from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

body:
On Fri, 23 Feb 2007 16:25:04 -0800, Ray Saintonge
<saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

"Parker Peters" posts are blacklisted at my mail server, so I don't
have full text of his comments, nor am I interested, but when you say:

>I'm not concerned right now with specifying who deserves the power.
>Rather than "throw the book" at anyone, I would prefer techniques that
>give us a better chance to identify those who have been unjustly
>treated.  If a bad egg gets through from time to time that's nothing to
>worry about.  The bad ones are good at repeating their mistakes, and
>will soon enough let us know.

I agree.  There have been several people who have been blocked who
I've argued for unblocking on those grounds.  At least one was
rejected out of hand, and I was loudly denounced for it, and that was
probably right as well, since he already had numerous chances which he
blew (this was due to medication, but that's not our problem).

Sometimes there are people, like [[User:Lee Nysted]], whose unblocking
seems to me to be a complete waste of time.  He is here for one
reason, and one reason only, and that's to get an article on himself
into the project.  It's all he's ever done, all he's ever wanted from
us, and even when superficially talking about something else, it's
obvious that he's talking about just that.  And I would not have
unblocked [[User:DeanHinnen]] either.  I might well be wrong about
those, too, but that's the price you pay for having humans instead of
robots as admins.

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Jeff V. Merkey

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

body:
Matthew Flaschen wrote:

Here you go:

This is posted here for the foundation to consider rather than on
Wikitech as these issues affect the credibility of the Foundation.
Posts on these issues to Wikitech get ignored and/or are not responded
to at all.  I am writing this in response to requests to GFDL enable the
wikigadugi.org sites.  I am unable to complete the process at present
because of severe problems with MediaWiki and the Foundations dumps.   I
have an extensive set of tools for mirroring wikipedia and they work
very well, provided I spend a lot of needless time cleaning up after the
MediaWiki developers.

1.  The current Mediawiki releases have had breakage with importDump.php
since 1.7.  I have been unable to make any progress in getting
complete runs of the Foundation XML dumps to post without modification
to MediaWiki and/or writing programs to clean up NULL titles
and other problems with the dumps.  Bottom line is that the mediaWiki
software DOES NOT WORK with standard XML dumps provided by the
foundation AT ALL through its sites, despite the Foundation's clear
messages this is in fact the case.   This harms the reputation and
credibility of the Foundation.    It needs to be addressed and fixed.

2.  mwdumper does not import the dumps.  It processes the files and
NOTHING shows up in the database.  If these tools do not work, the Meta
pages discussing them should say so and the programs should be removed
and/or other alternatives suggested or a disclaimer should be placed
there that states this.  As it stands, the information is misleading and
results in a lot of folks wasting a lot of time trying to make tools
work which clearly do not.  I have found dozens of blog entries and bug
reports on these issues and the developers ignore them.

3.  The Foundation needs to ask Brion Vibber and the developers to
cease  posting dumps which are incompatible with MediaWiki releases and
which the developers KNOW do not work and force compliance of these
processes and mediaWiki compatibility.

In other words, I do not think its too much to ask that the XML dumps
posted by the Foundation work with the released MediaWiki versions.  It
needs to be mandated and complinace required.    At present, you almost
need a degree in advanced computer science to be able to fix this
stuff.  I have spent several weekends debugging Brion's PHP code and
writing programs to correct these issues just so I can run import on the
latest dumps.    It would be much nicer if this stuff just worked.

Posts and emails to Wikitech are typically ignored on a lot of these
issues.  They need to be elevated and corrected.

Jeff


list: foundation-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

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

references:
<45E0C1E4.7080109@wolfmountaingroup.com>
	<45E0CBA6.1080807@gatech.edu>
	<45E0C476.8050901@wolfmountaingroup.com>

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

I have tried to work out such issues with Mr. Merkey before, however he
proved unable to follow directions of any kind, so it was a waste of
both our and his time to do so.

If someone other than Mr. Merkey is experiencing these problems, I would
very much like them to contact me to get them sorted out as soon as
possible.

I will not be available during the coming week, however, as I am in the
process of moving; I will be available during US east coast office hours
from March 5.

Again, if *anyone* *other* than Mr. Merkey is experiencing these
problems, please contact me; I would very much like to get them sorted
out if they actually exist and affect current release versions of
MediaWiki and mwdumper.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (Darwin)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

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-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


list: wikimedia-l


list: wikien-l

from_name: lawrence harms

subject: [WikiEN-l]  Zero information is preferred to misleading or false

body:
Dear Mr. Wales,

In the reference "Old Catholic Church"  there are listings of Old Catholic Churches in the United States.  There is a Old Catholic Church called "The American Catholic Church in the United States"  This Old Catholic Church is not listed with the rest of the listings.  If you wish, you may want to view there website ACCUS.US

The ACCUS website will direct you to individuals in places of authority within ACCUS.

The Presiding Archbishop of ACCUS is Most Reverend Lawrence J. Harms, D. D.  His e-mail address is presidingarchbishop at accus.us.

Thank you for your consideration in reading this e-mail.

The Clergy of ACCUS


from_name: Phil Sandifer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Daniel Brandt

body:
On Feb 24, 2007, at 3:28 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:

>>
> That absence of consensus alone contraindicates any kind of speedy
> action.  When who shows up in a "speedy" situation that hour (not just
> that day) makes a difference there is just too much room for abuse.
> What happens with Brandt or any other person that wants an article
> about
> himself removed is only one little corner of the problem.  A truly
> collaborative environment has no place for debates that depend on some
> kind of win/lose paradigm.  Speedy deletes should never be a weapon
> for
> winning a POV war.  Unless something is _immediately_ dangerous it can
> afford the time for due process.  Immediate gratification is not
> important.

This gets at another very, very fundamental problem, though - one
that is increasingly ripping the project apart at a foundational
level. (I am not, it should be noted, speaking here on a community
level. I'm talking about the encyclopedia itself.)

