subject: [Wikipedia-l] Where to move commentary

body:
> > For that matter, I'd like to see
> > the [http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?InterWiki InterWiki]
> > concept implemented...

> I thought it did work.

''Mea culpa.'' I even have a couple InterWiki links on my own
[[Tim_Chambers/Bookmarks]] page. I forgot. /.\ What ''doesn't work'' is
trying to combine it with [[Free Links]]. [[Wiki:InterWiki]] doesn't work in
wiki source, but plain old Wiki:InterWiki works fine.

<>< [[tbc]]


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Tim Chambers

subject: [Wikipedia-l] No subpages. Is that your final answer?

body:
Claudine Chionh <wikipedia at nullpage.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 06 November 2001, lsanger at nupedia.com wrote in response to tbc:
>
> > > The idea of a back-link feature has been tossed around. That
> > > was a feature of Ward's original WikiWiki. It's helpful.
> >
> > Can you tell us more about that?  I am imagining that this means you'd
> > link, say, at the bottom of a page, all the pages that link to the given
> > page?  That could be cool.
>
> I'm not Tim, but I've come across the backlinks concept on a
> number of other wikis...

I was thinking of Ward's WikiWiki. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiUrl explains
what I was referring to. There's a line on that page that says
http:wiki?search=PageTitle (search for links to a page).

Like Claudine said, it's a little easier when the page names are all bumpy
case -- they stand out in content. IMHO, a search for links in the 'pedia
would need to take into account both forms of free links: with and without
underscores. It should ignore case, too.

<>< [[tbc]]


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Where to move commentary

body:
> Only one problem with Tim's name for the wiki: http://www.metapedia.com/
> is already registered...

Aack. I don't like that domain name, anyway. I was thinking of us
''calling'' it the metapedia, but I think the URL should be
http://meta.wikipedia.com/. Keep it close to "home".

<>< [[tbc]]


from_name: Gareth Owen

in_reply_to: Jimmy Wales's message of "Tue, 6 Nov 2001 18:40:18 -0600"

body:
Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> writes:

> At least in my mind, there is no final decision.  But I'm inclined to agree
> with the no subpages point of view.

In which case I'd like to express my vehement opposition to this view.
I believe that Television/Band, Nirvana/Band and Catatonia/Band are ideal
places for those articles.  Similarly its far easier remember how to link to
[[Baseball/History]] (especially from [[Baseball/World Series]], say) than to
remember if its [[History of Baseball]] or [[The History of Baseball]] or
[[Baseball History]]...

Similarly /Talk pages are great, and handy, if they're used for discussing the
accompanying article rather than tedious meta-discussion best kept here,
which, a few vociferous eejits aside, they are.

The failing of subpages is that there is no clear policy for naming them.

--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12/1/01)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Corvus13 replied

in_reply_to: Tim Chambers's message of "Tue, 6 Nov 2001 13:29:01 -0800 (PST)"

body:
Tim Chambers <tbchambers at yahoo.com> writes:

> I'm going to wait about a week for him to calm down before writing to
> him again. But if anyone has their own conciliatory words to send to
> him, I confirmed his e-mail: corvus13 at hotmail.com.

Can someone give me a brief resume (by private email if you don't want to stir
old coals) as to what happened.
--
Gareth Owen
 (who likes translating articles written in broken English
  into his own variant of broken English)


from_name: lsanger at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Where to move commentary

body:
On Wed, 7 Nov 2001, Lars Aronsson wrote:

> Larry Sanger wrote: >
> http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Larry_Sanger/Moving_commentary_out_of_Wikipedia
> > I proposed to move the contents of [[Wikipedia commentary]],
> personal > essays, and perhaps some other pages to a different wiki
> altogether.
>
> It seems easier to keep all within one wiki, but perhaps restrict
> these categories of articles to be subpages of two wiki pages:
> Wikipedia (for policies) and Wikipedian (for user presentations).

This doesn't solve the problem we're trying to solve, though.  The problem
is: how do we keep mere discussion of Wikipedia, such as we're engaging in
now, from distracting people from the main task of writing articles.  It
has been, recently, quite a bit.

> [[LA2]] would become [[Wikipedian/LA2]].  Not too bad if you ask me.

Yes, it would be an improvement.  But it still wouldn't solve the problem.

Larry


subject: [Wikipedia-l] planetmath.org

body:
This is all great news about MathWorld.  I have been worried that some
such lawsuit would force Wikipedia to shut down.  It's nice to know
they've bounced back--*and* that Wikipedia might, perhaps, be able to
benefit from some of their work!

Larry


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Resource (copyright encumbered)

body:
Those of a mathematical bent may be pleased to know that the excellent
resource at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ is back online.  Whilst the text is
copyright, the ideas can't be.
--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12/1/01)


from_name: lcrocker at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Corvus13 replied

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body:
--- Gareth Owen <wiki at gwowen.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:

> In which case I'd like to express my vehement opposition to
> this view.

And now I'd like to take a stab at countering complaints.

> Television/Band, Nirvana/Band and Catatonia/Band...

Television (band), Nirvana (band) and Catatonia (band) are all
better page titles. I seem to remember reading that UseModWiki
was going to allow parentheses in titles at some point. Now I
hope the PHP software supports this.

> [[Baseball/History]] (especially from [[Baseball/World Series]]...)

[[History of Baseball]] and [[Baseball World Series]] are
synonymous.

> Similarly /Talk pages are great...

But the separate talk: namespace is even better.

> The failing of subpages is that there is no clear policy for
> naming them.

I think the concept of subpages is flawed in an encyclopedia. Why
limit ourselves to a primitive hierarchical structure?
Eliminating subpages paves the way for the implementation of even
better navigation features.

I would like to see wiki software that allows for enumeration of
generic terms that would trigger navigation links to appear on
article pages automatically. It's a natural consequence of
[[Wikipedia is not paper|Wikipedia not being paper]]. Using the
baseball articles as examples, "baseball" should be tagged as one
of those generic terms. Then any page with "baseball" in the
title would get a link to the [[Baseball]] article, and the
[[Baseball]] article would list links to all the other baseball
articles.

Going even farther, maybe "See also:" should be handled
specially. I can't think of how it would work, though.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Find a job, post your resume.
http://careers.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Corvus13 replied

body:
--- Gareth Owen <wiki at gwowen.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> Can someone give me a brief resume ... as to what happened.

Here's my POV. He seems to be an advocate of [[Crystallomancy]]. He
was
adding sections to gem and mineral pages that relayed interesting
folklore facts. He was clearly marking them folklore, but his writing
style started as non-NPOV. He toned it down, but MichaelTinkler was
making (quite valid) criticisms about capitalization and writing
style. That seems to have set him off. He took it personally. He also
took offense that Michael would question whether the contributions
were copyrighted. (Corvus13 said his material was original.)

<>< [[tbc]]

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Find a job, post your resume.
http://careers.yahoo.com


body:
Oy!  Once more into the breach.  :-)

Before I reply, let me say I am puzzled why we're still talking about
this.  Either you're asking for an explanation of my decision to eliminate
subpages (which is fine!), or, perhaps, you are expressing disagreement
that it should have been made so soon (that, too, would be fine).  But no
one has explicitly said the latter.  In fact, it looks like the discussion
is neither--it just looks like you're arguing about whether we should have
subpages, and I don't quite see what the point of doing that, per se, is.

What do you think?

Anyway, to reply:

On Wed, 7 Nov 2001, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Gareth Owen wrote: > In which case I'd like to express my vehement
> opposition to this view. > I believe that Television/Band,
> Nirvana/Band and Catatonia/Band are ideal > places for those articles.
>
> O.k., I'm more or less with you here, and this is part of what I keep
> stumbling over when I think about this.  My first objection here is
> that [[Nirvana/Band]] under the current system will have a link at the
> top of the page to [[Nirvana]], which probably doesn't make that much
> sense.
>
> Indeed, [[Band/Television]], [[Band/Nirvana]], and [[Band/Catatonia]]
> make more sense to me *from this point of view*: each of these pages
> will have an automatic link to [[Band]], which would then presumably
> be a broad overview of bands, or something of that sort.

As soon as we move to Magnus' software, the obvious solution will be
[[Nirvana (rock band)]], etc.

> >  Similarly its far easier remember how to link to
> > [[Baseball/History]] (especially from [[Baseball/World Series]], say) than to
> > remember if its [[History of Baseball]] or [[The History of Baseball]] or
> > [[Baseball History]]...
>
> I think that's absolutely right.  Whether or not it is _compelling_,
> I'm not sure.

Well, it might be easier for somebody to remember [[Baseball/History]] if
he created or worked on that page, but if he had created [[history of
baseball]], he'd no doubt find *that* easy to remember.  The fact is that
having subpages doesn't make pagenames any easier to remember.  It is just
a system, which implies one indeed reasonably easy way to remember page
titles.  Other systems that do not use subpages might be just as easy.
Then of course there's the problem that we won't know what pages use
subpages and what ones don't; eliminating them altogether at least reduces
the number of possibilities.  So, on the whole, I think eliminating
subpages will make it easier for us to remember page titles.

For me, the question doesn't turn on this issue, however.

> One thing to keep in mind is that (as far as I can tell) the *only*
> thing special about subpages is that they auto-link back to the parent
> page.  We would "technically" have done away with subpages if we
> simply omitted that feature, and treated '/' as an ordinary character
> like '_' or ':'.
>
> So in part, this isn't a debate about "subpages", but about "naming
> conventions", and in my mind, I keep mixing the two issues up.

On my view, it's about those things and a bit more.  Having subpages
actually can change ("force," "direct") the content of articles, and this
can be a bad thing.  See

http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Wikipedia_subpages_pros_and_cons

for this and other arguments.

> I think we are all in agreement that /Talk is such an integral part of
> our culture that we want to make them into a special case, a separate
> talk: namespace, that is automatically there for every article.

In other words, we can have the same functionality of /Talk pages without
subpages.

> > The failing of subpages is that there is no clear policy for naming them.
>
> I agree.

Well, I think there are a lot more failings than that.  See the above URL.

