from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Greek characters not rendering correctly

references:
<99vqxSCxpVB@erik_moeller>	<043101c449e2$58d531e0$67c56bd8@impressario>	<40C07A8E.1060400@cs.ucy.ac.cy>	<c9pvhc$jb5$2@sea.gmane.org>	<c9q05g$m05$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<40C0B165.1090403@pobox.com>

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
>> On second inspection, it definitely does *not* look fine!
>> http://meta.wikipedia.org/upload/3/38/Greek_problem_screenshot.png
>> This seems to be a problem with the software. The messages in the
>> MediaWiki namespace of [[el:]] are correct.
>>
>> Someone seriously needs to fix that, quickly.
>
> Use the letter "i" instead of the number "1" in "π" and "φ".

Brion, if you read my message, you will see that I said "The messages in
the MediaWiki namespace of [[el:]] are correct." They are using neither
"π" nor "&p1;", but the correct UTF-8 character for Greek Pi.

Please fix this. (When Wikipedia is back up ...)

Thanks,
Timwi


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikitech-l] Debian on new 1Us

body:
On Tue, Jun 01, 2004 at 11:18:54AM -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Ricky Beam wrote:
> > On Tue, 1 Jun 2004, Ivan Krstic wrote:
> > >... Also, since I'm told Jimbo is unfamiliar with Debian (which
> > >might be a problem during the installation), I'd like to point out that
> > >you can install Debian pretty easily from a Knoppix CD. Only a barebones
> > >install is needed - the rest can be done over ssh.
> >
> > Two words: Serial Console
>
> Do you have a specific hardware recommendation?  I think this is a
> good idea.

Cyclades, at www.cyclades.com, TS-1000 with 16 ports, or TS-2000 with
32 ports. Uses an embedded Linux and can be configured to provide
remote access using SSH, while most terminal servers still use telnet.

Regards,

	jeluf


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: { and function code

references:
<c9snk5$q72$1@sea.gmane.org> <c9spcd$tg7$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<20040605210730.GM13095@jeluf.mine.nu>

body:
Jens Frank wrote:

> Some statistics ( /includes/* only)
> jf at mormo:/var/www-phase3/includes$ grep function *php| grep '(' |wc -l
> 1425
> jf at mormo:/var/www-phase3/includes$ grep function *php| grep '(' |grep '{' |wc -l
> 692
>
> Looks like a tie.

This looks nothing like a tie. :) You're forgetting that the first grep
also counts lines that contain only a function invocation.


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: S K

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Klingon resurrected

body:
It seems to me that EM's concerns are valid, wether or
not people choose to deal with or recognise them. That
is, that there should be a reasonable firewall between
encyclopedic projects and others.  A "vanity project"
instigator myself, I can understand how people can
hold a reasonable objection to the idea that Wikimedia
be a haven for any number of conlang projects,
disguised as encyclopedias. The word is out, and most
certainly there will be more requests.

Since both the hapless Esperanto and the hopeless
Interlingua already have an established place, there
is little viable argument against conlangs in general.
 The only reasonable option is to limit them to the
very few that promise some utility.

CS
User:KuniShiro on symbolwiki.org / Various ip ranges
on Wikien.

--- Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> Erik Moeller wrote:
>
> > Timwi-
> >
> >>Thanks for your support. Many many people, in fact
> a clear majority,
> >>support full rights for the Klingon Wikipedia.
> Unfortunately, it seems
> >>that this has no significance here. Klingon is
> being treated like
> >>cripple-crap simply because a very small, but very
> loud minority has
> >>some sort of quabbles with it. And because one of
> them has been given
> >>(and is apparently allowed to retain) the power to
> have everything their
> >>way, and then intimidate everyone who tries to
> undo it.
> >
> > Interesting. Is this the way you respect a
> compromise which you yourself
> > proposed?
>
> I failed to make it clear enough that I expected the
> limitations imposed
> on tlh to also apply to tokipona. Now everyone
> things I wanted the
> Klingon Wikipedia, when in fact I only wanted equal
> rights.
>
> And the only reason why we still don't have equal
> rights is because
> people like you insisted on opposing tlh, because
> you said conceited and
> respectless things like "If anyone puts it back up,
> I'll go in there and
> suspend it myself!", and because the prejudice
> against the more
> widely-condemned Klingon is being adhered to more
> than the much more
> reasonable opposition against the less widely-known
> Toki Pona.
>
> Timwi
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Friends.  Fun.  Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger.
http://messenger.yahoo.com/


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: New skin

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:

> * There is no longer a "section edit" link for the very first section
> (before the first heading).

True. I'm missing it too. However, notice that you can use any
section-editing link and manually change its URL by replacing the number
at the end with a "0".

> * In Mono, I cannot turn off the underlined links.

Yes, you can. Go to [[User:Magnus Manske/monobook.css]] and enter:

   a { text-decoration: none; }

Timwi


list: wikien-l

from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: Summary style (was Re: [WikiEN-l] Response to Bryan Derken)

body:
At 10:39 AM 6/7/2004 +0000, Abe Sokolov wrote:
>On that note, I found the tone of Bryan's postings far less constructive
>than Mav's. While I'm not saying that Bryan was deriding me in his two
>mailing list postings, the tone of his postings was certainly derisive
>(using terms and phrases like "obstinate," "going on the attack,"
>"threats," "bludgeoned into submission," and the like). We do not have to
>analyze this disagreement in terms of our character flaws. I regret that
>Bryan'd decided to join in on this vitriolic attack-fest on the mailing
>list in response to a single disagreement.

Actually, that was the point of my original posting. I wasn't specifically
trying to discuss the article Origins of the American Civil War here, since
that's not what the mailing list is for and that's not the subject of the
thread to which I was responding. I was describing my personal opinion of
your editing style based on my experiences in that specific encounter. So
it's not surprising that I would use a lot of "character flaw"-type
language and that my posting wouldn't be particularly constructive as far
as the debate over the article itself is concerned, since the subject I was
focusing on was (my opinion of) character.

>Perhaps I was curt -- and I'm sorry. Now let's take this discussion back
>to where it belongs?back to [[Talk:Origins of the American Civil War]] and
>try to avoid personalizing this difference of opinion next time.

I'll accept your apology, and offer one of my own for any personal offence
I may have given via poor phrasing (though I still stand by my underlying
opinion since I didn't form it lightly). But my main concern is still
whether you plan to continue using the threat of edit wars in that
discussion. Apologies don't matter much if the basic problem remains
unresolved.


from_name: Peter Jaros

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Brion Vibber Day

body:
On Jun 2, 2004, at 8:09 AM, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>>
>>> I hereby decree, in my usual authoritarian and bossy manner, that
>>> today (June 1st) shall forever be known as Brion Vibber day.
>>
>> In the cases of Magnus Manske day and Tim Starling day, you explicitly
>> specified what it was that made you declare these days. What is it in
>> this case?
>>
>> (Maybe it's something obvious and I just missed it?)
>
> With Magnus Manske and Tim Starling, yes, it was a single unique
> achievement at a point in time.  Brion's award is a lifetime
> achievement award.  He's done so much, for so long, it was impossible
> to single out any one thing.

But why June 1st?  Was it arbitrary, or did something big happen
on that day I missed?

Peter

                            -- ---<>--- --
                  A house without walls cannot fall.
     Help build the world's largest encyclopedia at Wikipedia.org
                            -- ---<>--- --


list: foundation-l

from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Foundation-l] Copyright issues of wikimedia projects

body:
Daniel Mayer (maveric149) wrote in part:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>So you're right, this will be the same problem as we have today
>>when Microsoft incorporates BSD code into Windows.

>Good example, although I wasn't aware of that MS factoid.

I read it on the FSF web site, I believe.

I don't know how up to date it is, or how significant it is;
the FSF is hardly an NPOV source on this sort of thing.
But it's interesting to think about, all the same. ^_^

-- Toby


list: wikimedia-l


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Trivial bugfix in include/Math.php / Leave it as
	TeX

body:
Laurent GUERBY wrote:

> Otherwise when a user chooses "Leave it as TeX" he always gets "$ $"
> which is not that useful :).
>
> -			return ('$ '.htmlspecialchars( $tex ).' $');
> +			return ('$ '.htmlspecialchars( $this->tex ).' $');

Checked in, thanks :)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: A first encounter with Categories

body:
Viajero wrote:

> They aren't even consistently labelled! It is entirely possible,
> perhaps probable that someone will come along and create
> "Category:Contraltos opera singers" "Category:Tenors".

I have thought of this problem before, and I have come up with a
solution, so here it is. Discussion is encouraged.

I think it should be possible to create a redirect between categories:

   CATEGORY:TENORS
   ---------------
   1. REDIRECT [[Category:Tenor opera singers]]

(nothing new so far) and then, either one of the following things should
happen:

1. The category [[Category:Tenor opera singers]] should display all
    articles that are categorised in categories that redirect to it.
    This is probably too database-intensive because it potentially
    involves several database read queries;

2. Saving an article with [[Category:Tenors]] in it should automatically
    replace it with [[Category:Tenor opera singers]] before storing in
    the DB. This would only involve one extra read query per saved
    article that has a category tag.

The latter option has the added bonus that we can then allow categories
to be moved using the "Move" function, which automatically generates a
redirect. The new category name won't immediately display all the
articles, but the next time those articles are edited, the category tag
will automatically be updated.

Happy implementing! ;-)
Timwi


body:
Matthew Trump wrote:

> In any case, this is resulting in many editors going through many
> articles repeated to change the categorization. My watchlist is
> filled with long repeated edits in multiple waves.

