subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Action plan for 1.0 - news style intros should
	be recommended more strongly

body:
David Gerard wrote:

> On 07/19/04 01:53, Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
>> --- Mark Ryan <ultrablue at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>> If we are meant to be only be using short stubbish articles for
>>> everything (I have heard some people saying using only the first
>>> paragraph of articles), then how will we keep this separate from the
>>> main articles? Go the same way as monobook.css and have it like
>>> [[Christianity/stub]]? There are little conceptual problems that need
>>> to be thought through before we jump in head-first into preparing for
>>> this.
>>
>
>> Section 0 of every article should ideally have a lead section in it
>> that acts
>> as a concise summary of the entire article. Each of those lead
>> sections should
>> then be usable as concise encyclopedia articles in a single volume desk
>> reference (with maybe an overview also thrown in for some subjects).
>> Selection
>> of articles and validation of those sections would still be needed,
>> of course.
>> Thus nothing need be compromised on Wikipedia.
>
>
> Absolutely. That's why a strict [[news style]] [[inverted pyramid]]
> intro -
> first sentence, first paragraph, following paragraphs in order of
> droppability
> - is my very favourite article intro style.
>
> Currently, [[Wikipedia:News style]] speaks of it as almost optional.
> I strongly suggest this status be upgraded, something like: "Although
> optional, a news style intro is strongly recommended if you want an
> article
> to be in Wikipedia 1.0 - many print articles are likely to be only the
> intro
> of the web article." Thoughts?
>
> (Note that none of the 1.0 plans so far detract from the live wiki
> itself,
> and in fact would increase both its coverage and quality in useful ways.)

Although there is much merit to having the initial section of an article
give a general overview of the topic.  I don't think that the
application of "news style should extend any further than that.
Wikipedia is not a newspaper.  Being able to drop paragraphs at the end
of an article to fit the available space is fine for newspapers who have
short daily deadlines to meet.  The weeklies have more freedom on this
and monthlies and quarterlies even more.

A biographical article needs to present the person's life in a
chronological structure.  Many famous people had some of their most
significant events at the end of their lives.  What would a biography of
Lincoln or Kennedy be like if we had to cut the story of their
assassination  as a means of making those articles shorter?.

I can see that the desire to have a large number of articles is driving
the move the have severable opening stubs.

The important question comes down to is it better to have a large number
of short articles, or a much smaller number of comprehensive,
well-written and thoughtful articles.

When it is finally published, the hype will have preceded the event, and
created high expectations.  Which would be a better review?
    1. The new paper Wikipedia is a collection of short articles.  The
material appears very accurate, but any person who browses the net
could have found all this very easily.  Why did they bother?

or

    2. The new paper Wikipedia is a series of interesting and very
informative article.  Interspersed are a number of shorter articles with
a promise that these subjects will receive more thorough treatment in
the future.  We look forward to those future editions.

Ec


list: foundation-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Many thanks to Walter, developers, Tomos...

body:
Walter Vermeir wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>> I'd like to thank Walter, who manage to fix that very annoying bug on
>> foundation-l. He contacted gmane to report the problem, and the
>> newsgroup for the legal list is now closed. Gmane is fully working
>> again :-)
>>
>> ant
>
>
> I only send a email Anthere :)

But *that* mail fixed a nearly 2 months old issue :-)

> But why not make this a thank you thread?
>
> I like to thank the developers for that fantastic system for setting up
> a new WikiQuote wiki. Enter the url of the wikiquote of your disere and
> you get the message that it does not exist. But you get a button for
> "create new wiki" and it even works! I have now a brand new wiki to play
> whit.

I'd like to thank Tomos for his thoughtful and quiet comments :-)

> I hope there will come more of those automatic functions like activating
> the function for updating the logo of a wiki by use of uploading Wiki.png

Ohhhh, a wish list... may I ?

(restraining myself...)


list: wikimedia-l


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Forming an action plan for 1.0

body:
Sj wrote:
> Please remember that we '''do not need developer effort''' to move towards
> Wikipedia 1.0.

Yeah I've heard that before. Coding features is vastly easier than
organising Wikipedians. If someone puts some pretty buttons on Wikipedia
saying things like "review this article" and "mark for concise version",
then people will start clicking them. Policies will emerge out of the
chaos that ensues, and everything will come together. If someone wrote
the feature 6 months ago, we'd be ready to print by now.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 07/19/04 14:22, Magnus Manske wrote:
> Tim Starling wrote:
>> Sj wrote:

>>> Please remember that we '''do not need developer effort''' to move
>>> towards Wikipedia 1.0.

Ohhh yes we do. I've been researching this 1.0 question. Mostly that there's
been *over a year* of wibbling on the mailing list to no end. Hence my use
of the present Subject: line.

I'm really extremely interested in pushing the 1.0 thing and making a
workable plan the cats will herd to, letting the wiki do the work and
harnessing the power of dilettantism as admirably as we do. The work needed
for a 1.0 will be stuff that will only help the live wiki version as well.

>> Yeah I've heard that before. Coding features is vastly easier than
>> organising Wikipedians. If someone puts some pretty buttons on
>> Wikipedia saying things like "review this article" and "mark for
>> concise version", then people will start clicking them. Policies will
>> emerge out of the chaos that ensues, and everything will come
>> together. If someone wrote the feature 6 months ago, we'd be ready to
>> print by now.

> I'm on it, I'm on it! :-)

w00t!

Do we have a consensus on what things we want people to rate (accuracy,
coverage, good writing, grammar/spelling?) what scale (yes/no, 0-4, 0-10?)
and whether it's per version?

(I think there should be a bit of discussion before adding the feature
about possible ill effects of the per-version thing. It may make people
reluctant to polish minor problems in an otherwise high-rating version.
I may be completely wrong, of course. But I worry that this one, a feature
for 1.0, may have ill effects upon the live wiki.)

- d.


body:
On 07/19/04 01:53, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> --- Mark Ryan <ultrablue at gmail.com> wrote:

>>If we are meant to be only be using short stubbish articles for
>>everything (I have heard some people saying using only the first
>>paragraph of articles), then how will we keep this separate from the
>>main articles? Go the same way as monobook.css and have it like
>>[[Christianity/stub]]? There are little conceptual problems that need
>>to be thought through before we jump in head-first into preparing for
>>this.

> Section 0 of every article should ideally have a lead section in it that acts
> as a concise summary of the entire article. Each of those lead sections should
> then be usable as concise encyclopedia articles in a single volume desk
> reference (with maybe an overview also thrown in for some subjects). Selection
> of articles and validation of those sections would still be needed, of course.
> Thus nothing need be compromised on Wikipedia.

Absolutely. That's why a strict [[news style]] [[inverted pyramid]] intro -
first sentence, first paragraph, following paragraphs in order of droppability
- is my very favourite article intro style.

Currently, [[Wikipedia:News style]] speaks of it as almost optional.
I strongly suggest this status be upgraded, something like: "Although
optional, a news style intro is strongly recommended if you want an article
to be in Wikipedia 1.0 - many print articles are likely to be only the intro
of the web article." Thoughts?

(Note that none of the 1.0 plans so far detract from the live wiki itself,
and in fact would increase both its coverage and quality in useful ways.)

- d.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia for Cell Phones

body:
On 07/19/04 13:09, Mark Ryan wrote:

> Wikipedia is already browsable on my GPRS Nokia 6610 phone, when
> accessed through Google. But you can't edit or log in (or search).

Kwickee.com is *so* f*cked.

Those heavily interested in mobile issues need to form an action
plan on:

1. How to make Wikipedia more mobile-friendly as needed (if needed).
2. Strongly researching Kwickee so that we can thoroughly ride on
    their planned ridiculous UK advertising spend.

- d.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia for Cell Phones - bulk uploading images

body:
On 07/19/04 14:22, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

> Yes.  A certain fairly well-known wikipedian just went on a big tour
> of Europe and made a special point of taking "encyclopedic" photos of
> many prominent landmarks on his journey, but he still hasn't uploaded
> any of them, because it's a huge pain in the ass.
> I don't know the solution, but it sure would be sweet to have some
> means of bulk uploading, for example ftp or something like that.

Possibly we wouldn't need to do this ourselves. fotopic.net already offers
bulk mobile phone uploads for paid users. You can do a pile of photos on your
phone, upload to your fotopic.net page and have a gallery up a minute or so
later (so they claim). Expect to see other photo sites offering similar
services.

This lets people use another service as their staging area, and then they
can do the *hard* work, which is picking a non-sucky name and so on.

(Developer idea: If anyone tries to upload an image with a name of eight
characters or less before the extension - such as, ooh, CIMG0134.JPG or
DSCN0023.JPG or such *straight out the camera* names - ask if they really
mean that. If not forbidding it utterly.)

- d.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Compare selected versions javascript

body:
Rowan Collins wrote:

> There's even HTML attributes to tell the browser which ones should
> start checked, so unless someone *really* tried they couldn't select
> less than two anyway.

Never assume that. Never assume any browser works in any way you want,
and never assume malicious users might not send erroneous POST requests
by themselves. If you make assumptions, the cases you assume are
impossible can in some cases give rise to an exploit.

Timwi


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Andrew Dunbar

subject: [Wiktionary-l] UTF-8 and converting all wiktionaries

body:
--- "Gerard.Meijssen" <gerardm at myrealbox.com> wrote: >
On the beer parlour of en:wiktionary, Tim Starling
> says that it would be helpfull if all wiktionaries
> work in the same way.  The article was about UTF-8.
>
> The opportunity now is to have all wiktionaries
> transfer to UTF-8. This is the only way to have
> articles with titles like
> ?????????????????????????????? or
> ???????????????????????????????????? or
> ???????????????. As the purpose of wiktionaries is
> to have articles of words in any language, it should
> be obvious that this is the way to go.
>
> PS I would like these articles in nl:wiktionary :)
> GerardM

You have my full support. en Wiktionary is UTF-8 and
I don't think it makes any sense to have other ones
in another encoding. (Maybe CJK ones if they really
wanted some other one)

Hippietrail.

