from_name: GerardM

body:
Hoi,
The situation is deadlocked when everything centers around single
persons. When you want to put it like that there is a crisis, it is
however a personal crisis staged for everyone to see.

I do subscribe to the idea that it would be best for you to stay if
you want to. You have been a valuable contributor and you have been a
valuable vandalfighter. However, given the way you threw your weight
around, I do think it best when you do not force issues in the way you
have done. It is a distraction and it only makes the things you want
to achieve become secondary issues. It is telling that the things that
you want to see happen BECAME secondary because of the strategies that
you employ. This is not the first time that it happened.

You mean well, but the way you do things is detrimental for long term
cooperation.

Thanks,
   GerardM

On 1/18/06, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net> wrote:
> Tjipke de Vries wrote:
>
> > Andre Engels wrote:
> >
> >> Nevertheless, I think there IS a crisis on the Dutch Wikipedia that
> >> might require intervention.
> >
> >
> > What kind of intervention do you suggest?
> >
> > Tjipke de Vries
> >
> I do not think Andre has an answer to that. Neither have I. The
> situation is deadlocked at the moment. People are urging me by mail to
> stay. Another group would not have that. No one knows what to do. At the
> moment we have all lost.
>
> Waerth/Walter
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Justin Cormack

subject: [WikiEN-l] Pointless deletions

body:
On 18 Jan 2006, at 10:06, Tony Sidaway wrote:

> Two recent deletion listings.
>
> Tally, an article about an accounting software company that's been
> going for twenty years and has a number of major companies among its
> clients in its native India, including the Reserve Bank of India and
> the Indian IT giant, Infosys.  And SuperOffice, about a public listed
> company (ticker code SUO on the Oslo Bors) with a turnover of some
> Euro 30m.
>
> Easy keeps?  No, deleted on AfD.

rewrite WP:CORP then.

They were valid deletions based on this - unexpectedly, being a listed
company is not sufficient for a WP article, they have to be used to
calculate an index (eg FTSE 250).

Any listed company is probably notable - certainly verifiable info
is available, as they have to file accounts.

I dont see why WP:CORP is written the way it is, I dont see why
stock market indexes are that important, as companies move in and
out of them all the time.

Justinc


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Fair use images on user pages and enforcement

body:
On 1/18/06, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/18/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > It may or may not vanish, depending whether or not you use the image
> > on that user page for educational purposes.
>
> Please give me one example of where an image (any image) on a userpage
> is educational.
>
> --
> Sam

Can I give an example of an image that used to be on a userpage, but
was deleted?

I had on my userpage a photo I took from the top of a lighthouse in
New Jersey.  Next to it I had an image I created using Google Earth
which attempted to reproduce that photo.  I had a couple of lines of
text about how the two were created.

That's educational, and it's fair use, and the image was deleted.

Anthony


list: wikitech-l

from_name: admin Yellowikis

subject: [Wikitech-l] RfC: Multilingual MediaWiki

body:
Hi Erik,

My very first post to this group (at the end of 2004??) was a question
asking how to achieve this. It is a very complicated topic and one
that goes to the heart of usability. I am really pleased that this
work is going ahead and impressed with your specification.

My only question is what happens to first time users?

Under your proposed system users will not have to log on to change the
UI. This is clearly a great improvement. But will it be possible to
define a default UI language for a particular page? where no
preference for UI has been selected?

At the moment the default UI is defined by the MediaWiki set-up. So
someone clicking on the "Deutsch" link from www.wikipedia.org goes to
"de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptseite" where the content is in German and
the UI is automatically delivered in German too.

It would be good if this system could be preserved somehow.

Best wishes

Paul

On 1/17/06, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> A component milestone of Wikidata/WiktionaryZ development is true
> multi-language support for page titles and content on the MediaWiki
> level. We have funding to pay a developer to implement it (I'll be
> working on versioning and object/relational mapping in the meantime),
> and I have written the first set of specifications for this:
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_MediaWiki
>
> Note that this is in no way a proposal to merge existing Wikimedia
> projects; in fact, MediaWiki should be fully backwards compatible and
> continue to act exactly as it does now in monolingual installations
> (there'll be a couple of new features, such as persistent UI language
> selection for anonymous users). However, multilanguage support should be
> enabled for wikis like Commons and Meta, where multiple languages are
> handled in a single database.
>
> I think I've come up with a fairly clever way of dealing with the
> community issues of language filtering, but see for yourself. In any
> event, I'd much appreciate feedback on this proposal before we go ahead
> with the implementation, especially from Brion as the release manager. :-)
>
> Best,
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
Yellowikis is to Yellow Pages, as Wikipedia is to The Encyclopedia Britannica


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Overuse of horizontal rules

body:
I use the Classic skin myself; it was the standard when I first joined.
It does not impose a full-width horizontal line after a level 2
heading.  In Wiktionary we decided long ago to use a horizintal line
between languages, with the language names as level 2 headings.  This
has led to periodic complaints from those who use Monobook and end up
with horizontal lines both above and below the language name.

I appreciate the intent of allowing Monobook to be modified bu users,
but that does not do much good for those of us who may be interested in
content, but have limited experience or understanding about amending css
files.  To the extent that they might want to do so, if users are going
to be able to modify their skins that should apply to all skins.

Ec

Fred Bauder wrote:

> Cologne Blue on Wikipedia. I use the default skin (Monobook) on
> Wikicities and have noticed (and been slightly annoyed at) those
> weird lines and boxes though. Monobook is rather annoying in a number
> of ways. I guess I like the familiar.
>
> Fred
>
> On Jan 18, 2006, at 7:42 AM, geni wrote:
>
>> On 1/18/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
>>
>>> Makes it easier to edit. I don't get the horizontal line I guess.
>>> Fred
>>
>> Hmm which skin do you use?
>>
>> geni
>


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] Pointless deletions

body:
On 1/18/06, John Lee <johnleemk at gawab.com> wrote:
> If the original articles provide no basis for which to judge their
> topic(s) as worthy for inclusion in an encyclopedia, why bother
> rewriting them?

There was nothing much wrong with the original articles, both of which
correctly identified their subject making further research and cleanup
a simple matter.   The SuperOffice article , when deleted, could have
left nobody in any doubt about the size and scope of this
multinational public listed company.  The reason given for deletion
was "Less than 500 google hits", which seems to me to be rather
missing the point.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Pointless deletions

body:
On 1/18/06, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
>
> rewrite WP:CORP then.
>

No thanks.  If the WP:CORP guideline is so useless that it has us
deleting articles about companies of this size, it should be ignored,
or perhaps deleted itself.


from_name: Phil Boswell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: AFD courtesy problem

body:
"Kat Walsh" <mindspillage at gmail.com> wrote in
message news:8e253f560601171355k3dae65d6mda84f9e8382a1697 at mail.gmail.com...
On 1/17/06, Katefan0 <katefan0wiki at gmail.com>
wrote:
> > If it's possible to do, it seems to me the solution requiring the least
> > potential future work (undeleting, etc.) would be simply fixing it so
> > that
> > search engines can't archive these kinds of pages.
> I still think (and I don't remember if it was my idea originally or
> someone else's now :-)) that AfD needs to be in its own namespace and
> not indexed by Google so it has the added bonus of not making searches
> in Wikipedia: space useless by cluttering it up with noise.

I assume that the new Namespace Manager will make something like this
eminently doable:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Namespace_manager
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Pointless deletions

body:
On 18 Jan 2006, at 12:36, Tony Sidaway wrote:

> On 1/18/06, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
>>
>> rewrite WP:CORP then.
>>
>
> No thanks.  If the WP:CORP guideline is so useless that it has us
> deleting articles about companies of this size, it should be ignored,
> or perhaps deleted itself.

No, it was cited on the deletion.

I would agree with replacing it with any listed company can have
an article, and unlisted ones need proper verifiable info.

If you arent interested in fixing the guidelines and just want to
undelete articles you will just alienate a lot of people.

Justinc


from_name: Chris Jenkinson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Pointless deletions

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
> No thanks.  If the WP:CORP guideline is so useless that it has us
> deleting articles about companies of this size, it should be ignored,
> or perhaps deleted itself.

I think it should be the responsibility of someone who ignores a policy
to get something done for the good of Wikipedia, which I think you have
done here, to document what they did, what policy you ignored, and why
you ignored it. This will help others to reform the policies so ignoring
the policy won't be necessary in future.

Chris

--
Chris Jenkinson
chris at starglade.org

"Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful."
  -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Pointless deletions

body:
On 1/18/06, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
>
> On 18 Jan 2006, at 12:36, Tony Sidaway wrote:
>
> > On 1/18/06, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> rewrite WP:CORP then.
> >>
> >
> > No thanks.  If the WP:CORP guideline is so useless that it has us
> > deleting articles about companies of this size, it should be ignored,
> > or perhaps deleted itself.
>
> No, it was cited on the deletion.
>
> I would agree with replacing it with any listed company can have
> an article, and unlisted ones need proper verifiable info.
>

In order to be listed you need the following:

at least ?50,000-worth (Republic of Ireland: ?38,092.14) of share
capital of which at least 25% must have been paid for.
two shareholders
two directors, one of whom may also be the company secretary
a certificate of entitlement (the trading certificate) to do business
and borrow capital

That hardly makes you noteable

Then there is the bit where companies create spinoff to handle take
overs and the like (I ran across one where I think it was Alchemy
Partners (who should have an article but don't) had managed to put two
layers of PLCs between them and the softwear company they were buying.

geni


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] Pointless deletions

body:
On 1/18/06, John Lee <johnleemk at gawab.com> wrote:
>
> If the original articles provide no basis for which to judge their
> topic(s) as worthy for inclusion in an encyclopedia, why bother
> rewriting them?
>
> John Lee
> ([[User:Johnleemk]])

To make sure they did? Just because someone puts the article to a bad start
doesn't mean it should never be recreated. Rewriting shows the subject is
notable and thus worth an article. Seems a worthy enough reason to me to
"bother".

