from_name: Nick Wilkins

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On 2/24/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2/25/07, William Pietri <william at scissor.com> wrote:
> > Are you suggesting that it's ok that an expert in a topic, especially
> > one who is known for his technological savvy and ability to write for
> > the general public, can't understand our notability guidelines for his
> > field?
> >
>
> Given that we don't have any for his field ([[Wikipedia:Notability
> (fiction)]] doesn't really cover it and [[Wikipedia:Notability (web)]]
> only mentions a small part of it in passing) it seems not unreasonable
> that he does not understand them.

So we need to have a specific notability guideline about each and every
topic in order for anyone to understand what we're going to consider
notable?

-- Jonel


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Sage Ross

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On 2/24/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/25/07, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Standard practice has diverged considerably from the official line,
> > and I agree with Phil that we need to amend WP:N in particular to be
> > more accommodating of content where the subject can at least be
> > verified to exist (e.g., webcomics, Battlestar Galactica episodes,
> > marginally notable real people).
>
> I can confirm that 30 million chemical elements exist.

Huh?

> Given that old enough census data is published with can confirm rather
> a lot of people exist as well. Confirming somthing exists doesn't mean
> much.

I said "be more accommodating"; I don't mean to imply that existence
is sufficient.  A measure of common sense when assessing an article's
reliability  combined with a little looser official standards for
notability is the main thing (i.e., accepting that some topics that
people want to see in Wikipedia will have few good sources but keeping
rather than deleting them is still a plus to the overall quality of
Wikipedia).

> There is another problem with what you propose. Check out the talk
> pages of articles releated to [[Watchmen]] (or the trivia secetion on
> a lot of our lower quality articles). These fans likely know a lot
> about the subject but the conflicting interptritiations. The sexuality
> section on [[Rorschach (comics)]] can be a fine source of black humor.

The problem I see there is failure to follow WP:WAF.  Forcing that
material into an out-of-universe perspective would bring out the best
from what is indeed rough going in its present form; it would bring
out the fact that conflicting interpretations exist and get much
closer to NPOV than it is now.

-Sage


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Another master split

body:
We're planning on doing another master split this weekend. The idea is to
split off the following databases onto their own master:

bgwiki
bgwiktionary
commonswiki
cswiki
dewiki
enwikiquote
enwiktionary
eowiki
fiwiki
idwiki
itwiki
nlwiki
nowiki
plwiki
ptwiki
svwiki
thwiki
trwiki
zhwiki

This is a hand-selected list designed to simultaneously balance both the
data set size and the request rate across the two non-en partitions. Some
of the data used can be found at:

https://wikitech.leuksman.com/view/Index_size_versus_traffic

There should be no significant disruption to the main web service. Some
subsidiary services, such as toolserver replication, may be affected.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Liang Chen

subject:
[Wikitech-l] How to not display title of one page,
	like Main Page

body:
Thank!
Both works

On 2/24/07, Ilmari Karonen <nospam at vyznev.net> wrote:
> Liang Chen wrote:
> > Hi,
> >    I don't want to display the title of the page on main page, like
> > wikipedia's main page, how can I do that?
>
> You can edit [[MediaWiki:Monobook.css]] and add a rule like:
>
>    BODY.page-Main_Page H1.firstHeading {
>      display: none;
>    }
>
> This should hide the main page title on the (default) Monobook skin.
> For other skins, you'll need to add similar rules to their corresponding
> style sheets.
>
> Of course, if your main page is named something other than "Main Page",
> you'll have to change the "page-Main_Page" part to match the correct
> title.  You can look in the page source to see what the actual class
> name is.
>
> --
> Ilmari Karonen
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
                     ---BiGreat---
               www.Liang-Chen.com


from_name: Jeffrey V. Merkey

subject:
[Wikitech-l] [Fwd: [Foundation-l] Status of Current MediaWiki
 Tools and Other Issues which affect the Foundation]

body:
And here is another good one to look into on this problem. The
enwiki-20070206 imports FAIL with reports of
"NULL title detected" when running importDump.php from 1.8.2. The
problem is, there are NO NULL titles
contained in this XML file.

I have a tool that strips out the titles from the dumps for translation
and link grammar parsing. These tools do not
affect or alter the enwiki xml file at all but simply READ FROM IT, I
just use them to strip out the article titles.

Here is the output for the enwiki dump when article titles have been
striped and redirected to a file. There is not a
single NULL title or revision in the entire XMl Dump. This SAME
UNMODIFIED DUMP FROM THE FOUNDATION crashes in importDump complaining of
NULL titles when THERE ARE NO NULL TITLES IN THE DUMP AT ALL.

Stripped Titles enwiki-20070206:

ftp://www.wikigadugi.org/wiki/xml/titles-enwiki-20070206.txt.bz2

importDump.php Logs with crash and BOGUS NULL title error importing
enwiki-20070206:

ftp://www.wikigadugi.org/wiki/xml/log-enwiki-20070206.txt.bz2

Jeff


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
SonOfYoungwood at aol.com wrote:
> I agree that the deletionists are starting to act a little on the  ridiculous
> side, and something needs to be done soon. Wikipedia needs an  injection of
> common sense.

Does anyone know what the status of article validation or version
tagging or whatever the specific term is for that feature? I looked
around but the latest edits to pages about this topic were from mid-2006
or so.

I've long felt that something like it could be the key to resolving (or
at least drastically reducing) the inclusionism/deletionism dispute. If
there were a way to tag articles as warranting inclusion in a Wikipedia
1.0 or not, I believe there wouldn't be such a strong drive to outright
_delete_ stuff that some people believe is "unencyclopedic" or
"non-notable". The articles about Pokemon or webcomics or whatever else
is controversial on those grounds could be tagged appropriately,
allowing distributors of Wikipedia forks and mirrors to choose their own
threshold for notability with simple filters.


from_name: Phil Sandifer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On Feb 24, 2007, at 10:26 PM, geni wrote:

>
> Given that the outsiders is unlikely to have taken time to study them
> I have no reason to think they do appear so. But then many things in
> this world are incoherent to outsiders.
>

Yes, but the project is written for outsiders. If our logic doesn't
make sense to them, we did it wrong.

> Noah didn't, we don't know what McCloud said and Straub identified a
> weakness in our system that has little to do with policy.
>
Noah showed that our sense of notability is absurd. I've given a
pretty good account of what McCloud said, and so I'm not sure why you
say you don't know. Straub identified more than a weakness - he
identified a complete failure of policy to meaningfully prevent
spurious deletions. Which has been clear to anyone who follows DRV
for a while.

>
>> No. It's not. It never has been, it never will be, it never can be.
>> Reliable sourcing is fundamentally a more complex issue than a black
>> and white guideline could ever portray.
>
> This is going to come as a serious shock to all those lecturers
> teaching the subject
>

I doubt it. Nobody in a rhetcomp position I have ever talked to has
said that reliable sourcing is black and white. None of them ever
would. We teach whole courses on this subject. It's not something
that can be condensed into a usable single policy page. Otherwise
we'd be throwing out our textbooks and just assigning [[WP:RS]].
We're not.

> For an  impossible task it appears to have been done an awful lot of
> times. Anyone writing a review article will establish what is and is
> not a reliable source.
>

Yes. But they don't do it in an absolute, black and white sense that
is proscriptive for all other review articles.

> It generally fairly well known which journals can be trusted and which
> ones need to be used with caution that the reactions they describe may
> only work one time in 10.
>
But [[WP:RS]] lacks a list of those. And no such list readily
presents itself in the humanities.
>

> You were the one objecting to stuff being done "inconsistently,
> arbitrarily, and in a manner that is not meaningfully predictable"
>
> Now you object to an attempt to create a single unified rule set.
>
The previous system was more consistend and predictable than the
current one. Hell, it solved the schools debate. It was an ugly,
torturous debate, but it eventually shook out to "Look, stop
nominating schools, because they clearly get kept." That's a heck of
a better system than the current one.

> Just because you don't agree with the rules and don't agree with
> people's actions it does not mean that one flows from the other.
>
Huh?
>
> Depends on the area you are looking at. I'm seeing a lot more
> citations.
>
Citations != quality. And are, in fact, at times antithetical to it.
The more citations to secondary sources [[Jacques Derrida]] has, the
worse of an article it will be. Guarantee it.

>> No. Policy does not reduce dross.
>
> G11
>
Strange. I remember deleting such articles on sight before that
policy came into being. Nobody ever complained, so I have trouble
imagining that the policy is what caused that to be OK.

>> [[WP:AGF]]
>
> We are talking about stuff off wikipedia here. AGF does not apply.
> Thus there is no reason to make assumptions of any type.
>
We're talking about well-intentioned critiques of how Wikipedia is
working. The prerequisite for assuming good faith is not an account -
it's a contribution to the conversation. Noah, McCloud, and Straub
have all contributed to the conversation and deserve at least an
assumption of good faith.

> However after it has burned you know what the real problem is and can
> fix it. As a bonus you haven't spent time fixing it against attacks
> from giant geese.
>
Geni, I'm sorry, but this is stupid and a blatant straw man that,
frankly, strains the limits of good faith. I am pointing to a
problem. I am pointing to evidence that the problem is causing
concrete, describable negative effects. This is not [[WP:BEANS]].
This is "Uh-oh, it smells like smoke."

I am not advocating going and implementing solutions randomly. I'm
advocating actually looking and seeing that we have a problem. You're
opposing with insulting pithiness even bringing the problem up. You
imply that I misrepresent what people said, you refuse to assume good
faith on the part of external critics of Wikipedia, you reject prima
faciae the idea that someone has looked at our deletion and
notability debates and gone "WTF."

I'm not calling for radical solutions to every problem that arises.
Anything but - I think that's how we broke the system. I'm calling
for actually thinking through whether we have a problem. I would
think this practice would be uncontroversial enough to be allowed to
go by without the unhelpful pithiness.