> _______________________________________________
> Wiktionary-l mailing list
> Wiktionary-l at Wikipedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
>

___________________________________________________________ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - sooooo many all-new ways to express yourself http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com


from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Wikipedia-l] French Wikibooks

body:
Le Sunday 18 July 2004 04:30, Daniel Mayer a ?crit :

> > > Similar conversion of Wikibooks should be a fairly simple thing, I'm
> > > now just waiting for community approval. We can't put subdomains under
> > > wikisource.org because the domain name doesn't point to the right
> > > place. It's owned by Mav and points to a redirect server, redirecting
> > > to quote.wikipedia.org.
> >
> > Yes, I think Wikibooks in French is much wanted.
>
> Please don't do that Tim since a French Wikibooks already exists at
> http://wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page:Fran?ais .
>
> We just need the ability to switch the interface language via preferences.
>
> -- mav

Just FYI, after a quick poll in the Bistro, 7 more people voted in favor of a
subdomain http://fr.wikibooks.org, and none against it.

Please could you create it?
Thanks,
Yann

--
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux


body:
On 07/20/04 00:22, David Gerard wrote:

> Currently, [[Wikipedia:News style]] speaks of it as almost optional.
> I strongly suggest this status be upgraded, something like: "Although
> optional, a news style intro is strongly recommended if you want an article
> to be in Wikipedia 1.0 - many print articles are likely to be only the
> intro
> of the web article." Thoughts?

I've been reading a huge pile of stuff on Wikipedia 1.0 from the past
year. There have been several mentions of the idea, much support and
little objection. So I've boldly edited [[Wikipedia:News style]] and
[[Wikipedia:Summary style]] to call it a consensus recommendation,
because it does seem to be one.

- d.


from_name: Kurt Jansson

body:
Timwi schrieb:

> We used to have a system where we had just a row of checkboxes, and as
> soon as you had clicked two, it would load the diff, without requiring
> you to click a button. I wonder why we didn't keep that? I preferred
> that.

Me too. I don't know how unintuitive it is for a newbie, but I think it was the
perfect solution for the regular user.

Kurt


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: Rethinking Meta (was- Wikiquote now has
	subdomains)

body:
Anthere-

> Right management do not exist, but I think they could be very useful here.

Wrong. See $wgWhitelistEdit, $wgWhitelistRead and $wgWhitelistAccount in
includes/DefaultSettings.php of the current MediaWiki code. I currently
run one MediaWiki which uses a whitelist for certain pages.

> But if you want to write a paper or essay on a subject related to
> Wikipedia, and do not want it to be edited into CPOV form, then you
> should have the courage and conviction to stand for it with your real
> name. Alternatively, put it on your user page. -Eloquence 13:28, 29 Apr
> 2004 (UTC)

> Given the number of editors who accept to edit under their real name,
> and given the risks associated with using our real name on the net,
> ***requesting*** from people to sign their comments and participation
> with their real name in order to have those allowed in the main space is
> just something bad.

You still don't get what I wrote. You are free to include your opinion in
a regular CPOV article, e.g. "Some community members feel that .." You're
free to comment on talk pages in any matter you want. But if you want to
write an essay like

 "Why Wikipedia is doomed"

.. *with no counterpoints allowed*, then you should sign it. That is
completely different from your representation of my opinion, and I would
appreciate it if you could stop distorting my proposal. There are two
reasons for requiring this type of page to be signed: 1) reduce trolling,
2) make it clear that the article in question is not official Wikimedia
policy.

> We are allowed to write fabulous article under ip, why would not we be
> allowed to write what we think of Wikipedia under the same procedure ?

We are not allowed to write what we think of the latest Hollywood movie on
Wikipedia. We are only allowed to do it as NPOV (film critic Roger Ebert
said ..). The CPOV proposal *extends* this by allowing 1) community member
opinions, i.e. what would be called "original research" or "idiosyncratic"
on Wikipedia 2) signed personal essays. Most pages on Meta meet the CPOV
requirements *already*.

> I say, if we request from editors on meta to sign their participation
> with their real name, then we'll cause dramatic drop down in collaboration.

Again, stop misrepresenting the actual proposal.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Foundation-l] splitting meta in sub domains

body:
Anthere-
> Spreading the discussion in 150 subwikis is the
> lose-lose situation.

If there are 150 different active communities with a significant amount of
members who do not speak English, then they should all have a place where
they can discuss policy matters in their language, with a localized UI,
and without interference in many other languages which they don't speak.

See my response to Daniel for how this can be achieved within a single
installation, and how this principle could be applied to Wikipedia,
Wikibooks, Wikisource etc. as well. Either way, we should acknowledge the
need for language-level filtering, and make it a priority to implement
this. That would be a good test case for a bounty system.

Regards,

Erik


list: wikien-l

from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Dan, Zero, NPOV and the Israel Shahak article

body:
Robert is correct when he asserts that:

* We are obligated to follow NPOV policy, which states that
we phrase things like this: Israel Shahak claims X, other groups
disagree claiming Y.

If it's a question about how much weight Shahak's opinion should carry,
in comparison with the opinions of others -- well, that is not for the W
to say. Better to have an [[Israel Shahak]] article which addresses the
issue of the group's credibiliity -- also written from the NPOV.

The problems of the Middle East cannot be _resolved_ by Wikipedia
articles. It's not even clear that accurate, unbiased descriptions of
these problems would help men and women in that region reconcile.

But those of us who support Jimbo and Larry's original policy, i.e., the
mission of this encyclopedia, will continue to help craft articles that
describe as clearly and accurately as possible this situation and others
like it.

I daresay an essential element of this accuracy is the scrupulous
refusal to take sides on whether any particular source is creditable.
Better to say "most historians agree that" or "Islamic and Western
historians disagree over", etc.

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed


from_name: zero 0000

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Dan, Zero, NPOV and the Israel Shahak article

body:
It should come as no surprise to people who have been around
for a while that Robert Kaiser's claims concerning myself and
Dan Keshet contain barely a syllable of truth.  Now we have
been accused of being anti-Semites repeatedly.  It is a sad
sad indictment of our procedures that such offensive behaviour
towards other Wikipedians does not earn an automatic ban.

Zero.

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


from_name: Fennec Foxen

subject: [Wikitech-l] Compare selected versions javascript

body:
On Tue, 20 Jul 2004 08:05:27 +0200, tic at tictric.net <tic at tictric.net> wrote:
> Am Mon, 19 Jul 2004 15:28:28 -0700 hat Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales
> <jwales at wikia.com> geschrieben:
> > Yay!  I like it.
> > I'll only be happy when the web gets back to 1997, anyway.
> Some recent things haven't worked out bad though ;-). Else, I agree.

I'm all for backwards compatibility, graceful degradation, et cetera.
I try to make everything I write compatible with Lynx. ;)


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
On 20 Jul 2004 04:17:00 +0200 erik_moeller at gmx.de (Erik Moeller) wrote:
>Anthere-
>> Spreading the discussion in 150 subwikis is the
>> lose-lose situation.
>
>If there are 150 different active communities with a significant amount of
>
>members who do not speak English, then they should all have a place where
>they can discuss policy matters in their language, with a localized UI,
>and without interference in many other languages which they don't speak.

And they have that place. If the Chinese speaking want to speak among
themselves, they have the Chinese Talk, Wikipedia and Wikipedia Talk
namespaces on their own Wiki. If they don't want interference from other
languages, that is the better place to do so.

Andre Engels


from_name: Robert

subject: [WikiEN-l] Edit war on Islamophobia

body:
John Ball has started a revert war on the Islamophobia
article. He insists on allowing only one point of view to
exist, and he has described all other points of views as
"vandalism". He has faked quotes from other sources,
describing estimates from Islamic scholars as really coming
from American non-Muslims (He's lying do a Googl seacrh and
you can chekc for yourself.)

He even has picked his own favorite pro-Muslim group which
he has insited must be quoted, in full, without quotes, as
NPOV material. Totally disregarding our NPOV policy, he
writes:

  The statements of the Runnymede Trust should stand as
  stated by that body and not be altered as they do not
  then represent that organisation's opinion. The 8
  points were the result of a RT multi-faith commission
  and should be accepted as NPOV.

I did try to work with John. I wrote that no statement by
*any* one organization is accepted is NPOV. You must read
the article on Wikipedia's NPOV policy. I noted that
nowhere in the article were there quote marks. Therefore,
that section was plagiarism, and Wikipedia policy demands
that all plagiarism automatically be removed.

However, I want to work with others. I told John Ball that
we can include quotes from groups, *if* the quotes are
explicitly references ad such, and clearly demarcated from
the rest of the text with quote marks or some other form of
formatting.

I have no problem with including the point of view of this
group. However, other points of view exist and they must be
included as well. In response, John Ball deleted all points
of view other than his own, labeled me a vandal, and
started a revert war. He clearly is convinced that the POV
of one particular group is "NPOV" and that the article must
follow the POV only.

Like Zero and others, John Ball is not acting in good
faith. What do we do when someone publicly states that they
will refuse to follow our NPOV policy, and simply engages
in non-stop revert wars to remove all POVs that they
personally do not hold?

Robert (RK)

__________________________________
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Situation getting worse with Islamophobia article

body:
The situation with John Ball and the Islamophobia article
is now totally out of hand. John Ball is also publicly
slandering religious committed Muslims, such as Muhammad
Hisham Kabbani, of racist anti-Islamic propaganda. That's
not just incorrect, it borders on insane.

"John Ball" is revealing himself to be an Islamist
contributor who wants to remove all facts, statistics and
points of view from anyone who themselves is not
pro-Islamist. He sees any form of Islam as an enemy, except
for his own form. People like this rarely learn to follow
NPOV.

In any case, the original point stands. All of our article
smust be written in accord with NPOV policy. People who
repeatedly refuse to allow others points of view to be
expressed in an artuicle are in total violation of
Wikipedia's basic policy.

