from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Instructions

body:
I think the distinction is between "neutrality" and "advice".

A neutral article /describes/ the various ways to make guacamole or to
raise a child.

A How-To book gives /one author's/ advice about the "best" way to do
something.

Are WikiBooks supposed to be communally-written?

Maybe Ed Poor can write a book about prayer and release it as a "free"
text. But I'd probably like at least one copy of "Uncle Ed's Guide to a
Happy Prayer Life" to remain intact at WikiBooks. If anyone wants to
fork (and make their own, radically different text), they have my
blessing.

I'd like to see a book of Anthere's recipes...

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [WikiEN-l] Clue Stick

body:
Caution: graphic violence depicted

http://www.unitedmedia.com/creators/onebighappy/archive/images/onebighap
py20183000040224.gif

Ed Poor


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikitech-l] User-agent block list & Netscape 3

body:
Optim wrote:

>I need some skin which will NOT include any of
>the following:
>
>* any HTML more advanced than version 3.2
>* Dynamic HTML and DHTML
>* HTML Tables
>* Any kind of inline Images
>* Java / Javascript / ASP / Any kind of scripting
>* DIV and SPAN HTML tags
>* Preferably no custom HTML colours.
>* Any characters not included on a standard
>105-key English keyboard. This means: Avoid HTML
>entities, Unicode, etc when it is not absolutely
>needed.
>
But you do still need a different character set for Greek.

>One reason I dislike DIV tags is they prevent me
>from easily copy-pasting Wikipedia articles which
>contains inline images. Selecting the article
>text selects the image caption, too.
>
A person with limited or costly bandwidth should have the option to not
download images.  A contributor without that option will often be forced
to download the same image over and over again.  Images can make an
article much more attractive, but should be expendible.

>Just checking my email involves more than 1
>megabyte in traffic. Daily checking of email
>makes up somewhat more than 30MB in total.
>
Is that with or without the spam? :-)

>And when I think about Africa and other regions
>where Internet may be more under-developed, I
>think a lynx-friendly skin is a must, considering
>that we have an educational mission to fulfil.
>
I've heard it said that here in Canada we have the highest proportion of
high-speed connection in the world.  I would really feel restricted if I
had to have a slower line.  When we're spoiled with such dazzling speed,
we lose sight of the difficulties elsewhere.  Those of us with high
speed access, are also the ones with easier access to materials that
should be put into Wikipedia; that justifies our continuing to use it.
 At the same time many of us who use such connections have no idea about
the technical structures that underly it.  I get the impression that
most technical people don't find retrocompatibility to be an interesting
problem when there is so much excitement at the leading edge.  Many of
us have old computers in storage that we don't know what to do with.  It
would be simplistic to say that Africans would appreciate it if we
shipped all this hardware to them.  Efforts would still needed to  make
them useful   And we still haven't dealt with the challenge of providing
electrical power.

Ec


list: wikipedia-l

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] New "GNU Free Media Licence"? - was: What
	would	Richard Stallman say?

references:
<E1AuAuo-0001oK-1j@fencepost.gnu.org>	<200402202011.45801.news@RobertMichel.de>	<E1Av2Hq-0006TY-Ob@fencepost.gnu.org>	<200402232154.51816.news@RobertMichel.de>
	<403A73FD.9090008@secretlondon.me.uk>

body:
Caroline Ford wrote:

> The GNU web site suggests creative commons.
>
> "We believe that published software and documentation should be free
> software and free documentation <licenses.html#Intro>. We recommend
> making all sorts of educational and reference works free also, using
> free documentation licenses such as the GNU Free Documentation License
> <licenses.html#FDL> (GNU FDL)."
>
> "For other kinds of works, we recommend you consider the licenses
> proposed by Creative Commons <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/>."

What this suggests is that we follow a variety of strategies that
address our principles.  Sticking to one particular licence can put us
into a legalistic box that may restrict the application of those principles.

Ec


from_name: Geoff Burling

subject:
[WikiEN-l] HOWTOs/Recipes/Instructions and other imperative
	content

body:
On Mon, 23 Feb 2004, David Friedland wrote:

>
> The following seems to be the general idea that people have about how-to
> type content on Wikipedia. i.e. that it belongs on wikibooks, not
> wikipedia. I couldn't find anywhere where this was written out as
> policy, so this is my proposed addition to [[What Wikipedia is not]]:
>
>   Under what Wikipedia articles are not:
> * Instructions. Wikipedia seeks to be informative, not instructional.
> Therefore, things like how-tos, recipes, and other types of information
> that provide instruction on something are not appropriate on Wikipedia.
> They are appropriate, however, on Wikibooks, and articles that contain
> only instructional material should be moved to the appropriate area on
> Wikibooks. It is possible that information about instructions are
> appropriate on Wikipedia, but it should be presented in the indicative
> mood, and not the imperative mood that so distinctively marks
> instructional material.
>
I'm throwing out an argument against the concept that an encyclopedia
should be "informative, not instructional", based on one datum: for many
years (perhaps even now, but at least into the 1960's) it was not
uncommon for people to teach themselves how to play chess from the article
in the encyclopedia.

Explanations of other games would also fall under this ban. (Boy, we'd
better check the articles on card & board games -- they might also provide
the instructions on how to play these games.) And providing explanations
of how common gadgets like a faucet or electricity work could also be
instructional: I managed to figure out how to fix a leak in my bathtub
yesterday from studying a diagram.

Yes, we will end up with arguments over NPOV over any set of instructions.
However, we already have NPOV arguments over all kinds of information that
I never suspected existed. (I'm still puzzling over the controversy over
the proper name in English of the river that forms part of the border
between Germany and Poland.) But some of these have been resolved. I don't
see how we can't accomplish the same resolution with instructional material.

Geoff


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia-l Digest, Vol 7, Issue 42

body:
Dan Miller wrote:

>The other day I contacted the
>Democratic National Committee, asking them to release
>a photo for [[Terry McAuliffe]].  If they don't get
>back to me by the end of the week, I'll consider
>another line of attack, but some places might have
>people to handle this, even online.
>
What may be more common is that organizations are not prepared to deal
with such questions.  A letter seeking permissions can just as easily
trigger a debate within the target organization about who there has the
right to give the permissions
.
Ec


body:
David Friedland wrote:

> The following seems to be the general idea that people have about
> how-to type content on Wikipedia. i.e. that it belongs on wikibooks,
> not wikipedia. I couldn't find anywhere where this was written out as
> policy, so this is my proposed addition to [[What Wikipedia is not]]:
>
>  Under what Wikipedia articles are not:
> * Instructions. Wikipedia seeks to be informative, not instructional.
> Therefore, things like how-tos, recipes, and other types of
> information that provide instruction on something are not appropriate
> on Wikipedia. They are appropriate, however, on Wikibooks, and
> articles that contain only instructional material should be moved to
> the appropriate area on Wikibooks. It is possible that information
> about instructions are appropriate on Wikipedia, but it should be
> presented in the indicative mood, and not the imperative mood that so
> distinctively marks instructional material.

IIRC when I first joined up there were some wishful comments from Jimbo
about having practical information on Wikipedia, but Wikibooks did not
yet exist.  I have no problem with Wikipedia articles using an
instructional imperative.

Ec


body:
Imran Ghory wrote:

>On Mon, 23 Feb 2004, David Friedland wrote:
>
>>  Under what Wikipedia articles are not:
>>* Instructions. Wikipedia seeks to be informative, not instructional.
>>
>
>In the words of [[James Murray]] "we should be descriptive, not
>prescriptive".
>
Instructions, even though written in the imperative, are still
descriptive.  The only penalty may be that your cake won't rise, or
worse, you may blow yourself up and earn a Darwin Award. :-\   No
penalty will be applied by any other person.

Ec


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: HOWTOs/Recipes/Instructions and other
	imperative	content

body:
David Friedland wrote:

> I believe that instructional material is inherently opinionated: an
> instruction comes with the embedded assumption that the method
> described is somehow "correct". People only make imperative statements
> if they believe that the action they are directing is the "correct"
> action.  By making imperative statements, Wikipedia is asserting the
> opinion that the instructions themselves are correct. NPOV policy
> clearly stands against this: "assert facts, including facts about
> opinions--but don't assert opinions themselves."

This is a bizarre extension of NPOV policy. :-D   If your that concerned
maybe we should have a disclaimer attached to recipes.  Results may vary.

> Let's take the example of recipes. There can be disagreements about
> how different dishes are to be prepared. How do you neutralize
> disagreements without changing the mood from imperative to indicative?
>
> Example of an instruction from a guacamole recipe:
>
>    Add all the avocado to the bowl, then add the other ingredients.
> Mix well.
>
>    vs.
>
>    Add half the avocado to the bowl, then add the other ingredients.
> Mix well, then gently stir in the other half of the avocado.
>
> Is either one of these correct? Or should we say "Some chefs suggest
> setting aside half the avocado before mixing all the ingredients
> together, then gently stirring in the remaining avocado, to ensure the
> guacamole has a chunky texture, whereas other chefs prefer the smooth
> texture of mixing everything together all at once."

I prefer the simple instructions to the circumlocutious avoidance of
purported POV.

> I believe it is the intent of the NPOV not to take sides, even if
> there is only one side. Imperative language inherently takes the side
> of the instructions, and so should be avoided. Since HOWTOs and
> recipes use imperative language, they shouldn't be on the Wikipedia.
> Much of the content can perhaps be modified for inclusion on the
> Wikipedia, but it has to be rephrased so that each step is not only in
> the indicative mood, but is contextualized and/or justified.

Where there is another side an alternative recipe can also be given.

Ec


from_name: Delirium

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: HOWTOs/Recipes/Instructions and
	other	imperativecontent

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>I'm not a dogmatist on this point (recipes), I'm just throwing out for
>consideration -- what exactly makes this non-encyclopedic, other than
>the constraints of paper on traditional encyclopedias?
>
>
Well, except in the case of a very few dishes which have an "official"
way of doing them, there is generally no one recipe for any given dish.
Guacamole, for example, has as many recipes as there are people who make
guacamole: the recipe is essentially "put anything you want into mashed
avocado".  Sure, cookbooks often give a particular recipe for many
popular dishes, but I don't see us as a cookbook.  We can instead
describe what a dish is, and if someone wants a particular cook's
opinion on exactly how many tablespoons of this and that to include,
they can buy a cookbook from that cook.