> I think people are suggesting that the subpages system leads people to
> be "lazy" about coming up with page names.  But laziness isn't always
> a bad thing, of course.  Lazy is good if it means more accidental
> linking, or more easy-to-guess linking.  A consistent system of naming
> pages is necessary for that.
>
> There are some articles that are naturally sub-articles under a bigger
> article.  [[World War II/Iwo Jima]] makes sense to me instantly, and I
> also know instantly that it is different from [[Iwo Jima]].
>
> [[World War II/Iwo Jima]] is the story of the battle of Iwo Jima in
> World War II: what happened there?  Why was it important?
>
> [[Iwo Jima]] is the more general story of the island, a CIA factbook
> style article telling the history of the island, who lives there now,
> what their economy is, what impact WWII had on these things, etc.
>
> How would the anti-sub-pages crowd answer the argument that this is a
> natural and intuitive naming scheme that should be preserved?  And
> that alternatives such as [[Iwo Jima in World War II]] and [[The
> Battle of Iwo Jima]] and [[Battle of Iwo Jima]] are going to be a lot
> harder to 'accidentally' link to from elsewhere?

I would answer that it's one naming scheme, but it has no great advantages
over the combination of [[Iwo Jima]] and one of the names just mentioned
(e.g., [[Battle of Iwo Jima]]).  It's no harder to "accidentally" link to
from elsewhere.  Making battles subpages of wars is more or less a matter
of convention, and other intuitive conventions can be learned if they
indeed make some intuitive sense.  E.g., if we get into the habit of
naming battles without the definite article and using their most common
names, then anyone who wants to try to guess at the name could correctly
guess the name of the article is "Battle of Iwo Jima" (if that's the
common name--I don't know if it is :-) ).

There are *other* significant disadvantages to subpages, which I won't
rehearse here--you can find them on

http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Wikipedia_subpages_pros_and_cons

--Larry


body:
On Wed, 7 Nov 2001, Tim Chambers wrote:
> I would like to see wiki software that allows for enumeration of
> generic terms that would trigger navigation links to appear on
> article pages automatically. It's a natural consequence of
> [[Wikipedia is not paper|Wikipedia not being paper]]. Using the
> baseball articles as examples, "baseball" should be tagged as one
> of those generic terms. Then any page with "baseball" in the
> title would get a link to the [[Baseball]] article, and the
> [[Baseball]] article would list links to all the other baseball
> articles.

Tim makes some excellent new points here.  The above suggestion is
interesting; we should keep it in the backs of our minds...

Larry


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Corvus13 replied

body:
On Wed, 7 Nov 2001 lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:

> I'm not sure we should waste any time on these folks (i.e., those
> Wikipedians who occasionally take offense and leave).  Being able to
> see your own ideas from other points of view is a necessary skill
> here, as is having a thick skin.

I generally agree.  There's a bit of a tension between going out of our
way to see to it that *no one* leaves the project, and preserving high
standards.  Nupedia, by the way, has faced a similar problem.  Should
reviewers in their roles as reviewers, we asked ourselves, be expected to
hand-hold writers with poor ability in English or whose mastery of the
material is questionable?  On the one hand, we want the project to be open
and to encourage the development of content.  On the other hand, we don't
want to alienate some of our most productive members.

> If people are upset by aspects of
> the process we have deemed important, then trying to attract them
> back will have one of three results: (1) We just piss him off again;
> (2) We compromise the process out of misplaced guilt to keep him from
> leaving; or (3) He grows a spine, gets with the program, and stays.
>
> Obviously, we want (3).

In nearly all cases, yes.

> But if the person is capable of that and
> has stuff to say, he'll come back after he cools off regardless of
> what we do, as Manning apparently did.

Actually, a lot of us wrote to Manning asking him to come back, and that
seems to have been one reason he came back.  Of course, we all know the
real reason he came back is that he's an addict, just like all of us.  :-)

> Anything we do is more likely
> to lead to (1) or (2).

It's hard to tell, though, I suppose.  I think your most important point
here, Lee, is that indeed we *could* compromise the process out of
misplaced guilt.  I think that's right.  I do not think that we should
allow disruptive elements (of *all* sorts!) to be able to sidetrack us
from the good habits we have developed or that we are trying to develop.

On the other hand, I really *don't* want us to act like a "clique."  So
far, I think there's been rather little danger of that--my evidence is
that all of us disagree with each other on various issues from time to
time, which is healthy.

> So if people leave, let 'em.  If they come
> back, welcome them back. But let's not go out of our way to analyze
> every reason some person leaves and beat ourselves up.  If we do
> everything right, some people will still get pissed off and leave.
> That's life.

I agree with the above analysis 100%.

Larry


from_name: Jimmy Wales

in_reply_to: <r5i668ngcec.fsf@orr.maths.keele.ac.uk>; from wiki@gwowen.freeserve.co.uk on Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 09:26:19AM +0000

body:
Gareth Owen wrote:
> In which case I'd like to express my vehement opposition to this view.
> I believe that Television/Band, Nirvana/Band and Catatonia/Band are ideal
> places for those articles.

O.k., I'm more or less with you here, and this is part of what I keep
stumbling over when I think about this.  My first objection here is
that [[Nirvana/Band]] under the current system will have a link at the
top of the page to [[Nirvana]], which probably doesn't make that much
sense.

Indeed, [[Band/Television]], [[Band/Nirvana]], and [[Band/Catatonia]] make
more sense to me *from this point of view*: each of these pages will
have an automatic link to [[Band]], which would then presumably be a
broad overview of bands, or something of that sort.

Now, I'm _especially_ interested in this argument, which I think is
much more compelling than your band example:

>  Similarly its far easier remember how to link to
> [[Baseball/History]] (especially from [[Baseball/World Series]], say) than to
> remember if its [[History of Baseball]] or [[The History of Baseball]] or
> [[Baseball History]]...

I think that's absolutely right.  Whether or not it is _compelling_,
I'm not sure.

One thing to keep in mind is that (as far as I can tell) the *only*
thing special about subpages is that they auto-link back to the parent
page.  We would "technically" have done away with subpages if we
simply omitted that feature, and treated '/' as an ordinary character
like '_' or ':'.

So in part, this isn't a debate about "subpages", but about "naming
conventions", and in my mind, I keep mixing the two issues up.

> Similarly /Talk pages are great, and handy, if they're used for discussing the
> accompanying article rather than tedious meta-discussion best kept here,
> which, a few vociferous eejits aside, they are.

Yes!

I think we are all in agreement that /Talk is such an integral part of
our culture that we want to make them into a special case, a separate
talk: namespace, that is automatically there for every article.

> The failing of subpages is that there is no clear policy for naming them.

I agree.

I think people are suggesting that the subpages system leads people to
be "lazy" about coming up with page names.  But laziness isn't always
a bad thing, of course.  Lazy is good if it means more accidental
linking, or more easy-to-guess linking.  A consistent system of naming
pages is necessary for that.

There are some articles that are naturally sub-articles under a bigger
article.  [[World War II/Iwo Jima]] makes sense to me instantly, and I
also know instantly that it is different from [[Iwo Jima]].

[[World War II/Iwo Jima]] is the story of the battle of Iwo Jima in
World War II: what happened there?  Why was it important?

[[Iwo Jima]] is the more general story of the island, a CIA factbook
style article telling the history of the island, who lives there now,
what their economy is, what impact WWII had on these things, etc.

How would the anti-sub-pages crowd answer the argument that this is a
natural and intuitive naming scheme that should be preserved?  And
that alternatives such as [[Iwo Jima in World War II]] and [[The
Battle of Iwo Jima]] and [[Battle of Iwo Jima]] are going to be a lot
harder to 'accidentally' link to from elsewhere?

--Jimbo

--
*************************************************
*            http://www.wikipedia.com/          *
*        You can edit this page right now!      *
*************************************************


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Where to move commentary

body:
Larry Sanger wrote:
> http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Larry_Sanger/Moving_commentary_out_of_Wikipedia
> I proposed to move the contents of [[Wikipedia commentary]], personal
> essays, and perhaps some other pages to a different wiki altogether.

It seems easier to keep all within one wiki, but perhaps restrict
these categories of articles to be subpages of two wiki pages:
Wikipedia (for policies) and Wikipedian (for user presentations).

[[LA2]] would become [[Wikipedian/LA2]].  Not too bad if you ask me.

[[Spelling rules for Wikipedia]] would become [[Wikipedia/Spelling rules]].

The RecentChanges list and "view other versions" display would have to
link my contributions to [[Wikipedian/LA2]] instead of [[LA2]].  This
is a trivial fix in the wiki.pl script.  Probably much easier that
making it work with links to a separate wiki.

Initially, the old page titles would have to be #REDIRECTs to the new
entries, but that is a transition headache that we will face anyway.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik
  Teknikringen 1e, SE-583 30 Link?ping, Sweden
  tel +46-70-7891609
  http://aronsson.se


from_name: João Mário Miranda

body:
Slashdot has an interesting discussion about this:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23450&threshold=3&mode=thread

Joao
http://www.nonio.com

Gareth Owen wrote:
>
> Those of a mathematical bent may be pleased to know that the excellent
> resource at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ is back online.  Whilst the text is
> copyright, the ideas can't be.
> --
> Gareth Owen
> "Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
> are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12/1/01)
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

--
jo?o
http://www.nonio.com
http://www.explicacoes.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] planetmath.org

body:
Some of the content of

http://planetmath.org/

is under the GNU Free Documentation license. They
have an enciclopedia and some papers on mathematics.

Joao
http://www.nonio.com

Jo?o M?rio Miranda wrote:
>
> Slashdot has an interesting discussion about this:
>
> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23450&threshold=3&mode=thread
>
> Joao
> http://www.nonio.com
>
> Gareth Owen wrote:
> >
> > Those of a mathematical bent may be pleased to know that the excellent
> > resource at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ is back online.  Whilst the text is
> > copyright, the ideas can't be.
> > --
> > Gareth Owen
> > "Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
> > are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12/1/01)
> > [Wikipedia-l]
> > To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> > http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
> --
> jo?o
> http://www.nonio.com
> http://www.explicacoes.com
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

--
jo?o
http://www.nonio.com
http://www.explicacoes.com


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subject: [Wikipedia-l] planetmath.org

in_reply_to: <r5izo5y5t9h.fsf@orr.maths.keele.ac.uk>; from wiki@gwowen.freeserve.co.uk on Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 06:29:46PM +0000

body:
I think this illustrates why the GNU FDL is so important to what we
are doing here.

Did someone say that some of their content is under GNU FDL?  In
reading all about this lawsuit and the resolution of it, I don't see
that anywhere.

I'd be fearful of using content from this, even if it is claimed to be
under the GNU FDL, because I don't want to tangle with CRC Publishing.
I'm not saying that I'm 100% against it, just that I want us to be
thoughtful.

