from_name: Chris Jenkinson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Proposal: Requests for rollback

body:
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Andrew Lih wrote:
> I'm fairly sympathetic to the idea of separating out features to be
> doled out on a finer grain level, but many oppose it because it is
> creating different shades, and thereby different classes, of users,
> which is something Wikipedia has never been about. As mentioned in
> other threads, this leads to "collecting privileges" like medals or
> awards, when the spirit of Wikipedia has been to treat adminship as
> even "no big deal."

I don't think that having the rollback feature would necessarily create
a different "caste" of Wikipedians. As David Gerard pointed out above,
rollback can be emulated using JavaScript if really desired. Having
access to rollback is really no extra privilege over the rest of the
community. It's just a one-click reversion.

And, if more people have access to what were previously adminship
abilities, treating adminship as "no big deal" will definitely continue.

> A reminder - the primary reason for admin status was because of page
> deletion, and that's where the "trusted user" idea came from.

[...]

> Um, but because rollback is given only to trusted users right now,
> this is not a problem.
>
> Even for admins, they are discouraged from using rollback for issues
> related to legitimate content issues. Rollback should be used for
> fighting vandalism and trolling, and not as a standard part of an
> editor's toolbox.

In my proposal I outlined that the rollback feature is only to be used
for fighting vandalism/trolling. Since users must go through a
confirmation procedure similar to the current RfA one (albeit with a
lower threshold), it will still only be given out to trusted users.

Chris

- --
Chris Jenkinson
chris at starglade.org
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list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Timwi

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Categories and NPOV

body:
Fastfission wrote:
> [[Category:Pseudoscience]] is one which gets objections at fairly
> regular intervals. The reasons for the objections are pretty
> straightforward -- the users making such objections are almost always
> either Creationists or Eugenicists or other people who believe in
> bodies of thought labeled as "pseudoscience" -- and the response is
> generally pretty straightforward as well: Wikipedia is not claiming
> these so-labeled articles are actually "pseudoscience", but rather
> that they are labeled *by the mainstream scientific community* as
> "pseudoscience".

It is the year 2047.

After a plentiful dinner, Bob and Stan have somehow got into this
discussion that doesn't seem to want to come to an end. Bob is a
Creationist, firmly believing in the truth of the Bible. Stan is a
scientist and defends Darwin's theory of evolution.

To settle the dispute, Stan gets up and grabs a book from the shelf. The
front cover reads, "Wikipedia 1.0 - Category Index". Knowing that if
there's one thing he and Bob can agree on, it's the reliability of the
world-renowned Wikipedia, he browses through it and eventually presents
to Bob a page led by the heading "Category:Pseudoscience". His finger
points to the place where Creationism is listed.

"See, Creationism is pseudoscience," he explains.

Bob snaps the book out of Stan's hands and browses forward a fair chunk
of pages. Under "Category:Satanic lies", he shows to Stan, we find a
reference to the entry on "Evolution".

"See, Evolution is a Satanic lie."

No matter how many people you can convince that listing Article X under
[[Category:Pseudoscience]] does /not/ mean that Wikipedia takes the
stance that Topic X is a pseudoscience, the vast majority will assume
that it does.

And that is why people are complaining about those categorisations.

I am happy to have [[Creationism]] listed under
[[Category:Pseudoscience]], but only because it happens to agree with my
POV.

Maybe the only way out of this is to call the categories something
unwieldy-but-NPOV like [[Category:Theories or beliefs widely considered
pseudoscience]]...

Timwi


from_name: Haukur Þorgeirsson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Pseudoscience and pseudohistory

body:
> No matter how many people you can convince that listing Article X under
> [[Category:Pseudoscience]] does /not/ mean that Wikipedia takes the
> stance that Topic X is a pseudoscience, the vast majority will assume
> that it does.
>
> And that is why people are complaining about those categorisations.
>
> [snip]
>
> Maybe the only way out of this is to call the categories something
> unwieldy-but-NPOV like [[Category:Theories or beliefs widely considered
> pseudoscience]]...

Once again. Do you object to [[Holocaust denial]]
being in the [[Pseudohistory]] category? Would you
prefer to have something "NPOV" like [[Category:Theories
or beliefs widely considered pseudohistory]]?

Such over-qualifications with the good intention
of being as NPOV as possible is something which
Wikipedia has too much of already.

My favorite example is this sentence which I found
on the [[Britney Spears]] article about two months
ago:

"Britney Spears is often regarded by many as
a controversial sexual figure"

In my opinion the following sentences are fine:

1. Britney Spears is a controversial sexual figure.
2. Holocaust denial is pseudohistory.
3. Creationism is pseudoscience.

And if someone uses Wikipedia in 50 years to demonstrate
to her friend that Creationism is pseudo-science that's
fine too. Because it is.

Regards,
Haukur


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject:
[Wiktionary-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] en.wiktionary.org temporarily
	broken

body:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> The difference can be found in things like the English
> wiktionary seems to cherish the redirect pages while all redirect pages
> on the Dutch and Italian .. and others are always deleted. The reason
> for this is that like in a paper dictionaray we only want correct
> spellings and an incorrect spelling should result in a "not found"
> message.

I don't think that feelings are unanimous on this in the English
Wiktionary.  I frequently delete redirect pages, and see no point in
keeping Transwiki pages once the contents have been assimilated.

> One thing you have to consider with regard to the implementation of case
> sensitivity is, that the longer you wait the more work there is to make
> the necessary changes.

=-O ;-)

Ec


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia is *already* written from a scientific POV

body:
On Jun 30, 2005, at 3:47 PM, Haukur ?orgeirsson wrote:

>> Establishing the truth of a proposition, however obvious, as this is,
>> is not the purpose of Wikipedia, nor the purpose of categories.
>> Categories are an aid to the reader to in finding information.
>>
>
> I don't understand the dichotomy you seem
> to be trying to uphold. Wikipedia provides
> information but not truth? What is truth?

"What is truth?" Indeed, and we have an article on it, but that
article could not be said to offer a definitive and exhaustive answer.

> Here's the start of our article on the Eiffel Tower:
>
> "The Eiffel Tower ... is a metallic tower built
> on the Champ de Mars in Paris ... and is nowadays
> the most famous landmark and symbol of Paris."
>
> This is information. And truth.

Yes, the sun rises in the east.

>
> When we say "Homeopathy is a pseudoscience."
> we are also providing information by writing
> down a true statement. If I may paraphrase
> a couple of sentences from a certain sci-fi
> franchise:

Homeopathy is also alternative medicine and is, by report, the school
of medicine used by the Royal family of the United Kingdom.

>
> "The first duty of every Wikipedian is to the truth,
> scientific truth, historical truth and personal truth.
> It is the guiding principle of Wikipedia."

This quotation may exist somewhere, but a Google search results in
this return:
'Your search - Wikipedia "historical truth and personal truth" - did
not match any documents'

Who says that and in what context?

>
> When reasonable people interpret available data
> in different ways we try to describe each position
> fairly.

Right, but we ought not declare one viewpoint or another "the truth."
At least not within Wikipedia.

>
> Then there are some unreasonable positions. Those
> are usually dealt with in separate articles and
> otherwise ignored. Here's an excerpt from the
> start of the [[Apollo program]] article:
>
> "Project Apollo ... was devoted to the goal of landing a man on the
> Moon
> and returning him safely to Earth within the decade of the 1960s. This
> goal was achieved with the Apollo 11 mission in 1969."
>
> There are many people who disagree with this but
> since their position is unreasonable it is not dealt
> with in the main article but relegated to a separate
> article. Now, *that* article will try to fairly present
> the views of those who believe that the Apollo program
> was a hoax. However, by choosing to privilege the
> reasonable view in the main article Wikipedia has
> *already* chosen a position, whatever category the
> hoax article is put into.

Same with 9/11. There is no way we could feature the view that it was
all cooked up by plotters in the Bush administration or that the
building did not collapse but was demolished by planted explosives.

>
> Or let's take [[Earth]]. Here's an excerpt from the lead:
>
> "The planet formed around 4.57 billion (4.57?109) years ago and
> shortly
> thereafter acquired its single natural satellite, the Moon."
>
> There are many people who disagree with this. We try to
> describe their positions fairly in separate articles,
> e.g. [[Creationism]]. The article on creationism may
> try to be scrupulously fair to the creationists but the
> bottom line is that Wikipedia has *already* acknowledged
> the scientific facts as superior to the creationist
> theories (at least the "Young Earth" variety) by
> including them in main articles like [[Earth]].
>
> Including [[Creationism]] in [[Category:Pseudoscience]]
> is just icing on a cake that has already been baked.

Good cake.

Fred

>
> Regards,
> Haukur
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Nathan J. Yoder

subject: [WikiEN-l] e-mails to wikien-l being dropped

body:
It appears that my e-mails to this list are being dropped by the
moderator, just so people know why I haven't been able to respond. In
case this one isn't dropped too, you should know that David Gerard,
one of the arbs on my RfA is the one who is censoring me.

How can arbitrators not claim bias when they're engaging in active
censorship?  I can't respond on Wikipedia now and now not even on this
list.

----------------------------------------------
Nathan J. Yoder
http://www.gummibears.nu/
http://www.gummibears.nu/files/njyoder_pgp.key
----------------------------------------------


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Philippe Roth

subject: [Wikitech-l] Search troubles between v.1.3.13 and v.4.5

body:
Dear All,

We have some troubles in search under mediawiki v. 1.4.5

We have a mediawiki 1.3.13 working fine.
We have several articles in which the word "problem" appears.
If we make a search on "prob*", we have all the articles in which the
word "problem" is.

We made an upgrade to v. 1.4.5 and if we make a search on "prob*", no
article is found...
Why?

We installed mediawiki under Windows 2003 and EasyPhp v.1.8
Apache is v.1.3.33, php is v. 4.3.10 and MySWL is v. 4.1.9

The both mediawikis are on the same machine, for tests for the moment...

Many thanks in advance for any explaination.

Have a nice day,
Philippe Roth


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: (fwd) bishonen exercises abuse of admin power

body:
> Oh, btw, I also see your next post to the
> mailing list, where you have "figured out why it's doing it". Is that
> your idea of an apology?

