from_name: Anthere

body:
--- Giskart <giskart at linux.be> wrote:
> Axel Boldt wrote:
>
> >>The question marks are ugly and uninformative. It
> >>"reads" as "Huh?"
> >>
> >>The highlight method is expressive and attractive.
>
> >>It "reads" as
> >>"There should be an article on this, but there
> isn't
> >>yet."
> >>
> >>
> >I agree, the default behavior should be changed.
> >There's no question involved, so question marks are
> >illogical and out of place.
> >
> >Axel
> >
> If  the Wikipedians of the English Wikipedia wants
> to change that, so be
> it. But please do not change things like that on the
> other Wikipedia's
> whitout advise of those Wikipedia's.  -- giskart

I am with you here Giskart. I find the question mark
very self-explanatory and not out of place at all.
imho, the example given with blue, red and green links
is the one ugly. Given some of the conversations about
color use on the fr.wiki, I suspect most would agree
against giving encyclopedic content the color of a rainbow.

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list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: lcrocker at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Feature request

body:
> Sorry if this is already in the hopper or (!) has already been
> done, but it seems long overdue:
> We need a way to compile, based on lists of links (I guess),
> "Recent Changes" lists for all articles about a general topic.

This has been doable since Magnus's software, and still is; the
hard work is just compiling the list of links.  Once you have a
page of links, say, "Wikipedia:Major philosophy articles", then
you can just use the "watch links" feature of the sidebar to get
a list of recent changes to all pages linked from it.

Perhaps that feature could be added to, or tweaked to add
filters, etc.; but there's no point in wasting the effort to
do that until it has actual data to work with, and that will
take people creating those link pages.


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Questionmark Links Considered Harmful

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Somebody else wrote:

>>You can change the default behaviour in your user
>>preferences. Check "Highlight links to empty topics",
>>and links to empty pages will be red, instead of the
>>little blue question mark.

>Thanks, I didn't know that! Of course I still think this should be the
>default.

I've been using highlighted links since before I knew what they were.
I think that I must have clicked on the option by accident or something.
Whenever I see the "?" links, I'm shocked at how uninterpretable it is,
*especially* when the "?" follows a link of more than one word.

I never suggested switching defaults because of accessibility.
But if that can be worked around now, then let's switch.
(Current users' preferences should stay the same, however.)

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Article def for {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}

body:
Jim McKeeth wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>Hardly anybody has a clue that we exist.
>>Frankly, we're at the stage where "Any publicity is good publicity.".
>>We could issue a press release claiming to surpass Britannic now,
>>and it would be an obvious lie, but still good publicity in the end.

>If there were a press release that said we surpassed Britannica and a whole
>bunch of people came out and then someone makes a big fuss about how we
>don't really pass Britannica then people will remember Wikipedia in a bad
>way.  Then when 100,000 articles is released then everyone will say "Oh
>yeah, I remember when they said they passed Britannica - what a
>disappointment - I won't bother checking them out again."

When the 100,000 article count is released down the line,
most of the people on the Internet at that time
won't have been on it at the time of the old release (that is now).
Anything that gets our name in the air will be helpful,
because people will hear rumours and want to check it out for themselves.

>You always want any publicity to be modest so when someone comes they will
>be pleasantly surprised.  They will remember us as being more then they
>expected which will keep us in a positive light.

I myself want publicity to be honest, because I'm an honest person.
That's the reason that I wouldn't want this hypothetical lying press release.
If we think about what will generate the best publicity,
then we're thinking about the wrong bottom line.

We don't really need to discuss this to death very much,
since nobody actually wants to send out that press release,
and I agree with mav for my own reasons (our own integrity)
that we should report as accurate an article count as practicable.
The 500 byte minimum sounds reasonable to me.

-- Toby


from_name: Brion VIBBER

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:
> I've been using highlighted links since before I knew what they were.
> I think that I must have clicked on the option by accident or something.
> Whenever I see the "?" links, I'm shocked at how uninterpretable it is,
> *especially* when the "?" follows a link of more than one word.

It used to was that if the link was more than one word, the whole thing
got surrounded by brackets, ie:

  ...throughout the history of Foobaria? there were...
  ...throughout the [history of Foobaria]? there were...

This seems to have disappeared in phase III.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Pierre Abbat

subject: [Wikitech-l] Why URLs that change content when loaded are bad

body:
On Sunday 22 September 2002 23:30, Brion VIBBER wrote:
> Recently the image Great_Seal_of_the_United_States_(small).png vanished;
> its image description page listed it as present and had a link to one
> revision, but the image itself was gone.
>
> After brief investigation, I found that the image file was still present
> in the archives directory, and copied it back to where it belonged...
> but there had also once been an earlier revision of the same file (a
> non-transparent PNG), now missing both from the archive and the image page.
>
> Grepping the access logs, it turned out that a spider had come across
> the image description page and followed links to both revert and delete
> the older revision of the image -- simply loading up these links caused
> the wiki to move and permanently delete files.
>
> Apparently telling it to both revert and delete the same revision
> confused the poor wiki, and it ended up vanishing that revision entirely
> _and_ leaving the newer one only in the archives.
>
> As a workaround until a better way of handling these functions is
> decided on, I've hacked Skin.php to not give the delete/revert links to
> anonymous users (and therefore bots and spiders).

The delete link should appear only to sysops. I'm not sure how to handle
reverting by a non-sysop, but perhaps the old and new revisions should be
exchanged.

phma


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Block repeated copyright violator?

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:
> >I blocked someone for repeatedly inserting text from a copyrighted website
> >about Amiga operating systems. Should someone be blocked for that?
>
> Conceivably.
>
> I think that more tolerance should be given to such people
> than to vandals that clearly have no intention of being helpful.
> Such a person is more likely to be trying to do good.
> And as The Cunctator said, banning is a serious measure.
> IMO, it should be done when we've given up hope on somebody.

I think Toby is striking the right balance here.  Sometimes people will
just not understand copyright law, or they will make a mistake.  They are
probably benevolent, trying to help, and we want to encourage them.  But
if they won't listen, well, let's not waste too much time on them.

> In this particular case, you seem to have acted well, AFAICT.
> Each case needs to be looked at individually, after all.

Absolutely.

The type of person who inserts "fart" randomly in pages is not the type of
person we need to try very hard to "win over".  But someone who posts a
copyrighted article might just not understand the problem with it.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] [canuck_in_korea2002@yahoo.com: [Wikipedia-l] Fwd: Adding Wikipedia to OneLook]

body:
I'm forwarding this to wikitech-l.

I've been wanting to do a dump of our article titles to insert into the
search engines that I manage (bomis and 3apes, mainly), just to drive more
of the traffic that I influence towards wikipedia.  I did a little program
for this in the old UseMod days, but Bomis hasn't updated it's wikipedia
links since then. :-(

Perhaps we should have a script to generate RDF, which is a simple format used
by dmoz and familiar to search engine operators.

--Jimbo

----- Forwarded message from Stephen Gilbert <canuck_in_korea2002 at yahoo.com> -----

From: Stephen Gilbert <canuck_in_korea2002 at yahoo.com>
Date: Sat, 21 Sep 2002 09:29:48 -0700 (PDT)
To: wikipedia-l at nupedia.com
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fwd: Adding Wikipedia to OneLook

I just received this from the maintainer of OneLook, a
meta-search of dictionaries (and some encyclopedias).
Is there any way to produce a flat file of all our
articles? This would also allow Wikipedia to once
again work with Sunir Shah's MetaWiki search.

If you haven't tried OneLook before, give it a spin.
It's fantastic.

http://www.onelook.com/

Stephen G.

--- Doug Beeferman <doug at dougb.com> wrote:
> Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2002 13:16:10 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Doug Beeferman <doug at dougb.com>
> To: <canuck_in_korea2002 at yahoo.com>
>
>
> Hi Stephen,
>
> Thanks for your kind feedback on OneLook and sorry
> for the delay in
> responding to you.  I already have some familiarity
> with Wikipedia/Nupedia
> as a user and would love to add its headwords to
> OneLook.  Could you
> assist me in this?  In particular, do you know of a
> flat file that I could
> point OneLook's update engine to that lists
> Wikipedia's headwords (or
> topic names, or however they're called in
> Wiki-land)?
>
> Running the available SQL files through MySQL to
> dump these headwords on
> every update would be a bit unwieldy for various
> reasons.  One alternative
> would be a script that extracts the headwords from
> the .sql file, but I
> don't want to rewrite this if it's already been
> done.
>
> (I just spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out
> how to post this
> question on meta.wikipedia.com.  I was defeated.
> There's probaby
> something I'm missing or too lazy to read...)
>
> Thanks again for writing.  Are you involved actively
> in Wikipedia's
> maintenance?  If so, good luck with the project --
> it looks like it's
> really taking off!
>
> Doug
> (a canuck in America)
>
>
> ---     add     canuck_in_korea2002 at yahoo.com
> 2002-09-06 08:51:25     218.150.177.35  Mozilla/5.0
> Galeon/1.2.5 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20020610
> Debian/1.2.5-1
>
> I just discovered One-Look and it has quickly found
> a much coveted space
> on my browser's Personal Toolbar. I especially
> appreciate  the lack of
> pop-up ads. Thanks for the great resource!
>
>
> I notice you have several encyclopedias in your
> database. I would like to
> suggest an encyclopedia called Wikipedia. It is an
> effort to build a
> complete encyclopedia from scratch, written by
> volunteers and released
> under the GNU Free Documentation License. Wikipedia
> is one and a half
> years old, and currently has about 40,000 articles,
> many of which are very
> good.
>
> Cheers!
>
> Stephen Gilbert
>
>

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To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
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----- End forwarded message -----


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Now *this* is different

body:
Some unhelpful person is apparently "spamvertising" for wikipedia.