--Jimbo

--
*************************************************
*            http://www.wikipedia.com/          *
*        You can edit this page right now!      *
*************************************************


body:
As for me, I think that we should make changes very slowly and only
after we're really sure.  :-)  And I'm not 100% convinced.

Here's a couple of good examples of good uses of subpages:
[[Villanelle/Example]]
and
[[Saturday_Night_Live/Generalissimo_Francisco_Franco_is_still_dead]]

In the second case, the main page serves to set the context of the subpage
in a really nice way.  Anyone stumbling into the subpage would
probably be interested in visiting the main page.

> As soon as we move to Magnus' software, the obvious solution will be
> [[Nirvana (rock band)]], etc.

But how, exactly, is this really different from, let's say
[[Nirvana/Rock band]]?

> The fact is that having subpages doesn't make pagenames any easier
> to remember.  It is just a system, which implies one indeed
> reasonably easy way to remember page titles.

I think it makes them easy to *guess*, though.  And that's pretty important.
[[History of Baseball]] or [[Baseball History]]?  Hard to guess which
it might be.  But [[Baseball/History]] -- at least it is a system.

You might suggest: [[Baseball (History)]], but then I would respond --
what's the difference?  And shouldn't this page link to the main
[[Baseball]] page, automatically?  One would think so.

> In other words, we can have the same functionality of /Talk pages without
> subpages.

Yes, and I do agree with this.

One of the ways that I conceptualize namespaces is that it makes it
easier to distinguish what is *in the encyclopedia* versus what is
*about the encyclopedia*.  Right now, our personal names [[Jimbo
Wales]] for example, are *in the encyclopedia*, which doesn't really
make sense.  (Unless anyone thinks I'm famous enough to deserve an
entry, ha ha!)

> Well, I think there are a lot more failings than that.  See the above URL.

> I would answer that it's one naming scheme, but it has no great advantages
> over the combination of [[Iwo Jima]] and one of the names just mentioned
> (e.g., [[Battle of Iwo Jima]]).  It's no harder to "accidentally" link to
> from elsewhere.  Making battles subpages of wars is more or less a matter
> of convention, and other intuitive conventions can be learned if they
> indeed make some intuitive sense.

Won't any convention "force" or "direct" us to think in certain ways?
I hardly see this as an objection against this _particular_ convention.

> http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Wikipedia_subpages_pros_and_cons

Well, I disagree with some of those.

For example: "Subpages replace the English meaning of the slash with a
special meaning" -- the "sub" meaning of "slash" is well known in
English, at least to people who use computers at all, which means all
Wikipedians and all customers.  Websites do it!

http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Art_History/
http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Art_History/Criticism_and_Theory/

People know what this means, instantly.  This means that this category
"Criticism and Theory" is not about criticism and theory generally,
but in the context of Art History.

--Jimbo

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*            http://www.wikipedia.com/          *
*        You can edit this page right now!      *
*************************************************


subject: [Wikipedia-l] planetmath.org is not MathWorld

in_reply_to: <3BE9933C.84D8C2C4@explicacoes.com>; from jmiranda@explicacoes.com on Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 08:02:04PM +0000

body:
Ah, I understand now.

Jo?o M?rio Miranda wrote:

>
>
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
> >
> > I think this illustrates why the GNU FDL is so important to what we
> > are doing here.
> >
> > Did someone say that some of their content is under GNU FDL?  In
> > reading all about this lawsuit and the resolution of it, I don't see
> > that anywhere.
>
> No, it's  http://planetmath.org/ that is under GNU FDL. Planetmath.org
>  is not MathWorld !!!
>
> mathworld (http://mathworld.wolfram.com) is not under GNU FDL and
> I don't thik it can ever be.
>
> Joao
> http://www.nonio.com
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

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*        You can edit this page right now!      *
*************************************************


subject: [Wikipedia-l] planetmath.org

in_reply_to: <lsanger@nupedia.com>'s message of "Wed, 7 Nov 2001 10:07:48 -0800 (PST)"

body:
<lsanger at nupedia.com> writes:

> This is all great news about MathWorld.

Well it would be, if the legal settlement had been something other than
"Eric gets the shaft from CRC publishing".  From a wikipedia standpoint, this
is a hard lesson to the contributors of mathworld that their contributions
need protection to remain free.
(http://www.mathworld.com/erics_commentary.html)

Their new contribution copyright waiver makes me feel mildly nauseous.
(http://www.mathworld.com/permission_form.html)
--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12/1/01)


in_reply_to: <200111072251.fA7MpiB27541@ross.bomis.com>; from lcrocker@nupedia.com on Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 02:51:44PM -0800

body:
First of all, let me apologize to everyone for even having this
conversation.  I really wasn't aware of all that had gone before,
including the fact that Larry had already made a decision based on
existing consensus.

lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
> No, parentheses are for context to disambiguate the main term,
> not for sub-domains.  Again, there's already a standard body of
> knowledge for how to do this: real encyclopedias.  I'm the first
> to point out that we aren't constrained by paper here, but there's
> no reason we can't learn from the existing scholarship about how
> to organize and title knowledge.  This has been going on for a
> long time, and they're very good at it.

That's certainly true!

> "Automatic" things are great when they are things that a stupid
> computer can figure out.  Associations between ideas are at the
> bottom of that list.  Human beings should determine those.

O.k., that's a good counter-argument.

How about this...

There seems to be agreement that we could use the new software for the
meta-wikipedia, where we want all commentary _about_ the encyclopedia
to go.  Why don't we start that one without subpages, and then live
with it for a little while there.  This will give us real world
experience.  If we find that we don't miss subpages, then when we move
the full encyclopedia over to the new software, we can just re-align
the subpages, and be happy with it, secure in the knowledge that we
aren't giving up anything useful.

--
*************************************************
*            http://www.wikipedia.com/          *
*        You can edit this page right now!      *
*************************************************


in_reply_to: Tim Chambers's message of "Wed, 7 Nov 2001 10:29:21 -0800 (PST)"

body:
Tim Chambers <tbchambers at yahoo.com> writes:

> Television (band), Nirvana (band) and Catatonia (band) are all
> better page titles.

Why are they better?  Are they even demonstrably different besides being
(a) harder to type
(b) Unimplemented

> > [[Baseball/History]] (especially from [[Baseball/World Series]]...)
>
> [[History of Baseball]]

as is [[Baseball History]]

> and [[Baseball World Series]] are synonymous.
>
> > Similarly /Talk pages are great...
>
> But the separate talk: namespace is even better.

I must admit I haven't been following this.  What would replace
[[World War II/Talk]] ?

> I think the concept of subpages is flawed in an encyclopedia. Why
> limit ourselves to a primitive hierarchical structure?

Why limit ourselves to a flat non-structure?

> Eliminating subpages paves the way for the implementation of even better
> navigation features.

I don't see how subpages affect this one way or the other.

> any page with "baseball" in the title would get a link to the [[Baseball]]
> article, and the [[Baseball]] article would list links to all the other
> baseball articles.

I don't think this is dependent on the elimination of subpages one way or the
other...
--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12/1/01)


in_reply_to: <lsanger@nupedia.com>'s message of "Wed, 7 Nov 2001 11:12:14 -0800 (PST)"

body:
<lsanger at nupedia.com> writes:

> But no one has explicitly said the latter.  In fact, it looks like the
> discussion is neither--it just looks like you're arguing about whether we
> should have subpages

I'm not arguing anything :) I'm just stating that I like subpages, and will
continue creating them, and organising my input with them, up until the exact
moment that the software stops me.

> As soon as we move to Magnus' software, the obvious solution will be
> [[Nirvana (rock band)]], etc.

And [[Nirvana (grunge band)]], [[Nirvana (band)]], [[Nirvana (60s band)]]

> Well, it might be easier for somebody to remember [[Baseball/History]] if
> he created or worked on that page, but if he had created [[history of
> baseball]], he'd no doubt find *that* easy to remember

I guess what I'm arguing is this.
At the moment 'pedia contains the following articles

[[History of the United States]]
[[Chinese history]]
[[Baseball/History]]
[[Film history]]
[[History of the internet]]

Now I don't *really* mind which it is, but [0]

Similarly, I could forsee (since hypotheticals seem more important than
actualities these days) it having:
[[Battle of Stalingrad]] [[Siege of Leningrad]] [[Normandy landings]]

But if I'm writing [[World War II/Stalingrad]] and want to link to Leningrad,
I think I'm gonna be able to figure out [[/Leningrad]], rather than [[Battle
of Leningrad]] or [[Siege of Leningrad]].  I think that *is* easier to link,
if not accidentally, but with minimum thought and effort on my behalf.

> The fact is that having subpages doesn't make pagenames any easier to
> remember.

It doesn't make known pagenames easier to remember, it makes the unknown ones
easy to deduce.

Right, I've said my piece, so I'll go and libel [[Bud Selig]] a bit more.

[0] I mind anything, to be honest.
    I'm just stating my case.
--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] A copyright quickie (or two)

body:
i) I added an example villanelle and [[villanelle/Example]] and I'm pretty
   sure I'm in the clear on copyright.  But IANALNDIPOOTV[0], so can someone
   with the appropriate smarts check it out.  I put the relevant dates on.

ii)Someone asked about pictures of [[Blind Blake]] on [[Blind Blake/Talk]]
   I found the only one in existence[1] (which dates from 1930) but have no
   idea how to check its copyright status.  Anyone?

Sorry for sending so much to wikipedia-l today.
I'll stop now, and go home for dinner and Seinfeld reruns (it is 8pm).

[0] I Am Not A Lawyer Nor Do I Play One On Tv
[1] http://images.google.com/images?q=blind+blake&hl=&btnG=Google+Search
--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
 are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)


body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
> I think this illustrates why the GNU FDL is so important to what we
> are doing here.
>
> Did someone say that some of their content is under GNU FDL?  In
> reading all about this lawsuit and the resolution of it, I don't see
> that anywhere.

No, it's  http://planetmath.org/ that is under GNU FDL. Planetmath.org
 is not MathWorld !!!

mathworld (http://mathworld.wolfram.com) is not under GNU FDL and
I don't thik it can ever be.

Joao
http://www.nonio.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] planetmath.org

in_reply_to: Jimmy Wales's message of "Wed, 7 Nov 2001 15:09:41 -0600"

body:
Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> writes:

> Did someone say that some of their content is under GNU FDL?
> In reading all about this lawsuit and the resolution of it, I don't see that
> anywhere.

planetmath is not mathworld, but a free replacement.