I wonder how many times I'll have to resend this totally on-topic
e-mail before it finally gets through (not censored by the mod).

Let's put this response in a numerical list clearly outlining every
totally relevent statement.

1.  It's not an apology.
2.  It's an acknowledgement that either your did something wrong or
there is a bug with the system.
3.  Are you going to apologize for your false accusation against me?
The _only_ account under which I hit 'edit page' was njyoder.  Knowing
this, you must retract your accusation.
4.  Since I have not actually violated the block, will you now remove
it 24 hours from when it was originally issued (as you are obligated
to)?
5.  I'd like specific examples of what personal attacks I used that
warrant this block.  Note that no one has attempted to define personal
attack yet because they know if they did the accusation and blocked
would become completely unwarranted and make you look bad, as well as
the other arbtrators in my case who _flat out refused_ to define it.

Simplying describing someone's behavior--calling them a hypocrite, is
NOT a personal attack.  This has been a matter of debate on the no
personal attacks talk page, especially considering the policy does not
state what constitutes a personal attack.  The examples given on the
"no personal attacks" page (the closest thing to a definition) are
very different things from what I've said and you'd either have to be
either incredibly stupid or very dishonest to state otherwise.

I expect a direct apology from you and a removal of the block
immediatly.

----------------------------------------------
Nathan J. Yoder
http://www.gummibears.nu/
http://www.gummibears.nu/files/njyoder_pgp.key
----------------------------------------------


list: foundation-l

from_name: SJ

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Access Wikipedia through SMS

body:
On Thu, 30 Jun 2005, Stephan Walter wrote:

> The problem is that all articles start like this:
>
> "Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 ? April 18, 1955) ...."
>
> "The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) (established
> 1958) is ...."

That's actually pretty darn informative, when I searched for "Einstine" or
"NASA".  What more would you want to know from the first 100 characters?
I think this is almost optimal.

> > that, it would not be implemented. The responsible manager made it clear that
> > the phone company would not implement such a gateway, but that it would have to
> > be done by Wikipedia.
>
> There are companies offering SMS to HTTP gateways. All you would have to

Well, we could also set up our own... there are apparently open source
gateways out there that don't require too much in the way of hardware.

SJ


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Stephan Walter

body:
david at bruehlmeier.com wrote:
> Dear Wikipedians,

Hoi David,

> This is how we figured it might work: Send an SMS with the keyword (the term you
> want to look up) to a special number. The server will then access Wikipedia and
> return the abstract of the article. You will only get as much as will fit into
> an SMS, but in many cases, this will be enough.

The problem is that all articles start like this:

"Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 ? April 18, 1955) ...."

or:

"The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) (established
1958) is ...."

What I mean to say is that the first sentence is alway very long but not
very informative.

> I wrote this idea to Swisscom Mobile and got the answer that they would actually
> be interested to offer such a service. However, there would have to be a
> standardized gateway by Wikipedia to their Vodaphone live service. Other than
> that, it would not be implemented. The responsible manager made it clear that
> the phone company would not implement such a gateway, but that it would have to
> be done by Wikipedia.

There are companies offering SMS to HTTP gateways. All you would have to
do is write some PHP or Perl code that would reply to the SMS messages.
For Switzerland, such SMS would cost around CHF 0.40 to 1.00, and you'd
get about 20%-30% of that.

A real problem is that these services are normally only available in one
country, so you'd have to make contracts for all the countries where you
want to offer the service.

-Stephan


body:
> I dropped your messages for the attacks contained therein; I let this one
> through for having a lot fewer of them. The remaining readers of wikien-l
> are largely sick of fifty-message threads of querulous ranting, so they're
> not being encouraged. You don't have some sort of intrinsic right to rant
> as you please here; you can be sure at least a few of the many admins
> reading this list will have looked into the incidents upsetting you.

So out of the entire history of the mailing list, you decide to do
this just now?  Uh huh.  I had only sent about 3 e-mails so far and
you all of a sudden decided to start censoring.  Regardless of my
"personal attacks" my e-mails were still perfectly on-topic and had
legitimate questions.  Censoring them isn't going to make me e-mail
less, it's going to make me e-mail more in response to this nefarious
behavior.

Also, if the readers don't want to read certain e-mails, they don't
have to it.  It's simple really and it's also childish to not be able
to just move past a thread you don't like.

> And I must point out that you always have the option of not making
> personal attacks in your posts.

So why do you use them?

> You appear to take anything said about you that you don't like as an
> attack, yet are unable to perceive your own attacks on others.

Pot, meet kettle, it's black!  I only called one statement of yours a
personal attack, so this statement is just plain ludicrous.  I'm not
sure what math you're using, but the kind I'm using one does not equal
to many.

>  The
> reference to [[Wikipedia:No personal attacks]] should be all a reasonable
> person needs; that you don't seem to get it should not ultimately be anyone
> else's problem.

You have seriously got to be kidding me.  Have you read the talk page
for "no personal attacks"?  There is a lot of debate going on about
what constitutes a personal attack and what should/shouldn't be
allowed.  There is no clear consensus and you suggesting that it's
just what a reasonable person needs just a way for you to continue
being evasive and avoiding defining it.

So I guess all this debate and the many people engaging in it on the
talk page are just idiots, right?  After all, it's *totally* obvious,
it's just that so many people are too dumb to grasp the obvious and
really majority support for your "obvious" definition isn't needed at
all.

I'm sorry, but the facts just aren't in your favor here.  If you're
going to defend yourself, you better damn well not cop-out like you're
trying to do now.  If you can't even see the gray area involved here,
then you shouldn't be an admin at all.  I'm curious, is it a personal
attack if I call someone a black and white thinker?  What about
describing someone's views regarding a specific matter at hand as
"tunnel vision"?

> The wikien-l admins really don't like work, so try to avoid it as
> far as possible. But letting the list turn to querulous ranting is
> leading to (fairly justified IMO) complaints. So we'll be trying
> harder to stop the rubbish at a sensible point.

Huh?  You stopped me after 3 e-mails.  You even rejected my first
response to bishonen which was in direct regard to my block and is one
of the purposes of this list.  Cutting it off that early is hardly a
"sensible point."

----------------------------------------------
Nathan J. Yoder
http://www.gummibears.nu/
http://www.gummibears.nu/files/njyoder_pgp.key
----------------------------------------------


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Categories and NPOV: Libraries?

body:
dpbsmith at verizon.net wrote:

>Anyway, it seems to me that librarians must deal with this sort of thing all
>the time. And the many public libraries that use the Dewey Decimal system
>can't just fall back on the Library of Congress. Although perhaps there's
>some central authority that recommends Dewey classifications. But in any
>case, someone has to decide whether Velikovsky is science or science fiction.
>Who does? and how?
>
>
 From my limited experience talking to librarians, and much less limited
experience browsing libraries, the typical way it's done is to
cross-reference under any categories that seem relevant, and shelve
under the one that the author seemed to be aiming for.  So if it's
clearly intended to be a work of science-fiction, it'll be shelved
there.  If it's intended to be speculative science or something of that
sort, it may be shelved under science.

They generally avoid some of the problems in this discussion because
categories like "pseudoscience" don't exist---a book expounding a
physics theory will be shelved under physics, and whether it's a good
book by a Nobel Prize winner or a crappy book by a kook isn't the
cataloging system's job to judge.

-Mark


body:
> Your block will soon end and, provided your posts to the list do not
> continue to harp on being banned. your mail will go through and all
> will be back to normal.

So let me get this straight, I'm not allowed to talk about the thing
that was my whole purpose in e-mailing this list in the first place?
Considering that 'blocked page' directly refers to this list, it would
make no sense to then censor discussion about blocks.  Gotca, the
whole referral to this list thing was really just a farce to lure
users into the false sense that there might be justice for
malicious blocks.

You are also missing the point completely, it's about the block being
unjust and in not in accordance with wikipedia policy, it doesn't
matter that the lbock will "soon end" (which is actually 12 hours now
since the bug or whatever it was extended the ban wrongfully).  But
hey, even if an admin overstepped their bounds completely, it doesn't
matter if the block is gone, right?  And who cares about censorship?!

I also find it curious that not a single person has defined what
constitutes a personal attack yet.  I think the admins knew all along
that they were acting in error, which is why I've never received said
definition or any clarification of any kind.

What do you call it when someone in an authority position enforces an
undefined rule?

I wonder if that will even come close to being addressed.  It seems
doubtful since the arbitrators really don't actually care about being
just or enforcing the rules properly, it's simply a matter of how many
people you don't like you can get away with banning without a
significant backlash against themselves.

I say that in all seriousness true, the admins/arbs really don't seem
to care at all about justice, but rather saving their ass when they
act in prejudice. I think there is some sort of sense of infallibility
coming from the fact that their positions are pretty much ensured,
especially for arbitrators.  I expect this to backfire severely in
about 5-10 years as Wikipedia gets more popular and more of the
general population becomes aware of this and people are forcibly
removed from their positions due to public pressure.

----------------------------------------------
Nathan J. Yoder
http://www.gummibears.nu/
http://www.gummibears.nu/files/njyoder_pgp.key
----------------------------------------------


from_name: JAY JG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Proposal: Requests for rollback

body:
>From: Timwi <timwi at gmx.net>
>
>Sean Barrett wrote:
>>>The current situation seems to be that the people who frequent
>>>[[Wikipedia:Requests for adminship]] are quite paranoid with giving out
>>>adminship status. Anyone who isn't obviously completely dedicated and who
>>>doesn't think of nothing else than Wikipedia's well-being day and night,
>>>can't possibly be a suitable admin.
>>
>>So we should give admin privileges to people who aren't dedicated and
>>don't think about Wikipedia's well-being?  Huh?
>
>Just a *bit* black-and-white there, are we?

Rather less so than your original claims.

Jay.


from_name: thomas Armstrong

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Is there any cache feature Is there any cache feature
	installed in MediaWiki?

body:
Hi.

I'm changing the contents of 'MonoBook.php':

---------

<?php $this->msg('personaltools') ?>

----------
to
---------

<?php $this->msg('personaltools') ?>xxxxx

---------

But I refresh my webpages, and HTML doesn't change.