----- Forwarded message from 110106775 at reports.spamcop.net -----

From: 110106775 at reports.spamcop.net
Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2002 11:39:19 -0400 (EDT)
To: jwales at bomis.com
Subject: [SpamCop (http://www.wikipedia.org/) id:110106775]The True
    encyclopedia

- SpamCop V1.3.3 -
This message is brief for your comfort.  Please follow links for details.

http://spamcop.net/w3m?i=z110106775z735357dba0af37547c5f13e6aa5701a6z
Spamvertised website: http://www.wikipedia.org/
> http://www.wikipedia.org/ is 130.94.122.197; Sun, 22 Sep 2002 21:13:28 GMT

Offending message:
Received: from cthulhu.gerg.ca ([127.0.0.1] helo=smtp.mailkeep.net)
	by cthulhu.gerg.ca with smtp (Exim 4.05)
	id 17tDyc-0006ub-01
	for x; Sun, 22 Sep 2002 17:09:14 -0400
Received: from  ([63.102.49.32]) by smtp.mailkeep.net
          with SMTP (Mailkeep 1.2) id 02092211331714970
          for x; Sun, 22 Sep 2002 11:33:22 -0400
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	by starship.python.net with esmtp (Exim 4.10)
	id 17t8qY-0006gR-00
	for x; Sun, 22 Sep 2002 11:40:34 -0400
Received: from localhost.localdomain (cs6625175-189.austin.rr.com [66.25.175.189])
	by txsmtp01.texas.rr.com (8.12.5/8.12.2) with ESMTP id g8MFdJZH024825;
	Sun, 22 Sep 2002 11:39:19 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: The True encyclopedia
From: Hunter Peress <hu.peress at mail.mcgill.ca>
To: x, x,
   x, x,
   x, x,
   x, x,
   x, x, x,
   x, x, x,
   x, x, x,
   x, x,
   x, x, x,
   x, x, x,
   x, x, x,
   x, x, x,
   x, x, x,
   x, x,
   x, x, x,
   x, x, x,
   x, x, x,
   x, x, x,
   x, x,
   x, x,
   x, x,
   x, x,
   x, x, x,
   x, x, x,
   x, x,
   x, x,
   x, x,
   x, x,
   x, x,
   x
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Mailer: Ximian Evolution 1.0.5
Date: 22 Sep 2002 10:41:29 -0500
Message-Id: <1032_________________amel at HillCountryPeress>
Mime-Version: 1.0
X-Spam-Status: No, hits=2.5 required=5.0 tests=SUSPICIOUS_RECIPS,VERY_SUSP_RECIPS
X-Spam-Level: **

The True encyclopedia:
http://www.wikipedia.org/

Its like a collection of the world's knowledge. Anyone can edit anything.
You don't even have to sign up. Multilingual even... Give it a try.

----- End forwarded message -----


from_name: Tesla Coil

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Naming Conventions (names and titles)

body:
For example, we have Edward Stanley, the 14th Earl of Derby
and Edward Stanley, the 15th Earl of Derby.

Wikipedia:Naming conventions (names and titles) might suggest
these should be [[Edward, 14th Earl of Derby]] and [[Edward,
15th Earl of Derby]].

Or, it should be [[Earl of Derby]] and [[Edward, 15th Earl
of Derby]].  The 14th Earl of Derby was Prime Minister, and
arguably moreso *The* [[Earl of Derby]] than the 15th Earl
of Derby.

I must say I dislike this, because there are plenty of minor
conflicts of fact to sort out in research of a given century
without having to chase down every Lord Halifax to ascertain
whether they are *The* [[Lord Halifax]] for all centuries.

Appeals for "consistency" may have been blown away in debate
on city names, but I've more important things to do than play
favorites between this Lord Halifax and that Lord Halifax.

In no case is it [[Edward Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby]] and
[[Edward Stanley, 15th Earl of Derby]]. "English-speakers do
not put family names as part of the title."

Meanwhile, [[Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of Derby]] redirects
to [[Thomas Stanley]]...


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Now *this* is different

body:
I should point out that it could just be that someone sent a mass
email out to all his friends, and one of them reported it as spam, not
realizing it wasn't intended that way.  No particular action is necessary
at this stage, and I'm writing this fellow to ask him what's up.

Giskart wrote:

> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
> >Some unhelpful person is apparently "spamvertising" for wikipedia.
> >
> >
> >
>
> Put on the main page a message for a week that it is not policy of
> wikipedia to send spam. And a message to everbody to discourage misuse
> of the good name of wikipedia by sending spam. -- giskart
>
>
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
> From root at nupedia.com (Cron Daemon) Mon Sep 23 04:25:36 2002


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Now *this* is different

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> I should point out that it could just be that someone sent a mass
> email out to all his friends, and one of them reported it as spam, not
> realizing it wasn't intended that way.  No particular action is necessary
> at this stage, and I'm writing this fellow to ask him what's up.

 > > > Subject: The True encyclopedia
 > > > From: Hunter Peress <hu.peress at mail.mcgill.ca>

I believe this is the same fellow who's currently pushing a wacky I've-
been-a-registered-user-for-four-days-and-I-know-how-to-radically-reform-
Wikipedia-for-the-batter scheme at his user page:

   http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3AHfastedge

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Now *this* is different

body:
Brion VIBBER wrote:
> I believe this is the same fellow who's currently pushing a wacky I've-
> been-a-registered-user-for-four-days-and-I-know-how-to-radically-reform-
> Wikipedia-for-the-batter scheme at his user page:

Uh, for the _better_. Though reforming the Wikipedia batter might be
interesting too. Who's up for cross-linked waffles?

Maybe it's time to go to bed. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] difficulties of a kids' wikipedia

body:
At 08:41 PM 9/23/02 +1000, you wrote:
>I think a 'children's wikipedia' is an EXCELLENT idea, but it would have
>to be much more closely monitored and supervised than the general one,
>which would probably remove it from the 'wikipedia' spectrum entirely.
>You can't create an online project for kids and not supervise it for
>appropriate content. Nobody would use it.
>
>Something like this would really be a project for schools... I could
>imagine kids researching topics and creating articles as part of their
>general studies or computer literacy classes, and then uploading them as
>part of their class work. But rather than having each individual child
>have a login you'd want to set it up so that the TEACHER was the one
>registered... and most primary/elementary school teachers really think
>they've got too much on their plates already to do something like that.
>They're either not computer-literate enough themselves, or not
>interested, or too busy... so I doubt that the project would be
>convincingly taken up.

The "report" was always a staple of my lower level schoolwork, usually
pieced together from encyclopedia articles. A kid's wikipedia is a natural
for English classes, even the editing.  This idea might have a lot more
traction and popularity with teachers then we might think.

We just need a charter school that takes it up as its project. Although it
wouldn't have to be a school, it could even be a project of a teachers'
union or a state department of education.

Fred


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletions

body:
At 09:03 AM 9/23/02 -0400, you wrote:
>All right. The big deleters (Engels, Jheimens, Mav) have adopted a more
>aggressive policy for deleting pages than the stated one (on
>[[Wikipedia:Votes for deletion]] and [[Wikipedia:Policy on permanent
>deletion of pages]]).
>
>Primarily, they delete stubs.
>
>We hashed this out once a while ago (see [[m:Kill the Stub Pages]],
>[[Wikipedia:The perfect stub article]], [[Wikipedia:Find or fix a stub]])
>and as you can see from the deletion policy, the consensus was that in the
>face of disagreement/ambiguity, it was better to not delete stubs than to
>delete them.
>
>I'd like to ask people to stop deleting stubs until we discuss this again.
>
>(See also [[User talk:Maveric49]] for a beginning debate.)

I quite agree, although my vested interest in stubs is less now days, since
I have both had little time and have generally worked on substantial
articles.  I just don't have time to monitor the deletion police. I did
notice a proposed deletion of [[poverty]] a dismal article about a dismal
subject, which I thought rather unwise. It would seem on obvious candidate
for editing and addition of more substantial material rather than deletion.

To the individuals involved, I would say that if you spent more time
writing articles you would have less time for vandalism.

Fred


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Feature request

body:
--- lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
> > Sorry if this is already in the hopper or (!) has
> already been
> > done, but it seems long overdue:
> > We need a way to compile, based on lists of links
> (I guess),
> > "Recent Changes" lists for all articles about a
> general topic.
>
> This has been doable since Magnus's software, and
> still is; the
> hard work is just compiling the list of links.

Right. Here's the problem. I could easily spend the
next weekend compiling an [[Alphabetical list of
mathematics articles]]. This will allow me to cut down
on my time by simply doing a "Watch links" on that
page every morning. Cool. I update the list by
monitoring special:Newpages occasionally. Nice. Except
we need the same for all other major fields. Unless
you have somebody really active, these lists will
become obsolete and thus useless really soon. See
[[Biographical Listing]] for example. Once the list is
out of date, somebody needs to spend another weekend.
And you never know whether the list is out of date or
not, unless you have just spent a weekend on it.

I still believe that all of this can and should be
done automatically, by tracing link paths from the
main page.

Axel

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from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletions

body:
All right. The big deleters (Engels, Jheimens, Mav) have adopted a more
aggressive policy for deleting pages than the stated one (on
[[Wikipedia:Votes for deletion]] and [[Wikipedia:Policy on permanent
deletion of pages]]).

Primarily, they delete stubs.

We hashed this out once a while ago (see [[m:Kill the Stub Pages]],
[[Wikipedia:The perfect stub article]], [[Wikipedia:Find or fix a stub]])
and as you can see from the deletion policy, the consensus was that in the
face of disagreement/ambiguity, it was better to not delete stubs than to
delete them.

I'd like to ask people to stop deleting stubs until we discuss this again.

(See also [[User talk:Maveric49]] for a beginning debate.)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Now *this* is different

body:
On Monday 23 September 2002 10:22, Brion VIBBER wrote:
> Brion VIBBER wrote:
> > I believe this is the same fellow who's currently pushing a wacky I've-
> > been-a-registered-user-for-four-days-and-I-know-how-to-radically-reform-
> > Wikipedia-for-the-batter scheme at his user page:
>
> Uh, for the _better_. Though reforming the Wikipedia batter might be
> interesting too. Who's up for cross-linked waffles?