Mgm


subject: [WikiEN-l] Pointless deletions

body:
On 18 Jan 2006, at 13:00, geni wrote:
>
> In order to be listed you need the following:
>
> at least ?50,000-worth (Republic of Ireland: ?38,092.14) of share
> capital of which at least 25% must have been paid for.
> two shareholders
> two directors, one of whom may also be the company secretary
> a certificate of entitlement (the trading certificate) to do business
> and borrow capital
>
> That hardly makes you noteable

Depends where. The listing requirements for the NYSE are somewhat
more than that. And in fact most markets that I can think of.

What are those the requirements for?

Justinc


from_name: Stephen Bain

subject: [WikiEN-l] AFD courtesy problem

body:
On 1/18/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Rob wrote:
> > Can we prevent google from indexing Vfd discussion pages?
>
> This would be a start, and I've talked to the dev's about it.  But I
> don't think it is sufficient.   Deletion seems much preferable to me.

I think Sam had the best idea above, which I would have also suggested.

Blank the page, or perhaps just leave a default notice. The debate
will still be accessible in the history, the search engines will only
see the default notice. They will still see the debate while it is
going on, but that is going to happen anyway.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Pointless deletions

body:
On 1/18/06, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
>
> On 18 Jan 2006, at 13:00, geni wrote:
> >
> > In order to be listed you need the following:
> >
> > at least ?50,000-worth (Republic of Ireland: ?38,092.14) of share
> > capital of which at least 25% must have been paid for.
> > two shareholders
> > two directors, one of whom may also be the company secretary
> > a certificate of entitlement (the trading certificate) to do business
> > and borrow capital
> >
> > That hardly makes you noteable
>
> Depends where. The listing requirements for the NYSE are somewhat
> more than that. And in fact most markets that I can think of.
>
> What are those the requirements for?
>
> Justinc

The be a PLC in the UK:

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

There is not actual requirment to have any public stock.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Notability meta-guidelines

body:
On 1/18/06, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
> "Steve Bennett" <stevage at gmail.com> wrote in
> message news:f1c3529e0601180739x58cee2bai8424268f8cd0eb30 at mail.gmail.com...
> [snip]
> > 1) A subject should not become *more notable* by appearing in
> > Wikipedia.  {The vanity principle}
>
> Just so long as you do not confuse "notable" with "widely known".
>
> If there are only four people in the world who can perform a particularly
> crufty surgical procedure, then I would say that all four of them would
> count as "notable".
>
> However they might not be "widely known" outside the community of surgeons
> and related practitioners.
>
> In this kind of case, it is the duty of Wikipedia to ensure that these
> people are made **more** widely-known, because they are sufficiently notable
> to deserve it.
>

In that case, how *could* Wikipedia make a subject "more notable"?
Isn't a subject inherently notable or non-notable regardless of
whether or not it's in Wikipedia?

The only way I can see to interpret 1) is to make "notable" mean
something like "well known".

And frankly, the rule doesn't make sense to me.  Providing someone
with information on something when they request it isn't advertising.
Advertising is when you provide someone with information other than
what they requested.

IOW, if someone does a search for "Bob's Garage Band" and they get
information on it, how is that advertising?

Anthony


subject: [WikiEN-l] Pointless deletions

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:

>On 1/18/06, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Clearly we need a good definition of what listed means; also
>>investment trusts and suchlike generally have laxer requirements
>>and probably should not be included.
>>
>>
>No. Guidelines are a substitute for thought.  Use your noggin and
>nothing much bad will happen.
>
Some of those noggins are best suited as battering rams. ;-)

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Pointless deletions

body:
On 1/18/06, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
>
>
> If you arent interested in fixing the guidelines and just want to
> undelete articles you will just alienate a lot of people.
>

They're just guidelines, not policy.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Pointless deletions

body:
On 1/18/06, Chris Jenkinson <chris at starglade.org> wrote:
>
> I think it should be the responsibility of someone who ignores a policy
> to get something done for the good of Wikipedia, which I think you have
> done here, to document what they did, what policy you ignored, and why
> you ignored it.

Yes, I'd say what I did here was to observe the unwritten policy that
we don't delete articles without a good reason.  I'd pop it into the
deletion policy but I think that would be redundant.


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Desysopping procedure against waerth

body:
2006/1/18, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net>:
> I do not think Andre has an answer to that. Neither have I. The
> situation is deadlocked at the moment. People are urging me by mail to
> stay. Another group would not have that. No one knows what to do. At the
> moment we have all lost.

Indeed, I do not know. I do however think that it would be good to
look beyond the specifics of this specific case and the underlying
issues. And perhaps hear something from elsewhere about whether the
same problems exist there, and if not, why not, or why do they not
have the consequences of people being de-sysopped, asking for their
own de-sysopping and leaving the Wikipedia?

* What is the policy on (for example) blocking, and how is it decided?
That is, when and by whom is it decided that certain behavior is
enough to block a user or an IP, when and by whom is it decided how
long, and when and by whom is it decided to remove such a block?
* How is such policy decided? If there is a vote, who starts the vote
and at what point? If things work with consensus, how is consensus
reached and who decides when that it has been reached? What happens
when the same policy is interpreted differently by different people?
What happens when large groups of editors cannot come to a consensus?
* There's many people who have a great love for Wikipedia. That sounds
good, but I have found that it often is a major source of friction as
well. What doe you do when two such people have precisely opposite
views on what is desirable and what is disastrous for Wikipedia? How
do you stop them from destroying their own and each other's pleasure?
* What do you do with problem users? How do you stop them from
destroying the fun for everyone or specific targets? And if you deal
with them, how is it decided that they are?
* How do you avoid Wikipedia becoming constant fighting, about issues
and/or about people?

I'm sure there's other Wikipedias which have had problems like the
ones the Dutch are facing now. But I doubt that they have it with this
frequency. It's not the first time things like this happen (nor is it
the first time Waerth is involved).  And that's why I think there's
something wrong. I think that every Wikipedia has its trolls, and
every Wikipedia has its users like Waerth and me, well-meaning but
hot-headed. But why then, is it starting to get so common on nl: for
these vulcanoes to erupt so violently?

--
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Pointless deletions, bogus guidelines

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

geni stated for the record:

> On 1/18/06, Travis Mason-Bushman <travis at gpsports-eng.com> wrote:
>
>>Have you read some of the comments on that page's Talk page? They wish
>>eventually to entirely abolish [[WP:IAR]] "and expunge its history."
>
> Good anyone who need IRA to justify their actions should have carried
> them out in the first place.

WP:IAR is one of the fundamental pillars of Wikipedia.  An attack on it
is an attack on the basic structure of our project to create an
encyclopedia.

>>The idea that "process is important" inherently puts rules and bureaucracy
>>above writing an encyclopaedia - and we are here to write an encyclopaedia,
>>correct? What [[WP:IAR]] states at its root is a principle that is central
>>to Wikipedia - that is to say, that if you're doing what you believe is
>>something that will benefit the encyclopaedia, damn the rules and do it
>>anyway.
>
> Perhaps but don't expect mercy if you make the wrong descision. If you
> throw the rules out of the window don't complain if you go that way
> too (I have not ben playing to much Max Payne I have not ben playing
> to much Max Payne)

Ah, so you're planning to abolish WP:AGF, too.  Is WP:NPOV third on your
list?

>>The fact that nothing (except image deletions) is permanent on Wikipedia
>>makes [[WP:IAR]] work. If someone doesn't believe that my [[WP:BOLD]]
>>invocation of [[WP:IAR]] was proper, they are free to boldly revert it, or
>>in the case of a deletion, find one of those 700 admins to undelete it, in
>>which case a discussion can begin.
>
> Or we could do the discussion bit first you know. to quote Tony Sidaway:
>
> Wikipedia is not a multiplayer game, it's not a time-critical affair.
> If something needs to be done, it'll wait until tomorrow, or most
> likely someone else will do it if it urgently needs to be done. --Tony
> Sidaway|Talk 20:08, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)
>
>
>>[[WP:IAR]] at its core, is about the fact that it is more beneficial to the
>>encyclopaedia to *do* something than to worry about going through five
>>levels of something Wikipedia is not, namely bureaucracy, before doing it.
>
> Outside of directly improveing article content it is in fact often
> beneficial to do nothing on wikipedia. Problems have a tendancy to
> solve themselves given time
>
>
>>Being [[WP:BOLD]], a principle which I think no one would disagree with,
>>often requires its complement, [[WP:IAR]].
>>
>>-FCYTravis
>>
>
>
> WP:BOLD does not apply to admin actions.~~~~
> --
> geni

Wrong.  Admins are as encouraged to be as bold as any other editor.  The
word "admin" does not appear on WP:BOLD at all, let alone as an exception.

- --
 Sean Barrett     | All life is six-to-five against.
 sean at epoptic.org |
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Pointless deletions

body:
On 18 Jan 2006, at 13:17, geni wrote:

> On 1/18/06, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 18 Jan 2006, at 13:00, geni wrote:
>>>
>>> In order to be listed you need the following:
>>>
>>> at least ?50,000-worth (Republic of Ireland: ?38,092.14) of share
>>> capital of which at least 25% must have been paid for.
>>> two shareholders
>>> two directors, one of whom may also be the company secretary
>>> a certificate of entitlement (the trading certificate) to do
>>> business
>>> and borrow capital
>>>
>>> That hardly makes you noteable
>>
>> Depends where. The listing requirements for the NYSE are somewhat
>> more than that. And in fact most markets that I can think of.
>>
>> What are those the requirements for?
>>
>> Justinc
>
> The be a PLC in the UK:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_limited_company
>
> There is not actual requirment to have any public stock.