I've got:
$wgDefaultSkin = 'MonoBook';
at 'LocalSettings.php'.

Is there any cache feature installed in MediaWiki? How can I disable it?

Thank you very much.


body:
David 'DJ' Hedley wrote:
> I don't believe that it is necessary. A rollback button is useful, but I
> don't see why it is worth a "Requests for Rollback" to get it. If a user
> does RC patrol and wants the aid of rollback (ie, 'the mop'), then they
> probably would prefer full admin powers in order to be able to block
> vandals, and so on. Being an admin doesn't have many set, 'must do'
> responsibilities - RC patrollers can happily become admins without further
> hassles, if they want to keep out of Wikipolitics.

If only it was as easy to become admin as you're making it out to be!

The current situation seems to be that the people who frequent
[[Wikipedia:Requests for adminship]] are quite paranoid with giving out
adminship status. Anyone who isn't obviously completely dedicated and
who doesn't think of nothing else than Wikipedia's well-being day and
night, can't possibly be a suitable admin.

I especially don't get why most people seem to think that someone with a
minimum number of edits and/or a minimum average number of edits per day
is automatically a more suitable admin. I would think that someone who
edits frantically is much more likely to turn into a troublemaker than
someone who edits only sporadically.

Timwi


body:
Haukur ?orgeirsson wrote:

>There are many people who disagree with this. We try to
>describe their positions fairly in separate articles,
>e.g. [[Creationism]]. The article on creationism may
>try to be scrupulously fair to the creationists but the
>bottom line is that Wikipedia has *already* acknowledged
>the scientific facts as superior to the creationist
>theories (at least the "Young Earth" variety) by
>including them in main articles like [[Earth]].
>
>Including [[Creationism]] in [[Category:Pseudoscience]]
>is just icing on a cake that has already been baked.
>
>
It's particularly foul-smelling icing, though.  NPOV certainly is
compatible with not giving minority or conspiracy-theory opinions undue
weight by inserting them everywhere or making them seem as if they're
mainstream, but at the same time outright name-calling is a little
inappropriate.  Saying, as Wikipedia, that Creationism is pseudoscience
is across the line of good taste I think.  Not mentioning the
young-earth theory in the intro to [[Earth]] may imply that we judge it
as not being a serious scientific position, but outright saying
"Creationism is a load of horse-shit" is a little more inappropriate.

-Mark


from_name: Sabine Cretella

body:
Klaus-Eduard Runnel wrote:

>Maybe someone can think of a way to create automatic links to pages with
>titles differing just by the case of the first letter? E.g. it would be
>helpful to have link to "aa" from the article titled "Aa". I have had no
>success trying to accomplish something like that using the available means
>of mediawiki. That's by the way one of the reasons why not-yet-so-big
>Estonian wiktionary has not switched over to case-sensitivite first letters
>yet.
>
>There could be use for a magic word similar to PAGENAMEE which would return
>the page title with spaces substituted by '+' characters.
>
>
>
Hi Klaus, as much as I know there is a bot that can revert everything to
lower case (see the mails of Biron today). So creating all pages in
lower case should be possible without problems. If you then need help to
have a look at the German words that often have capital initial letters
... let me know.

I noted you already use templates like {{-en-}} so I suppose the
category for German is there.

Do you have a template list somewhere?

Ciao, Sabine

___________________________________
Yahoo! Mail: gratis 1GB per i messaggi e allegati da 10MB
http://mail.yahoo.it


body:
Chris Jenkinson wrote:
>
> Just that the feature is there will involve them in Wikipolitics,
> regardless of whether they use them.

Can't say I agree, from own experiences. For what admins are you speaking?

My own experiences tell me that it's always your own actions that
involve you in wikipolitics. This can include actions that don't require
admin privileges, such as nominating something on VfD. (Comment on my
talk page: "How dare you VfD other people's articles??" -- apparently
you're only allowed to VfD your own articles.)

Timwi


body:
David Gerard wrote:

>Delirium (delirium at hackish.org) [050701 07:55]:
>
>
>
>>  Saying, as Wikipedia, that Creationism is pseudoscience
>>is across the line of good taste I think.
>>
>>
>
>
>Saying Intellient Design is pseudoscience wouldn't be, though, as imitating
>science is its precise purpose. So how would you categorise creationism?
>Mythology, like [[Xenu]]?
>
>
We have an overview article [[Origin beliefs]], which seems to be a
reasonably neutral yet succinct and descriptive term for the class of
beliefs about the origin of the universe that lay outside the scientific
community.  How about [[Category:Origin beliefs]]?

-Mark


from_name: Jtkiefer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Creationism is not horse-shit, it's pseudo-science

body:
Haukur ?orgeirsson wrote:

>>It's particularly foul-smelling icing, though.  NPOV certainly is
>>compatible with not giving minority or conspiracy-theory opinions undue
>>weight by inserting them everywhere or making them seem as if they're
>>mainstream, but at the same time outright name-calling is a little
>>inappropriate.  Saying, as Wikipedia, that Creationism is pseudoscience
>>is across the line of good taste I think.  Not mentioning the
>>young-earth theory in the intro to [[Earth]] may imply that we judge it
>>as not being a serious scientific position, but outright saying
>>"Creationism is a load of horse-shit" is a little more inappropriate.
>>
>>
>
>No-one is proposing that we do. Pseudo-science is a
>word with a particular meaning, not name-calling
>(unless applied to something that isn't actually
>pseudo-science).
>
>There are, Godwin help me, nazi categories on Wikipedia.
>That's not name-calling either, when used appropriately.
>
>Regards,
>Haukur
>
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>
>
>
    Creationism is a prickly problem, wikipedia can't really take either
side due to the fact that no matter what you write on it it's almost
impossible to avoid POV pushing.

                        -Jtkiefer


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Gabriel

subject: [Wikipedia-l] new statistics ?

body:
how often the statistics page is updated ?
i am just curius of how are we doing


from_name: Michael Turley

body:
On 6/30/05, Haukur ?orgeirsson <haukurth at hi.is> wrote:

> When we say "Homeopathy is a pseudoscience."
> we are also providing information by writing
> down a true statement. If I may paraphrase
> a couple of sentences from a certain sci-fi
> franchise:
>
> "The first duty of every Wikipedian is to the truth,
> scientific truth, historical truth and personal truth.
> It is the guiding principle of Wikipedia."

You've mentioned four separate truths there.

I'm of the opinion that Wikipedia tries to serve all of them, not just
the scientific truth.

In what order we serve them is the primary puzzle, and that differs on
a case by case basis.

For example, I think mention of Creationism is perfectly appropriate
for the article on [[Earth]].  Should it be the first mention?  No.

Mention of the scientific explanation of the origin of the earth
should similarly get mention in the [[Creationism]] article.

It's not our job to decide what view is the right one, even though
we've all probably already made our own decisions.  It is our job to
catalog and present the views, preferably thoroughly referenced and
cited, ordered by vague consensus judgements of levels of acceptance
and importance, and then let the readers make the final decision of
what they believe.

We are catalogers of existing third party views of the truth, nothing
more.  We shouldn't be here to judge the truth or falsehood of
anything; only the level of acceptance of various views of the truth.

--
Michael Turley
User:Unfocused


body:
I think wikipedia will always end up taking the scientific view as long
as the scientific view is the prevailing view in americn society


body:
This of course is not to say that american society may not eventually
change to a point of view where creationism is the main theory of life
and the theory of natural selection is more of a minority opinion.

-Jtkiefer


body:
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Timwi wrote:
> Chris Jenkinson wrote:
>
>>
>> Just that the feature is there will involve them in Wikipolitics,
>> regardless of whether they use them.
>
>
> Can't say I agree, from own experiences. For what admins are you speaking?
>
> My own experiences tell me that it's always your own actions that
> involve you in wikipolitics. This can include actions that don't require
> admin privileges, such as nominating something on VfD. (Comment on my
> talk page: "How dare you VfD other people's articles??" -- apparently
> you're only allowed to VfD your own articles.)

As I'm not an admin at Wikipedia I'm not speaking from my experiences
there. I've been a moderator on several large community sites, and I
frequently get asked to do things which I either can't do, am not
allowed to do and all kinds of other stuff like that. Admittedly, there
are less moderators on that site than admins on Wikipedia, but the
principle remains. Those having what other people see as "power" will
always be politicking with those who have the "power". Wikipedia just
has a more diluted-power environment (no bad thing - this proposal
dilutes it even further).

Chris

- --
Chris Jenkinson
chris at starglade.org

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from_name: Klaus-Eduard Runnel

body:
Maybe someone can think of a way to create automatic links to pages with
titles differing just by the case of the first letter? E.g. it would be
helpful to have link to "aa" from the article titled "Aa". I have had no
success trying to accomplish something like that using the available means
of mediawiki. That's by the way one of the reasons why not-yet-so-big
Estonian wiktionary has not switched over to case-sensitivite first letters
yet.

There could be use for a magic word similar to PAGENAMEE which would return
the page title with spaces substituted by '+' characters.

Klaus


from_name: Yaroslav Fedevych

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Is there any cache feature Is there any cache
	feature installed in MediaWiki?

body:
On Thu, Jun 30, 2005 at 05:37:24PM +0200, thomas Armstrong wrote:
> Hi.
>
> I'm changing the contents of 'MonoBook.php':
>

I did the same (making my own skin), and had to clear browser's cache
all the time. Annoying, but worked for me (tm)[*]. Still don't know
the reason (and I don't care, by the way...).

[*] "works for me" is unofficial unregistered trademark of Linus
Torvalds.