If you reform Wikipedia for the batter, I'll take a pitcher of it.

phma


from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Feature request

body:
Larry Sanger wrote:

 >Sorry if this is already in the hopper or (!) has already been done, but
 >it seems long overdue:
 >
 >We need a way to compile, based on lists of links (I guess), "Recent
 >Changes" lists for all articles about a general topic.  I think this is
 >actually a very pressing need that should have been taken care of long
 >ago.  (For the record, I asked for it probably a year ago or more.)  The
 >idea is that we'd be able to maintain lists of all articles on a given
 >general subject, such as philosophy, and any changes made to any articles
 >on the subject would show up on the recent changes page for that subject.
 >
 >Why do we need this?  At least one reason is it might help attract experts
 >to the project.  Just speaking for myself, I'm sure I'd spend more time on
 >Wikipedia if there were a philosophy recent changes page.  More
 >importantly, the recent changes page has *always* been huge.  It's now
 >more cumbersome than ever and makes it hard for people to focus their
 >attention, which would be a nice option.  Lack of the feature also makes
 >it hard to *monitor* goings-on in a general subject area.
 >
 >With the relatively new mysql-driven software, this shouldn't be as
 >difficult as it might have been before.  One could compile personal lists
 >using the "watch this page" feature; what I suggest is that we have
 >publicly-editable and publicly-viewable lists of the same nature.
 >
 >(Minor point: in a list of recent changes pages, I think there should be
 >automatically listed the number of topics that are listed under a given
 >subject.  That'd give us an idea of how much more work there is to be done
 >in adding to the list.)
 >
 >I am not committed to any particular version of the feature, by the way.
 >I'd just like to see it done.  I don't want to have to wade through 5000
 >edits just to see all the recent philosophy edits.
 >
 >Larry
 >
 >
 >[Wikipedia-l]
 >To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
 >http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
 >
 >
 >
 >
 >
I have some ideas on this:

The problem of finding subject groups is closely related to the problem
of indexing.

The problem with the current link structure is that it is much too
dense: you can get between articles very easily, as Wikipedia is a very
"small world" network. This tends to defeat any attempts at automated
indexing. What is needed is a way of making some pages and links more
visible than others to automatic indexing systems.

We define a new "category" namespace. An article can contain any number
of "category" links, which do not appear in the main body of the
article, but instead in a separate area, like the inter-language links.
There, they link to a placeholder "category" page which can be used to
define and describe the category. (And its "category talk" page can be
used to discuss the category).

Now, all pages that link to a category page "belong" to that category.
Categories are just sets: there can be any number of them, and they can
belong to multiple competing schemes.  And categories can belong to
categories, too, allowing for hierarchies and networks of categories to
be created. The presence of categories will make machine indexing much
easier.

Some very basic categories that might be useful for a start:

*[[category:animal]] eg wolf, cat, bird, dinosaur
*[[category:vegetable]]  eg potato, cactus
*[[category:person]] eg Isaac Newton, Sherlock Holmes (but see below)
*[[category:time period]] eg 20th century, Feburary, 200 BC, Cenozoic
*[[category:event]]  eg Wars of the Roses, 1997 Academy Awards
*[[category:place]] eg Dubrovnik, Alaska, Indian Ocean, Atlantis (but
see below)
*[[category:field of study]] eg Biology, Chemistry, Philosophy, Law,
Accountancy, Civil engineering
** not sure of the best name(s) for this: field of endeavour, subject of
inquiry?
*[[category:fictional]] eg Sherlock Holmes, Atlantis
*[[category:abstraction]] eg Soul, Mind, Sophie Germain prime,
Mathematical set

I'd like to get these very simple categories in place first, as a sort
of "page coloring" experiment. Notice that they are neither complete,
nor framed in the form of a hierarchy: this is not a taxonomy. For
example, "prion" belongs to none of these categories. Perhaps someone
will create a [[category:other lifeform]] page for the Archaea, prions
and viruses.

How to bootstrap the process? My first idea is this:

* assign categories to about 1000 articles by hand
* train a naive Bayesian classifier to recognise each category
* adjust thresholds to make sure that classifications are reasonably
accurate
* machine-classify the entire Wikipedia!

Now, this process will be less than perfect. Some articles will be
mis-classified, others will be missed because the threshold
probabilities were set too high: ie both type I and type II errors.
Mis-classification will not damage any actual articles, it will only
result in errors in machine-generated indexes. But at this point, manual
editing will take over.

New articles can be machine-classified once they reach say 250
characters, using a Bayesian classifier that is trained on the corpus as
a whole: and again, once they have been machine-classified once, they
are then left alone thereafter.

Now, at this point, we may not need to create a "philosophy" or
"chemistry" category. Instead, we can just note that these are
[[category:field of study|fields of study]] and hence that pages that
link to them, or are linked from them, "belong" to them in some sense.
Similar treatment can be done for time periods.

I'm not 100% sure how this would work, but I think that a workable
mechanism could be evolved, given the initial category coloring.

Neil


from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletions

body:
At 07:23 AM 9/23/02 -0600, Fred Bauder wrote:

>I quite agree, although my vested interest in stubs is less now days, since
>I have both had little time and have generally worked on substantial
>articles.  I just don't have time to monitor the deletion police. I did
>notice a proposed deletion of [[poverty]] a dismal article about a dismal
>subject, which I thought rather unwise. It would seem on obvious candidate
>for editing and addition of more substantial material rather than deletion.
>
>To the individuals involved, I would say that if you spent more time
>writing articles you would have less time for vandalism.
>
>Fred

You're talking to, and about, people who have made many substantial
contributions to the Wikipedia--disagreements on policy do not constitute
vandalism, any more than cluttering the Wikipedia with one-sentence stubs
does.

--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


body:
Brion VIBBER wrote:

 > Toby Bartels wrote:
 >
 >> I've been using highlighted links since before I knew what they were.
 >> I think that I must have clicked on the option by accident or something.
 >> Whenever I see the "?" links, I'm shocked at how uninterpretable it is,
 >> *especially* when the "?" follows a link of more than one word.
 >
 >
 > It used to was that if the link was more than one word, the whole
 > thing got surrounded by brackets, ie:
 >
 >  ...throughout the history of Foobaria? there were...
 >  ...throughout the [history of Foobaria]? there were...
 >
 > This seems to have disappeared in phase III.
 >
 > -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
 >
Yes, I remember that. It was much clearer than the current way of
linking a phrase.
Can we have it back, please?

Neil


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletions

body:
On 9/23/02 9:23 AM, "Fred Bauder" <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> I quite agree, although my vested interest in stubs is less now days, since
> I have both had little time and have generally worked on substantial
> articles.  I just don't have time to monitor the deletion police. I did
> notice a proposed deletion of [[poverty]] a dismal article about a dismal
> subject, which I thought rather unwise. It would seem on obvious candidate
> for editing and addition of more substantial material rather than deletion.
>
> To the individuals involved, I would say that if you spent more time
> writing articles you would have less time for vandalism.
>
I just want to say that I'm not trying to imply that anyone, including the
people I mentioned, aren't well-intentioned, positive contributors. The
people who delete a lot also contribute lots more. We just need to all work
together for best principles on how to properly manage Wikipedia's content,
find the right balance between a free-for-all and delete-all-mediocrity.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletions

body:
On 9/23/02 9:53 AM, "Vicki Rosenzweig" <vr at redbird.org> wrote:

> At 07:23 AM 9/23/02 -0600, Fred Bauder wrote:
>
>> I quite agree, although my vested interest in stubs is less now days, since
>> I have both had little time and have generally worked on substantial
>> articles.  I just don't have time to monitor the deletion police. I did
>> notice a proposed deletion of [[poverty]] a dismal article about a dismal
>> subject, which I thought rather unwise. It would seem on obvious candidate
>> for editing and addition of more substantial material rather than deletion.
>>
>> To the individuals involved, I would say that if you spent more time
>> writing articles you would have less time for vandalism.
>>
>> Fred
>
> You're talking to, and about, people who have made many substantial
> contributions to the Wikipedia--disagreements on policy do not constitute
> vandalism, any more than cluttering the Wikipedia with one-sentence stubs
> does.
>
I think he meant "less time for dealing with vandalism". I don't think he
was asserting _they_ were vandals. At least I chose to interpret it that
way.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletions

body:
>On Mon, Sep 23, 2002 at 02:49:01PM +0100, tarquin wrote:
>> >I just don't have time to monitor the deletion police. I did
>> >notice a proposed deletion of [[poverty]] a dismal article about a dismal
>> >subject, which I thought rather unwise. It would seem on obvious candidate
>> >for editing and addition of more substantial material rather than
>> >deletion.
>> I objected to the deletion proposal for [[poverty]].
>> It was a lousy, pathetic stub, but it's a serious topic which Wikipedia
>> should cover.
>> Deleting that stub only puts off the day when we write an article on it.
>
>I'm not convinced it works that way, inexperienced wikipedian that I am.
>Speaking personally, if I notice a "full" link then I'll likely as not
>pass over it. If I notice an "empty" link then I'm much more likely to
>consider whether I could write an article on the subject.
>
>--
>Khendon  (Jason Williams)

I would say it is a good habit to check out articles on subjects of
interest. Especially in areas of expertise.

Fred


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>  it could even be a project of a teachers'
>union.
>
Teachers' unions try to decrease the work of teachers, not increase it.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletions

body:
On 9/23/02 10:22 AM, "Andre Engels" <engels at uni-koblenz.de> wrote:

>> All right. The big deleters (Engels, Jheimens, Mav) have adopted a more
>> aggressive policy for deleting pages than the stated one (on
>> [[Wikipedia:Votes for deletion]] and [[Wikipedia:Policy on permanent
>> deletion of pages]]).
>>
>> Primarily, they delete stubs.
>>
> I don't know where you get the impression that "Primarily, [we] delete stubs."
> but it is a very bad description of what we do. Yes, we delete stubs, but not
> all stubs, just the very bad ones. I know you disagree with the deletion of
> stubs, so I bend backward, but there is still a limit - and to me that limit
> is reached if a stub is _less_ than a dictionary definition. Your anger seems
> to have been aroused by maveric deleting impulse noise with the text "Unwanted
> low-quality loud sound(s)". Now, I now too little about impulse noise to give
> a definition of it, but I do know that if someone who does know about it
> writes about it, (s)he will not let that definition stand. Which means that
> it does NOT fall under "stubs that at least have a decent definition and might
> in the future become articles".