>
>> Aside from an admittedly polemical call to nuke RS I've not demanded
>> total change right now.
>
> Aside from that Mr Lincoln how was the play?
>
The post began "Consider this another entry in that time-tested genre
of "obviously
futile suggestions to nuke things that nobody is ever going to nuke,
but probably should anyway" posts." If that doesn't flag this as "not
an entirely serious suggestion" I don't know what to tell you.

>> In fact, total change right now is what got
>> us into this mess. (Oh no, we got panned in USA Today. We'd better
>> overhaul the system!) If anything, my position is more conservative
>> than yours.
>
> I never claimed to be conservative.
>

No, just to be opposed to changing things.
>>
>
> No because that only works with the more incompetent POV pushers.

Strange - the block system has always seemed to me to work pretty
well no matter who you block. [[WP:AN]] sometimes doesn't work as
well, but that seems intimately related to the "fix it with policy"
approach.

-Phil


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On Feb 24, 2007, at 10:50 PM, geni wrote:

>
> Common sense has no requirement to be logical or to be based on
> evidence and thus has no place in a rational system.
>
> Of course we live in a world where there are huge social pressures to
> accept <s>bellyfeel</s> common sense
>
> If you want a system that outsides have a hope of figuring out you
> will set up system that includes as little common sense as possible.

Wikipedia is not a rational system.

Wikipedia is not designed and should not be designed to be written by
robots.

Wikipedia depends on subjective judgment, case by case evaluation,
and adherence to general principles, not to white line rules.

Your desire to systematize the world is admirable, but the era of
natural philosophy has long passed.

-Phil


from_name: Ron Ritzman

subject: [WikiEN-l] Daniel Brandt

body:
On 2/24/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:

> Our due process is capricious and based on who shows up.

This is part of what I call the "loud minority effect" which is an
evil version of "the squeaky wheel gets the grease". This is when
small numbers of highly opinionated people just happen to yell louder
then everybody else.

>This is most
> obvious on AfD, where articles are serially renominated until they
> get deleted. The renominations are justified under the slogan
> "consensus can change," but in practice it's not consensus that
> changes - few of the people who voted keep the previous few times
> even show up to weigh in. That's not consensus changing - that's the
> equivalent of asking daddy if you can have a cookie because mommy
> said no.

I once suggested a limited "double jeopardy" system for AFD but not
too many people liked it. I thought it would keep articles from
getting nominated over and over and over again. Notable things don't
one day magically stop being notable.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
Philip Sandifer wrote:

>I just had dinner with [[Scott McCloud]], and, unsurprisingly, the
>conversation turned to webcomics, and, eventually, to Wikipedia's
>treatment of them. (This was partially spurred by the Kristopher
>Straub debacle, about which I will say only that it demonstrates the
>degree to which the bias is overwhelmingly towards deletion across
>many areas of Wikipedia right now)
>
Deletion to the point of sterility.

>McCloud is somebody who knows comics. He quite literally wrote the
>book on them. In the course of the conversation it became clear that
>he was pretty well completely fed up with Wikipedia. And it should be
>noted, this comes from someone who has been on the forefront of
>digital technology debates several times. He makes clear his
>admiration for the concept of Wikipedia. He makes clear his
>admiration for how Wikipedia got started. His problem is with how it
>works now.
>
>The problem he has? Notability. Specifically the arbitrary and
>capricious way in which AfD targets things, questions their
>notability, and uses guidelines that make no sense from the outside.
>
I know nothing about webcomics.  That's enough to qualify me to stay
away from any specific deletion debate about any of them.

>Our efforts to ensure reliability have come at the cost of a great
>deal of respect - and respect from people we should have respect
>from. We are losing smart, well-educated people who are sympathetic
>to Wikipedia's basic principles. That is a disaster.
>
It has the appearance of a project that has lost its way.  Time was that
the public mantra was, "Wikipedia is not reliable."  The "Nature"
article showed that we weren't so bad, but by then a lot of editors (and
perhaps Jimbo himself) had been spooked into an obsession for accuracy.
We have now gone to the opposite extreme.  Our size has brought us into
seriously uncharted territory about the nature of collaboration and
inclusivity, and many of our editors schooled in old hierarchical
structures have yet to make the leap into an environment which cannot be
subject to the controls with which they are familiar.

Reliability does matter.  Still there will always be issues where
reliability remains uncertain or unattainable.  Are we to pretend that
that world of uncertainty does not exist because we are missing Reliable
Sources?  Sometimes we need to simply admit that the information has not
been verified or cannot be verified.  We warn the reader that he uses
the information at his own risk.

>And it's a disaster that can be laid squarely at the feet of the
>grotesque axis of [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:N]] - two pages that are eating
>Wikipedia alive from the inside out. (And I don't mean this in terms
>of community. I mean that they are systematically being used to turn
>good articles into crap, and have yet to demonstrate their actual use
>in turning bad articles into good ones.)
>
Notability has been a consistent thorn in the side for as long as I can
remember.  Reliable Sources started later as one more of many means to
deal with the notability problem.  None of these means has succeeded.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On 2/24/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> The "is Rorschach gay?" and the "did Rorschach survive?" sections were
> written from an out of universe perspective.  As was the
> "interpretations by random people" section. [[Comedian (comics)]] if
> you look at the The "Smile" section a couple of those are pretty
> questionable.
>

I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing.  In [[Rorschach
(comics)]], the "Sexuality" section is mostly in-universe; though it
makes reference to "through the entire series", its main concern is
characterizing Rorschach as if he were real.  I'm not sure what the
"did Rorschach survive" section is.  In any case, the biggest problem
with the article is poor writing and presentation, not wacky original
research.  It attempts to unpack some of the possible meanings of the
fiction; I'd much rather see that than the sterile plot-summary-only
of the other extreme.

-Sage


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
geni wrote:

>On 2/24/07, Philip Sandifer <sandifer at english.ufl.edu> wrote:
>
>
>>The problem he has? Notability. Specifically the arbitrary and
>>capricious way in which AfD targets things, questions their
>>notability, and uses guidelines that make no sense from the outside.
>>
>>
>Treating those outside wikipedia as a single homogeneous group is
>illogical. Different groups will have different views about whether or
>not certain guidelines make sense. can find plenty of groups that
>think including any webcomics at all make us inferior and think that
>our inclusion of such non entities as penny arcade.
>
Who's saying that the outside is a single homogeneous group?  At least
try to argue against what is said.  Saying that what matters to others
is inferior is an act of pomposity.  Who has the right to arrogate such
decisions to himself.  I am not so special as to pass judgement on
someone else's interest in webcomics.  Are you?

>>See also Timothy Noah's recent article on Slate for this - it gives a
>>good view of how notability guidelines look to the outside. In this
>>case, it's how they look to the subject of the article, but I assure
>>you - they look similar to people who are familiar with the subject.
>>In short, they appear a Kafka-esque absurdity.
>>
>>
>Almost any set of rules can be made to appear that way.
>
It's more than just appearing.  Rules can be a refuge from thinking.

Ec


from_name: Kasimir Gabert

subject:
[Wikitech-l] [Fwd: [Foundation-l] Status of Current MediaWiki
	Tools and Other Issues which affect the Foundation]

body:
Hello,

I imported the dump from enwikibooks to test.kgprog.com and it worked
perfectly.  This is not one of the smaller wikis and it has just
confirmed my belief that Wikimedia dumps work.  If you can demonstrate
with a specific example what your error is, and provide the
appropriate parts of the xml file, then I am sure that the developers
will look at your case seriously.

Kasimir

On 2/24/07, Kasimir Gabert <kasimir.g at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/24/07, Jeffrey V. Merkey <jmerkey at wolfmountaingroup.com> wrote:
> > Kasimir Gabert wrote:
> >
> > >Hello,
> > >
> > >Just because of this post I feel compelled to take the time to
> [snip]
> > >every time.  We are talking about whether or not dumps from Wikimedia
> > >work, not whether or not your system is good.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > I created Local Area Networking my friend. I think I know if a system
> > works or not.
>
> You invented LAN??  I guess everything I have heard about Robert
> Metcalfe is completely false because "Jeffrey V. Merkey" posted
> otherwise.
>
> >
> > >>have installed applicances in the field and folks are coming back about
> > >>this issue a lot when they try to use various XML dumps from the
> > >>Foundation.
> [snip]
> > >importDumps.php it does not look like it would stop working after a
> > >larger xml file is loaded.
> > >
> > >
> > I have. Go back and read this list for the traces posted.
>
> "Traces posted"?  Do you mean... the debugging output from php5 when
> it is importing your database?  I might be blind, but I can see
> nothing.
>
> >
> > >
> > >
> > >>When mediawiki gets into low memory conditions of any kind, the wheels
> > >>
> > >>
> > >
> > >There is a big difference between whether or not imports work and
> > >whether or not your machine can handle them.
> > >
> > >
> > The imports bugs have a large number of pages on google about this and a
> > lot of other places.
>
> Nothing critical at
> http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=specific&order=relevance+desc&bug_status=__open__&product=&content=import
>
> You might be providing a true argument, but I am not convinced right
> now.  All of my tests have worked, it definitely could be faster, but
> I do not understand why you are having issues.  It seems to me like it
> is your fault, not Wikimedia's fault.
>
> >
> > >
> > >
> > >>fly off when imports, reading, and editing or going on at the same time.
> > >>
> > >>Jeff
> > >>
> > >>
> > >
> > >I would also like to know what your proposed solution would be?  Allow
> > >people to dynamically load Wikipedia's content?  Do you have any idea
> > >how ridiculous that sounds?
> > >
> > >
> >
> > >Kasimir
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >>
> > >>Kasimir Gabert wrote:
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>>Hello,
> > >>>
> > >>>I can verify that uploading MediaWiki dumps works.
> > >>>
> > >>>I was able to successfully import (using *nothing but the built in MW
> > >>>tools*) ba.wikipedia.org to test.kgprog.com in a few minutes with a
> > >>>brand new installation of MW 1.9.3.
> > >>>
> > >>>The list of things that I had to do (in case Merkey really does want
> > >>>to learn how to do this):
> > >>>* Download MediaWiki
> > >>>* Download the dump (for BA wiki and this test it was
> > >>>http://download.wikipedia.org/bawiki/20070222/bawiki-20070222-pages-articles.xml.bz2
> > >>>)
> > >>>* Install MediaWiki (many tutorials on doing this)
> > >>>* Extract the XML file from the bz2 compressed file (I used bunzip2 on Linux)
> > >>>* Move the extracted xml file to maintenance/dump.xml
> > >>>* In a terminal cd to maintenance
> > >>>* Type in "php importDump.php dump.xml"
> > >>>* Wait for the dump to finish
> > >>>* Type in "php rebuildrecentchanges.php"
> > >>>
> > >>>The wiki has now been successfully created with all of the dumped
> > >>>pages from Wikimedia Foundation.
> > >>>
> > >>>Kasimir
> > >>>
> > >>>On 2/24/07, Jeffrey V. Merkey <jmerkey at wolfmountaingroup.com> wrote:
> > >>>
> > >>>
> > >>>
> > >>>
> > >>>>Domas Mituzas wrote:
> > >>>>
> > >>>>
> > >>>>
> > >>>>
> > >>>>
> > >>>>>Dear Jeffrey,
> > >>>>>
> > >>>>>
> > >>>>>
> > >>>>>
> > >>>>>
> > >>>>>
> > >>>>>
> > >>>>>>to have some personal issue, but this is simply reports of bugs and
> > >>>>>>issues which have been floating for over a year and have not been
> > >>>>>>closed.
> > >>>>>>
> > >>>>>>
> > >>>>>>
> > >>>>>>
> > >>>>>>
> > >>>>>>
> > >>>>>This is open project, quality patches are always welcome.
> > >>>>>
> > >>>>>
> > >>>>>
> > >>>>>
> > >>>>>
> > >>>>>
> > >>>>>
> > >>>>I am happy to post them.
> > >>>>
> > >>>>Jeff
> > >>>>
> > >>>>_______________________________________________
> > >>>>Wikitech-l mailing list
> > >>>>Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > >>>>http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> > >>>>
> > >>>>
> > >>>>
> > >>>>
> > >>>>
> > >>>
> > >>>
> > >>>
> > >>>
> > >>_______________________________________________
> > >>Wikitech-l mailing list
> > >>Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > >>http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> >
>
>
> --
> Kasimir Gabert
>