I really don't see anything wrong with that. Some people just act a bit
too quickly, and add articles to too broad categories. (I did that too
at first.) But it gives people something to work with, and splitting
them up into smaller categories is less work than creating smaller
categories from scratch.

This is the Wiki process. Someone makes a sub-optimal contribution and
others improve on it. Yes, sometimes it's a bit of work to clean up
after *really* sub-optimal contributions, but a good end-result will
eventually precipitate out. C'est la vie-kie.

Timwi


body:
Stan Shebs wrote:

> there are a couple of different approaches. One is to
> create categories for every conjunction of categories - if you have
> "hotels" and "museums" and "Ohio", that means you should have "hotels
> in Ohio" and "museums in Ohio" categories.

I favour this approach. Without it, [[Category:Museums]] would contain
*all* museums in the world (millions!), and [[Category:Ohio]] would
contain absolutely *everything* about Ohio (cities, museums,
exhibitions, operas, theatres, cinemas, railways, bus lines,
sightseeing, TV stations, and all sorts of other unrelated things).

> The other approach is to
> have an article in multiple categories and do nothing else, but then
> the software currently gives you no easy way to list only the museums
> in Ohio.

And even if it did, my above comment still stands -- I think the only
articles [[Category:Museum]] should directly contain are those that
don't fit in any of its sub-categories (e.g. [[museum]]).

> I personally tend to favor the second approach, because the
> conjunction categories will combinatorially explode and eventually
> outnumber articles.

How did you come to this conclusion? With the conjunction categories,
the vast majority of articles will be in only one category. But even if
your calculation was plausible, what's wrong with having loads of
categories (which are just a bit of meta stuff) and a slightly smaller
number of articles (all of which, however, will be loaded with useful
information)?

> It seems more useful to add a way for the category
> page to optionally group members by a second category or some such, so
> you can go to the museums category and say "organize by location
> categories" and have it sort and group by country/state/city.

Any scheme like that will always be limited in an annoying way. Imagine
the particular location you want isn't in it. It would take developer
effort to add it. Or imagine you want to combine two things, both of
which aren't a location.

> In any case, I think category creation will settle down once there
> are about as many categories as there are lists now.

Has there been an edit war about categories yet, at all? It seems that a
lot of people are grumpy that categorisations of particular articles get
changed multiple times, but as I said before, I don't see anything wrong
with that, especially when it settles down to something that nobody
insists on reverting.

Timwi


from_name: Travis Cole

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fundraising

body:
On Jun 7, 2004, at 6:45 PM, Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
>
> By the way, do we have professional/competent people to design the
> complex
> network we need? How much may cost a network analysis by a professional
> company? May it help?

I'm new here, so my information is spotty, so I hope I'm not
overstepping any bounds
by commenting, however I will add in my two cents any way :)

 From what I've been able to gather by looking at the graphs available
online, and
briefly talking to a few people on IRC, It looks to me like the network
it's self is not
a problem and may not be for a long time to come.  From what I can tell
most of the
wikimedia sites are not huge bandwidth hogs.  Although I have zero
visibility into
how much NFS traffic there is or how much bandwidth DB downloads eat up.

The places that do seem of most concern seem to be keeping up with
demand
placed on the webservers and the databases.  Which may be a matter of
adding
more and more boxes, ironing out some bottlenecks in the code/database
or both.

Of course if there are network issues, I'm sure some reasonably
competent network
engineers around.  (I might qualify as that, at least it's a big part
of my day job...)

Just some thoughts.

--
-kelp


from_name: Daniel P.B.Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Error on quadratic formula page

body:
> From: kartik at townisp.com
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Error on quadratic formula page
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Message-ID: <1069.216.195.13.175.1085973610.squirrel at 216.195.13.175>
> Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1
>
> Dear Wikipedia,
>
> I love your encyclopedia and I use it a lot.
> One day when I looked at the quadratic formula page, it mentioned
> another
> quadratic formula I had never seen before:
>
> x= 2c / b {+-}sqrt(b^2-4ac)
>
> I tried it out and found out that it had a mistake. It needs a
> negative b
> (-b) in the denominator instead of a positive b. It should read:
>
> x= 2c / -b {+-}sqrt(b^2-4ac)
>
> If you would like me to send you the proof, just ask.
>
> Please reply promptly.

You're right!

Wikipedia is down right now so I can't do anything about it. It might
be interesting to look at the page history and find out how long it has
been that way without anyone noticing.

When Wikipedia is up and running again, which would you prefer: would
you like to have somebody else to make the correction, or would you
like to make the correction yourself?

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net alternate:
dpbsmith at alum.mit.edu
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/

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body:
At 03:22 AM 6/8/2004 +0200, Anthere wrote:
>[[list of museums in Australia with a chinese flag hanging above the
>entrance door]] is of no use.
>
>Search "[[museum]]" where "[[country]] is 'australia'" and "[[topic]] is
>'China'" is useful.
>
>To be useful, meta-tags must be large rather than very specific. Query
>gives the specificity.

But thanks to subcategorization, they can be _both_. [[Museums in ohio]]
can be a subcategory of [[Museums]] along with all the other [[Museums in
<location>]] subcategories, and then all you need to do is throw in a
mechanism for referring to all the articles in a category tree and you can
treat [[Museums]] as if it contained all museum articles everywhere. If
you're already proposing a query language for manipulating categories this
seems a fairly trivial extension to it to me.

I've been wavering a bit, but I think I'm coming down pretty solidly in the
fine-grained categorization camp. The other day I was working on moving the
articles in the [[North American Rivers]] category to the [[North American
rivers]] category (note capitalization), and started putting the articles
into [[Idaho rivers]], [[Alberta rivers]], etc subcategories instead
because the list was so big and generic otherwise. I then found it
trivially easy to stick those subcategories under the relevant geographic
categories as well ([[Idaho]], [[Alberta]]), and it occurred to me that it
would be fairly easy once I was done to set up [[Mississippi watershed]],
[[Colorado watershed]], etc. since in many cases whole entire states drain
into those and I could just drop their subcategories in place to include
all of their rivers. It would be a whole lot more work if I had to go
around to each of those articles and add a new category to every river in
North America.

IMO, fine-grained categories provide a convenient "handle" by which groups
of articles can be organized in various useful ways, without requiring
editors to learn how to deal with query languages doing complicated or
mysterious stuff "behind the scenes" or adding lots of high-level category
tags to individual articles.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Big crash 6/6

body:
That took a lot longer than I'd hoped, but we're back online.

Damaged pages are five Rambot entries:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tazewell_County,_Virginia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sussex_County,_Virginia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surry_County,_Virginia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffolk,_Virginia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staunton,_Virginia

They can be restored from backup if anyone wants to.

imagelinks tables have been cleared as we forgot to add them to the
backup job. There were problems in the to begin with, so we should
regenerate them anyway when the opportunity arises.

archive tables were not backed up. If there is great desire for them it
may be possible to retrieve them from the old database files.

Backup dump is available, though enwiki needs some tweaking so don't
download it quite yet.

We should be able to set up a slave server and *keep the fricking' thing
in sync* this time. I hope. sigh.

Ariel has crashed a couple times in the last day so it's not reliable at
present. Might be hardware, might be software. Needs testing. Will
probably use another machine as a slave.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Abe Sokolov

subject: [WikiEN-l] Ed Poor's abuse of admin powers

body:
On the mailing list daniwo59 at aol.com wrote: "In this case, 172 was
bullied off [I no longer contribute to articles] by people who have yet to
respond to the content of his arguments beyond some rhetorical ranting about
things which are barely relevant to the content at hand. It was done with
personal attacks, using terms such as Stalinist, revisionist, totalitarian,
etc. It was also done (sorry, Ed, but I have to point this out) by having
the title "Can we ban 172 now" appear countless times as an email header."

Right after I announced that I'd be leaving Wikipedia, Ed Poor unprotected
[[Augusto Pinochet]] writing, "after recent discussions on the mailing list
[i.e. me geting pushed off by a witch-hunt he'd started], I hope we can work
together now." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_log

Then, also without discussing his intentions, he unilaterally removed the
reference to U.S. backing from the Pinochet article
(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Augusto_Pinochet&diff=3940359&oldid=3939010)

What would be the reaction if I unprotected the Pinochet article and changed
the content to my preferred version? My changes would be reverted and
actions would be taken against me swiftly. What Ed Poor did was no
different. He was a party in the dispute and he used admin powers to ram his
way through.

And Ed starts up a mailing list discussion saying that ''I should be
banned'', right? This was an abuse of admin powers. He drove me off this
site, and then used his admin powers to censor factual content in an
article. [[User:172|172]] 18:14, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)

_________________________________________________________________
Getting married? Find great tips, tools and the latest trends at MSN Life
Events. http://lifeevents.msn.com/category.aspx?cid=married


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: [MediaWiki-CVS] phase3/languages LanguageFr.php,
	1.64, 1.65

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
>
>> Modified Files:
>>     LanguageFr.php Log Message:
>> adding isRTL() althought its false;
>
>
> Uh, why?
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Hello,

Mainly to ease RTL debugging for me. My development wiki is using french
and overriding this method allow me to fastly switch RTL mode for
debugging purposes (s/false/true/ instead of rewriting the method each
time).

Feel free to remove it if it leads to perf issues :o)

--
Ashar Voultoiz


body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

> Timwi-
>
>>Thanks for your support. Many many people, in fact a clear majority,
>>support full rights for the Klingon Wikipedia. Unfortunately, it seems
>>that this has no significance here. Klingon is being treated like
>>cripple-crap simply because a very small, but very loud minority has
>>some sort of quabbles with it. And because one of them has been given
>>(and is apparently allowed to retain) the power to have everything their
>>way, and then intimidate everyone who tries to undo it.
>
> Interesting. Is this the way you respect a compromise which you yourself
> proposed?