I apologize; I didn't mean that you delete stubs more than anything else; I
meant the primary issue of contention is that you delete stubs.

My anger hasn't been aroused. This is more about patterns of behavior than
specific examples, but if we must discuss individual cases, the real problem
with the deletion of "impulse noise" was that it happened within half an
hour of appearing on the Votes for deletion page. That's much too fast,
whether or not its definition is sufficient.

The thing to remember is that deletions are effectively immutable; thus the
burden to justify deletion should be extreme (or at a minimum, the process
should be slow).

Some of the harm in deleting weak stubs:
* discourages potential contributors who see their work deleted, instead of
improved
* prevents people who find stubs to goad them to improve the entry from
doing so
* hard to quantify weakness--how "decent" must the entry be?
* hides measure of interest in the entry

We need to either amend the stated policy or change current deletion
behavior; either way, we should discuss these issues first.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletions

body:
On 9/23/02 10:27 AM, "Andre Engels" <engels at uni-koblenz.de> wrote:

>> Fred Bauder wrote:
>>
>>> I just don't have time to monitor the deletion police. I did
>>> notice a proposed deletion of [[poverty]] a dismal article about a dismal
>>> subject, which I thought rather unwise. It would seem on obvious candidate
>>> for editing and addition of more substantial material rather than deletion.
>>>
>> I objected to the deletion proposal for [[poverty]].
>> It was a lousy, pathetic stub, but it's a serious topic which Wikipedia
>> should cover.
>> Deleting that stub only puts off the day when we write an article on it.
>
> Well, if you want to write an article on poverty, or want to ask someone
> else to write it, then by all means do so. I still don't see how the existing
> definition would in any way have helped you, nor how the non-existence of
> the page in any way would stop you.

Some of the issue here is that Fred and tarquin shouldn't have to justify
themselves; if they object, then the issue should be closed. Why? Because
deletions are discontinuities. Non-deletion isn't.

And the policy should be set up that such objections shouldn't have to be
raised very often.


from_name: Tom Parmenter

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletions

in_reply_to:
<200209231427.g8NER3J23080@chakotay.uni-koblenz.de> (message from
	Andre Engels on Mon, 23 Sep 2002 16:27:02 +0200 (CEST))

body:
|From: Andre Engels <engels at uni-koblenz.de>
|Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2002 16:27:02 +0200 (CEST)
|
|> Fred Bauder wrote:
|>
|> >I just don't have time to monitor the deletion police. I did
|> >notice a proposed deletion of [[poverty]] a dismal article about a dismal
|> >subject, which I thought rather unwise. It would seem on obvious candidate
|> >for editing and addition of more substantial material rather than deletion.
|> >
|> I objected to the deletion proposal for [[poverty]].
|> It was a lousy, pathetic stub, but it's a serious topic which Wikipedia
|> should cover.
|> Deleting that stub only puts off the day when we write an article on it.
|
|Well, if you want to write an article on poverty, or want to ask someone
|else to write it, then by all means do so. I still don't see how the existing
|definition would in any way have helped you, nor how the non-existence of
|the page in any way would stop you.
|
|Andre Engels
|[Wikipedia-l]


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Children's Wikipedia

body:
On 9/23/02 10:51 AM, "Florian Konnertz" <florian.konnertz at web.de> wrote:
> I'd appreciate your further comments and ideas about a kid's wiki/
> -pedia. I would like to contribute to such a project!

I suspect the issues involved in creating a quality kid's wikipedia fall too
far outside of the thrust of Wikipedia.org. However, Wikipedia's code and
content is free for copying and reuse; that is, anyone who has a clear
vision on how to run such a website may.

I also suspect that if someone were willing and able to dedicate the effort
to organizing such a project that Jimbo would be happy to donate the space
on the wikipedia.org server for that.

But other than the (not inconsiderable) costs of starting the project up,
there's nothing stopping you from putting up a website with just the
Wikipedia articles that you think appropriate to a kid's editable
encyclopedia.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletions

body:
On 9/23/02 10:51 AM, "Tom Parmenter" <tompar at world.std.com> wrote:
>> From my page:
>    Rescued from the Votes for deletion death row:
>
>    Arts and Crafts Movement, Mouthpiece, Ununennium, which led to
>    boilerplate entries on the rest of the undiscovered Unun elements,
>    which were immediately hopped up by Vicki Rosenzweig; Camp;
>    Undocumented feature
>
> To me, the votes for deletion page is a constrained Recent Changes,
> where I am reminded of things I might contribute on, but would not
> have thought of on my own.  Every one of these was a really poor
> stub.  Every one is now a pretty good stub.  I call that progress.
> But they wouldn't be there at all if I hadn't been prompted by the
> Votes for Deletion page.

I think that's why we have [[Wikipedia:Find or fix a stub]].

Maybe we need a [[Wikipedia:Wretched stubs that someone would delete if
there weren't other people who want to protect all stubs, no matter how
poor, from the vicious axe of erasure, so you bleeding hearts better fix
these stubs fast, all right?]]


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Children and Wiki

body:
The Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, any time. Even children can edit
an article, if they can figure out how to click on the "Edit" link. I
daresay my 6-year-old daughter could do it; and would, if sites like
pbs.org/kids weren't so absorbing.

However, this is an international wiki. Everyone in the world can see
what the child contributes, not just the other kids at their school. If
some 44-year-old adult decides to change the child's contribution, it
will get changed -- perhaps too quickly for the child's comfort. Well,
that's life in the grown-up world, and welcome to it, kid!

On the other hand, a school can have its own wiki. Its students can
write booger and fart all day long, and see how their classmates (or the
wiki administrator) responds. The lesson might be valuable for them. And
with the ability to undo peremptory deletes, a child could defend
whatever they deem valuable from techno-bullies.

If I ran a school's wiki, I would allow only signed-on contributors
personally known to me. If they didn't follow the rules, I'd kick them
off quickly. The word would get around: you can write anything you want,
unless you do X, Y or Z. Who knows such a wiki could lead? With the
proper guidance, the children might even create something wonderful.

Hmm, my father runs the website for a school in Lexington,
Massachusetts. Maybe I'll talk to him about setting up a wiki for that
school.

Ed Poor


from_name: Stephen Gilbert

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletions

body:
--- The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> wrote:
> We need to either amend the stated policy or change
> current deletion
> behavior; either way, we should discuss these issues
> first.

Please, please, let's get a non-destructive delete
that retains the history but makes the page empty in
all other respects. Then any issues like this will be
moot, since all deletions would be reversible.

Stephen Gilbert

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo!
http://sbc.yahoo.com


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Me a vandal? Than't rich

body:
This is idiotic. All this wasted effort over a damn 35
byte useless microstub. And Fred's comment that what I
and others have done is somehow vandalism is way over
the top: On the day in question I spent 2 and a half
freaken hours going through the new pages list fixing
dozens of stubs, half of which were on inane cartoon
characters, and wikified, NPOVed and added content to
many more short and full-blown articles. I also found
several copyright violations and added those to the
deletion queue. I do this type of thing every several
days. I'm sure they must have, but I don't recall the
last time Fred or Cunc did this.

And yes, I also deleted about a dozen micro-stubs
which /did not/ in my opinion meet the policy
definition of "at least a decent definition". The
article Cunc is battering about was the best of the
bunch -- that's why I included the entire text in the
deletion summary (that way if somebody disagreed then
they could recreate it).  There is furthermore no
requirement that all pages that are to be deleted must
be on the votes for deletion page before they are
deleted -- the policy only states that if there is
some question, then post.

Vandal indeed. I'm sick of this whole episode. And
Cunc don't be surprised if I begin to ignore your
posts to my talk page in the same why you ignore my
post to your talk page (thinking of the tribute
article comments here).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

PS I get the list on a digest, so  if there was an
apology by Fred or if Fred misspoke then I apologize
for reacting in this manor.

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo!
http://sbc.yahoo.com


from_name: Mark Christensen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Feature request

body:
I think the thing to do is to test out the current capabilities as best
we can.  To that effect, I'm setting up the "List of Philosophical
Topics" as a test case.  The list is by no means complete, and some of
the links aren't disambiguated properly, but it is 1) a long list
(useful for testing performance issues) and 2) it already exists, and
helps Larry out directly with his current request.

Even if this shows that the current software solution doesn't provide
exactly what we need, it should at least help us to be more clear about
what features a better solution would possess.

Mark Christensen

-----Original Message-----
From: Axel Boldt [mailto:axelboldt at yahoo.com]
Sent: Monday, September 23, 2002 10:40 AM
To: wikipedia-l at nupedia.com
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Feature request

--- lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
> > Sorry if this is already in the hopper or (!) has
> already been
> > done, but it seems long overdue:
> > We need a way to compile, based on lists of links
> (I guess),
> > "Recent Changes" lists for all articles about a
> general topic.
>
> This has been doable since Magnus's software, and
> still is; the
> hard work is just compiling the list of links.

Right. Here's the problem. I could easily spend the
next weekend compiling an [[Alphabetical list of
mathematics articles]]. This will allow me to cut down
on my time by simply doing a "Watch links" on that
page every morning. Cool. I update the list by
monitoring special:Newpages occasionally. Nice. Except
we need the same for all other major fields. Unless
you have somebody really active, these lists will
become obsolete and thus useless really soon. See [[Biographical
Listing]] for example. Once the list is out of date, somebody needs to
spend another weekend. And you never know whether the list is out of
date or not, unless you have just spent a weekend on it.

I still believe that all of this can and should be
done automatically, by tracing link paths from the
main page.

Axel

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo!
http://sbc.yahoo.com
[Wikipedia-l]
To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletions

body:
On 9/23/02 12:02 PM, "Khendon" <jason at jasonandali.org.uk> wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 23, 2002 at 02:49:01PM +0100, tarquin wrote:
>>> I just don't have time to monitor the deletion police. I did
>>> notice a proposed deletion of [[poverty]] a dismal article about a dismal
>>> subject, which I thought rather unwise. It would seem on obvious candidate
>>> for editing and addition of more substantial material rather than
>>> deletion.
>> I objected to the deletion proposal for [[poverty]].
>> It was a lousy, pathetic stub, but it's a serious topic which Wikipedia
>> should cover.
>> Deleting that stub only puts off the day when we write an article on it.
>
> I'm not convinced it works that way, inexperienced wikipedian that I am.
> Speaking personally, if I notice a "full" link then I'll likely as not
> pass over it. If I notice an "empty" link then I'm much more likely to
> consider whether I could write an article on the subject.