Again, I'd refer people to [[turkey (food)]], which I hope does a good
job with the balance.  It even mentions 30-45 minutes as common cooking
time for deep-fried turkey, without giving instructions such as "fry for
38 minutes at 450 F", which would not really be supportable.

Plus I just don't like the tone.  I'd rather we be descriptive.  [[Virus
cleaning]] that describes what virus cleaning is and how it's usually
done, instead of [[How to clean your computer of viruses]] that gives
instructions.

-Mark


subject: [Wikitech-l] DNS servers.

body:
Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen wrote:

>On Mon, 23 Feb 2004, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>>I trust Daniel completely, so I'm satisfied with his word on this.  His
>>intentions have been stated publicly, and that's good enough for me.
>>
>The problem is that one can never trust a company. Companies regularly go back
>on their words if it's profitable for them. Also, companies can go bust and
>their property sold off to to cover debts.
>
Bankruptcies can have an uncertain effect on copyrights.  When the
assets are liquidated the company's copyrights may be completely
ignored, or not noticed at all.  They are not distributed or sold as
assets.  My contention would be that when the bankruptcy is discharged
without a distribution of copyrights, that would put the copyrights into
the public domain.  Copyright is a property right.  Can a property right
exist in the absence of someone to own it?

Ec


from_name: dpbsmith at verizon.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] A case for recipes and how-tos

body:
Please forgive me if you've seen this rant elsewhere or if I've already ranted it here.  I've been ranting it here and there and not getting very much discussion. This is essentially what I posted recently in the Village Pump.

Appropriate how-to's should have a place in Wikipedia. I am beginning to feel this more and more. I agree that "Wikipedia articles should not be mere sets of instructions, but additionally provide historical context and further information." However, I am somewhat bemused by the apparent consensus that instructional articles are not encyclopedic. Given

a) the derivation of the word (-paideia, teaching or instruction),
b) the historical origins of the Britannica, where "utility" was a chief feature of the mission,
c) The lack of any deprecation on the What Wikipedia is Not page,
d) The apparent endorsement on the Wikipedia:How-to page,
I don't think articles should not be excluded merely on the basis of being how-tos.

An ideal encyclopedia should contain the elements of a full course of general education. Just because something could go in a textbook doesn't mean it should be excluded from an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia is a textbook--a comprehensive textbook, and "instruction" belongs in it as well as "information."

That's what I said in the Pump. Rambling on. I like that line "Wikipedia articles should not be mere sets of instructions, but additionally provide historical context and further information." I remember when my wife and I took a scuba course, circa 1970, and learned many things in the context of This Is The Way You Dive. Which it was, if you wanted to get PADI certification. Later, we encountered other divers from other countries and discovered that many of the things we had been taught as holy writ were merely _a_ way to dive.

So, yes, how-to's should ideally carry cultural context, an indication of the date and time, an indication of the "school" to which the how-to belongs ("this is how you write a barbershop arrangements _that meets SPEBSQSA contest requirements as of 2004;" "this is a recipe for sweet potato pie _as prepared in Virginia in 1970_," etc.) Controversies should be noted ("Some insist on mace in a Georgian flip, others maintain that only nutmeg is correct"). Intelligent discussion should surround the how-to.

One more thought. Childrens' encyclopedias, such as the Book of Knowledge and Childcraft, _always_ have contained how-to's.

And encyclopedias have always contained what might be called vague how-to's or how-to-LIKE articles. You can't actually build an atomic bomb from the article that once appeared in the Encyclopedia Americana, but IIRC it contained enough practical details to cause some concern.  The 1911 Britannica won't really tell you exactly how to build a lighthouse, but there is certainly a lot of detailed how-to-like information on the specifics of lighthouse lens design, what must be taken into account in choosing a suitable island, special concerns in building the masonry, etc. I believe it tells you how to do the mathematical calculations to properly curve a railroad track... things like that.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] problem on coronelli

body:
On Feb 24, 2004, at 10:17, Camille Constans wrote:
> Jimmy, we seem to have a pb, we cant access to coronelli, the 2nd
> squid cache, no ping, no ssh, nothing :)
>
> [shaihulud at suda data]$ ping coronelli.wikimedia.org
> PING coronelli (207.142.131.230) 56(84) bytes of data.
>> From suda (207.142.131.226) icmp_seq=1 Destination Host Unreachable
>> From suda (207.142.131.226) icmp_seq=2 Destination Host Unreachable
>
> Could you have a look or try to restart it ?

Apparently someone has restarted it?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject:
[WikiEN-l] HOWTOs/Recipes/Instructions and other
	imperative	content

body:
Geoff Burling wrote:

>I'm throwing out an argument against the concept that an encyclopedia
>should be "informative, not instructional", based on one datum: for many
>years (perhaps even now, but at least into the 1960's) it was not
>uncommon for people to teach themselves how to play chess from the article
>in the encyclopedia.
>
POV: A chessboard has 64 squares.

NPOV: Experts claim that a chessboard has 64 squares.

I wonder where this leads us. :-)

Ec


from_name: Richard Stallman

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: New "GNU Free Media Licence"? - was: What would
	Richard Stallman say?

in_reply_to:
<200402232154.51816.news@RobertMichel.de> (message from Robert
	Michel on Mon, 23 Feb 2004 21:54:51 +0100)

references:
<E1AuAuo-0001oK-1j@fencepost.gnu.org>
	<200402202011.45801.news@RobertMichel.de>
	<E1Av2Hq-0006TY-Ob@fencepost.gnu.org>
	<200402232154.51816.news@RobertMichel.de>

body:
    So I can state that there hasn`t been a discussion about a special GNU licence
    for pictures yet and nobody dissagreed that there is probably a need for one.

I don't think that the question of a "license for images" is a
well-posed question.  The ethical requirements depend more on the
purpose of the work (entertainment or education, say) than on the
medium (image or text, say).  Images in textbooks should be free,
including the freedom to publish modified versions, and the GFDL is a
good license to use.

Images meant for entertainment are a different issue, and I would
probably recommend using one of the Creative Commons licenses for
them.

There is no difficulty in including images in a GFDL-covered work.  It
isn't necessary to mention images specifically in the license because
the same conditions apply to text, images, and whatever else the work
may contain.


body:
    B - getting the right to use this picture only on official Wikipedia server/
    mirrors, CD-Roms & official Wikipedia books (a special new licence)
    C - getting the right to use this picture with a redused quality and size
    D - creating a non public pay per view area inside the wikipedia

If Wikipedia did any of these things, it would no longer be free.  We
would need to start another project to be the free encyclopedia.
It makes no sense to put completeness above freedom.  Wikipedia should
do as good a job as it can do while remaining free.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] What would Richard Stallman say? (IP users)

body:
    Writer owns the copyright forever no matter what. Even if you made smth for
    hire, you still owns the copyright.

In the US, the copyright on a work made for hire belongs to the
employer.  The employer is the copyright holder, from the very start,
and the employer is considered the author.

I believe this is also true in the EU, but my memory is less certain
as regards the EU.  If you want to be certain, please ask an EU lawyer.


from_name: Caroline Ford

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Look, I appreciate people chiming in with information, but if you
>don't know what you're talking about, please don't chime in as if you
>are speaking authoritatively.  This is an unmoderated list, so you're
>welcome to post, but really, I think a bit of restraint is in good
>taste.
>
>For the record, the stuff that talthen at wp.pl wrote is all completely
>wrong, and has absolutely no applicability to anything we're
>discussing.
>
>And a lot of stuff that other people are writing, though I prefer not
>to name names, is equally speculative and wrong.
>
>--Jimbo
>_______________________________________________
>
>
>
Which is all fair enough and demonstrates the fact that we need proper
advice on this subject.

With advice we can then make a proper policy, rather than going round in
circles.

I think one problem here is that some contributors seem to presume that
US law is the same as law in the rest of the world. This causes non US
contributors to state the law in their country as they see it.

We need advice on not only what US law allows us to do (ie fair use etc)
but what effect this would have on publishing the works in a country
outside the US.

Caroline /Secretlondon


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Instructions

body:
Anthere wrote:

>> I'd like to see a book of Anthere's recipes...
>>
>> Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed
>
>
> That would be with pleasure that I offer you the recipee for the
> Pastilla I promised to Ponteauchat recently Ed.

If Ed contributed we would have a real Ant and Uncle Cookbook. :-)

> However, I will not lose my time writing a recipee that will be
> immediatly listed on votes for deletion, and that will indeed be
> deleted, unless *I* make the effort to make a stub for it to preserve
> the link. The current proposition is that unless someone make a stub
> for it, the page will be deleted and no link to recipee preserved.

Ah!!!  So they're back to their old tricks at the Vandals for Deletion
page .

> This is the current proposition
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:Ratatouille&diff=2514708&oldid=2514051
>
>
> I am lucky, I went from "unique complainer" to "minority on the subject".
>
> So, the proposition is that unless someone make the specific effort to
> save the article, it will be deleted and links not preserved.

Maybe it's up to the person complaining to make the changes.  They
should learn to do something useful, rather than just going around
destroying other people's work.  A lot of people have said keep, but
they've moved the recipe anyway to create a fait accomplis

> I have a couple of options.
> * Either I spent several hours per week making stubs for recipees
> articles, in order to save them from deletionists. I dunno if it is
> the way I foresee my future in wikipedia;
>
> * Or I undelete all deleted articles, till a compromise is found, or I
> end up in front of arbitration for abuse; somehow, that fits my
> personality better :-)

Undeleting would be most appropriate.  There's a need to stand up to
these bullies.

Ec


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Fair use in the UK

body:
Sheldon Rampton wrote:
> http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/0,7495,900093,00.html

That's the report I remember, too.

--Jimbo


subject:
[WikiEN-l] WIPE syndrome (was: HOWTOs/Recipes/Instructions and
	other imperative content)

body:
Speaking of "Wikipedia articles using an instructional imperative",
check out Irismeister's keen rant:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Irismeister/wipe_syndrome

Ed Poor


from_name: Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen

subject: [Wikitech-l] DNS servers.

body:
On Mon, 23 Feb 2004, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> I trust Daniel completely, so I'm satisfied with his word on this.  His
> intentions have been stated publicly, and that's good enough for me.