I failed to make it clear enough that I expected the limitations imposed
on tlh to also apply to tokipona. Now everyone things I wanted the
Klingon Wikipedia, when in fact I only wanted equal rights.

And the only reason why we still don't have equal rights is because
people like you insisted on opposing tlh, because you said conceited and
respectless things like "If anyone puts it back up, I'll go in there and
suspend it myself!", and because the prejudice against the more
widely-condemned Klingon is being adhered to more than the much more
reasonable opposition against the less widely-known Toki Pona.

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: MediaWiki profiling tip

body:
Evan Prodromou wrote:
> Wow! That's _great_ information.
>
> I wonder if it would justify removing the wfProfileX() functions from
> MediaWiki. They really, really clutter up the code, and according to
> Ashar's graph, they take up almost 4% of the runtime!

Hello,

I am not sure it takes that much cpu time, the profiling shown in the
screenshot comes from my dev wiki using a very simple page.

> Also, could you generate some conclusions from the profiling info?

I am actually trying to track memory usage to lower it. My wiki need php
memory_limit to be set at 10MB for ex, which seems too much.
My low target is to save about 1.5MB, high target is 3.2MB.

Also, it looks like the language->ucfirst() method use a LOT of cpu time
and could be improved.

--
Ashar Voultoiz


subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] proposed policy change - allow
	*certain* CC-licensed images on Wikipedia...

body:
On Jun 7, 2004, at 2:49 AM, Delirium wrote:

> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>> I fully support that we should accept images under all free licenses,
>> using the aggregation clause of the GNU FDL. (Clause 7.)
>>
> This requires defining a free license, however:
>
> -- Does requiring attribution (like old-style BSD) make the license
> non-free?  Richard Stallman seems to think so, from what I can gather
> from gnu.org.

Don't the GFDL and GNU GPL require attribution?

> -- Does permitting only verbatim redistribution make the license
> non-free?  Many people (including myself) would argue so.

I would say so.

Peter

                            -- ---<>--- --
                  A house without walls cannot fall.
     Help build the world's largest encyclopedia at Wikipedia.org
                            -- ---<>--- --


from_name: K Forstner

body:
Anthere,

I'm sorry for any/all misunderstandings. You know, I'm not against Rambots
updating information on obscure American towns, but the bots whose aim it
was to de-link disambiguation pages caused some silly lines on a number of
pages, especially in a linguistic context (which is not that rare) when you
want to point exactly to the fact that a word has several meanings.

Anyway, I'm clearly out of touch with the rest of the discussion. No one
ever reacts to my contributions (you are the exception here), so I seem to
have no idea what Wikipedia discussions are currently all about. I mean I
can't even access it, but everyone seems to know everything about it except
me.

I'll have to wait till Wikipedia is online again to see the status quo on
categorizations.

All the best,

KF

----- Original Message -----
From: "Anthere" <anthere9 at yahoo.com>
To: <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Monday, June 07, 2004 12:57 AM
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: A first encounter with Categories

>
> K Forstner wrote:
> > I'm again intrigued by the discussions here, be it categorizations or a
user
> > I seem to have never come across called 172 (?). I came back from a
weekend
> > a couple of hours ago and since then have been trying to access
Wikipedia --
> > to no avail.
> >
> > As far as categories are concerned, I tried to point out some days ago
that
> > there should be some policy everyone could agree on, but Timwi suggested
we
> > should just go ahead. The result of this approach is being deplored
already.
> >
> > I wonder though if a bot is the right answer.
> >
> > KF
>
>
> Well, I regret that all what people understood of my proposal was the
> final comment on bots. It was not a bot proposal I was suggesting, but a
> team working proposal, something a bit like a wikiproject, in order to
> reduce current anarchy on category organisation.
>
> No one commented on anything, but on this bot issue; so I gather my
> suggestion was not interesting. Never mind :-)


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Not a lynch mob

body:
The arbitration committee's solution has been to require the "super user" to
slow down and explain themselves to others. Not particularly successful in
the case of Wik however, as he still went over the edge, apparently.

Fred

> From: Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com>
> Reply-To: anthere9 at yahoo.com, English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Tue, 08 Jun 2004 03:01:34 +0200
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Not a lynch mob
>
>
>
> Jim Cecropia wrote:
>> Well, "lynch mob" has a meaning in US culture beyond literally
>> "stringing someone up" "extra-judicially." It refers to an atmosphere in
>> which the question on the table which can be stated: "We're fed up this
>> guy, podners, what're ya gonna do about it?" I see some of that here.
>> I've had an unpleasant run-in in an issue in which 172 was a part, and I
>> do think he is too aggressive and arbitrary; but I've also come to
>> realize that he is one of the best contributors to Wikipedia. This
>> shouldn't give him (or anyone) a "pass" to become a "super-user," but I
>> think our efforts should focus on how we can get experienced
>> contributors to follow certain basic rules without "banning," which is
>> an insult, rather than a time-out. Maybe it's not possible, but I think
>> the desire for collegiality should make us think.
>
>
> I think you mention an important point here.
> What about a collection of civil duties that good contributors will have
> to take care of each time they have not followed certain basic rules ?
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Viajero

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Re: A first encounter with Categories

body:
On 06/07/04  at 02:09 PM, "Matthew Trump" <wikipedia at decumanus.com> said:

> I think the main thrust of categories right now is
> that perhaps they are becomng very quickly fine-grained (Fine grained
> categories are just more interesting perhaps).

Exactly, and worse, not well documented.

> Ideally, it would have best to have only coarse-grained categories at
> first (using some kind of community process like Anthere described),
> creating finer-grained ones only later.

Yes, as has been proposed elsewhere, this should be the first task of the bespoke article validation commitees.

> I realize that this is hindsight, but I think in the long run something
> like you propose would be very good and may eventually result in the
> fine-grained categories being replaced by more convenient coarse-grained
> ones. It would definitely make searching much more easy, if you could
> choose from "Ohio" and "museums" rather than having to search a much
> longer list for "museums of Ohio" or "Ohio museums" or "museums in Ohio"
> or "museums (Ohio)" etc.

Indeed, at the risk of sounding simplistic, what is the point of fine-grained categories? If you do a full-text search on "ohio museums OR galeries" or "boston bruins player" doesn't that serve the purpose? The number of hits is  manageable; how many museums are there in Ohio or hockey players  from Boston worth an article anyway?

V.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Yes, it is a lynch mob

body:
Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com wrote:

"I don't want blood. I want peace."

Heh, assuming that you're being honest here, you're not doing a good job.

Saying such frivolous niceties may allow you to get away with a lot, but
this is all about imposing your POV and nothing else.

Either I was going to keep restoring this reference to U.S. backing of the
'73 coup in Chile or VeryVerily, and to a lesser extent you, were going to
keep censoring factual content (despite the fact that an overwhelming
majority of uses who've chimed in on the talk page-- roughly 90%-- favor
keeping it).

Not only did you unprotect the Pinochet article and remove the reference to
U.S. backing immediately after I'd stopped making contributions, you
neglected to mention that the edit war continued even with me gone.

After my exit, your unprotection of the article, and your revision of the
article, User:John Kenney restored the refernece to U.S. backing; VV then
reverted him without comment right away. Later, a different user restored
it-- this time Ruhrjung-- reinserted it; and, once agian, VV again reverted
him unceremoniously, making no comment other than "stop" in the edit
summary.

I'm getting loudly and roundly condemned for "edit warring." But the only
difference between Ruhrjung/John and me was that whereas they'd given up
after one attempt, I was equally persistent as you and VV. That's why you
want me banned-- for being just as committed to fighting censorship as you
and VV were committed to censorship. Perhaps Ruhrjung, John, and many others
were wise to give up. After all, had they stood up to you and your cohorts,
they too would've been run out of town.

Oh, you and VV are sure going to have fun rewriting history with me gone.

-172

_________________________________________________________________
Check out the coupons and bargains on MSN Offers! http://youroffers.msn.com


from_name: Jim Cecropia

subject: [WikiEN-l] Test to see if everyone is getting this message at Wiki

body:
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from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Fundraising

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Jimmy-
>
>
>>In my opinion, we are going to need another $100,000 of equipment by
>>the end of the year, *and* we can *easily* raise that from donations
>>from the general public.
>>
>>
>Yes. A $100K fundraising drive makes sense, but at least *some* content
>should be up - at least the squids serving pages in offline mode. That's
>because many of our visitors come from Google, and if fundraising is the
>first thing they see - and no content - they will be turned away.
>
>We should also have realtime updates of funds coming in, this can
>dramatically increase participation. This isn't that hard to do as PayPal
>provides an interface for it:
>https://www.paypal.com/en/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/xcl/rec/ipn-intro
>
>Lastly, I think hardware alone is not enough. We need a fulltime
>professional systems administrator with direct access to the machines.
>Within a $100K budget that is certainly viable. If Brion wants a new job,
>I'd say he should be immediately offered this opportunity.
>
Since we haven't decided yet what hardware we need, or studied how much
it will cost, we don't know how accurate the $100,000 figure is.
However, I'm inclined to take Jimbo's estimate as applying to hardware
costs alone, not possible employee salaries. Given the growth in our
traffic, and the fact that our equipment is not yet adequate to handle
crisis situations, I think we have a lot to do just on the hardware front.

I don't mean to dispute that we are close to the point where paid
employees are necessary, and I agree that Brion is one of the first
people we should consider in that regard, if he's interested. (By the
way, Brion, I'm sorry I don't know how to say this in Esperanto, but
thanks for your efforts in getting the site back up, and you've
certainly earned having a day in your honor.)