A PLC is not a listed company, just a limited company. It was listed
that I was suggesting WP:CORP should be changed to.

Justinc


subject: [WikiEN-l] Pointless deletions

body:
On 18 Jan 2006, at 13:35, Tony Sidaway wrote:

> On 1/18/06, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> If you arent interested in fixing the guidelines and just want to
>> undelete articles you will just alienate a lot of people.
>>
>
> They're just guidelines, not policy.

So?

Whats wrong with fixing the guidelines?

Justinc


from_name: Brock Batsell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Pointless deletions

body:
On Jan 18, 2006, at 9:13 AM, Tony Sidaway wrote:

> No. Guidelines are a substitute for thought.  Use your noggin and
> nothing much bad will happen.

Tony,

I recently advocated, both on this list and on AN/I, for a long-time
editor who had been permanently blocked.  I had never spoken with
this editor before, but we carried on a conversation off-list in my
hopes that we could eliminate the issue that led to his block in the
first place.

I attempted to make it clear that Wikipedia has guidelines and
policies that must be followed by all of its editors, so that clutter
and cruft can be eliminated and we can get to work on writing an
encyclopedia.  I also encouraged him to bring up his problems with
those policies and guidelines on the respective talk pages in order
to effect change in Wikipedia.

Now I (and he) see a longtime administrator and respected editor
making a liar out of me, completely ignoring the processes that
volunteers long before I arrived worked to hammer out in order to
make this encyclopedia the best it can be.

For the record, I completely agree that this article should not have
been deleted, as do most people on this list.  But your complete
disregard for anyone with a differing opinion is astonishing.  How
much effort did explaining this undeletion and enforcing it require
with regard to its reward (one article is undeleted that should not
have been deleted)?  Wouldn't this time have been better spent
advocating a change in the written policy that led to its deletion,
so that your work can benefit thousands of similar articles?

The user I worked with had very strong views that he had thought out
quite well, although they were contrary to policy.  He used his
noggin just fine.  Unfortunately, just using your noggin and ignoring
the noggins of other people (otherwise known as consensus) is not how
Wikipedia was built, and it's not how it will be built in the
future.  You know that as well as I do.

Warmest regards,
[[en:User:Bbatsell]]
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from_name: Liviu Andronic

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fairness in voting

body:
> > You know what, I think everything one says is a POV.
>
> Yes, and on Wikipedia, people try to work together to make it more
> neutral. However, Pavel was not open to that.

This is why Moldovan Wikipedia ought to be deleted. It can never be a
*neutral* place. It is from the very start of it a POV. And Pavel, he is
just one of the Moldovans and Romanians that strongly disagree to its
existence. He is just showing his feelings more than others.

> Well, what's the point of keeping mo.,  if it's just like ro. ?
>
> Please re-read that paragraph again. It wasn't just like ro.wiki until
> Pavel moved pages and replaced their contents...

It is not Pavel to be blamed for the similarity of mo.wiki and ro.wiki.
Taking into consideration that it is the same language on both Wikipedias,
and that the are a lot of mo.wiki contents that are mere transliterations
from ro.wiki - very bad transliterations, by the way -, the questions stays:
"what's the point of keeping mo.?". Even if you do not have much knowledge
in Romanian or Moldovan, you can convince
yourself of the similarity of the articles:  http://mo.wikipedia.org/wiki/
?????? and http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grecia. This is not by far a
singular example. I found it with the help of
http://mo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random.

Furthermore, this mo.wiki is full of errors and mistakes. It is really awful
to read its pages. And this is due to the fact that most of the
contributions and the two by far biggest contributors (Russ with 208 edits
and Node_ue with 185, while the total number of articles is 360 on Dec 10,
2005 ) are made by people that do not know the Romanian language. The
biggest Moldovan contributor on mo.wiki - to my knowledge - is Dmitriid [
http://mo.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dmitriid], with a total of 10
contributions [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediaMO.htm].
And even he is a native Russian speaker and knows Romanian at an
intermediate level. This a place of high low-quality content.

My point is: Moldovan Wikipedia is disastrous at the moment and has no
future.

> Romanians are not foreigners on the Moldovan Wikipedia!
>
> Ro.wikipedians are. Romanians who are established mo.wikipedians, like
> Ronline, are not "foreigners". But most -- Bogdan, AdiJapan, Bonaparte
> -- are foreigners.

Read the previous messages. Any Romanian is directly concerned by
mo.wikipedia and has all the right not to be considered as foreigner there.

> And it's going to be this way as long as people are uninformed by such
> pages
> > as mo.wikipedia.org! All the people should know that: There is no
> > Moldovan/Moldavian/Moldoveneasca Language!
>
> About half of the native speakers of Limba Noastra in Rep. Moldova
> disagree with you. They consider they speak "limba moldoveneasca". If
> it was open-and-shut, there would be no controversy about language in
> R.Moldova, people would just accept the so-called "fact" you just
> said. But it's not 100% clear-cut, it's not obvious one way or the
> other. Different people came to different conclusions, splitting the
> country ideologically, and the government considers it "limba
> moldoveneasca". We can't just say on Wikipedia, "there is no Moldovan
> language", because it is _not neutral_ -- millions disagree.

Now, please take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldova#Demographics
, especially at the correctness of the 2004 census: "About 2004 census".

Now, about my already beloved Moldovan language. One may consider Moldovan
from three points of view:

First of all this is the the name given by the Moldovan Constitution to the
Romanian language. I have also found a nice example here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldova#Comparison_with_Romanian
.
[Article 13, The National Language, Use of Other Languages

(1) The national language of the Republic of Moldova is Moldovan, and its
writing is based on the Latin alphabet.]

Secondly, this is the name of the dialect spoken in Moldova, that is a badly
*spoken *Romanian. The written part stays identical to Romanian (minor,
minor differences; far less that American and British English) and is more
appropriate to the previous paragraph. It is better developed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan.

Thirdly, this is the name for the Romanian language written in a Cyrillic
script. More detailed information about this script [
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_alphabet]: "The Moldovan alphabet is a
Cyrillic alphabet derived from the Russian alphabet and developed for the
Romanian/Moldovan language in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. It was the
official script in Moldavian ASSR and between 1940 and 1989 in the Moldavian
SSR and still is the official and the only accepted alphabet in
Transnistria." You may notice that Cyrillic Romanian/Moldovan was always *
imposed* in Moldova beginning with stalinist time and continuing today in
Transnistria. That is, Moldovans were not and are not enthusiastic, the
least to say, on the use of the Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet. One could find
more information on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_language#Artificial_evolution_of_Romanian_to_Moldovan
. However, please notice that this page as well as some other Moldova
related pages are *currently protected* and, consequently, their contents
are disputed.

> I am saying this as a person who has lived all his life in Moldova, who
> > speaks Romanian and Russian fluently and who knows much about the
> history of
> > his nation's language and traditions.
>
> ...do you know of Grigore Ureche? In his Chronicles of the Moldovan
> Nation (letopisetul tarii moldovei), he has a chapter titled "about
> our Moldovan language" (pentru limba noastra moldoveneasca). He wrote
> his Chronicles in Cyrillic. He was not under Soviet time -- on the
> contrary, he was an early Moldovan patriot who wrote a lot of valuable
> material about his country. And this was before Russia annexed
> Bessarabia.

And Node, do you know of Grigore Ureche? Ever read what he wrote? And how in
the earth did you make him a Moldovan patriot (as in opposition to Romanian
nationalism, I guess). Take a nice look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigore_Ureche. In his chapter titled *about**
**our Moldovan language,* "Ureche asserted that the Moldavian language was
the same language as Wallachian and that Moldavians, Wallachians, and
Transylvanians, were of the same ethnicity. [...] which would eventually
lead to the rise of 18th century Romanian nationalism." Alternatively,
please read http://www.scriptorium.ro/carti/grigore_ureche/grigore_ureche-letopisetul_tarii_moldovei-text.cap4.decorated.html
.

OK. So if anyone got to this line: congratulations!

--
Liviu


subject: [Wikipedia-l] "adminship is no big deal"

body:
On 1/18/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> You mischaracterize an ambiguous situation as being totally corrupt.
>
> Fred
>
How so?  I read over what I wrote and I don't think I imply corruption
at all.  I do believe there is some corruption, but I wouldn't even
characterise the system as being totally corrupt if directly asked
about it.

I guess you could take what I say about the arb com, that they choose
cases which suit their POV, as a hint of corruption.  I'm not sure I'd
call that corruption, because I think it's true of any judicial or
quasai-judicial entity.

Admins influence content with the admin actions they take.  I consider
that to be an accurate description of the way things are.  It would be
very hard to change this, you'd have to give someone (or some group)
authority to make specific rules for the admins to follow, and then
someone would have to enforce those rules strictly.  That's not how
things work in Wikipedia.  It's probably not even a good idea.

But hiding your head in the sand and saying that admins exercise no
authority over content is not a good idea either.

Anthony

> On Jan 18, 2006, at 9:10 AM, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>
> > On 1/18/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> >
> >> Yes, it is somewhat outdated, but it remains true in a sense;
> >> administrators are on the same level as everyone else as far as
> >> content is concerned, pointing out that you are an administrator will
> >> not get you far in a content dispute, and carried far enough, will
> >> get you desysopped.  There are occasional lapses and a few folks
> >> sneak
> >> around a bit, but those who think being an administrator gives them
> >> authority over the most important thing in Wikipedia, content, are
> >> mistaken.
> >>
> >> Fred
> >>
> >
> > I'm amazed sometimes at how often blatently untrue statements like
> > this get made.
> >
> > Admins decide which content gets deleted and which content gets
> > undeleted.  They decide when pages are protected and when they are
> > unprotected.  While those pages are protected they decide what those
> > pages are going to say.  They decide when to block someone for
> > violating the three revert rule and when not to block someone for
> > violating it.
> >
> > On very rare occassion an admin does something so ridiculously
> > outrageous and out of touch with the POV of the arbitration committee
> > that they get reprimanded for it, but there are numerous occassions
> > where they influence content and nothing happens at all.
> >
> > It's very hard to separate power from authority, and in a flat (as
> > opposed to hierarchical) system, it's probably impossible.
> >
> > Anthony


from_name: Christof Damian

subject: [Wikitech-l] Google doesn't index the Commons

body:
On Wed, 18 Jan 2006, Brianna Laugher wrote:
>
> A related problem is that Google does not index the commons. Well,
> more or less. It is basically impossible to find any commons content
> in there - as you normally can by going ' keyword
> site:commons.wikimedia.org '. Personally I find this rather
> unbelievable and appalling on Google's behalf. Does anyone else
> think we should, um, make them aware of this? pfctdayelise 13:26, 16
> January 2006 (UTC)

It is rather annoying. I have a wiki wit a large amount of images too
and description on the "Image:" pages.