The problem is that one can never trust a company. Companies regularly go back
on their words if it's profitable for them. Also, companies can go bust and
their property sold off to to cover debts.

This also goes for my company, and it's made me think I should try to transfer
it to some local organization instead - a LUUG or the local branch of the EFF.

These are considerations we should take with all such domains, and with all
contact we have with companies: Only contracts and licenses will do.

---

Btut I still don't know who to contact in order to hook up the domain to
Wikipedia's DNS servers.

Can anyone help me here?

-- Daniel


from_name: Timwi

subject: [WikiEN-l] Time hierarchy theorem

body:
Hi,

this may seem like an odd request, but if there are any Computer
Scientists here, especially Complexity Theorists, I am wondering if
anyone could help me fill in the proof for the Time hierarchy theorem:

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

I seem to be unable to find a proof for it elsewhere on the Internet.

Thanks,
Timwi


from_name: Sheldon Rampton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Fair use in the UK

body:
Jimbo wrote:

>For example, a British newspaper distributed in France was fined for
>calling Jacques Chirac a worm.  That's an inexcusable violation of
>human rights on the part of the French government, but it doesn't seem
>likely to cause us any trouble since we srupulously avoid making ALL
>controversial claims.  We would, of course, report on the flap, in a
>neutral manner, but French law is not (to my knowledge) an obstacle to
>that.

Are you sure of that? I remember the "worm"
incident. The Sun, a British tabloid owned by
Rupert Murdoch, carried a front-page, full-page
illustration in which they doctored to a photo of
Chirac's head by putting it on a worm's body. The
only mention of a fine that I can find, however,
is the following report in the Guardian:

http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/0,7495,900093,00.html

This report says that the Sun "could be forced to
pay a ?30,000 fine," noting that the French
capital is "unused to a press that taunts
politicians so openly. ... The tabloid's
controversial stance breaks a French law that
makes it a criminal offence to insult the
president. Breaking the law carries a fine up
45,000 euros." However, it doesn't say that a
fine was actually levied or that anyone even
attempted to do so. This story was then picked up
in "Little Green Footballs," a pro-war,
conservative blog, which complained that "the Sun
will be fined 30,000 pounds" because of the
stunt. However, LGF's only source is the Guardian
article:

http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=5641

If someone wants to criticize the French law, I'd
have no problem with that (just as I'd have no
problem with someone criticizing England's
repressive libel law). In practice, however,
British libel laws don't prevent the tabloids
from engaging in reckless and often obnoxious
journalism, and the same is probably true in
France. The mere fact that a law is on the books
doesn't mean that it is always (or even often)
enforced.

The "worm" incident is probably just one more
example of the Murdoch media's habit of acting
like jerks and then pretending they've been
persecuted for it when they haven't.
--
--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
|     Weapons of Mass Deception
--------------------------------


body:
Geoff Burling wrote:

>I'm throwing out an argument against the concept that an encyclopedia
>should be "informative, not instructional", based on one datum: for many
>years (perhaps even now, but at least into the 1960's) it was not
>uncommon for people to teach themselves how to play chess from the article
>in the encyclopedia.
>
>
But I think we can do this from the "informative, not instructional"
standpoint.  Our articles on chess already provide a good foundation for
someone interesting in learning, including both a general description of
the game and specific strategies for various parts of the game and
various situations (even a database of common openings and counters!).
And it's all from a descriptive point of view, not a "how to play chess"
point of view.

I just really don't like the condescending tone of "this is how you do
this".  Just *describe* things.  We are in no position to give
instructions, because we just report on what other people say; we don't
do original research and come up with our own tutorials, because that's
well outside our mission (which explicitly states "no original research").

-Mark


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bureaucrat on French Wikipedia

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
>
>> From: "Nicolas Weeger" <nweeger at noos.fr>
>>
>>> Guillaume Blanchard a rit :
>>>
>>>> You created a statu of bureaucrat so Wikipedias are not any more
>>>> need to
>>>> request the developers to ratify the vote of the new administrators,
>>>> but the
>>>>
>>>> only user who has this statu on French Wikipia is a user that don't
>>>> taking
>>>>
>>>> part in French Wikipedia and who don't speak French. Can you make some
>>>> French-speaking bureaucrats?
>>>>
>>> Unless i'm mistaking, any sysop can make other users sysop.
>>> Bureaucrat kind of disappeared :)
>>>
>>
>> On French Wikipedia, sysop get a message "you need bureaucrat statu" when
>> trying to acces the "Turn a user into a sysop" page.
>>
> I tried to promote someone at Wikisource and got the same message.

I tried to set it up so that any sysop could do it, but Erik reverted it
back to the bureaucrat scheme.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: HOWTOs/Recipes/Instructions and other
	imperativecontent

body:
Jimmy-

> I don't buy the argument that recipes are inherently POV.  First of
> all, it's a bit odd to think of a recipe as potentially biased, isn't
> it?  I suppose it's possible for one to be biased about a recipe "This
> is the only proper way to boil an egg".  But it's also entirely
> possible to be NPOV, by giving alternate methods in the same article
> or in different articles.

Well, Jimbo, there are more complicated recipes than boiling eggs ;-). And
the more complicated it is, the more annoying it will be when you're
trying to follow it and have to deal with separating the points of view.
Worst of all, these POVs will become inconsistent with one another, so you
have to follow who is saying what in order to produce something edible.
The egg faction argues .. the milk advocates claim .. but the water
admirers feel ..

I agree with the notion that recipes should be either on Wikibooks, or on
a separate project. What's wrong with that? It's not like content moved to
Wikibooks is somehow lost to the project. We can still link to it.

If someone wants to write an NPOV article *about* a certain recipe, its
history, the different variants etc., than that may have a place in
Wikipedia. But the two are fundamentally different.

I believe Wikibooks also needs more mothers.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] HOWTOs/Recipes/Instructions and otherimperative	content

body:
I think you mean, in Western chess's main variant, a chessboard has 64
squares. There's also fairy chess, 3-d chess, etc.

And in Korean/Chinese chess, the pieces aren't placed on squares at all!
Rather, on the points where the lines of a 10 x 9 grid intersect.

Bonus question: How many squares on a Go board?

Tricky Ol' Uncle Ed


from_name: David Friedland

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: HOWTOs/Recipes/Instructions and other imperative
	content

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Geoff Burling wrote:
>
>> I'm throwing out an argument against the concept that an encyclopedia
>> should be "informative, not instructional", based on one datum: for many
>> years (perhaps even now, but at least into the 1960's) it was not
>> uncommon for people to teach themselves how to play chess from the
>> article
>> in the encyclopedia.
>>
> POV: A chessboard has 64 squares.
>
> NPOV: Experts claim that a chessboard has 64 squares.
>
> I wonder where this leads us. :-)
>
> Ec

More like:

POV: Don't wait too long to castle or you may leave your king in an
easily attacked position.

NPOV: Some chess analysts say that failure to castle early in the game
results in the king being in a position that is easily attacked. Others
instead argue that waiting to castle leaves with you more options for
protecting the king.

(I just made this up, I know almost nothing about chess strategy)

The point is you don't have to give instructions to explain how a game
is played. You can just _explain_ how the game is played.

And besides:

NPOV: Most chessboards have 64 squares, although some variants of chess
are played on larger or smaller boards.

-- David


subject: [WikiEN-l] Question about images and GFDL

body:
Hi,

a few days ago I added two images that I took at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_College%2C_Cambridge

Silly me forgot to mention that I took those pictures and that I am
releasing them under the GNU FDL.

Now, [[User:Imran]] came along and added {{msg:unverified}} to one of
them: http://tinyurl.com/2t5bd - This, I can understand, because I
completely forgot to mention the source of the image and everything.

However, the same user added {{msg:GFDL}} to the other image:
http://tinyurl.com/2auzx - This, I'm a little puzzled about. How were
they to know that the image was GFDLed?

Thanks for any insight,
Timwi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Lost Sheep department

body:
See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ed_Poor#Plautus_Satire_Chooses_Wi
kirolemodel

I hope this is for real :-)

Ed Poor
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from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Category feature fixed

body:
I was reminded (thanks, Erik!) that the category feature in the CVS was
not working. I /think/ I fixed it (now in CVS). Try it by setting
$wgUseCategoryMagic=true in LocalSettings.

Magnus


from_name: Imran Ghory

body:
On Tue, 24 Feb 2004, Timwi wrote:

> Now, [[User:Imran]] came along and added {{msg:unverified}} to one of
> them: http://tinyurl.com/2t5bd - This, I can understand, because I
> completely forgot to mention the source of the image and everything.
>
> However, the same user added {{msg:GFDL}} to the other image:
> http://tinyurl.com/2auzx - This, I'm a little puzzled about. How were
> they to know that the image was GFDLed?

I was going on the assumption (as some of the other taggers are) that
if the photo was taken by a wikipedian and that the wikipedian was likely
to understand the GFDL (primarily sysops and other long-term regulars)
then unless they stated otherwise I assumed that it was under GFDL (as the
image upload page states). If I'm not satisfied on either of these
accounts then I mark it unverified.

When I came across the first image I wasn't sure and didn't check your
userpage, but when I came across the other images from Cambridge I checked
it and came to the conclusion that you took the photos and were familiar
with the GFDL upload policy.

Normally in most cases I would mark an image with no information as
unverified, as I'm trying to work fairly rapidly through the images
(spending 5-10 seconds/image) and unless there's a block of images
uploaded by the same user I don't normally bother to try and find out what
the licence should be.

Imran
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran


from_name: Camille Constans

subject: [Wikitech-l] problem on coronelli

body:
Jimmy, we seem to have a pb, we cant access to coronelli, the 2nd squid cache, no ping, no ssh, nothing :)

[shaihulud at suda data]$ ping coronelli.wikimedia.org
PING coronelli (207.142.131.230) 56(84) bytes of data.
>From suda (207.142.131.226) icmp_seq=1 Destination Host Unreachable
>From suda (207.142.131.226) icmp_seq=2 Destination Host Unreachable

Could you have a look or try to restart it ?