However, in terms of financial planning, employee salaries are a
separate consideration from hardware, and not something we can address
through periodic fundraising drives. Salaries are an ongoing cost, and
in order to have employees we need to develop a revenue stream that can
support these costs. The revenue can be from general public donations or
some other source (grants?), but it must be reasonably reliable. Right
now, regular donation levels (outside of specific fundraising efforts)
are not even enough to support the cost of having one employee, even a
part-time one. People will be a lot more critical of our financial
management skills if we're asking for money "so we can make payroll".

In many businesses and organizations, employee salaries and benefits are
the single biggest expense, sometimes more than all other costs put
together. That may not ever be the case here, since we have the efforts
of so many fine volunteers. But if we are going to start hiring
employees, we need to have a good idea that we can pay them on a
continuing basis. Ideally, Larry Sanger should be the last person this
project has to lay off for financial reasons.

--Michael Snow
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from_name: Natalia =?UNKNOWN?Q?Men=E9ndez?=

subject: [Foundation-l] permission

body:
>
> I am writing to different websites to ask for permission to incorporate

> into a print publication (a textbook) some  materials.
> Those materials are to appear as published (in case my book is
accepted
> for publication)  in the following work: English for Information
> and Communication Technology, a textbook for Spanish students of
> technical English, which I am currently preparing for publication.
> The texts will be part of the reading comprehension activities.
> I have read the  Verbatim copying in the web page, and I would like
> to know if I can use texts from Wikipedia ad refer to the them using
> the conventional scholarly form of acknowledgement at the end of
> the texbook (including the title of the text and the page of my book
> where it appears as well as the referece to Wikipedia)
> Thank you in advance.
> Yours sincerely,
> Natalia Menendez, Ph.D
>
>

===================================================================
EASY and FREE access to your email anywhere: http://Mailreader.com/
Powered by Debian: http://www.debian.org
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subject: [Foundation-l] permission


from_name: Ralesk Ne'vennoyx

subject: [Wikipedia-l] I am STILL unfairly banned!

body:
sada asda wrote:

> I am not a previous user who was formerly banned. I have not committed
> any wrongs. I have merely disagreed with User:172 over the content of an
> article, and now I am being blacklisted and denied even a pretense of
> fair treatment!
>
> My posts are not accepted at the english mailing list, I am banned from
> the chatroom, I am personally attacked and insulted by numerous users,
> and I am currently banned without the support of Jimbo Wales, or the
> arbitration committee!!!!!!!!
>
> This is not fair. This is not reasonable. This is not acceptable.
>
And how many times are you going to post this on wikipedia-l and not
even react to the answers given to you?

I believe Fennec said it well: ?You're not helping your cause.?  In
fact, you are tickling ''my'' troll alarm, and that?s something that?s
not easy to do.

--
R.


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] Ban policy

body:
John Robinson wrote:

> User JRR Trollkien [...] was blocked by an administrator before he had
> made 20 edits.
> [...]
> c) at least a month of which was caused by some sort of crazy
> departure from the case itself ("JRR Trollkien is an offensive name".
> Where did that come from? Why was that even put forth?)

The reason for the discussion of the username is that the initial block
was justified on the basis of his username, along the lines of "the name
JRR Trollkien is obviously implying he is a troll and therefore should
be banned".  The discussion was therefore whether this was a legitimate
reason to ban a user.  Content did not enter into it, as he was banned
before anybody even had a chance to complain about his content.
Subsequently, some content complaints have also emerged, but there is
far from consensus on the matter.

I'd suggest your frustration may stem from the fact that you take a
particular viewpoint on who ought to edit Wikipedia that not everyone
here does.  Wik, for example, has quite a few people calling for him to
be banned, but also quite a few people who do not think he ought to be
banned.  In many cases both sides are equally at fault (many of the
people Wik has been in edit wars with could just as easily be ban
candidates themselves), so unless we are simply going to be banning lots
of people left and right, it takes some time to sort out the few cases
in which there is absolutely no option but to ban people.  I also don't
respect the "good contributors have left because of Wik" argument
either.  That's a temper-tantrum sort of "people didn't do what I wanted
so I'm going home!!" thing, and I don't think we can let that sort of
thing influence Wikipedia decisions.  For what it's worth, good
contributors would also leave if we banned Wik, and far more would leave
if we were regularly banning people, especially people in relatively
borderline cases.

-Mark


subject: [Wikitech-l] QueryPage cache

body:
The querycache table stores up to 1000 items from the miser'd special
pages (currently Ancientpages, Deadendpages, Lonelypages, Longpages,
Popularpages, Shortpages, Wantedpages) so that display of the special
pages can be done quickly with pre-cached data and nice, navigable
display. (You can change the number of items shown and scroll through,
and wantedpages that are created ought to show as such though i've not
tested this.)

The good: quick response and reasonable display of pages like:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spezial:Wantedpages
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Especial:Lonelypages
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Ancientpages

The bad: it takes a long time to rebuild all the caches for all the
wikis. I've been running it for an hour and it's only up to 'fa' (doing
wikipedia and wiktionary interleaved). For en.wikipedia it's
sufficiently slow that they back up and really slug things down; I ended
up canceling most of the runs on enwiki to keep things running smoothly.

The script to run the rebuilding is recache-all-specials in
/home/wikipedia/bin (it's just a big mass URL hitter.)

So, while reading from the querycache is *great*, we could still use
some improvements on making the original queries more efficient.
Wantedpages and Lonelypages are particularly nasty on superhuge wikis.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: rose.parks at att.net

body:
--

-------------- Original message from Mr Paul Vogel : --------------
> Please respond or reply back to this message so that I
> can be sure that you are getting this message.
>
> Thanks!
>
> -Paul Vogel
> http://www.cosmotheism.net
>
>
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Photos: High-quality 4x6 digital prints for 25?
> http://photos.yahoo.com/ph/print_splash
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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from_name: Anthere

body:
Viajero wrote:

> Actually, it was a good suggestion. I left a message on Camembert's talk page yesterday asking him if he wanted to coordinate with classical music categories with me and a similar message on another user's page who is interested in Latin American topics. Alas, this was shortly before the database server went belly-up...
>
>
> V.

I am glad then :-)
Perhaps you could at the same time define which areas are not yet
covered and really should be ?

ant


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Not a lynch mob

body:
Jim Cecropia wrote:
> Well, "lynch mob" has a meaning in US culture beyond literally
> "stringing someone up" "extra-judicially." It refers to an atmosphere in
> which the question on the table which can be stated: "We're fed up this
> guy, podners, what're ya gonna do about it?" I see some of that here.
> I've had an unpleasant run-in in an issue in which 172 was a part, and I
> do think he is too aggressive and arbitrary; but I've also come to
> realize that he is one of the best contributors to Wikipedia. This
> shouldn't give him (or anyone) a "pass" to become a "super-user," but I
> think our efforts should focus on how we can get experienced
> contributors to follow certain basic rules without "banning," which is
> an insult, rather than a time-out. Maybe it's not possible, but I think
> the desire for collegiality should make us think.

I think you mention an important point here.
What about a collection of civil duties that good contributors will have
to take care of each time they have not followed certain basic rules ?


body:
Well, errr, don't worry. Things will sort out on time :-)
You are correct that bots may cause problems...

I fear I disagree with you when you say "everyone knows everything about
it but me". Categories seem a bit anarchic right now (well, last time I
succeeded to edit was 2 days ago...) and it seems functionalities bits
were forgotten in software update. No one knows everything. Ever :-)

I'd like to support a comment made previously. It has to do with
categories and meta tagging.

Proper meta tagging will allow our content to be neatly organised and
easy to search. Proper meta tagging implies neat categories, which may
be crossed by other neat categories. Internet is a huge mess of data,
most of them are very poorly referenced. We'll become a serious
reference if our content is cleanly tagged, hence searchable with
complex queries.

[[list of museums in Australia with a chinese flag hanging above the
entrance door]] is of no use.

Search "[[museum]]" where "[[country]] is 'australia'" and "[[topic]] is
'China'" is useful.

To be useful, meta-tags must be large rather than very specific. Query
gives the specificity.

K Forstner wrote:
> Anthere,
>
> I'm sorry for any/all misunderstandings. You know, I'm not against Rambots
> updating information on obscure American towns, but the bots whose aim it
> was to de-link disambiguation pages caused some silly lines on a number of
> pages, especially in a linguistic context (which is not that rare) when you
> want to point exactly to the fact that a word has several meanings.
>
> Anyway, I'm clearly out of touch with the rest of the discussion. No one
> ever reacts to my contributions (you are the exception here), so I seem to
> have no idea what Wikipedia discussions are currently all about. I mean I
> can't even access it, but everyone seems to know everything about it except
> me.
>
> I'll have to wait till Wikipedia is online again to see the status quo on
> categorizations.
>
> All the best,
>
> KF


subject: [Wikitech-l] some profiling results

body:
Hello,

I have made some profiling loading my mediawiki main page (
http://www.twenkill.net/wiki/ ) wich use phptal monobook skin and is set
to use the french language. For profilling I used "Advanced php profiler".

The first trouble I found is that loading the page use up to 8417176
bytes of memory ! It looks like mediawiki is including every single
possible classes script even if it will not use it.

I noticed some possible candidates for fixing:

MEMORY:
1/ Skins:
I use the monobook phptal as default skin but the software also loads
the three skin classes SkinStandard.php, SkinNostalgia.php,
SkinCologneBlue.php . They should only be called if they are the default
skins or the current user skin. Save close to 200KB memory.