I thought about hacking mediawiki so that it changes the Image:*.jpg
to something else, without having to change any wiki text.

I don't think google will fix their bot soon, this has been broken for
ages.

christof

--
Christof Damian
christof at damian.net


from_name: Rob Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] A Wikipedia lynching

body:
A editor recently accused others and their source, Prof. Harvey Klehr, of
being part of a lynching.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Harry_Magdoff_and_espionage&diff=34950836&oldid=34254772
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Harry_Magdoff_and_espionage&diff=34950836&oldid=34254772>

He has repeated these libels here
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:List_of_Americans_in_the_Venona_papers&diff=35566271&oldid=35564984
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:List_of_Americans_in_the_Venona_papers&diff=35566271&oldid=35564984%C2%A0>

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Harry_Magdoff_and_espionage&diff=next&oldid=34975393

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Americans_in_the_Venona_papers&diff=34527735&oldid=34519165
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Americans_in_the_Venona_papers&diff=34527735&oldid=34519165>

alleging this 'Posse' Comitatus is part of a conspiracy to justify civil
rights violations.

Now the editor has filed an RfM to force insertion of defamatory criticism
like this of Prof. Harvey Klehr in several articles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_mediation#Significance_of_Venona.2C_List_of_Americans_in_the_Venona_papers.2C_and_Harry_Magdoff_and_espionage

What the editor neglects to state in his RfM is his own conflict of
interest, cited here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_arbitration/Nobs01_and_others/Evidence#Nobs01_view_of_Cberlet.27s_request

and here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Chip_Berlet#Human_Rights_Activist

How long will this abuse of legitimate Wikipedia dispute resolution
processes be tolerated?

Nobs01


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Registering www.wikipedia.se for sv.wikipedia.org

body:
"Andreas Vil?n" <andreas.vilen at gmail.com>
wrote in message
news:cb099c010601180538p372b1ef3q1d762142d2ab1196 at mail.gmail.com...
[snip]
> All top domains I search for are redirects to their country's primary
> language, I don't see why www.wikipedia.se shouldn't. In fact, since
> wikipedia.fi is, that would be pure discrimination. Especially since
> Swedish is far more widespread in Finland than Finnish is in Sweden.

Maybe they should therefore be updated to provide proper portal
facilities...unless there's a chapter in that country in which case surely
they ought to be doing something with "their site"?
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Pointless deletions

body:
On 1/18/06, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
> Whats wrong with fixing the guidelines?
>

I like to think that my actions may have contributed an impetus in
that direction.  it's a wiki.  I think you'd have a reasonable chance
of getting the guidelines changed now that we're all aware that stock
exchange listed companies are *not* generally considered encyclopedic
according to the guidelines.  Of course if I proposed  it then the
reaction would be an expression of approval of disapproval for
unilateral action, which is another matter entirely.


from_name: Sherool

subject: [WikiEN-l] Overuse of horizontal rules

body:
On Wed, 18 Jan 2006 05:07:37 +0100, stevertigo <vertigosteve at yahoo.com>
wrote:

> Too many people have an annoying tendency to use level
> 2 headers for even one paragraph sections. This
> automatically makes horzontal rules show (in most CSS
> I guess) and breaks flow for reading. This is annoying
> as fuck.
>
> Discuss.
>
> SV

Technicaly it's not a horizontal ruler, it's just the bottom border set on
the h2 element. Just add:

h2{border:0px;}

to your User:<whatever>/monobook.css file (asuming you use the monobook
skin) to remove the underline if it's bothering you. You can change
font-size and so on the the same manner. As long as you are logged in you
can pretty much change the look and feel of everyting to your liking by
making your own stylesheet this way (asuming you know a bit CSS).
Personaly I like the underlining.

--
[[User:Sherool]]


from_name: Rob Church

body:
> I'm using lastest mediawiki 1.4.X,

Hint: MediaWiki 1.4 is nowhere near the latest release, which is
1.5.5. I'd imagine the problem still affects that however; and it
affects HEAD, given that that's what Commons runs. Seems to be a
Google oversight rather than our fault.

Rob Church

On 18/01/06, erchache2000 <erchache2000.enciclopedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> Christof Damian escribi?:
> > On Wed, 18 Jan 2006, Brianna Laugher wrote:
> >
> >> A related problem is that Google does not index the commons. Well,
> >> more or less. It is basically impossible to find any commons content
> >> in there - as you normally can by going ' keyword
> >> site:commons.wikimedia.org '. Personally I find this rather
> >> unbelievable and appalling on Google's behalf. Does anyone else
> >> think we should, um, make them aware of this? pfctdayelise 13:26, 16
> >> January 2006 (UTC)
> >>
> >
> > It is rather annoying. I have a wiki wit a large amount of images too
> > and description on the "Image:" pages.
> >
> > I thought about hacking mediawiki so that it changes the Image:*.jpg
> > to something else, without having to change any wiki text.
> >
> > I don't think google will fix their bot soon, this has been broken for
> > ages.
> >
> > christof
> >
> >
> I'm using lastest mediawiki 1.4.X, and has same problem....google bot
> caching me but dont show any results on search google webpage :-S
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] how to avoid caching of pages with dynamic content

body:
$wgOut->setSquidMaxage( 0 );

Rob Church

On 18/01/06, Thomas Gries <mail at tgries.de> wrote:
> Inside an extension module:
> what is the correct way to _disable caching for that specific page_
> (example: dynamic integration of  texts from another source, which might
> change) ?
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Andreas Vilén

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Registering www.wikipedia.se for sv.wikipedia.org

body:
In that case you could add the romani and jiddish wikis and remove the
sv. wiki since Swedish is not an official language of Sweden but those
are... The point is, of course, that the majority of the Swedish
inhabitants speak Swedish, and when they go to an .se address they
assume to find content in Swedish. I guess most Swedish finns would go
to www.wikipedia.fi (which links directly to fiwiki, when Swedish has
shared official status with Finnish in Finland) if they searched for
content in Finnish.

All top domains I search for are redirects to their country's primary
language, I don't see why www.wikipedia.se shouldn't. In fact, since
wikipedia.fi is, that would be pure discrimination. Especially since
Swedish is far more widespread in Finland than Finnish is in Sweden.

But this wasn't really the point of the discussion. The point is: is
is possible to finance the purchase of the domain name?

/Andreas
On 1/17/06, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't agree with this move. I think that Wikipedia.se should be a
> portal with links to the Swedish, Finnish, and Sami Wikipedias because
> they are all languages of Sweden.
>
> Mark
>
> On 17/01/06, Andreas Vil?n <andreas.vilen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi, I've started a discussion at svwiki about registering the address
> > www.wikipedia.se (.se is the primary domain of Sweden), but it's
> > currently owned by someone, and it will probably cost money to buy it.
> > I have not contacted the person who owns it yet, but I'm checking if
> > there's any way this could be financed by Wikimedia? I also see that
> > for example www.wikipedia.de, www.wikipedia.no and www.wikipedia.pl
> > already exists.
> >
> > I think registering the .se address would increase traffic to the
> > Swedish Wikipedia, since many today probably believe there is only an
> > English version of it, and I don't know, but I suspect that traffic to
> > svwiki is relatively low, at least we have pretty few editors.
> >
> > Is there any possibility this could be done?
> >
> > Thank you!
> >
> > Andreas
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>
> --
> "Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Overuse of horizontal rules

body:
On 1/18/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> Makes it easier to edit. I don't get the horizontal line I guess.
> Fred

Hmm which skin do you use?

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Pointless deletions

body:
On 1/18/06, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
> A PLC is not a listed company, just a limited company. It was listed
> that I was suggesting WP:CORP should be changed to.
>
> Justinc

Any PLC can get it self listed. It is not just a limited company

Alternative Investments Market aparent has 2,200 companies on it's books.
--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] AFD courtesy problem

body:
On Tue, 17 Jan 2006 22:53:13 +0100, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 17/01/06, slimvirgin at gmail.com <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> The broader issue is why we allow Google to pick up any of our talk or
>> project pages, where NPOV, NOR, and V don't apply. Can anyone explain
>> why we allow that?
>
> It's logistically quite tricky to arrange matters so the spiders
> understand the difference between a talk page and a "real" page;
> "allowing" isn't the key, it's "why don't we prevent it", and the
> answer is "if we tried it probably wouldn't work very well".
>
> Not to stop anyone attempting something, but...

It's not nessesary for the spiders to know the differense between the
namespaces. As long as MediaWiki know the difference it should be trivial
to make it include:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

in the header when rendering a talkpage (and any other namespace we don't
want indexed).

All the spider need to know is not to index pages that contain that
directive, and most major web indexers (including Google) do honor that
tag.

It would require a one time purge of the cache of all the affected
namespaces after it was implemented to take effect though, and stuff that
have already been indexed might hang around in search results for months
before the effects fully propegate.