Thanks

Shaihulud


from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbitration

body:
My request for arbitration with Wik has been sitting there since February 18, and not a single step has been accomplished.  Is anything going to get done, or is this just a black hole?

RickK

---------------------------------
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subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: New "GNU Free Media Licence"? - was: What
	would Richard Stallman say?

body:
On Tue, 24 Feb 2004, Richard Stallman wrote:

>     B - getting the right to use this picture only on official Wikipedia server/
>     mirrors, CD-Roms & official Wikipedia books (a special new licence)
>     C - getting the right to use this picture with a redused quality and size
>     D - creating a non public pay per view area inside the wikipedia
>
> If Wikipedia did any of these things, it would no longer be free.  We
> would need to start another project to be the free encyclopedia.
> It makes no sense to put completeness above freedom.  Wikipedia should
> do as good a job as it can do while remaining free.

I would assume that what Jimbo meant with point C here is that we got the
copyright owners to put a version of the image of reduced quality and size
under the GFDL (or a compatible license).

Scaling down an image is a lossy operation, so the owner needn't worry that we
we (or someone using Wikipedia material) scaled that image back up - the
quality wouldn't improve, and certainly not match the requirements of the
customers professional photographers usually pander to.

But it would still be very useful to us, certainly better than nothing, and
Free / Libre.

I see it is quite likely that photographers would agree to something like this.
With proper attribution, it might even turn out to be profitable for them.

Or am I missing something?

-- Daniel


subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbitration

body:
Rick wrote:

> My request for arbitration with Wik has been sitting there since
> February 18, and not a single step has been accomplished.  Is anything
> going to get done, or is this just a black hole?

Arbitration in Wik's case has been accepted (I think this is noted on
the page somewhere, though the page is badly in need of some
reorganization), and is currently being discussed.

-Mark


from_name: Robert Michel

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: New "GNU Free Media Licence"? - was: What would
 Richard Stallman say?

references:
<E1AuAuo-0001oK-1j@fencepost.gnu.org>
	<200402232154.51816.news@RobertMichel.de>
	<E1Avgj8-0006Vu-Ag@fencepost.gnu.org>

body:
Salve,

probably my list was not complete:
Am Dienstag, 24. Februar 2004 18:52 schrieb Richard Stallman:
>> B - getting the right to use this picture only on official Wikipedia
>> server/ mirrors, CD-Roms & official Wikipedia books (a special new licence)
>> C - getting the right to use this picture with a redused quality and size
>> D - creating a non public pay per view area inside the wikipedia
>
> If Wikipedia did any of these things, it would no longer be free.  We
> would need to start another project to be the free encyclopedia.

*g* My intention was not to start B,C or D, only to try to list all
possibilities - I agree that this wouldn`t belongs to a free project.

> It makes no sense to put completeness above freedom.  Wikipedia should
> do as good a job as it can do while remaining free.

Wouldn`t be this aim also would match for
>> E - using this picture with "fair use"
?

So instead of B or E we could please the right owner to support us with the
use:
Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 1.0
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

Because these licenses will
- make shure that wikipeadia could use it still in future
- let us use it internationaly, too
- be an advantage for the right owner, becouse it would be more restrictive
than "fair use".

I would be really happier, when Wikipedianer would ask for a license, instead
of beeing too lazy and argue only with "fair use".
rob


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: recipes

body:
Peter Jaros wrote:

> On Feb 24, 2004, at 10:31 AM, Dan Miller wrote:
>
>> I'd have fewer problems if they were accompanied by an
>> article on the food item in question.  A recipe, on
>> its own, doesn't belong in an encyclopedia.
>
>
> Again, however, as someone said earlier, an encyclopedia ought to be
> *de*criptive, not *pro*scriptive.

The only ones that are proscribing the work of others are those wanting
to delete these recipes.

> Thus, cocktail recipes might be more appropriate than, say, cake
> recipes (in their respective articles).  A Cosmopolitan, for instance,
> is made according to more or less one recipe, whereas there are myriad
> recipes for, for example, chocolate cake which are more than slight
> variations of one another.

If there is more than one recipe, than why not just show how they vary?

> Giving a recipe for a particular chocolate cake would not serve to
> describe chocolate cake.  If one recipe was particularly famous,
> however, it might merit its own section (or possibly article; I'd like
> to try *that* cake) where the recipe *would* be descriptive.  It's a
> subtle distinction, but an important one.  It comes through to
> readers, if only in terms of a sense of the style.

That's very patronizing of you.

Ec


body:
Peter Jaros wrote:

> On Feb 24, 2004, at 2:11 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> Instructions, even though written in the imperative, are still
>> descriptive.  The only penalty may be that your cake won't rise, or
>> worse, you may blow yourself up and earn a Darwin Award. :-\   No
>> penalty will be applied by any other person.
>
> There are are two issues here of encyclopedicity (so to speak).  One
> is the content: encyclopedia articles should be descriptive, which
> instructions are.  The other is style: encyclopedia articles should
> *sound* descriptive, which instructions don't.  Thus, much of this cam
> be cleared up by rephrasing certain sentences.

If it is only a question of "sounding descriptive" then your solution of
rephrasing sentences would be more appropriate than destroying the work
of others.

Ec


from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Instructions

body:
> I'd like to see a book of Anthere's recipes...
>
> Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed

That would be with pleasure that I offer you the recipee for the
Pastilla I promised to Ponteauchat recently Ed.

However, I will not lose my time writing a recipee that will be
immediatly listed on votes for deletion, and that will indeed be
deleted, unless *I* make the effort to make a stub for it to preserve
the link. The current proposition is that unless someone make a stub for
it, the page will be deleted and no link to recipee preserved.

This is the current proposition

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:Ratatouille&diff=2514708&oldid=2514051

I am lucky, I went from "unique complainer" to "minority on the subject".

So, the proposition is that unless someone make the specific effort to
save the article, it will be deleted and links not preserved.

I have a couple of options.
* Either I spent several hours per week making stubs for recipees
articles, in order to save them from deletionists. I dunno if it is the
way I foresee my future in wikipedia;

* Or I undelete all deleted articles, till a compromise is found, or I
end up in front of arbitration for abuse; somehow, that fits my
personality better :-)


subject: [Wikitech-l] DNS servers.

body:
On Tue, 24 Feb 2004, Ray Saintonge wrote:

>> The problem is that one can never trust a company. Companies regularly go
>> on their words if it's profitable for them. Also, companies can go bust and
>> their property sold off to to cover debts.

> Bankruptcies can have an uncertain effect on copyrights.  When the
> assets are liquidated the company's copyrights may be completely
> ignored, or not noticed at all.  They are not distributed or sold as
> assets.  My contention would be that when the bankruptcy is discharged
> without a distribution of copyrights, that would put the copyrights into
> the public domain.  Copyright is a property right.  Can a property right
> exist in the absence of someone to own it?

For a software company, I don't think copyrights will be ignored. And it's
wishful thinking to believe the copyrights of a bankrupt software company
vanish in a puff og logic.

Also, a company can be subject to hostile takeovers (for instance if a majority
of stockholders in my company go personally bankrupt).

We should plan for the worst case scenario.

(Which is why at my company the individual programmer always keeps copyright,
while the company gets to use the software under the GPL.)

-- Daniel


from_name: ciaran

subject: [Wikitech-l] Unbelieveable 1.1.0

body:
I really wish I hadn't "upgraded" to this recommended version. But I
won't go into all the issues here.

One question: The status of links (broken, existing) NO LONGER UPDATE on
any Wiki posts. Does anyone know why this is? I don't ever plan on
implementing memcache (the lack of real documentation as to how I can do
it being the primary reason)... is this an issue for future wikipedia
releases? Is memcache (or lack thereof) ruining the Wiki's ability to
update broken/not broken links?

I have memcache turned off, and the MediaWiki namespace turned off as well.

Thanks for answers.
ciaran


from_name: Elisabeth Bauer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Instructions

body:
Anthere wrote:

> However, I will not lose my time writing a recipee that will be
> immediatly listed on votes for deletion, and that will indeed be
> deleted, unless *I* make the effort to make a stub for it to preserve
> the link. The current proposition is that unless someone make a stub for
> it, the page will be deleted and no link to recipee preserved.

How I am supposed to cook a ratatouille after this poor stub when left
out on a lonely planet with nothing but Wikipedia? (I took it with me
because I thought it was a all-comprehensive encyclopedia and I'd need
no other books)

Shit, I should have better taken the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy
instead.

How are archeologues in 2000 years supposed to know how the old French
cooked a ratatouille, if we don't tell them? Sorry, this is human
knowledge and should not be left out of an encyclopedia.

greetings,
elian


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Fair use in the UK

body:
I remember that discussion of last year Jimbo.
Afaik, there was no fine, just threat of a fine.
Politics.

Sheldon Rampton a ?crit:
> Jimbo wrote:
>
>> For example, a British newspaper distributed in France was fined for
>> calling Jacques Chirac a worm.  That's an inexcusable violation of
>> human rights on the part of the French government, but it doesn't seem
>> likely to cause us any trouble since we srupulously avoid making ALL
>> controversial claims.  We would, of course, report on the flap, in a
>> neutral manner, but French law is not (to my knowledge) an obstacle to
>> that.
>
>
> Are you sure of that? I remember the "worm" incident. The Sun, a British
> tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, carried a front-page, full-page
> illustration in which they doctored to a photo of Chirac's head by
> putting it on a worm's body. The only mention of a fine that I can find,
> however, is the following report in the Guardian:
>
> http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/0,7495,900093,00.html
>
> This report says that the Sun "could be forced to pay a ?30,000 fine,"
> noting that the French capital is "unused to a press that taunts
> politicians so openly. ... The tabloid's controversial stance breaks a
> French law that makes it a criminal offence to insult the president.
> Breaking the law carries a fine up 45,000 euros." However, it doesn't
> say that a fine was actually levied or that anyone even attempted to do
> so. This story was then picked up in "Little Green Footballs," a
> pro-war, conservative blog, which complained that "the Sun will be fined
> 30,000 pounds" because of the stunt. However, LGF's only source is the
> Guardian article:
>
> http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=5641
>
> If someone wants to criticize the French law, I'd have no problem with
> that (just as I'd have no problem with someone criticizing England's
> repressive libel law). In practice, however, British libel laws don't
> prevent the tabloids from engaging in reckless and often obnoxious
> journalism, and the same is probably true in France. The mere fact that
> a law is on the books doesn't mean that it is always (or even often)
> enforced.
>
> The "worm" incident is probably just one more example of the Murdoch
> media's habit of acting like jerks and then pretending they've been
> persecuted for it when they haven't.


from_name: Peter Jaros

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: recipes

body:
On Feb 24, 2004, at 10:31 AM, Dan Miller wrote:

> I'd have fewer problems if they were accompanied by an
> article on the food item in question.  A recipe, on
> its own, doesn't belong in an encyclopedia.