2/ Feed:
The feed class is loaded in Skin.php only to retriew the available feeds
(through an array in feed.php), that call should only be made for
syndicated pages.
Similary, the LogPage, DifferenceEngine and SearchEngine aren't usefull
for articles. Save 30KB, 340KB and 200KB respectivly.

CPU:
1/ looks like languagefr->ucfirst use about 20% of the total script time
for the sole purpose of uppercasing the first char of a given string by
calling strtr(). Maybe the strings could be declared as utf-8 and a php
function like uppercase() called instead ? I think Tim Starling looked a
bit at this.

2/ wfprofileout use 5% although it's an empty function. Using single
quote instead of double seems to have improved it a bit :)

3/ do_html_entity_decode use close to 4% maybe it could be replaced by
the php function html_entity_decode() that looks to make the same task
(php >= 4.3.0)

That's all for this night. For the memory issue, it looks like a fix
would be to instant a user object first (to get its options) then an
article object (to see if it's a feed / special page) then create skin.

--
Ashar Voultoiz
[[fr:Utilisateur:Hashar]]


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Fundraising

body:
I also think we are reaching a point where perhaps
someone will need to be hired.

However, I'd like to point out that it seems to me
that more organisation would be a good way to go as
well. No person on a payroll is ever available 24
hours a day, so just paying *one* person to do
technical maintenance will *not* suffice to fix
technical issues such as what happened two days ago.

When WP blew up, Brion was not available, not
reachable. Several developers spent a lot of time
trying to fix things. They tried to contact Brion and
Shaihulud. No one had Shaihulud references. Perhaps
would it be best that more developers are involved,
that they can contact one another more easily, that
they are more up-to-date with infrastructure status
and caracteristics ?

Now, should we start a fundraising campaign ?

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Friends.  Fun.  Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger.
http://messenger.yahoo.com/


body:
Other people are going to reorganize "your" article from time to time or at
least try to. This can be done in good faith, or perhaps in bad faith,
'let's get rid of this "crap"'. Bryan Derken's effort appears to have been
in good faith. I think the better approach would have been to let him try it
out, then evaluate it and if it is not hopeless, correct whatever problems
come up. Saying No upfront is a power play in a situation where, despite
being the major author, you actually have no power. Thus, to prevail, you
have to be pretty aggressive.

Fred

> From: "Abe Sokolov" <abesokolov at hotmail.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Tue, 08 Jun 2004 09:43:43 +0000
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: Summary style (was Re: [WikiEN-l] Response to Bryan Derken)
>
> I did not get a good first impression of your editing style based on my
> experiences in that specific encounter either. You were utterly unengaged
> with the narrative and the historical aspects of the article. You only
> seemed concerned about shuffling around text, titles, series boxes, pages,
> and the like. But did you stop to figure other whether you knew what you
> were doing?


body:
I would really like to see that article divided into two articles, one
called Danzig, one Gdansk, with the Danzig article about the long German
heritage, the article Gdansk about the present Polish city with historical
emphasis on Polish matters. I know this is Wikinfo philosopy but why can't
we try it out here in this one case?

Fred

> From: Magnus Link <ruhrjung at yahoo.de>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Tue, 8 Jun 2004 09:24:49 +0200 (CEST)
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] semi-permanent protection of (very) contentious articles
>
> Is it maybe soon time to make a little modification to
> Wikipedia's policy on protection, to allow
> contentious articles to be long-term protected - in
> order to stimulate the use of talk pages instead of
> edit wars?
>
> The article on Gdansk is once again protected. Of
> course it's the wrong version that's fixated for some
> time now.
>
> Not only the wrong version in my personal view, but
> the wrong version from the perspective of numerous
> serious attmpts to solve the conflict in accordance
> with Wikipedia customs.
>
> The character of the long-standing conflict is not
> much different from that of the recently discussed
> Pinochet article. Maybe the chief difference is that
> it does not touch the interest of the English speaking
> world, and therefore attracts not much attention from
> the Wikipedia community.
>
> However, many contributors have put much time and
> effort into the dispute solving process; and as being
> one of these contributors I start to feel that all
> that energy is badly rewarded.
>
> /M.L.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Mit sch?nen Gr??en von Yahoo! Mail - http://mail.yahoo.de
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

body:
On Monday 07 June 2004 21:44, K Forstner wrote:
> I'm sorry for any/all misunderstandings. You know, I'm not against Rambots
> updating information on obscure American towns, but the bots whose aim it
> was to de-link disambiguation pages caused some silly lines on a number of
> pages, especially in a linguistic context (which is not that rare) when you
> want to point exactly to the fact that a word has several meanings.

That also can happen with people, not only with bots. When it does, I
reambiguate with comment <!-- don't disambiguate because ... -->


body:
On Monday 07 June 2004 20:13, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> --- Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> > Stan Shebs wrote:
> > > there are a couple of different approaches. One is to
> > > create categories for every conjunction of categories - if you have
> > > "hotels" and "museums" and "Ohio", that means you should have "hotels
> > > in Ohio" and "museums in Ohio" categories.
> >
> > I favour this approach. Without it, [[Category:Museums]] would contain
> > *all* museums in the world (millions!), and [[Category:Ohio]] would
> > contain absolutely *everything* about Ohio (cities, museums,
> > exhibitions, operas, theatres, cinemas, railways, bus lines,
> > sightseeing, TV stations, and all sorts of other unrelated things).
>
> That is simply bad database design. A user should be able to select
> [Museums] WITHIN [Ohio] or just [Museums] or even just [Ohio]. Otherwise
> different tags will be needed for all possible combinations of museums,
> sport stadiums, or amusement parks in every single area of the world. It
> would be much better to have tags for the places and tags for things. Let
> the user decide what combination of variables he or she wants to select.
> That will require an advanced search capability to be added to MediaWiki,
> but I assume that was planned anyway.

Haven't I just wrote that I have a patch which does exactly that?
Category:Museums/Ohio returns all pages in Category:Museums and
Category:Ohio.


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

body:
Abe, I don't think I abused any powers whatsoever. Nonetheless, if there
is any specific action or statement of mine you object to, I am willing
in good faith to take it back.

I would like to settle this issue courteously and reasonably. I believe
you are a man of good motives and high intellectual ability.

As far as I know, despite my initial query about whether "we" can ban
you and VerilyVerily, you have NOT been banned. I can't say I've read
every post word for word, but I seem to recall Fred Bauder of the
Arbitration Committee affirming that you remain a contributor in good
standing. (I don't recall anyone specifically supporting a ban on your
user:172 account, but Erik or someone recommended blocking you from a
specific article -- perhaps "Augusto Pinochet" which seems to be at the
focus of this dispute.)

If anyone else thinks I've taken advantage of my sysop powers or of the
wrangle over your membership, to take out or put in ANYTHING in a
Wikipedia article, I am willing to step away from editing that article.
In fact, to show good faith, even if you are the ONLY ONE who feels that
way, go ahead and revert. Mark it something like "undoing Ed's abuse of
power" and I'll leave it at that. Fair enough?

I is not true that I "used admin powers to ram my way through", but if
you or anyone else thinks so, then I'll simply stop editing for a while.
That is, until this issue is resolved.

Please note that I didn't read your post of Monday, June 07, 2004 4:02
PM until Tuesday, June 08, 2004 at 9:30 A.M., so I made a bunch of edits
to "Augusto Pinochet" this morning. I will avoid making any further
edits on that article and others related to it -- other than the talk
pages -- until there is general consensus that I am free to do so.

Think of this as placing myself under house arrest, if you wish.

Ed Poor


from_name: Constans, Camille (C.C.)

subject: [Wikitech-l] Big crash 6/6

body:
>
>Ariel has crashed a couple times in the last day so it's not
>reliable at
>present. Might be hardware, might be software. Needs testing. Will
>probably use another machine as a slave.
>

We dont have another server with enough space to be used as slave....

Shaihulud


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>Abe, I don't think I abused any powers whatsoever. Nonetheless, if there
>is any specific action or statement of mine you object to, I am willing
>in good faith to take it back.
>
>I would like to settle this issue courteously and reasonably. I believe
>you are a man of good motives and high intellectual ability.
>
>As far as I know, despite my initial query about whether "we" can ban
>you and VerilyVerily, you have NOT been banned. I can't say I've read
>every post word for word, but I seem to recall Fred Bauder of the
>Arbitration Committee affirming that you remain a contributor in good
>standing. (I don't recall anyone specifically supporting a ban on your
>user:172 account, but Erik or someone recommended blocking you from a
>specific article -- perhaps "Augusto Pinochet" which seems to be at the
>focus of this dispute.)
>
>I is not true that I "used admin powers to ram my way through", but if
>you or anyone else thinks so, then I'll simply stop editing for a while.
>That is, until this issue is resolved.
>
>Think of this as placing myself under house arrest, if you wish.
>
>
I think that Ed has been around long enough to know that a title like
"Should we ban Xxxx" is bound to raise the fever level of discussion.
This is NOT an abuse of sysop powers, because anybody can create such a
title without being a sysop.

Any such title immediately prejudices the situation against the person
named, although VV received considerably less discussion than 172.
Perhaps that's just because more of us have had encounters with 172.