--
?????????? ??????????? -- ?????? ?????? ???.
	?. ?. ????


from_name: Geoffrey Bell

body:
>
> If only one side of
> the story is being told, it is NOT science.
>
I hate to say it, but not everyone agrees, and that's really all there is to
be said.

~~~~

On 6/30/05, Skyring <skyring at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 7/1/05, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> > Jtkiefer:
> >
> > > Creationism is a prickly problem, wikipedia can't really take either
> > > side due to the fact that no matter what you write on it it's almost
> > > impossible to avoid POV pushing.
> >
> > Stating that creationism is pseudoscience is not POV-pushing. Maybe
> > Intelligent Design, which is a bit more controversial -- but creationism
> > as in "God created the World", where it makes "scientific" claims, is
> > pretty much universally regarded as pseudoscience by people from
> > existing scientific disciplines.
>
> Nobody is attempting to denigrate personal belief or faith by
> labelling Creationism as psuedoscience. It's just that Creationism is
> not science.
>
> Saying that it's psuedoscience because scientists say so doesn't do
> much to help. Perhaps if we say that scientists test and confirm
> theories by experiment and change what they believe to be true going
> by the results, but adherents of psuedoscience make no such changes -
> they reject or ignore evidence contrary to their existing beliefs, and
> it is the *appearance* rather than the reality of scientific method
> which is important to them.
>
> Creationism (and other psuedosciences) may well contain many beliefs
> that are true and accurate and testable. For example, a Creationist
> might point out in all sincerity that the first Neanderthal remains
> were discovered to be merely those of an old man with arthritis. True
> enough, but the old man was a Neanderthal old man. If only one side of
> the story is being told, it is NOT science.
>
> --
> Peter in Canberra
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Mark Ryan

subject: [WikiEN-l] (fwd) bishonen exercises abuse of admin power

body:
It certainly sounds like a bug. There are many bugs associated with
the upgrade to MediaWiki 1.5 (and also many invaluable new features).
The developers will obviously work to fix any problems, but that will
take time. I suggest if you don't want your block to be extended
automagically by the software, stop trying to edit until the block has
expired.

~Mark Ryan

On 6/30/05, Nathan J. Yoder <njyoder at energon.org> wrote:
> Aha, I figured out why it's doing it.  I just hit "edit page" while
> still logged in as njyoder and the thing automatically renews the
> block whenever I do that.  This is what happens when you upgrade to
> beta version of software.  Try a test block on another account and
> you'll see it will automatically renew the block even if you're logged
> in as the same user who was originally blocked.  That's a bug or some
> strange misfeature.
>
> ----------------------------------------------
> Nathan J. Yoder
> http://www.gummibears.nu/
> http://www.gummibears.nu/files/njyoder_pgp.key
> ----------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Muke Tever

body:
Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> The reason for this is that like in a paper dictionaray we only want correct
> spellings and an incorrect spelling should result in a "not found" message.

In the US, and probably in other places where spelling is not phonetic,
one of the most common uses for a dictionary (if not the most common)
is to find what the correct spelling of a word is.  If there is not
"spell check" in the form of redirects or see-unders, then the Wiktionary
is useless for this.

	*Muke!
--
website:     http://frath.net/
LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/
deviantArt:  http://kohath.deviantart.com/

FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki:
http://wiki.frath.net/


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [WikiEN-l] The sandbox incubator

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

> In other words, I would strongly argue in favor of shutting down the
> sandbox as a VfD-resistant incubator for games which distract from the
> purpose of building an encyclopedia. There is value to wikigames as
> entertainment and as an artistic effort, but there's a separate wiki
> dedicated to this already -- http://games.wikicities.com/ -- and I
> feel that our own gaming related efforts should be limited at best.

I'm surprised that the Sandbox is "VfD resistant" in the first place - I
would have thought anything sandbox-related would be deliberately
ephemeral and of no lasting value, and hence eminently deleteable. The
template on there even says that Sandbox contents are wiped every 12
hours, wouldn't this apply to Sandbox subpages too?


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] OK, You're Busted!

body:
Yep,

Fred

On Jun 30, 2005, at 5:11 PM, Skyring wrote:

> Getting an
> abusive editor out of Wikipedia seems like a bloody good idea to me.


from_name: David Gerard

body:
I accidentally deleted this from the moderation queue, so am forwarding it
by hand as wikien-l is an official conduit for complaints about blocking.
This is not meant to imply that I attribute any substance to this complaint
whatsoever, and personally I would say "cheers to Bishonen, keep up the
good work." But anyway.

- d.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Nathan J. Yoder" <njyoder at gummibears.nu>
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2005 04:09:43 -0400
Subject: bishonen exercises abuse of admin power
I was just recently given a temporary block for all of wikipedia by
bishonen for comments here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_transgendered_people

Of course, that block was based on an injunction in an RfA that she
was a party to (as a person filing a complaint, not an arbitrator).
It's a conflict of interest and she definitely over stepped bounds
there. This reeks of personal vendetta and given her personal history
of irrational behavior and personal dislike for me it's not
surprising

Not only that, her block was based on non-existant "personal attacks."
Calling someone a hypocrite or a liar has already been determined to
not constitute a personal attack, however she has decided to override
already existing Wikipedia policy and invent her own.

Another issue I'd like to address is regarding my RfA (since I can't
comment in it due to being blocked).

1.  The admins invented a new Wikipedia policy on the spot, that IRC
logs can't be used.  Their reference is a meta article which is not
part of Wikipedia policy.

Not just that, but they violate their newly
invented policy by using evidence from IRC against me:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Njyoder/Proposed_decision#Disruptive_edits_with_respect_to_Bishonen.27s_RfA

2.  Just for emphasis, there is not wikipedia policy against posting
IRC logs, so that can't be used against me.  Not just that, but it's
totally and utterly irrelevent to the reason the RfA was created--for
my actions on the gender articles.  The whole thing involving Bishonen
existed over about 2 days and ended over 3 weeks before the RfA, but
it was drug up again for the sole purpose of using it as "evidence"
against me.  I pointed this out in the RfA, but the arbs ignored it
completely because it didn't support the conclusion that they wanted
to reach.

3.  There are "findings of fact" that include disagreement over my
edits on pages.  A disagreement is not grounds for an RfA at all.

4.  I wasn't ever using personal attacks.  The arbitrators
deliberately refused to define  personal attacks since they knew that
if they did try to define them in a way that made me a violator,
they'd end up being guilty themselves.  If I'm going to be accused of
using personal attacks, they better damn well define them, because the
policy page on it and other disinterested third parties don't consider
accusing someone of lying to be a personal attack.

5.  I was said to not have cited sources in the "findings of fact,"
and yet there was _no_ evidence of this.  You'd think they'd at least
provide a link to something I didn't cite a source for.  I didn't
insert new information into the gender article.

I removed information because some of it was wrong (which I did cite
sources for), some of it was _obviously_ POV, some of it was totally
incoherent and some of it I was asking for a source for. The only
thing I removed for reasons of factual accuracy was the etmology, for
which I did quote an external source regarding the etymology of it.
So it's a lie to say that  I didn't cite anything.

To say it's a "finding of fact" that I didn't cite sources for things
I removed makes no sense.  That's not how wikipedia works.  According
to them, if I remove or add anything I have to cite a source, but if
AlexR and Axon add or remove anything, they don't need any citations
at all.

That's completely backwards, if something in an article is contested
and no source is provided, it is standard wikipedia procedure to
remove it until a source can be provided.

This makes even less sense because neither Axon nor AlexR (the main
parties to the dispute) never accused me of violating the rules to no
cite sources.  That was something added in by an arbitrator on a whim
for no reason.

I don't even understand their complaints, I removed a lot of very bad,
non-encyclopedic garbage from it and as a result now two people are
working on completely new versions of the article.

6.  "2.5) Njyoder seems to lack insight into the complexities involved
in crafting an adequate article regarding gender; his editing style
could be fairly characterized as ham-handed [38] and [39]."

Some of these bullet points shouldn't even exist.  Personal opinion of
my understanding and editing style aren't even relevent and yet 3
aribtrators voted on this.  If these arbs weren't biased, it should
have received _zero_ votes.  I'll note that most of these points were
added by one arb, even though most of them, even from the standpoint
of the complaintants, weren't actually relevent.  It's trully sad, he
could have completely fabricated numerous accusations, like saying I
was making racist remarks and inserted it as a bullet point and none
of the other arbitrators would have bothered to check if it was true
and would have just voted "support."

7.  They are disputing my arguing style in quite a few bullet points
and are arguing that I should be banned on the basis that they
basically disagree with my viewpoint.  It makes no sense to reprimand
me for persisting with my argument when those arguing against me were
persisting with theirs just as much.  It's also not against any
wikipedia policies to stand firm in your views, if it were, there
would be a lot of problems.

Also, they engage in a strawman by quite literally, out of my entire
argument, just quoting a part of a single sentence.  they got my
"basic argument" entirely wrong and I'm betting you the arbitrators
didn't even bother reading through it, they just took the summary
given by Axon and AlexR even though I actually gave a summary myself.

8. "Extensive attempts by other editors to explain that the talk page
was not an appropriate venue for extended discussion of the "truth" of
a particular reference were ineffective."

and "The establishment of truth is not one of the purposes of
Wikipedia which merely attributes the knowledge it contains to
published sources."

These are just plain ridiculous points.  Talk pages most certainly
exist to discuss the validity of things included in an article.
Wikipedia does not exist to simply parrot any arbitrary source that
someone decided to  pick.  Of course, it appears the arbitrators voted
to suggest that you should just blindly take any information from any
source and it's perfectly ok as long as you cite it.

Not just that, but that's not what was even being contested on the
talk pages.  Most people arguing against me weren't arguing that it
shouldn't be discussed on the talk pages, they were arguing that the
source was actually valid and thusly should be included.

You'll also note that this is another example of inventing a policy on
the spot.  Why don't the arbitrators put up a vote for this as a