Again, however, as someone said earlier, an encyclopedia ought to be
*de*criptive, not *pro*scriptive.  Thus, cocktail recipes might be more
appropriate than, say, cake recipes (in their respective articles).  A
Cosmopolitan, for instance, is made according to more or less one
recipe, whereas there are myriad recipes for, for example, chocolate
cake which are more than slight variations of one another.

Giving a recipe for a particular chocolate cake would not serve to
describe chocolate cake.  If one recipe was particularly famous,
however, it might merit its own section (or possibly article; I'd like
to try *that* cake) where the recipe *would* be descriptive.  It's a
subtle distinction, but an important one.  It comes through to readers,
if only in terms of a sense of the style.

Peter

                                  -- ---<>--- --
                        A house without walls cannot fall.
           Help build the world's largest encyclopedia at Wikipedia.org
                                  -- ---<>--- --


body:
On Feb 24, 2004, at 2:11 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Instructions, even though written in the imperative, are still
> descriptive.  The only penalty may be that your cake won't rise, or
> worse, you may blow yourself up and earn a Darwin Award. :-\   No
> penalty will be applied by any other person.

There are are two issues here of encyclopedicity (so to speak).  One is
the content: encyclopedia articles should be descriptive, which
instructions are.  The other is style: encyclopedia articles should
*sound* descriptive, which instructions don't.  Thus, much of this cam
be cleared up by rephrasing certain sentences.

Peter

                                  -- ---<>--- --
                        A house without walls cannot fall.
           Help build the world's largest encyclopedia at Wikipedia.org
                                  -- ---<>--- --


subject: [Wikitech-l] problem on coronelli

body:
On Tue, 24 Feb 2004 12:28:03 -0800
Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:

> On Feb 24, 2004, at 10:17, Camille Constans wrote:
> > Jimmy, we seem to have a pb, we cant access to coronelli, the 2nd
> > squid cache, no ping, no ssh, nothing :)
> >
> > [shaihulud at suda data]$ ping coronelli.wikimedia.org
> > PING coronelli (207.142.131.230) 56(84) bytes of data.
> >> From suda (207.142.131.226) icmp_seq=1 Destination Host Unreachable
> >> From suda (207.142.131.226) icmp_seq=2 Destination Host Unreachable
> >
> > Could you have a look or try to restart it ?
>
> Apparently someone has restarted it?
>

Yes jimmy, restarted it. Dont know why it crashed


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] HOWTOs/Recipes/Instructions and other imperativecontent

body:
Delirium wrote:
>I just really don't like the condescending tone of "this
>is how you do this".  Just *describe* things.  We are
>in no position to give instructions, because we just
>report on what other people say; we don't  do original
>research and come up with our own tutorials, because
>that's well outside our mission (which explicitly states
>"no original research").

Exactly. The goal of Wikibooks is to instruct, the goal of Wikipedia, at least
the English Wikipedia, is to inform. We can still inform readers how some
people instruct others, but we should *not* be the ones doing the instructing.
To do so would be a violation of our NPOV policy as practiced in the context of
Wikipedia.

This was one of the main reasons why I proposed a different neutrality policy
for Wikibooks. The compromise was to use NPOV but to limit the focus of
textbooks so that they are still useful in instruction.

But different cultures will have different ideas about what is appropriate to
include in an encyclopedia or textbook, so I don't pretend to extend this
concept to the other language Wikipedias (where instructional material may very
well be appropriate to have in an encyclopedia for their culture).

Wikipedia is already a run-away success. Let's not impoverish Wikibooks by
duplicating that project's content and mission.

-- mav

__________________________________
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: recipes

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
>The only ones that are proscribing the work of others are
>those wanting to delete these recipes.

Deleting is bad. Moving is better. But the best thing to do would be to create
an actual encyclopedia article on the subject and move the "two cups flour, one
dash of salt..." stuff to Wikibooks. But informing readers about the different
ways a particular dish is created can be very encyclopedic if done correctly
(others have gone over how to do that better than I can).

--mav

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: HOWTOs/Recipes/Instructions and other imperativecontent

body:
Cimon Avaro wrote:
>(pardon my french) The original french encyclopaedists
>made a point of detailing as many crafts and industries
>as possible, down to the most minute detail, with graphic
>illustrations capable of practical implementation. This is
>what made them notable in their own time as spreading
>the industrial revolution.

And the ones in the English tradition have tended to shy away from
instructional material and language.

Again, different cultures will have different ideas about how to best organize
information. The instructional/informative and textbook/encyclopedia
distinction seems to me to be rather prevalent in the English language
tradition.

But different cultures may have different ways of doing things. However, much
of the current situation can be fixed by converting the recipes into
encyclopedia articles (informative voice) and moving the rest to Wikibooks.

Both projects would benefit from this.

I do not favor deletion.

-- mav

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from_name: Gabriel Wicke

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: problem on coronelli

body:
On Tue, 24 Feb 2004 12:28:03 -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:

Hi Brion,

this is from /var/log/messages:

Feb 24 08:24:32 coronelli kernel: nfs: server zwinger.wikimedia.org not responding, still trying
Feb 24 08:24:35 coronelli kernel: nfs: server zwinger.wikimedia.org OK

(....)

Feb 24 08:30:10 coronelli sshd[5007]: Accepted publickey for e23 from 207.142.131.234 port 57719 ssh2

(....)

Feb 24 08:34:17 coronelli kernel: IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=00:30:48:71:5d:00:00:02:fc:0c:b4:00:08:00 SRC=69.31.11.21 DST=207.142.131.236 LEN=57 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=59 ID=0
DF PROTO=ICMP TYPE=8 CODE=0 ID=57185 SEQ=59478
Feb 24 08:34:17 coronelli kernel: IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=00:30:48:71:5d:00:00:02:fc:0c:b4:00:08:00 SRC=69.31.11.21 DST=207.142.131.236 LEN=57 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=59 ID=0
DF PROTO=ICMP TYPE=8 CODE=0 ID=36193 SEQ=62838
Feb 24 08:34:35 coronelli kernel: IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=00:30:48:71:5d:00:00:02:fc:0c:b4:00:08:00 SRC=69.25.7.20 DST=207.142.131.236 LEN=84 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=56 ID=0 DF PROTO=ICMP TYPE=8 CODE=0 ID=1095 SEQ=51910
Feb 24 08:34:38 coronelli kernel: IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=00:30:48:71:5d:00:00:02:fc:0c:b4:00:08:00 SRC=69.25.7.20 DST=207.142.131.236 LEN=84 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=56 ID=0 DF PROTO=ICMP TYPE=8 CODE=0 ID=1095 SEQ=25607
Feb 24 08:34:51 coronelli kernel: IN=eth0 OUT= MAC=01:00:5e:00:00:01:00:10:dc:da:af:34:08:00 SRC=64.157.176.36 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=32 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=1259 PROTO=2
Feb 24 10:18:34 coronelli syslogd 1.4.1: restart.
Feb 24 10:18:34 coronelli syslog: syslogd startup succeeded

Nothing to see really, hard to tell the reason.
--
Gabriel Wicke


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Instructions

body:
Anthere wrote:

>>> This is the current proposition
>>>
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:Ratatouille&diff=2514708&oldid=2514051
>>>
>>>
>>> I am lucky, I went from "unique complainer" to "minority on the
>>> subject".
>>>
>>> So, the proposition is that unless someone make the specific effort
>>> to save the article, it will be deleted and links not preserved.
>>
>> Maybe it's up to the person complaining to make the changes.  They
>> should learn to do something useful, rather than just going around
>> destroying other people's work.  A lot of people have said keep, but
>> they've moved the recipe anyway to create a fait accompli
>
> Yes, except that the vfd is a pot au feu, sorry, a pit fire. I never
> go there. How can I guess that deletionists are slowly, insidiously,
> sneakily, making all good recipes of serious honest food disappear, to
> make us all eat plastic steack when that is all that is left ?
>
> Since the consensus is "delete, eat food raw, or buy a microwave to
> survive", I asked Erik a new feature that would warn me when vandalism
> over recipees is under way.

Forgive me if  I vent my frustrations about the incrdible ignorance of
the deletionists.  I really haven't had anything to do with recipes, but
I do believe that they quite properly belong in Wikipedia.  I would be
inclined to add more if I had any idea about the subject.  If people
want to start a systematic cookbook in Wikibooks I have no objection to
that; it could even include some or all of the recipes that are in
Wikipedia.  That's no reason to delete them from Wikipedia.

I joined this project with the hope of being able to make constructive
contributions.  I would prefer doing that to looking over my shoulder to
see where some gang wants to keep imposing its narrow views on everybody
else.  Those of us who would give the proposed deletions a fair
consideration don't have the time to waste going over each one in the
detail that they deserve.  Unless people can view these proposed
deletions fairly, any vote for deletion is essentially illegitimate.

Let me know, Anthere, if you need help in reverting these changes.

Ec


body:
Charles Matthews wrote:

>Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote
>
>>>Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>>>Bonus question: How many squares on a Go board?
>>>
>>Depends.
>>
>>Normally none. But if you are a master, one.
>>
>That's POV.  A leading expert claims 42.  Details supplied if you need them.
>
Hmm!  I recently learned that 42 was the meaning of life and everything.
 That goes beyond go.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Instructions

body:
Ray Saintonge a ?crit:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>>> I'd like to see a book of Anthere's recipes...
>>>
>>> Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed
>>
>>
>>
>> That would be with pleasure that I offer you the recipee for the
>> Pastilla I promised to Ponteauchat recently Ed.
>
>
> If Ed contributed we would have a real Ant and Uncle Cookbook. :-)

We'll put bromide in all recipees...