The dramatic flair that you suggest is not required from you.  I would
expect that a sysop should participate in toning down a debate.  Using
more neutral email subject headings would be a positive development.  A
title like a simple "172 vs. VV" is far more neutral than "Shall we ban
172 and VV".
Perhaps all of us who want to respond to such an item on the list should
remove the word "ban" from the title of the response.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Press Questions on Wikipedia

body:
Fennec Foxen wrote:

>On Tue, 13 Apr 2004 03:20:23 -0700 (PDT), DJ <mister_stud at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>> My name is Daniel and I'm a writer for the Paradise
>>Valley Community College newspaper in Phoenix,
>>Arizona. I wanted to ask a few questions about your
>>site Wikipedia. If you can get back to me prior to
>>Thursday the 13th, I would appericate any questions
>>you would be willing to answer. Thanks for your time!
>>
>>
>
>What do you want to know?
>
>
I think that this was one of the old items that Brion cleared from the
approvals for the mailing list.  Given the date of the message, he may
not be around to answer.  :-)

Ec


from_name: Magnus Link

subject: [WikiEN-l] semi-permanent protection of (very) contentious articles

body:
Is it maybe soon time to make a little modification to
Wikipedia's policy on protection, to allow
contentious articles to be long-term protected - in
order to stimulate the use of talk pages instead of
edit wars?

The article on Gdansk is once again protected. Of
course it's the wrong version that's fixated for some
time now.

Not only the wrong version in my personal view, but
the wrong version from the perspective of numerous
serious attmpts to solve the conflict in accordance
with Wikipedia customs.

The character of the long-standing conflict is not
much different from that of the recently discussed
Pinochet article. Maybe the chief difference is that
it does not touch the interest of the English speaking
world, and therefore attracts not much attention from
the Wikipedia community.

However, many contributors have put much time and
effort into the dispute solving process; and as being
one of these contributors I start to feel that all
that energy is badly rewarded.

/M.L.

Mit sch?nen Gr??en von Yahoo! Mail - http://mail.yahoo.de


from_name: Abe Sokolov

body:
bryan.derksen at shaw.ca wrote:
"So it's not surprising that I would use a lot of "character flaw"-type
language and that my posting wouldn't be particularly constructive as far as
the debate over the article itself is concerned, since the subject I was
focusing on was (my opinion of) character."

I did not get a good first impression of your editing style based on my
experiences in that specific encounter either. You were utterly unengaged
with the narrative and the historical aspects of the article. You only
seemed concerned about shuffling around text, titles, series boxes, pages,
and the like. But did you stop to figure other whether you knew what you
were doing?

Perhaps I should've spent more time briefing you on all the complications
that would arise from your proposals instead of hoping that you'd figure
this out on your own after reviewing the talk page discussions and reading
the article. Still, do you expect everything to be spoon fed?

On that note, reconsider this point from an earlier posting:

"Notice that as the reader moves down the page, the narrative builds on
points already established in the text. Unless someone rewrote and
significantly expanded each section of the article, Bryan's proposals
would've left the individual components of the series superficial at best
and incoherent at worst."

To illustrate this (and the dangers of your impatient approach to
reorganizing articles on major historical topics), I copied and pasted onto
this e-mail below a portion text taken from the section "The internal
structure and character of the Republican Party." I noted in brackets all
the points that would be unclear if this section were to become a
self-standing article (like all sections, the prose of this particular
section was tailored to the placement of the section within the narrative).

Taken from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_American_Civil_War_%283/4%29#The_internal_structure_and_character_of_the_Republican_Party
:

"As the Democrats were grappling with their own troubles [What troubles?],
radicals in the Republican party [Who are the "radicals?"] fought against
the idea of "non-extension" [What's "non-extension?"] and fought to keep the
focus on the issue of slavery in the West [What issue of slavery in the
West? What contention?], which allowed them to mobilize a great deal of
popular support [Why is this the case?], at the focal point of political
discourse. Chase [Who's Chase?] wrote Sumner [Who's Sumner?] that if the
conservatives succeeded [Who? Conservative relative to whom?], it might be
necessary to recreate the Free Soil party [What's the Free Soil Party?]. He
was also particularly disturbed by the tendency of many Republicans to
eschew moral attacks on slavery for political and economic arguments [Why?].

As a caveat, it is important to note that the controversy over slavery in
the West was still not creating a fixation on the issue of slavery. Although
the old restraints on the sectional tensions were being eroded with the
rapid extension of mass politics and mass democracy in the North [How so?],
the perpetuation of conflict over the issue of slavery in the West still
required the efforts of certain Democrats in the South and radical
Republican politicians in the North [What efforts?]. They had to ensure that
the sectional conflict would remain at the center of the political debate.

William Seward [Again, who's Seward?], in fact, contemplated this potential
as far back as the 1840s, when the Democrats were the nation's majority
party, usually controlling Congress, the presidency, and many state offices.
At the time, the country's institutional structure and party system allowed
slaveholders to prevail in more and more of the nation's territories and to
garner a great deal of influence over national policy [Examples illustrating
this?]. With growing popular discontent with the unwillingness of many
Democratic leaders to take a stand against slavery [Taking what forms?], and
growing consciousness of the party's increasingly pro-Southern stance
[Pro-Southern in what ways?], Seward became convinced that the only way for
the party to counteract the Democrats' strong monopoly of the rhetoric of
democracy and equality was for the Whigs to embrace anti-slavery as a party
platform."

This should make it clear your proposals would require every single section
of the article to be rewritten, expanded, and recontextualized
significantly. (BTW, who's going to do that? I don't want to. I doubt that
Mav does; he wants less text-- not more text. Are you? If so, reorganization
comes with rewriting?and expanding?the entire entry) This is not as easy as
cut/paste, designing new boxes, and moving pages.

bryan.derksen at shaw.ca wrote:
"But my main concern is still whether you plan to continue using the threat
of edit wars in that discussion. Apologies don't matter much if the basic
problem remains unresolved."

I'm not at all sorry about that comment. You're just taking it the wrong
way. Right now, I oppose your proposals just as much as you support them;
the threat of an edit war is always implicit whenever this is the case
between two editors. My only crime there might be speaking an esoteric
truth. Anyway, all I meant was be patient (thus, adding a note about why you
might want to be patient) and continue negotiating. This doesn't mean that
I'm not listening.

-172

_________________________________________________________________
Getting married? Find great tips, tools and the latest trends at MSN Life
Events. http://lifeevents.msn.com/category.aspx?cid=married


from_name: Fennec Foxen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Press Questions on Wikipedia

body:
On Tue, 13 Apr 2004 03:20:23 -0700 (PDT), DJ <mister_stud at yahoo.com> wrote:
>  My name is Daniel and I'm a writer for the Paradise
> Valley Community College newspaper in Phoenix,
> Arizona. I wanted to ask a few questions about your
> site Wikipedia. If you can get back to me prior to
> Thursday the 13th, I would appericate any questions
> you would be willing to answer. Thanks for your time!

What do you want to know?


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fundraising

body:
Hi all,
It's a little bit strange to me to ask people money before to know exactly
what we need.
I think we first need to design the network we need to face the exponential
progression of Mediawiki projects.
Then we can think what hardware/software we need to make it (thus, know
about how much we need).
Then we can ask people to donate to buy this hardware.
Personnaly, instead of hear "we need $100,000" I prefer to hear "we need to
buy X, Y and Z that may cost around $100,000".
Just my POV.

By the way, do we have professional/competent people to design the complex
network we need? How much may cost a network analysis by a professional
company? May it help?

Aoineko

----- Original Message -----
From: "Delirium" <delirium at hackish.org>
To: <wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 2004 7:03 AM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Fundraising

> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
> >In my opinion, we are going to need another $100,000 of equipment by
> >the end of the year, *and* we can *easily* raise that from donations
> >from the general public.
> >
> >
> I think we'll need a decent justification of that to make sure everyone
> understands why we need the money and what we're going to do with it.
> $100,000 is a *lot* of money, and I can imagine at least some people
> will be skeptical that it's entirely necessary---we have to give them at
> least some plausible reason to believe that it's really not possible to
> run the site reasonably well on, say, $50,000 worth of equipment instead
> (which would still be a lot of equipment!).  At the very least a
> proposed parts list with some explanation of why we need the various
> parts (and can't do with cheaper replacement for the very-expensive
> ones) would help---even non-techie people who aren't going to read it
> all the way through will be somewhat mollified by at least seeing that
> we've taken the time to put something like that up.
>
> -Mark


subject:
Proliferation of "unfairly blocked" mails (was: [WikiEN-l] Can
	someone please explain to me...)

body:
Someone wrote:
> I was browsing through some topics in the wikipedia this morning, without problem.  This afternoon, I find myself ip-blocked.
> I have never edited or attempted to edit a page.  I don't even have a login for the site.

Then how did you get notified of your supposed IP block? What message
did you observe? What is the IP in question? And if you're not going
to bother making an account, why bother with the mailing list?

And in general, what is up with the proliferation of "unfairly
blocked" messages on the mailing list? They all seem to be from Yahoo
addresses as well- throwaway accounts, no doubt, and there is little
doubt that *many* of them are not legitimate.


subject: [WikiEN-l] questionable use of wikipedia content

body:
On Sun, 23 May 2004 21:44:10 +1200, leon breedt <ljb at bitserf.org> wrote:
> hi,
> i'm not sure that this is actually a violation of the GNU FDL, but:

You're looking for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks


subject: [WikiEN-l] Error on quadratic formula page

body:
On Sun, 30 May 2004 23:20:10 -0400 (EDT), kartik at townisp.com
<kartik at townisp.com> wrote:
> One day when I looked at the quadratic formula page, it mentioned another
> quadratic formula I had never seen before:
<snip>
On Wikipedia, I have a message I use for cases such as this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Sofixit

Without the links you'll get at the above page:

Hello, welcome to Wikipedia! We welcome your contributions. Wikipedia
is a wiki, and anyone- including you! - can edit nearly any article,
at any time, by clicking the Edit tab at the top of the page, next to
the tabs for Discussion and History. You don't even need to login,
although there are several reasons why you might want to. So, feel
free to be bold and make this correction yourself! If you are unsure
about how to edit a page, try out the Sandbox to test your editing
skills.


from_name: Marco Krohn

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Fundraising

body:
On Tuesday 08 June 2004 08:44, Michael Snow wrote:
> However, in terms of financial planning, employee salaries are a
> separate consideration from hardware, and not something we can address
> through periodic fundraising drives. Salaries are an ongoing cost, and
> in order to have employees we need to develop a revenue stream that can
> support these costs. The revenue can be from general public donations or
> some other source (grants?), but it must be reasonably reliable.

what about _limited_ ads? With limited I mean that individual wikipedias (en,
de, fr,...) can decide on their own if they want to increase Wikipedias
revenue stream or not, e.g. if "es" doesn't want ads no ads on their pages
will be shown. An additional option would be showing ads to anonymous viewers
only or vice versa to logged in users only, as far as they agree with that.
Me for example wouldn't mind if I see some ads if I know that this increases
Wikipedias revenue stream a bit.