See http://planetmath.org/?op=license
--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
 are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)


from_name: Michel Clasquin

body:
On Wednesday 07 November 2001 02:40, you wrote:
> Compare:
>
> [[Military of Afghanistan]]
> and
> [[Sudan/Military]]
>
> In the former, the author had to link back to the main page by hand,
> in the latter, it happened automatically.

But I could have arrived at [[Military of Afghanistan]] either from
[[Military]] or [[Afghanistan]]. Odds are I want to return to the page I
came from, not the other one. For which purpose we have a little thing
called a Back button in most browsers <g>, so the linkback's function is
still there, really for the majority of cases. Given all the other
problems subpages seem to cause, I agree that we can nix them.

PS. the meat world has caught up with me and I have had to cut down on my
wiki activities for a while. But as [[Arnold|Terminator]] put it "I'll be
back"

--
Michel Clasquin, D Litt et Phil (Unisa)
clasqm at mweb.co.za/unisa.ac.za   http://www.geocities.com/clasqm
This message was posted from a Microsoft-free PC

f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb n nx dmnstrtn


from_name: Simon Kissane

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Vote on subpages

body:
I personally support abolishing support for subpages
in the software. But some people (GWO, AV) seem to
disagree. So I have a proposal: if there is a lack of
consensus on whether or not we should get rid of
subpages, why not have a vote on it? I have noticed
that nupedia-l has held votes on stuff to do with
Nupedia (although since I've never been involved in
that list, just had a quick peek at the archives, I
don't know the details of how they operate...)

We could simply appoint someone as returning officer
(hereafter RO) (I think LMS acted as RO for nupedia-l;
if he wants to he could do it for this as well;
otherwise I'd be willing to do it, or anyone else who
wishes to step forward can). We agree on precisely
what the question is, i.e. "the support for subpages
that exists in the current Wikipedia software shall
not be implemented in the new Wikipedia software", and
then everyone emails their vote (yes or no; I think we
should try to avoid maybes or "its more complicated
than that" votes) to the RO. The RO then tabulates the
votes and posts the result to the mailing list. (I'd
also recommend the RO posting who voted each way --
that way we can ensure against fraud.)

We could have the vote on Wikipedia itself, the only
problem there is that fraud would be far too easy.
Doing it by email is safer. But we still should notify
the election and the result on Wikipedia itself, for
the sake of Wikipedians who don't participate in this
mailing list.

__________________________________________________
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Proposal for a "#PARENT" command

body:
Some have said that the advantage of having subpages
is that every subpage has a link to its parent page.
We could still keep that functionality, with a little
extra work, if we added a "#PARENT" command.

Suppose we have pages [[Afghanistan]] and
[[Afghanistan/History]]. Currently,
[[Afghanistan/History]] has a link back to
[[Afghanistan]] in it. But if we rename
[[Afghanistan/History]] to [[History of Afghanistan]],
the link back disappears.

That is why I propose a "#PARENT" command. The
"#PARENT" command would be placed at the beginning of
[[History of Afghanistan]], as follows:
#PARENT [[Afghanistan]]
Then, a link to [[Afghanistan]] will appear on the
[[History of Afghanistan]] page, just like a link to
[[Afghanistan]] appears on the [[Afghanistan/History]] page.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Find a job, post your resume.
http://careers.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Moving commentary out of Wikipedia

body:
I don't really think the idea of moving commentary out
of Wikipedia will work. The problem is that no hard
line can be drawn between "policy discussion" and
"discussion about the articles". It is easy for a
discussion about "what belongs in this article" to
degenerate into "what is wikipedia's policy on this
matter" to "is wikipedia's policy a good idea".

Again, if you propose to keep "official policy pages"
in Wikipedia, then people will want to comment on them
-- suggest additions or clarifications, or disagree
with the policies themselves. The most natural place
for them to do so would be [[Wikipedia
policy/Talk]]... And you wouldn't want to get rid of
[[Wikipedia policy/Talk]], because what if they are
only asking questions like "can anyone think of a way
of making the third paragraph clearer... i have
trouble understanding it", which really do belong in
[[Wikipedia policy/Talk]], not on "metawikipedia"...

With all due respect, I think Larry is overeacting to
some recent disputes. Cutting all commentary out of
Wikipedia is IMHO too radical a response. I think the
solution here isn't structural change to Wikipedia,
its trying to resolve the disputes at issue. (Which I
don't think any of those involved, myself included,
have done good enough a job of trying to resolve.)

Simon J Kissane

__________________________________________________
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] CIA World Factbook

body:
I have been thinking about how we have included the
CIA world factbook in Wikipedia. A lot of the
information given therein (who is President of such
and such a country, etc.) is subject to very frequent
change. Already several entries are out of date.

Now, we have added CIA world factbook 2000 edition,
but there will be new editions in the future -- how
are we going to integrate the new information into
Wikipedia? Doing it manually would be so time
consuming, but just replacing the pre-existing content
might loose valuable information or changes from other
sources...

I think that simple lists of facts for various
countries, like that contained in the CIA world
factbook, really isn't best suited to Wiki format. And
the CIA world factbook entries, although they have
been reformatted to some extent, really need a lot
more work done for them.

I was thinking maybe if we could create a parrallel
database to Wikipedia, just for countries of the
world, and other such information the CIA World
Factbook records. And we write a script to
automatically convert the CIA world factbook into the
database; and a script to turn the database into
Wikipedia-style format. We could then either link to
these Wikipedia-style pages from the database script,
or import their content into Wikipedia... so long as
we ask people only to change the original database.

We would still maintain Wikipedia articles for more
prosaic bits of information on each country, like its
history... only simple facts like "area", "who is its
President", etc., would be recorded. We would make
sure the database and the Wikipedia articles are
well-integrated.

I also think that several other bits of information
included in Wikipedia really could go in a database as
well. I am thinking here especially of such lists as
[[Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom]]. These lists
can be automatically updated to some extent from each
succesive release of the CIA world factbook.

And people's biographies we be another good candidate:
a database with peoples names, dates/locations of
birth and death, and a few other easily categorised
bits of information (nationality,
occupation/field/activities for which they are
principally remembered). Of course most of the details
on the person would be maintained in the associated
Wikipedia articles, but then we could easily
automatically generate listings like [[Poets]] or
[[Famous personages of 17th century Poland]].

I might try doing some work on such a database when I
finish my end-of-year exams (last exam is on Nov. 27).
I am also hoping to have a fiddle with Magnus' PHP
Wiki, maybe add some features I've had in mind (e.g.
the "#PARENT" command I proposed, improve the search
engine, add some (inoffensive) support for builtin
category schemes)...

Simon J Kissane

__________________________________________________
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] planetmath and wikipedia

body:
I only discovered PlanetMath when I heard it mentioned
on this mailing list. I've participated in Wikipedia
for a while now, though I've only had a quick look at
PlanetMath.

PlanetMath and Wikipedia have similar goals -- they
both seek to produce a free, GNU FDL encyclopedia.
PlanetMath aims to cover only Mathematics, while
Wikipedia aims to cover just about everything.

PlanetMath is like Nupedia in that articles are
clearly owned by authors, while in Wikipedia the
authorship is much more collective.

PlanetMath also appears to have much better support
for mathematics in its software. (Articles are written
in LaTeX).

Now, I was wondering about the potential relationship
between Wikipedia and Planetmath. Maybe we could
establish some way of encouraging content from
Planetmath to be added to Wikipedia, or vice versa?

I also thought for a moment about some form of merger
between the two projects, or removing all the maths
content from Wikipedia and sending it to PlanetMath,
or something similar. I don't think these are good
ideas, since the two projects seem to be quite
different in culture (author-centric vs. anyone can
edit).

On the other hand, maybe some form of integration
between PlanetMath and Nupedia might be a good idea?
Maybe PlanetMath could be rolled into Nupedia, or
PlanetMath could become the maths section of Nupedia?
(Just a thought -- I don't participate in Nupedia, and
discussion of that sort of stuff really belongs on
nupedia-l)

Simon J Kissane

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from_name: Anatoly Vorobey

body:
You, lcrocker at nupedia.com, were spotted writing this on Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 02:51:44PM -0800:
> But Larry's right here--allowing subpages just makes three things
> you have to guess among rather than two.  Personally, "History
> of Baseball" is the first thing I'd assume, because that's what it
> would be in a paper encyclopedia.

No, it wouldn't; it would be a subsection "history" of the article "baseball".
Which corresponds to subpages quite nicely.

--
Anatoly Vorobey,
my journal (in Russian): http://www.livejournal.com/users/avva/
mellon at pobox.com http://pobox.com/~mellon/
"Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly" - G.K.Chesterton


in_reply_to: <20011107183926.U2760@aristotle.bomis.com>; from jwales@bomis.com on Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 06:39:26PM -0600

body:
You, Jimmy Wales, were spotted writing this on Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 06:39:26PM -0600:
> First of all, let me apologize to everyone for even having this
> conversation.  I really wasn't aware of all that had gone before,
> including the fact that Larry had already made a decision based on
> existing consensus.

I believe this is an incorrect characterization of the issue. Larry made
the decision, but it was not based on any existing consensus.

(this isn't meant to criticize Larry's decision, although I happen to think it's
misguided; it's meant to be a statement of facts as they are).

I'll note in passing an uncanny resemblance of all arguments Jimmy has advanced
in favor of subpages to all arguments I made on the Wikipedia discussion pages
regarding the same; considering that Jimmy apparently didn't read these pages,
the coincidence is remarkable.

I stopped discussing this particular issue on Wikipedia after seeing that all
discussions led nowhere.

--
Anatoly Vorobey,
my journal (in Russian): http://www.livejournal.com/users/avva/
mellon at pobox.com http://pobox.com/~mellon/
"Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly" - G.K.Chesterton


subject: [Wikipedia-l] #PARENT

body:
I earlier proposed something similar to the "#PARENT" idea,
but I'd like to warn against it as used here: just using to
creat the link is bad.  We can already create links to parent
articles, and we _should_ do so with plain English sentences
that establish context.  Remember the "establish context"
rule?  The article "Generalisimo Francisco Franco is Still
Dead" shouldn't just have a hidden tag that puts a link to SNL
in the title bar rather than the article; it should begin with
a clear English sentence, "Late-night variety show [[Saturday
Night Live]] contained a news parody..."  Sentences.  Good.