--
Kasimir Gabert


from_name: Mark Ryan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Daniel Brandt

body:
On 24/02/07, Ron Ritzman <ritzman at gmail.com> wrote:
> Gee wow, Jimbo agrees with the "troll". Perhaps we should now moderate
> Jimbo for "troll support" or something. Expressing an opinion you do
> not agree with is not trolling.

Jimbo hasn't blocked Yanksox from editing, as far as I know.

~Mark Ryan


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
William Pietri wrote:

>Philip Sandifer wrote:
>
>
>>See also Timothy Noah's recent article on Slate for this - it gives a
>>good view of how notability guidelines look to the outside. In this
>>case, it's how they look to the subject of the article, but I assure
>>you - they look similar to people who are familiar with the subject.
>>In short, they appear a Kafka-esque absurdity.
>>
>>
>For those wondering, the article is here:
>
>http://www.slate.com/id/2160222/
>
>
Thanks for the link.  Noah does a good job showing what a joke the
notability criterion has become.

Ec


list: foundation-l

from_name: teun spaans

subject: [Foundation-l] a new free image!

body:
Gerard,

May I kindly remind you how this thread started.

This thread started with a beautiful story of how the lack of a photo
prompted a professional photographer to donate photos. Personally I think
this would never happened if there had been an image under the fair use
provision. The lack of a picture makes people run, if there is a picture no
one gets out of his chair to say: He, there is a match tonight, I'm gonna
take some pix.

I know many fair use advocates think the opposite. On this list I read "the
availability of a fair use image won't stop
someone from adding a free alternative" and "We should also recall that the
readers, would like to see an image until there "

When we spoke with each other in the past you never supported the usage of
"fair use". Somehow your statements on this list, when I read them, even
where they seem to say the opposite, seem to suggest that you have changed
your point of view.
For example, when Muhammed suggests "the availability of a fair use image
won't stop someone from adding a free alternative", I think: he's right it
is not forbidden to add a free picture. But no longer any one will stand up
and say: it is a shame that we dont have a photo, There is a mact / concert
/ interview tonight, I am going there and snap some pix! So effectually,
having a fair use image does hurt the collecting of free content. Then you
come and suggest that there is no need to cripple images for fair use (an
doubtful statement, see below). Even when you add "If anything we should not
have "Fair use" material.", your previous statement seems to support
Muhammeds plead for fair use.

You suggest that it is not necessary to crop high quality images for fair
use. The assumption that cropping images improves legal chances for fair use
application is however very widespread. It also was one of the factors in
Kelly v. Arriba-Soft, 03 C.D.O.S. 5888 (9th Cir. 2003).

The defenders of fair use should realize that we talk about a rather vast
amount of images.
Some numbers:
Template:albumcovers:     >55.000
Template:film-screenshot: >15.000
Template:Tv-screenshot:  > 30.000
Now these images will be hard to replace, but I really wonder how many
attempts have been made to make them free.
Others, such as those of famous people, and many of the 15.000 pics in
"template:fair use in" fall in this category, could potentially be replaced
by free pictures is someone simply steps out of his chair and starts taking
pictures.

Gerad, I think you did not understand what I wrote about NC and ND. The
current draft as I read it, places little restrictions on exemptions. This
may lead to all kinds of unintended exemptions.

I know that in your heart, Gerard, you support the creation of free content.

I wish you health and happiness,
teun spaans

On 2/24/07, GerardM < gerard.meijssen at gmail.com > wrote:
>
> Teun.
> May I kindly remind you that we are discussing on this list how to deal
> with
> all types of issues. Personally I have never ever uploaded "Fair use"
> material. It is however done on some of our projects. When material is
> used
> with a justification of being "Fair use", there is imho no reason to
> cripple
> such material. This was suggested in the previous post.
>
> You were wrong in how you reacted to what I wrote about NC and ND the
> other
> day, you again assume things that are not in line with what I wrote. It is
>
> good to remember that "Fair use" is permitted to a project under a
> Exemption
> Doctrine Policy if they so choose. It is therefore relevant to discuss how
> this is to be implemented if at all. This is what I did.
>
> Thanks,
>      GerardM
>
>
> On 2/24/07, teun spaans <teun.spaans at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Gerard,
> >
> > may I kindly remind you that our aim is to make and collect free
> content?
> > Fair use is not free.
> >
> > And your remark about crippling content looks false: i checked a few of
> > the
> > old versions, and these didnt have a photograph. Not even a fair use
> one.
> >
> > regards,
> > teun spaans
> >
> >
> >
> > On 2/24/07, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com > wrote:
> > >
> > > Hoi,
> > > When you have a good quality picture that you want to use under Fair
> > use,
> > > you use it as a good quality picture. Why cripple our content when
> there
> > > is
> > > no need ? If anything we should not have "Fair use" material.
> > > Thanks,
> > >      GerardM
> > >
> > > On 2/24/07, Mohamed Magdy <mohamed.m.k at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > <snip>
> > > > Well, good work!..but as others said, this isn't the proper way to
> get
> > > > rid of fair use images..the availability of a fair use image won't
> > stop
> > > > someone from adding a free alternative, fair use images shouldn't be
> > > > added in a high resolution..right? so when someone sees the image
> with
> > > > low quality and s/he has another free one, s/he will replace it with
> > the
> > > > free image, provided that you place a message on free use images
> > saying
> > > > 'this image isn't free, if you can help.replace it...'...on the
> other
> > > > end, I think with the increasing popularity, people will just add
> > their
> > > > images(to say: hey, i took that image you see on [[Cat]]
> article!)...
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > foundation-l mailing list
> > > > foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> > > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > foundation-l mailing list
> > > foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> > >
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] a new free image!


subject: [Foundation-l] a new free image!

body:
Ray,

if you want to have a little experiment, NBA players might be a good
playingfield. But as in medicine, you should have a check group. Take a
similar sized group, make a list of the persons with fair use images, and at
the end of the experiment, see which group has more free images added to
them.

i wish you health and happiness,
teun spaans

On 2/24/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
> daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
>
> >In a message dated 2/23/2007 7:21:31 PM Eastern Standard Time, writes:
> >
> >Is your  point that we should remove all "fair use images", causing the
> >articles to  be without an image making someone donate a free  one?
> >
> >Cbrown1023
> >
> >More or less. My point is that we don't *need* fair use images, and in
> this
> >particular instance, a fair use image would have prevented us from
> obtaining a
> > free one.
> >
> So let's try a controlled experiment.  Remove all non-free and fair use
> images of current NBA players, and measure the rate at which free
> pictures are added.  If the experiment fails there should be no
> technical difficulty in restoring the fair use images.
>
> Ec
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] a new free image!


from_name: T P

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
I think many people fail to realize that Wikipedia is and always will be a
work-in-progress.  We really don't know what our notability policy is, and
there are no easy answers.  Stan Shebs was quite right when he pointed out
that there are no known solutions to this problem.

This is kind of related to the whole "Wikipedia is Failing" controversy, in
that so many people have such different ideas of what Wikipedia should be,
and a lot of them conclude that Wikipedia doesn't measure up.

People think Wikipedia should be an encyclopedia, but that's just an
analogy.  The truth is Wikipedia is something new and different and what it
is is a matter of negotiation within the Wikipedia community.

I wouldn't worry about Wikipedia failing to live up to your expectations or
someone else's expectations.  Wikipedia is what it is.  The fact that it is
useful enough to be in the top ten websites is success enough.

Adam


subject: [Foundation-l] RfC: Draft licensing policy resolution

body:
Thank you. I will be glad if this is fixed.