I know I am opening Pandora's box, but if we need some constant revenue stream
then this is something we should at least think about. As long as there is an
easy way to remove ads, e.g. logged in users can switch ads off (or on) by
changing their preference entries, I would found it an acceptable solution.

best regards,
  Marco

--
Marco Krohn
Theoretical Physics
University of Hannover


subject:
[WikiEN-l] semi-permanent protection of (very) contentious
	articles

body:
On Tue, 08 Jun 2004 05:43:37 -0600, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
>
> I would really like to see that article divided into two articles, one
> called Danzig, one Gdansk, with the Danzig article about the long German
> heritage, the article Gdansk about the present Polish city with historical
> emphasis on Polish matters. I know this is Wikinfo philosopy but why can't
> we try it out here in this one case?

No, Wikinfo philosiphy is to have the "sympathetic point of view" and
allows multiple articles which cover the same content but with
different sympathies. On the other hand, there's nothing really
against Wikipedia "philosophy" (insofar as it exists) which is
incompatible with having two articles about different aspects of the
same thing (the city now, the city historically), which would cover
more or less mutually exclusive areas.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Fundraising

body:
On Tue, 8 Jun 2004 11:18:57 +0200, Marco Krohn <marco.krohn at web.de> wrote:
> what about _limited_ ads? With limited I mean that individual wikipedias (en,
> de, fr,...) can decide on their own if they want to increase Wikipedias
> revenue stream or not, e.g. if "es" doesn't want ads no ads on their pages
> will be shown. An additional option would be showing ads to anonymous viewers
> only or vice versa to logged in users only, as far as they agree with that.
> Me for example wouldn't mind if I see some ads if I know that this increases
> Wikipedias revenue stream a bit.

If there are any ads (not likely) I think they will be opt-in by user,
not by Wikipedia.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Snapshot wikipedia installations in schools

body:
On Tue, 8 Jun 2004 14:33:54 +0200, Andy Rabagliati <andyr at wizzy.com> wrote:
>
> Folks,
>
>   In conjunction with the Wizzy Digital Courier internet
>   access project http://wizzy.org.za/ I am considering
>   installing wikipedia.
>
No, no, no, I think you're planning on installing MediaWiki, and
setting it up with a *snapshot* of Wikipedia content. (let's play
pedantic so no one gets confused, eh? :)


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: New skin

body:
Timwi wrote:

> Magnus Manske wrote:
>
>> * There is no longer a "section edit" link for the very first section
>> (before the first heading).
>
> True. I'm missing it too. However, notice that you can use any
> section-editing link and manually change its URL by replacing the
> number at the end with a "0".

OK, so we can delay fixing that to the next "full" version :-)

>> * In Mono, I cannot turn off the underlined links.
>
> Yes, you can. Go to [[User:Magnus Manske/monobook.css]] and enter:
>   a { text-decoration: none; }

Thanks, that worked. But, we *do* have a user option for that. Shouldn't
we use that instead?

YAB (Yet Another Bug):
When I open an internal link in a new tab (FireFox 0.8) by clicking with
the middle mouse button, the link I clicked on suddenly shows the
"external link" symbol. Probably some CSS weirdness again.

Magnus


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: bug: HTML tags in some messages stay verbatim
	(eg:	MediaWiki:Addedwatchtext)

body:
Timwi wrote:
> The problem he described is reproducible. Go to the Turkish Wikipedia
> and try to add something to your watchlist.
>
> On en, you get:
>     The page "Latin alphabet" has been added to your _Watchlist_.
>
> On tr, you get:
>     The page "16 Haziran" has been added to your <a
>     href="/wiki/Special:Watchlist">watchlist</a>.
>
> This needs fixing.

Right, fix the translation to use wiki markup.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: Summary style (was Re: [WikiEN-l] Response to Bryan Derken)

body:
--- Abe Sokolov <abesokolov at hotmail.com> wrote:
>...
> On that note, reconsider this point from an earlier posting:
>
> "Notice that as the reader moves down the page, the narrative builds on
> points already established in the text. Unless someone rewrote and
> significantly expanded each section of the article, Bryan's proposals
> would've left the individual components of the series superficial at best
> and incoherent at worst."
>
> ....
>
> "As the Democrats were grappling with their own troubles [What troubles?],
> radicals in the Republican party [Who are the "radicals?"] fought against
> the idea of "non-extension" [What's "non-extension?"] and fought to keep the
> focus on the issue of slavery in the West [What issue of slavery in the
> West? What contention?], which allowed them to mobilize a great deal of
> popular support [Why is this the case?], at the focal point of political
> discourse. Chase [Who's Chase?] wrote Sumner [Who's Sumner?] that if the
> conservatives succeeded [Who? Conservative relative to whom?], it might be
> necessary to recreate the Free Soil party [What's the Free Soil Party?]. He
> was also particularly disturbed by the tendency of many Republicans to
> eschew moral attacks on slavery for political and economic arguments [Why?].

Just provide links and context via phrases and with parenthesis as needed. I
don't think anybody was proposing just ripping the text out and rearranging
things.

> ...
> This should make it clear your proposals would require every single section
> of the article to be rewritten, expanded, and recontextualized
> significantly. (BTW, who's going to do that? I don't want to. I doubt that
> Mav does; he wants less text-- not more text. Are you? If so, reorganization
> comes with rewriting?and expanding?the entire entry) This is not as easy as
> cut/paste, designing new boxes, and moving pages.

No - I want more text by adding a survey article that summarizes the whole
topic and provides links to the detailed parts that have already been written.
If those parts depend on context that has already been established by previous
parts, then those will have to have more context and links added so that they
can be both stand-alone articles and part of a series.

We should not be writing in a way that assumes a person is going to read from
page 1 straight to page 30 in order to be able to make sense of any page in
between. Some people will only be concerned about content in a middle section,
others in content at the end. We are building an encyclopedia here, not a
collection of books (Wikibooks are organized in a linear way, however). So our
articles cannot assume too much about what the person has already read.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Friends.  Fun.  Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger.
http://messenger.yahoo.com/


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Klingon resurrected

references:
<ca2g1a$ij8$1@sea.gmane.org> <9AUxRsUxpVB@erik_moeller>
	<ca4su5$pq0$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Timwi wrote:
> I just can't describe how angry I was and still am about the favouritism
> Toki Pona is receiving. It is totally infuriating, seriously.

It's not receiving any favoritism, it's just being utterly ignored. If I
hadn't mentioned it was a conlang, nobody'd have noticed. Klingon is
famous, and that makes people spend a lot of time and hot air talking
about it when we've all got better things to do.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] I am unfairly banned,
	until it is resolved I have little choice but to post here

body:
Sada,

Go through the mailing list and follow the Lir debate. You will find
that the people here do have quite a bit of experience with bans.

As far as things are concerned, you may state you case to me in
rational terms, and if your case has merit, I will see what I can do.
However, please consider that I will not help you if you are trying
to waste my time. My private email is at the bottom, so if you
prefer, it's available to you.

Please understand that everyone here is horribly busy.

--- sada asda <unfairlybanned2001 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I cannot "prove" my innocence; and it is ridiculous that I am being
> asked to defend myself against crimes which don't even exist. If I
> am a sockpuppet (which I am not), so what? Many users have more
> than one account. What wikipedia page states that sockpuppetry is a
> bannable offence? Regardless, Im not a sockpuppet!
>
> I should be unbanned, if you have a problem with me -- you can
> request mediation and then arbitration. The process should not be
> usurped by you people, simply because some of you have the power to
> do so.
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Friends.  Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger>
_______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

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

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Friends.  Fun.  Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger.
http://messenger.yahoo.com/


from_name: dpbsmith at verizon.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: semi-permanent protection of (very) contentious

body:
> From: Magnus Link <ruhrjung at yahoo.de>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] semi-permanent protection of (very) contentious
> 	articles
>
> Is it maybe soon time to make a little modification to
> Wikipedia's policy on protection, to allow
> contentious articles to be long-term protected - in
> order to stimulate the use of talk pages instead of
> edit wars?

If we start getting a lot of pages that are protected for this reason, I am
afraid we will see creative bad behavior that it intended to bypass this
protection. In order not to stimulate such behavior I will not give examples
of some possibilities that occur to me.

Just as we make reversions easier for sysops, but not impossible for regular
users... and just as some shareware does not require payment, but has an
annoying countdown timer and delay before the program starts if you have not
paid... I suggest we ask the developers for a way to "soft-protect" pages.

A "soft-protected" page could be edited by anyone, but would require some
annoying, time-consuming and (wishful thinking) thought-provoking steps to be
performed first.