Robert

__________________________________
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New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages!
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from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Chillove, pedophilia, NPOV, and Wikipedia

body:
This morning, I removed two images from [[Childlove]], an article about
pedophilia. One was a brochure put out by a group called CLogo, which is devoted to
promoting the "mutually beneficial" possibilities of pedophilia. It showed a
doll (at first I thought it was a young girl), sitting on someone's lap. The
other was a magazine cover by Martijn, a Dutch group, showing a young,
shirtless, preadolescent boy.

Frankly, I am quite disgusted by this abuse of our NPOV policy.

Danny
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subject: [WikiEN-l] correction

body:
Correction: The pictures were on the [[Childlove movement]] page

Danny
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from_name: Bill

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Chicago Sun Time article on Wikipedia

body:
http://www.suntimes.com/output/worktech/cst-fin-andy20.html

A very interesting article in a major paper.  What makes it somewhat
unusual is that the author actually describes how he fixed an article
that had a problem.

Bill


subject: [WikiEN-l] Anthony and the Main Page edit war

body:
Anthony has engaged in an edit war on the Main Page. I blocked him for 24
hours.

Danny
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from_name: tic at tictric.net

body:
Am Mon, 19 Jul 2004 15:28:28 -0700 hat Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales
<jwales at wikia.com> geschrieben:

> Brion Vibber wrote:
>> The easiest way is to just rip out the javascript bit: use two plain
>> columns of radio buttons, as UseMod does, without worrying too much.
>> It's impossible to select more than two, and we can handle zero or one
>> relatively gracefully with a last-version diff or error message.
>
> Yay!  I like it.
>
> I'll only be happy when the web gets back to 1997, anyway.

Some recent things haven't worked out bad though ;-). Else, I agree.

>
> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Zero and NPOV: He is avoding the issue by trying to ban
	me

body:
Again, Zero is talking out of both sides of his mouth. He
said that he wanted to engage in moderation. Yet at the
same time he pushs Shahak's anti-Jewish propaganda as
facts, he deletes vast chunks of multiple articles when
they include info he does not agree with, and has started a
web page dedicated to banning me from Wikipedia. Does that
sound like a sincere desire to engage in moderation?

The issue is simple: Do we follow NPOV policy or not?

Zero has a partisan agenda. Israel Shahak is not accepted
by any mainstream historians; that is in indisputable fact.
In every insitution I have studied or taught in, Shahak's
views are considered false and racist. In contrast,
Shahak's claims are only accepted by Neo-Nazis, White
Supremacists, radical Islamic groups, and the like. (Again,
please do not take my word on this. Please do a Google
search on this subject and see for yourself who his only
supporters are.)

Yet this statement of fact enrages Zero; he doesn't want
anyone to know this. Yet this is no different than our
articles on Richard Wagner or on Holocaust deniers. Last
year, a number of anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers tried
to damage our articles on these subjects. Fortunately,
cooler heads prevailed by merely following NPOV policy. Why
should this article be any different?

Zero has filled the talk page on the Shahak article with
personal comments (e..g in his view, Shahaks' claims about
the Jews are true.) Well, even if all Jews were as racist
as Shahak and Zero imagine, we would still have to follow
NPOV policy. This means we say that according to Group A
and author A, all Jews are racist, but according to group B
and C, and authors D and E, they are not.

Remember NPOV? A contributor may have a prejudice, but they
can stay here if they follow the rules. We have to allow
articles to present points of view, even if they are points
of view that we disagree with.

The long-standing problem with Zero isn't his belief that
Jews are racist. That's irrevelant. He can believe anything
he likes about Jews, blacks, gays, whomever. However, the
long-standing problem is that he refuses to let any POV be
mentioned except his own. Zero constantly refuses to follow
POV. And *that* has always been a bannable offense.

So we have a choice. (A) Ban Zero. (B) Privately talk to
him, and explain that all points of view must be included,
even those we happen to disagree with. And mention that
discussion on Talk pages should be about how to phrase
facts in the article, and not focused on one person's
beliefs about the content.

I hope that he can convinced to follow NPOV.

Robert (RK)

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body:
On Tue, 20 Jul 2004 05:21:01 -0700, Poor, Edmund W
<edmund.w.poor at abc.com> wrote:
> If it's a question about how much weight Shahak's opinion should carry,
> in comparison with the opinions of others -- well, that is not for the W
> to say.

Now, does "the W" refer to Poor, Edmund W or to Wikipedia? Mind if I
beat you up for calling it "the W" so often? Sheesh, I'd even prefer
WikiPedial (CamelCase) to "the W". :)

But that said, there *must* be some judgement exercised somewhere when
it comes to whether an opinion carries enough weight to be mentioned,
lest the articles become a List of People's Objections To or Support
Of Suchandsuch.


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
David Gerard wrote:

> Do we have a consensus on what things we want people to rate (accuracy,
> coverage, good writing, grammar/spelling?) what scale (yes/no, 0-4,
> 0-10?)
> and whether it's per version?
>
> (I think there should be a bit of discussion before adding the feature
> about possible ill effects of the per-version thing. It may make people
> reluctant to polish minor problems in an otherwise high-rating version.
> I may be completely wrong, of course. But I worry that this one, a
> feature
> for 1.0, may have ill effects upon the live wiki.)
>
My implementation can use scales, for yes/no decisions, a scale of 1/2
will do :-)

Different "types" can have different scales, so we could have a
"Spelling" 1-5, and a "Use in 1.0" yes/no at the same time.

Currently, I am using yet another special page, and while that will stay
for statistics etc., I'd like to have the "pure" rating page as another
tab in the current skin, like "edit" and "history". Any help in coding
is welcome :-)

Magnus


from_name: blankfaze

body:
True that, folk!  AC, here we come!
-blankfaze


from_name: Mark Pellegrini

body:
"Anthony has engaged in an edit war on the Main Page. I blocked him for 24
hours. "

Good for you Danny - tried to pull the same thing yesterday and I came within a whisker of blocking him myself. I'm glad I wasn't involved this time. I think the Arbcom really needs to consider his case.

--Mark

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from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] Czech wikipedia: how to ban users?

body:
Jan, this is the right place to ask, and I hope others will chime in
with advice.  I'm not very helpful with such things myself, but I do
hope your request doesn't get lost in the shuffle.


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- Andre Engels <andrewiki at freemail.nl> wrote:
> And they have that place. If the Chinese speaking want to speak among
> themselves, they have the Chinese Talk, Wikipedia and Wikipedia Talk
> namespaces on their own Wiki. If they don't want interference from other
> languages, that is the better place to do so.

Very good point. Erik, will you stop it now? I have not seen a single post in
favor of your idea so there seems to be consensus that it will not happen.

--mav

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from_name: Mark Richards

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Chillove, pedophilia, NPOV, and Wikipedia

body:
Yes, however morally repugnant we and most of the
world might find this, stating that there are some
people who hold this POV and linking to material that
they produce is NPOV. It is not acceptable to pretend
that such people do not exist. We must, of course, put
this in the context of the general feeling in society
that this is reprehensible.
Mark

--- Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
>
> > This morning, I removed two images from
> [[Childlove]]
>
> Thanks for announcing it, so someone can revert it
> ;-)
>
> > Frankly, I am quite disgusted by this abuse of our
> NPOV policy.
>
> So now wanting to represent a POV is abuse of the
> NPOV policy? That's
> interesting.
>
> I haven't participated in this discussion so far
> because this is a very
> sensitive subject, and because I didn't know much
> about it until
> recently. This discussion got me interested, and I
> read some of the
> stuff that was linked to in order to inform myself
> of the pedophiles'
> point of view. It is a very radical point of view,
> and one that is quite
> contrary to that of society at large, but that only
> makes it all the
> more important for us to include it. Someone
> mentioned early in this
> discussion that it would be dangerous for us to make
> the impression that
> we are somehow endorsing pedophilia, but at the same
> time, censoring
> this POV would be endorsing society's aversion,
> which (apparently)
> pedophiles perceive as discrimination and prejudice.
>
> I therefore strongly suggest we keep images that
> document this POV (as
> long as they don't break any laws, of course).
>
> Timwi
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

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body:
Yes, however morally repugnant we and most of the
world might find this, stating that there are some
people who hold this POV and linking to material that
they produce is NPOV. It is not acceptable to pretend
that such people do not exist. We must, of course, put
this in the context of the general feeling in society
that this is reprehensible.
Mark

--- Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
>
> > This morning, I removed two images from
> [[Childlove]]
>
> Thanks for announcing it, so someone can revert it
> ;-)
>
> > Frankly, I am quite disgusted by this abuse of our
> NPOV policy.
>
> So now wanting to represent a POV is abuse of the
> NPOV policy? That's
> interesting.
>
> I haven't participated in this discussion so far
> because this is a very
> sensitive subject, and because I didn't know much
> about it until
> recently. This discussion got me interested, and I
> read some of the
> stuff that was linked to in order to inform myself
> of the pedophiles'
> point of view. It is a very radical point of view,
> and one that is quite
> contrary to that of society at large, but that only
> makes it all the
> more important for us to include it. Someone
> mentioned early in this
> discussion that it would be dangerous for us to make
> the impression that
> we are somehow endorsing pedophilia, but at the same
> time, censoring
> this POV would be endorsing society's aversion,
> which (apparently)
> pedophiles perceive as discrimination and prejudice.
>
> I therefore strongly suggest we keep images that
> document this POV (as
> long as they don't break any laws, of course).
>
> Timwi
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

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from_name: Mathias Schindler

subject: [Wikipedia-l] What a nice quotation...

body:
"Take all that to heart. Still, I stress that Wikipedia is clearly one
of the Internet's top five information tools. No other free online
resource -- none -- can give you such a quick and useful briefing on
practically any subject you can think of.