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

-Phil


from_name: James Forrester

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

body:
On 24/02/07, Cormac Lawler <cormaggio at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/24/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 2/24/07, Cormac Lawler <cormaggio at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > That's an good idea. I was also going to suggest, where
> > > people/projects want to use *some* fair use images, might it be an
> > > idea to somehow identify fair use images as such *within the article*
> > > - by, say, putting a coloured border around it and having a text that
> > > says "This image is not free - help us find one", and linking to a
> > > template or other page as is done in this case?
> > >
> > > Dunno..
> > >
> > > Cormac
> > >
> >
> > This has been suggested but has never really got anywhere. You
> > couldn't quite patch it into the fromowner system because step 4 in
> > the upload instructions wouldn't work. You could set up a parallel
> > system. The Devs might not be too happy though.
> >
>
>
> Right - I was actually thinking of something that would be activated
> (for want of a better word) when including the image within an
> article. Couldn't it be a simple template that would include the image
> as well as the colours/texts around the image that indicate "fair use
> - not free"? True, this would mean it is up to the person including
> the image to see whether the image is free or fair use - but it could
> easily become standard practice.

A much technically neater solution, which doesn't rely on users doing
the right thing, is surely to have local files (all of which will be
tagged as non-free, as otherwise they'd be on Commons, post SUL) have
such "WARNING, BAD NASTY EVIL COPYRIGHTSNESS!" image CSS.

But this is, really, not the best place to be having such a
discussion; perhaps commons-l, or wikipedia-l (though other projects
use images too, obviously).

Yours,
--
James D. Forrester
jdforrester at wikimedia.org | james at jdforrester.org | jdforrester at gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]


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


from_name: Philip Sandifer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Best,
Phil Sandifer
sandifer at english.ufl.edu

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a
boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

 >


subject: [WikiEN-l] Daniel Brandt

body:
On Feb 24, 2007, at 4:33 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Thomas Dalton wrote:
>
>>> I can think of three greater ones in under a second. Putting the
>>> goatse in sitenotice for example.
>>>
>>>
>> That would be reverted in seconds. Very little harm done.
>>
> It would be exceptional for an admin to post such a picture, unless he
> is trying to document his own hara-kiri.

For which there are far better and more destructive options. (My
personal favorite choice is history merging vandalism. Which, to
date, nobody has done, and which, to date, I remain surprised that
nobody has done.)

-Phil


from_name: Marc Riddell

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

body:
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


from_name: William Pietri

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
Thanks for taking the time to write that; it was very interesting. One
question, in hopes that I can better understand your perspective, and
feel free to point me at the archives if you've covered this before.

Philip Sandifer 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.
>

Suppose we create a scale that runs from -10 to 10. At 10 are things we
obviously have to have in the encyclopedia, like [[Oxygen]] or
[[France]]. At -10 we have things like [[The 237th raindrop that just
hit the puddle outside my bathroom window]]. Let's further suppose that
0 is the current point where something is just as likely to be kept as not.

If I understand rightly, you're saying that around zero, we're
unpredictable. We might keep a -2 one time and delete a 2 other times,
yes? And that although on a long time-scale that may work out adequately
for our readers, for those who peek inside the process see that area of
the scale as messy and chaotic, and judge us by that?

If so, how far up and down the scale do your concerns go?

> 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,

William

--
William Pietri <william at scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri


from_name: Jim Hu

subject: [Wikitech-l] Announcement:ProcessCite Extension released

body:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ProcessCite

ProcessCite.php is an extension to Cite.php.  It
- makes it easier to add citations to the biomedical literature by
fetching reference info based on PMID from PubMed
- allows storing lists of shortcuts|references in a wiki page
(default is "$wgSitename Reference Library")
- makes the reference style consistent - using a style I arbitrarily
chose ;) -
- disambiguates some different ways to make a citation.

ProcessCite.php requires adding a hook to Cite.php.  I've requested
the addition of this hook on bugzilla

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9091

To see ProcessCite in action, see:

http://ecoliwiki.net/colipedia/index.php/Help:References

Hope this is useful to someone and that the real programmers can help
me make it better!

Jim Hu
=====================================
Jim Hu
Associate Professor
Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics
2128 TAMU
Texas A&M Univ.
College Station, TX 77843-2128
979-862-4054


subject: [WikiEN-l] Daniel Brandt

body:
Sorry, but I may need a little more context.

Rob Smith wrote:
>> Do you feel the current article doesn't meet BLP and other standards?
>>
> Yes. The article was created primarily so nested criticism in another
> article could be removed, using a source citation to allege Mr. Brandt was
> associated with, or somehow aligned with an entirely unreputable
> organization.  In fact, that claim remains in the PIR article, although I
> have  thoroughly documented the source of the claim is ( a ) self
> publishing, ( b ) violates WP:ATT Questionable and self published source.
>

Which organization are you saying the current article incorrectly claims
he's associated with? I didn't see anything like that in the article.
For what it's worth, I'm looking at the Google cache, as I don't have
access to the most recent deleted version.

And just to be clear, I'm explicitly not asking about the history of the
Brandt article or the interactions around it. I'm sure it's fascinating,
but I strongly like to avoid bringing up something that is apparently a
sensitive topic.

Thanks,

William

--
William Pietri <william at scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri


from_name: Matthew Flaschen

body:
Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>

I didn't get any attachment.

Matthew Flaschen

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
Phil Sandifer wrote:
> It's tough to say, mostly because I have trouble conceiving of
> notability as a linear thing.

Yeah. That's probably because it isn't. :-)

> But I'd say -2/2 is a good bet, and we
> can peak out around -4/4. I'll also note, that gap has been
> expanding, and if you go all the way out to where notability tagging
> is happening you get solidly out to the -4/4, -5/5 range. ([[Timothy
> Noah]] and [[Oni Press]] being two recent egregious examples of bad
> notability tagging.) Obviously notability tagging is a less
> destructive practice than deletion, but it does still fall into the
> larger problem of making our criteria look byzantine and impenetrable
> - in fact, possibly even moreso, as a notability tag stays visible
> for longer than five days.

Yep. That's a hard one. The tagger in question looks curious to me:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/REtwW

That tag was his third edit, made an entire eight minutes after joining.
That's pretty unusual for an actual newbie, but I don't see anything
that makes me think malice is involved.