policy and see how well it goes over?  I guarantee you that it will be
shot down quickly, because it's absurd.

Following their logic, you can include any information from any source
in a Wikipedia article.  As long as it's a published source, nothing
else matters.

This wasn't a quotation of popular opinion either, this was a matter
of statistical fact as stated by the Wikipedia article.  It stated
something from the Kinsey Report as fact, even though it was factually
incorrect.  In what strange bizzarro wikipedia is incorrect
information allowed to be included simply because it's from a popular
published source?  I guess this means now I can start taking
statistics from random popular websites that were clearly pulled out
of thin air.

----

Anyway, as you can see the arbitrators are inventing new policies,
refusing to address my concerns, not reading what happened and are
fabricating things which never happened.

They're proposing a ban on all gender/sexuality related articles. I've
only made two significant edits on any gender/sexuality articles
(gender and bisexuality).  If you include talk pages, I've edited a
total of 3 pages for which there is dispute: gender, bisexuality and
third gender.

This doesn't make any sense to me, I'm basically being banned from all
sexuality articles for removing a single paragraph (with strong
evidence backing my reason doing so--I cited NUMEROUS expert sources
and a primary source) from a single sexuality article.

I'm also being banned for removing POV, incoherent sentences and bad
information from a single gender related article.

How the heck does a year long ban make sense here?  This is a bad case
of the arbs trying to enforce their own opinions.  Heck, at least one
of the arbs on the case (ambi) is part of the LGBT Wikipedia notice
board that tries to regulate articles, so it's pretty obvious she
wants to keep those articles as-is.

THE FOLLOWING IS JUST A RANT AND IS NOT DIRECTLY RELEVENT, NO NEED TO
READ.

I don't really care so much for editing the article so much as I care
about the absolutely astounding level of intellectual dishonesty going
on here.  They don't like someone challenging obvious POV and
extremist LGBT propaganda (yes, I can provide direct links, if
necessary, to the parties trying to defend obvious POV).

They are trying desperately to make as large a number possible of
Wikipedia articles on every tiny little subject concerning LGBT things
and the articles themselves read as if they are taken straight out of
a LGBT book for a queer studies course, except a lot more poorly
written.  I imagine a couple years from now they'll have an article
for everything, even things like
Gay_rights_and_the_views_of_third_baptist_church_in_podunk,Utah.

I just am so surprised how sheltered some of these sub-cliques are,
because you know damn well their the types are college undergrads
(with mommy and daddy paying their way), they just discovered they had
a large group of people they can whine to and have validate heir
feelings and biases.

I think a few years down the road, when they start meeting those of
the gobbleteequa type outside of school, they'll realize what pansies
they are and that most gobbleteequa aren't whiny academic PC cowards
who have no understanding of the real world.  Yes, that's right,
you're not actually representative of the group, you're representative
of just the extremists.  You're theoreticians and idealists.  And you
know the irony of it all?  It's almost always the most privileged who
are whining about being underprivileged.  The ones who actually ARE
underprivileged get pissed off at these types for that very reason and
as a result become more distanced from movements (they scared the less
privileged ones off).

The one example that I always like to think of is how the rich white
female feminists always try to speak for all women and then have they
audacity to privilege check middle and lower class black women when
said black women call the rich white ones on their BS. This is
paralleled in all of the gobbleteequa groups as well and is truly sad.
:-(

----------------------------------------------
Nathan J. Yoder
http://www.gummibears.nu/
http://www.gummibears.nu/files/njyoder_pgp.key
----------------------------------------------


from_name: Andrew Gray

body:
On 30/06/05, JAY JG <jayjg at hotmail.com> wrote:

> >The current situation seems to be that the people who frequent
> >[[Wikipedia:Requests for adminship]] are quite paranoid with giving out
> >adminship status. Anyone who isn't obviously completely dedicated and who
> >doesn't think of nothing else than Wikipedia's well-being day and night,
> >can't possibly be a suitable admin.
>
> That's hardly the case.  There currently are hundreds of admins (500?), with
> 2 or 3 new ones being created weekly, so its hardly impossible.

We've 498 just now; number five hundred will probably be created
tomorrow (or tonight, possibly, in the Deep West)...

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


subject: [Wiktionary-l] Re: en.wiktionary.org temporarily broken

body:
On 6/30/05, Sabine Cretella <sabine_cretella at yahoo.it> wrote:
>
> Klaus-Eduard Runnel wrote:
>
> >Maybe someone can think of a way to create automatic links to pages with
> >titles differing just by the case of the first letter? E.g. it would be
> >helpful to have link to "aa" from the article titled "Aa". I have had no
> >success trying to accomplish something like that using the available
> means
> >of mediawiki. That's by the way one of the reasons why not-yet-so-big
> >Estonian wiktionary has not switched over to case-sensitivite first
> letters
> >yet.
> >
> >There could be use for a magic word similar to PAGENAMEE which would
> return
> >the page title with spaces substituted by '+' characters.
> >
> >
> >
> Hi Klaus, as much as I know there is a bot that can revert everything to
> lower case (see the mails of Biron today). So creating all pages in
> lower case should be possible without problems.

Thanks Sabine. Well yes, conversion should not be a problem, and a bot could
also add those see-also links we were thinking of, step-by-step. We just
hoped we could temporarily display a message (possibly using
MediaWiki:Sitenotice) suggesting the user to try the alternatives with the
alternatives listed as direct links or giving a link to a query that would
search for (all kinds of) alternatives.

If you then need help to
> have a look at the German words that often have capital initial letters
> ... let me know.
>
> I noted you already use templates like {{-en-}} so I suppose the
> category for German is there.

We do not have much German words yet, so those can be dealed with manually.

> Do you have a template list somewhere?

We do not have a template guide, although it would be a good idea to have
it. You can check the template list at Special:Allpages
http://et.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Eri%3AAllpages&from=&namespace=10
.

> Ciao, Sabine

T?au :),
Klaus.


subject: [Foundation-l] Access Wikipedia through SMS

body:
david at bruehlmeier.com (david at bruehlmeier.com) [050628 19:19]:

> This is how we figured it might work: Send an SMS with the keyword (the term you
> want to look up) to a special number. The server will then access Wikipedia and
> return the abstract of the article. You will only get as much as will fit into
> an SMS, but in many cases, this will be enough.

This idea has been thrown around for a while :-) You can be sure someone
will implement it eventually. Probably using, as you say, the first 160
chrs of the article.

Perhaps this will lead to better-formed [[:en:Wikipedia:Lead summary]]
sections ;-)

I understand there has also been discussion about this for Africa - where
cellphones are much more common than Internet connections. And how to make
editing via cellphone usable, since we're not a read-only encyclopedia.

(Hmm, what would the GFDL have to say about this?)

- d.


from_name: Phil Sandifer

body:
On Jun 30, 2005, at 6:09 PM, Fred Bauder wrote:
>
> Right, but we ought not declare one viewpoint or another "the
> truth." At least not within Wikipedia.

True enough, but it should be noted that the NPOV policy is also not
a demand that we be ACTIVELY WRONG.

-Snowspinner


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
dpbsmith at verizon.net wrote:

>How do libraries handle it?
>
>When I was about eleven, I discovered that my local library had a copy of
>Immanuel Velikovsky's "Worlds in Collision" shelved among the science books.
>I went to the librarian full of indignation, demanding that they reshelve it
>under "science fiction." The librarian somehow calmed me down... and the book
>stayed where it was.
>
>Well, I'm older. (And to tell the truth the geologists seems to be a lot less
>uniformitarian than they used to be. Asteroids extinguishing the dinosaurs?
>Well, OK. But I still don't think the fall of manna that saved the Israelites
>resulted from the earth passing through a comet's tail.)
>
>Anyway, it seems to me that librarians must deal with this sort of thing all
>the time. And the many public libraries that use the Dewey Decimal system
>can't just fall back on the Library of Congress. Although perhaps there's
>some central authority that recommends Dewey classifications. But in any
>case, someone has to decide whether Velikovsky is science or science fiction.
>Who does? and how?
>
The Library of Congress classifies "Worlds in Collision" at QB603, and
suggests the Dewey Class 523.1.  These are both in the science
area.http://catalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v3=4&ti=1,4&SEQ=20050630232438&Search_Arg=Worlds+in+Collision&Search_Code=TALL&PID=19110&CNT=25&SID=1

Some of these things are on  the fringes of science, but they lack the
nice human story to make it as science fiction.  I'm sure that LoC needs
to face these problems with great regularity.

Ec


from_name: Patrick Hall

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Mongolian, crazy Mongolian

body:
On 6/30/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Mark Williamson wrote:
>
> >A representation of what a proper implementation of Mongolian script
> >protocols on mn.wiki should look like can be found here:
> >http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Mongolian_wikipedia_preview.png
> >(it's pretty neat, actually)
> >
> >
> Cool!  Maybe someday we may even able to handle those American Indian
> languages that started in the middle of a deerskin and wrote in a
> spiral. :-)
>
> Ec

We can use the same stylesheet when we get around to the Phaistos Wikipedia. 8^)

-Pat


from_name: JAY JG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Thoughts on the process of requesting adminship

body:
>From: Timwi <timwi at gmx.net>
>
>
>I was going to post this as a reply to another posting, but my thoughts
>have become somewhat general, and so I'm posting this as a new entry.
>
>I have come to realise that our current process of requesting adminship is
>at a sharp contrast to the wiki model in general. I have come to believe
>that we are not following our own principles that we so highly value.

What tangible (not philosophical) benefits in terms of creating a better
encyclopedia would these changes provide?

>Why do we let anyone edit? Because we believe that assuming good faith is a
>good thing. We let people edit because they can't do any lasting damage
>anyway; if they turn out to be editing in bad faith, we can still revert
>their edits and block them later. No permanent damage done. We also let
>people edit because we believe that they are innocent until they show
>themselves guilty.
>
>Incidentally, with admin powers, we handle it quite differently. Not only
>does becoming an admin require majority support, but it is even the case
>that many people vote "oppose" on the grounds of lack of dedication, lack
>of a minimum number of edits, or lack of involvement in community issues.
>They can apparently get away with an argument that essentially amounts to
>saying "we can't really be sure they're innocent, so we'll have to assume
>they're guilty for now". As a result, there are people who are not admins
>even though they would never be doing anything wrong if they were. Those
>people should be admins.