--
[[User:Sherool]]


from_name: Brianna Laugher

body:
Hi,

Someone suggested I (commons and en user:pfctdayelise) post this here.
If I am mistaken and Google does in fact index the Commons, I would
really appreciate someone explaining how to go about it. Comments
welcome on either of my user talk pages, COM:VP or by email.

cheers, Brianna (pfctdayelise)

Originally at [[commons:COM:VP#Keywords]]:

A related problem is that Google does not index the commons. Well,
more or less. It is basically impossible to find any commons content
in there - as you normally can by going ' keyword
site:commons.wikimedia.org '. Personally I find this rather
unbelievable and appalling on Google's behalf. Does anyone else think
we should, um, make them aware of this? pfctdayelise 13:26, 16 January
2006 (UTC)

        This has been discussed before. Part of the problem is that
descriptive info is in "foo.jpg", but Google has no way of knowing
that we have text pages that just happen to be named identically to
the nontextual image files that everybody in the world uses. Another
problem is that Google ranks by references to the page, and most
commons pages look like orphans or near-orphans, image references from
WP articles being made "secretly" via the MediaWiki local/commons
two-step lookup. On keywords, feel free to add them anywhere, they
will help our own search algorithm. I'm not so inclined to be
concerned about that, considering how many thousands of images still
have not a single link or category. Stan Shebs 00:22, 17 January 2006
(UTC)

            Google does have a way to know that those pages are HTML,
not binary files: it's in the http header field called "Content-Type".
Google just ignores it (or does not even try to load such a page).
[snip]  Duesentrieb(?!) 02:01, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

--
"Mathematicians do it with Nobel's wife."


from_name: Justin Cormack

subject: [WikiEN-l] Pointless deletions

body:
On 18 Jan 2006, at 14:45, geni wrote:

> On 1/18/06, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
>> A PLC is not a listed company, just a limited company. It was listed
>> that I was suggesting WP:CORP should be changed to.
>>
>> Justinc
>
> Any PLC can get it self listed. It is not just a limited company
>
>
> Alternative Investments Market aparent has 2,200 companies on it's
> books.

AIM probably doesnt count in a normal definition of listed (though
there are some requirements - AIM shell companies are not entirely
worthless)

Its the replacement for the USM (the Unlisted Securities Market) ie
trading of unlisted shares without the full listing requirements.

Clearly we need a good definition of what listed means; also
investment trusts and suchlike generally have laxer requirements
and probably should not be included.

Justinc


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Doctored Wikipedia article read out on air by
	conservative talk show host

body:
Interesting allegation. Supposedly the scenario is that some political
extremist edited a Wikipedia page about the Center for Constitutional
Rights so as to contain slanted editorial from a political website
opposed to that organisation, then he or another person later read out
on air, word for word, the contents of the resulting article, preceded
by the words "This is according to the Wikipedia free encyclopedia on
the Web. OK? I didn't make this up."

http://wikipediareview.proboards78.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=1137542140

The edit is there, and there is a link to a political blog site
purporting to contain a sound recording from the broadcast.


from_name: David Gerard

body:
Justin Cormack wrote:

>Clearly we need a good definition of what listed means; also
>investment trusts and suchlike generally have laxer requirements
>and probably should not be included.

What I'm reading here is that the guideline in question was clearly
bogus and ignoring it as bogus was the right thing to do. And if
people are going to cite it on AFD, it'll need some sort of
ratification from people other than five AFD regulars.

- d.


body:
On 18 Jan 2006, at 14:55, Fastfission wrote:

> I'm not sure about this. If it is fair use in one instance, it
> should be
> fair use in all instances. I don't think there is a legal
> difference between
> having one fair use magazine cover and having 200, providing each
> use meets
> the fair use standards. In cases where multiple-sources from a single
> copyright holder were held not to be fair use (i.e. Twin Peaks) it was
> because the sum collection of the uses really did take away from
> the use of
> the original source (i.e. was basically a detailed plot abridgment
> and could
> be read without watching the shows). I don't think that's the same
> thing as
> using a large number of completely separate magazine or DVD covers. At
> least, that's my understanding of it.

Copying will always be considered by the court __as a whole__. Thats
very clear.

With magazine covers, if we had say downloaded (made up example; I
havent
looked into where they came from) the Official Playboy Magazine Cover
website
and stuck them all in wikipedia then we would be liable - we would be
taking
advertising revenue from their website thus causing damages.
Regardless of
the amount of important critical commentary we make on them.

CD covers even in thumbnail form now have commercial value en masse, for
marketing purposes.

Of course there isnt much case law yet, anything could happen. IANAL. I
expect we shall hear from a lawyer soon.

Justinc


subject: [WikiEN-l] Pointless deletions

body:
On 1/18/06, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
> Clearly we need a good definition of what listed means; also
> investment trusts and suchlike generally have laxer requirements
> and probably should not be included.

No. Guidelines are a substitute for thought.  Use your noggin and
nothing much bad will happen.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Data dumps

body:
Emilio Gonzalez wrote:
> Just a comment. Why not adding user_groups table in the public dump? It
> can be useful for some statistical purposes and I can't see any risk in
> publishing this information.

Ummm, because I forgot? :)

I'll switch it.

(The info contained is already available through Special:Listusers, so it's not
terribly secret.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
Christof Damian escribi?:
> On Wed, 18 Jan 2006, Brianna Laugher wrote:
>
>> A related problem is that Google does not index the commons. Well,
>> more or less. It is basically impossible to find any commons content
>> in there - as you normally can by going ' keyword
>> site:commons.wikimedia.org '. Personally I find this rather
>> unbelievable and appalling on Google's behalf. Does anyone else
>> think we should, um, make them aware of this? pfctdayelise 13:26, 16
>> January 2006 (UTC)
>>
>
> It is rather annoying. I have a wiki wit a large amount of images too
> and description on the "Image:" pages.
>
> I thought about hacking mediawiki so that it changes the Image:*.jpg
> to something else, without having to change any wiki text.
>
> I don't think google will fix their bot soon, this has been broken for
> ages.
>
> christof
>
>
I'm using lastest mediawiki 1.4.X, and has same problem....google bot
caching me but dont show any results on search google webpage :-S


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Registering www.wikipedia.se for
	sv.wikipedia.org

body:
This is taking NPOV to the extreme... 99% of all people living in
Sweden except to get to a site in Swedish when they go to a website
with the ending .se, probably most Swedish Finns would go to
www.wikipedia.se (and surely not sv.wikipedia.org) if they wanted to
find Wikipedia in Swedish, not www.wikipedia.fi. But as I have said
numerous times, this is another discussion.

The question is: "Is it possible to get Wikimedia to pay for the
domain name www.wikipedia.se?"

/Andreas
On 1/18/06, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> "Andreas Vil?n" <andreas.vilen at gmail.com>
> wrote in message
> news:cb099c010601180538p372b1ef3q1d762142d2ab1196 at mail.gmail.com...
> [snip]
> > All top domains I search for are redirects to their country's primary
> > language, I don't see why www.wikipedia.se shouldn't. In fact, since
> > wikipedia.fi is, that would be pure discrimination. Especially since
> > Swedish is far more widespread in Finland than Finnish is in Sweden.
>
> Maybe they should therefore be updated to provide proper portal
> facilities...unless there's a chapter in that country in which case surely
> they ought to be doing something with "their site"?
> --
> Phil
> [[en:User:Phil Boswell]]
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Pointless deletions

body:
On 18 Jan 2006, at 15:13, Tony Sidaway wrote:

> On 1/18/06, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
>> Clearly we need a good definition of what listed means; also
>> investment trusts and suchlike generally have laxer requirements
>> and probably should not be included.
>
>
> No. Guidelines are a substitute for thought.  Use your noggin and
> nothing much bad will happen.

I think these ones could be very useful. They could point to the
public sources of information on listed companies to help people
verify details on them, and point to sources for companies missing
articles.

And point out things that are non obvious to non specialists such
as the fact that Investment Trusts shouldnt have their own articles
they should be listed under the management company.

And point to lists of stock exchanges and that sort of thing.

Justinc


from_name: Chris Jenkinson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Paying for providing data to customers

body:
GerardM wrote:
> When you pay for Internet access, you pay for the utility of Internet.
> The ISP provides you with access to the Internet. This means that they
> provide you with a SPECIFIC bandwith. What BellSouth is doing is
> essentially not only make you pay but the organisation that is putting
> content on the Internet as well. So they make you pay twice because it
> is obvious that the organisation that is made to pay will increase
> your bill by that amount.
>
> Until this time you pay for a service, a given amount of access to the
> Internet. With this proposal you do not get this service because
> additional tolls have to be paid.

I propose that if BellSouth go ahead with this stupid idea of theirs, we
block access to all people connecting from BellSouth and tell them to
switch their ISP. They will learn fast enough that their idea is stupid.

Chris

--
Chris Jenkinson
chris at starglade.org

"Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful."
  -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
On 1/18/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> A lot of it is poker. Folks without a decent hand, raising and
> bluffing. I suggest courteous calling: asking for sources,
> negotiating, patience, using the dispute resolution process effectively.
>
> Fred
>
I suggest that, even if one is willing to go through all the trouble
of learning and following the dispute resolution process, 9 times out
of 10 nothing will happen anyway, because the arbitration committee is
grossly ineffective at handling any but the most obvious of disputes.

There are many RFCs started against admins who have clearly exceeded
the bounds of their authority, and that ultimately amount to nothing.
Quite often the reasoning behind this is that the ultimate result
justifies the means.  Less often but still sometimes the excuse is
more along the lines that the admin *thought* the ultimate result
would justify the means.  It's really not such a bad argument, but it
makes any argument that admins don't have any authority pretty
obviously false.

Some clear examples which illustrate my point would be wrt speedy
deletion.  Excuses for admins exceeding their authority under the
speedy deletion policy (which in itself was created in some ways under
threats of page protection and banning) include that the content would
have been deleted anyway and even that the admin was "being bold" and
doing something which she thought was right.