It's certainly the case that different people work different ways. That's
why this is an issue. If deletions were revertible this would be much less
of an issue. That way people who wished to could delete what they consider
useless stubs and those that don't consider them useless could undelete
them. (And that should be the end of it; no deletion wars--one veto and the
issue is dead.) Of course there are still many problems with that.

Another suggestion: Automatic [[Mark this page a poor stub]], to give people
an obvious option other than putting poor stubs on Votes for deletion or
deleting them.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletions

body:
The Cunctator wrote:
> Some of the harm in deleting weak stubs:
> * discourages potential contributors who see their work deleted, instead of
> improved
> * prevents people who find stubs to goad them to improve the entry from
> doing so
> * hard to quantify weakness--how "decent" must the entry be?
> * hides measure of interest in the entry
>
> We need to either amend the stated policy or change current deletion
> behavior; either way, we should discuss these issues first.

For a change, I agree with all that Cunc is saying here.

Khendon wrote:
 > I'm not convinced it works that way, inexperienced wikipedian that I
 > am. Speaking personally, if I notice a "full" link then I'll likely as
 > not pass over it. If I notice an "empty" link then I'm much more
 > likely to consider whether I could write an article on the subject.

Speaking personally, I work the exact opposite way. A "full" link on a
subject that interests me will almost certainly get followed to see
what's there (and I then may correct / expand / replace completely with
new text), while an "empty" link is guaranteed nothing, and much more
likely to be ignored unless I'm already planning to write on that
particular subject.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Jim McKeeth

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletions

body:
At 05:02 PM 9/23/2002 +0100, Khendon wrote:
>Speaking personally, if I notice a "full" link then I'll likely as not
>pass over it. If I notice an "empty" link then I'm much more likely to
>consider whether I could write an article on the subject.

This goes back to the comment about coloring links to stubs differently
then articles.  Which I also think is a good idea.  If there could also be
a header on the page of a stub that indicates it as such.  That will do a
lot for diffusing people's criticism's of Wikipedia's quality if they do
find a stub.


from_name: Larry Sanger

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Feature request

body:
Great minds thinking alike, apparently.  Sorry, Magnus, I didn't know you
had suggested it or I would have added "me too."

Lee and Brion said that we already have a way of doing this.  I see what
you guys mean, but it would be nice if these lists were linked to from a
central location, preferably the main Recent Changes page.  Maybe they
could even be in a separate namespace or something, as Neil Harris
suggests.

Again, I'm not suggesting any particular details; I just think it's
something we need to think about more.  I might start putting together
a list of philosophy links (or rather adapt the old one(s)), but I don't
want to feel like I'm wasting my time.

--Larry

On Mon, 23 Sep 2002, Magnus Manske wrote:

> This is what I suggested a few weeks ago, almost to the letter, but the
> discussion vanished slowly into the Internet ether...
>
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Now *this* is different

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote in first part:

>Some unhelpful person is apparently "spamvertising" for wikipedia.

>----- Forwarded message from 110106775 at reports.spamcop.net -----

I'd be interested in knowing how well the SpamCop report
helps you deal with the spammer and fix the problem.
I use SpamCop regularly to report the spam that I receive,
but I've never seen how it works on the other end.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] RE: F***

body:
I know I'll get in trouble for this, but in the spirit of "be bold" I
deleted the [[Fuck]] article. It just seemed pointless to have an
article called f***.

If someone wants to write an article on obscenity or censorship, and
treat the problems the term f*** has had, fine. But I don't want to see
every dirty word (or word that's gotten the dirty end of the stick) have
its own article.

Ed Poor
An "old fart"


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Feature request

body:
On 9/23/02 11:39 AM, "Axel Boldt" <axelboldt at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I still believe that all of this can and should be
> done automatically, by tracing link paths from the
> main page.

All that needs to be done is to automatically convert the links on the main
page to the special Watch Links equivalents.

I hacked up an example at [[User:The Cunctator/ByTopic]]. It's pretty
useful. Though from review the Watch Links page needs to have the recent
changes of the page itself as well as what links to it, I think.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] A possible solution to the deletion problem.

body:
Here is my idea:

As The Cunctator noted, deletions are effectively irreversible,
since there is no straightforward way for even a sysop
to get at the deleted page, archived though it may be.
We should change this.

I propose that any logged in user have the option to delete pages,
just as they all have the option to move pages today.
But this will not really delete the page from the database!
The page is still there, and if you go to it,
you can look at its history to see what it used to say.
You can even revert it to undelete the page if you wish.
The deletion will show up in [[Special:Recentchanges]]
and [[Special:Watchlist]], where we will see that it has been deleted,
with summary text similar to the text on [[Wikipedia:Deleted pages]]
(which the deleter will have provided in a form
just as sysops do today when they delete pages).
These pages and article histories can have a "D" flag by the edit,
similar to the "N" for new pages and the "M" for minor edits.

The deleted page shouldn't show up in [[Special:Allpages]].
A link to the deleted page should have a "?" (or red colour).
You'll be allowed to move pages to these deleted pages
(swapping histories since we want to preserve them).
For all intents and purposes, the page appears to be gone,
but when you go to it, you can find stuff in the history still.
The database will know to treat the page in this fashion,
because a new Boolean field will have a flag saying that it's been deleted.

To make this really work well, we should include one more thing:
the ability to delete individual versions from a page's history.
This would be used to remove copyright violations, and for no other reason.
There are many copyright violations hidden in pages' histories now,
and we are technically in violation of copyright for having them,
however unobvious it may be for somebody to get to them.
So we need to do this anyway, as has been suggested before.
Only sysops would be able to do this, with a "del" link
next to the "diff" and "cur" links in each page's history.

Benefits of my proposal:
* Forces us to deal with copyright violations in histories.
* Allows people to restore wrongly deleted pages easily.
* Makes it much safer to delete useless stubs without hassle.
* Lets people know if a page on their watchlist has been deleted.
* Allows people to reverse redirects by moving pages without being a sysop.
  (You delete the target, then move the source to the target.)

It also obviates the need for [[Wikipedia:Deleted pages]],
but this needs to be replaced with [[Special:Deletedhistories]]
(to track deletions of copyright violations in histories),
so that isn't really a benefit.

I believe that this proposal would be very helpful to all of us.
The Cunctator will be able to rest easy knowing that
no information has been lost when Andre deletes a page,
and Andre will be able to delete truly useless pages
without getting The Cunctator on his case about it.
We'll still need a deletion policy to prevent edit wars
(of a delete/revert variety), but it won't have to be as strict.
Deletion will be just another edit, like the rest of Wikipedia
(except for deletion of copyright violations, which we *should* be tough on).

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Red links

body:
>As the majority on the list (including myself) seems to favor the "red
>links" instead of the "?" for broken links, and after (one) positive
>feedback from the German list as well, I committed the appropriate
>change to the CVS repository. It should affect only not-logged-in users.
>The change will go online as soon as someone updates the running software.

It will also affect new users, I assume --
their default preference setting will now use coloured links.

And you implemented the accessibility provision that the OP mentioned, yes?

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Children's Wikipedia

body:
Florian Konnertz wrote in small part:

>Concerning the question how the wikipedia and the *wikidia* could be

We could call the children's Wikipedia "Wikipaedia",
unless you think that will be misunderstood ^_^.

-- Toby


from_name: Giskart

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Now *this* is different

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Some unhelpful person is apparently "spamvertising" for wikipedia.
>
>
>

Put on the main page a message for a week that it is not policy of
wikipedia to send spam. And a message to everbody to discourage misuse
of the good name of wikipedia by sending spam. -- giskart


subject: [Wikitech-l] [Stephen.Thornton@mic.ul.ie: Popper Entry]

body:
I think the Nupedia software is written so that articles in a subject area
are not displayed unless a subject is "active."  So, none of the
philosophy articles are displayed, because there is no philosophy editor
and therefore the subject area is "inactive."

This is just a bug, not a requested feature.  Whether it can and will be
fixed--don't know!

Of course, if we were to implement the Nupedia system agreed upon last
November, or some other simpler system, presumably this sort of problem
wouldn't exist...

--Larry


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Hfastedge (was: Now *this* is different)

body:
Brion VIBBER wrote:

> > > > Subject: The True encyclopedia
> > > > From: Hunter Peress <hu.peress at mail.mcgill.ca>
>
> I believe this is the same fellow who's currently pushing a wacky I've-
> been-a-registered-user-for-four-days-and-I-know-how-to-radically-reform-
> Wikipedia-for-the-batter scheme at his user page:
>
>   http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3AHfastedge

See also: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk%3AHfastedge

I've mentioned to this user on his/her talk page that blanket deletion
of huge swathes of material when rewriting is bad wiki etiquette.
We should keep an eye out.
Well-meaning, I think, but is leaping in a bit too quickly.


body:
This is precisely the sort of solution I'd support.  It's been suggested
before, and now I'd say it's time we actually implemented it.

--Larry


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletions

body:
tarquin wrote in part:

>Could we ressurect the "Articles in need of attention" page, and post
>there instead of the votes for deletion page?
>It's there but doesn't seem to be in use much.

The name of the page is [[Wikipedia:Votes for rewrite]].
You can find them all by searching for "votes",
since I created [[:]] redirects to each of them
when the watch lists weren't working right once.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Feature request

body:
(Wikitech-l: this is more on automatic subject classification, which Axel
brought up recently on Wikipedia-l.)

On Mon, 23 Sep 2002, Axel Boldt wrote:

[snip excellent comments that I agree with]

> I still believe that all of this can and should be
> done automatically, by tracing link paths from the
> main page.

I'm going to repeat some of what you've said earlier, adding my own
perspective.  I really hope some programmers pursue this--they needn't ask
anyone's permission.  The proof's in the pudding.

