her,
it's inevitable that bad material will appear some of the time.
Actually, even with banning, that much is inevitable on a wiki.
But I don't see this as a problem, since these times will be rare.
Let's suppose that, instead of a 4 hour edit war,
there had been only the 4 hours of discussion on the talk page,
ending with Tokerboy's compromise as in real life.
Then Lir would have had 4 hours of slander on a page,
followed by the current week of a page improved by her involvement.

Of course you were frustrated at being involved in that edit war,
especially when Lir was simultaneously being such an @$$hole on talk.
But next time, don't put yourself through the edit war;
the talk page is enough (and enough to see Lir's true nature too).

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:
> Gareth Owen wrote:
>>The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> wrote:
>>>How do they clutter the "worthwhile" entries? Wikipedia is not paper.
>>RandomPages
>
> An idea:
> Can Randompage weight the articles that it picks by their length?
> This will make *any* stub less likely to be chosen,
> arguably without giving a distorted picture of what Wikipedia is like.

The Ram-bot city entries average somewhere around 2130 bytes each
(standard deviation 113), which is *larger* than the English
Wikipedia-wide average for article-space non-redirect pages (about 1900
bytes, standard deviation a whopping 3028).

As I recall, the median article size is smaller than the average; if you
could cut out the Ram-bot cities by size, you'd cut out most of the rest
of Wikipedia with them.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Rob Brewer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] 194.117.133.196

body:
194.117.133.196 (cache-haw.cableinet.co.uk) which has been blocked in the
last hour or so is a transparent proxy cache for users of the Blueyonder
cable modem service in Bristol, England. The IP block is affecting me even
though I'm logged in.

Any ideas?

Rob Brewer
[[User:Rbrwr]]


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 194.117.133.196

body:
On Sat, Oct 26, 2002 at 11:27:43PM +0100, Rob Brewer wrote:
> Envelope-to: mattheww+wikipedia at chiark.greenend.org.uk
> X-SAUCE-Warning: (chiark.greenend.org.uk) reverse DNS: 130.94.122.197: Error during DNS PTR lookup for 197.122.94.130.in-addr.arpa: No such domain
> X-Sender: ab007d0224_2 at pop3.blueyonder.co.uk
> X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 5.1.1
> To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> From: Rob Brewer <rob at rbrwr.org>
> Subject: [Wikipedia-l] 194.117.133.196
> Errors-To: wikipedia-l-admin at wikipedia.org
> X-BeenThere: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.13
> Precedence: bulk
> Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> List-Help: <mailto:wikipedia-l-request at wikipedia.org?subject=help>
> List-Post: <mailto:wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org>
> List-Subscribe: <http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l>,
> 	<mailto:wikipedia-l-request at wikipedia.org?subject=subscribe>
> List-Id: <wikipedia-l.wikipedia.org>
> List-Unsubscribe: <http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l>,
> 	<mailto:wikipedia-l-request at wikipedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
> List-Archive: <http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/>
> Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2002 23:27:43 +0100
>
>
> 194.117.133.196 (cache-haw.cableinet.co.uk) which has been blocked in the
> last hour or so is a transparent proxy cache for users of the Blueyonder
> cable modem service in Bristol, England. The IP block is affecting me even
> though I'm logged in.
>
> Any ideas?

As a temporary workaround, you could try setting an explicit proxy in
your browser (eg cache-gat.cableinet.co.uk , which has a different IP
address).

-M-


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 194.117.133.196

body:
At 23:27 26/10/02 +0100, Rob Brewer wrote:

>194.117.133.196 (cache-haw.cableinet.co.uk) which has been blocked in the
>last hour or so is a transparent proxy cache for users of the Blueyonder
>cable modem service in Bristol, England. The IP block is affecting me even
>though I'm logged in.
>
>Any ideas?

To answer my own question, I've managed to force my HTTP traffic through a
different cache for the moment. So I'm back on line and the vandal is
still blocked. Other useful contributors (the person who wrote [[South
Gloucestershire]] for example) may still be blocked, too.

Rob
[[User:Rbrwr]]


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 194.117.133.196

body:
At 23:34 26/10/02 +0100, mattheww+wikipedia at chiark.greenend.org.uk wrote:

>As a temporary workaround, you could try setting an explicit proxy in
>your browser (eg cache-gat.cableinet.co.uk , which has a different IP
>address).

Thanks. As you can see I found my own way there (or somewhere similar) ;-)

Rob


from_name: Irina Rosenthal

body:
Brion VIBBER <brion at pobox.com> writes:

> A number of languages are currently virtually unusable on the
> Latin-1-hardwired old server. (Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hebrew...) If
> anyone expresses interest I can set them up in Unicode on the new
> server; though there are presently problems with the search function,
> you can edit and link so it's better than nothing!

Please do that - I don't want to know how many possible contributors have
been driven away by the broken encoding up to now.

Maybe I'll find the time to do some promotion for the arabic wikipedia.

greetings,
elian
--
Unix -is- user friendly. It's just very selective about who its
friends are. And sometimes even best friends have fights.