It seems absolutely clear to me that admins, collectively at least,
have a significant amount of de-facto authority in Wikipedia.  They
have powers, and there are essentially no hard rules over how they are
permitted to use it (let alone *enforced* rules).

Anthony


from_name: Stephen Bain

subject: [WikiEN-l] Overuse of horizontal rules

body:
On 1/18/06, stevertigo <vertigosteve at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Too many people have an annoying tendency to use level
> 2 headers for even one paragraph sections. This
> automatically makes horzontal rules show (in most CSS
> I guess) and breaks flow for reading. This is annoying
> as fuck.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_%28headings%29
MoS says to start with level 2 headings, not any other level, which
makes alot of sense.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


body:
On 18 Jan 2006, at 15:37, Fred Bauder wrote:

> Suppose that an image can be considered fair use because it is used
> for educational purposes, say in the article Tiananmen Square
> protests of 1989 where the image Image:Tianasquare.jpg
>
> is said to be fair use under the following rationale:
>
> The use of this historic photograph in Wikipedia is claimed to be a
> fair use of the image under United States copyright law for the
> following reasons:
> This photograph depicts a non-reproduceable historic event.

Copyright law says nothing about non reproducable historic events.

Justinc


subject: [WikiEN-l] Notability meta-guidelines

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:

>2) A subject should not appear in Wikipedia when many more subjects in
>its category or field do not. {The insignificance principle}

This is a very bad idea. We lack great swathes of many areas. 2. would
only be a good idea if our systemic bias were negligible, when it's
nothing of the sort; pretending it is is counterproductive.

>Thus we can say, "come back when c, b and a have been fulfilled to
some extent".

To which the obvious answer is "there is no reason not to start *here*."

>3) Imaginary or fictitious subjects have less right to appear in
>Wikipedia than other subjects. {The fancruft principle}

We are not running out of disk space in any way at all, and 100000
"fancruft" articles don't make it any harder for me to find, e.g.,
[[EXA]] or [[Xenu]].

This is not a book. If someone makes a book, they can take care of it
how they wish (e.g. the Category system).

I do like the first one, though, and this email strikes me as
hopefully the start of a good working editorial definition of
"notability"!

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Notability meta-guidelines

body:
On 18 Jan 2006, at 15:39, Steve Bennett wrote:

> Hi,
>   There are a great deal of arguments over what is and isn't notable
> in various fields, but not much agreement on what the goals of having
> notability guidelines at all - or why we want to delete well written
> articles about arguably "unimportant" topics. In particular, as
> someone recently pointed out, why we want to (hypothetically) keep a
> stub written about a species of extinct beetle little is known about,
> while we would delete a page about an internet chat site with
> thousands of active users.
>
> I suggest that there are some underlying, unspoken principles at
> play here:
>
> 1) A subject should not become *more notable* by appearing in
> Wikipedia.  {The vanity principle}
>
> 2) A subject should not appear in Wikipedia when many more subjects in
> its category or field do not. {The insignificance principle}
>
> 3) Imaginary or fictitious subjects have less right to appear in
> Wikipedia than other subjects. {The fancruft principle}

I think these are a good start.

2. can be difficult during construction of an encyclopedia, as people
cannot cover stuff in a top down logical order necessarily.

I think there are some generally agreed non-principals too:

a. There should not be arbitrary numeric cutoffs (eg no articles on
cities with fewer than 50000 people or whatever), cutoffs should
correspond
to categories used in the real world.


body:
On 1/18/06, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>
> >I had on my userpage a photo I took from the top of a lighthouse in
> >New Jersey.  Next to it I had an image I created using Google Earth
> >which attempted to reproduce that photo.  I had a couple of lines of
> >text about how the two were created.
> >
> If it's articleworthy, put it in an article. If not, why have it
> on WP at all? Put it on your own website and reference it.
>
> Stan

I'm not sure it was ready for an article.  And I would have put it up
on my own website, except that I misplaced my copy and the one on
Wikipedia was deleted.

Anyway, I'm not complaining about it not being kept in Wikipedia.  I
merely brought it up as an example which I was asked to provide.

Anthony


from_name: charles matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Notability meta-guidelines

body:
"David Gerard" wrote

>>Steve Bennett wrote:

>>2) A subject should not appear in Wikipedia when many more subjects in
>i>ts category or field do not. {The insignificance principle}

>This is a very bad idea. We lack great swathes of many areas. 2. would
only be a good idea if our systemic bias were negligible, when it's
nothing of the sort; pretending it is is counterproductive.

Agree with David.  In fact this sort of reasoning is rarely useful.  Tell
people to write about what they are not sufficiently informed/motivated to
write about, rather than what they know or are interested in researching and
they are hardly likely to give of their best.

Charles


subject: [WikiEN-l] Notability meta-guidelines

body:
Justin Cormack" wrote

> 2. can be difficult during construction of an encyclopedia, as people
> cannot cover stuff in a top down logical order necessarily.

Indeed, if you write about mathematics, you have to do it bottom-up to do it
properly.  Five years in, and WP begins to get there, i.e. the mathematics
coverage is only about half a century behind the times (that's good, by the
way).

Charles


from_name: Martin Baumann

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: index.php -> index.cgi

body:
Hi,

I tried the following changes to LocalSettings.php and I renamed index.php to index.cgi and I added the interpreter line to index.cgi.

$wgScript           = "$wgScriptPath/index.cgi";
$wgRedirectScript   = "$wgScriptPath/redirect.php";

## If using PHP as a CGI module, use the ugly URLs
#$wgArticlePath      = "$wgScript/$1";
$wgArticlePath      = "$wgScript?title=$1";

I get the following message when I open the site with a browser:

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, rzwebmaster at rz.uni-karlsruhe.de and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Any idea?

Thanks, MB
______________________________________________________________
Verschicken Sie romantische, coole und witzige Bilder per SMS!
Jetzt bei WEB.DE FreeMail: http://f.web.de/?mc=021193


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] A Wikipedia lynching

body:
I more or less agree with you on the Venona material. That was never
the issue in your arbitration. Asking for mediation is hardly abuse
of dispute resolution process. This assertion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
title=Talk:List_of_Americans_in_the_Venona_papers&diff=35566271&oldid=35
564984

I certainly would not agree with, I am a big fan of Harvey Klehr. But
again, requesting mediation is not abuse of our process, but
following it.

Fred

On Jan 18, 2006, at 2:09 PM, Rob Smith wrote:

> A editor recently accused others and their source, Prof. Harvey
> Klehr, of
> being part of a lynching.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
> title=Talk:Harry_Magdoff_and_espionage&diff=34950836&oldid=34254772
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
> title=Talk:Harry_Magdoff_and_espionage&diff=34950836&oldid=34254772>
>
>
> He has repeated these libels here
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
> title=Talk:List_of_Americans_in_the_Venona_papers&diff=35566271&oldid=
> 35564984
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
> title=Talk:List_of_Americans_in_the_Venona_papers&diff=35566271&oldid=
> 35564984%C2%A0>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
> title=Talk:Harry_Magdoff_and_espionage&diff=next&oldid=34975393
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
> title=List_of_Americans_in_the_Venona_papers&diff=34527735&oldid=34519
> 165
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
> title=List_of_Americans_in_the_Venona_papers&diff=34527735&oldid=34519
> 165>
>
> alleging this 'Posse' Comitatus is part of a conspiracy to justify
> civil
> rights violations.
>
> Now the editor has filed an RfM to force insertion of defamatory
> criticism
> like this of Prof. Harvey Klehr in several articles
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
> Wikipedia:Requests_for_mediation#Significance_of_Venona.
> 2C_List_of_Americans_in_the_Venona_papers.
> 2C_and_Harry_Magdoff_and_espionage
>
> What the editor neglects to state in his RfM is his own conflict of
> interest, cited here
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
> Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_arbitration/Nobs01_and_others/
> Evidence#Nobs01_view_of_Cberlet.27s_request
>
> and here
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Chip_Berlet#Human_Rights_Activist
>
> How long will this abuse of legitimate Wikipedia dispute resolution
> processes be tolerated?
>
> Nobs01
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
On 1/18/06, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/18/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > I had on my userpage a photo I took from the top of a lighthouse in
> > New Jersey.  Next to it I had an image I created using Google Earth
> > which attempted to reproduce that photo.  I had a couple of lines of
> > text about how the two were created.
> >
> > That's educational, and it's fair use, and the image was deleted.
>
> OK. That use probably is educational, and probably is fair use.
>
> Of course, it's an entirely different matter to ask whether Wikipedia
> should allow fair use in userpages.  A good reason not to would be the
> extreme difficulty in deciding, in each instance, what is and what
> isn't fair use.  It is far easier, and in my opinion better, to err on
> the side of caution and not allow any such images.
>

You're right, whether or not it's fair use is a different question as
to whether or not Wikipedia should allow fair use.  I was only
discussing the former.

As for the latter, I don't really think it matters, so long as people
are made aware of the rule.  If I had known about such a rule before
uploading the image, I never would have done so.

Anthony


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: "adminship is no big deal"

body:
Walter Vermeir wrote:
> Habj <sweetadelaide at ...> writes:
>
>
>>This statemant, "adminship is no big deal", originates from enwiki.
>>Could someone please explain in what circumstances this saying was
>>worded? I see it used meaning "adminship is no big deal, so you
>>shouldn't be so careful who to elect for this task" as well as
>>"adminship is no big deal, so you shouldn't try and find ways to get
>>rid of admins who are obviously unsuitable for the job".
>>
>>My guess is: this sentence originates from the truly virgin stage of
>>wikipedia, where some people wanted to avoid others starting fighting
>>for admin (or at the time, "sysop") status. Currently, I see no reason
>>for the remaining of this statements in various places in the
>>Wikipedia namespace in various wikipedias - none at all.
>>
>>/Habj
>
>
> I have not found the source from that quote. But I have found some postings
> from the early days that are about this is and contain that attitude I think.
>
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc/2197/
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc/3804/
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc/2172/
>
> Walter

It should be reminded that originally (before the phases II/III of the
software, which were implemented in spring then summer 2002 on the
english wikipedia the "sysop" power were quite different from what they
are right now.
Afaik, phase II was never implemented on non english projects (german
maybe ?) and international projects jumped directly from phase I to
phase III end of 2002 and beginning 2003.