On 2/23/07, Kat Walsh <mindspillage at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2/23/07, teun spaans <teun.spaans at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 2/23/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Content tagged as NC and ND will on its
> > > own not be permitted.
> >
> > It will be deleted by 2008 according to the draft
> > > resolution.
> >
> >
> > The draft says:  ''
> >
> > By February XX, 2008, all existing files under an unacceptable
> > license must either be used under an EDP, or shall be deleted''
> >
> > So if a community acccepts NC or ND as an EDP, it will not be deleted.
> > So your statement is invalid.
>
> His statement is actually valid; if the wording suggests otherwise it
> will be fixed!
>
> -Kat
>
>
> --
> Wikimedia needs you: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising
> * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mindspillage | (G)AIM:Mindspillage
> mindspillage or mind|wandering on irc.freenode.net | email for phone
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2007-02-25

body:
An automated run of parserTests.php showed the following failures:

This is MediaWiki version 1.10alpha (r20052).

Reading tests from "maintenance/parserTests.txt"...
Reading tests from "extensions/Cite/citeParserTests.txt"...
Reading tests from "extensions/Poem/poemParserTests.txt"...

  18 still FAILING test(s) :(
      * URL-encoding in URL functions (single parameter)  [Has never passed]
      * URL-encoding in URL functions (multiple parameters)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: message transform: <noinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: message transform: <onlyinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)  [Has never passed]
      * BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Mixing markup for italics and bold  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: 5 quotes, code coverage +1 line  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: dt/dd/dl test  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Images with the "|" character in the comment  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Parents of subpages, two levels up, without trailing slash or name.  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Parents of subpages, two levels up, with lots of extra trailing slashes.  [Has never passed]

Passed 493 of 511 tests (96.48%)... 18 tests failed!


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On 2/24/07, Philip Sandifer <sandifer at english.ufl.edu> wrote:
> I just had dinner with [[Scott McCloud]], and, unsurprisingly, the
> conversation turned to webcomics, and, eventually, to Wikipedia's
> treatment of them. (This was partially spurred by the Kristopher
> Straub debacle, about which I will say only that it demonstrates the
> degree to which the bias is overwhelmingly towards deletion across
> many areas of Wikipedia right now)
>

As a general rule attempting to prove anything from an n=1 sample is a
really really bad idea.

If we accept those I can show that people are adding webcomic articles
to wikipedia in order to promote them.

> McCloud is somebody who knows comics. He quite literally wrote the
> book on them. In the course of the conversation it became clear that
> he was pretty well completely fed up with Wikipedia. And it should be
> noted, this comes from someone who has been on the forefront of
> digital technology debates several times. He makes clear his
> admiration for the concept of Wikipedia. He makes clear his
> admiration for how Wikipedia got started. His problem is with how it
> works now.
>

His problem is that wikipedia isn't what he wants it to be. Wikipedia
is the second or third to document things not the first.

> The problem he has? Notability. Specifically the arbitrary and
> capricious way in which AfD targets things, questions their
> notability, and uses guidelines that make no sense from the outside.
>

Treating those outside wikipedia as a single homogeneous group is
illogical. Different groups will have different views about whether or
not certain guidelines make sense. can find plenty of groups that
think including any webcomics at all make us inferior and think that
our inclusion of such non entities as penny arcade.

> See also Timothy Noah's recent article on Slate for this - it gives a
> good view of how notability guidelines look to the outside. In this
> case, it's how they look to the subject of the article, but I assure
> you - they look similar to people who are familiar with the subject.
> In short, they appear a Kafka-esque absurdity.
>

Almost any set of rules can be made to appear that way.

> This is a new problem - these are major figures who are sympathetic
> to Wikipedia but fed up with its operation. And I can tell you, the
> tone among people I talk to in that real life thing I maintain is
> pretty similar - great respect for Wikipedia as a concept, reasonable
> respect for Wikipedia as a resource, no respect for Wikipedia as
> something anyone would ever want to edit. The actual editorial
> process of Wikipedia is rightly viewed as a nightmare. Hell, I view
> it as a nightmare at this point - I've given up editing it because
> the rules seem to have been written, at this point, with the
> intention of writing a very bad encyclopedia.
>

No they are written with the objective of avoiding an extremely bad
encyclopedia.

> Our efforts to ensure reliability have come at the cost of a great
> deal of respect - and respect from people we should have respect
> from. We are losing smart, well-educated people who are sympathetic
> to Wikipedia's basic principles. That is a disaster.
>

You would have to show that we would not have lost respect from them
anyway and that any net change in respect levels is worse than what
would have happened if we had not taken steps to try and ensure
reliability.

> And it's a disaster that can be laid squarely at the feet of the
> grotesque axis of [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:N]] - two pages that are eating
> Wikipedia alive from the inside out. (And I don't mean this in terms
> of community. I mean that they are systematically being used to turn
> good articles into crap,

systematically?

> and have yet to demonstrate their actual use
> in turning bad articles into good ones.)

Various articles with fridge fanatics would be an example.

--
geni


from_name: Jeremy Tobacman

subject: [Foundation-l] a new free image!

body:
Better still, *within* a category like "NBA players," randomize at the level
of the individual page.  I think this sounds like a great idea; let me know
off-line if I can help.

Best,
Jeremy

2007/2/24, teun spaans <teun.spaans at gmail.com>:
>
> Ray,
>
> if you want to have a little experiment, NBA players might be a good
> playingfield. But as in medicine, you should have a check group. Take a
> similar sized group, make a list of the persons with fair use images, and
> at
> the end of the experiment, see which group has more free images added to
> them.
>
> i wish you health and happiness,
> teun spaans
>
> On 2/24/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> >
> > daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
> >
> > >In a message dated 2/23/2007 7:21:31 PM Eastern Standard Time, writes:
> > >
> > >Is your  point that we should remove all "fair use images", causing the
> > >articles to  be without an image making someone donate a free  one?
> > >
> > >Cbrown1023
> > >
> > >More or less. My point is that we don't *need* fair use images, and in
> > this
> > >particular instance, a fair use image would have prevented us from
> > obtaining a
> > > free one.
> > >
> > So let's try a controlled experiment.  Remove all non-free and fair use
> > images of current NBA players, and measure the rate at which free
> > pictures are added.  If the experiment fails there should be no
> > technical difficulty in restoring the fair use images.
> >
> > Ec
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] a new free image!


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
geni wrote:

>On 2/25/07, Sage Ross <sage.ross at yale.edu> wrote:
>
>
>>>Given that old enough census data is published with can confirm rather
>>>a lot of people exist as well. Confirming somthing exists doesn't mean
>>>much.
>>>
>>>
>>I said "be more accommodating"; I don't mean to imply that existence
>>is sufficient.  A measure of common sense
>>
>>
>
>[[Wikipedia:There is no common sense]]
>
A questionable essay, but just an essay.

>Common sense has no requirement to be logical or to be based on
>evidence and thus has no place in a rational system.
>
I suppose that that is technically correct, but such a strictly rational
system exists only in theory.  The logical extension of your rational
system is personified in Mr. Bean.

>Of course we live in a world where there are huge social pressures to
>accept <s>bellyfeel</s> common sense
>
There are even more pressures to conform to established structures such
as government bureaucracies and an endless flow of useless forms.

>If you want a system that outsides have a hope of figuring out you
>will set up system that includes as little common sense as possible.
>
This has got to be one of your more idiosyncratic pieces of sophistry.
Imagine!  Purporting to logicaly disprove the existence of common
sense.  There's a famous scene from a Jack Nicholson movie ("Five Easy
Pieces"?) where he orders something slightly different from what is on
the restaurant menu.  The waitress cannot comply because it's not
written on the menu.  I've had a similar experience at breakfast in a
restaurant.  My then wife wanted one egg, but the menu only specified
two eggs.  In the establishment's mind serving only one egg was impossible.

Common sense is what keeps things from being stupid.

>>when assessing an article's
>>reliability  combined with a little looser official standards for
>>notability is the main thing (i.e., accepting that some topics that
>>people want to see in Wikipedia will have few good sources but keeping
>>rather than deleting them is still a plus to the overall quality of
>>Wikipedia).
>>
>>
>
>[[WP:NOR]]
>
Taking refuge in rules doesn't solve very much.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
Phil Sandifer wrote:

>On Feb 24, 2007, at 10:26 PM, geni wrote:
>
>
>>For an  impossible task it appears to have been done an awful lot of
>>times. Anyone writing a review article will establish what is and is
>>not a reliable source.
>>
>>
>Yes. But they don't do it in an absolute, black and white sense that
>is proscriptive for all other review articles.
>
Sorry to breach etiquette, but did you not mean "prescriptive" instead
of "proscriptive"?  There's a big difference.

>>It generally fairly well known which journals can be trusted and which
>>ones need to be used with caution that the reactions they describe may
>>only work one time in 10.
>>
>>
>But [[WP:RS]] lacks a list of those. And no such list readily
>presents itself in the humanities.
>
Taking this to it's logical conclusion, a claim that a source is
reliable is a statement that should itself be reliably sourced.

>>Depends on the area you are looking at. I'm seeing a lot more
>>citations.
>>
>>
>Citations != quality. And are, in fact, at times antithetical to it.
>The more citations to secondary sources [[Jacques Derrida]] has, the
>worse of an article it will be. Guarantee it.
>
An excess of citations can have the appearance of a snow job.

>>>[[WP:AGF]]
>>>
>>>
>>We are talking about stuff off wikipedia here. AGF does not apply.
>>Thus there is no reason to make assumptions of any type.
>>
>>
>We're talking about well-intentioned critiques of how Wikipedia is
>working. The prerequisite for assuming good faith is not an account -
>it's a contribution to the conversation. Noah, McCloud, and Straub
>have all contributed to the conversation and deserve at least an
>assumption of good faith.
>
Yes!  Geni's rejection of Assume Good Faith gives the impression that
this maxim was newly invented for Wikipedia.  It has long been a
fundamental principle for anyone to get along.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
Stan Shebs wrote:

>Philip Sandifer wrote:
>
>
>>And it's a disaster that can be laid squarely at the feet of the
>>grotesque axis of [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:N]] - two pages that are eating
>>Wikipedia alive from the inside out. (And I don't mean this in terms
>>of community. I mean that they are systematically being used to turn
>>good articles into crap, and have yet to demonstrate their actual use
>>in turning bad articles into good ones.)
>>
>>
>I can relate to this - just today I had an uninformed editor claim one
>of the world's famous postage stamps is "non-notable" because the
>article only has one reference - apparently the part where the reference
>is a page in the most authoritative works in philately doesn't matter,
>because he couldn't manage to find it mentioned more than once online.
>The mind boggles at the multiple incompetences, but since it's all done
>with templates, even the least capable of editors is enabled to cast
>aspersions on good content.
>
Not long ago there was a proposal to relocate the items that appear on
AfD to the various WikiProjects so that the requests could be looked at
by people who have some understanding of the issue.  As usual that got
nowhaere.