Setting aside the painful topic of notability, is this a sign that we
could use a different division between what restaurants call "front of
house" and "back of house"? I'm looking at the various maintenance
templates:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_maintenance_templates

Some are important warnings that really belong at the top of pages,
either because they are about unreliable content or because it's only
fair to let people know that an article might be axed.

Putting them all at the top of an article made sense early on, when the
ratio of editors to readers was higher. But at some point, wouldn't we
want to hide more of the plumbing where the average reader never sees it
unless the go looking?

William

--
William Pietri <william at scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
geni wrote:
> 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.
>

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?

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.

William

--
William Pietri <william at scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] Parker Peters

body:
On 2/23/07, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/23/07, John Lee <johnleemk at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The moderators have agreed to ban this user from subscribing to the list.
> > Since he was not making any positive contributions through his membership,
> > it has been revoked.
>
> This is sort of sad; gadflys and contrary opinions help strengthen
> projects, and on his good days, he was on the "probably making me
> think enough that it's positive overall" side of things.
>
> But I see why, from the bad days.
>
> We need a better class of gadfly.

Speaking as an upper class gadfly, I have to say that Parker Peters
wasn't that bad and shouldn't have been banned.

People need to learn how to killfile users they don't like, instead of
appealing to moderators.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
You're criticizing how Wikipedia is working right now? You must be
insane, or a fool, or a spy.

LONG LIVE WIKIPEDIA!

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)
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.)
>
> Best,
> Phil Sandifer
> sandifer at english.ufl.edu
>
> You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a
> boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
>
>  >
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Daniel Brandt

body:
Phil Sandifer wrote:

>On Feb 24, 2007, at 4:33 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>
>>Thomas Dalton wrote:
>>
>>
>>>>I can think of three greater ones in under a second. Putting the
>>>>goatse in sitenotice for example.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>That would be reverted in seconds. Very little harm done.
>>>
>>>
>>It would be exceptional for an admin to post such a picture, unless he
>>is trying to document his own hara-kiri.
>>
>>
>For which there are far better and more destructive options. (My
>personal favorite choice is history merging vandalism. Which, to
>date, nobody has done, and which, to date, I remain surprised that
>nobody has done.)
>
Don't give them ideas! :-)

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
geni 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.
>

Ok. Who do you believe can understand them then?

>> 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.
>

I agree that would be great, but from your response I feel like you miss
my point.

If it's ok that an expert in the field can't figure out what we would
and wouldn't keep under our guidelines, why would we expect anybody else
to be able to apply them usefully or, on the receiving end, feel like
they are being applied fairly?

It seems to me like you're saying that only a data sorting expert could
understand our guidelines, and that's ok by you. I'm saying that that if
that's the case, then we are guaranteed that our deletion process would
not just look capricious but actually be capricious, because it's not
data sorting experts who are doing most of the adding of articles or the
removing of them on AfD.

Is that something you're also content with? I'm not saying that's
necessarily unreasonable. Although I wouldn't agree, I can see people
just writing this chaos off as an acceptable cost. But I want to be sure
I understand what you're saying.

William

--
William Pietri <william at scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri


from_name: Kasimir Gabert

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

references:
<45E0C1E4.7080109@wolfmountaingroup.com> <45E0D94C.10608@pobox.com>
	<45E0F200.4000308@wolfmountaingroup.com>
	<200702250212.36862.leon@vserver152.masterssystems.com>
	<45E0F5CD.9050809@wolfmountaingroup.com>
	<F8EAFD65-85E8-47E1-9F55-DE205B7488F0@gmail.com>
	<45E0FD74.3020703@wolfmountaingroup.com>

body:
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
>

--
Kasimir Gabert


from_name: SonOfYoungwood at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
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.

| 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.


from_name: Jeffrey V. Merkey

references:
<45E0C1E4.7080109@wolfmountaingroup.com>	<45E0CBA6.1080807@gatech.edu>	<45E0C476.8050901@wolfmountaingroup.com>
	<45E0D94C.10608@pobox.com>

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>Hash: SHA1
>
>I have tried to work out such issues with Mr. Merkey before, however he
>proved unable to follow directions of any kind, so it was a waste of
>both our and his time to do so.
>
>
>
The traces are posted to wikitech you asked for Brion a very long time
ago. This statement is simply not accurate.

>If someone other than Mr. Merkey is experiencing these problems, I would
>very much like them to contact me to get them sorted out as soon as
>possible.
>
>

Exhibit A

http://www.mwusers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2402

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

Jeff

>I will not be available during the coming week, however, as I am in the
>process of moving; I will be available during US east coast office hours
>from March 5.
>
>Again, if *anyone* *other* than Mr. Merkey is experiencing these
>problems, please contact me; I would very much like to get them sorted
>out if they actually exist and affect current release versions of
>MediaWiki and mwdumper.
>
>- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
>Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (Darwin)
>Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
>
>iD8DBQFF4NlMwRnhpk1wk44RAjJ6AJ4+l1QepY6hY4iqeUhqk384X6JrUQCghL+D
>eRuXqQAqVdKttEaVWrmo+gk=
>=ebLF
>-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>


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

body:
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.

Ec

Jeremy Tobacman wrote:

>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 :
>
>
>>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 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.
>>>


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


from_name: effe iets anders

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

body:
Yeah, meta-l would be great for this :) I heard someone that it might be set
up, i hope it comes soon! :)

Lodewijk

2007/2/24, James Forrester <jdforrester op gmail.com>:
>
> On 24/02/07, Cormac Lawler <cormaggio op gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 2/24/07, geni <geniice op gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On 2/24/07, Cormac Lawler <cormaggio op gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > That's an good idea. I was also going to suggest, where
> > > > people/projects want to use *some* fair use images, might it be an
> > > > idea to somehow identify fair use images as such *within the
> article*
> > > > - by, say, putting a coloured border around it and having a text
> that
> > > > says "This image is not free - help us find one", and linking to a
> > > > template or other page as is done in this case?
> > > >
> > > > Dunno..
> > > >
> > > > Cormac
> > > >
> > >
> > > This has been suggested but has never really got anywhere. You
> > > couldn't quite patch it into the fromowner system because step 4 in
> > > the upload instructions wouldn't work. You could set up a parallel
> > > system. The Devs might not be too happy though.
> > >
> >
> >
> > Right - I was actually thinking of something that would be activated
> > (for want of a better word) when including the image within an
> > article. Couldn't it be a simple template that would include the image
> > as well as the colours/texts around the image that indicate "fair use
> > - not free"? True, this would mean it is up to the person including
> > the image to see whether the image is free or fair use - but it could
> > easily become standard practice.
>
> A much technically neater solution, which doesn't rely on users doing
> the right thing, is surely to have local files (all of which will be
> tagged as non-free, as otherwise they'd be on Commons, post SUL) have
> such "WARNING, BAD NASTY EVIL COPYRIGHTSNESS!" image CSS.
>
> But this is, really, not the best place to be having such a
> discussion; perhaps commons-l, or wikipedia-l (though other projects
> use images too, obviously).
>
> Yours,
> --
> James D. Forrester
> jdforrester op wikimedia.org | james op jdforrester.org | jdforrester op gmail.com
> [[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l op lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


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

body:
Yeah, meta-l would be great for this :) I heard someone that it might be set
up, i hope it comes soon! :)

Lodewijk

2007/2/24, James Forrester <jdforrester at gmail.com>:
>
> On 24/02/07, Cormac Lawler <cormaggio at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 2/24/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On 2/24/07, Cormac Lawler <cormaggio at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > That's an good idea. I was also going to suggest, where
> > > > people/projects want to use *some* fair use images, might it be an
> > > > idea to somehow identify fair use images as such *within the
> article*
> > > > - by, say, putting a coloured border around it and having a text
> that
> > > > says "This image is not free - help us find one", and linking to a
> > > > template or other page as is done in this case?
> > > >
> > > > Dunno..
> > > >
> > > > Cormac
> > > >
> > >
> > > This has been suggested but has never really got anywhere. You
> > > couldn't quite patch it into the fromowner system because step 4 in
> > > the upload instructions wouldn't work. You could set up a parallel
> > > system. The Devs might not be too happy though.
> > >
> >
> >
> > Right - I was actually thinking of something that would be activated
> > (for want of a better word) when including the image within an
> > article. Couldn't it be a simple template that would include the image
> > as well as the colours/texts around the image that indicate "fair use
> > - not free"? True, this would mean it is up to the person including
> > the image to see whether the image is free or fair use - but it could
> > easily become standard practice.
>
> A much technically neater solution, which doesn't rely on users doing
> the right thing, is surely to have local files (all of which will be
> tagged as non-free, as otherwise they'd be on Commons, post SUL) have
> such "WARNING, BAD NASTY EVIL COPYRIGHTSNESS!" image CSS.
>
> But this is, really, not the best place to be having such a
> discussion; perhaps commons-l, or wikipedia-l (though other projects
> use images too, obviously).
>
> Yours,
> --
> James D. Forrester
> jdforrester at wikimedia.org | james at jdforrester.org | jdforrester at gmail.com
> [[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


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

body:
Leon Weber wrote:

>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.
>

If it is, its one sided.  I have no personal issues with Brion.   I'm
just a MediaWiki user and this is a quality issue.   I would agree Brion
appears
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.

Jeff

>Please don't expetiate it on that public
>mailing list, thank you.
>
>-- Leon
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Rich Holton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Daniel Brandt

body:
Phil Sandifer wrote:
>
> On Feb 24, 2007, at 3:28 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> That absence of consensus alone contraindicates any kind of speedy
>> action.  When who shows up in a "speedy" situation that hour (not just
>> that day) makes a difference there is just too much room for abuse.
>> What happens with Brandt or any other person that wants an article
>> about
>> himself removed is only one little corner of the problem.  A truly
>> collaborative environment has no place for debates that depend on some
>> kind of win/lose paradigm.  Speedy deletes should never be a weapon
>> for
>> winning a POV war.  Unless something is _immediately_ dangerous it can
>> afford the time for due process.  Immediate gratification is not
>> important.
>
> This gets at another very, very fundamental problem, though - one
> that is increasingly ripping the project apart at a foundational
> level. (I am not, it should be noted, speaking here on a community
> level. I'm talking about the encyclopedia itself.)
>
> Our due process is capricious and based on who shows up. 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.
>
> -Phil

I agree that this is a troublesome development. The more active users,
the more of an issue this becomes. Finding a good way to fix this is not
easy.

[brainstorm]
How about if there is a list somewhere of AFD participants. Anyone can
add their name to the list, but an AFD can only be closed when a quorum
(TBD) of those participants have made some comment on the deletion
proposal. Someone will be de-listed if they have not commented on any
proposal for a defined period. Of course, they can immediately re-join
the list of participants at any time.
[/brainstorm]

NB: A "brainstorm" in this context means a relatively unfiltered idea,
intended primarily to stimulate thought, modifications, and other
proposals. Seldom will an initial brainstorm idea be accepted as is.

-Rich Holton


references:
<45E0C1E4.7080109@wolfmountaingroup.com>	<45E0CBA6.1080807@gatech.edu>
	<45E0C476.8050901@wolfmountaingroup.com>

body:
Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
> Matthew Flaschen wrote:
>
> Here you go:
>
> This is posted here for the foundation to consider rather than on
> Wikitech as these issues affect the credibility of the Foundation.
> Posts on these issues to Wikitech get ignored and/or are not responded
> to at all.  I am writing this in response to requests to GFDL enable the
> wikigadugi.org sites.

I hope you understand dumps are not a requirement for the GFDL.
Special:Export and indeed the XHTML pages themselves count as
transparent copies.

> This harms the reputation and
> credibility of the Foundation.    It needs to be addressed and fixed.

No, it should be fixed, but it doesn't need to be.  Wikimedia has no
obligation to provide dumps, working or otherwise.

> It would be much nicer if this stuff just worked.

That's true.

Matthew Flaschen

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from_name: Rob Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] Daniel Brandt

body:
On 2/24/07, William Pietri <william at scissor.com> wrote:

> Sorry, but I may need a little more context.
>
> Rob Smith wrote:
> >> Do you feel the current article doesn't meet BLP and other standards?
> >>
> > Yes. The article was created primarily so nested criticism in another
> > article could be removed, using a source citation to allege Mr. Brandt
> was
> > associated with, or somehow aligned with an entirely unreputable
> > organization.  In fact, that claim remains in the PIR article, although
> I
> > have  thoroughly documented the source of the claim is ( a ) self
> > publishing, ( b ) violates WP:ATT Questionable and self published
> source.
> >
>
> Which organization are you saying the current article incorrectly claims
> he's associated with? I didn't see anything like that in the article.
> For what it's worth, I'm looking at the Google cache, as I don't have
> access to the most recent deleted version.
>
> And just to be clear, I'm explicitly not asking about the history of the
> Brandt article or the interactions around it. I'm sure it's fascinating,
> but I strongly like to avoid bringing up something that is apparently a
> sensitive topic.
>
> Thanks,
>
> William

Footnote 1 in the PIR entry

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

is a self published source (alleging a link with IHR, which I believe is on
the spamblock list).  The introduction from the self publishing source
references the original Guardian article, a questionable source per WP:ATT.


body:
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


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
Philip Sandifer wrote:
> 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.
>
It's amazing how quickly people have gone from "it can't possibly work"
to grumbling about how we haven't solved every problem with it.

What he think will happen if he visits EB? "Scott who? Our board of
expert editors have already determined that webcomics aren't worth
writing about." Encarta? Probably wouldn't get even that much of an
answer. CZ? I think we can guess Larry Sanger's response, ha ha. As the
world's largest encyclopedia, every day we deal with scaling problems
that have *never* been solved before. Of course it's going to be messy -
we can't just go offline while a bunch of eggheads ponders solutions.
I've actually spent time in the university library learning what other
people have done for large-scale knowledge organization, in the hopes of
getting useful ideas for WP, and I tell you, the state of the art is
just pathetic.

I think people like Scott McCloud, and other experts, just assume that
there are fellow experts out there who have solved problems like how to
assess notability, and we're just a bunch of stupids because we're not
using their solutions. We need to get the word out - *there* *are* *no*
*known* *solutions*. Every day we have to wing it, because we have no
other choice.

I don't like to think about it too much, because it starts to p*ss me
off a little - the expert is saying "I don't want to work on WP because
you're all a bunch of amateurs who don't know how to do things right".
Well gee, Mr. Expert, if no experts ever participate, what do you think
you're going to end up with? And if you guys have all these amazing
solutions to our problems, how come we can't ever seem to find where
they are published?
> 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.

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.

Stan


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On Feb 24, 2007, at 7:48 PM, geni wrote:

>
> As a general rule attempting to prove anything from an n=1 sample is a
> really really bad idea.
>
Geni, with all due respect, stop being dense and actually listen to
people. Your continual attitude of putting your fingers in your ears
and reducing all opposition to pithily described straw men is
insulting and counterproductive. I did not say that the Straub
incident proves that our deletion is flawed. I said it's a
demonstration of the flaws. There's a difference, and you know it.

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

I don't deny that such articles exist. Never have - it would be
stupid to. But I've always thought that articles are better judged on
their own merits than by speculating about the motives for their
creation. If the article is unduly self-promoting it should be fixed
(deletion being one means of fixing it.) But that can be evaluated
(and is best evaluated) through means other than trying to guess the
motives of authors.

> 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.
>

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.

> 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.
>

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.
>

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

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.
>

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

> systematically?
>
Yes.
>
> Various articles with fridge fanatics would be an example.

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.

-Phil


subject: [WikiEN-l] Parker Peters

body:
The Cunctator wrote:
> On 2/23/07, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 2/23/07, John Lee <johnleemk at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> The moderators have agreed to ban this user from subscribing to the list.
>>> Since he was not making any positive contributions through his membership,
>>> it has been revoked.
>> This is sort of sad; gadflys and contrary opinions help strengthen
>> projects, and on his good days, he was on the "probably making me
>> think enough that it's positive overall" side of things.
>>
>> But I see why, from the bad days.
>>
>> We need a better class of gadfly.
>
> Speaking as an upper class gadfly, I have to say that Parker Peters
> wasn't that bad and shouldn't have been banned.
>
> People need to learn how to killfile users they don't like, instead of
> appealing to moderators.
>

I have to agree. I often wonder if the calls for banning from this list
are more an attempt to punish than anything else.

-Rich


subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2007-01-13

body:
Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 15, 2007 at 11:45:13AM -0500, Simetrical wrote:
>> On 1/15/07, Edward Z. Yang <edwardzyang at thewritingpot.com> wrote:
>>> WEll, it totally depends on the culture you've made regarding unit
>>> tests. Here, it's "Oh, it's unreasonable to think that all the
>>> parsertests will pass" but in other places its "Unit tests are super
>>> important and no development goes forward until all tests pass". I
>>> myself fall into the latter camp.
>> In case you didn't notice, though, 18 of the 19 failing tests are
>> actually unimplemented features, not regressions.  :)  Maybe it would
>> be best if we removed the TODOs altogether.  Then we would get,
>> appropriately, passes when we have no regressions, and failures on
>> regressions.  People might actually even notice when regressions crop
>> up!  (How long has that 1887 part 2 thing been regressed?)
>
> I concur that this seems an excellent idea.  If the terror level, er,
> um, error level is always greater than 0 then no one will pay any
> attention to it.

There could still be a separate list of parser tests we want to pass.

Matthew Flaschen

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from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Parker Peters

body:
On 24/02/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Courage cannot become foolhardiness, and agility cannot become
> evasiveness.  That's a rare combination of qualities.  Parker's agility
> is lacking, but it is unduly harsh to say that he was making no positive
> contributions.  I am not so insecure in my views that I can tolerate no
> criticism.

Parker's LiveJournal should be just the thing, then:
http://parkerpeters.livejournal.com/

- d.


body:
Hello,

Just because of this post I feel compelled to take the time to
download and install enwiki dumps...

On 2/24/07, Jeffrey V. Merkey <jmerkey at wolfmountaingroup.com> wrote:
>
> Now try it with one of the huge enwiki dumps with all the stuff on the
> talk pages on 1.5 mediawiki that's gone through 1 year on the internet
> with database upgrades through 1.8.2 and tell me if it still works (will
> take 2-3 days to run with the enwiki dumps even on a fast system). I

Okay, we are not talking about whether or not you have destroyed your
system because you tried to start it from 1.5 and just upgraded it
every time.  We are talking about whether or not dumps from Wikimedia
work, not whether or not your system is good.

> 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.

It would be really nice if you could provide some examples.  I can
test with a larger wiki, if you want... Looking through
importDumps.php it does not look like it would stop working after a
larger xml file is loaded.

>
> 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.

> 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
>

--
Kasimir Gabert


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
on 2/24/07 5:16 PM, Philip Sandifer at sandifer at english.ufl.edu wrote:

> I just had dinner with [[Scott McCloud]], ?????????
>
> Best,
> Phil Sandifer

Phil,

Thank you for this entire post. It is educational on many fronts. It needs
to be taken by all at Wikipedia as a heads up - a wakeup call. If it is
treated lightly, trivialized, or worse, ignored - the denial within the
Community is deeper and more profound than I thought.

Marc Riddell

--
If you're restricted to what is - you are cut off from - - what could be.


from_name: Phil Sandifer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On Feb 24, 2007, at 8:52 PM, William Pietri wrote:

>
>
> Suppose we create a scale that runs from -10 to 10. At 10 are
> things we
> obviously have to have in the encyclopedia, like [[Oxygen]] or
> [[France]]. At -10 we have things like [[The 237th raindrop that just
> hit the puddle outside my bathroom window]]. Let's further suppose
> that
> 0 is the current point where something is just as likely to be kept
> as not.
>
> If I understand rightly, you're saying that around zero, we're
> unpredictable. We might keep a -2 one time and delete a 2 other times,
> yes? And that although on a long time-scale that may work out
> adequately
> for our readers, for those who peek inside the process see that
> area of
> the scale as messy and chaotic, and judge us by that?
>
> If so, how far up and down the scale do your concerns go?
>

It's tough to say, mostly because I have trouble conceiving of
notability as a linear thing. But I'd say -2/2 is a good bet, and we
can peak out around -4/4. I'll also note, that gap has been
expanding, and if you go all the way out to where notability tagging
is happening you get solidly out to the -4/4, -5/5 range. ([[Timothy
Noah]] and [[Oni Press]] being two recent egregious examples of bad
notability tagging.) Obviously notability tagging is a less
destructive practice than deletion, but it does still fall into the
larger problem of making our criteria look byzantine and impenetrable
- in fact, possibly even moreso, as a notability tag stays visible
for longer than five days.

-Phil


from_name: Daniel P. B. Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] Ya can talk all ya wanna but its differn't than it was

body:
> From: Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia
>
>> No they are written with the objective of avoiding an extremely bad
>> encyclopedia.
>
> 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.

Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia yet. It was _certainly_ not an
encyclopedia _then._ I've always assumed that calling it "the free
encyclopedia that anyone can edit" was a deliberate attempt to keep
the _goal_ clear and always in front of everyone.

>> Various articles with fridge fanatics would be an example.
>
> 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.

Sounds like the classic dispute between the entrepreneurs and
innovators who start things and the more pedestrian, less imaginative
types that make them work and maintain them.

Things change.

It's not like it was back then. When a dollar was a dollar. And the
girls were prettier. And we had _real_ music then, wonderful music,
not this modern stuff, noise, it's just noise, I tell you.

Ya can talk, ya can talk,
ya can bicker, ya can talk,
ya can bicker, bicker, bicker,
ya can talk, ya can talk,
ya can talk, talk, talk, talk,
bicker, bicker, bicker,
ya can talk all ya wanna
but it's differnt than it was.


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Ya can talk all ya wanna but its differn't than it
	was

body:
On Feb 24, 2007, at 9:07 PM, Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:

>
> Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia yet. It was _certainly_ not an
> encyclopedia _then._ I've always assumed that calling it "the free
> encyclopedia that anyone can edit" was a deliberate attempt to keep
> the _goal_ clear and always in front of everyone.
>

Bull. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. It's not a publishable one, for a
variety of reasons, quality only being one. But it's clearly an
encyclopedia.

> Things change.

Yes. But I've seen nobody provide any evidence that there was a rash
of crazies we couldn't deal with leading to the implementation of
[[WP:RS]] and [[WP:N]]. Or that there was a sudden decrease in
crazies when we had them. Or, really, any correlation between the
two, little yet causality.

-Phil


from_name: Sage Ross

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
> Philip Sandifer 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.

One of the big things that rankles me is the large swaths of content
that are in clear violation of WP:N and the more specific guidelines,
but that are de facto acceptable.

Television episodes are the clearest examples I know of.  We have a
guideline for fiction notability and there's been a centralized
discussion that more or less follows WP:N:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Centralized_discussion/Television_episodes

But this is blatantly disregarded for many series.  See, for example,
all the articles linked from here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Battlestar_Galactica_%28re-imagined_series%29_episodes

For most episodes, there is nothing to establish notability.  For this
particular series, there is a moderate amount of information available
about production through podcasts and blogs by the creators, but that
stuff isn't in the episode articles for the most part.

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 developed this line of argument a little further in a recent blog post:
http://ragesossscholar.blogspot.com/2007/02/wikipedia-original-research-and-popular.html

-Sage


from_name: Jake Nelson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
The entire deletion system is in a very bad state. This is nothing new
- VFD has always had problems, and in the last 3-4 years, it's only
gotten worse. It's our biggest PR problem. And I mean that: it's a
bigger problem for our image than bad bios (though much less likely to
cause legal trouble). Every use of "non-notable", "vanity", or
"unencyclopedic" on VFD has hurt Wikipedia. Webcomics suffer the worst
of it, but it's widespread and longstanding. Plus, the last few years
have seen countless layers of procedure and rules encrustation on the
original structure, making it more inconsistent and nonsensical. A
newcomer can make no sense of the system at all, not even bringing the
insanity of DRV into it.

I increasingly think we need to just nuke the whole deletion system.
Unless there's sensitive content (personal information, etc.) or
copyright violations that need to be removed from article history,
just fix, stub, substub, or blank it (in order of decreasing
preference).

-- Jake Nelson
[[en:User:Jake Nelson]]

On 2/24/07, Han Dao <wikipediankiba at gmail.com> wrote:
> As evidence that the webcomic community is fed up with this.
>
> http://comixpedia.org
>
> Basically a webcomic encyclopedia. Started in response to
> en.wikipedia.orgabritary deletions.
>
> I think the problem is experts/lack of experts. Experts probably know the
> subject area and can probably make better judgement calls than the layman.
> But we got mostly layman who don't know much about webcomics saying delete,
> non-notable.
>
> On 2/24/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > On Feb 24, 2007, at 9:35 PM, William Pietri wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > Putting them all at the top of an article made sense early on, when
> > > the
> > > ratio of editors to readers was higher. But at some point, wouldn't we
> > > want to hide more of the plumbing where the average reader never
> > > sees it
> > > unless the go looking?
> >
> > Yes - absolutely. But on the other hand, we should take a long, hard
> > look at the plumbing - I'm unconvinced that it would pass health
> > inspections, to continue your restaurant metaphor.
> >
> > -Phil
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Gwern Branwen

body:
Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> writes:

> On Feb 24, 2007, at 9:07 PM, Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
>
>>
>> Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia yet. It was _certainly_ not an
>> encyclopedia _then._ I've always assumed that calling it "the free
>> encyclopedia that anyone can edit" was a deliberate attempt to keep
>> the _goal_ clear and always in front of everyone.
>>
>
> Bull. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. It's not a publishable one, for a
> variety of reasons, quality only being one. But it's clearly an
> encyclopedia.
>
>> Things change.
>
> Yes. But I've seen nobody provide any evidence that there was a rash
> of crazies we couldn't deal with leading to the implementation of
> [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:N]]. Or that there was a sudden decrease in
> crazies when we had them. Or, really, any correlation between the
> two, little yet causality.
>
> -Phil

All that happened was that the Seigenthaler mess scarred the tender
flesh of the collective minds of the community. I suspect it affected
us long-term by providing a paradigmatic case for criticism and poisoning the waters
of fresh recruits. I remember noticing definite differences in policy
discussions and just general discussions on Talk pages bare weeks and
months after the USA Today editorial hit.

--
Gwern
Inquiring minds want to know.


body:
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: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
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.
>
>
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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On Feb 24, 2007, at 9:37 PM, geni wrote:

>
> 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.

Here's the problem: what fixes that breaks [[Jacques Derrida]]. What
fixes [[Jacques Derrida]] breaks [[Rorschach (comics)]].

Solution: Stop trying to implement a fix that applies to both articles?

-Phil


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On Feb 24, 2007, at 9:35 PM, William Pietri wrote:

>
> Putting them all at the top of an article made sense early on, when
> the
> ratio of editors to readers was higher. But at some point, wouldn't we
> want to hide more of the plumbing where the average reader never
> sees it
> unless the go looking?

Yes - absolutely. But on the other hand, we should take a long, hard
look at the plumbing - I'm unconvinced that it would pass health
inspections, to continue your restaurant metaphor.

-Phil


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On 2/24/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/25/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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

Something that everyone, Wikipedian or not, needs to understand - and
that good teachers inform their students of - is this:

There is no such thing as a reliable source.

No single source of information can ever be trusted, and no set of
sources, no matter how complete, can ever be trusted completely. All
sourcing should reflect that "source 1 says A, source 2 says B" -
leaving the veracity of their claims up to the reader's trust of said
sources. Now, I'm not fond of having a footnote after every word in an
article, so much of our content becomes "a rough consensus of persons
who have recently edited this article says A" (which I would hope
readers have a suitably low trust of, but is sufficient for
uncontroversial data).

-- Jake Nelson
[[en:User:Jake Nelson]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
Bryan Derksen wrote:

>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.
>
At Wikimania they were  planning to start it on de: and after a month of
testing there a rudimentary form could be applied to en:.  All it was
going to do was to record whether an article had been checked for
vandalism.  That's not much, but it would have been a beginning.

>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.
>
It wouldn't solve everything, but any reduction in the time needed to
argue about deletions would be a step in the right direction.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On Feb 24, 2007, at 9:40 PM, geni wrote:

> Wikipedia:Notability (academics)]]

If we didn't have a notability guideline on porn stars, this would be
our worst one. It's ridiculously selective, and fails the sniff test
in the humanities. It should be a slam dunk that anybody who has
published in PMLA or Critical Inquiry should, at the very least, have
an article outlining that work. Absolute dead-on common sense, and if
this were true it would immediately boost the quality of articles in
this area astronomically. If I didn't suspect that it would get
ripped out by a mob of deletionists, I'd work my way through the last
decade of Critical Inquiry putting in summaries of the work published
in it. But I won't, because I'm not willing to invest that kind of
time in order to have someone tag it for deletion.

-Phil


subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
On Feb 24, 2007, at 9:25 PM, geni wrote:

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

A+ for snippyness, D for actual content there. What makes you believe
that our notability guidelines appear coherent and consistent to the
outside? Particularly in light of, in the last week, three separate
instances of people showing inconsistencies in three very different
approaches (Straub, McCloud, and Noah).
> WP:RS is pretty solid
> There are a few conditions where it breaks down but is otherwise
> pretty solid.
>

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 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.

> 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.
>

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.
>
> 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.
>

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.
>

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

No. Policy does not reduce dross. Good editors reduce dross. Policy
reduces good editors.
>> 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.
>

[[WP:AGF]]
>> 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.
>

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.

> 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.
>

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

> 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.

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 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.

-Phil


body:
Now try it with one of the huge enwiki dumps with all the stuff on the
talk pages on 1.5 mediawiki that's gone through 1 year on the internet
with database upgrades through 1.8.2 and tell me if it still works (will
take 2-3 days to run with the enwiki dumps even on a fast system). I
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.

When mediawiki gets into low memory conditions of any kind, the wheels
fly off when imports, reading, and editing or going on at the same time.

Jeff

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
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
>


from_name: Han Dao

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

body:
As evidence that the webcomic community is fed up with this.

http://comixpedia.org

Basically a webcomic encyclopedia. Started in response to
en.wikipedia.orgabritary deletions.

I think the problem is experts/lack of experts. Experts probably know the
subject area and can probably make better judgement calls than the layman.
But we got mostly layman who don't know much about webcomics saying delete,
non-notable.

On 2/24/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Feb 24, 2007, at 9:35 PM, William Pietri wrote:
>
> >
> > Putting them all at the top of an article made sense early on, when
> > the
> > ratio of editors to readers was higher. But at some point, wouldn't we
> > want to hide more of the plumbing where the average reader never
> > sees it
> > unless the go looking?
>
> Yes - absolutely. But on the other hand, we should take a long, hard
> look at the plumbing - I'm unconvinced that it would pass health
> inspections, to continue your restaurant metaphor.
>
> -Phil
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Parker Peters

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>On 24/02/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>
>>Courage cannot become foolhardiness, and agility cannot become
>>evasiveness.  That's a rare combination of qualities.  Parker's agility
>>is lacking, but it is unduly harsh to say that he was making no positive
>>contributions.  I am not so insecure in my views that I can tolerate no
>>criticism.
>>
>>
>Parker's LiveJournal should be just the thing, then:
>http://parkerpeters.livejournal.com/
>
I've had the impression that the relationship that you have with him is
not based on mutual respect. ;-)

What he rants about in his own blog doesn't bother me.  He has managed
to anger a number of people in positions of power to the point where I
wonder whether they feel so injured that they have lost sight of
objectivity.  He has his faults, but he also makes valid points.

I don't intend to start campaigning for his readmission to the list.
Some important issues have been raised on the list, and Parker's
presence on the list could be too disruptive even when he's right.

Ec


from_name: Marc Riddell

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

body:
on 2/24/07 9:27 PM, Garion96 at garion96 at gmail.com wrote:

> 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

Thank you very much for this. I have been trying to find out who the
photographer of the Joan Finney photo was for some time now. I originally
emailed the person who contributed it, but was told they had merely uploaded
it to the site. I am trying to track down the photographer so I can deal
with any copyright issues there may be if I upload it to Finney's Wikipedia
Article.

Your input will help.

Thanks again,

Marc Riddell


from_name: jayjg

subject: [WikiEN-l] Daniel Brandt

body:
On 2/23/07, Rob Smith <nobs03 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Before voting to keep, please review the evidence presented at...
> Nobs01

Can people (particularly those who are already banned from Wikipedia)
who post links to slanderous and defamatory conspiracy-mongering
harassment fora be immediately and permanently banned from this list
as well? Thanks.

Jay.


body:
I download the dumps to /wikidump/dump and type from the root wiki dir:

# translate to Cherokee

# -gdfl insert [:en:links] back to wikipedia into each article during
translation -nt strip any NULL titles or revisions - syl output in syllabary
wikitrans -syl -gfdl -nt /chr/chrlexicon.cherokee_nation
/chr/chrlexicon.eastern_band /chr/chrlexicon.oklahoma-missouri -thes
chr2en.thesaurus -thes \
en2chr.thesaurus -grammar Otali.bin < enwiki-<date>.xml > sylwiki-<date>.xml
wikitrans -gfdl -nt /chr/chrlexicon.cherokee_nation
/chr/chrlexicon.eastern_band /chr/chrlexicon.oklahoma-missouri -thes
chr2en.thesaurus -thes \
en2chr.thesaurus -grammar Otali.bin < enwiki-<date>.xml > phwiki-<date>.xml

// strip from XML file and download all images from wikipedia commons
and wikipedia with 16 daemons (-p parallel mode)
wikix -p < /wikidump/dump/enwiki-<date>.xml (this program actually
creates parallel scripts which resync images from the Foundation
./image_sh
#

php maintenance/importDump.php < /wikidump/enwiki-<date>.xml >&
/wikidump/en.log &
php maintenance/importDump.php < /wikidump/sylwiki-<date>.xml >&
/wikidump/chr.log &
php maintenance/importDump.php < /wikidump/phwiki-<date>.xml >&
/wikidump/chrp.log &

I think I got it. :-)

Jeff

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
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
>


from_name: Kurt Maxwell Weber

body:
On Saturday 24 February 2007 20:07, Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:

> Ya can talk, ya can talk,
> ya can bicker, ya can talk,
> ya can bicker, bicker, bicker,
> ya can talk, ya can talk,
> ya can talk, talk, talk, talk,
> bicker, bicker, bicker,
> ya can talk all ya wanna
> but it's differnt than it was.

Whaddyatalk, whaddyatalk, whaddyatalk?
Whydayabicker?

Well, it's the Model T Ford that made the cracker barrel
Obsolete, obsolete, obsolete
The cracker barrel just sorta
Went out the window
Five, ten, fifteen
Twenty miles to the
County seat, county seat, county seat
Who's gonna patronize a little bitty
Two-by-four kinda store anymore?

--
Kurt Weber
<kmw at armory.com>


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Parker Peters

body:
Oskar Sigvardsson wrote:

>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.
>
That's your characterization.

>And, to top it all off, on
>his blog (which David linked to) he compared his ban with the
>Kristallnacht!
>
So what?  It's only a blog.

>If you've any doubts about him, just read that entry. We cannot
>possibly want that kind of charater contributing.
>
I find phrases like "that kind of character" to be very scary.

Ec


from_name: Jeffrey V. Merkey

body:
Kasimir Gabert wrote:

>Hello,
>
>Just because of this post I feel compelled to take the time to
>download and install enwiki dumps...
>
>On 2/24/07, Jeffrey V. Merkey <jmerkey at wolfmountaingroup.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Now try it with one of the huge enwiki dumps with all the stuff on the
>>talk pages on 1.5 mediawiki that's gone through 1 year on the internet
>>with database upgrades through 1.8.2 and tell me if it still works (will
>>take 2-3 days to run with the enwiki dumps even on a fast system). I
>>
>>
>
>Okay, we are not talking about whether or not you have destroyed your
>system because you tried to start it from 1.5 and just upgraded it
>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.

>>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.
>>
>>
>
>It would be really nice if you could provide some examples.  I can
>test with a larger wiki, if you want... Looking through
>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.

>
>
>>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.

>
>
>>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
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
>