The original sysop (phase I) had a technical interface to delete or
block editors. There was no protection feature. Deletion was "final"
(content could not be recovered, ever). On the english wp, I think only
Jimbo and Larry ever had that status. On a few languages, others had it
(on the french, Aoineko, Shaihulud and myself, for 3 months, before we
upgraded to phase II).

The current sysop status was introduced in phase II (probably) and
really used in phase III. I presume Jimbo made the sysops in phase II
and it switched to a voting model somewhere in phase III. I remember
that in spring 2003, candidates were basically saying on the mailing
list "could I be sysop ?" and if there was no opposition, it was done so
(by a developer).

If you look at Walter archives, the first and third links are post to
phase I, just bordering phase II. This was when the sysop status with
reversibility action was introduced. Before that date, there was really
no sysop.

Link II was posted around the time phase III was introduced. As you can
note, it refers to non-reversible actions possible for sysops. However,
afaik, except for images, sysops have never been able to do irreversable
actions.

ant


from_name: Chip Berlet

subject: [WikiEN-l] A Wikipedia lynching

body:
Wow!

Almost surreal.

For the record, my POV is that this anaysis by the banned Nobs01 is biased and not accurate.

My willingness to go through mediation again (after months of mediation and arbitration with Nobs01)  is hardly a sign of bad faith.

:-)

-Cberlet

________________________________

From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org on behalf of Rob Smith
Sent: Wed 1/18/2006 4:09 PM
To: English Wikipedia
Subject: [WikiEN-l] A Wikipedia lynching

A editor recently accused others and their source, Prof. Harvey Klehr, of
being part of a lynching.

<<SNIP>>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Subversion coming

body:
Ok, SourceForge got our Subversion import done, but their notification hooks are
broken: commit mails don't include diffs, and they haven't allowed support for
the CIA notification bot yet. This makes it virtually impossible to follow what
changes your fellow developers are making.

When we get these resolved, we can patch in the remaining changes from CVS and
start using the SVN repo.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
admin Yellowikis:
> Under your proposed system users will not have to log on to change the
> UI. This is clearly a great improvement. But will it be possible to
> define a default UI language for a particular page? where no
> preference for UI has been selected?

That is the idea. To quote the proposal:

<<
When no user interface language is set, the UI language should be
identical to the content language, that is, when viewing pages in
English, the UI language should be English; in German, the UI language
should be German, and so on. This ensures that each language community
can customize the interface messages according to their needs, and
emulates the current behavior of multilingual Wikimedia projects with
split databases.
 >>

Best,

Erik


from_name: Haukur Þorgeirsson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Notability meta-guidelines

body:
I write my share of articles here on things I happen to be interested in.
A number of times the topics I've chosen to write about have zero English
language Google hits and no coverage on the Web in any language.

Yet an article of mine has never ever been submitted to AfD. No-one has
even made the mere suggestion that an article I've written should be
deleted. I think there might be three reasons for this:

1. People trust that an experienced editor is submitting articles on
reasonably worthy topics.
2. I cite my sources.
3. I write about old stuff.

I think the third reason may actually be the most important one. People
are worried about non-notable companies using Wikipedia to advertise their
stuff. No-one is worried about abuse of Wikipedia to promote obscure 11th
century runic inscriptions.

So, I think the idea runs like this: "If it happened 1000 years ago and
someone still cares enough about it to write an article then it's probably
notable enough to keep."

Thus I am spared AfD battles even though my hobbies can be just as obscure
and specialized as anyone else's. I feel for people interested in stuff
like webcomics which happens to be popular today and is thus subject to
much more scrutiny.

Regards,
Haukur


from_name: GerardM

body:
When you pay for Internet access, you pay for the utility of Internet.
The ISP provides you with access to the Internet. This means that they
provide you with a SPECIFIC bandwith. What BellSouth is doing is
essentially not only make you pay but the organisation that is putting
content on the Internet as well. So they make you pay twice because it
is obvious that the organisation that is made to pay will increase
your bill by that amount.

Until this time you pay for a service, a given amount of access to the
Internet. With this proposal you do not get this service because
additional tolls have to be paid.

Thanks,
   GerardM

On 1/18/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> On 1/17/06, Maru Dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 1/17/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > > Seems to me like they're just trying to offer an additional service
> > > (faster, more reliable) on top of the ones they already offer.  I
> > > don't see the big deal.
> > >
> > > Anthony
> >
> > The way these businesses work things, the slippery slope argument is
> > *very* applicable. Even if they charge for traffic, and they merely
> > impose extra charges on all new services and speeds,  eventually you
> > will have no choice but to pay, because bandwidth requirements go ever
> > up-  analogously, if someone offered you a totally free 512 bps
> > Internet connection, would you take it? What if "paying for premium
> > connections" had gotten started when 512 bps were the norm for home
> > users?
> >
> > ~Maru
>
> I don't know about you, but I *already* have no choice but to pay for
> Internet access and other telecommunications services, so I really
> don't see what the big deal is.  But maybe I'm missing something.
>
> "analogously, if someone offered you a totally free 512 bps Internet
> connection, would you take it?"  I'm not sure what the point of this
> question is, but if it was an always-on connection hell yeah I'd take
> it.  I'd love even just a 1 bps Internet connection just so I could
> send a short message to my computer from some other location to
> connect for real (or to determine its IP address, or whatever).  But
> I'm one of those poor souls who can't currently get DSL.
>
> Anthony
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Subversion coming

body:
Rob Church wrote:
> So which do we commit to until then?

CVS.

You know, the one that I *didn't* just say we won't use until it's made usable. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Notability meta-guidelines

body:
Hi,
  There are a great deal of arguments over what is and isn't notable
in various fields, but not much agreement on what the goals of having
notability guidelines at all - or why we want to delete well written
articles about arguably "unimportant" topics. In particular, as
someone recently pointed out, why we want to (hypothetically) keep a
stub written about a species of extinct beetle little is known about,
while we would delete a page about an internet chat site with
thousands of active users.

I suggest that there are some underlying, unspoken principles at play here:

1) A subject should not become *more notable* by appearing in
Wikipedia.  {The vanity principle}

2) A subject should not appear in Wikipedia when many more subjects in
its category or field do not. {The insignificance principle}

3) Imaginary or fictitious subjects have less right to appear in
Wikipedia than other subjects. {The fancruft principle}

I believe that 1) is the crux of vanity concerns. No one really cares
about the dataspace wasted on Jimmy Bob's Groovy Garage Band. But we
object to the idea that Wikipedia is being harnessed as an advertising
medium.

The second principle I think is one that should be spoken. We then
have a logical argument for rejecting an article about an
uninteresting street in an outer suburb of Wagga Wagga:
a) There are hardly any interesting streets in this suburb in WP
b) There are hardly any interesting streets in Wagga Wagga at all in WP
c) There are hardly any streets in any major cities in Australia listed.

Thus we can say, "come back when c, b and a have been fulfilled to some extent".

The third principle explains the repugnance with which some editors
treat "fancruft". Notability and popularity are disregarded, and this
principle comes through: "We" simply don't want a lot of articles
about any fictitious subject. This obviously causes tension with the
large numbers of editors who want to create thirty articles about
their favourite Pok?mon character.

So my first question is: Do these principles adequately explain most
of the other notability guidelines?

If so, then the community is faced with two questions:
a) Do we accept these meta guidelines? Do we want to add others?
b) How do we publish these meta guidelines, and how do we make sure
they are taken into account into all other notability guidelines?

Comments please!

Steve


from_name: Ilya N.

subject: [WikiEN-l] Overuse of horizontal rules

body:
I think that if the artice is only a lead and a little bit of text, you
shouldn't have many headers at all.
--
~Ilya N.
http://w3stuff.com/ilya/ (My website; DarkLordFoxx Media)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ilyanep (on Wikipedia)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Pointless deletions

body:
On 1/18/06, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
>
>
> And point out things that are non obvious to non specialists such
> as the fact that Investment Trusts shouldnt have their own articles
> they should be listed under the management company.
>
> And point to lists of stock exchanges and that sort of thing.

I've no idea why it should be the case that investment trusts
shouldn't have their own article.   I'd adopt the pragmatic approach
that if something has a ticker symbol or is a name that I'm likely to
encounter in the financial pages, we're not running out of paper so it
can have an article, which may be merged into another article but
that's an editing decision, not a matter for deletion.

Lists of stock exchanged?  Try [[List of stock exchanges]] in article space.


from_name: Justin Cormack

subject: [WikiEN-l] Pointless deletions

body:
On 18 Jan 2006, at 16:50, Tony Sidaway wrote:

> On 1/18/06, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> And point out things that are non obvious to non specialists such
>> as the fact that Investment Trusts shouldnt have their own articles
>> they should be listed under the management company.
>>
>> And point to lists of stock exchanges and that sort of thing.
>
> I've no idea why it should be the case that investment trusts
> shouldn't have their own article.   I'd adopt the pragmatic approach
> that if something has a ticker symbol or is a name that I'm likely to
> encounter in the financial pages, we're not running out of paper so it
> can have an article, which may be merged into another article but
> that's an editing decision, not a matter for deletion.

It varies by exchange but they often dont appear in most of the
financial
pages and they dont have the same listing requirements as other
companies
(such as turnover and history requirements) as they simply invest in
other
companies). Basically closed [[Mutual Fund]]s. They can be created
and uncreated
easily. They do have a potential to become notorious of course.