If automatic categorization could be done, and it sounds very plausible to
me, it would be *far* superior to a hand-maintained list of subject area
links.  And incredibly useful, too.

OK, the following will reiterate some of the earlier discussion.

Presumably, nearly every page on Wikipedia can be reached from nearly
every other page.  (There are orphans; and there are pages that do not
link to any other pages, though other pages link to them.)

This suggests that we can basically assign a number--using *some*
algorithm (not necessarily any one in particular: here is where
programmers can be creative)--giving the "closeness" of a page to all the
listed subjects.  (This is very much like the Kevin Bacon game, of course,
and the "six degrees of separation" phenomenon.)

The question whether a *useful* algorithm can be stated is interesting
from a theoretical point of view.  As I understand it, the suggestion is
that there is a simple and reliable (but how reliable?) algorithm, such
that, given simply a list of all the links in Wikipedia (viz., the source
page and destination page), and a list of subject categories, we can
reliably sort all pages into their proper categories.

It will not do to say, "There are obvious counterexamples, so let's not
even try."  We can live with some slop.  This is Wikipedia!  We could even
fix errors by hand (ad hoc corrections are possible; why not?).  As far as
I'm concerned, the real question is, once we try *various* algorithms,
what's the highest reliability we can actually generate?  I'll bet it'll
be reasonably high, certainly high enough to be quite useful.

Here's an attempt at expressing an algorithm:

For a given page P (e.g., [[Plato's allegory of the cave]]), if the
average number of clicks (not backtracking to any page already reached--
otherwise you deal with infinite regresses) needed to reach P from the
subject page S (e.g., [[Philosophy]]) through all possible links between P
and S (or, perhaps, all possible links below a certain benchmark number?)
is lower than the average number of clicks need to reach P from any other
subject page, then P is "about" S.

The algorithm could be augmented in useful ways.  In case of ties, or near
ties, a page could be listed as under multiple subjects.  I have no idea
if this algorithm is correct, but that doesn't matter--it's just an
example.  If you think harder and longer, I'm sure you'll think of a
better one.

This would be fascinating, I'm sure, for the programmers.  Can't we just
take the question about how long processing will require as a constraint
on the algorithm rather than as a knock-down argument that it's not
feasible?  The *exercise* is to find (and implement!) an algorithm that
*is* feasible.  We don't even have to do this using Wikipedia's server, if
it would be too great of a load; anyone could download the tarball and
process it.  You could do a cron job once a day, compile the 40-odd
"subject numbers" for each article in Wikipedia, and sort articles into
subject groups (in some cases, multiple subject groups for a given
article--why not?).  From there we could use scripts already written to
create the many "recent changes" pages.

I really, really, really want to see [[Philosophy Recent Changes]].  We
desperately need pages like that, and this is one of the best possible
ways we have of getting them.  It's worth actually exploring.

--Larry


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Feature request


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletions

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>Khendon wrote:

>>I'm not convinced it works that way, inexperienced wikipedian that I am.
>>Speaking personally, if I notice a "full" link then I'll likely as not
>>pass over it. If I notice an "empty" link then I'm much more likely to
>>consider whether I could write an article on the subject.

>I would say it is a good habit to check out articles on subjects of
>interest. Especially in areas of expertise.

When I started out with Wikipedia, that's just what I did.
It quickly became unworkable -- I guess that I have too much expertise.

I always thought that orange for tiny stubs proposal was ugly,
but to be honest, I would probably follow those links most readily.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletions

body:
Jeronimo wrote in last part:

>On the topic of sub-stubs, this was discussed some weeks ago on the
>list, and I believe the general opinion was that there's no need for
>such sub-stubs.

It was certainly discussed, and I'm the one that brought it up,
but I honestly don't think that any consensus was reached on them.
If a deleted page's history is preserved and easily read,
then I will certainly join the consensus to delete them
(whereas before I was just being provocative to suggest it).

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] RE: F***

body:
Ed Poor wrote:

>I know I'll get in trouble for this, but in the spirit of "be bold" I
>deleted the [[Fuck]] article. It just seemed pointless to have an
>article called f***.

You're supposed to be bold about *updating* articles, not *deleting* them!!!

>If someone wants to write an article on obscenity or censorship, and
>treat the problems the term f*** has had, fine. But I don't want to see
>every dirty word (or word that's gotten the dirty end of the stick) have
>its own article.

That may well be true.
So did you copy the information on [[Fuck]] to [[Obscenity]]
and then make [[Fuck]] a redirect to [[Obscenity]]?
Or did you just delete the information?

(Here I am assuming that [[Fuck]] did actually have information on it,
and wasn't one of the "microstubs" that another thread is going on about.)

-- Toby


body:
I wrote in very first part:

>Here is my idea:

And I seem to be at least the 3rd to suggest it.
But I receive the messages in digest form,
and I'd thought of it a couple of weeks ago anyway,
so I don't feel bad about claiming it for my own.
^_^

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletions

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>I just don't have time to monitor the deletion police. I did
>notice a proposed deletion of [[poverty]] a dismal article about a dismal
>subject, which I thought rather unwise. It would seem on obvious candidate
>for editing and addition of more substantial material rather than deletion.
>
I objected to the deletion proposal for [[poverty]].
It was a lousy, pathetic stub, but it's a serious topic which Wikipedia
should cover.
Deleting that stub only puts off the day when we write an article on it.


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Feature request

body:
This is what I suggested a few weeks ago, almost to the letter, but the
discussion vanished slowly into the Internet ether...


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Red links

body:
As the majority on the list (including myself) seems to favor the "red
links" instead of the "?" for broken links, and after (one) positive
feedback from the German list as well, I committed the appropriate
change to the CVS repository. It should affect only not-logged-in users.
The change will go online as soon as someone updates the running software.

Magnus


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletions

body:
Tom Parmenter wrote:

>To me, the votes for deletion page is a constrained Recent Changes,
>where I am reminded of things I might contribute on, but would not
>have thought of on my own.  Every one of these was a really poor
>stub.  Every one is now a pretty good stub.  I call that progress.
>But they wouldn't be there at all if I hadn't been prompted by the
>Votes for Deletion page.
>
Yup, I ended up wasting a whole evening of my life researching the Ford
Escort, and writing a pretty good article on it (if I say so myself,
still needs work from an expert) -- and I've never owned a car in my
life and know next to nothing about them!

Could we ressurect the "Articles in need of attention" page, and post
there instead of the votes for deletion page?
It's there but doesn't seem to be in use much.


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Me a vandal? Than't rich

body:
>This is idiotic. All this wasted effort over a damn 35
>byte useless microstub. And Fred's comment that what I
>and others have done is somehow vandalism is way over
>the top:
>-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
>
>PS I get the list on a digest, so  if there was an
>apology by Fred or if Fred misspoke then I apologize
>for reacting in this manor.

No misunderstanding and no apology. But I do think putting deleted material
in history should solve the problem. As to evalating exactly what you have
done, that is your responsibility, Life is just too short to follow someone
around.

Fred


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletions

in_reply_to:
<B9B4896C.3DBA%cunctator@kband.com> from The Cunctator at "Sep 23,
 2002 09:03:40 am"

body:
> All right. The big deleters (Engels, Jheimens, Mav) have adopted a more
> aggressive policy for deleting pages than the stated one (on
> [[Wikipedia:Votes for deletion]] and [[Wikipedia:Policy on permanent
> deletion of pages]]).
>
> Primarily, they delete stubs.
>
> We hashed this out once a while ago (see [[m:Kill the Stub Pages]],
> [[Wikipedia:The perfect stub article]], [[Wikipedia:Find or fix a stub]])
> and as you can see from the deletion policy, the consensus was that in the
> face of disagreement/ambiguity, it was better to not delete stubs than to
> delete them.
>
> I'd like to ask people to stop deleting stubs until we discuss this again.
>
> (See also [[User talk:Maveric49]] for a beginning debate.)

I don't know where you get the impression that "Primarily, [we] delete stubs."
but it is a very bad description of what we do. Yes, we delete stubs, but not
all stubs, just the very bad ones. I know you disagree with the deletion of
stubs, so I bend backward, but there is still a limit - and to me that limit
is reached if a stub is _less_ than a dictionary definition. Your anger seems
to have been aroused by maveric deleting impulse noise with the text "Unwanted
low-quality loud sound(s)". Now, I now too little about impulse noise to give
a definition of it, but I do know that if someone who does know about it
writes about it, (s)he will not let that definition stand. Which means that
it does NOT fall under "stubs that at least have a decent definition and might
in the future become articles".

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletions

in_reply_to:
<3D8F1BCD.9040802@planetunreal.com> from tarquin at "Sep 23, 2002
 02:49:01 pm"

body:
> Fred Bauder wrote:
>
> >I just don't have time to monitor the deletion police. I did
> >notice a proposed deletion of [[poverty]] a dismal article about a dismal
> >subject, which I thought rather unwise. It would seem on obvious candidate
> >for editing and addition of more substantial material rather than deletion.
> >
> I objected to the deletion proposal for [[poverty]].
> It was a lousy, pathetic stub, but it's a serious topic which Wikipedia
> should cover.
> Deleting that stub only puts off the day when we write an article on it.

Well, if you want to write an article on poverty, or want to ask someone
else to write it, then by all means do so. I still don't see how the existing
definition would in any way have helped you, nor how the non-existence of
the page in any way would stop you.

Andre Engels


from_name: Florian Konnertz

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Children's Wikipedia

body:
Hi all!

I've been glad to read about this idea.

If you know children well you might consider the possibilty that they
had this idea before us ;-)

I assume that there are already a lot of wikis maintained by children,
especially in the context of local areas, school intranets, etc.

As already stated by Fred there is a need for people like teachers who
are already working with children to help them to connect their wikis to
each other.
IMO for children it is not so much important to contribute to *the* one
and only encyclopedia, if they could grasp this idea at all. They prefer
  communicating to each other, and see only need for a steady storage of
information if they are asked by others to explain them something and
want to refer to some articles.

So i guess for the younger ones it should be the loosely combination of
a wiki communication and collaboration space where they can play and
explain things to each other and the older children could do the task of
refractoring the contributed stuff and build a uniform wikipedia from
it. (with the help of us wikipedians and their teachers)

I want to encourage you to keep this idea in mind as it would be nice to
watch the children's wiki grow. Never underestimate their creativity and
the readiness of the older to help the younger ones.

Another point is the phenomenon that children often explain things to
each other in very pictured language and funny where we adults can
profit also as some grasp some sorts of things easier that way. The
corresponding pages could be referenced from wikipedia more or less for
fun to learn how children think about an issue - and this will keep the
generations together.

Concerning the question how the wikipedia and the *wikidia* could be
linked to each other: I cannot imagine a proper solution (namespaces
etc.) yet. I'll think about this problem, i already do some related work
on interwiki solutions as suggested i.e on
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AllInOneWiki
There's still much work to do and good ideas needed.

I'd appreciate your further comments and ideas about a kid's wiki/
-pedia. I would like to contribute to such a project!

Regards,
Florian

--
Florian Konnertz

Have a nice day!

http://www.openspirit.de  consciousness research and wisdom traditions
http://www.openspirit.de/os_portal/noowiki/FrontPage
Collaboration

http://www.florian-konnertz.de
homepage, my linux howtos
http://www.openmovie.org
movie and mp3 -player projects


from_name: Khendon

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletions

body:
On Mon, Sep 23, 2002 at 02:49:01PM +0100, tarquin wrote:
> >I just don't have time to monitor the deletion police. I did
> >notice a proposed deletion of [[poverty]] a dismal article about a dismal
> >subject, which I thought rather unwise. It would seem on obvious candidate
> >for editing and addition of more substantial material rather than
> >deletion.
> I objected to the deletion proposal for [[poverty]].
> It was a lousy, pathetic stub, but it's a serious topic which Wikipedia
> should cover.
> Deleting that stub only puts off the day when we write an article on it.

I'm not convinced it works that way, inexperienced wikipedian that I am.
Speaking personally, if I notice a "full" link then I'll likely as not
pass over it. If I notice an "empty" link then I'm much more likely to
consider whether I could write an article on the subject.

--
Khendon  (Jason Williams)
khendon at khendon.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletions

body:
On 9/23/02 4:16 PM, "Brion VIBBER" <brion at pobox.com> wrote:

> The Cunctator wrote:
>> Some of the harm in deleting weak stubs:
>> * discourages potential contributors who see their work deleted, instead of
>> improved
>> * prevents people who find stubs to goad them to improve the entry from
>> doing so
>> * hard to quantify weakness--how "decent" must the entry be?
>> * hides measure of interest in the entry
>>
>> We need to either amend the stated policy or change current deletion
>> behavior; either way, we should discuss these issues first.
>
> For a change, I agree with all that Cunc is saying here.

Um, thanks.

<snip Kendon preferring empty links to stubs, Vibbor preferring stubs to
empty links>

I hope it's clear that we as a group have differing preferences. The best
solution would satisfy both parties: namely, some way of denoting
"insufficient" links such that they are distinguished from "full" links (as
Jim McKeeth has mentioned).

To implement this we need two components:
* a way of denoting "insufficient" entries (or "sub-stubs" or "micro-stubs",
etc.) similar to the "watch this page" function
* a way of marking such entries in the text of the entries; e.g. different
link coloration or a "!" instead of a "?"


subject: [Wikipedia-l] RE: F***

body:
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|Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2002 13:34:35 -0400
|
|
|I know I'll get in trouble for this, but in the spirit of "be bold" I
|deleted the [[Fuck]] article. It just seemed pointless to have an
|article called f***.
|
|If someone wants to write an article on obscenity or censorship, and
|treat the problems the term f*** has had, fine. But I don't want to see
|every dirty word (or word that's gotten the dirty end of the stick) have
|its own article.
|
|Ed Poor
|An "old fart"
|[Wikipedia-l]
|To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
|http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
|

It's not every dirty word, Ed, it's one important word, so important
that one of the most distinguished American lexicographers wrote a
whole book about it.

It's back now, and is being edited.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Red links

body:
> As the majority on the list (including myself) seems to favor the "red
> links" instead of the "?" for broken links, and after (one) positive
> feedback from the German list as well, I committed the appropriate
> change to the CVS repository. It should affect only not-logged-in users.
> The change will go online as soon as someone updates the running software.

Thank you very much, Magnus! This is what I call a prompt response :-)

Regards,

Erik

--
Werden Sie mit uns zum "OnlineStar 2002"! Jetzt GMX w?hlen -
und tolle Preise absahnen! http://www.onlinestar.de


from_name: Jeroen Heijmans

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletions

body:
wikipedia-l-request at nupedia.com wrote:

>All right. The big deleters (Engels, Jheimens, Mav) have adopted a more
>aggressive policy for deleting pages than the stated one (on
>[[Wikipedia:Votes for deletion]] and [[Wikipedia:Policy on permanent
>deletion of pages]]).
>
>Primarily, they delete stubs.
>
I - my username is Jheijmans - don't delete stubs. The pages I delete
contain:

* outright gibberish, such as
"afqweoriyqpwtha;sehfqpiugaigasgfas;lkfjzczvzzcvz1234"
* vandalism, such as "F*CK YOU", "Haha I can edit this page"
* "Put your text for the new article here"
* non-encyclopedia material, such as "Check my website at
http://www.geocities.com/thisiscool", or "For information on this
subject, check my website"
* copyrighted material - which I list first as such on the deletion
votes pages
* sub-stub information of the level "George Bush is the president" or
"Malawi is some sort of place in Africa, I think"

I also remove pages like the above, emptied or marked as such by other
Wikipedians

For a large part, the pages I delete have existed for less than a day. I
don't see that deleting such crap would hamper anybody to write a
serious stub or article about the topic.

On the topic of sub-stubs, this was discussed some weeks ago on the
list, and I believe the general opinion was that there's no need for
such sub-stubs.

Jeronimo


body:
--- Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:
> To make this really work well, we should include one
> more thing:
> the ability to delete individual versions from a
> page's history.
> This would be used to remove copyright violations,
> and for no other reason.
> There are many copyright violations hidden in pages'
> histories now,
> and we are technically in violation of copyright for
> having them,
> however unobvious it may be for somebody to get to
> them.
> So we need to do this anyway, as has been suggested
> before.
> Only sysops would be able to do this, with a "del"
> link
> next to the "diff" and "cur" links in each page's
> history.

I agree with most of your proposal, but I'm not sure
of this part. I do agree with the need to remove
copyright  violations. I am concerned, however, that
people may be too quick to use this function. We've
had many cases where one Wikipedian believed a text to
be under copyright, but it was actually contributed by
the copyright holder. If such a feature was put in
place, we would have to develop a fairly strict policy
on why and how to use it.

On the other hand, everyone could loosen up on
deletions. :)

Stephen Gilbert

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo!
http://sbc.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Red links

body:
--- Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:
> >As the majority on the list (including myself)
> seems to favor the "red
> >links" instead of the "?" for broken links, and
> after (one) positive
> >feedback from the German list as well, I committed
> the appropriate
> >change to the CVS repository. It should affect only
> not-logged-in users.
> >The change will go online as soon as someone
> updates the running software.
>
> It will also affect new users, I assume --
> their default preference setting will now use
> coloured links.
>
> And you implemented the accessibility provision that
> the OP mentioned, yes?

Several people from the other language projects
(particularly French, I believe) said they prefered to
leave the little blue question marks as the default
behaviour. Has this been taken into account?

Stephen Gilbert

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo!
http://sbc.yahoo.com


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Red links

body:
I am glad that everybody's seems SO happy by how
quickly that issue was settled.

And indeed, taking very quick decisions as soon as a
reasonable small number of people agree seem to be the
easiest way to achieve consensus. Is everybody's happy
? great.

I am not.

Don't get me wrong. If the majority of people here
think it better to switch to red links, that's ok.

But, since you were so quick, did you realise Giskart
asked you a little bit of delay to have time to ask
the dutch wiki ? Do you know at what time he asked the
question ?

Sun, 22 Sep 2002 20:42:22 +0200 (on my screen)

Do you know what time it was when you posted it was
all set, changes done, everybody happy ?

Mon, 23 Sep 2002 15:12:30 +0200 (on my screen)

That is less than 19 hours later

I read messages of your proposition to change this
morning before leaving for work. No time to ask
anything on the french wiki. And indeed, it would have
been useless. By the time I got home, it was done.

Trivial issue ???

Nope. Don't think so.

Question : if french or dutch decide they would prefer
? rather than red, is it technically possible ?

That also triggers a few questions in my mind upon the
position of international wikipedia in the existing
community.

I laid them down here
http://meta.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=Future_of_international_Wikipedias_as_part_of_the_main_community

peace

--- Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at epost.de> wrote:
> As the majority on the list (including myself) seems
> to favor the "red
> links" instead of the "?" for broken links, and
> after (one) positive
> feedback from the German list as well, I committed
> the appropriate
> change to the CVS repository. It should affect only
> not-logged-in users.
> The change will go online as soon as someone updates
> the running software.
>
> Magnus
>
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go
> here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

__________________________________________________
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from_name: Karen AKA Kajikit

body:
I think a 'children's wikipedia' is an EXCELLENT idea, but it would have
to be much more closely monitored and supervised than the general one,
which would probably remove it from the 'wikipedia' spectrum entirely.
You can't create an online project for kids and not supervise it for
appropriate content. Nobody would use it.

Something like this would really be a project for schools... I could
imagine kids researching topics and creating articles as part of their
general studies or computer literacy classes, and then uploading them as
part of their class work. But rather than having each individual child
have a login you'd want to set it up so that the TEACHER was the one
registered... and most primary/elementary school teachers really think
they've got too much on their plates already to do something like that.
They're either not computer-literate enough themselves, or not
interested, or too busy... so I doubt that the project would be
convincingly taken up.

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

To err is human... to really foul things up add kitten and stir.

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating
Ample Aussies Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ampleaussies/


subject: [Wikipedia-l] the REAL solution to useless stubs and micro-stubs

body:
On Tue, 24 Sep 2002, Karen AKA Kajikit wrote:

> If it's garbage delete it.
>
> Full stop.
>
> Deleting a pitiful little stub that contains no useful content is NOT
> vandalism, and I defend my right and Mav's right and anyone else's right
> to do it.

I fully sympathize with this view, Karen (though I think it'd be better to
just display contentless pages as new pages, preserving their histories).
To accuse anybody of vandalism over this issue is seriously overblown.
Mav deserves a lot of more respect than he's been given here, and (maybe
this won't be surprising) I can relate to his frustration.  He's trying to
do some *good*, and to maintain *standards*.  To accuse him of vandalism
for this behavior is a perfect example of the sort of inversion of values
that this society often suffers, and is just totally, needlessly
provocative and combative.  Trying to maintain standards is a good thing,
not a bad thing; even if you disagree with his methods, there's no reason
not to do so kindly.

Larry


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletion

body:
On Mon, 23 Sep 2002, Jeroen Heijmans wrote:

> ... If I have to explain every single move and deletion and addition I
> make here and have it approved by all Wikipedians, we might as well
> stop the entire project. ...

Precisely.  Accountability is one thing.  That's absolutely key, we can
all agree.  But provoking a needlessly hostile or confrontational scene
whenever you disagree with someone, on the most minor issues--that's
totally unnecessary.  Unfortunately, it's been a traditional part of
Wikipedia at least since I became Wikipedia's resident whipping boy.  :-)
Now that I'm officially no longer the project leader (thank god), I see
the same venom directed at others.

There's no reason for this; a little kindness, *please*!

Larry


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Truth in advertising

body:
On Monday 23 September 2002 02:32 pm, The Cunctator wrote:
> To implement this we need two components:
> * a way of denoting "insufficient" entries (or "sub-stubs" or
> "micro-stubs", etc.) similar to the "watch this page" function
> * a way of marking such entries in the text of the entries; e.g. different
> link coloration or a "!" instead of a "?"

This has already been suggested in one way or another by several people now,
including me. This could in fact be married with the proposed 500
byte/character article definition cut-off whereby any page that is less than
500 characters yet meets the current criteria for automatic article detection
would be marked as being a stub.

I could also see having a function where an article that is above the 500
character minimum threshold but is still obviously inadequate to human eyes
to be even a minimal article on the subject, could be "voted" to be counted
as a stub.

For example, a 700 character article on US history could only be a stub under
most anybody's definition -- a simple list of major conflicts the US has been
involed in and the most important presidents and generals would be more than
1000 characters. On the other hand, a 510 character article on some obscure
Mayan god that even most present day Maya decendents are unaware of, could
possibly classify as a minimal article and not a stub so long as it is well
written. So I see the range of 500 to a 1000, or maybe even, 1500 bytes as
the major subjective stubiness realm.

Of course, I still argue that that 95+% of encyclopedia topics objectively
can't be covered even as minimal articles with fewer than 500 characters. I
would further argue that it is not possible to have a decent definition using
fewer than 100 characters, but that is a different thread....

It is very interesting that you mention the use of ! for denoting stubs -- a
newbie posted /exactly/ that suggestion on my talk page. It is strange
sometimes how the same idea is simultaneously proposed by several different
people at once. I guess good ideas are infectious. :-)

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

PS, I'm still a bit mad, but I'm glad we are on rational speaking terms again
Cunctator.


from_name: lcrocker at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Red links

body:
> I read messages of your proposition to change this
> morning before leaving for work. No time to ask
> anything on the french wiki. And indeed, it would have
> been useless. By the time I got home, it was done.
> ...
> Question : if french or dutch decide they would prefer
> ? rather than red, is it technically possible ?

Absolutely.  Just do it yourself.  I'm already about
two weeks behind on changes I'd like to make to the
software (having a job really gets in the way); thank
goodness Brion has taken up some of the maintenance
slack for me.  But I don't have the time or, for that
matter, much desire to deal with international wikis.
The code is available to anyone. Access to the server
is available to anyone who can demonstrate need and
competence.  Just do it.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] De-linking; the recycle bin alternative to deletion

body:
On Monday 23 September 2002 07:55 pm, Fred wrote:
> No misunderstanding and no apology. But I do think putting deleted material
> in history should solve the problem. As to evalating exactly what you have
> done, that is your responsibility, Life is just too short to follow someone
> around.
>
> Fred

Do you ever have anything positive to say here or do you just enjoy insulting
people you don't like (mostly me)? Name calling is a childish game played by
children and those with weak minds in an atempt to cheaply "win" an arguement
they feel they would otherwise lose.

With that said, I wouldn't at all mind the replacement of the deletion
function with a de-linking from the database function; When a page is
de-linked from database then all links to it would be replaced by an empty
link and the de-linked page would be listed on a log page (this would be
similar to Microsoft's Recycle Bin).

Then all the micro-stub lovers could pick and choose at their leisure the
micro-stubs they wish to turn into stubs and the history of who first typed
the epic prose of "fill in", or "Pete Rose was a ball player. Jesus rules!"
or my favorite "I am the bomb and you all know that i am the bomb and you all
know that i will always be the bomb regardless of what anyy of you have to
say about the fact that i am the bomb and about the fact that i will always
be the bomb"  will be preserved.

But then there is the problem of badly named pages that resulted from
typos or vandalism, such as the hypothetical [[DON QUIOTE LIKES CARROTS]] or
[[When Derams May COme]]. It would be silly to keep a page history, even one
hidden under an edit link, for a page title that will never become an article
or even a redirect.

There is also the problem of copyright violations that need to be removed for
legal reasons.

So unless the developers or the software itself periodically clears-out the
recycle bin by permanently deleting old de-linked pages, then there are
significant draw-backs to this plan.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Feature request

body:
On Mon, Sep 23, 2002 at 09:53:01AM +0100, Neil Harris wrote:
> >
> I have some ideas on this:
>
> The problem of finding subject groups is closely related to the problem
> of indexing.
>
> The problem with the current link structure is that it is much too
> dense: you can get between articles very easily, as Wikipedia is a very
> "small world" network. This tends to defeat any attempts at automated
> indexing. What is needed is a way of making some pages and links more
> visible than others to automatic indexing systems.

Agreed so far. But instead of having automatic assignments of categories
I would suggest to have a small number of perhaps 20 major categories:

- Philosophy
- Geography
- Biography
- Mathematics
- History
- Physics
- Biology
- Theology
- Mythology
- ....

and to have those as checkboxes on the edit-page of the article.
An author can easily categorize his article. Non-categorized
articles can be spotted by a Special:uncategorized page.

An article can have multiple categories checked, an article on
Beethoven would appear in Music as well as in Biography.

Recent Changes might be extended to provide a filter so Larry
can look for his Philosophy articles.

Regards,

	JeLuF


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletion

body:
wikipedia-l-request at nupedia.com wrote:

>I believe that this proposal would be very helpful to all of us.
>The Cunctator will be able to rest easy knowing that
>no information has been lost when Andre deletes a page,
>and Andre will be able to delete truly useless pages
>
Andr? is deleting truly useless pages, so is Mav and so am I. We are
trying to do what we think is good for Wikipedia - if we wanted to do
harm, there's far easier and better was than to delete ultra-crappy
pages with no content. If I have to explain every single move and
deletion and addition I make here and have it approved by all
Wikipedians, we might as well stop the entire project. I'm doing this
while thinking reasonable. If you think that deletion was wrong: go
ahead and write a great article about the subject - don't make such a
noise out of it.

Jeronimo


from_name: Tim Marklew

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Lists of articles to monitor subject areas - a proposal

body:
>We need a way to compile, based on lists of links
>(I guess),
>"Recent Changes" lists for all articles about a
>general topic.
>
>This has been doable since Magnus's software, and
>still is; the
>hard work is just compiling the list of links.

I've just had a go at compiling one of these lists, a list of articles on
economics at [[Economics articles (master list)]].  I think the page will be
useful, for me if noone else! I thought I was already watching pretty much
all the economics articles, but I uncovered a few more gems that I didn't
know about.

As Wikipedia gets bigger, I think categorisations like this will be
increasingly necessary - with 3000+ changes per day, scanning all of the
recent changes for articles that interest you is becoming an activity for
die-hard Wikipediholics only.

We could quite easily ensure that all pages get categorised like this,
provided of course that we put in the hard work.  By running a query on the
database, we could generate a page of "Articles that haven't been
categorised yet" (in a similar way to the pages like [[Wikipedia:Most wanted
stubs]].  In this way, we could ensure that all new articles get put on a
categorisation page, and hence come to the attention of the experts who
monitor the "watch links" on that page.

Let me know if you would be interested in putting these lists together - if
we have a few volunteers I will put the "Articles that haven't been
categorised yet page" idea into practice.

Tim (Enchanter)

_________________________________________________________________
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http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Feature request

body:
wikipedia-l-request at nupedia.com wrote:

>Great minds thinking alike, apparently.
>
...but fools seldom differ ;-) No seriously, I like this idea very much.
The benefit it has over the normal watchlist is that you can separate
topics. If you want focus on topic X, your list is not cluttered with
other topics.

I just realise that this feature is already available; simply create a
page with all the relevant links, and click "Watch links". Maybe there
could be some help in creating such lists, but I not much work should be
needed.

Jeronimo.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Red links

body:
On Monday 23 September 2002 11:00 pm, Anthere wrote:
> Question : if french or dutch decide they would prefer
> ? rather than red, is it technically possible ?

In order to preserve the good will of the non-English language Wikipedia's I
propose that any change in default behavior like this /must/ be decided by
each individual Wikipedia community.

I'm not a Wikipedia developer, but from what I do know about databases it
should be fairly easy to implement different "default behavior" tables for
each language (similar to having different language.php files).

However for the English Wikipedia I think it was unanimous (or pretty darn
close) that "highlight empty links" should be the default.

If stubs are highlighted in yet another color then the non-highlighted
alternative would probably be an exclamation point as The Cunctator suggested.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Stub color

body:
On Monday 23 September 2002 11:00 pm, you wrote:
> I always thought that orange for tiny stubs proposal was ugly,
> but to be honest, I would probably follow those links most readily.
>
>
> -- Toby

Whatever color we choose for stubs, it /should/ be a bit ugly. That way
contributors will be that much more motivated to fix the sub-500 byte stubs.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)