>Even so, I understand why the guidelines were created, to close
>loopholes that have been discovered and exploited. Alternate ideas that
>don't rely on magical thinking are still welcome.
>
The sad part is that many who quote or apply the rules have absolutely
no understanding of what went into producing those rules.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
geni wrote:

>On 2/25/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>
>>Who's saying that the outside is a single homogeneous group?  At least
>>try to argue against what is said.  Saying that what matters to others
>>is inferior is an act of pomposity.
>>
>>
>I didn't say that
>
Reinserting what I was responding to:

>[I] can find plenty of groups that
>>think including any webcomics at all make us inferior and think that
>>our inclusion of such non entities as penny arcade.
>
If that's not what you said then what did you mean?

>>Who has the right to arrogate such
>>decisions to himself.  I am not so special as to pass judgement on
>>someone else's interest in webcomics.  Are you?
>>
>>
>If that interest translates into writing scholarly articles and books
>on the subject then I judge that I would make the whole subject less
>problematical to deal with. Given enough time.
>
You're attaching too much weight to being scholarly.  Sometimes people
just want to know what the webcomic is about.

Ec


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Bot edit rates

references:
<445562e00702191954vd25b5cetb23c303addcf8073@mail.gmail.com>	<erhukr$rmj$1@sea.gmane.org>	<6faf39c90702211055w381e93f4pa8f55dcdc84a38bc@mail.gmail.com>	<eri7c8$t6d$1@sea.gmane.org>	<ern1iu$mpr$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<ernh8s$vn$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
>
> At the time, the user_editcount field had been recently introduced,
> but it clearly wasn't sufficient to provide the information users
> were looking for, as Simetrical notes.

Hm, you are being a bit ambiguous -- your message /could/ be taken to
mean that the edit count is already displayed on Special:Contributions.
However, I can't see it. Am I not looking in the right place, or did I
misunderstand you?


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bot edit rates

references:
<445562e00702191954vd25b5cetb23c303addcf8073@mail.gmail.com>	<erhukr$rmj$1@sea.gmane.org>	<6faf39c90702211055w381e93f4pa8f55dcdc84a38bc@mail.gmail.com>	<eri7c8$t6d$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<ern1iu$mpr$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<7c2a12e20702231042l7bb31e9bs3926850788e0dc22@mail.gmail.com>

body:
Simetrical wrote:
> On 2/23/07, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>
>>Amazing: You were very tempted to block them because they were causing
>>too much traffic, but it still didn't occur to you to simply add the
>>count to the Special:Contributions page, thereby peacefully rendering
>>them obsolete?
>
> First of all, there was no edit count until just recently.  Second of
> all, people aren't just interested in edits, they're interested in
> edit *stats*.

Are you suggesting that because people want "more than just X", they
shouldn't even have X?

Timwi


from_name: zetawoof

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On 2/25/07, Peter Ansell <ansell.peter at gmail.com> wrote:
> Of course by keeping an articles history available you respect the
> GFDL, even if you do not appreciate it and wish not to have it
> immediately available. You wouldn't want to actually do that now...
> Would you? Afterall, the whole debacle relies on Wikipedia being able
> to destroy GFDL'd content.

The GFDL doesn't require anyone to distribute the texts that it
covers, and Wikipedia is no different from anyone else in this respect
- it's under no obligation to continue to distribute the articles
which are contributed to it. All that the GFDL requires of Wikipedia
is that it keep track of who's contributed to the text that's
available.


body:
Kasimir Gabert wrote:

>Hello,
>
>I imported the dump from enwikibooks to test.kgprog.com and it worked
>perfectly.  This is not one of the smaller wikis and it has just
>confirmed my belief that Wikimedia dumps work.  If you can demonstrate
>with a specific example what your error is, and provide the
>appropriate parts of the xml file, then I am sure that the developers
>will look at your case seriously.
>
>Kasimir
>
>

enwiki, not wikibooks. I can get wikibooks to work too. It is related to
large dumps. It behaves like stack corruption. I have posted
the logs already. You have to consider I also have all of the images as
well in an integrated setup, like wikipedia - squid clusters included,
so a workstation test is not probably the same scenario. Try the
November and February XML dumps on 1.8.2, not 1.9.3. I have gone through
the upgrade path too many times already each time hoping importDump
would work better. It has improved, but still is buggy. I doubt its in
the platform, or the site would not work at all, and it works.

Jeff

>On 2/24/07, Kasimir Gabert <kasimir.g at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>On 2/24/07, Jeffrey V. Merkey <jmerkey at wolfmountaingroup.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Kasimir Gabert wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>Hello,
>>>>
>>>>Just because of this post I feel compelled to take the time to
>>>>
>>>>
>>[snip]
>>
>>
>>>>every time.  We are talking about whether or not dumps from Wikimedia
>>>>work, not whether or not your system is good.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>I created Local Area Networking my friend. I think I know if a system
>>>works or not.
>>>
>>>
>>You invented LAN??  I guess everything I have heard about Robert
>>Metcalfe is completely false because "Jeffrey V. Merkey" posted
>>otherwise.
>>
>>
>>
>>>>>have installed applicances in the field and folks are coming back about
>>>>>this issue a lot when they try to use various XML dumps from the
>>>>>Foundation.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>[snip]
>>
>>
>>>>importDumps.php it does not look like it would stop working after a
>>>>larger xml file is loaded.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>I have. Go back and read this list for the traces posted.
>>>
>>>
>>"Traces posted"?  Do you mean... the debugging output from php5 when
>>it is importing your database?  I might be blind, but I can see
>>nothing.
>>
>>
>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>When mediawiki gets into low memory conditions of any kind, the wheels
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>There is a big difference between whether or not imports work and
>>>>whether or not your machine can handle them.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>The imports bugs have a large number of pages on google about this and a
>>>lot of other places.
>>>
>>>
>>Nothing critical at
>>http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=specific&order=relevance+desc&bug_status=__open__&product=&content=import
>>
>>You might be providing a true argument, but I am not convinced right
>>now.  All of my tests have worked, it definitely could be faster, but
>>I do not understand why you are having issues.  It seems to me like it
>>is your fault, not Wikimedia's fault.
>>
>>
>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>fly off when imports, reading, and editing or going on at the same time.
>>>>>
>>>>>Jeff
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>I would also like to know what your proposed solution would be?  Allow
>>>>people to dynamically load Wikipedia's content?  Do you have any idea
>>>>how ridiculous that sounds?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>Kasimir
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>Kasimir Gabert wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>Hello,
>>>>>>
>>>>>>I can verify that uploading MediaWiki dumps works.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>I was able to successfully import (using *nothing but the built in MW
>>>>>>tools*) ba.wikipedia.org to test.kgprog.com in a few minutes with a
>>>>>>brand new installation of MW 1.9.3.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>The list of things that I had to do (in case Merkey really does want
>>>>>>to learn how to do this):
>>>>>>* Download MediaWiki
>>>>>>* Download the dump (for BA wiki and this test it was
>>>>>>http://download.wikipedia.org/bawiki/20070222/bawiki-20070222-pages-articles.xml.bz2
>>>>>>)
>>>>>>* Install MediaWiki (many tutorials on doing this)
>>>>>>* Extract the XML file from the bz2 compressed file (I used bunzip2 on Linux)
>>>>>>* Move the extracted xml file to maintenance/dump.xml
>>>>>>* In a terminal cd to maintenance
>>>>>>* Type in "php importDump.php dump.xml"
>>>>>>* Wait for the dump to finish
>>>>>>* Type in "php rebuildrecentchanges.php"
>>>>>>
>>>>>>The wiki has now been successfully created with all of the dumped
>>>>>>pages from Wikimedia Foundation.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Kasimir
>>>>>>
>>>>>>On 2/24/07, Jeffrey V. Merkey <jmerkey at wolfmountaingroup.com> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Domas Mituzas wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>Dear Jeffrey,
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>to have some personal issue, but this is simply reports of bugs and
>>>>>>>>>issues which have been floating for over a year and have not been
>>>>>>>>>closed.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>This is open project, quality patches are always welcome.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>I am happy to post them.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Jeff
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>_______________________________________________
>>>>>>>Wikitech-l mailing list
>>>>>>>Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>>>>>>>http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>_______________________________________________
>>>>>Wikitech-l mailing list
>>>>>Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>>>>>http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>_______________________________________________
>>>Wikitech-l mailing list
>>>Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>>>http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>--
>>Kasimir Gabert
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
>


from_name: Leon Weber

references:
<45E0C1E4.7080109@wolfmountaingroup.com> <45E0D94C.10608@pobox.com>
	<45E0F200.4000308@wolfmountaingroup.com>

body:
Am Sonntag 25 Februar 2007 03:18 schrieb Jeffrey V. Merkey:

> Please fix your code Brion. People are seeing it, you just ignore them.

This seems to be a personal conflict. Please don't expetiate it on that public
mailing list, thank you.

-- Leon
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20070225/a27346ef/attachment.pgp>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On 2/25/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> No. His problem is that Wikipedia is documenting things
> inconsistently, arbitrarily, and in a manner that is not meaningfully
> predictable not only to an outsider but to one of the most respected
> figures in the field. If Scott McCloud cannot figure out the rhyme or
> reason to what is and isn't a notable comic (webcomic or print) on
> Wikipedia, odds are the rhyme or reason is shit.

Scott McCloud appears to be an expert on comics. Not data sorting.

> You're misunderstanding. I'm not using sense in terms of "is a good
> idea." I mean it in terms of "is actually recognizable as an idea as
> opposed to a set of arbitrary rules."
> I'm not saying that McCloud's
> objection is that our notability guidelines are unreasonable. I'm
> saying that his objection is that they're nonsensical.

WP:RS is pretty solid

There are a few conditions where it breaks down but is otherwise pretty solid.

Wikipedia:Notability has a solid base in the:
has been the subject of at least one substantial or multiple,
non-trivial published works from sources that are reliable and
independent of the subject and of each other.

However working out if a certain article passes or fails this every
time is hard. This in common cases people use shortcuts (just as
chemists don't use MO theory to work out roughly what an organic
chemical will look like) as long as people understand that these are
approximations and what the underlying assumptions are that should be
possible to deal with.

Of course none of this matters as long as people continue to use AFD
for campaigning.

> Strange. Because we were doing a fine job of writing a good
> encyclopedia before we had them, so I'm not exactly sure what we
> accomplished there.

Things change. Before we had them they tended to exist as de-facto
standards in any case. And frankly once you take off the rose tinted
specs the quality was not that high.

No amount of policy can ensure really good articles but they can
reduce the amount of total dross.

> No. I have to show that Wikipedia has a problem in the eyes of people
> who are disposed to be sympathetic to it.

Claim they are.

> This isn't a double blind
> study to establish beyond a scientific doubt that Wikipedia has a
> problem. Such studies don't exist, and if they're a prerequisite for
> change then change is impossible. Which, admittedly, seems like the
> situation you want most of the time.

Pretty much. Nine times out of ten doing nothing is a surprisingly
good solution.

It's easy to find tales of woe and then say that this requires total
change right now. Much harder to do a proper examination of the
situation which would allow you to have some idea what the correct
changes are.

> I must be remembering the two years I spent editing Wikipedia before
> [[WP:N]] and [[WP:RS]] were codified wrong, because I'm pretty sure
> we were capable of dealing with such groups before we had them.

We didn't have the 9/11 twoothers. We did rather badly with the aether
people. In the early days of wikipedia we were rather tech heavy and
other than certain audiophiles most tech people tend to be fairly
sceptical. That isn't the case any more.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On 2/25/07, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> Standard practice has diverged considerably from the official line,
> and I agree with Phil that we need to amend WP:N in particular to be
> more accommodating of content where the subject can at least be
> verified to exist (e.g., webcomics, Battlestar Galactica episodes,
> marginally notable real people).

I can confirm that 30 million chemical elements exist.

Given that old enough census data is published with can confirm rather
a lot of people exist as well. Confirming somthing exists doesn't mean
much.

There is another problem with what you propose. Check out the talk
pages of articles releated to [[Watchmen]] (or the trivia secetion on
a lot of our lower quality articles). These fans likely know a lot
about the subject but the conflicting interptritiations. The sexuality
section on [[Rorschach (comics)]] can be a fine source of black humor.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On 2/25/07, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> I'd have to say this is how it looks to many academics as well.  Even
> biographies of extremely famous researchers are routinely hauled into
> AfD with piles of ignorant "d, nn" votes.  There's a reason we almost
> never have an article on a Nobel Prize winner before he or she actually
> wins a Nobel Prize---because any researcher whose fame is even a bit
> short of "won a Nobel Prize" is deleted as non-notable.
>
> -Mark

[[Wikipedia:Notability (academics)]]

Seems fairly well fleshed out.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On 2/25/07, William Pietri <william at scissor.com> wrote:
> Are you suggesting that it's ok that an expert in a topic, especially
> one who is known for his technological savvy and ability to write for
> the general public, can't understand our notability guidelines for his
> field?
>

Given that we don't have any for his field ([[Wikipedia:Notability
(fiction)]] doesn't really cover it and [[Wikipedia:Notability (web)]]
only mentions a small part of it in passing) it seems not unreasonable
that he does not understand them.

> That puzzles me, as I'd think that if Scott McCloud can't understand our
> comic guidelines, there's no hope that your average comic fan will be
> able to get them. And unless we're restricting AfD and article creation
> to information architects and people with Master of Library Science
> degrees (which I'm assuming is what you mean by experts in data
> sorting), that seems like a big minus to me.
>

I would like those people to go over our guidelines yes.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
zetawoof wrote:
> The GFDL doesn't require anyone to distribute the texts that it
> covers, and Wikipedia is no different from anyone else in this respect
> - it's under no obligation to continue to distribute the articles
> which are contributed to it. All that the GFDL requires of Wikipedia
> is that it keep track of who's contributed to the text that's
> available.

There is one significant area where deletion breaks this, cases of
"merge and delete." That result should never be implemented, there
should only be "merge and redirect" if merging is to be done.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On 2/25/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:

> A+ for snippyness, D for actual content there. What makes you believe
> that our notability guidelines appear coherent and consistent to the
> outside?

Given that the outsiders is unlikely to have taken time to study them
I have no reason to think they do appear so. But then many things in
this world are incoherent to outsiders.

>Particularly in light of, in the last week, three separate
> instances of people showing inconsistencies in three very different
> approaches (Straub, McCloud, and Noah).

Noah didn't, we don't know what McCloud said and Straub identified a
weakness in our system that has little to do with policy.

> No. It's not. It never has been, it never will be, it never can be.
> Reliable sourcing is fundamentally a more complex issue than a black
> and white guideline could ever portray.

This is going to come as a serious shock to all those lecturers
teaching the subject

>This page is not flawed in
> any particular manifestation - it is flawed at the most fundamental
> level imaginable - it's a policy page trying to perform an impossible
> task.
>

For an  impossible task it appears to have been done an awful lot of
times. Anyone writing a review article will establish what is and is
not a reliable source.

It generally fairly well known which journals can be trusted and which
ones need to be used with caution that the reactions they describe may
only work one time in 10.

> Yes. We took our notability guidelines, which used to be a vague
> sense of "if things like it survive VfD, it probably will too" and
> yoked them to our sourcing guidelines. This isn't so much throwing
> the baby out with the bathwater as drowning the baby in the bathwater.

You were the one objecting to stuff being done "inconsistently,
arbitrarily, and in a manner that is not meaningfully predictable"

Now you object to an attempt to create a single unified rule set.

> I don't think this describes the problem. It's not that we have rules
> that make sense but follow them badly. It's that we have rules that
> don't really make sense and that we follow them pretty well.

Just because you don't agree with the rules and don't agree with
people's actions it does not mean that one flows from the other.

> The quality still isn't that high. But I don't think it's gone up
> much since Siegenthaler. I think it's stuck in a situation where it
> can't actually improve. Which might explain why 1.0 has stalled.

Depends on the area you are looking at. I'm seeing a lot more citations.

> No. Policy does not reduce dross.

G11

>Good editors reduce dross. Policy reduces good editors.

Dealing with dross doesn't exactly help them.

> [[WP:AGF]]

We are talking about stuff off wikipedia here. AGF does not apply.
Thus there is no reason to make assumptions of any type.

> And 10% of the time Rome burns. That's a high enough error rate to
> deserve more care than the pithy dismissals you've perfected.

However after it has burned you know what the real problem is and can
fix it. As a bonus you haven't spent time fixing it against attacks
from giant geese.

> Aside from an admittedly polemical call to nuke RS I've not demanded
> total change right now.

Aside from that Mr Lincoln how was the play?

>In fact, total change right now is what got
> us into this mess. (Oh no, we got panned in USA Today. We'd better
> overhaul the system!) If anything, my position is more conservative
> than yours.

I never claimed to be conservative.

> And I'm wearing rose-coloured glasses? I remember when I could be
> advancing two or three arbcom cases against POV pushing lunatics at
> once.

And those made up a significant percentage of their population.

Now you might just clean half the lunitics out of one subject area.

>And those were just the ones I knew about, which, we ought
> remember, was almost certainly a minority as I've only looked at
> around .5% of the articles on Wikipedia in my life. We've always had
> dreadful POV problems. And we've always dealt with them the same way
> - by going "OK, you're nuts" and blocking the person.
>

No because that only works with the more incompetent POV pushers.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Find-A-Grave Images

body:
On 2/24/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> To any and all,
>
> I am still trying to find out copyright information on a photo on the
> Find-A-Grave site. It's in regard to the Kansas Governor, Joan Finney
> which
> I would like to upload to her WP Article. I emailed them over a month ago
> and still have not received a reply. Has anyone else ever dealt with them
> in
> the past? Is this delay in response typical?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Marc Riddell

I missed your earlier e-mail but yes, there has been dealings before between
find-a-grave and wikipedia editors. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Find-A-Grave_famous_people .

Garion96


from_name: Oskar Sigvardsson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Parker Peters

body:
On 2/25/07, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> Speaking as an upper class gadfly, I have to say that Parker Peters
> wasn't that bad and shouldn't have been banned.

Wasn't so bad? He lied, repeatedly. It's obvious he pretended to be
someone else (how many other sockpuppets did he have?) He ranted, he
insulted, and generally behave like an ass. And, to top it all off, on
his blog (which David linked to) he compared his ban with the
Kristallnacht!

If you've any doubts about him, just read that entry. We cannot
possibly want that kind of charater contributing.

--Oskar


from_name: Domas Mituzas

references:
<45E0C1E4.7080109@wolfmountaingroup.com>
	<45E0D94C.10608@pobox.com>	<45E0F200.4000308@wolfmountaingroup.com>
	<200702250212.36862.leon@vserver152.masterssystems.com>
	<45E0F5CD.9050809@wolfmountaingroup.com>

body:
Dear Jeffrey,

> to have some personal issue, but this is simply reports of bugs and
> issues which have been floating for over a year and have not been
> closed.

This is open project, quality patches are always welcome.

--
Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On 2/25/07, Sage Ross <sage.ross at yale.edu> wrote:
> On 2/24/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 2/25/07, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Standard practice has diverged considerably from the official line,
> > > and I agree with Phil that we need to amend WP:N in particular to be
> > > more accommodating of content where the subject can at least be
> > > verified to exist (e.g., webcomics, Battlestar Galactica episodes,
> > > marginally notable real people).
> >
> > I can confirm that 30 million chemical elements exist.
>
> Huh?
>

Should have been compounds.

Anyway that would be pretty minor compared to the couple of hundred
million articles on stars.

>
> > Given that old enough census data is published with can confirm rather
> > a lot of people exist as well. Confirming somthing exists doesn't mean
> > much.
>
> I said "be more accommodating"; I don't mean to imply that existence
> is sufficient.  A measure of common sense

[[Wikipedia:There is no common sense]]

Common sense has no requirement to be logical or to be based on
evidence and thus has no place in a rational system.

Of course we live in a world where there are huge social pressures to
accept <s>bellyfeel</s> common sense

If you want a system that outsides have a hope of figuring out you
will set up system that includes as little common sense as possible.

> when assessing an article's
> reliability  combined with a little looser official standards for
> notability is the main thing (i.e., accepting that some topics that
> people want to see in Wikipedia will have few good sources but keeping
> rather than deleting them is still a plus to the overall quality of
> Wikipedia).

[[WP:NOR]]

> The problem I see there is failure to follow WP:WAF.  Forcing that
> material into an out-of-universe perspective would bring out the best
> from what is indeed rough going in its present form; it would bring
> out the fact that conflicting interpretations exist and get much
> closer to NPOV than it is now.
>
> -Sage

The "is Rorschach gay?" and the "did Rorschach survive?" sections were
written from an out of universe perspective.  As was the
"interpretations by random people" section. [[Comedian (comics)]] if
you look at the The "Smile" section a couple of those are pretty
questionable.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
Yes, but the project is written for outsiders. If our logic doesn't
make sense to them, we did it wrong.

It is written to be read by them. If you think it goes much beyond
that look at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Isle_of_Wight&action=edit

>Noah showed that our sense of notability is absurd.

I beg to differ. He showed he disagreed with it.

>I've given a
>pretty good account of what McCloud said, and so I'm not sure why you
>say you don't know.

You've given a couple of very condensed versions padded by your POV.
Given what we know of confirmation bias it don't feel that that is a
very reliable source.

>Straub identified more than a weakness - he
>identified a complete failure of policy to meaningfully prevent
>spurious deletions. Which has been clear to anyone who follows DRV
>for a while.

Policy assumes people play fair.

>I doubt it. Nobody in a rhetcomp position I have ever talked to has
>said that reliable sourcing is black and white. None of them ever
>would. We teach whole courses on this subject. It's not something
>that can be condensed into a usable single policy page. Otherwise
>we'd be throwing out our textbooks and just assigning [[WP:RS]].
>We're not.

WP:RS isn't completely black and white either. You admit is it
possible to judge the validity of a source. WP:RS is just a very very
condensed set of instructions on how to do that.

> For an  impossible task it appears to have been done an awful lot of
> times. Anyone writing a review article will establish what is and is
> not a reliable source.
>

Yes. But they don't do it in an absolute, black and white sense that
is proscriptive for all other review articles.

>
>But [[WP:RS]] lacks a list of those.

Issue doesn't come up often enough to put one together. Chemicalcruft
doesn't appear to have entered the lexicon yet.

>And no such list readily presents itself in the humanities.

WOK has an index of Social science papers going back the 50s. It would
be fairly trivial to compile an outline of such a list based on
citation rates (although you then have to adjust for publication type
which is always a pain).

>The previous system was more consistend and predictable than the
>current one.

Not if you threw something new at it.

>Hell, it solved the schools debate. It was an ugly,
>torturous debate, but it eventually shook out to "Look, stop
>nominating schools, because they clearly get kept." That's a heck of
>a better system than the current one.

I understand people are following aprox that approach with webcomics (
"Look, stop
creating article's on webcomics, because they clearly get deleted.").
I suspect you would object if they ever looked like succeeding (and
the schools issue isn't over).

>Citations != quality. And are, in fact, at times antithetical to it.
>The more citations to secondary sources [[Jacques Derrida]] has, the
>worse of an article it will be. Guarantee it.

How do the one's there lower the quality of the article

>Strange. I remember deleting such articles on sight before that
>policy came into being. Nobody ever complained, so I have trouble
>imagining that the policy is what caused that to be OK.

Strangely copyvio most of the time but the OTRS people are getting a
bit fed up with people doing that.

It also helps the deletion rates are so high that no one checks the logs.

I the meantime people used to tag suck articles with cleanup rather
than CSD and their they rotted.

>We're talking about well-intentioned critiques of how Wikipedia is
>working.

Or well-intentioned critiques that wikipedia isn't what they want it
to be. Although to be fair since it appears no one really worked that
hard on defining encyclopedia before wikipedia came along that is
hardly a position that is impossible to support.

>The prerequisite for assuming good faith is not an account -
>it's a contribution to the conversation. Noah, McCloud, and Straub
>have all contributed to the conversation and deserve at least an
>assumption of good faith.

I'm assuming they are not out to destroy wikipedia.

>Geni, I'm sorry, but this is stupid and a blatant straw man that,
>frankly, strains the limits of good faith. I am pointing to a
>problem.

No. You are claiming there is a problem

>I am pointing to evidence that the problem is causing
>concrete, describable negative effects.

Given that you are yet to properly describe the problem it is quite
hard to establish a case of cause and effect.

>I am not advocating going and implementing solutions randomly. I'm
>advocating actually looking and seeing that we have a problem.

I've looked. I see people unhappy that wikipedia isn't what they want it to be.

>You're
>opposing with insulting pithiness even bringing the problem up. You
>imply that I misrepresent what people said,

I imply that you are a human. I've spent too long dealing with reports
of psychics and the like to trust reported conversation. Especially
when the person reporting it has a stake in the outcome.

>you refuse to assume good
>faith on the part of external critics of Wikipedia, you reject prima
>faciae the idea that someone has looked at our deletion and
>notability debates and gone "WTF."

I'm sure they have done. Certainly it would be in keeping with a
popular response to our copyright policy. Quite a few preditions of
ruin there. Is that some I should be worried about?

>I'm not calling for radical solutions to every problem that arises.
>Anything but - I think that's how we broke the system. I'm calling
>for actually thinking through whether we have a problem. I would
>think this practice would be uncontroversial enough to be allowed to
>go by without the unhelpful pithiness.

You assetion is that we have a problem. I'm throwing the normal
battery of tests at it.

>The post began "Consider this another entry in that time-tested genre
>of "obviously
>futile suggestions to nuke things that nobody is ever going to nuke,
>but probably should anyway" posts." If that doesn't flag this as "not
>an entirely serious suggestion" I don't know what to tell you.

That you have forgetten Ed Poor.

>No, just to be opposed to changing things.

I tend to oppose changeing things that would involve going over old
ground into the middle of a long running fire fight. There are better
ways of changeing things.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On 2/25/07, Stan Shebs <stanshebs at earthlink.net> wrote:
> The mind boggles at the multiple incompetences, but since it's all done
> with templates, even the least capable of editors is enabled to cast
> aspersions on good content.

It really is time we moved those kind of templates to the talk pages.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On 2/25/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Who's saying that the outside is a single homogeneous group?  At least
> try to argue against what is said.  Saying that what matters to others
> is inferior is an act of pomposity.

I didn't say that

> Who has the right to arrogate such
> decisions to himself.  I am not so special as to pass judgement on
> someone else's interest in webcomics.  Are you?

If that interest translates into writing scholarly articles and books
on the subject then I judge that I would make the whole subject less
problematical to deal with. Given enough time.

Hmm one would think "bob's big book of webcomics" would make quite a
good coffee table book.

--
geni


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Bot edit rates

references:
<445562e00702191954vd25b5cetb23c303addcf8073@mail.gmail.com>
	<erhukr$rmj$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<6faf39c90702211055w381e93f4pa8f55dcdc84a38bc@mail.gmail.com>
	<eri7c8$t6d$1@sea.gmane.org> <ern1iu$mpr$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<7c2a12e20702231042l7bb31e9bs3926850788e0dc22@mail.gmail.com>
	<erqptf$n0k$2@sea.gmane.org>

body:
2007/2/25, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net>:
>
> Simetrical wrote:
> > On 2/23/07, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> >
> >>Amazing: You were very tempted to block them because they were causing
> >>too much traffic, but it still didn't occur to you to simply add the
> >>count to the Special:Contributions page, thereby peacefully rendering
> >>them obsolete?
> >
> > First of all, there was no edit count until just recently.  Second of
> > all, people aren't just interested in edits, they're interested in
> > edit *stats*.
>
> Are you suggesting that because people want "more than just X", they
> shouldn't even have X?

I think he's suggesting that giving them X through another means will not
stop them from using edit count bots if what they want is more than X.

--
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels


subject: [Foundation-l] a new free image!

body:
2007/2/25, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>:
>
> I was going to suggest a different sport (perhaps American football) as
> the other group.  A possible distortion from randomizing in one sport is
> that the person who adds the free pictures is likely to do so in batches
> that are accumulated independently of our randomizing process.

I think that comparing two sports will give much more distortion, exactly
because of the batches in that case are NOT independent of our randomizing
process. If you use randomizing within one group, such a batch of pictures
would increase the numbers for both groups, and probably rightly so. If you
use a different sports as your check group, it means that such a batch would
go all to one side, thus causing quite a bit of distortion which may well
not be related to the difference we are looking at.

Another problem I see is that it might take quite a long time to get
results. I doubt whether a year would be enough to get a meaningful
difference, even if a large number of pages are involved.

--
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels


subject: [Foundation-l] a new free image!


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On 2/25/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> I suppose that that is technically correct, but such a strictly rational
> system exists only in theory.  The logical extension of your rational
> system is personified in Mr. Bean.
>

Not really.

Technically it was personified by one of the more extreme Greek
sceptics but given his followers kept having to pull him out of the
way of carts and things I suspect there are limits.

> There are even more pressures to conform to established structures such
> as government bureaucracies and an endless flow of useless forms.

Common sense tell the civil servant that one extra form wont matter.

> This has got to be one of your more idiosyncratic pieces of sophistry.
> Imagine!  Purporting to logicaly disprove the existence of common
> sense.

No. Something exists that people describe as common sense. The
definition shifts from person to person mind (try reading the
editorial columns in any news paper to the right of you).

The problem is that all these systems of common sense have a tendency
to break down if asked to do anything as mildly complex as calculus.

> There's a famous scene from a Jack Nicholson movie ("Five Easy
> Pieces"?) where he orders something slightly different from what is on
> the restaurant menu.  The waitress cannot comply because it's not
> written on the menu.  I've had a similar experience at breakfast in a
> restaurant.  My then wife wanted one egg, but the menu only specified
> two eggs.  In the establishment's mind serving only one egg was impossible.
>

Because they were not applying logic to the situation

> Common sense is what keeps things from being stupid.
>

Going by what happens when people try to apply common sense to quantum
physics I beg to differ.

> Taking refuge in rules doesn't solve very much.

Saves me haveing to go over old ground.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On 2/25/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Taking this to it's logical conclusion, a claim that a source is
> reliable is a statement that should itself be reliably sourced.

In certain areas where there are disputes over the reliability of
sources (religion some political stuff) that is broadly correct
although it is more often that people will be required to provide
sources showing X is not a reliable source

--
geni


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Using Semantic Wiki (update of pages using a
	specific template)

body:
2007/2/24, Gunter <News2006 at freenet.de>:
>
> Hello,
>
> we are evaluating the use of the Semantic Wiki Extension.
>
> While it has great abilities, there is one big disadvantage. We are
> using templates with the relevant attribute definition.
>
> If you update the template, e.g. add a new attribute, all the articles
> based on that template need to be opened and saved again.
>
> I was wondering if it would be possible to
>
> a) Either write an extension, where I input the name of the template and
> this is done automatically (which function would I need to call with php
> to update an article?)
>
> b) Have it done automaticalley. I noticed, when you change the category
> of the template, after some processing  time all pages using that
> template are updated and in the new category.

As far as I know, (b) is already being done in curren MediaWiki, see
[[meta:Help:Job queue]]

--
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels


from_name: SonOfYoungwood at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
In a message dated 2/25/2007 4:04:27 AM Central Standard Time,
bryan.derksen at shaw.ca writes:

There is  one significant area where deletion breaks this, cases of
"merge and  delete." That result should never be implemented, there
should only be  "merge and redirect" if merging is to be done.

I correct users on their talk pages when they vote merge and  delete; I wish
everyone else would follow suit to keep these people from  screwing up.

| Tyler | Zorin Deckiller |
| Wikipedia Administrator |  Former SWU member |
| _http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Deckiller_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Deckiller)   |
| _http://www.myspace.com/redsectora_ (http://www.myspace.com/redsectora)   |

**************************************
 AOL now offers free
email to everyone.  Find out more about what's free from AOL at
http://www.aol.com.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On 2/25/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> If that's not what you said then what did you mean?
>

Exactly what I said that such groups exist. Personally I disagree with
them but they do exist.

> You're attaching too much weight to being scholarly.  Sometimes people
> just want to know what the webcomic is about.

Then may I recommend comixpedia.org to them. Some things are better
delt with outside wikipedia or even wikimedia.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
T P wrote:

>I think many people fail to realize that Wikipedia is and always will be a
>work-in-progress.  We really don't know what our notability policy is, and
>there are no easy answers.  Stan Shebs was quite right when he pointed out
>that there are no known solutions to this problem.
>
That being the case editors and admins should stop pretending that there
is a solution.

>This is kind of related to the whole "Wikipedia is Failing" controversy, in
>that so many people have such different ideas of what Wikipedia should be,
>and a lot of them conclude that Wikipedia doesn't measure up.
>
That conclusion is not the only possible one to derive from your
premise.  People do indeed have different ideas of what Wikipedia should
be, and some of us would conclude that that is a good thing.  "Measuring
up" implies having predetermined notions about what would be a standard
for success.  The standards for a collaborative environment have yet to
be defined.  Applying the old hierarchical standards contradicts the
collaborative model   Wikipedia fails when it closes off avenues to
innovation and collaboration.

Keeping those avenues open is scary business because it means accepting
that a technique that you were long convinced was the only solution may
suddenly be found wrong.  Validation does not come in the form of the
immediate intangible reward of having your idea accepted and written in
stone.  In a truly collaborative environment every policy or idea is
permanently open to change.  It doesn't matter that at some point there
was a vote to adopt a policy.  If someone disagrees at any time in the
future he should have the right to add his negative vote, or change his
previous vote.  If enough people do that the policy could be reversed.

"Ignore All Rules" was never meant as a convenient drop-dead tool for
excusing misbehaviour.  The notion should precede the action rather than
follow it.  It requires that one has carefully considered the relevant
rule and found it wanting.

>People think Wikipedia should be an encyclopedia, but that's just an
>analogy.  The truth is Wikipedia is something new and different and what it
>is is a matter of negotiation within the Wikipedia community.
>
I don't think that this line of reasoning gets us anywhere.  It just
gets us into a lot of semantic debate about the nature of an
encyclopedia, a debate for which there is no firm answer.  This debate
was largely superceded with the founding of the sister projects as
spin-offs for ideas that did not really fit into the definition of an
encyclopedia.  What is new and different then is Wikimedia.

>I wouldn't worry about Wikipedia failing to live up to your expectations or
>someone else's expectations.  Wikipedia is what it is.  The fact that it is
>useful enough to be in the top ten websites is success enough.
>
Absolutely.  Expectations come from a What-do-the-neighbours-think? kind
of mentality.  We want accuracy and reliability, but on our own terms,
not on terms which we imagine have been set by others.   If our
neighbours complain that we are being unreliable about some specified
issue we will examine it and change it as circumstances require;
sometimes we will find no need to change it at all.  We should never be
panicked into action by vague general claims of unreliability, though I
fear that some editors feel flea-bitten by such repetitive comments.

Ec


from_name: Jeff Raymond

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:

> Well I admire Scott McCloud too, and I thought his piece "I can't stop
> thinking" was visionary in its day, but in the end if the system does
> not support a directory of webcomics because they fail to meet the
> sourcing guidelines, is that strictly a problem with Wikipedia
> processes, or is it a misconception about what Wikipedia is?

If there's a sitaution where notable things are *not* being included
because of our guidelines, it's a problem on our end and not on the
outside.  One size fits all simply doesn't work.

-Jeff

--
Name: Jeff Raymond
E-mail: jeff.raymond at internationalhouseofbacon.com
WWW: http://www.internationalhouseofbacon.com
IM: badlydrawnjeff
Quote: "As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the
	Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else."
	- Sen. Rick Santorum on the war in Iraq.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bot edit rates

body:
Andre Engels wrote:
>
>>Are you suggesting that because people want "more than just X", they
>>shouldn't even have X?
>
> I think he's suggesting that giving them X through another means will not
> stop them from using edit count bots if what they want is more than X.

And how is that a reason not to let them have X?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
Jeff Raymond wrote:

> On the contrary. We can have both, and we can have standards. The issue
>
>is that we need to have senisble standards, and we clearly lack that.
>Phil Sandifer is so completely on target with his commentary that last few
>days, and we'd be very smart to listen to him.
>
I sometimes have the impression that we have too many AfDers whose
knowledge of webcomics is indistinguishable from their knowledge of
brain surgery. :-)

Ec


from_name: Sheldon Rampton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> The sad part is that many who quote or apply the rules have absolutely
> no understanding of what went into producing those rules.

I think this is the real problem more than the rules themselves. I
had an unpleasant experience about six months ago with someone who
nominated the [[Drupal]] article for deletion. Drupal is a content
management system that has had several books written about it;
Wikipedia articles on it exist in at least a dozen languages; and the
English-language article has existed for years with dozens if not
hundreds of individual editors participating in it. The article met
every test for notability, but it got nominated anyway.

Worse yet, the same individual also kept trying to delete specific
pieces of information from the article, such as the link to Drupal's
own website (which he called "linkspam"). The individual who kept
doing this would frequently cite Wikipedia policies, but his usage of
them was arbitrary, capricious and often contrary to the actual
policies themselves.

I got sufficiently irritated with this person that I spent some time
reviewing the history of his contributions to Wikipedia and found
that he didn't have a pattern of similar behavior outside the
[[Drupal]] article. Elsewhere, he generally seemed to be a competent,
sincere contributor. By his own admission, however, he didn't know
anything about Drupal and didn't care to learn anything about it. The
result was that he was mechanically applying rules without sufficient
knowledge of the topic at hand to grasp when and whether the rules
applied. The problem, in other words, wasn't that he lacked
understanding of *the rules themselves*. Rather, he lacked
understanding of *how the rules should be applied in a specific
context*.

I don't think there's any way to write rules so perfect that they
eliminate this type of problem. It's a people problem, not a rule
problem. Maybe we could add a new rule that says people should defer
to others when editing articles about topics they don't understand,
but (1) the most likely violators of this policy won't read the rule
anyway, and (2) even if they do, they probably won't recognize their
own ignorance.

I have a solution: a system whereby individual Wikipedians get rated
by other users according to their competency as editors in specific
topic areas. I estimate that developing the code necessary to make
this work properly will take approximately the same number of person-
hours as it has taken thus far to write all of Wikipedia. Add to that
the number of hours needed to spend arguing about whether such a
system is desireable or possible, and we effectively have a problem
that will be solved at about the same time as the heat death of the
universe. ;-)

--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
|     Weapons of Mass Deception
|     Banana Republicans
|     The Best War Ever
--------------------------------
|  Subscribe to our free weekly list serve by visiting:
|  http://www.prwatch.org/cmd/subscribe_sotd.html
|
|  Donate now to support independent, public interest reporting:
|  https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?id=1118
--------------------------------