We do have some in [[Category:Exchange-traded_funds]]. No one has
found anything encyclopaedic to say about them. Not sure what the
point of these articles is.

> Lists of stock exchanged?  Try [[List of stock exchanges]] in
> article space.

I assumed that was there but hadnt had time to check.

Justinc


from_name: candy

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: mwdumper problems

body:
It shows only a few pages:

A	                to 	Alexander Selkirk
Alexander Severus	to 	Antipope
Antiprism	        to 	Foreign relations of Antigua and Barbuda
Geography of Africa	to 	?gir

Why wasnt the entire dump imported. As its only a few pages there are so
many red links. That is broken links I guess.

Candy

Rob Church wrote:
> What does Special:Allpages show?
>
>
> Rob Church
>
> On 17/01/06, candy <ccanddyy at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>Jitse Niesen wrote:
>>
>>>On 1/8/06, candy <ccanddyy at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>I tried to import the entire english wikipedia dump(some 15 gigs) in to
>>>>mediawiki1.4.
>>>>The entire process took 2 days and then, it seems nothing happened !
>>>>I got an error like the following in between somewhere.
>>>>
>>>>ERROR 1062 (23000) at line 28: Duplicate entry '1' for key 1
>>>>
>>>>But the import was not aborted. So I let it continue.
>>>
>>>
>>>I never tried importing the dump in MediaWiki 1.4, but I had the same
>>>problem in 1.5. The solution for me was to empty some tables first. In
>>>1.5, the following does the trick: Run "mysql -u root -p wikidb" and
>>>give the commands "truncate page; truncate revision; truncate text;".
>>>My guess is that in 1.4 you need to do "truncate cur;".
>>>
>>>Jitse
>>
>>
>>I did as you instructed by emptying the cur, old ,and blobs tables. The
>>import went on for 3 days. The size of the database wikidb(in this case)
>>increased to 4.1 GB. only although the total dump is 15 gig big.
>>After the import was over, I started the http server, and if I try to
>>search some page say "FRance" in the search field, no results are
>>obtained showing the import was not successful. What do you think is the
>>problem.
>>Is there something more I should do?
>>
>>Candy
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>Wikitech-l mailing list
>>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>>


from_name: Sam Korn

body:
On 1/18/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> It may or may not vanish, depending whether or not you use the image
> on that user page for educational purposes.

Please give me one example of where an image (any image) on a userpage
is educational.

--
Sam


body:
On 1/18/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> I had on my userpage a photo I took from the top of a lighthouse in
> New Jersey.  Next to it I had an image I created using Google Earth
> which attempted to reproduce that photo.  I had a couple of lines of
> text about how the two were created.
>
> That's educational, and it's fair use, and the image was deleted.

OK. That use probably is educational, and probably is fair use.

Of course, it's an entirely different matter to ask whether Wikipedia
should allow fair use in userpages.  A good reason not to would be the
extreme difficulty in deciding, in each instance, what is and what
isn't fair use.  It is far easier, and in my opinion better, to err on
the side of caution and not allow any such images.

Users with your legal knowledge are not in great supply (see Raul's laws).

--
Sam


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
2006/1/18, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net>:
> You mischaracterize an ambiguous situation as being totally corrupt.

Which is wrong, but still closer to the truth than your
characterisation of no sysop power at all.

--
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels


from_name: Phil Boswell

body:
"Steve Bennett" <stevage at gmail.com> wrote in
message news:f1c3529e0601180739x58cee2bai8424268f8cd0eb30 at mail.gmail.com...
[snip]
> 1) A subject should not become *more notable* by appearing in
> Wikipedia.  {The vanity principle}

Just so long as you do not confuse "notable" with "widely known".

If there are only four people in the world who can perform a particularly
crufty surgical procedure, then I would say that all four of them would
count as "notable".

However they might not be "widely known" outside the community of surgeons
and related practitioners.

In this kind of case, it is the duty of Wikipedia to ensure that these
people are made **more** widely-known, because they are sufficiently notable
to deserve it.

HTH HAND
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]


body:
"Steve Bennett" <stevage at gmail.com> wrote in
message news:f1c3529e0601180739x58cee2bai8424268f8cd0eb30 at mail.gmail.com...
[snip]
> 3) Imaginary or fictitious subjects have less right to appear in
> Wikipedia than other subjects. {The fancruft principle}

That takes care of those pesky religious articles, and the literature, and
the TV programmes, and the movies ...

On what basis do you make this particular claim?
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]


from_name: geni

body:
On 1/18/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> Interesting allegation. Supposedly the scenario is that some political
> extremist edited a Wikipedia page about the Center for Constitutional
> Rights so as to contain slanted editorial from a political website
> opposed to that organisation, then he or another person later read out
> on air, word for word, the contents of the resulting article, preceded
> by the words "This is according to the Wikipedia free encyclopedia on
> the Web. OK? I didn't make this up."
>
> http://wikipediareview.proboards78.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=1137542140
>
> The edit is there, and there is a link to a political blog site
> purporting to contain a sound recording from the broadcast.

Don't worry his supporters still think we are left leaning:

http://www.marklevinfan.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=519.

--
geni


from_name: Walter van Kalken

body:
Tjipke de Vries wrote:

> Andre Engels wrote:
>
>> Nevertheless, I think there IS a crisis on the Dutch Wikipedia that
>> might require intervention.
>
>
> What kind of intervention do you suggest?
>
> Tjipke de Vries
>
I do not think Andre has an answer to that. Neither have I. The
situation is deadlocked at the moment. People are urging me by mail to
stay. Another group would not have that. No one knows what to do. At the
moment we have all lost.

Waerth/Walter


from_name: stevertigo

subject: [WikiEN-l] Students Expose Sex Offender Through Wikipedia Research

body:
MGM wrote:
> Yes, it is quite appropriate. It was covered in this
> week's issue of the Wikipedia Signpost.

SB wrote:
> "It's a win for the wiki system."

Im having formatting problems, so Ive replied here:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/stevertigo/444.html

~SV

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


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Sam Korn wrote:

>On 1/18/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>
>
>>It may or may not vanish, depending whether or not you use the image
>>on that user page for educational purposes.
>>
>>
>Please give me one example of where an image (any image) on a userpage
>is educational.
>
It's better not to get hung up on "educational".  The relevant wording
is "...for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching
(including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research
..."  There are other purposes there, any one of which could qualify the
material as fair use.  The words "such as" in particular suggest that
this is not an exclusive list; there could be other purposes.

Ec


from_name: Andy Rabagliati

body:
On Wed, 18 Jan 2006, Chris Jenkinson wrote:

> I propose that if BellSouth go ahead with this stupid idea of theirs, we
> block access to all people connecting from BellSouth and tell them to
> switch their ISP. They will learn fast enough that their idea is stupid.

BellSouth provide the customers.

They think they can charge the Content Providers.

This is a very old debate, about Peering. All the major ISPs are
familiar with it. The bigger Dogs get to charge the smaller Dogs.

I live in South Africa - we (as a country) pay to peer - we are a
smaller Dog. America never pays to peer. Europe used to - I am not sure
they do any more.

BellSouth think they are a Big Dog.

Cheers,    Andy!


body:
It is not particularly about peering even tough it is a similar story.
BellSouth wants to have an organisation like Apple pay for providing
bandwith to its customers. This in turn means that by subscribing to
an ISP you are giving it the "power" to abuse this final mile control.
With South Africa it is different in that access to South Africa from
American resources is relatively expensive. This can be negated by
moving resources closer to Africa.

It would be interesting to know what is more expensive, connecting
Africa from Europe compared to connecting Africa from the USA. This
could factor in where resources of the Wikimedia Foundation are
located. We are according to Alexa the 19th website in the world. When
we move because of schemes like this, it might be noticed.

Thanks,
    GerardM

On 1/18/06, Andy Rabagliati <andyr at wizzy.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Jan 2006, Chris Jenkinson wrote:
>
> > I propose that if BellSouth go ahead with this stupid idea of theirs, we
> > block access to all people connecting from BellSouth and tell them to
> > switch their ISP. They will learn fast enough that their idea is stupid.
>
> BellSouth provide the customers.
>
> They think they can charge the Content Providers.
>
> This is a very old debate, about Peering. All the major ISPs are
> familiar with it. The bigger Dogs get to charge the smaller Dogs.
>
> I live in South Africa - we (as a country) pay to peer - we are a
> smaller Dog. America never pays to peer. Europe used to - I am not sure
> they do any more.
>
> BellSouth think they are a Big Dog.
>
> Cheers,    Andy!
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: John Lee

subject: [WikiEN-l] Pointless deletions

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:

>Two recent deletion listings.
>
>Tally, an article about an accounting software company that's been
>going for twenty years and has a number of major companies among its
>clients in its native India, including the Reserve Bank of India and
>the Indian IT giant, Infosys.  And SuperOffice, about a public listed
>company (ticker code SUO on the Oslo Bors) with a turnover of some
>Euro 30m.
>
>Easy keeps?  No, deleted on AfD.
>
>Turns out that the guy who listed them did so to make a point.
>
>I summarily undeleted these articles--articles on such prominent
>companies should never have been deleted and the process that deleted
>them is clearly broken.
>
>They have been redeleted.  Twice.
>
>I am utterly ashamed of the process and those who have deleted these
>good articles in the name of that process.
>
>I have undertaken a bottom-up rewrite of both, but we should not be
>deleting such articles and we should not be forced through the silly
>pantomime of rewriting in order to keep articles about these companies
>on Wikipedia.
>
>
I beg to differ. The motive of the original nominator is besides the
point. There's also the fact that the original articles did not make
their status clear, so I think a rewrite would be necessary. (By the
way, I "voted" to delete both articles on the original AfD.)

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])