My idea was "#CONTEXT", which was used to do the other thing
that subpages are useful for, and for which I currently use them,
and that's to simplify cross-linking among pages within a subject
area.  See the Poker pages, for example; but the same thing could
be done with "Law", "Medicine", "Mathematics", etc.  My idea was
that if a page contained a "#CONTEXT Law" tag, then any link in
that page like [[bar]] would, when the page was saved, search first
for a page "Bar (Law)", and only then "Bar".  Likewise, under
"#CONTEXT Chemistry", [[deposition]] would look for "Deposition
(Chemistry)" and then "Deposition" (hopefully a disambiguating page),
but never "Depostion (Law)".


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Vote on subpages

body:
I'm not opposed to this, except that I think it would be unfortunate
if we got into a mode of voting on things, rather than working to
near-unanimous consensus wherever possible.

Sometimes there will be really irreconcilable difference of opinion,
and then I would say that a vote isn't a bad idea, but of course
subject to the caveat that a vote would only be advisory.  For
example, I couldn't respect a vote to abandon free licensing, or a
vote to turn Wikipedia into a anti-copyright-protest site, etc.

But usually, differences of opinion will not be irreconcilable.  A
modified proposal might satisfy everyone.

For now, I propose that we respect Larry's decision to do away
subpages in the new software, and that we test the new software on
meta.wikipedia.com, which will be the newly appointed place for policy
discussions and general commentary.  (/Talk still belongs on  the main
site, of course.)

If we use that for a month or so, we'll all probably have a different
perspective, grounded in experience rather than speculation, of at
least some of the aspets of no-sub-pages.

I'm betting that consensus will grow out of that.

--
*************************************************
*            http://www.wikipedia.com/          *
*        You can edit this page right now!      *
*************************************************


subject: [Wikipedia-l] #PARENT

body:
First, I agree that something like this might be a way to make the
elimination of subpages a lot more palatable.

I think there might indeed be some technical way to replace messy,
inelegant, and generally bad subpages as well as sometimes messy,
inelegant "title (context)" named pages with either something like Lee's
proposal or something like Simon's.  Lee's makes more sense to me, for
just the reasons Lee cites.  But I think there might be other
possibilities we should consider.  Whatever we do, we should bear in mind
that Wikipedia should be reasonably simple for users.  Right now it *is*
reasonably simple, which is one reason so many people are able to work on
it.  (On the other hand, probably the slight learning curve is one reason
the quality of Wikipedia is as good as it is.)  Nupedia's experience
teaches, if anything else, that it's a really *bad* idea to ask even smart
people to learn complicated systems.

I like Lee's idea, but rather than having the text "#CONTEXT" in the
article itself--there are many ways of messing that up--I would rather see
a drop-down menu containing a list of different subject areas.  This would
allow us to link to the analysis article in math rather than to the
analysis article in philosophy with no extra typing.  The page title (the
one at the top of the screen) generated could be, if we wanted it to be,
"analysis (mathematics)".  This might provide a good idea for a convention
on how to link from one context to another context.  That is, if I wanted
for some reason to link from the philosophy article about analysis to the
math article, then I could decontextualize the link by typing [[analysis
(mathematics)]].

Another excellent feature of having a drop-down menu listing different
subject areas is that it would allow us each individually to follow
articles only in areas we're interested in.  If I don't care about what's
going on in math, and I'm only interested in philosophy and psychology
(say), then I could set my "recent changes" page so that I am presented
only with recent changes to philosophy and psychology articles.

Of course, it could be a multiple-selection menu, so that the article
about God could be listed under both philosophy and religion.

This would cohere (or could be made to cohere) perfectly with Nupedia's
top-level category scheme, which would no doubt be a significant advantage
in the long run.

OK, all this being said, what worries me most about this kind of proposal
is that it complicates the system hugely.  I'd have to be convinced that
the amount of complication it would represent wouldn't be so enormous that
we would have dug ourselves into a hole we couldn't get out of.  This is
*easy* to underestimate--you programmers ought to know that.  The above
discussion, as well as Lee's, I'm sure we'd both agree, are completely
inadequate explorations of the various considerations that would be
involved.  What we need is a sort of technical and nontechnical report
that would clearly lay out all of the potential issues--technical
problems, administrative problems, political problems, epistemological
problems ;-), etc., that this proposal would raise.  Barring some such
discussion, I don't know how we could adequately evaluate the risk.

Larry

On Thu, 8 Nov 2001 lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:

> I earlier proposed something similar to the "#PARENT" idea,
> but I'd like to warn against it as used here: just using to
> creat the link is bad.  We can already create links to parent
> articles, and we _should_ do so with plain English sentences
> that establish context.  Remember the "establish context"
> rule?  The article "Generalisimo Francisco Franco is Still
> Dead" shouldn't just have a hidden tag that puts a link to SNL
> in the title bar rather than the article; it should begin with
> a clear English sentence, "Late-night variety show [[Saturday
> Night Live]] contained a news parody..."  Sentences.  Good.
>
> My idea was "#CONTEXT", which was used to do the other thing
> that subpages are useful for, and for which I currently use them,
> and that's to simplify cross-linking among pages within a subject
> area.  See the Poker pages, for example; but the same thing could
> be done with "Law", "Medicine", "Mathematics", etc.  My idea was
> that if a page contained a "#CONTEXT Law" tag, then any link in
> that page like [[bar]] would, when the page was saved, search first
> for a page "Bar (Law)", and only then "Bar".  Likewise, under
> "#CONTEXT Chemistry", [[deposition]] would look for "Deposition
> (Chemistry)" and then "Deposition" (hopefully a disambiguating page),
> but never "Depostion (Law)".
>
>
>
>
>
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


body:
Barring major objections, I think this is *exactly right*.  I think
this might be a way to achieve the consensus I was talking about.  It
gives the "automatic linkback" capability that we like about subpages,
but (respecting what LDC said yesterday, which made sense to me), it
makes it more flexible and allows humans to determine the conceptual
relationships.

All the #PARENT command would *really* need to do would be to make the
automatic linkback.  There could be multiple parents.  The parents
don't need to know about their children, unless we do it.

I like it.

Simon Kissane wrote:

> Some have said that the advantage of having subpages
> is that every subpage has a link to its parent page.
> We could still keep that functionality, with a little
> extra work, if we added a "#PARENT" command.
>
> Suppose we have pages [[Afghanistan]] and
> [[Afghanistan/History]]. Currently,
> [[Afghanistan/History]] has a link back to
> [[Afghanistan]] in it. But if we rename
> [[Afghanistan/History]] to [[History of Afghanistan]],
> the link back disappears.
>
> That is why I propose a "#PARENT" command. The
> "#PARENT" command would be placed at the beginning of
> [[History of Afghanistan]], as follows:
> #PARENT [[Afghanistan]]
> Then, a link to [[Afghanistan]] will appear on the
> [[History of Afghanistan]] page, just like a link to
> [[Afghanistan]] appears on the [[Afghanistan/History]] page.
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Find a job, post your resume.
> http://careers.yahoo.com
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] planetmath and wikipedia

body:
Simon Kissane wrote:
> Now, I was wondering about the potential relationship
> between Wikipedia and Planetmath. Maybe we could
> establish some way of encouraging content from
> Planetmath to be added to Wikipedia, or vice versa?

Unfortunately, our wiki software doesn't give us any "firm" way to
credit them properly with the author history.  We could put that stuff
directly *in* the article, but to some extent that's problematic
because later editors might delete something that we legally need to
be there.

I don't think this is an insurmountable objection, but something we
should consider before wholesale copying starts.

> I also thought for a moment about some form of merger
> between the two projects, or removing all the maths
> content from Wikipedia and sending it to PlanetMath,
> or something similar. I don't think these are good
> ideas, since the two projects seem to be quite
> different in culture (author-centric vs. anyone can
> edit).

Yes, and one of the great things about open projects is that because
we can ultimately share our content, non-proprietary competition
benefits us all.  (Just as Linux and FreeBSD often benefit from
aspects of each others codebase.)

> On the other hand, maybe some form of integration
> between PlanetMath and Nupedia might be a good idea?
> Maybe PlanetMath could be rolled into Nupedia, or
> PlanetMath could become the maths section of Nupedia?

Certainly, Nupedia could quickly borrow all the Planet Math content!
Nupedia, unlike wikipedia, can easily accomodate author-centricity.

There shouldn't be any major impediment to that, other than the
Nupedia culture of incredibly slow thorough academicness.  (Which I
praise and damn simultaneously, mind you! :-))

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*            http://www.wikipedia.com/          *
*        You can edit this page right now!      *
*************************************************


body:
On 7 Nov 2001, Gareth Owen wrote:

> Tim Chambers <tbchambers at yahoo.com> writes:
>
> > Television (band), Nirvana (band) and Catatonia (band) are all
> > better page titles.
>
> Why are they better?  Are they even demonstrably different besides being
> (a) harder to type
> (b) Unimplemented

Not particularly harder to type, but maybe a little.  The question doesn't
turn on any single issue, here, certainly not on whether we have to type
() versus /.  Of course they're unimplemented--that's because we haven't
implemented them yet.  It's kind of like saying that it's a disadvantage
of drug legalization that drugs are, in fact, still illegal.  Yeah.
That's why we want 'em legal!  :-)

> > I think the concept of subpages is flawed in an encyclopedia. Why
> > limit ourselves to a primitive hierarchical structure?
>
> Why limit ourselves to a flat non-structure?

For reasons listed on
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Wikipedia_subpages_pros_and_cons

One of those reasons was inadequately stated.  I'm going to include here
the new statement:

* '''Single-level hierarchy is unjustified:''' subpages allow us to impose
some conceptual structure or hierarchy on topics--but only one level of
hierarchy. This is conceptually unappealing. Shouldn't it be either all or
none?  Look at it this way: suppose we create <nowiki>[[Foo/Bar]]</nowiki>
and we're writing on the <nowiki>[[/Bar]]</nowiki> subpage.  Then we
discover a subsubtopic we want to create.  What do we do then--just create
a brand new top level page, apparently, for the subsubtopic.  But then why
do we have <nowiki>[[/Bar]]</nowiki> on a subpage in the first place?
Doesn't make sense.  This sort of thing could very easily happen in any
area of human knowledge that is highly structured and "hierarchical," such
as math, philosophy, and even history (there are many historical details
of historical details).

> > Eliminating subpages paves the way for the implementation of even better
> > navigation features.
>
> I don't see how subpages affect this one way or the other.

Lee's proposal is just one example.  It would be *way* too complicated to
have both subpages *and* Lee's proposal.