Disagree.  Admin is a position of increased responsibility and trust; trust
must be earned.

>If we disregard for a moment that admins can delete images permanently,
>which surely can be rectified in a future software update, admins cannot do
>any lasting damage, just like editors. As such, their situation is a quite
>close analogy to the case of the editors.

Why not have everyone made bureaucrats while you're at it? They can't do
much harm either, nothing that can't be undone.

>If we applied the current request-for-adminship philosophy to editing, we
>would have to vote on everybody's right to edit before allowing them to
>edit!

The analogy is poor; admins have only a small number of additional powers; a
few more or fewer would have little impact on the workings of Wikipedia.
Having to vote on edits, on the other hands, would radically change an
impeded Wikipedia's function.

>As a first step, I would like to suggest to make it policy that "oppose"
>votes must be accompanied by reasoning indicating the nominee's past
>wrongdoing or potential for wrongdoing. It should not be permitted to vote
>"oppose" just because someone has "only a few hundred edits", as this is
>neither a crime nor a sign of bad faith. As a safeguard against crackpots
>nominating themselves straight after their first edit, however, I suggest
>that candidates must be nominated by an existing admin.

Not only is this easily gamed, but only having a few hundred edits means
that other people evaluating the editor have little to go on when trying to
assess whether or not they will abuse being an admin.

>In the long-term, my suggestion is to abolish the requirement for majority
>vote. Anyone who is already an admin is trusted; I think someone nominated
>by an existing admin should therefore be given a certain "initial trust"
>too. Thus, admins should be able to just appoint other admins. As for
>removing adminship, ideally I would like to see the process closely
>resemble that for blocking users. The things we have collected at
>[[Wikipedia:Blocking policy]] have evolved over time; a similar
>"deadminning policy", containing various behaviours that warrant
>deadminning without a vote, is surely conceivable. In particular, I can
>imagine the 3RR apply to page-protection, deletion/undeletion, or
>blocking/unblocking other users. Having more admins, and therefore more
>sensible admins ;-), makes this much easier to keep under control by the
>community.

As has been pointed out, there are already plenty of admins, 500 and
growing, more than enough, and there is a process of voting them in which
ensures that they are generally quite sensible.  This is simply another
attempt to fix a non-existent problem.

>What if tens of people gang up, all become admins and then do lots of bad
>stuff? Well, it is already possible for people to gang up -- and indeed,
>gangs of web forum users have done so in the past.

The ones who did so in the past were rather stupid, which was inevitable,
given their beliefs.  In the future this would be a much more serious
problem, and could severely disable Wikipedia.  Imagine a bunch of
page-move/pelican-shit vandals admins working together.

Though some people seem to keep forgetting this, the primary purpose of
Wikipedia is to create an encyclopedia, not experiment with
anarcho-democracy, or create an on-line trust community or online group
therapy for internet trolls.  Changes to current processes which are
currently working well make no sense, particularly as these changes do not
seem to be at all for the purpose of making a better encyclopedia.

Jay.


from_name: Sabine Cretella

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Icelandic - "Jökull/jökull"

body:
Hi, on the Italian wiktionary someone with only IP added the above term
with a capital letter. The definition says that it means "ice" or is a
person's name. Now I tried to check with is.wikipedia/is.wiktionary and
I found out that indeed it is a persons name, but I cannot find a
reference to its meaning of "ice".

Anyway when it means "ice" doesn't it need the spelling "j?kull" with a
lower case "j"?

I hope there's someone talking this language on the list, otherwise I'll
just add the name and delete the rest.

Sorry for crossposting, but since this is a seldom language chances are
higher that someone can help me.

Ciao Sabine

___________________________________
Yahoo! Messenger: chiamate gratuite in tutto il mondo
http://it.beta.messenger.yahoo.com


subject: [Wiktionary-l] Icelandic - "Jökull/jökull"


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject:
[Wiktionary-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] en.wiktionary.org temporarily
	broken

body:
Klaus-Eduard Runnel wrote:

>Maybe someone can think of a way to create automatic links to pages with
>titles differing just by the case of the first letter? E.g. it would be
>helpful to have link to "aa" from the article titled "Aa". I have had no
>success trying to accomplish something like that using the available means
>of mediawiki. That's by the way one of the reasons why not-yet-so-big
>Estonian wiktionary has not switched over to case-sensitivite first letters
>yet.
>
>There could be use for a magic word similar to PAGENAMEE which would return
>the page title with spaces substituted by '+' characters.
>
>Klaus
>
Hoi,
This would be a bad idea. It may help some wiktionaries but it would
certainly break others. There is a big difference between the
implementation of the English wiktionary who for whatever reason stayed
overly long with capitalised articles and wiktionaries like the Dutch,
the Italian and may others who changed the capitalisation at the first
opportunity. The difference can be found in things like the English
wiktionary seems to cherish the redirect pages while all redirect pages
on the Dutch and Italian .. and others are always deleted. The reason
for this is that like in a paper dictionaray we only want correct
spellings and an incorrect spelling should result in a "not found" message.

Ultimate Wiktionary is a project that intends to merge wiktionaries and
its communities and build additional functionality and community.
However, until individual wiktionaries start to merge into it, you
cannot assume functionality and certainly automatic functionality is
possible that is incompatible with other wiktionaries. It is possible to
create the Ultimate Wiktionary because from a technical point of view,
it makes a clean break with the existing wiktionaries. The result will
be a single project and as a consequence it will be possible to change
its functionality when the need arises.

One thing you have to consider with regard to the implementation of case
sensitivity is, that the longer you wait the more work there is to make
the necessary changes.

Thanks,
    GerardM


subject: [Foundation-l] IEEE LOM

body:
wiki_tomos wrote:

>Hi. I find it rather odd that nobody so far seems to have responded to this
>interesting proposal. So I am making a modest attempt. I have to admit that
>I just ask questions & clarifications mostly, and I am not sure if others
>have the same questions.
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: Gerard Meijssen
>Sent: Sat, 04 Jun 2005 08:10:53 +0200
>Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] IEEE LOM
>
>
>
>
>>>However if 50% of the Dutch data is of an universal nature, it would
>>>mean that this 50% does not need to be entered for the articles in other languages.
>>>Hosting this metadata on the Wikimedia servers makes sense;
>>>
>>>
>
>I think I want to learn more about this part. What do you mean by the universal data?
>
>
The Dutch implementation of IEEE LOM has Dutch localisation for the
international labels. When 50% of the data is the same on every article
independent of the localisation used, and when an article on the same
topic in different languages shares this metadata, you do not have to
enter those again. To make IEEE LOM available, you need to implement the
local standard next to the published standard.

>Some of the IEEE data are common to all Wikipedia (or Wikimedia) articles/pages so that
>they do not have to be manually entered for individual articles/pages separately, but
>could simply be implemented at a different level?
>
>
>
>>>it allows for the opening up of Free content in a proprietary world.
>>>It would make a huge deduction in cost for every second language implementing the IEEE LOM data.
>>>
>>>
>
>I want to know more about these statements, too.
>
>What are some of the expected benefits of tagging the contents with IEEE LOM? Are you suggesting
>many commercial content providers will take Wikipedia contents and offer them as part of their
>contents? That sounds good to me (reuse of contents is good in principle in my opinion).
>
>
Yes, that is what I suggest.

>I also wonder about how they will comply with GFDL that requires, among other things, that
>contents should not be technically protected for people to read or copy, and that no other
>terms than license will be applied. Well, that's their (those commercial content providers)
>business to figuire things out, so perhaps the question is not very relevant to our discussion.
>
>
>
Making content accessible is what we do. Making people comply with our
license is a different matter. I learned that schools themselves often
ask organisations to rate info according to IEEE LOM. But once info HAS
been categorized according to this standard, our information will be
found for use. The issues re licensecompliance are not different for us
as it is for the commercial content providers, if anything the
commercial boys have more to lose.

>
>
>>The questions I put to you are:
>>*   Are we willing to host open standard meta data for the educational world.
>>*   Are we willing to cooperate with organisations that are interested in implementing this data.
>>*   How will we manage such things; funds can be found to pay people doing this kind of work - can we consider this
>>
>>Thanks,
>> GerardM
>>
>>
>
>Am I correct in assuming that what they want is that somehow we (Dutch Wikipedians, or Wikipedians
>in general) will tag our contents in the way specified in IEEE LOM? And they will pay for the server and
>traffic in return? Is that the deal they are proposing?
>
>
No, they want to host our content and tag the info. Us hosting the
content, will allow for sharing the "universal" IEEE LOM labels and this
in turn will lead to less effort in tagging our content for other
countries following the paths of interwiki links. This is what I propose
what we should do. Finding 100% funding is something that is relatively
easy to do certainly when the management of this IEEE LOM stuff is what
the rationale is.

>Immediate question that I have, in that case, is that:
>*Do they want to somehow host the Dutch Wikipedia only, on a separate server?
>
>*Did they consider creating a mirror themselves, and do all the tagging by themselves? In that case,
>for good or not, they perhaps need only a few experienced Wikipedians as advisors/consultants. Not
>particularly an exciting choice, but could be quite sensible.
>
>
This will prevent the economies of scale. So it is cool when they do
this, it makes however more sense when this metadata is integrated
within our own systems.

Thanks,
GerardM

>Cheers,
>
>Tomos
>


subject: [Foundation-l] IEEE LOM


body:
Nathan J. Yoder (njyoder at energon.org) [050630 20:06]:

> Also, I have to wonder if David Gerard, the one who created the
> injunction, is ever going to bother abiding by the no personal attacks
> rule himself and actually bother to qualify what counts as a personal
> attack.  He won't bother since he knows he's guilty of it himself.

[[Wikipedia:No personal attacks]]

Owing to the list's lack of patience with complainants going off into
attack jags, your posts here are now moderated. Please do try harder to
speak politely. Thanks!

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia is *already* written from a scientific POV

body:
Haukur ?orgeirsson wrote:

>>Establishing the truth of a proposition, however obvious, as this is,
>>is not the purpose of Wikipedia, nor the purpose of categories.
>>Categories are an aid to the reader to in finding information.
>>
>>
>I don't understand the dichotomy you seem
>to be trying to uphold. Wikipedia provides
>information but not truth? What is truth?