>> However, I will not lose my time writing a recipee that will be
>> immediatly listed on votes for deletion, and that will indeed be
>> deleted, unless *I* make the effort to make a stub for it to preserve
>> the link. The current proposition is that unless someone make a stub
>> for it, the page will be deleted and no link to recipee preserved.
>
>
> Ah!!!  So they're back to their old tricks at the Vandals for Deletion
> page .

Yesssssssss

>> This is the current proposition
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:Ratatouille&diff=2514708&oldid=2514051
>>
>>
>> I am lucky, I went from "unique complainer" to "minority on the subject".
>>
>> So, the proposition is that unless someone make the specific effort to
>> save the article, it will be deleted and links not preserved.
>
>
> Maybe it's up to the person complaining to make the changes.  They
> should learn to do something useful, rather than just going around
> destroying other people's work.  A lot of people have said keep, but
> they've moved the recipe anyway to create a fait accomplis

Yes, except that the vfd is a pot au feu, sorry, a pit fire. I never go
there. How can I guess that deletionists are slowly, insidiously,
sneakily, making all good recipes of serious honest food disappear, to
make us all eat plastic steack when that is all that is left ?

Since the consensus is "delete, eat food raw, or buy a microwave to
survive", I asked Erik a new feature that would warn me when vandalism
over recipees is under way.

>> I have a couple of options.
>> * Either I spent several hours per week making stubs for recipees
>> articles, in order to save them from deletionists. I dunno if it is
>> the way I foresee my future in wikipedia;
>>
>> * Or I undelete all deleted articles, till a compromise is found, or I
>> end up in front of arbitration for abuse; somehow, that fits my
>> personality better :-)
>
>
> Undeleting would be most appropriate.  There's a need to stand up to
> these bullies.
>
> Ec


body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>Delirium wrote:
>
>>I just really don't like the condescending tone of "this
>>is how you do this".  Just *describe* things.  We are
>>in no position to give instructions, because we just
>>report on what other people say; we don't  do original
>>research and come up with our own tutorials, because
>>that's well outside our mission (which explicitly states
>>"no original research").
>>
>Exactly. The goal of Wikibooks is to instruct, the goal of Wikipedia, at least
>the English Wikipedia, is to inform. We can still inform readers how some
>people instruct others, but we should *not* be the ones doing the instructing.
>To do so would be a violation of our NPOV policy as practiced in the context of
>Wikipedia.
>
There's a great deal of overlap between instruct and inform.  For some
of us instruct is only a form of inform to deal with practical skills.
 Everybody who has been here for any length of time accepts NPOV, but it
is a variable term whose application can vary with circumstance.  There
is a big difference between how NPOV relates to a fractious political
issue, and how it relates to practical instruction.  None of the current
debate on recipes has been based on who has the best recipe for making
whatever dish,  The NPOV argument has focused on whether the use of the
imperative mood implies POV, and that is debatable.

>This was one of the main reasons why I proposed a different neutrality policy
>for Wikibooks. The compromise was to use NPOV but to limit the focus of
>textbooks so that they are still useful in instruction.
>
I don't think that the nature of NPOV alone should be the key
distinguishing factor between two projects.  We can do much better.  I
support Wikibooks but don't spend much time there.  My own vision of it
is as a place for the more organized and comprehensive treatment of
various subjects.  There is considerable room for overlap between the
two projects.

>But different cultures will have different ideas about what is appropriate to
>include in an encyclopedia or textbook, so I don't pretend to extend this
>concept to the other language Wikipedias (where instructional material may very
>well be appropriate to have in an encyclopedia for their culture).
>
These cultural differences go beyond just language.  Different
English-speaking cultures can deal differently with this, and they
should all be respected.

>Wikipedia is already a run-away success. Let's not impoverish Wikibooks by
>duplicating that project's content and mission.
>
Some duplication and overlap of material would not be harmful.  A
restrictive view about what is included would.  If a reader finds a
topic useless, he simply won't look at it.

Ec

>


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbitration Matter of Wik

body:
The Matter of Wik has been accepted for arbitration, and is proceeding. The
arbitration committee has a one proposed first draft of our findings and is
discussing remedies at this point. This matter is somewhat complicated by
the delay in actually adopting the 3 reverts rule. We had voted to conduct
our deliberations in private so no page on which we are opening deliberating
exists.

Fred, member of the arbitration committee

From: Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com>
Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2004 19:50:08 -0800 (PST)
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbitration

My request for arbitration with Wik has been sitting there since February
18, and not a single step has been accomplished.  Is anything going to get
done, or is this just a black hole?

RickK

Do you Yahoo!?
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Irismeister

body:
This matter is listed on the page Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration and has
been referred by Jimbo. At this point two members of the arbitration
committee have voted to accept the case, four are required. Evidence is
being collected at Wikipedia:Matter of Irismeister evidence. Anyone,
including you, can add links to evidence at that page. Especially needed (in
my opinion-ridiculous bending over backwards to be fair opinion) is any
evidence that Theresa Knott actually did libel Irismeister (under any
reasonable legal theory of libel). I would not want to convict Irismeister
of making baseless legal threats if there is some basis.

Fred, member of the arbitration committee

> From: "Arno M" <redgum46 at lycos.com>
> Organization: Lycos Mail  (http://www.mail.lycos.com:80)
> Reply-To: redgum46 at lycos.com, English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2004 12:37:34 +0600
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: RE: [WikiEN-l] Irismeister
>
> Isn't this guy now at the arbitration committee stage?
> It sounds like this matter needs a moveon.
>
> (BTW , my first entry!)


from_name: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

body:
On Tue, 2004-02-24 at 16:14, Jimmy Wales wrote:

    I'm not a dogmatist on this point (recipes), I'm just throwing out for
    consideration -- what exactly makes this non-encyclopedic, other than
    the constraints of paper on traditional encyclopedias?

    --Jimbo

Even historically, bugger all!

(pardon my french) The original french encyclopaedists made a point of
detailing as many crafts and industries as possible, down to the most
minute detail, with graphic illustrations capable of practical
implementation. This is what made them notable in their own time as
spreading the industrial revolution.

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen (aka Cimon Avaro)

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body:
On Tue, 2004-02-24 at 22:48, Poor, Edmund W wrote:

    Bonus question: How many squares on a Go board?

    Tricky Ol' Uncle Ed

In the words of the "Boxers or shorts?" answer one is not supposed to
supply:

Depends.

Normally none. But if you are a master, one.

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen (aka Cimon Avaro)

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from_name: Abigail Brady

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: What would Richard Stallman say? (IP users)

references:
<000d01c3fa42$382c03a0$0600a8c0@motrab>
	<93R6RCh8bzB@westermayer-74391.user.cis.dfn.de>
	<shfzd1f0va.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>

body:
On Tue, 2004-02-24 at 06:27, Karl Eichwalder wrote:
> Till Westermayer <till at tillwe.de> writes:
>
> > Depends. In the US, you can, in Germany, you can't.
>
> I guess you meant the "urheberrecht" in Germany - it is conceptionally
> different from the US copyright.  The one who creates a work owns the
> "urheberrecht" and he or she can grant the right to make use of the work
> to somebody else.  That's it roughly.

That's called the 'moral right' in English.  It means effectively squat.

--
Abi


body:
I liked the compromise of having them in both places with no more hassle
about it. Obviously the encyclopedia article can be more complete with
history of the recipe, alternate formulations etc.

Fred

> From: "KNOTT, T" <tknott at qcl.org.uk>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2004 14:34:22 -0000
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: RE: [WikiEN-l] HOWTOs/Recipes/Instructions and other
> imperativecontent
>
> I really don't think it matters if recipes and other how to's are on wikipedia
> or on wikibooks, as long as they are not deleted totally. Can we come to some
> agreement on what to do and just do it. I would like a policy in place so that
> they don't keep getting listed on VfD.
>
> Theresa
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Irismeister

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>Evidence is
>being collected at Wikipedia:Matter of Irismeister evidence. Anyone,
>including you, can add links to evidence at that page. Especially needed (in
>my opinion-ridiculous bending over backwards to be fair opinion) is any
>evidence that Theresa Knott actually did libel Irismeister (under any
>reasonable legal theory of libel). I would not want to convict Irismeister
>of making baseless legal threats if there is some basis.
>
WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Normally where there is an allegation of libel the onus would be upon
the person making that allegation to show where this was done.  What one
person considers as libellous to his person, may not even be noticed by
others.

Ec


from_name: Nick Pisarro

subject: [Wikitech-l] Two projects I'm exploring

body:
There are two projects that I am exploring that might make mediawiki more
robust in handling the emmense load being placed on it.

One, is a one or two pass wiki parser. The current parser, which performs
dozens of passes, probably degrades by the square of the file size. I have
added some thoughts to http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-pass_parser

Storing diffs in the 'old' table. This would not affect performance,
except when loading or comparing old revisions, but could drastically
reduce the size of the database, which has to benefit how manageable it
is. There already is a differencing engine in the source, though I'm not
sure how reliable it is--it may also degrade by the square of the file
difference. Here too, a sequence of diffs can be merged in one pass.
Having written such code in the past, I plan to create a write up
exploring this idea. Has this idea been discussed amongst the developers?
What are the gotcha's?

Nick Pisarro


body:
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:

> On Wed, 2004-02-25 at 13:25, Charles Matthews wrote:
>
>Ray Saintonge wrong
>
>> Hmm!  I recently learned that 42 was the meaning of life and everything.
>>  That goes beyond go.
>
>Hey, that's POV too!  As a teaser, can I say that the tricky point here is
>that go boards are rectangular, rather than square (8% to compensate for
>foreshortening).
>
>Charles
>
> At the risk of "blowing the gaff", and in the intrest of containg this
> thread from becoming a spammed one, let me explicte!
>
> A go board does not contain squares. The markers are placed at
> intersections of lines.
> A master will give handicap to a novice, by allowing the novice to
> place four markers,
> which in themselves define a rectangular space, which the master will
> envision as a
> square, although it is not a square geometrically.