Larry


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: planetmath and wikipedia

in_reply_to: <200111081724.SAA28574@tanne.uni-paderborn.de>; from axel@uni-paderborn.de on Thu, Nov 08, 2001 at 06:24:37PM +0100

body:
Hey, we support TeX and LaTeX now, too!  Ted O'Connor figured this out
on his own, without any support or oversight from me.  It just
magically appeared a couple of days ago.

Axel Boldt wrote:
> Planetmath has however vastly superior math typesetting support since they
> integrate LaTeX. I am pretty sure that eventually a feature like that
> will be available on Wikipedia as well: you type
>   $$ \sum_{i=1}^n i^2 $$
> into a wiki article and TeX will convert the formula behind the scenes
> into a graphic to be included in the page. That would also be useful
> for chemical structure formulas and drawings. Such a system, called
> mathwiki, is running at http://www.mathcircle.org/cgi-bin/mathwiki.pl.
> The code is based on Cunningham's wiki.

http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Wikipedia_Announcements

For now, you have to wait for Ted to make your image for you, but
someday we will surely find a way to automate this.  One problem is
that TeX is not just a typesetting thing, but a programming language,
so blindly letting the webserver interpret it is very dangerous.

I'm sure Ted will look at the mathwiki cite and see how they do it.
Maybe their code is GPL and we can use it.

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*************************************************
*            http://www.wikipedia.com/          *
*        You can edit this page right now!      *
*************************************************


body:
On Wed, 7 Nov 2001, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Here's a couple of good examples of good uses of subpages:
> [[Villanelle/Example]]
> and
> [[Saturday_Night_Live/Generalissimo_Francisco_Franco_is_still_dead]]
>
> In the second case, the main page serves to set the context of the subpage
> in a really nice way.  Anyone stumbling into the subpage would
> probably be interested in visiting the main page.

They're as good as far as they go.  But there are some significant
disadvantages.  Pointing to examples of "good" subpages is not very
persuasive to me.  I mean, sure--there are plenty of examples where they
seem to work, where they seem to have some use.  Nobody who says we should
get rid of subpages denies this.  The point is that, on the whole, they do
more damage than good.

> > As soon as we move to Magnus' software, the obvious solution will be
> > [[Nirvana (rock band)]], etc.
>
> But how, exactly, is this really different from, let's say
> [[Nirvana/Rock band]]?

Well, it's different in several ways.  For one thing, whereas the meaning
of [[Nirvana (rock band)]] is plain to anyone who has ever used an
encyclopedia before, the meaning of [[Nirvana/Rock band]] is not.  Anyone
who doesn't know that Nirvana is the name of a rock band is going to be
particularly confused by the name [[Nirvana/Rock band]].  Is Nirvana a
drug used by rock bands?  Is it a bit of slang when talking about rock
concert experiences?  Is there a rock band devoted to the concept or
attainment of nirvana?  Or, perhaps, is there a rock band called
"Nirvana"?

Moreover, subpages in this case are used in a totally different way from
in other cases.  "Rock band" is not a subtopic of "Nirvana," in the way
that "Iwo Jima" is a subtopic of "World War II."  (We aren't writing about
the *rock band variety* of nirvana. :-) )

Suppose some people have taken to making albums subpages of bands.  Then
we couldn't do that for Nirvana's albums in this case, unless we wanted to
munge subsubpages.

Why should the page about Nirvana live on a subpage (a subpage of a page
about a religious concept!!) whereas The Beatles get their own page.  (Or
maybe they should be on a subpage of [[insect]]?)

Etc.  See "Contra subpages" again.

> > The fact is that having subpages doesn't make pagenames any easier
> > to remember.  It is just a system, which implies one indeed
> > reasonably easy way to remember page titles.
>
> I think it makes them easy to *guess*, though.

But so do other conventions!  The only reason they're easy to guess is
that they represent a convention--it has nothing to do with the fact that
they're subpages.

Besides, the point is just empirically false.  Since we don't know a
priori when someone has or hasn't created a subpage, we can't guess.  We
have to use the search engine (which is one reason it's important for that
search engine to be fast).  Really, there's no way to get around using
that search engine to check up on the names of possibly already-existent
articles.

> And that's pretty important.
> [[History of Baseball]] or [[Baseball History]]?  Hard to guess which
> it might be.  But [[Baseball/History]] -- at least it is a system.

We could say: use "X history" rather than "history of X," and set up a
competing system.  Right now, in fact, we use all three--the two I just
mentioned, and "X/History."

> You might suggest: [[Baseball (History)]], but then I would respond --
> what's the difference?  And shouldn't this page link to the main
> [[Baseball]] page, automatically?  One would think so.

Naw, I wouldn't suggest that.

Any page about the history of baseball should and almost certainly would
have a link to the [[baseball]] article within the first two lines of the
article.

> > Well, I think there are a lot more failings than that.  See the above URL.
>
> > I would answer that it's one naming scheme, but it has no great advantages
> > over the combination of [[Iwo Jima]] and one of the names just mentioned
> > (e.g., [[Battle of Iwo Jima]]).  It's no harder to "accidentally" link to
> > from elsewhere.  Making battles subpages of wars is more or less a matter
> > of convention, and other intuitive conventions can be learned if they
> > indeed make some intuitive sense.
>
> Won't any convention "force" or "direct" us to think in certain ways?
> I hardly see this as an objection against this _particular_ convention.

No, that's not the forcing and directing objection.  Here's that
objection, again, from "Contra subpages":

Arbitrary subpage-imposed hierarchies arbitrarily contextualize
information and thereby influence how articles are written: as one result
of the foregoing, the small arbitrary hierarchy created by a parent page
and its subpages quite often forces how we write content. Why should the
people writing about star wipes be forced to consider them in the context
of film editing as opposed to digital effects? If we write about the
history of Algeria under Algeria/History?, we'll consider Algeria's
history as one element of Algeria's existence. If we write about the same
subject under History/Algeria?, we'll consider Algeria's history as one
element of history. There is no good reason to impose this sort of
constraint upon Wikipedia's writers, particularly when it is arbitrary. It
simplifies the situation greatly to let each topic determine its own
context, as it were.

> > http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Wikipedia_subpages_pros_and_cons
>
> Well, I disagree with some of those.

OK!

> For example: "Subpages replace the English meaning of the slash with a
> special meaning" -- the "sub" meaning of "slash" is well known in
> English, at least to people who use computers at all, which means all
> Wikipedians and all customers.  Websites do it!
>
> http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Art_History/
> http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Art_History/Criticism_and_Theory/

Well, it's not used consistently in Wikipedia, and that's why it's
unclear--it's ambiguous.

Another quote:

The slash has no clear meaning and is therefore confusing in an article
title: the slash creates a completely ambiguous relationship between the
subject to the left of the slash and the subject to the right of the
slash. For example, we could make "A" a subpage of "Countries of the
world"; then, the list of pages under "A" would be the set of the
countries of the world whose names in English begin with the letter "A."
We could also make "Pearl Harbor" a subtopic of "World War II," and the
relationship here is that Pearl Harbor is
the-location-of-an-important-attack-in World War II. We could make "David
Hume" a subtopic of "Philosopher" because Hume is a philosopher. Etc.
Other punctuation has clear meaning. Wiki's slash does not. Therefore, it
is better, for clarity, to eliminate the slash and replace it with
English.

> People know what this means, instantly.  This means that this category
> "Criticism and Theory" is not about criticism and theory generally,
> but in the context of Art History.

Yes.  If it were always used that way, then maybe it would be OK (the
other objections to subpages notwithstanding.  But indeed, if you'll
notice, /Arts/Art_History/Criticism_and_Theory/ is already a
subsubcategory, and if we're making *that* a subsubcategory, then golly,
why aren't we making subsubsubcategories for the criticism and theory of
the history of, say, pre-Rafaelite painting?  The slash has meaning and
makes sense in a Yahoo-type hierarchy, I'll concede.  As stand-alone
two-story hierarchy, it seems to have come to mean quite a wide variety of
things.

Larry


body:
On 7 Nov 2001, Gareth Owen wrote:

> > As soon as we move to Magnus' software, the obvious solution will be
> > [[Nirvana (rock band)]], etc.
>
> And [[Nirvana (grunge band)]], [[Nirvana (band)]], [[Nirvana (60s band)]]

Your point is?  The subpages could just as easily be [[Nirvana/grunge,
band, 80s band, etc.]].

> > Well, it might be easier for somebody to remember [[Baseball/History]] if
> > he created or worked on that page, but if he had created [[history of
> > baseball]], he'd no doubt find *that* easy to remember
>
> I guess what I'm arguing is this.
> At the moment 'pedia contains the following articles
>
> [[History of the United States]]
> [[Chinese history]]
> [[Baseball/History]]
> [[Film history]]
> [[History of the internet]]
>
> Now I don't *really* mind which it is, but [0]

Since we're going to have to look up the title, I don't think it matters
that much either.  Which means the question whether or not to have
subpages doesn't turn on this.  (It turns on other issues.)

> Similarly, I could forsee (since hypotheticals seem more important than
> actualities these days) it having:
> [[Battle of Stalingrad]] [[Siege of Leningrad]] [[Normandy landings]]
>
> But if I'm writing [[World War II/Stalingrad]] and want to link to
> Leningrad, I think I'm gonna be able to figure out [[/Leningrad]],
> rather than [[Battle of Leningrad]] or [[Siege of Leningrad]].  I
> think that *is* easier to link, if not accidentally, but with minimum
> thought and effort on my behalf.

I really doubt that's what you'd do.  You'd use the search engine.  I hope
you would, anyway.

> > The fact is that having subpages doesn't make pagenames any easier to
> > remember.
>
> It doesn't make known pagenames easier to remember, it makes the unknown ones
> easy to deduce.

Well, *any* convention makes known names easy to deduce.

> Right, I've said my piece, so I'll go and libel [[Bud Selig]] a bit more.
>
> [0] I mind anything, to be honest.
>     I'm just stating my case.

Yep, sounds good.

For the record, I don't care that much either.  I'm just trying to make an
improvement, and I've encountered considerable resistance.  ;-)

Larry


body:
I'd just like to put Gareth's new sig into context:

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

:-)  As you can see, this was written on January 10, just two days after
Wikipedia was set up and announced.  This was very exciting to me because
at the time we had garnered, oh, I don't know, about 14 articles on
Nupedia.  So the fact that Wikipedia had gained the same number of not-bad
articles in two days that Nupedia had gained over the previous 11 months
was, well, pretty exciting.  :-)

Just thought you might enjoy the background, that's all.  :-)

Larry


body:
On Wed, 7 Nov 2001 lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:

> >[[Saturday_Night_Live/Generalissimo_Francisco_Franco_is_still_dead]]
> >...
> > In the second case, the main page serves to set the context of the
> > subpage in a really nice way.  Anyone stumbling into the subpage
> > would probably be interested in visiting the main page.
>
> Yes, that's the one use that subpages really make sense for: small
> topics that _only_ make sense in the context of a larger topic.
> But sacrificing that small utility to avoid more serious problems
> isn't that drastic, I think.  My personal preference would be to live
> with longer articles (just include those short things within the main
> article).  Accidental links aren't an issue here, precisely because
> these topics are context-dependent.

Agreed.  That's another thing that needed to be said.  :-)

> > You might suggest: [[Baseball (History)]], but then I would respond
>
> No, parentheses are for context to disambiguate the main term,
> not for sub-domains.  Again, there's already a standard body of
> knowledge for how to do this: real encyclopedias.  I'm the first
> to point out that we aren't constrained by paper here, but there's
> no reason we can't learn from the existing scholarship about how
> to organize and title knowledge.  This has been going on for a
> long time, and they're very good at it.

Another thing I wish I had said.  :-)

> > what's the difference?  And shouldn't this page link to the main
> > [[Baseball]] page, automatically?  One would think so.
>
> "Automatic" things are great when they are things that a stupid
> computer can figure out.  Associations between ideas are at the
> bottom of that list.  Human beings should determine those.

This, by the way, is probably the most serious objection to any attempts
to automate the placement of navigational links in articles.  We should we
leave that to chance, if it's so important?

"Let the content itself determine the structure of the web."  That's my
motto.

> Sure, subpages are handy for some things (I use a lot of them).
> But they don't really do much that we can't do anyway, and they
> have at least one serious problem: that they enforce inappropriate
> conceptual relationships.  I think that's 10 times as important
> to get rid of than any mere convenience they might have.0

I agree with that 100%.  (I think there are a few other really serious
problems too, though.)

Larry


body:
On Thu, 8 Nov 2001, Anatoly Vorobey wrote:

> You, lcrocker at nupedia.com, were spotted writing this on Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 02:51:44PM -0800:
> > But Larry's right here--allowing subpages just makes three things
> > you have to guess among rather than two.  Personally, "History
> > of Baseball" is the first thing I'd assume, because that's what it
> > would be in a paper encyclopedia.
>
> No, it wouldn't; it would be a subsection "history" of the article
> "baseball". Which corresponds to subpages quite nicely.

That entirely depends on the encyclopedia.  In an encyclopedia on the
history of sports, it wouldn't be true.  In an encyclopedia on baseball,
it wouldn't be true.

We should not limit ourselves to what we see in ordinary general
encyclopedias like Britannica, World Book, and the rest.  We should aim to
have the content, eventually, of 1,000 specialized encyclopedias, such as
one of my very favorite encyclopedias, The Companion to Epistemology.
This contains nearly all the information you'd find in an ordinary
introduction to epistemology, and then some, broken into relatively small
chunks and (in very many cases, anyway) presented from a neutral point of
view.

Larry


body:
On Wed, 7 Nov 2001, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> First of all, let me apologize to everyone for even having this
> conversation.  I really wasn't aware of all that had gone before,
> including the fact that Larry had already made a decision based on
> existing consensus.

And let me apologize for making a decision when there were still plenty of
people wanting to talk.

But the decision has been made.

> How about this...
>
> There seems to be agreement that we could use the new software for the
> meta-wikipedia, where we want all commentary _about_ the encyclopedia
> to go.  Why don't we start that one without subpages, and then live
> with it for a little while there.  This will give us real world
> experience.  If we find that we don't miss subpages, then when we move
> the full encyclopedia over to the new software, we can just re-align
> the subpages, and be happy with it, secure in the knowledge that we
> aren't giving up anything useful.

This is a rather good idea, I think.  I'd like to hear what others have to
say.

I personally am not at all opposed to the idea of having subpages on a
commentary wiki.  In that context, I frankly don't care.  They also help
people build their own "personal pages."  On the other hand, maybe we
should agree that the latter is actually a bad thing.  :-/

Larry


body:
On Thu, 8 Nov 2001, Anatoly Vorobey wrote:

> You, Jimmy Wales, were spotted writing this on Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at
> 06:39:26PM -0600: > First of all, let me apologize to everyone for
> even having this > conversation.  I really wasn't aware of all that
> had gone before, > including the fact that Larry had already made a
> decision based on > existing consensus.
>
> I believe this is an incorrect characterization of the issue. Larry
> made the decision, but it was not based on any existing consensus.

Yes, I'm not aware that there was a consensus.  It was, rather, a decision
to get a choice behind us, in view of my understanding of the issues and
in view of the fact that, by my count, most of those who had weighed in
about subpages were opposed to them or wouldn't mind having them removed.

> I'll note in passing an uncanny resemblance of all arguments Jimmy has
> advanced in favor of subpages to all arguments I made on the Wikipedia
> discussion pages regarding the same; considering that Jimmy apparently
> didn't read these pages, the coincidence is remarkable.

Well, it's just a sign that you're both observing the same phenomena, and
coming to the same conclusions about them.  The conclusions just happen to
be wrong, in many cases!  :-)

Larry


body:
--- Simon Kissane <sj_kissane at yahoo.com> wrote:
> ...With all due respect, I think Larry is overeacting to
> some recent disputes...

He also pointed out that RecentChanges was getting too cluttered with
changes ''not'' directly related to encyclopedia content.

The key reason I'm on board with Larry's proposal is because I think
RecentChanges on Wikipedia should show ''only'' changes to articles
and Talk ''about'' articles and ''no'' changes and talk about
meta-wikipedia issues.  The only way to do that is to push
meta-discussions completely out of the Wikipedia.

In another message, Simon wrote:
> ... why not have a vote on it?

I do not support this call for a vote; however, we ''do'' need enough
Wikipedians to unequivocally get behind a course of action (or to say
they want to take no action) so that the whole community can see that
consensus has been reached.

And so here's my declaration. I am in favor of creating a wiki based
on Magnus' PHP software at http://meta.wikipedia.com/ that hosts all
meta-discussions (commentary, personal pages, etc.).

When the metapedia comes online, I will do my part to move commentary
from www.wikipedia.com to meta.wikipedia.com and to keep it there.

<>< [[tbc]]

__________________________________________________
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Find a job, post your resume.
http://careers.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] CIA World Factbook

body:
--- Simon Kissane <sj_kissane at yahoo.com> wrote:
> ... A lot of the
> information given therein ... is subject to very frequent
> change. Already several entries are out of date.

Excellent point. I renew my call for [[Tim Chambers/Wikipedia
configuration management|configuration management]].

We need to begin managing Wikipedia as a versioned product! I don't
mind fleshing out the idea, but last time I proposed this it didn't
get very far.

See
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Tim_Chambers/Wikipedia_configuration_management

<>< [[tbc]]

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Find a job, post your resume.
http://careers.yahoo.com


body:
On Wed, 7 Nov 2001, Simon Kissane wrote:

> I don't really think the idea of moving commentary out
> of Wikipedia will work. The problem is that no hard
> line can be drawn between "policy discussion" and
> "discussion about the articles".

I think such a line already has been drawn: when people write essays or
make proposals on new pages (subpages of [[Wikipedia commentary]] or their
own pages), that's the stuff that would go in the commentary wiki.  The
discussion of policy issues on /Talk pages (or, in the future, in the
"Talk:"  namespace) can be considered applications of more general
principles, at least for convenience's sake.  In the future, general
policy discussion on a talk page could be transferred, profitably, to the
metawiki.  The distinction is clear enough to make the move quite useful,
I think.

> Again, if you propose to keep "official policy pages"
> in Wikipedia, then people will want to comment on them
> -- suggest additions or clarifications, or disagree
> with the policies themselves. The most natural place
> for them to do so would be [[Wikipedia
> policy/Talk]]...

Well, so far, this hasn't happened too much.  If something were still a
matter of considerable debate, then it wouldn't belong on the official
pages.  Or, alternatively, the disagreement should be noted on the
pages--noted, but not *engaged*.  This is a matter of some
self-discipline, and it really hasn't been a problem so far.  Most of the
disagreement about policy (whether new or old) has taken place off the
policy pages.  (The NPOV page is an exception!)

> And you wouldn't want to get rid of
> [[Wikipedia policy/Talk]], because what if they are
> only asking questions like "can anyone think of a way
> of making the third paragraph clearer... i have
> trouble understanding it", which really do belong in
> [[Wikipedia policy/Talk]], not on "metawikipedia"...

OK, so we have a bit of overlap.  That's a lot better than having a lot of
incendiary debate cluttering up the Recent Changes page.

> With all due respect, I think Larry is overeacting to
> some recent disputes.

This is not just my proposal; many people are behind it.

Simon, it would be helpful if you would simply refrain from offensive
attempts to characterize the appropriateness of my reactions.  In case you
didn't know, that is *not* respectful.  Stick to the arguments, please.

> Cutting all commentary out of
> Wikipedia is IMHO too radical a response.

I don't think it's radical at all.  It just involves moving the commentary
away from the main wiki.  What's radical about that?  Commentary is not
what Wikipedia is about.  We are not here to talk about writing an
encyclopedia; we're here to write one.  (Well, *I* am actually *paid* to
talk about writing an encyclopedai

> I think the
> solution here isn't structural change to Wikipedia,
> its trying to resolve the disputes at issue. (Which I
> don't think any of those involved, myself included,
> have done good enough a job of trying to resolve.)

The reason I disagree with this, again, is that more and more such
incendiary disputes are bound to arise, as Wikipedia grows.  This is a way
to make the metadiscussion more scalable.

Larry


subject: [Wikipedia-l] CIA World Factbook

body:
On Wed, 7 Nov 2001, Simon Kissane wrote:

> I have been thinking about how we have included the
> CIA world factbook in Wikipedia. A lot of the
> information given therein (who is President of such
> and such a country, etc.) is subject to very frequent
> change. Already several entries are out of date.

Yep, how we will maintain changeable information is a sticky problem.

We are limited, though, to the people we have on hand.  Unless we have
enough people willing to code and implement the sort of solution you're
proposing, Simon, we might as well not try.  There are a good half-dozen
people who have put serious time into those factbook entries, but I'm not
sure that's enough for the sort of project you propose.

In a year, though, the factbook info will be even more out of date (hence,
we'll have more motivation) and we might very well have several times the
number of people working on the project that we have now.  We also,
hopefully, will have finalized Magnus' software and several coders will be
intimately familiar with the software and how to add new features.  So,
I'd suggest putting this off until then.

On the other hand, I could simply be entirely wrong about how much
interest there'd be in working on this and keeping this updated.

> I might try doing some work on such a database when I
> finish my end-of-year exams (last exam is on Nov. 27).
> I am also hoping to have a fiddle with Magnus' PHP
> Wiki, maybe add some features I've had in mind (e.g.
> the "#PARENT" command I proposed, improve the search
> engine, add some (inoffensive) support for builtin
> category schemes)...

For reasons others have mentioned, I don't like the #PARENT feature,
personally.

Larry


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Uploading pictures

body:
Ask Jason Richey for the URL and (?) password you'll need to upload them
yourself.  His address is jasonr at bomis.com.

Larry

On 8 Nov 2001, Gareth Owen wrote:

> I had some images in wikipedia, but my website that was hosting them is gone.
> (Something along the lines of "You left this university 2 years ago" :( )
> Remind me how I get the Bomis dudes to host them.
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Vote on subpages

body:
I agree with this...

Larry

On Thu, 8 Nov 2001, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> I'm not opposed to this, except that I think it would be unfortunate
> if we got into a mode of voting on things, rather than working to
> near-unanimous consensus wherever possible.
>
> Sometimes there will be really irreconcilable difference of opinion,
> and then I would say that a vote isn't a bad idea, but of course
> subject to the caveat that a vote would only be advisory.  For
> example, I couldn't respect a vote to abandon free licensing, or a
> vote to turn Wikipedia into a anti-copyright-protest site, etc.
>
> But usually, differences of opinion will not be irreconcilable.  A
> modified proposal might satisfy everyone.
>
> For now, I propose that we respect Larry's decision to do away
> subpages in the new software, and that we test the new software on
> meta.wikipedia.com, which will be the newly appointed place for policy
> discussions and general commentary.  (/Talk still belongs on the main
> site, of course.)
>
> If we use that for a month or so, we'll all probably have a different
> perspective, grounded in experience rather than speculation, of at
> least some of the aspets of no-sub-pages.
>
> I'm betting that consensus will grow out of that.
>
>


body:
On Thu, 8 Nov 2001, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Barring major objections, I think this is *exactly right*.  I think
> this might be a way to achieve the consensus I was talking about.  It
> gives the "automatic linkback" capability that we like about subpages,
> but (respecting what LDC said yesterday, which made sense to me), it
> makes it more flexible and allows humans to determine the conceptual
> relationships.

But that's what hyperlinks generally do.

> All the #PARENT command would *really* need to do would be to make the
> automatic linkback.  There could be multiple parents.  The parents
> don't need to know about their children, unless we do it.

If that's all the parent command were supposed to do, then why not forego
the heavy lifting and just go with the hyperlinks we've already got?

> > Suppose we have pages [[Afghanistan]] and
> > [[Afghanistan/History]]. Currently,
> > [[Afghanistan/History]] has a link back to
> > [[Afghanistan]] in it. But if we rename
> > [[Afghanistan/History]] to [[History of Afghanistan]],
> > the link back disappears.

I can't imagine that there wouldn't be a link to [[Afghanistan]] in an
article about Afghanistan's history.  :-)

Larry


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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Uploading pictures

body:
I had some images in wikipedia, but my website that was hosting them is gone.
(Something along the lines of "You left this university 2 years ago" :( )
Remind me how I get the Bomis dudes to host them.
--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
 are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)


from_name: Steven Barker

body:
On Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 10:53:12PM -0800, Simon Kissane wrote:
> Some have said that the advantage of having subpages
> is that every subpage has a link to its parent page.
> We could still keep that functionality, with a little
> extra work, if we added a "#PARENT" command.

Subpages have two useful characteristics:
 1) the subpages link back to the parent (so [[Baseball/History]]
    automatically links back to [[Baseball]]).
 2) If you know the parent page, you can easily guess where a subtopic is
    without guessing how it is named (cf [[World War II/Normandy]])

The suggestion of a #PARENT command is good at providing the first part, but
does nothing for the second.

I propose that instead of #PARENT we make it so that a command
"#CHILD foo bar" on [[foo]] aliases [[foo/bar]] to [[baz]] (which should have
an independantly meaningful name).  [[baz]] would get an automatic backlink
to [[foo]] and to any other pages that name it as a child (and perhaps
include what it is refered to on those pages?).  The Wikipedia software
could then resolve all links to [[foo/bar]] to [[baz]] automatically.

This would let locations like [[World_War_II/Normandy]] move to some other
name without loosing it's obviousness, and [[History of Baseball]] be both
[[Baseball/History]] and [[History/Baseball]].

Perhaps we could allow multiple levels of redirection so that I could link
to [[World War II/Midway/Order of battle]] without having any idea what the
real name of that page might be.  This might cause problems if intermediate
subpages do not exist, but that could be worked out (after all, Unix
filesystems can do all of this).

Of course automating this shouldn't be an excuse to not introduce subtopics
inline in the article, but they would allow more simple expression of ideas
that *do* fit into a hierarchical structure.

Steve aka [[BlckKnght]]

--
Steven Barker                                      scbarker at uiuc.edu
  True to our past we work with an inherited, observed, and accepted vision of
  personal futility, and of the beauty of the world.
  		-- David Mamet
Get my GnuPG public key at: http://www.blckknght.org/pubkey.asc
Fingerprint: 272A 3EC8 52CE F22B F745  775E 5292 F743 EBD5 936B


subject: [Wikipedia-l] no #PARENT, no #CHILD, implement in a much simpler way

body:
The #PARENT and #CHILD discussion is making my system designer's
skin crawl. I already said this once at
http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2001-November/000764.html,
but indulge me as I me repeat it again:

    I would like to see wiki software that allows for enumeration
    of generic terms that would trigger navigation links to
    appear on article pages automatically. It's a natural
    consequence of [[Wikipedia is not paper|Wikipedia not being
    paper]]. Using the baseball articles as examples, "baseball"
    should be tagged as one of those generic terms. Then any page
    with "baseball" in the title would get a link to the
    [[Baseball]] article, and the [[Baseball]] article would list
    links to all the other baseball articles.

Now, allow me to elaborate.

Let's create a page in the new wiki called [[special:generic
terms]]. Then we simply edit that page and add generic terms to
the list -- a simple enumeration of [[free links]] like this:

[[World War II]]
[[Baseball]]
[[Afghanistan]]
[[Colorado]]

etc.

This effectively defines the set of articles that are "parent"
articles.

So all pages listed on this special page are handled specially by the
wiki software. If you edit [[Baseball]], the software looks up all
articles that have the generic term "baseball" in the
title. (Encyclopedias are distinguished by their meaningful titles, so
this shouldn't be a problem -- regardless of whether the page is
[[History of Baseball]] or [[Baseball History]].) Back to the
example. The software finds all articles whose titles include
"baseball," and the [[Baseball]] article gets an automatic link to
them. Job done. Similarly, the [[History of Baseball]] page gets an
automatic
link to [[Baseball]] ''because'' we put [[Baseball]] on the
[[special:generic terms]] page. No one has to remember to add #PARENT
and (aack) #CHILD links. It's all associated automatically by
''title'' with the simple addition to a list of generic terms--terms which
have so far tempted people to create subpages.

This works nicely for [[Colorado Springs]] (by an accident of
naming) but also for [[Denver, Colorado]]. Because both have
"Colorado" in their title, they are flagged as "children" of
[[Colorado]], and [[Colorado]] would automatically be updated to
link to them when these new "child" page titles are defined.

Ah, but it breaks down when you want to write an article called
[[Battle of Britain]] or [[D Day]], doesn't it? No World War II
to be found in those titles. (Both are better encyclopedia titles
than [[World War II/Battle of Britain]] and [[World War II/D
Day]] IMHO.) So let's add another intuitive feature to the wiki
software: a "see also" section. Let's say the convention is that
in any article, all [[free links]] that appear between the words
"see also:" on themselves on a line (the Perl regexp is /^see
also:$/i) and a horizontal line will be indexed sort of like
children as well.

So [[Battle of Britain]] would look this:

The '''Battle of Britain''' began on August [[1940]]. [sic]

After the [[France|French]] collapsed under the [[Blitzkrieg]]...

...

See also:
[[World War II]]
----

Then any article mentioned in any other article's "see also"
section would receive preferential treatment in the backlink
feature that I mentioned in
http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2001-November/000751.html.

The backlink on each article page could have a very intuitive
name, like "Show all articles that mention this one." Then you
get the list in two sections. If you clicked on it for [[World
War II]], the first section would be intuitively titled, "All
Articles that Refer to "World War II" In the See Also Section"),
and the second section would be titled, "All Articles that Refer
to "World War II" Anywhere in the Body of the Article").

These two techniques are both intuitive and relatively easy to
implement in wiki software.

<>< [[tbc]]


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Mathworld disaster (was: planetmath.org)

body:
Gareth Owen writes:

> Well it would be, if the legal settlement had been something other
> than "Eric gets the shaft from CRC publishing"

And it's not just Eric. I contributed to mathworld over the years here
and there. I never signed over my copyrights. CRC have published my
materials without permission. They will get a threatening letter from
me soon. CRC textbooks are dead in our department.

Axel


body:
Simon suggests some sort of integration between plantemath.org and
Nupedia/Wikipedia.

All three projects are GFDL'd, so collaboration is easy (planetmath
requires no invariant sections). No work is ever lost. I don't see a
need for tight integration, and as Simon pointed out, the projects
differ in several respects. Whatever good content they produce at
planetmath we will use; whatever good content we produced at wikipedia
they can use. Everybody wins it seems.

Planetmath has however vastly superior math typesetting support since they
integrate LaTeX. I am pretty sure that eventually a feature like that
will be available on Wikipedia as well: you type
  $$ \sum_{i=1}^n i^2 $$
into a wiki article and TeX will convert the formula behind the scenes
into a graphic to be included in the page. That would also be useful
for chemical structure formulas and drawings. Such a system, called
mathwiki, is running at http://www.mathcircle.org/cgi-bin/mathwiki.pl.
The code is based on Cunningham's wiki.

Axel