For example, if you get to a soft-protected page by any usual route and click
"edit this page," it might take you to a screen that explains that the
subject is contentious. The only option to proceed takes you, not to the
article's Edit box, but to the article's Talk page. From the Talk page there
would be the usual link to the article, but it would carry some special tag
in the URL such that clicking on the article's Edit links _when reached via
this route_ would allow you to edit as usual.

Or something like that.

"Slow down, fella, let's talk this over," instead of "admission to authorized
personnel only."


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fundraising

body:
Just an idea so people can actually *see* what their money is used for:
Someone go to the server farm with a digital camera and take a picture
of our assorted hardware, with Jimbo in the middle, or Brion :-)

Then put it up on the fundraising page, saying "that's all we have, we
need a lot more to make wikipedia really fast and reliable".

Magnus

Delirium wrote:

> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>> In my opinion, we are going to need another $100,000 of equipment by
>> the end of the year, *and* we can *easily* raise that from donations
>> from the general public.
>>
>>
> I think we'll need a decent justification of that to make sure
> everyone understands why we need the money and what we're going to do
> with it.  $100,000 is a *lot* of money, and I can imagine at least
> some people will be skeptical that it's entirely necessary---we have
> to give them at least some plausible reason to believe that it's
> really not possible to run the site reasonably well on, say, $50,000
> worth of equipment instead (which would still be a lot of
> equipment!).  At the very least a proposed parts list with some
> explanation of why we need the various parts (and can't do with
> cheaper replacement for the very-expensive ones) would help---even
> non-techie people who aren't going to read it all the way through will
> be somewhat mollified by at least seeing that we've taken the time to
> put something like that up.
>
> -Mark
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] content validation

body:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_validation

build little by little with irc discussion :-)

Please offer feedback : add your comments and suggestions.

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Press Questions on Wikipedia

body:
On Tue, 08 Jun 2004 09:05:43 -0700, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> I think that this was one of the old items that Brion cleared from the
> approvals for the mailing list.  Given the date of the message, he may
> not be around to answer.  :-)

Goodness. I thought he meant June 18. That *is* an old thread... :)


from_name: Troels Arvin

subject: [Wikitech-l] Alt-B

body:
Hello,

In the new default skin, the Alt-B key combination seems to bound to the
"what links here" function. Alt-B is normally the shortcut to the
bookmarks, at least in my browser (Mozilla Firefox). I find the binding to
"what links here" rather annoying, because it blocks me from a keyboard
shortcut. I doubt that I'm the only one annoyed by this.

I suggest that the Alt-B key mapping be dropped or changed to something
else.

--
Greetings from Troels Arvin, Copenhagen, Denmark


from_name: Andy Rabagliati

body:
Folks,

  In conjunction with the Wizzy Digital Courier internet
  access project http://wizzy.org.za/ I am considering
  installing wikipedia.

  Wizzy Digital Courier is primarily to enable Internet access
  for countries / communities that cannot afford daytime
  internet access, due to Telcom monopolies and per-minute
  local telephone charges.

  In two pilot schools, I have installed wikipedia on their
  intranet, with great success. After initial skeptism from
  teachers, it has become a very useful resource.

  I install the wikimedia tarball, and a weekly snapshot.

  Due to the time taken to download new snapshots, I only
  do these between semesters - it can take a week or so to
  download, using UUCP at cheap rates in evenings and weekends.

  After feedback from teachers, I have two requests :-

  1.	Graphics	(you knew that was coming !)

	To determine feasibility of this, can you give me
	an idea of the size of a potential graphics archive ?
	An incremental snapshot would almost be mandatory for
	this, I think.

  2.	A daily SQL update for the main page.

  	This will give it a newsy feel, instead of talking
	about Mandarin Chinese for two months :-) I know
	that some of the articles it refers to will not be
	available, but ... tough.

  Thanks again for an invaluable resource that almost replaces
  the web at one fell swoop in places that cannot afford the web.

Cheers,    Andy!


from_name: Delirium

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: a humble request about the category display bug

body:
Timwi wrote:

> The categories shouldn't be inside the article itself; they should be
> moved further up a bit:

I'd prefer they were moved to approximately where the "other languages"
links currently are.

-Mark


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Klingon resurrected

references:
<ca2g1a$ij8$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<9AUxRsUxpVB@erik_moeller>	<ca4su5$pq0$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<40C60A20.5080805@pobox.com>

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
>> I just can't describe how angry I was and still am about the
>> favouritism Toki Pona is receiving. It is totally infuriating,
>> seriously.
>
>
> It's not receiving any favoritism, it's just being utterly ignored. If
> I hadn't mentioned it was a conlang, nobody'd have noticed. Klingon is
> famous, and that makes people spend a lot of time and hot air talking
> about it when we've all got better things to do.

Of course!  Without actually calling the klingophiles trolls, the
"Ignore the trolls" principle still applies.  The Klingon language would
be less successful if it were given full privileges so the everyone
could then actively ignore it. :-)

Ec


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] some profiling results

body:
Ashar-
> Hello,

> I have made some profiling loading my mediawiki main page (
> http://www.twenkill.net/wiki/ ) wich use phptal monobook skin and is set
> to use the french language. For profilling I used "Advanced php profiler".

Let's not forget intermittent slow queries, we still have a few of them.
Watchlists are still quite slow - I haven't looked into how the wl_cache
works, but it doesn't seem to use cached data for generating new
watchlists (i.e. only lookup changes that aren't in the cache).
Ancientpages bogged down the server recently, it doesn't seem to be using
the index properly; we may want to add it to the query cache for the time
being. Special:Contributions gets slow when people start digging with
large offsets. Special:Undelete appears to have no paging, which makes it
slow when the archive is large.

Regards,

Erik


body:
Andy Rabagliati wrote:

>  1.	Graphics	(you knew that was coming !)
>
>	To determine feasibility of this, can you give me
>	an idea of the size of a potential graphics archive ?
>	An incremental snapshot would almost be mandatory for
>	this, I think.
>
>
Well, the *German* images sum up to ~1GB, so the English ones /might/
still fit on a DVD...

>  2.	A daily SQL update for the main page.
>
>  	This will give it a newsy feel, instead of talking
>	about Mandarin Chinese for two months :-) I know
>	that some of the articles it refers to will not be
>	available, but ... tough.
>
>
There are wikipedia "offline readers" under construction - my "Waikiki",
and a "WikiRover". Both use their own rendereing software and a sqlite
database, which opens the possibility of a daily sync with the wikipedia
database. Nothing definite so far.

Magnus


subject: [WikiEN-l] Toronto Star quote with (sic)

body:
Theresa Robinson wrote:

>The Toronto Star has an article which very briefly mentions Wikipedia:
>http://paul.ca/u/2b57
>
>'According to wikipedia.org, "A weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a
>human guide who (sic) you get to know."'
>
>It's good that Wikipedia is prominent enough that it can be quoted briefly
>without a description.
>
>On the other hand, what's with the (sic)?  Is the author picking on the
>'who' vs 'whom' distinction?  And the quote is from a quote, and it was
>attributed to Wikipedia, and not Dave Winer, who is quoted.
>
>
Fixed!  Now when someone looks at the article, they will see that the
"sic!" is a part of it. :-)

Ec


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

body:
On Tue, 8 Jun 2004, Magnus Manske wrote:

>
>Andy Rabagliati wrote:
>
>>  1.	Graphics	(you knew that was coming !)
>>
>>	To determine feasibility of this, can you give me
>>	an idea of the size of a potential graphics archive ?
>>	An incremental snapshot would almost be mandatory for
>>	this, I think.
>>
>>
>Well, the *German* images sum up to ~1GB, so the English ones /might/
>still fit on a DVD...

They do. Images on en: sum up to almost 2GB.

Alfio


body:
Jay Bowks wrote:

>From: "Andy Rabagliati" <andyr at wizzy.com>
>
>
>>Folks,
>> [...]
>> Due to the time taken to download new snapshots, I only
>>  do these between semesters - it can take a week or so to
>>  download, using UUCP at cheap rates in evenings and weekends.
>>  1. Graphics (you knew that was coming !)
>>
>>
>
>Hi Andy,
>I work with three different
>school districts in SW New
>Hampshire, USA. We have
>the students using Wikipedia
>as a resource with different
>access. One school has an
>AOL dial up account at
>33.6k another a frame
>relay connection and one
>more on local cable broad
>band. We've tried it all!
>
>One outlying school cannot
>afford a live fulltime connection
>and we download whole websites
>and mirror them on the server when
>requested by teachers, so the process
>is during nighttime. For this school
>I've brought a lot of information on
>CD-R's, shared it out of the drive
>and have the kids access the info.
>These are all just ways to make do,
>untill they get faster access in the
>area, (which is very rural).
>
>I was thinking that if you could use
>a backup sent to you on CD-R or a
>DVD of whatever images or tarballs
>will be needed it would save you
>incredible amounts of download time,
>wouldn't it?
>
>
>>  2. A daily SQL update for the main page.
>>
>>
>Even a weekend update would be quite
>recent and something to look forward
>to for the students and teachers.
>
>
>>  Thanks again for an invaluable resource that almost replaces
>>  the web at one fell swoop in places that cannot afford the web.
>>Cheers,    Andy!
>>
>>
>
>I wholeheartedly agree, Andy.
>I feel that Wikipedia is an excellent
>resource for schools!
>
Andy brings the problem down to earth.  We can still find places with
limited Internet access without having to look in Africa.  The United
States has some of the best colleges and universities in the world, but
an OECD study a couple years ago showed that education at the elementary
and secondary levels it is remarkable for the inconsistent quality
between one district and an other.

The poorer school districts need all the help they can get.

Ec