>
>Here's the start of our article on the Eiffel Tower:
>
>"The Eiffel Tower ... is a metallic tower built
>on the Champ de Mars in Paris ... and is nowadays
>the most famous landmark and symbol of Paris."
>
>This is information. And truth.
>
>When we say "Homeopathy is a pseudoscience."
>we are also providing information by writing
>down a true statement. If I may paraphrase
>a couple of sentences from a certain sci-fi
>franchise:
>
One of the first things to be learned in critical (or scientific)
thinking is to distinguish between statements of fact and statements of
opinion.  To be most effective that approach must be applied with
absolute rigour. Let's deal only with the Eiffel Tower statement, since
it doesn't have the level of controversy that one might associate with
homeopathy.   That the Eiffel Tower is a metallic tower is a statement
of fact; that can be directly observed, but even that assumes that there
is no controversy about the nature of metal.  That it is on the Champ de
Mars in Paris is a statement of fact.  The naming of places is arbitrary.

That it is the most famous landmark in Paris is a statement of opinion.
Fame is a question of opinion.  There is no way that you can go the
Eiffel Tower and perform any physical test that will establish its
fame.  It is not a falsifiable hypothesis.

It is information, and it may be true, but it is not a statement of fact.

Ec


body:
Michael Turley wrote:

>On 6/30/05, Haukur ?orgeirsson <haukurth at hi.is> wrote:
>
>
>>When we say "Homeopathy is a pseudoscience."
>>we are also providing information by writing
>>down a true statement. If I may paraphrase
>>a couple of sentences from a certain sci-fi
>>franchise:
>>
>>"The first duty of every Wikipedian is to the truth,
>>scientific truth, historical truth and personal truth.
>>It is the guiding principle of Wikipedia."
>>
>>
> You've mentioned four separate truths there.
>
Four?  I only see three in that list.

>I'm of the opinion that Wikipedia tries to serve all of them, not just
>the scientific truth.
>
>In what order we serve them is the primary puzzle, and that differs on
>a case by case basis.
>
If a person feels that he has been healed by Homeopathy, that is a
personal truth.

Hahnemann's work in homeopathy, the adoption of the Homeopathic
Pharmacopoeia byt the US government, and the preogress of legal cases
about homeopathy are all part of the historical truth.

I considered scientific truth in my previous posting.

Ec


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: The elections are on, but I cast a blank ballot!

body:
Gregory Maxwell a ?crit:
 > On 6/29/05, Anthere
<anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
 >
 >>I invite you to ask more questions here as well as on the appropriate
 >>candidate talk page if you feel it necessarily.
 >
 >
 > Well, in my reasoning I thought I was fairly clear that a lot of my
 > motivation was not based on a dislike of any of the candidates, but
 > more because two years is too long and because the editors, myself
 > included, are not being given quite enough information about
 > longer-term issues. I don't think 'questions' are a good solution to
 > the lack of information in the statements because we can not expect a
 > large enough audience to read the discussion.

Hi

I am sorry because I prepared a long answer... and my computer crashed
:-((( I just can't feel the courage to do it all again. Sorry, I will
make it quite short and probably very badly expressed. But I have to
finish something quickly for wikimania tonight and will be away for the
week end.

 > But since I'm being invited to ask questions, I'd like to ask a
 > question of all of the candidates; please pardon its length. Perhaps
 > this is more directed at Angela, since she mentioned the GFDL in her
 > statement, but I'd like to hear comments from all.
 >
 > What is your long-term position with respect to the GFDL, particularly
 > with respect to attribution?  Specifically, I've read the new CC-wiki
 > license and I'm very concerned that it creates a special right for
 > site operators (as opposed to first editors or publishers).  The
 > requirements of the CC-wiki are fairly similar to the not quite
 > GFDL-compatible attribution suggestions we make on our licensing page,
 > which is a big reason why I would even mention CC-wiki when talking
 > about Wikipedia licensing.
 >
 > Obviously Wikipedia could never be licensed as CC-wiki, and I have
 > great faith that the Free Software Foundation would not make unwise
 > changes to later versions of the GFDL... but I think that we would all
 > benefit from finding out exactly what changes the board would request
 > on our behalf.
 >
 > I feel confident that the community will not tolerate a change to the
 > licensing which grants Wikimedia special legal rights which would
 > inhibit the ability of the community to fork should the board somehow
 > lose its mind and act against what the community feels is its best
 > interest. This would require that the license not provide a special
 > attribution loophole that allows only attributing to the site where
 > the material was originally created.  I would like a direct assurance
 > that the board members will make no attempt to achieve such a change
 > for GFDL-licensed content on Wikipedia, Commons, or Wikibooks.
 >
 > I'd also like to know how each board member thinks the board to
 > incorporate community input into licensing-related discussions. I
 > believe that most people would agree that the use of our content could
 > be enhanced by some degree of carefully thought out change, but I know
 > I'd like to have the ability to provide input; for example, my point
 > on the non-negotiability of the legal ease of forking.
 >
 > Thanks!

I think it is correct to mostly direct these questions to Angela, as
indeed, they are not part of my platform, nor were last year.
I try to keep up with such matters as much as I can, but it certainly
is not the part I can best help, nor to be entirely fair with you, the
part I am most interested in ;-) And given our time restraints, I truely
think it is best that each board member try to focus on certain matters
rather than to disperse himself in myriads of issues.

This said... I was confronted many times during the past year to the
issue of our license and the implication of reuse rules to respect.
I am not entirely sure I agree with Angela when she says she knows very
few mirrors compliants to the reattribution rule. Each time I had the
opportunity to do so for the reusers of the french content this year, I
mentionned amongst *requirements* the fact of doing a direct link to
the article or to the history of the article. And most to my surprise,
most reusers absolutely followed this requirement.and link the article
itself. I do believe that at least for all electronic medias, it is
possible to insist on this requirement and see it followed. It might be
that we need to clarify for readers who the authors of an article are
but I really would not support attributions being removed from editors
to be given to the Foundation.

I mostly see a major issue with the GFDL with regards to all printed
work. It makes little sense to print the entire GFDL license, nor the
entire list of authors, at the end of a book in which a little bit of
gfdl content has been included. It makes no sense either when part of an
article in included in a newspaper. No editor will ever follow that
burden. This is a problem which needs to be solved and I would support
having some of the requirements made simpler in these cases.

One thing I would like to insist upon is that there is no reason you
should feel you do not have the power to make things change yourself
once you decide to do it. In the current discussions on licensing
issues, two immediately pop up in my mind.

First is the issue of being allowed to reuse images from other
organisations, which will probably involve some consensus over the
license used in the end. For this, I invite you to read the very recent
report by Submarine http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ESA_images.
This is an ongoing action lead by french and german editors. Please,
feel free to get involved.

The second issue will probably become more and more proeminent in the
future. It is simple. First, Commons seem to contain many images which
are not free by our standards. Second, an image does not have
necessarily the same status depending on the country. Perhaps editors
such as Foenyx or Aurevilly could explain you better all this. And if
you read french, I invite you to read Soufron's thoughts here :
http://soufron.free.fr/soufron-spip/plan.php3

Just this to say that when you say "I'd also like to know how each board
member thinks the board to incorporate community input into
licensing-related discussions." (with a word missing probably), I do not
think the board "incorporate" community input into discussions, I think
the community discussion drive many licensing issues. Maybe what is
missing for you, is the knowledge of where the discussions take place or
what initiatives are taken.

In any cases, you are correct to raise such an issue... and as Cimon
recently told me, we need more public board meeting. I think it could be
good to suggest one in fall to discuss the issue.

Sorry, I was probably very unclear. I am a bit tired.

ant


from_name: Sam Korn

body:
> Anyway, it seems to me that librarians must deal with this sort of thing all
> the time. And the many public libraries that use the Dewey Decimal system
> can't just fall back on the Library of Congress. Although perhaps there's
> some central authority that recommends Dewey classifications. But in any
> case, someone has to decide whether Velikovsky is science or science fiction.
> Who does? and how?

Quite often, this will be done by the publisher (certainly in my
experience with school libraries), who will put a Dewey number on the
copyrights page.  Not exactly neutral, but that's the way it seems to
be done as far as I can tell.

Sam


from_name: Andrew Dunbar

body:
Polyglot is yet again misrepresenting the so-called vote. I really don't want
to go through it again but anybody who wants to know the true sentiments
felt by *all* the contributors to the en.wiktionary must read the relevant
sections of the "voting" page, the Beer parlour, etc. It has a long history
which Polyglot and a couple of others are very happy to gloss over because
the change is what they want and it is convenient for them to make
absolutely zero mention of the multiple heated debates.

I logged onto IRC shortly before I had to start work when I discovered the
mess and used some very frank language with whatever devs I could find
there.

When the anger died down a little I was told that in fact the scheme I've
hoped for all along, full case folding, is planned for the long run. What
this means is that we will be running around splitting all the articles in
two now, making plenty of mess; then after that change, running around
merging them back together in a different way!

I've got a life to get on with tonight so I'm not hanging around to bicker
about things. I sure hope it all settles down someday though and we
can actually know what is happening, what will happen in the future,
and be able to plan for what the devs have in store.

Hippietrail.

On 6/30/05, Sabine Cretella <sabine_cretella at yahoo.it> wrote:
> ............
>
> >>
> >>
> >> It was Tim. He didn't announce the change (that I noticed, anyway) and
> >> forgot to log it in the administrator's log, then happened to be away
> >> from the computer for the next several hours.
> >
> >
> > There has been a vote with a very positive outcome and somebody
> > apparently said something about it on irc. The English Wiktionary had
> > indeed decided to switch over, but it had not been decided when.
> > Anyway, on the page where the vote had happened this was indicated and
> > there was a link to a page where a discussion was held how to go about
> > it. If Tim had read all that, he would have known we were not ready
> > for the change.
> > Anyway, I for one, am glad the change has finally happened and I'm
> > sure we'll manage to clean up the mess, eventually.
>
>
> As much as I remember the switch over should have been done on April 1st
> (no, not a joke), but then, even if it was decided no-one really moved.
>
> I am already cleaning the links on it.wiktionary to en.wiktionary since
> someone (withour logging in) added manually some interwiki-links using
> capitalised words and besides that creating messed up pages using
> {{PAGENAME}} instead of re-writing the word in the title - so basically
> all double work. Should whoever added these pages read this message:
> please never use the pagename-template again like you did - if you don't
> know how to create a proper page, just contact me (also by e-mail is fine)..
>
> Ciao, Sabine
>
>
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
> Yahoo! Mail: gratis 1GB per i messaggi e allegati da 10MB
> http://mail.yahoo.it
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
http://linguaphile.sf.net


body:
On 30/06/05, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Anyway, it seems to me that librarians must deal with this sort of thing all
> > the time. And the many public libraries that use the Dewey Decimal system
> > can't just fall back on the Library of Congress. Although perhaps there's
> > some central authority that recommends Dewey classifications. But in any
> > case, someone has to decide whether Velikovsky is science or science fiction.
> > Who does? and how?
>
> Quite often, this will be done by the publisher (certainly in my
> experience with school libraries), who will put a Dewey number on the
> copyrights page.  Not exactly neutral, but that's the way it seems to
> be done as far as I can tell.

This is part of the CIP process - cataloguing-in-print. Basically, a
proof copy of the book is catalogued to a basic standard, and this
gets put on the flyleaf; it means that you can open a book and create
a catalogue record without having to go to the effort of cataloguing
it.

Classification numbers generally get assigned at this stage, but
they're often inaccurate (especially for more abtruse subjects), and
libraries often reclassify from scratch on receipt. This I wouldn't
put too much faith in. The cataloguer is quite often not the publisher
- in the US, it's often the Library of Congress. (Look carefully,
you'll see "The Library of Congress has catalogued the X edition as
follows: ...")

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


body:
On 30/06/05, dpbsmith at verizon.net <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:

> Anyway, it seems to me that librarians must deal with this sort of thing all
> the time. And the many public libraries that use the Dewey Decimal system
> can't just fall back on the Library of Congress. Although perhaps there's
> some central authority that recommends Dewey classifications. But in any
> case, someone has to decide whether Velikovsky is science or science fiction.
> Who does? and how?

Dewey is in fact controlled by a very strong central organisation -
you should see the money they charge! <g> It's currently in the 22nd
edition, of four hefty hardbound volumes; one a guide to implementing,
two detailed references, and a voluminous index; even then, you still
find quite impressive ambiguities.

If you want, I can go and have a look at the weekend and see if it
discusses the classification of such books; it'd be interesting to
note what, if anything, it has to say.

[And as a sidenote - I have done guerrilla reshelving in the past, I confess...]

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


from_name: Haukur Þorgeirsson

body:
> Establishing the truth of a proposition, however obvious, as this is,
> is not the purpose of Wikipedia, nor the purpose of categories.
> Categories are an aid to the reader to in finding information.

I don't understand the dichotomy you seem
to be trying to uphold. Wikipedia provides
information but not truth? What is truth?

Here's the start of our article on the Eiffel Tower:

"The Eiffel Tower ... is a metallic tower built
on the Champ de Mars in Paris ... and is nowadays
the most famous landmark and symbol of Paris."

This is information. And truth.

When we say "Homeopathy is a pseudoscience."
we are also providing information by writing
down a true statement. If I may paraphrase
a couple of sentences from a certain sci-fi
franchise:

"The first duty of every Wikipedian is to the truth,
scientific truth, historical truth and personal truth.
It is the guiding principle of Wikipedia."

When reasonable people interpret available data
in different ways we try to describe each position
fairly.

Then there are some unreasonable positions. Those
are usually dealt with in separate articles and
otherwise ignored. Here's an excerpt from the
start of the [[Apollo program]] article:

"Project Apollo ... was devoted to the goal of landing a man on the Moon
and returning him safely to Earth within the decade of the 1960s. This
goal was achieved with the Apollo 11 mission in 1969."

There are many people who disagree with this but
since their position is unreasonable it is not dealt
with in the main article but relegated to a separate
article. Now, *that* article will try to fairly present
the views of those who believe that the Apollo program
was a hoax. However, by choosing to privilege the
reasonable view in the main article Wikipedia has
*already* chosen a position, whatever category the
hoax article is put into.

Or let's take [[Earth]]. Here's an excerpt from the lead:

"The planet formed around 4.57 billion (4.57?109) years ago and shortly
thereafter acquired its single natural satellite, the Moon."

There are many people who disagree with this. We try to
describe their positions fairly in separate articles,
e.g. [[Creationism]]. The article on creationism may
try to be scrupulously fair to the creationists but the
bottom line is that Wikipedia has *already* acknowledged
the scientific facts as superior to the creationist
theories (at least the "Young Earth" variety) by
including them in main articles like [[Earth]].

Including [[Creationism]] in [[Category:Pseudoscience]]
is just icing on a cake that has already been baked.

Regards,
Haukur


from_name: Jtkiefer

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

> Jtkiefer:
>
>>    Creationism is a prickly problem, wikipedia can't really take
>> either side due to the fact that no matter what you write on it it's
>> almost impossible to avoid POV pushing.
>
>
> Stating that creationism is pseudoscience is not POV-pushing. Maybe
> Intelligent Design, which is a bit more controversial -- but
> creationism as in "God created the World", where it makes "scientific"
> claims, is pretty much universally regarded as pseudoscience by people
> from existing scientific disciplines.
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>

Your right calling creationism a science would be POV pushing, but if
you take the stance that creationism is anything, science,
pseudo-science, legend, myth, total bullshit... you're still gonna piss
someone off which is an inherent problem with having an open medium like
wikipedia.

-Jtkiefer


subject: [WikiEN-l] The sandbox incubator

body:
Bryan Derksen wrote:

> Erik Moeller wrote:
>
>> In other words, I would strongly argue in favor of shutting down the
>> sandbox as a VfD-resistant incubator for games which distract from
>> the purpose of building an encyclopedia. There is value to wikigames
>> as entertainment and as an artistic effort, but there's a separate
>> wiki dedicated to this already -- http://games.wikicities.com/ -- and
>> I feel that our own gaming related efforts should be limited at best.
>
>
> I'm surprised that the Sandbox is "VfD resistant" in the first place -
> I would have thought anything sandbox-related would be deliberately
> ephemeral and of no lasting value, and hence eminently deleteable. The
> template on there even says that Sandbox contents are wiped every 12
> hours, wouldn't this apply to Sandbox subpages too?
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>
What an easy solution might be would to have a wipe every 12 hours of
the sandbox main page that also deletes any subpages (except any used
for offical uses regarding the sandbox).

    -Jtkiefer


from_name: Ole Andersen

subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Icelandic - "Jökull/jökull"

body:
On 6/30/05, Sabine Cretella <sabine_cretella at yahoo.it> wrote:
> Hi, on the Italian wiktionary someone with only IP added the above term
> with a capital letter. The definition says that it means "ice" or is a
> person's name. Now I tried to check with is.wikipedia/is.wiktionary and
> I found out that indeed it is a persons name, but I cannot find a
> reference to its meaning of "ice".

It means a glacier. It has, btw, been borrowed to Danish in the form
'j?kel', which is a bit narrower in scope - we would say 'j?kel' about
a glacier in the Nordic countries, while we would say 'gletsjer' about
glaciers anywhere.

--
http://palnatoke.org * Ole Andersen, Copenhagen, DK
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/freecycle_cph/
ICQ: 86989486


subject: [Wiktionary-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Icelandic - "Jökull/jökull"


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: DB migration issue

body:
Edward De Jongh wrote:
> Hi all I have an issue with migrating a current wiki from RHES8 to
> Debian Sarge. Is this the right list to post to? If not please let me
> know which is the correct list.
>

You want mediawiki-l: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

-- Tim Starling


body:
> It's particularly foul-smelling icing, though.  NPOV certainly is
> compatible with not giving minority or conspiracy-theory opinions undue
> weight by inserting them everywhere or making them seem as if they're
> mainstream, but at the same time outright name-calling is a little
> inappropriate.  Saying, as Wikipedia, that Creationism is pseudoscience
> is across the line of good taste I think.  Not mentioning the
> young-earth theory in the intro to [[Earth]] may imply that we judge it
> as not being a serious scientific position, but outright saying
> "Creationism is a load of horse-shit" is a little more inappropriate.

No-one is proposing that we do. Pseudo-science is a
word with a particular meaning, not name-calling
(unless applied to something that isn't actually
pseudo-science).

There are, Godwin help me, nazi categories on Wikipedia.
That's not name-calling either, when used appropriately.

Regards,
Haukur


from_name: Timwi

body:
Sean Barrett wrote:
>>The current situation seems to be that the people who frequent
>>[[Wikipedia:Requests for adminship]] are quite paranoid with giving out
>>adminship status. Anyone who isn't obviously completely dedicated and
>>who doesn't think of nothing else than Wikipedia's well-being day and
>>night, can't possibly be a suitable admin.
>
> So we should give admin privileges to people who aren't dedicated and
> don't think about Wikipedia's well-being?  Huh?

Just a *bit* black-and-white there, are we?


from_name: Finne Boonen

body:
indeed, as far as I know it means glaciar, it is used in the same way
as mount is in e.g. Mount St Helens,   as well as just meaning
glacier. I've never heard it used in a persons name tho.

Finne

On 6/30/05, Ole Andersen <palnatoke at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/30/05, Sabine Cretella <sabine_cretella at yahoo.it> wrote:
> > Hi, on the Italian wiktionary someone with only IP added the above term
> > with a capital letter. The definition says that it means "ice" or is a
> > person's name. Now I tried to check with is.wikipedia/is.wiktionary and
> > I found out that indeed it is a persons name, but I cannot find a
> > reference to its meaning of "ice".
>
> It means a glacier. It has, btw, been borrowed to Danish in the form
> 'j?kel', which is a bit narrower in scope - we would say 'j?kel' about
> a glacier in the Nordic countries, while we would say 'gletsjer' about
> glaciers anywhere.
>
> --
> http://palnatoke.org * Ole Andersen, Copenhagen, DK
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/freecycle_cph/
> ICQ: 86989486
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
"Maybe you knew early on that your track went from point A to B, but
unlike you I wasn't given a map at birth!" Alyssa, "Chasing Amy"
http://hekla.rave.org/cookbook.html - my crossplatform dieet/recipe app