Everybody ( :-\ ) knows that!  I would especially think that Ed knew it
when he raised the question.  As for the reference to 42, I can only
assume that you didn't have a Babelfish in your ear when you read it. :-)

Ec


from_name: Charles Matthews

body:
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote

>> Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>>Bonus question: How many squares on a Go board?

>Depends.

>Normally none. But if you are a master, one.

That's POV.  A leading expert claims 42.  Details supplied if you need them.

Charles (EGF 2300 at go)


from_name: KNOTT, T

subject: [WikiEN-l] Irismeister

body:
Jimbo only referred it yesterday. We are still adding evidence at the moment. The arbitration committee will have to decide if to accept it, then they need a week to investigate.

IMO it is more important to follow good procedure than to get things done quickly. Don't worry, although he is driving me nuts I can take it for as long as is necessary. His NPOV edits are reverted by lot's of people so wikipedia will not suffer.

Theresa

-----Original Message-----
From: Arno M [mailto:redgum46 at lycos.com]
Sent: 25 February 2004 06:38
To: English Wikipedia
Subject: RE: [WikiEN-l] Irismeister

Isn't this guy now at the arbitration committee stage?
It sounds like this matter needs a moveon.

(BTW , my first entry!)
--

--------- Original Message ---------

DATE: Tue, 24 Feb 2004 08:39:09
From: "KNOTT, T" <tknott at qcl.org.uk>
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Cc:

>Can I ask for people to help me out a bit here. Irismeister is following me around trying to provoke me. My tactic of doing my best to ignore him seems to be winding him up as he made a couple of absurd edits yesterday - he removed "if swallowed ....... seek medical help" from ammonium chloride on the ground that seeking medical help from unqualified persons wastes time and is therefore dangerous. This _may_ be because english is not his first language and he doesn't realize the phrase means - go to a doctor or ring the emergency services, but I think it's just that he's baiting me.
>
>Another example is on the reflexology page where he deleted a quote that I put in calling it obscene. This is the most ridiculous thing I ever heard so I reverted.
>
>My problem is, I am now at the stage where I simply revert all the deletions he makes of my work without even considering his arguments. It may well be that I make a bad edit, irismeister reverts it and I revert it back again simply because it was him. I am concerned that other editors may be reluctant to argue with me for fear of agree with him, or even for fear of getting involved in the war. So I'm asking for you lot's help. If you see me revert irismeister and you think that even though he is a jerk, his edit had some merit please say so on the talk page. I can't bring myself to argue my case with him anymore, but I don't want the quality of wikipedia to suffer as a result.
>
>Cheers.
>
>Theresa
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

____________________________________________________________
Find what you are looking for with the Lycos Yellow Pages
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from_name: Ivan Krstic

subject: [Wikitech-l] Semi-automated wikipedia spell-checking

body:
All,

I wanted to share a heads-up. Last weekend I had an hour of spare time,
so I wrote wps-e, a semi-automated and reasonably[1] intelligent spell
checker for Wikipedia. After compiling an extensive dictionary from
several known-good sources, wps-e currently operates with a 668 thousand
word base and some 2.2 thousand "automatic correction" entries
(misspellings that almost certainly should be autocorrected (i.e.
leaderhip -> leadership, prominant -> prominent)).

It's written in Perl, and you can take a look at some of the results of
its run by looking at contributions by User:Ike on en. It's
semi-automated in the sense that - other than the autocorrect list - it
doesn't do more than *propose* correct spelling, and even then it never
autocommits back to wikipedia without a user manually approving the
changes. Because the Princeton Wordnet database is free, the software
also integrates meanings of its proposed spellings into the (colored,
but console-based) interface.

I am working out some final kinks out of the software, and will be
releasing it soon. Sometime in the near future, I expect to release a
windows-based GUI app that might make this type of copyediting very
easily accessible to larger masses, which would mean cleaning up WP
pretty quickly (I was alone able to go through about 2000 articles with
wps-e in under 3 hours).

If there are a few interested fellow Perl-masochists here (Erik, Timwi
maybe?), I'd be more than happy to send them the beta to try and break
or improve before it's released. Just drop me an e-mail. If someone with
proper permissions wanted to copy-edit directly on one of the WP
servers, they would have very low per-correction time (though this
effect can be achieved by normal users by pre-fetching articles, which
I'm looking to add to wps-e anyway).

Cheers,
Ivan

[1] - it doesn't cook dinner for you, but I've had - other than last
names - very few false positives to deal with.


body:
Charles Matthews wrote:

>>I really don't think it matters if recipes and other how to's are on
>>
>wikipedia or on wikibooks, as long as they are not deleted totally. Can we
>come to some agreement on what to do and just do it. I would like a policy
>in place so that they don't keep getting listed on VfD.
>
>>Theresa
>>
>
>Well, I believed it was policy they all went to wikibooks; I thought and
>think that that's a good, clear policy; and not one that hampers changing
>the policy later if other thoughts prevail.
>
When did that become policy?  Some of the recipes have been there more
than two years.  The first that I knew about the moves was two days ago
when the matter came up on the mailing list.

It seems that some proposed policy statements get posted on an obscure
page, and if nobody notices it for some period of time (which is often
of reasonable length) it's assumed that silence is consent.  When a
newbie comes along and reads it, he understandably interprets the
statement as though it were policy.  He proceeds to quite innocently act
upon it, and set off a firestorm from the old-timers who never heard of
this rule.

Wikipedia and it's related projects have become a huge undertaking where
many contributors work away quietly in their own limited area of
interest and expertise.  Those contributors don't spend a lot of time
analyzing a lot of rules; they want even less to be involved in
rancorous debates about whether something should be deleted.  For me the
matters that come up on the mailing lists combined with administrative
duties at Wiktionary and Wikisource are more than enough to satisfy any
cravings that I might have for bureaucratic participation.

Those with a passion for rule making need to understand the human
consequences of their rule-making.  Today's rules fill many pages, and
that is not to anybody's advantage.

Ec


body:
Till Westermayer wrote:

>>Till Westermayer <till at tillwe.de> writes:
>>
>>>Depends. In the US, you can, in Germany, you can't.
>>>
>>I guess you meant the "urheberrecht" in Germany - it is
>>conceptionally different from the US copyright.  The one who
>>creates a work owns the "urheberrecht" and he or she can grant the
>>right to make use of the work to somebody else.  That's it
>>roughly.
>>
>Yeah. And if a person in Germany creates a work, s/he will own the
>urheberrecht and the copyright. Even if s/he seels the copyright, s/he
>will still own the urheberrecht. As far as I know, this situation
>doesn't exist in the USA, and I think some of the confusion about this
>topic is related to that non-universal distinction.
>
Canada recognizes separate moral rights, but the implication of that is
unclear.

The sale of copyrights creates a contractual obligation, and may provide
for the buyer to have an exclusive right to publish.

What was interesting about the former US law that provided for renewals
after 28 years is that the right to renew was exclusively that of the
author.  Thus, if he had received a bad deal when he sold the rights in
the first place that original deal expired, and he was free to negotiate
a better deal elsewhere.  The company that had first bought the rights
did not have the right to renew.

Ec

>


from_name: Nick Reinking

subject: [Wikitech-l] Two projects I'm exploring

body:
On Wed, Feb 25, 2004 at 11:07:30AM -0500, Ivan Krstic wrote:
> Now that Magnus mentioned it on Meta, I'm more inclined to ask: is
> writing Phase IV in C/C++ something that's being actively considered?
> Sure, it's an effort, but we're looking at - minimally - an order of
> magnitude improvement in performance. That does, however, raise the
> question of whether it's worth it to reinvent the wheel (Phase III is
> great software) for a problem that, in the foreseeable future, can be
> solved cheaply by throwing more processor horserpower into the mix, and
> by better caching.
>
> -IK

Well, an order of magnitude means we can do the same amount of work with
half the machines we have now, or twice as much with the same.  That's a
pretty big deal.  That said, rewriting the entire codebase in C/C++ will
take a huge amount of developer time.  If there are any time-sensitive
spots in the code, it might be worth recoding those in C/C++ - but I
don't know about the entire codebase.  I really don't think that's a
"win", as far as developer time, or future maintainability.

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


subject: [Wikitech-l] Faster parsing (was: Two projects I'm exploring)

body:
On Wed, Feb 25, 2004 at 11:20:31AM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> As a programmer with well over a quarter century of experience, I
> applaud this effort by Nick to identify and slay the "dragon" of
> N-squared performance.
>
> When a process on a file takes time proportion to the file size, we call
> that N. When time is proportion to log N, we call that log N performance
> (quicksort, which uses a partition scheme and then sorts the partitions,
> has log N performance).
>
> A process whose elapsed time grows in proportion to the SQUARE of the
> file size is out of control! It's called an N-squared or N^2 process,
> and is to be avoided like the plague. Insertion sort and Bubble sort are
> examples, and have long been shunned for all but small numbers of items.
>
> Nick, if you and Magnus can pull this off, to Brion's satisfaction, you
> will gain the everlasting gratitude of the entire Wikipedia community.
> More power to you!
>
> There are two projects that I am exploring that might make mediawiki
> more robust in handling the emmense load being placed on it.
>
> One, is a one or two pass wiki parser. The current parser, which
> performs dozens of passes, probably degrades by the square of the file
> size. I have added some thoughts to
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-pass_parser

I've written a Flex parser for Wikipedia, which can handle about 75% of
the Wikipedia syntax at a speed many tens of times faster than the
current parser.  (http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_flexer)
Using that and PHP could easily collapse the parser down to a two pass
parser.  However, as I said, it may not be worth it - if the
multi-multi-pass parser we have now only takes 1-2% of the time it takes
to generate a page, is it worth it to try to optimize that bit away?

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


subject: [WikiEN-l] Irismeister

body:
This is not a Court. One possible wrong that was committed was making
unsupported charges of libel. If Irismeister is guilty of making unsupported
claims of libel we need to look into what was said about him. So far,
although there are some apologies and retractions there is evidence he was
called a "Quack" and a "nutcase". In the context of a mudslinging exchange
however.