Andy Ihnatko writes on technical and computer issues for the Sun-Times. "

http://www.suntimes.com/output/worktech/cst-fin-andy20.html


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Sorting interwiki links

body:
Timwi wrote:
> On the English Wikipedia we've already been doing it that way (sorting
> by the language code), but on the Hungarian Wikipedia (for example) they
> seem to think that English should always come first.

It is likely the case that the needs of different language communities
will be different.  Generally, I would imagine that people would like
something like "the most popular second language spoken by speakers of
this language" to be listed first.  That might be English in many areas,
but not necessarily everywhere.

One problem I see with alphabetic order is that 'Abkhazian' for example would
always come first everywhere.  According to Wikipedia, this language is only
spoken by 4 different groups about whom Wikipedia has no article.  :-(

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

--Jimbo


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Summary style is better (was: Action plan for 1.0 -
	news style intros should be recommended more strongly)

body:
--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Although there is much merit to having the initial section of an article
> give a general overview of the topic.  I don't think that the
> application of "news style should extend any further than that.
> Wikipedia is not a newspaper.  Being able to drop paragraphs at the end
> of an article to fit the available space is fine for newspapers who have
> short daily deadlines to meet.  The weeklies have more freedom on this
> and monthlies and quarterlies even more.
>
> A biographical article needs to present the person's life in a
> chronological structure.  Many famous people had some of their most
> significant events at the end of their lives.  What would a biography of
> Lincoln or Kennedy be like if we had to cut the story of their
> assassination  as a means of making those articles shorter?.

That is exactly why I support Summary Style instead of News Style. The
"dropability" part does not apply to what we are doing and strictly speaking
News Style only provides for lead sentences, not lead sections.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Summary_style

Summary Style is somewhat similar in spirit to News Style, except it tries to
apply the concept to Wikipedia, which is most certainly not a newspaper. It
aims to not overwhelm readers with too much info up front and tries to offer
summaries under prominent "Main article"-type links in sections. That way we
serve several different types of users;
*those that want a quick summary of what the topic is about (lead section),
*those that want a basic summary (a set of several paragraph long sections -
subsectioning can increase the number of paras),
*and those that want to go into more detail ('Main article' links to articles
which cover a sub-topic summarized in a section).

But articles *should not* start out like this. Summary Style is more of a set
of guidelines on how to split long articles (>40-50KB) into a set of daughters.
Each of those daughters could eventually become large enough to bud out
articles of its own. And so on - not unlike cellular division.

Also, most good lead sections should be usable as concise encyclopedia articles
in their own right. Some more expansive topics, such as major wars, will also
need to have overviews, however. Overviews should have important info not
contained in or barely mentioned in the lead section. Together these lead
sections and overviews could be used almost directly in a desk reference
concise version of Wikipedia.

This division of content also makes it possible to create many different kinds
of topic-based encyclopedias for print/DVD/CD; A general one would only have
survey articles while a specific topic encyclopedia would have all the survey
and daughter articles in its topic area. Creating a meta tagging system would
help facilitate this by automating what goes where (this is a bit beyond the
purpose of categories, IMO, but they *could* be used for this if needed).

> The important question comes down to is it better to have a large number
> of short articles, or a much smaller number of comprehensive,
> well-written and thoughtful articles.

In terms of content, not really articles, we can and should have both. This can
be done by splitting long articles and leaving a good-sized summary of that
article in a section of a survey article on the topic.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Sorting interwiki links

body:
Angela_ wrote:
> There is quite a long running poll at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Language_order_poll. Views on
> the English Wikipedia are fairly evenly split between "By order of
> alphabet, based on two letter code" and "By order of alphabet, based
> on local language".

I just added my vote for "By order of usage pattern in local
language", i.e. I think they should be ordered by how people in each
wikipedia language community actually use them.  This may require some
study of logfiles to see what people are clicking on.

But that's just one vote.  :-)


body:
The script changes the display attribute of every button even if the button is already in the right state. Bad idea - typically only one or two need to be changed and browsers can be slow at making visibility changes.

Changing from:

 }  else { // no radio is checked in this row
  if(!oli) inputs[0].style.visibility = 'hidden';
  else inputs[0].style.visibility = 'visible';
  if(dli) inputs[1].style.visibility = 'hidden';
  else inputs[1].style.visibility = 'visible';

to this version which only changes the state when necessary:

 }  else { // no radio is checked in this row
  if(!oli) {
   if ( inputs[0].style.visibility != 'hidden' )
     inputs[0].style.visibility = 'hidden';
  }
  else {
   if ( inputs[0].style.visibility != 'visible' )
     inputs[0].style.visibility = 'visible';
  }
  if(dli) {
   if ( inputs[1].style.visibility != 'hidden' )
    inputs[1].style.visibility = 'hidden';
  }
  else {
   if ( inputs[1].style.visibility != 'visible' )
    inputs[1].style.visibility = 'visible';
  }

should assist without the need to remove the work of whoever made the change.


from_name: Timwi

body:
daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:

> This morning, I removed two images from [[Childlove]]

Thanks for announcing it, so someone can revert it ;-)

> Frankly, I am quite disgusted by this abuse of our NPOV policy.

So now wanting to represent a POV is abuse of the NPOV policy? That's
interesting.

I haven't participated in this discussion so far because this is a very
sensitive subject, and because I didn't know much about it until
recently. This discussion got me interested, and I read some of the
stuff that was linked to in order to inform myself of the pedophiles'
point of view. It is a very radical point of view, and one that is quite
contrary to that of society at large, but that only makes it all the
more important for us to include it. Someone mentioned early in this
discussion that it would be dangerous for us to make the impression that
we are somehow endorsing pedophilia, but at the same time, censoring
this POV would be endorsing society's aversion, which (apparently)
pedophiles perceive as discrimination and prejudice.

I therefore strongly suggest we keep images that document this POV (as
long as they don't break any laws, of course).

Timwi


from_name: Jan Vanek jr.

body:
I am one of sysops at cs: Wikipedia. Recently there was a spate registered
user's disruptive edits somewhere between trolling and outright vandalism.
There is a need to ban him temporarily, but there's no way to do it:

As far as I understood en:Wikipedia:Blocking_policy#How_to_block, you're just
supposed to go to Special:Blockip, or cs:Speci?ln?:Blockip, and put the
username into the IP address field. However, this results in the
MediaWiki:Badipaddress error message.

I don't know anything about MediaWiki and have no particular understanding of
PHP, but the respective script in CVS
(http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/phase3/includes/SpecialBlockip.
php?rev=1.30) also tests the variable $wgSysopUserBans, which apparently
(http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/phase3/includes/DefaultSettings
.php?rev=1.30) is false by default:

 # User rights
 (...)
 $wgSysopUserBans        = false; # Allow sysops to ban logged-in users

I, or at least Google, found no other instance of the variable anywhere, so no
way to set it to true either. On the other hand, there must be a way to do it -
there are bannings going on at en: all the time. So, could somebody with better
knowledge of the system tell me whether I missed anything, or whom should I ask
to set this in cs? Or is there a workaround, a way to find out a registered
user's IP address?

Thanks a lot for any help.

--
Jan Vanek jr. (cs:Wikipedista:Mal%C3%BD%C4%8Dten%C3%A1%C5%99,
en:User:Malyctenar)

P. S. It might be also worth changing the SpecialBlockip script to give
another, more appropriate error message in such cases.


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fwd: Multiple categories

body:
On Monday 19 July 2004 23:01, Timwi wrote:
> Nikola Smolenski wrote:
> >>I see what you mean, but with the category system you envision, none of
> >>the categories would be very useful to browse by eye, and that happens
> >>to be a very fruitful way of browsing wikipedia. And all articles would
> >
> > You are right that most categories would have a lot of articles; but I
> > don't think that that's not fruitful. If someone needs a list of all
> > cities featured on WIkipedia, there it is; if someone needs a list of all
> > cities in Germany, it could be made. With current system, one is fine
> > with a list of all cities in Germany but there is no way at all of
> > getting a list of all cities.
>
> This argument is fallacious. You say "if someone needs a list of all
> cities in Germany, it could be made", referring to a hypothetical future
> feature. Then you say "there is no way at all of getting a list of all
> cities", but it is obviously possible for there to future feature for
> that too (display a category and all sub-categories).

No it isn't. One of the future features isn't hypothetical, it is made, tested
(by you), found to work, and I don't know what is preventing its inclusion in
the CVS. The other feature is a hypothetical one; it doesn't exist and it is
possible (though unlikely) that it never will.


from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Compare selected versions javascript

body:
On Tue, 20 Jul 2004 00:33:55 +0100, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> Never assume that. Never assume any browser works in any way you want,
> and never assume malicious users might not send erroneous POST requests
> by themselves. If you make assumptions, the cases you assume are
> impossible can in some cases give rise to an exploit.

OK, fair enough - but note that a browser that ignores the HTML
'checked' attribute is unlikely to support JavaScript in any real
sense anyway. Also note that the form isn't even a POST request, just
a way of filling the <foo> and <bar> values in the
'...&diff=<foo>&oldid=<bar>' URL - whatever the form does, the actual
diff code needs to be impervious to all sorts of strange values in
there, because people can type them straight in their address bar. In
fact, it seems to do rather well - my thoroughly mixed up test
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia%3ACopyrights&diff=4738913&oldid=4730944
(which refers to three articles at once, in different ways) actually
has a fairly sane outcome. So, too, does just deleting one of the
values; and deleting both just leaves you looking at the current
version.

In other words, as one would hope, the arguments are validated on
processing, not on input.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Andrew Lih

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Action plan for 1.0 - news style intros should
	be recommended more strongly

body:
I definitely agree with making things inverted pyramid, many of my
edits in have been exactly that - moving the most important facts into
the first graf.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On Tue, 20 Jul 2004 01:04:22 +0000, David Gerard
<fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> On 07/20/04 00:22, David Gerard wrote:
>
> > Currently, [[Wikipedia:News style]] speaks of it as almost optional.
> > I strongly suggest this status be upgraded, something like: "Although
> > optional, a news style intro is strongly recommended if you want an article
> > to be in Wikipedia 1.0 - many print articles are likely to be only the
> > intro
> > of the web article." Thoughts?
>
>
> I've been reading a huge pile of stuff on Wikipedia 1.0 from the past
> year. There have been several mentions of the idea, much support and
> little objection. So I've boldly edited [[Wikipedia:News style]] and
> [[Wikipedia:Summary style]] to call it a consensus recommendation,
> because it does seem to be one.
>
>
>
>
> - d.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
Andrew Lih
University of Hong Kong
andrew.lih at gmail.com


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
Israel Shahak's obituary in the Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4216853,00.html

puts the lie to your false accusations, Robert.

"chairman of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights"

" Israel Shahak, academic, human rights campaigner, born April 28 1933; died
July 2 2001"

Fred

> From: Robert <rkscience100 at yahoo.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2004 09:19:18 -0700 (PDT)
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Zero and NPOV: He is avoding the issue by trying to ban me
>
> Again, Zero is talking out of both sides of his mouth. He
> said that he wanted to engage in moderation. Yet at the
> same time he pushs Shahak's anti-Jewish propaganda as
> facts, he deletes vast chunks of multiple articles when
> they include info he does not agree with, and has started a
> web page dedicated to banning me from Wikipedia. Does that
> sound like a sincere desire to engage in moderation?
>
> The issue is simple: Do we follow NPOV policy or not?
>
> Zero has a partisan agenda. Israel Shahak is not accepted
> by any mainstream historians; that is in indisputable fact.
> In every insitution I have studied or taught in, Shahak's
> views are considered false and racist. In contrast,
> Shahak's claims are only accepted by Neo-Nazis, White
> Supremacists, radical Islamic groups, and the like. (Again,
> please do not take my word on this. Please do a Google
> search on this subject and see for yourself who his only
> supporters are.)
>
> Yet this statement of fact enrages Zero; he doesn't want
> anyone to know this. Yet this is no different than our
> articles on Richard Wagner or on Holocaust deniers. Last
> year, a number of anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers tried
> to damage our articles on these subjects. Fortunately,
> cooler heads prevailed by merely following NPOV policy. Why
> should this article be any different?
>
> Zero has filled the talk page on the Shahak article with
> personal comments (e..g in his view, Shahaks' claims about
> the Jews are true.) Well, even if all Jews were as racist
> as Shahak and Zero imagine, we would still have to follow
> NPOV policy. This means we say that according to Group A
> and author A, all Jews are racist, but according to group B
> and C, and authors D and E, they are not.
>
> Remember NPOV? A contributor may have a prejudice, but they
> can stay here if they follow the rules. We have to allow
> articles to present points of view, even if they are points
> of view that we disagree with.
>
> The long-standing problem with Zero isn't his belief that
> Jews are racist. That's irrevelant. He can believe anything
> he likes about Jews, blacks, gays, whomever. However, the
> long-standing problem is that he refuses to let any POV be
> mentioned except his own. Zero constantly refuses to follow
> POV. And *that* has always been a bannable offense.
>
> So we have a choice. (A) Ban Zero. (B) Privately talk to
> him, and explain that all points of view must be included,
> even those we happen to disagree with. And mention that
> discussion on Talk pages should be about how to phrase
> facts in the article, and not focused on one person's
> beliefs about the content.
>
> I hope that he can convinced to follow NPOV.
>
> Robert (RK)
>
>
>
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
> http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
> _______________________________________________
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> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


body:
Israel Shadak

> From: Robert <rkscience100 at yahoo.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2004 09:19:18 -0700 (PDT)
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Zero and NPOV: He is avoding the issue by trying to ban me
>
> Again, Zero is talking out of both sides of his mouth. He
> said that he wanted to engage in moderation. Yet at the
> same time he pushs Shahak's anti-Jewish propaganda as
> facts, he deletes vast chunks of multiple articles when
> they include info he does not agree with, and has started a
> web page dedicated to banning me from Wikipedia. Does that
> sound like a sincere desire to engage in moderation?
>
> The issue is simple: Do we follow NPOV policy or not?
>
> Zero has a partisan agenda. Israel Shahak is not accepted
> by any mainstream historians; that is in indisputable fact.
> In every insitution I have studied or taught in, Shahak's
> views are considered false and racist. In contrast,
> Shahak's claims are only accepted by Neo-Nazis, White
> Supremacists, radical Islamic groups, and the like. (Again,
> please do not take my word on this. Please do a Google
> search on this subject and see for yourself who his only
> supporters are.)
>
> Yet this statement of fact enrages Zero; he doesn't want
> anyone to know this. Yet this is no different than our
> articles on Richard Wagner or on Holocaust deniers. Last
> year, a number of anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers tried
> to damage our articles on these subjects. Fortunately,
> cooler heads prevailed by merely following NPOV policy. Why
> should this article be any different?
>
> Zero has filled the talk page on the Shahak article with
> personal comments (e..g in his view, Shahaks' claims about
> the Jews are true.) Well, even if all Jews were as racist
> as Shahak and Zero imagine, we would still have to follow
> NPOV policy. This means we say that according to Group A
> and author A, all Jews are racist, but according to group B
> and C, and authors D and E, they are not.
>
> Remember NPOV? A contributor may have a prejudice, but they
> can stay here if they follow the rules. We have to allow
> articles to present points of view, even if they are points
> of view that we disagree with.
>
> The long-standing problem with Zero isn't his belief that
> Jews are racist. That's irrevelant. He can believe anything
> he likes about Jews, blacks, gays, whomever. However, the
> long-standing problem is that he refuses to let any POV be
> mentioned except his own. Zero constantly refuses to follow
> POV. And *that* has always been a bannable offense.
>
> So we have a choice. (A) Ban Zero. (B) Privately talk to
> him, and explain that all points of view must be included,
> even those we happen to disagree with. And mention that
> discussion on Talk pages should be about how to phrase
> facts in the article, and not focused on one person's
> beliefs about the content.
>
> I hope that he can convinced to follow NPOV.
>
> Robert (RK)
>
>
>
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
> http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Anthony and the Main Page edit war

body:
Pete/Pcb21 wrote:
> Are we really saying that if you want to get something done you have to
> break the rules and accept a temporary punishment in "sacrifice"?

No, that's not right.  What Anthony did was wrong and foolish, and the
result was appropriate.

If Anthony had a problem with how slow the process was going, or a
problem with the process itself, or a problem with the process being
complete but not implement, then the solution would have been quite
simple: come to the mailing list and post a constructive comment about
the situation, asking for support.

Behaving like a jerk to force an issue is really not helpful.

Getting into edit wars to get your way is just poor form.

--Jimbo


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Announce: Going to start phase4

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> In most European languages the adjectives for each gender are different.

In most languages there are also ways to avoid mentioning the gender,
even though it might take some effort. In English, the words boy,
girl, man, woman do mention gender, but the words child and person do
not.  It might be awkward to say policeperson (or police officer)
instead of policeman, but if you really want to avoid treating the
genders differently (as is considered politically correct), this is a
possible way forward.

Being forced to speak differently because of your gender, age, social
class or race is a form of apartheid that keeps people in difference,
where they should be equals.  The simplicity of English is a radical
challenge to many other languages and cultures.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/


body:
Ec, I think most will agree that strict adherence to inverted pyramid
is not necessary.  We don't need for graf (n) to always be less
important than graf (n-1). However, hopefully this shows what we
should try to strive for, from the [[Pat Tillman]] article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Pat_Tillman&diff=3313964&oldid=3313922

Before the edit, the most important part of his life story was in the
last paragraph.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On Tue, 20 Jul 2004 00:04:19 -0700, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>
> David Gerard wrote:
>
> > On 07/19/04 01:53, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> >
> >> --- Mark Ryan <ultrablue at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>> If we are meant to be only be using short stubbish articles for
> >>> everything (I have heard some people saying using only the first
> >>> paragraph of articles), then how will we keep this separate from the
> >>> main articles? Go the same way as monobook.css and have it like
> >>> [[Christianity/stub]]? There are little conceptual problems that need
> >>> to be thought through before we jump in head-first into preparing for
> >>> this.
> >>
> >
> >> Section 0 of every article should ideally have a lead section in it
> >> that acts
> >> as a concise summary of the entire article. Each of those lead
> >> sections should
> >> then be usable as concise encyclopedia articles in a single volume desk
> >> reference (with maybe an overview also thrown in for some subjects).
> >> Selection
> >> of articles and validation of those sections would still be needed,
> >> of course.
> >> Thus nothing need be compromised on Wikipedia.
> >
> >
> > Absolutely. That's why a strict [[news style]] [[inverted pyramid]]
> > intro -
> > first sentence, first paragraph, following paragraphs in order of
> > droppability
> > - is my very favourite article intro style.
> >
> > Currently, [[Wikipedia:News style]] speaks of it as almost optional.
> > I strongly suggest this status be upgraded, something like: "Although
> > optional, a news style intro is strongly recommended if you want an
> > article
> > to be in Wikipedia 1.0 - many print articles are likely to be only the
> > intro
> > of the web article." Thoughts?
> >
> > (Note that none of the 1.0 plans so far detract from the live wiki
> > itself,
> > and in fact would increase both its coverage and quality in useful ways.)
>
> Although there is much merit to having the initial section of an article
> give a general overview of the topic.  I don't think that the
> application of "news style should extend any further than that.
> Wikipedia is not a newspaper.  Being able to drop paragraphs at the end
> of an article to fit the available space is fine for newspapers who have
> short daily deadlines to meet.  The weeklies have more freedom on this
> and monthlies and quarterlies even more.
>
> A biographical article needs to present the person's life in a
> chronological structure.  Many famous people had some of their most
> significant events at the end of their lives.  What would a biography of
> Lincoln or Kennedy be like if we had to cut the story of their
> assassination  as a means of making those articles shorter?.
>
> I can see that the desire to have a large number of articles is driving
> the move the have severable opening stubs.
>
> The important question comes down to is it better to have a large number
> of short articles, or a much smaller number of comprehensive,
> well-written and thoughtful articles.
>
> When it is finally published, the hype will have preceded the event, and
> created high expectations.  Which would be a better review?
>     1. The new paper Wikipedia is a collection of short articles.  The
> material appears very accurate, but any person who browses the net
> could have found all this very easily.  Why did they bother?
>
> or
>
>     2. The new paper Wikipedia is a series of interesting and very
> informative article.  Interspersed are a number of shorter articles with
> a promise that these subjects will receive more thorough treatment in
> the future.  We look forward to those future editions.
>
> Ec
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
Andrew Lih
University of Hong Kong
andrew.lih at gmail.com


from_name: zero 0000

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Zero and NPOV: He is avoding the issue by trying to
	ban me

body:
Robert Kaiser wrote:

(1)  "[Zero] pushs Shahak's anti-Jewish propaganda"
  An absolute lie.  I have not supported Shahak's position on
  anything.  I have only been concerned with Kaiser's attempts
  at dishonest smearing of Shahak.
(2)  "in [Zero's] view, Shahaks' claims about the Jews are true"
  An absolute lie.  Since I am a good editor, I have not stated
  my opinion on Shahak's claims and don't believe that my opinion
  is even relevant.  Kaiser, on the other hand, breaths hatred
  of Shahak in everything he writes.  Should we allow Wikipedia
  articles to be dumping grounds for someone's emotions?
(3)  "[Zero's] belief that Jews are racist"
  Another absolute lie.  Kaiser knows that I have never made any
  such claim or even come within a hundred miles of it, but of
  course he is not here to tell the truth.

Why am I bothering to write this?

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


from_name: Bill Clark

subject: [Wikitech-l] DNS for wikibooks.org broken

body:
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 01:14:15 +0200, Jens Frank <jeluf at gmx.de> wrote:

> Subdomains of wikibooks.org don't work, only wikibooks.org and
> www.wikibooks.org are available, but not e.g. en.wikibooks.org.

Looks like domain wildcards are set up:

root at xoom:~>host -l wikibooks.org
wikibooks.org name server gunther.bomis.com
wikibooks.org name server zwinger.wikipedia.org
wikibooks.org has address 207.142.131.235
wikibooks.org has address 207.142.131.236
*.wikibooks.org has address 207.142.131.235
*.wikibooks.org has address 207.142.131.236

This works for me:

root at xoom:~>host en.wikibooks.org
en.wikibooks.org has address 207.142.131.235
en.wikibooks.org has address 207.142.131.236

So does this:

root at xoom:~>host fakename.wikibooks.org
fakename.wikibooks.org has address 207.142.131.235
fakename.wikibooks.org has address 207.142.131.236

Perhaps there's something odd with the wildcard setup?  I'm actually
surprised that I could see entries for "*.wikibooks.org" since I'd
thought those were supposed to be handled by the authoritative
nameservers.  The way they're listed above makes it appear as if the
local resolver (or my ISPs DNS servers) would handle the wildcard part
-- perhaps that's why Jens is having trouble?

-Bill


body:
I should point out that this is the second day in a row Anthony has pulled a
stunt like this. Yesterday, when Jim Henson was featured with a fair use
picture, he removed the picture (causing a revert war betwene him and
several
others) and then when the page was protected (by me) he uploaded a blank
image to replace it. When people reverted that, he got into a revert war on
the
image page. Like today, all this edit warring was visible on the main page.

Anthony is doing this just because he can, because Wikipedia has no
guidelines
against users who are out to disrupt things.

Futhermore, I don't particularly like the suggestion that his actions
motivated policy.
As I said on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Feature : "I've
opposed previous
proposals for voting on stuff because it would add a helleva lot of work to
the process
(as people above have said). The reason I support this is because it
contains no voting.
As a result, unlike all previous proposals, it seems like it might actually
reduce the work
and the bickering. If this had been brough up before Anthony's vandalism
spree, I would
have supported it just the same. Raul654 22:23, Jul 20, 2004 (UTC)

--Mark


from_name: Tobias Hesse

subject: [Wikitech-l] suggestion from [Wikide-l]

body:
Hello!

We have been discussing the following problem on [Wikide-l]:

In the German-speaking countries de.wikipedia.org is used quite frequently
to do research. More and more we are also linked in online magazines or
even referenced in printed publications. Whatismore, many visitors reach
us from google (we have got a very good rank for many key words) and then
have no idea what the Wikipedia is about. They find useful data at the
Wikipedia but often times - not to say most of the time - but don't know
that everybody can edit articles. We aren't too concerned about the ones
that believe everything even the rare facts that might be incorrect
because nobody has revised them but we think that more people would use
the opportunity to amend articles than do already today.

We therefore would like to introduce a small JavaScript-script into the
German wikipedia pages that shows a small text about the wiki principle to
everybody reaching with an external referrer. First we thought about
making realizing this via a php-Script but this would increase the load
the server has to deal with whereas a JavaScript-script that is stored in
every file coulod be cached.

We know that there are still some browser out there that have problems
with the more elaborate JavaScript-scripts but this probably is a problem
of the not-so-widely-used, non-MS browsers. But then we figured that most
of the time - and we know that this involves a lot of generalizing -
those, who know the internet well use alternative browser and that those,
who know the internet well, know at least a little about Wikipedia and the
wiki principle.

Has any of the developers any objections against anything like this? I'll
post the script later on as it is still in development.

Best regards

wotan


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

in_reply_to:
<9f02ca4c04071915415ed8aa02@mail.gmail.com> (Rowan Collins's
	message of "Mon, 19 Jul 2004 23:41:30 +0100")

body:
Rowan Collins <rowan.collins at gmail.com> writes:

I alos like the current implementation more than the previous one; my
main arguments are:

> * a self-submitting form gives you no chance to change your mind, or
> even work out what the boxes mean, before it starts processing your
> "selection"

I was often bitten by this annoyance.

> * check-boxes don't normally work like that, so people won't be
> expecting that to happen [OK, so this point's more subjective than the
> others]

I "hate" misbehaving UI widgets.

--
                                                         |      ,__o
                                                         |    _-\_<,
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |   (*)/'(*)


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject: [WikiEN-l] issues

body:
"In the particular case of Martha Stewart, Anthony takes matters into
his own hands, breaking long-standing rules that Anthony knows all about."

I think you have mischaracterised this severely.  There is absolutely *no
rule* saying that Raul has the right to do whatever he wants on that page.
He merely has been permitted to do whatever he wanted in the past because he
wasn't doing anything that people disagreed with.  If this were an article,
this would be clearcut.  See [[Wikipedia:Ownership of articles]].  But for
some reason because it is a template suddenly people are claiming that it
can be owned, and that a single person can do whatever he wants?  Well,
perhaps now that it is clear that people will be blocked for disagreeing
with Raul on a template that can be considered a rule, but it certainly
wasn't a long-standing rule before that.

As for Raul's comment:  "As a result, unlike all previous proposals, it
seems like it might actually reduce the work and the bickering. If this had
been brough up before Anthony's vandalism spree, I would have supported it
just the same." I'd note that my proposal, which is nearly identical to the
one which apparently is going to be implemented, had no voting involved.

As for Jimbo's comment (he apparently doesn't know the full story) that I
should have used the mailing list, I have had nothing but trouble with the
mailing list.  I'm not even sure if this will go through.  The mailing list
is a terrible place to run a wiki.  The wiki should be run on the wiki
itself.

Instead of inserting a conclusion here, I'm going to take another day or
more to think about things first.  I'm seriously disturbed by the hypocrisy
of this organisation right now.


from_name: Leonard Vertighel

subject: [Wikitech-l] Sorting interwiki links

body:
Am Dienstag, 20. Juli 2004 21:58 schrieb Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales:
> I just added my vote for "By order of usage pattern in local
> language", i.e. I think they should be ordered by how people in each
> wikipedia language community actually use them.  This may require some
> study of logfiles to see what people are clicking on.

Sorry if I'm totally missing the point, but users are not supposed to know
this order when adding interwiki links manually, right? Will the software
take care of that in some future version?


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Czech wikipedia: how to ban users?

body:
If any of the other wikis would like username blocking enabled, they
can request it at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Non-development_tasks_for_developers

Angela.

On Tue, 20 Jul 2004 22:52:46 +0200, Ronny Raschkowan
<ronny at kopfrechnung.de> wrote:
> I added a line for cs: at the $wgSysopUserBans in the
> InitialiseSettings.php.
> You should be able to ban registered users now on the cs: Wikipedia.
>
> By the way, I also added that line for the it: Wikipedia after a request
> in IRC.
>
> Sincerly yours,
> Fire


from_name: Ronny Raschkowan

body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

> Jan, this is the right place to ask, and I hope others will chime in
> with advice.  I'm not very helpful with such things myself, but I do
> hope your request doesn't get lost in the shuffle.

Hello.

I added a line for cs: at the $wgSysopUserBans in the
InitialiseSettings.php.
You should be able to ban registered users now on the cs: Wikipedia.

By the way, I also added that line for the it: Wikipedia after a request
in IRC.

Sincerly yours,
Fire


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: issues

body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:

>As for Jimbo's comment (he apparently doesn't know the full story) that I
>should have used the mailing list, I have had nothing but trouble with the
>mailing list.  I'm not even sure if this will go through.  The mailing list
>is a terrible place to run a wiki.  The wiki should be run on the wiki
>itself.
>
>Instead of inserting a conclusion here, I'm going to take another day or
>more to think about things first.  I'm seriously disturbed by the hypocrisy
>of this organisation right now.
>
Jimbo can't always be expected to investigate every dispute, and there's
nothing wrong with his suggestion that people try the mailing list in
this kind of situation. It's not the only option, but plenty of options
are better than provoking an edit war to make a point. The thing is,
trying these options takes time, and apparently some people lack the
patience and self-discipline to wait more than a few minutes to
accomplish what they want.

Part of the problem is that quite a few people (Anthony is certainly not
the only one - others have been debated here on the list as well) seem
to feel perfectly justified in violating the 3-revert guideline. Not
only do they blatantly exceed the limit, but in most of these cases they
don't even pause before crossing the line. They make no attempt to get
more of the community involved, which is the only way consensus can
develop when issues are contested. Instead, they should be trying a
number of other options, of which posting to the mailing list is merely
one. There is also IRC, contacting other users who are on the wiki at
the time (especially those who have edited the article before),
mediation, [[Wikipedia:Requests for comment]], etc. I might entertain an
argument that more than 3 reverts can be justified, but _never_ if you
haven't tried other means of dealing with the situation first.

What's really appalling is that in many instances, not even the talk
page of the disputed article is being used. The only communication going
on is through edit summaries, and since those typically consist of "rv",
accusations of vandalism, snide remarks, or the pre-filled edit summary
from an admin using the rollback button, it's worse than useless.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Angela

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation website meeting

body:
On Saturday 24 July 2004, there will be a meeting in the #wikimedia
IRC channel (irc://irc.freenode.net/wikimedia) regarding the Wikimedia
Foundation website (http://wikimediafoundation.org). The meeting will
start at 21:00 UTC. All are welcome to attend. There is no requirement
to sign up for the meeting, but the Board do reserve the right to
remove anyone causing undue disruption.

A log of the meeting will be published on Meta on Sunday. Please see
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Foundation_website_meeting,_July_2004
for further details, including a draft agenda.

Angela.


body:
daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:

> Anthony has engaged in an edit war on the Main Page. I blocked him for
> 24 hours.
>
> Danny

There has been a breakdown in the wiki-process here.

As I understand it:

1) Up until today, Raul654 has been the sole judge of what goes on the
featured article area of the main page. This has mainly been on the
grounds of practicality.

2) Anthony disliked that so much editorial power rests with one
individual and wanted to institute some system, albeit more bureaucratic
than the above model, that would allow greater involvement of the
community. i.e. in his view make the process more wiki. (I personally
thing models where there is devolution of responsibility to trusted
individuals can be compatible with the wiki way).

3) Anthony repeatedly makes this suggestion at
[[Wikipedia_talk:Featured_article_candidates]] where he finds a good
deal of support that the current model is not very wiki. However no
changes are effected. The talk page wiki process has effectively failed him.

4) In the particular case of Martha Stewart, Anthony takes matters into
his own hands, breaking long-standing rules that Anthony knows all about.

5) Anthony is banned.

6) Proposals, very much along the lines of Anthony's, are proposed at
[[Template_talk:Feature]] and look like they will be accepted.

This seems WRONG! It took the action of a revert/edit war on the main
page to get proposals accepted where talk pages failed.

Are we really saying that if you want to get something done you have to
break the rules and accept a temporary punishment in "sacrifice"?

Pete/Pcb21


body:
Angela_ wrote:

> If any of the other wikis would like username blocking enabled, they
> can request it at
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Non-development_tasks_for_developers

Why isn't it enabled for all Wikipedias?


subject: [Wikitech-l] suggestion from [Wikide-l]

body:
Hello!

We have been discussing the following problem on [Wikide-l]:

In the German-speaking countries de.wikipedia.org is used quite frequently
to do research. More and more we are also linked in online magazines or even

referenced in printed publications. Whatismore, many visitors reach us from
google (we have got a very good rank for many key words) and then have no
idea what the Wikipedia is about. They find useful data at the Wikipedia but
often times - not to say most of the time - but don't know that everybody
can edit articles. We aren't too concerned about the ones that believe
everything even the rare facts that might be incorrect because nobody has
revised them but we think that more people would use the opportunity to
amend articles than do already today.

We therefore would like to introduce a small JavaScript-script into the
German wikipedia pages that shows a small text about the wiki principle to
everybody reaching with an external referrer. First we thought about making
realizing this via a php-Script but this would increase the load the server
has to deal with whereas a JavaScript-script that is stored in every file
coulod be cached.

We know that there are still some browser out there that have problems with
the more elaborate JavaScript-scripts but this probably is a problem of the
not-so-widely-used, non-MS browsers. But then we figured that most of the
time - and we know that this involves a lot of generalizing -  those, who
know the internet well use alternative browser and that those, who know the
internet well, know at least a little about Wikipedia and the wiki
principle.

Has any of the developers any objections against anything like this? I'll
post the script later on as it is still in development.

Best regards

wotan


body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
> Pete/Pcb21 wrote:
>
>>Are we really saying that if you want to get something done you have to
>>break the rules and accept a temporary punishment in "sacrifice"?
>
>
> No, that's not right.  What Anthony did was wrong and foolish, and the
> result was appropriate.
>
> If Anthony had a problem with how slow the process was going, or a
> problem with the process itself, or a problem with the process being
> complete but not implement, then the solution would have been quite
> simple: come to the mailing list and post a constructive comment about
> the situation, asking for support.
>
> Behaving like a jerk to force an issue is really not helpful.
>
> Getting into edit wars to get your way is just poor form.
>
> --Jimbo

Yes I absolutely agree that Anthony behaved very badly and he's back to
square one (or even square minus one) in gaining people's trust.

However I am really complaining that his actions, by and large, have
succeeded. If he hadn't have behaved like that then
[[Wikipedia:Tomorrow's featured article]] wouldn't exist right now.

I am at a bit of a loss of how to improve things though:
before the fact - we should've taken more notice of the talk page.
However this is a very vague and unimplementable guideline.

after the fact - doing nothing to change the policy in a sort of "we
don't negotiate with vandals" style seems to be cutting off our nose to
spite our face.

All in all, a tricky one. I thought the general issue was worth flagging
as it may happen again - on our very busiest Wikipedia: pages it is hard
to change things because there are so many interested parties.

Pete/Pcb21


from_name: Jens Frank

body:
Hi,

Subdomains of wikibooks.org don't work, only wikibooks.org and
www.wikibooks.org are available, but not e.g. en.wikibooks.org.

Regards,

JeLuF


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] HP Hardware donation

body:
Though it is not entirely fixed, here are some news of a hardware donation made to Wikimedia Foundation

-------------

An employee at HP in France has contacted us, offering us free hardware.

This is a no-strings-attached donation from a few friends at HP who want to support Wikipedia. They reserve the right to mention this donation.

The machines offered are:* One 4U 6 CPU Xeon 750 with 1GB of RAM* One 4 CPU Xeon 700 with 2GB of RAM* One 6U 8 CPU Xeon 900 with 16GB of RAM and 2 SCSI drive max (which might work as a web server box immediately)* 3 Celeron 600 1U with 20G/ide and 128M of memory.

There were a lot of discussion on irc these days about these servers
and many people got involved to determine what would be best doing.

First we decided to accept the offer :-) The 6 servers will be picked up 2 french contributors, Med and Cereal Killer on thursday.
There will be a small shipping cost from Grenoble (the city where the servers come from) to Paris, which will be taken by the WMF.

Med will install the Celerons. They will have a memory upgrade (the WMF will pay for this).

Yann has found us a hosting company ready to host the three squids for free, http://lost-oasis.fr/ :-)

The three bigger servers will be shipped from Paris to Florida. We are currently trying to find cheap shipping cost.
Any help/suggestion for *cheap* shipping is most welcome. We'd prefer a company with good credentials,
but there is no requirement in terms of shipping speed, so we might be able to find a good price.
Please, help us if you know a good shipping solution.

-----------

I will set a page on the future wikimediafoundation website (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF/Main Page) to begin listing corporations helping Wikimedia projects.

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
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subject: [Foundation-l] HP Hardware donation

body:
Though it is not entirely fixed, here are some news of a hardware donation made to Wikimedia Foundation

-------------

An employee at HP in France has contacted us, offering us free hardware.

This is a no-strings-attached donation from a few friends at HP who want to support Wikipedia. They reserve the right to mention this donation.

The machines offered are:* One 4U 6 CPU Xeon 750 with 1GB of RAM* One 4 CPU Xeon 700 with 2GB of RAM* One 6U 8 CPU Xeon 900 with 16GB of RAM and 2 SCSI drive max (which might work as a web server box immediately)* 3 Celeron 600 1U with 20G/ide and 128M of memory.

There were a lot of discussion on irc these days about these servers
and many people got involved to determine what would be best doing.

First we decided to accept the offer :-) The 6 servers will be picked up 2 french contributors, Med and Cereal Killer on thursday.
There will be a small shipping cost from Grenoble (the city where the servers come from) to Paris, which will be taken by the WMF.

Med will install the Celerons. They will have a memory upgrade (the WMF will pay for this).

Yann has found us a hosting company ready to host the three squids for free, http://lost-oasis.fr/ :-)

The three bigger servers will be shipped from Paris to Florida. We are currently trying to find cheap shipping cost.
Any help/suggestion for *cheap* shipping is most welcome. We'd prefer a company with good credentials,
but there is no requirement in terms of shipping speed, so we might be able to find a good price.
Please, help us if you know a good shipping solution.

-----------

I will set a page on the future wikimediafoundation website (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF/Main Page) to begin listing corporations helping Wikimedia projects.

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
-------------- next part --------------
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URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/attachments/20040721/0647e2fc/attachment-0001.htm


subject: [Foundation-l] HP Hardware donation

body:
Though it is not entirely fixed, here are some news of a hardware donation made to Wikimedia Foundation

-------------

An employee at HP in France has contacted us, offering us free hardware.

This is a no-strings-attached donation from a few friends at HP who want to support Wikipedia. They reserve the right to mention this donation.

The machines offered are:* One 4U 6 CPU Xeon 750 with 1GB of RAM* One 4 CPU Xeon 700 with 2GB of RAM* One 6U 8 CPU Xeon 900 with 16GB of RAM and 2 SCSI drive max (which might work as a web server box immediately)* 3 Celeron 600 1U with 20G/ide and 128M of memory.

There were a lot of discussion on irc these days about these servers
and many people got involved to determine what would be best doing.

First we decided to accept the offer :-) The 6 servers will be picked up 2 french contributors, Med and Cereal Killer on thursday.
There will be a small shipping cost from Grenoble (the city where the servers come from) to Paris, which will be taken by the WMF.

Med will install the Celerons. They will have a memory upgrade (the WMF will pay for this).

Yann has found us a hosting company ready to host the three squids for free, http://lost-oasis.fr/ :-)

The three bigger servers will be shipped from Paris to Florida. We are currently trying to find cheap shipping cost.
Any help/suggestion for *cheap* shipping is most welcome. We'd prefer a company with good credentials,
but there is no requirement in terms of shipping speed, so we might be able to find a good price.
Please, help us if you know a good shipping solution.

-----------

I will set a page on the future wikimediafoundation website (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF/Main Page) to begin listing corporations helping Wikimedia projects.

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
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subject: [Foundation-l] HP Hardware donation

body:
Though it is not entirely fixed, here are some news of a hardware donation made to Wikimedia Foundation

-------------

An employee at HP in France has contacted us, offering us free hardware.

This is a no-strings-attached donation from a few friends at HP who want to support Wikipedia. They reserve the right to mention this donation.

The machines offered are:* One 4U 6 CPU Xeon 750 with 1GB of RAM* One 4 CPU Xeon 700 with 2GB of RAM* One 6U 8 CPU Xeon 900 with 16GB of RAM and 2 SCSI drive max (which might work as a web server box immediately)* 3 Celeron 600 1U with 20G/ide and 128M of memory.

There were a lot of discussion on irc these days about these servers
and many people got involved to determine what would be best doing.

First we decided to accept the offer :-) The 6 servers will be picked up 2 french contributors, Med and Cereal Killer on thursday.
There will be a small shipping cost from Grenoble (the city where the servers come from) to Paris, which will be taken by the WMF.

Med will install the Celerons. They will have a memory upgrade (the WMF will pay for this).

Yann has found us a hosting company ready to host the three squids for free, http://lost-oasis.fr/ :-)

The three bigger servers will be shipped from Paris to Florida. We are currently trying to find cheap shipping cost.
Any help/suggestion for *cheap* shipping is most welcome. We'd prefer a company with good credentials,
but there is no requirement in terms of shipping speed, so we might be able to find a good price.
Please, help us if you know a good shipping solution.

-----------

I will set a page on the future wikimediafoundation website (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF/Main Page) to begin listing corporations helping Wikimedia projects.

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
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subject: [Wikitech-l] HP Hardware donation

body:
Though it is not entirely fixed, here are some news of a hardware donation made to Wikimedia Foundation

-------------

An employee at HP in France has contacted us, offering us free hardware.

This is a no-strings-attached donation from a few friends at HP who want to support Wikipedia. They reserve the right to mention this donation.

The machines offered are:* One 4U 6 CPU Xeon 750 with 1GB of RAM* One 4 CPU Xeon 700 with 2GB of RAM* One 6U 8 CPU Xeon 900 with 16GB of RAM and 2 SCSI drive max (which might work as a web server box immediately)* 3 Celeron 600 1U with 20G/ide and 128M of memory.

There were a lot of discussion on irc these days about these servers
and many people got involved to determine what would be best doing.

First we decided to accept the offer :-) The 6 servers will be picked up 2 french contributors, Med and Cereal Killer on thursday.
There will be a small shipping cost from Grenoble (the city where the servers come from) to Paris, which will be taken by the WMF.

Med will install the Celerons. They will have a memory upgrade (the WMF will pay for this).

Yann has found us a hosting company ready to host the three squids for free, http://lost-oasis.fr/ :-)

The three bigger servers will be shipped from Paris to Florida. We are currently trying to find cheap shipping cost.
Any help/suggestion for *cheap* shipping is most welcome. We'd prefer a company with good credentials,
but there is no requirement in terms of shipping speed, so we might be able to find a good price.
Please, help us if you know a good shipping solution.

-----------

I will set a page on the future wikimediafoundation website (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF/Main Page) to begin listing corporations helping Wikimedia projects.

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
-------------- next part --------------
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body:
Timwi wrote:
> Angela_ wrote:
>
>> If any of the other wikis would like username blocking enabled, they
>> can request it at
>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Non-development_tasks_for_developers
>
>
> Why isn't it enabled for all Wikipedias?

Because when the feature was set up, it was the ultimate move in a long
controversy. Adding this new feature was done solely on needs expressed
by the english wikipedia. The feature was made customizable to allow
local decisions to use it or not.
I think that most would now agree that this has been good, and should be
made default everywhere. In particular because history of the feature
set up being lost, some wikis do not understand why it does not work for
them :-)


from_name: Arwel Parry

body:
In message <8b722b80040720143078f3360e at mail.gmail.com>, Angela_
<beesley at gmail.com> writes
>If any of the other wikis would like username blocking enabled, they
>can request it at
>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Non-development_tasks_for_developers
>
>Angela.

Oh great, another Meta page that most people won't know exists! :(

Please excuse my cynicism, Angela, but I am in despair to see that the
top two links off that page are [[Meta:Language files to be updated]]
and [[Meta:Requests for languageXX.php update ]], when I have in the
last week or so posted both here and on Wiki-en asking whether anybody
actually monitors those pages and perhaps even occasionally actions
requests on those particular pages since there are currently outstanding
update requests going back many months, and only got a reply saying that
the MediaWiki strings have largely superseded the language files. Yes, I
KNOW that, but there are still things which can only be tweaked using
the language file.

I've had a request for an update to LanguageCy.php for over two weeks
now, because we've got a mis-spelling in the name for "July". I realise
we can't expect the developers to drop everything but the present total
silence gives us no indication that anyone has even noticed our request,
let alone give us an indication of when it might possibly be done. In
the last half hour I've written a reply to a complaint on
[[cy:Wicipedia:Y Caffi]] from a user who was complaining that while the
Welsh word for redirect, ail-cyfeirio, works, when an article is moved
the system puts "redirect" in the article, which no longer works because
the current version of the language file doesn't have the English
synonym in it; the version I've asked to be applied does. I said it
should be fixed soon -- am I to be shown up as a liar?

I'm sorry, but from my seat on the sidelines of this mailing list I get
the impression that the developers are more interested in writing
version 4 of MediaWiki than in getting version 3 to work properly in all
languages.

--
Arwel Parry
cy.wikipedia.org
http://www.cartref.demon.co.uk/


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject:
[Wikitech-l] List of things that need to be done developer-wise on
	the Icelandic Wikipedia

body:
Hey guys and first of all thanks for the great work on MediaWiki, i
would like to request of you three things that need to be done on the
Icelandic wikipedia regarding technical issues to bring it up to par
with the larger wikipedias.

1. Insert the LanguageIs.php
Thanks a lot for previous help on this file, it's already in CVS and
ready to roll;=)

2. Post-LanguageIs.php insertation

After namespaces have been translated to Icelandic we'll have a lot of
broken wikilinks, [[Category:foo]] instead of [[Flokkur:foo]] and so
on, i understand that instead of falling over gracefully the system
will break due to this, so it would like to request that a bot be run
which replaces English namespace text inn all wikitext to the
Icelandic equivalents.

Timwi previously pointed out to me that i could use some Perl scripts
( http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Useless_Perl_Scripts ) to do this
myself, however i would prefer not to as i don't have experience with
those and it could lead to some undesired consequences.

3. Make Wikilinks work correctly,
Currently, if i write wikilinks on is. they will not behave in the
correct way, [[a]]b will only make a href="" for a but not b, see
http://is.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sandkassinn for a demo of this,
could all letters listed in the Icelandic alphabet at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_alphabet be put in some sort of
list for allowed characters to expand on?


subject: [WikiEN-l] more questions

body:
Then expect to be banned.

Fred

> From: "Anthony DiPierro" <anthonydipierro at hotmail.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2004 06:37:10 -0400
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] more questions
>
> So yes, I ignore the 3-revert guideline, at least, the one written on
> Wikipedia:revert.


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Lightness vs. darkness (was: Anthony and the Main Page
	edit war)

body:
Jimbo is right:

> Behaving like a jerk to force an issue is really not helpful.
> Getting into edit wars to get your way is just poor form.

There's a difference between taking bold (but reversible) action, as I
myself occasionally do -- and then taking the heat for it.

... And committing the most venial of Wiki sins: blitzing a page with
reverts to prevent anyone else from modifying it.

The difference between doing what Larry originally wrote about it
[[Wikipedia:Be bold]] and what all those annoying edit warriors do is
like day and night, light and darkness, good and evil. It's the
difference...

...between a wake-up call and a fatal drug overdose;

...between having a bucket of cold water thrown in your face, and having
a old tire filled with gasoline hung around your neck and set on fire.

Ed Poor

(I'm a big 4 fan: I never metaphor I didn't like ;-)


from_name: blankfaze

subject: [WikiEN-l] more questions

body:
> Let's talk about why the violations of some users are ignored,
> such as Blankfaze during the exact same edit war that got me banned.

For the record, during that edit war, I reverted exactly 4 times.
Orginally, only 3, but [[User:Danny]] told me to revert a 4th time and
he would protect the page.  Ask him... I was rather hesistant to break
the 3 revert rule.

As for Anthony, I understand that he has raised this issue on talk
pages in the past.  However, to his supporters, I make the argument
that it is incredibly immature and inappropriate to take the actions
Anthony did just becasue you're not getting your way.

I realise that the "rules" naming [[User:Raul654]] as de facto
administrator of the feature template aren't really written down
anywhere, that they're moreso common knowledge (or so I thought)...
And maybe that was a mistake from the beginning.  Maybe it was just
asking for trouble.

But you can't make *any* argument to me that justifies Anthony's actions.