Fred

> From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2004 09:11:58 -0800
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Irismeister
>
> Fred Bauder wrote:
>
>> Evidence is
>> being collected at Wikipedia:Matter of Irismeister evidence. Anyone,
>> including you, can add links to evidence at that page. Especially needed (in
>> my opinion-ridiculous bending over backwards to be fair opinion) is any
>> evidence that Theresa Knott actually did libel Irismeister (under any
>> reasonable legal theory of libel). I would not want to convict Irismeister
>> of making baseless legal threats if there is some basis.
>>
> WITHOUT PREJUDICE
>
> Normally where there is an allegation of libel the onus would be upon
> the person making that allegation to show where this was done.  What one
> person considers as libellous to his person, may not even be noticed by
> others.
>
> Ec
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


body:
On Wed, Feb 25, 2004 at 11:43:18AM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> Um, there is, I, (pause to remove foot from mouth)
>
> Reducing time from .99 to .97 doesn't sound very important. But I still
> think that efforts to reduce page delivery time are important. Any idea,
> no matter how far-fetched, should be considered.
>
> Naturally, the proof is in the pudding. So after we try a given
> optimization, we ought to measure the results and see if it really gets
> the pages to the users any faster.
>
> Ed "Sheepish" Poor

Sorry to be a balloon burster.  ;)  Do we have any recent profiling on
the code that shows where the bottleneck is?  I imagine most of the time
is spent poking about in the database.  If that truly is the case,
developer time would best be spent trying to maybe optimize the database
layout or adding support for a faster database...

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


subject: [Wikitech-l] Two projects I'm exploring

body:
Now that Magnus mentioned it on Meta, I'm more inclined to ask: is
writing Phase IV in C/C++ something that's being actively considered?
Sure, it's an effort, but we're looking at - minimally - an order of
magnitude improvement in performance. That does, however, raise the
question of whether it's worth it to reinvent the wheel (Phase III is
great software) for a problem that, in the foreseeable future, can be
solved cheaply by throwing more processor horserpower into the mix, and
by better caching.

-IK

Nick Pisarro wrote:
> There are two projects that I am exploring that might make mediawiki more
> robust in handling the emmense load being placed on it.
[...]


from_name: Kelly Anderson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Two projects I'm exploring

body:
>Well, an order of magnitude means we can do the same amount of work with
>half the machines we have now, or twice as much with the same.  That's a
>pretty big deal.  That said, rewriting the entire codebase in C/C++ will
>take a huge amount of developer time.  If there are any time-sensitive
>spots in the code, it might be worth recoding those in C/C++ - but I
>don't know about the entire codebase.  I really don't think that's a
>"win", as far as developer time, or future maintainability.

Is it possible to write part of a single page PHP program in C++? Or do you
have to make the entire page into a CGI?

I've got a lot of C++ experience, but very little PHP. I suspect that there
are a lot more C++ programmers than PHP programmers out there, and we like
to help. :-)

-Kelly


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

body:
As a programmer with well over a quarter century of experience, I
applaud this effort by Nick to identify and slay the "dragon" of
N-squared performance.

When a process on a file takes time proportion to the file size, we call
that N. When time is proportion to log N, we call that log N performance
(quicksort, which uses a partition scheme and then sorts the partitions,
has log N performance).

A process whose elapsed time grows in proportion to the SQUARE of the
file size is out of control! It's called an N-squared or N^2 process,
and is to be avoided like the plague. Insertion sort and Bubble sort are
examples, and have long been shunned for all but small numbers of items.

Nick, if you and Magnus can pull this off, to Brion's satisfaction, you
will gain the everlasting gratitude of the entire Wikipedia community.
More power to you!

Ed Poor
Professional Software Developer

-----Original Message-----
From: wikitech-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
[mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Nick Pisarro
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2004 9:17 AM
To: Wikimedia developers
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Two projects I'm exploring

There are two projects that I am exploring that might make mediawiki
more robust in handling the emmense load being placed on it.

One, is a one or two pass wiki parser. The current parser, which
performs dozens of passes, probably degrades by the square of the file
size. I have added some thoughts to
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-pass_parser

Storing diffs in the 'old' table. This would not affect performance,
except when loading or comparing old revisions, but could drastically
reduce the size of the database, which has to benefit how manageable it
is. There already is a differencing engine in the source, though I'm not
sure how reliable it is--it may also degrade by the square of the file
difference. Here too, a sequence of diffs can be merged in one pass.
Having written such code in the past, I plan to create a write up
exploring this idea. Has this idea been discussed amongst the
developers? What are the gotcha's?

Nick Pisarro

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


body:
Ray Saintonge wrong

> Hmm!  I recently learned that 42 was the meaning of life and everything.
>  That goes beyond go.

Hey, that's POV too!  As a teaser, can I say that the tricky point here is
that go boards are rectangular, rather than square (8% to compensate for
foreshortening).

Charles


body:
Um, there is, I, (pause to remove foot from mouth)

Reducing time from .99 to .97 doesn't sound very important. But I still
think that efforts to reduce page delivery time are important. Any idea,
no matter how far-fetched, should be considered.

Naturally, the proof is in the pudding. So after we try a given
optimization, we ought to measure the results and see if it really gets
the pages to the users any faster.

Ed "Sheepish" Poor


body:
On Wed, Feb 25, 2004 at 05:17:02PM +0000, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Last time we did profiling, the Prime #1 Enemy was
> OutputPage::replaceInternalLinks(). The rest of the page parsing was zippy
> fast even with a hojillion passes.
>
> This requires splitting up the page, identifying links, normalizing
> titles, checking lookup tables for page existence, and generation of
> output links. Make it fast and you win a prize!

Depending on how much time replaceInternalLinks spends doing regular
expression matching (as opposed to looking up page existence), you could
use the Flex code I have to nearly completely optimize away link
formatting.  It would be very easy to update the code to convert the
link into a singular format - that way, there would be no need to do the
PHP regular expression matchings.

Kind of a pity that PHP doesn't let you compile regular expressions.  :(

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


subject: [Wikitech-l] Two projects I'm exploring

body:
Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org> writes:
>> Now that Magnus mentioned it on Meta, I'm more inclined to ask: is
>> writing Phase IV in C/C++ something that's being actively considered?
>> Sure, it's an effort, but we're looking at - minimally - an order of
>> magnitude improvement in performance. That does, however, raise the
>> question of whether it's worth it to reinvent the wheel (Phase III is
>> great software) for a problem that, in the foreseeable future, can be
>> solved cheaply by throwing more processor horserpower into the mix, and
>> by better caching.
>>
>> -IK
>
>Well, an order of magnitude means we can do the same amount of work with
>half the machines we have now, or twice as much with the same.  That's a
>pretty big deal.  That said, rewriting the entire codebase in C/C++ will
>take a huge amount of developer time.  If there are any time-sensitive
>spots in the code, it might be worth recoding those in C/C++ - but I
>don't know about the entire codebase.  I really don't think that's a
>"win", as far as developer time, or future maintainability.

I suspect there is a lot that can be done without going to C/C++. With
some performance tuning you probably could get a doubling to an order of
magnitude performance out of the current code base. PHP is the right size
language for this product. At worst you might have to write some C/C++
helper programs. Typically, if a product hasn't been written with
performance in mind and never tuned, 90% of the CPU cycles occur in 5-10%
of the code.

I've been writing C/C++ programs for over 20 years. It is not a great
language for working with string data. Unless you code carefully, you'll
end up worse off. In terms of features/programmer hour, PHP is probably
several times more productive than C/C++.

Speaking on a purely theoretical basis, an important thing to writing or
tuning a program written in something like PHP is to understand what
operations cost the most when executed in the particular language. Also in
almost any language, repeatedly scanning, copying and concatinating large
strings, like 100,000 byte articles is really costly. Most string based
programs spend 90% of their time doing storage allocation, so *looking* is
much better than *touching*. Another thing to avoid are operations that go
up by the square of the number of or size of objects. linear to 'n * Log
n'  are what you want to strive for.

Database turning is quite important as well, though I get feeling you've
been on top of that.

Has much work been done in seeing what takes the most time when running
mediawiki? I am still quite new to it and PHP as well.

Nick


from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject: [Wikitech-l] Two projects I'm exploring

body:
>>>>> "NP" == Nick Pisarro <nickp at aperture.com> writes:

    NP> Storing diffs in the 'old' table. [...]

    NP> Having written such code in the past, I plan to create
    NP> a write up exploring this idea. Has this idea been discussed
    NP> amongst the developers?  What are the gotcha's?

I brought it up on wikitech-l a few weeks ago:

  http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-February/008330.html

Once again illustrating the lameness of mailing lists for design
discussions. I've copied that email to meta:

  http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_diff_version_control

...as a first step in really hashing out this idea.

I think the main issues were the following:

  * Any decrease in performance -- even for relatively rare actions,
    like retrieving a historic page version -- is really not OK.
  * It'd be great to reduce database size: saves wear-and-tear on
    storage devices, saves time on e.g. backups, etc., etc.

Anyways, it's probably a good idea to follow up on. Let's work on meta
to whip it into a good proposal.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide


subject: [Wikitech-l] Two projects I'm exploring

body:
>>>>> "NP" == Nick Pisarro <nickp at aperture.com> writes:

    NP> One, is a one or two pass wiki parser. The current parser,
    NP> which performs dozens of passes, probably degrades by the
    NP> square of the file size. I have added some thoughts to
    NP> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-pass_parser

So, one thing I think is important is changing the parser to create an
intermediate tree structure before generating HTML. That way, we'd be
able to output multiple data formats: PDF, XML, what-have-you.

I realize that few Wiki engines do this, probably because it's so easy
to just use regex substitutions for the most simple Wiki markup. But
separating the two functions of the parser -- parsing Wiki markup,
generating HTML -- would make the parser a lot easier to work with,
and we could make enhancements more easily. Also, of course, the whole
multiple output channel thing.

This would have a performance cost (BOO!) but it might be mitigated by
doing the parsing to intermediate format at save time, and storing the
intermediate format in the DB. One idea is parsing to a tree
structure, then storing that structure as YAML.

It's an idea to consider, even if we discard it. If we're going to
rework the parser, then this is the time to consider it.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide