subject: [WikiEN-l] Dartmouth follies

body:
Stan, I tend to agree there is a (perhaps misplaced) sense of urgency
about having to "mop up" quickly, list things on VfD, etc. Some of it
might be arrogance or nastiness.

But I'd like to offer another interpretation - there is no confidence
these suspicious edits will be found or caught later. And that can bug
certain types of people. Of all the mechanisms Wikipedia has for
tracking changes and edits, perhaps the weakest is how to allow new
entires to linger for a specified period and grow, and then come back
to evaluate later. For many, "check it later" means "check it never."

I guess this could be cast as a finer grain interpretation of
inclusionism and deletionism.

Absolute inclusionist - any and everything should be in Wikipedia
Optimistic inclusionist - maybe not good now, but it may be, keep and
check back later
Pessimistic deletionist - may be good sometime, but delete it now, and
keep only when good
Absolute deletionist - it's not "encyclopediac", get rid of it

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 17:45:08 -0700, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
> Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
>
> > [...]
>
> > Who cares if there's a page up for a month or so lauding the wonders
> > of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center? These article all fall squarely
> > in the "borderline" category. Get them cleaned up, but we don't need
> > to drop everything and do it right away.
>
> This should be tattooed on the back of each hand of every Wikipedian,
> so it's visible while typing. :-)
>
> Going by comments I've seen, I think it feeds some people's egos
> to believe that they're saving WP's reputation from certain doom
> by quick listing of obscure articles on VfD - but WP's reputation
> is really made or broken by the quality of content in the articles
> of general interest, since those are the ones that readers find.
>
> Another thing that I see is a sense of urgency, as if all the
> editing is going to come to a stop in 24 hours, and everything
> needs to be perfect by then. Even some oldtimers seem to act
> as if they don't really believe WP will be around next year,
> the year after, and the year after that. (It will, right? :-) )
>
> Stan
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Andrew Lih
andrew.lih at gmail.com


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: What is the purpose of this mailing list ??

body:
--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.  Wikispecies is a species directory;
> these are not the same thing.

And yet the only example you have given shows fairly clearly that that info
should be in Wikipedia. Directory structures can and should be developed
through the use of categories.

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


body:
--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > 2) Have it in both places and thus have to maintain it in both places
>
> This is clearly a point against WikiSpecies, but I don't find it a
> very compelling point.  The kind of scientific information in
> WikiSpecies does not change that rapidly for most species, and in any
> event, it will be very simple for contributors to copy from one
> resource to the other...

That is a fork! You have stated several times that you would not support
internal forks of Wikimedia projects. Why in the world are you moving from that
position? Forks divide the userbase between two different projects, meaning
that updates to one will have to be propagated to the other. But this will not
always happen and if it does it takes time - time that could have been spent
improving more content.

> It is important to understand that we don't control the question of
> whether or not WikiSpecies will exist.  It will.  We can either do it
> in-house, in which case the task of updating from one to the other can
> be greatly simplified by software and common culture (i.e. Wikispecies
> contributors will be Wikimedians, we will all know each other, we can
> find common solutions).

What kind of logic is that? What we need to do is improve our software and use
the Wikimedia Commons so that the functions that the Wikispecies people want to
do can be done *without* creating a fork.

> We have testimony from biologists who are eager to work on the project
> that they would find it useful.  Presumably, they understand that a
> general purpose encyclopedia will cover much of the same ground and
> more besides.  It's just a different _kind_ of work, with a different
> _purpose_ and a different _audience_.

What? The content will be the same and Wikipedia's audience is already
everybody. There is no justification for a fork. None.

> Is wiktionary a fork because the content in wiktionary could be
> incorporated into wikipedia?  I don't see how.  It's a different sort
> of work, and it is valuable *even if* we could legitimately have a
> full encyclopedia article about every word in every language,
> including such information as etymology, pronunciations, etc.

See my other email about how that is a total and irrelevant strawman. It also
directly contradicts something you just said a few posts ago: that Wikipedia
wants to have articles on every single species (something I agree with -
although many will be combined into genus articles).

-- mav

_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Win 1 of 4,000 free domain names from Yahoo! Enter now.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/goldrush


body:
--- Marco Krohn <marco.krohn at web.de> wrote:
> Jimbo, I don't consider this as a strong indication that there is much
> overlap
> between wikitionary and wikipedia. We are not talking about article _names_,
> but about the _content_ of the articles. If you compare the content they are
> not even close to being similar. A small correction in the Wikipedia article
> about "economics" would in 99% of the cases not lead to a need to correct the

Exactly my point that this was a total strawman.

> IMHO a closer comparison than a sister-project is another language, like "en"
> and "de". But this time the difference is that we risk to lose a lot or even
> all experts of the field to a more specialized project. I don't see who then
> will sync these articles with Wikipedias. And I don't see why we should
> duplicate effort before we are sure that there is no way around it. I would
> much prefer a technical solution, where our user base is not forked.

Great point. There is no reason to create a fork since that would divert
development effort away from Wikipedia and other existing Wikimedia projects.

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


subject: [Wikipedia-l] What is the purpose of this mailing list ??

body:
--- Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
> I think the point is that yes, we can include everything into wikipedia,
> but then we'll have
> * normal people bored and scared away by a flood of dull data
> * scientists (who are to be considered borderline-normal people;-)
> taking their field so seriously that they'll simply refuse to work on an
> article about cats that links to [[catwoman]]

This is already taken care of through the use of summaries linked to more
detailed articles on the topic. For example all the [[Geology of ...]] articles
I've been created for geographic areas. There is *no* reason why [[Biology of
...]] articles cannot also be created and in fact there are already many
[[evolution of ...]] articles.

> The proposed solution therefore is
> * let normal people have their encyclopedia article, with an "in-house"
> link to the dull, boring flood of data at wikispecies

As Jimbo's example clearly shows it is not just data but prose as well. This
detail should be in Wikipedia. If any part of an article is too detailed, then
it should be summarized and spun off into a daughter article. This is done all
the time and is the natural way to deal with our differing audiences.

> * let scientists work on the cool, exciting data at wikispecies, amongst
> their own where they are comfortable, and provide a link to the "other
> stuff" at wikipedia

Draw scientists away from Wikipedia you mean.

-- mav

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Developers needed!

body:
--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Just for the record, I think Wikipedia is a general encyclopedia. ant

Just for the record, you are mistaken. Have you seen all the niche topics we
cover in great detail?

-- mav

_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Win 1 of 4,000 free domain names from Yahoo! Enter now.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/goldrush


list: wikien-l

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Dartmouth follies

body:
Andrew Lih wrote:

>Stan, I tend to agree there is a (perhaps misplaced) sense of urgency
>about having to "mop up" quickly, list things on VfD, etc. Some of it
>might be arrogance or nastiness.
>
>But I'd like to offer another interpretation - there is no confidence
>these suspicious edits will be found or caught later. And that can bug
>certain types of people. Of all the mechanisms Wikipedia has for
>tracking changes and edits, perhaps the weakest is how to allow new
>entires to linger for a specified period and grow, and then come back
>to evaluate later. For many, "check it later" means "check it never."
>
>I guess this could be cast as a finer grain interpretation of
>inclusionism and deletionism.
>
>Absolute inclusionist - any and everything should be in Wikipedia
>Optimistic inclusionist - maybe not good now, but it may be, keep and
>check back later
>Pessimistic deletionist - may be good sometime, but delete it now, and
>keep only when good
>Absolute deletionist - it's not "encyclopediac", get rid of it
>
In that spectrum I would classify myself as "optimistic inclusionist".

Beyond the universally recognized vandalism which I would delete
immediately most of this stuff is harmless.  Those who feel strongly
that something needs to be deleted should develop their own mechanisms
for tracking it (perhaps on a sub-page of their own user page)  If the
material becomes lost and nobody notices it for a year or more, so
what?  In a database of 500,000 items it's not taking up a lot of space,
and the peace of mind that we earn from not having to go through yet
another deletion argument is worth a lot more.

One really needs to examine the dynamics of deletionism.  One individual
has a passion for reviewing new articles for what he considers
unencyclopedic.  He finds a likely candidate and makes a VfD entry.  A
cadre of like minded individuals who trust his judgement immediately
respond with their votes of support.  Those of us who see some value in
the article would need to spend a considerable amount of time reviewing
the article before we could devise reasonable arguments for its
retention, but we all have other priorties, and a limited amount of time
for pursuing them.  I assure you that campus life at Dartmouth has no
personal importance to me whatsoever.  My priorities do not include
spending the amount of time that I would consider necessary to mount a
proper defence of thse articles.  The number of Wikipedians to whom they
may have enough personal importance is likely very small, certainly
rarely enough to quicly offset the deletionists' votes.

Recently, on Wikisource, where I do follow such things someone enterred
a scattering of Swedish daily TV schedules going back to 1969.  He seems
to have stalled after very few.  This seems the sort of thing that could
inspire even an ardent inclusionist to put weight on the delete button.
I am, nevertheless, willing to be patient.  I might even be convinced to
accept it if he can present things in a consistently informative.  In
practical terms, I'm confident that the size of his project is well
beyond his capacity, and that he will tire very soon.  In another month
I may even suggest to him that this would be more beneficial if did a
more thorough job.  I may then seek to delete it as a fragmentary and
abandoned experiment, hopefully in a way that does not generate a lot of
friction.

What seriously bugs me about it is that we end up with this cadre of
passionate, and perhaps obsessive individuals running the show.

Ec


from_name: Stan Shebs

body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

>
>To further illustrate the difference, compare:
>http://www.fishbase.org/Summary/SpeciesSummary.cfm?genusname=Carcharodon&speciesname=carcharias
>with
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_White_Shark
>
>Notice that our article (quite properly) discusses the movie Jaws, and
>links to Steven Spielberg.  Fishbase does not, and again, quite
>properly.
>
>I see a species directory as a significantly different *kind* of
>resource than a general encyclopedia.  They can be mutually
>reinforcing and supporting, as with wikitnary and wikipedia.
>But they are not the same thing.
>
Where I think you'd get into trouble is pointing at some specific
piece of FishBase data and saying "this is too detailed for Wikipedia,
must go elsewhere". So far as I know, not a single word of WP ToL
material has ever been rejected for excessive depth. So while
conceptually one can talk about species content beyond what WP allows,
in practice we haven't actually set any limits on WP. On the contrary,
the bird people are well on the way to documenting every bird species
in detail, so it would be pretty hard for a wikispecies to have
anything new to offer in that area, and if it's OK for birds, why not
for beetles?

Without an agreed-upon rule about what species data may not be
included in WP, then what reason is there for me not to import
every single wikispecies addition into WP also?

Just as an experiment, let's try it; somebody please point out a
specific piece of FishBase data for a fish species that they think
is too detailed, I'll write it into WP and we can see what kind of
reaction it gets.

Stan


list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] image bug

body:
Many thanks
Ray

Jens Frank wrote:

>> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>>
>>>>Could somebody please look at the situation of images on Wikisource.
>>>>All of them give 404 errors,  and "What links here" invariably shows
>>>>that nothing links to them.
>>>>
>>>>
>
>Fixed.
>
>Regards,
>
>JeLuF
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Taxoboxes.

body:
--- Gerard Meijssen <gja.meijssen at chello.nl> wrote:
> When it is an animal it should be [[Animalia]] and not [[Animal]]ia .
> Vernacular names are also difficult to use. The point being we have to
> discuss this and we have to be willing to cooperate. I would really
> welcome one Taxobox that is acceptable and usable by all wikipedia.

These are naming convention issues and are thus specific to each Wikipedia. On
the English Wikipedia we use, well, English to name articles. Redirects should
exist so that such a standardized taxobox would work on any language wiki.

-- mav

_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Win 1 of 4,000 free domain names from Yahoo! Enter now.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/goldrush


body:
--- Mirko Thiessen <wikipedia at mirko-thiessen.de> wrote:
> I was (and still am) supportive of the WikiSpecies project. You can't
> expect to have a Wikipedia article about every species of caddisflies,
> or about every ground-dwelling roundworm. As Andy pointed out, these
> articles would remain stubs, as mostly no information but the mere
> name would be available - plus some scientific stuff that is of no
> interest for the general reader. Some of these data might be the
> scientific name, its synonymes, the scientist first describing the
> species (the taxonomic author).

We already have the goal to cover every single species in Wikipedia. If all
that is known about a certain species can only fill a stub, then that stub
should be incorporated into an article on the genus.

-- mav

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Developers needed!

body:
--- Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> Still, if I started a semiconductor wiki, where I tried to document
> every transistor since the [[AF107]] (Germanium, PNP, high frequency,
> circa 1961), I think my articles would be thrown out of the main
> Wikipedia pretty soon, and I should develop this idea in my own,
> separate project.

A table with all your data you mention would be welcome as a daughter article
linked from the main Wikipedia articles you mentioned.

-- mav

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


from_name: Jeremy Milum

subject: [Wikitech-l] "Today's Featured Article" by email

body:
I don't believe this has been mentioned before, but PHPList would seem
to be a good fit for this feature.  It is a lightweight mail list program that
requires PHP and MySql.  It also features an RSS to email list function that
might also be nice when combined w/  mediawiki's RSS feed features.  Here
is a link to a NewsForge article about PHPList:

http://software.newsforge.com/software/04/08/20/1538204.shtml?tid=79&tid=132


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] WikiDB (was Re: Tabular data in
	Wikipedia	(Wikispecies -> Wikicommons))

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>
>> I think there is a growing sentiment that people do not want to fork
>> Wikipedia to create Wikispecies.  This makes a lot of sense.
>> However, there
>> is something important that is needed for Wikispecies which Wikipedia
>> does
>> not provide: efficient access of tabular data.
>
>
> I was thinking along similar lines a couple of months ago, when
> considering the needs of Wikiquote, and to a lesser extent Wiktionary.
> The basic plan I came up with was:
>
> * Each record is an arbitrary list of key-value pairs.
> * User-designed edit forms and search forms constrain data entry to
> particular fields
> * User-designed display templates are used to format the data and
> integrate it with other parts of the wiki
> * Each field has an index, to allow fast searching and report generation.
> * Indexes may be sparse, with most records not containing a given
> field. I believe this can be efficiently handled by creating a
> separate table for each key, on demand at runtime.

It would be cool if there was some way to differentiate language
specific and language-neutral data. A 747's wingspan is the same
irrespective of language, should be possible to record and edit in
only one place, but the common name of Homo sapiens is per-language.

Stan


from_name: Eugene Gill

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Mintguy RFC

body:
Mike Halterman <haltermannews at ...> writes:

>
> I find all of this behavior from Netoholic to be utter rubbish. If you need
me to certify the basis for the
> dispute, I will gladly do so.
>
> -Mike H (TheCustomOfLife)
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Express yourself with Y! Messenger! Free. Download now.
>

I think Netohlic's recent behaviour is beneath contempt. Not this spurious RFC,
I can live with that. But his disgraceful behaviour in overuling most other
peoples wishes on the television naming convention page and claiming a
consensus that doesn't exist. It is just totally out of order. But as I am now
the subject of this RFC I don't feel I can rectify the situation without
drawing more fire.

Mintguy


from_name: John

subject: [WikiEN-l] Mailing List Software

body:
On Wed, 25 Aug 2004 20:18:15 +0000, David Gerard
<fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:

> If they don't mind a third-party provider and ads, Yahoo Groups is
> good - http://www.yahoogroups.com/

The beta of Google Groups 2 is coming along nicely and allows Yahoo
groups-like mailing lists with text based ads and a nicer interface
then Yahoo.

http://groups-beta.google.com/


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Taxoboxes.

body:
--- Gerard Meijssen <gja.meijssen at chello.nl> wrote:
> >These are naming convention issues and are thus specific to each Wikipedia.
> On
> >the English Wikipedia we use, well, English to name articles. Redirects
> should
> >exist so that such a standardized taxobox would work on any language wiki.
>
> mav,
> This list is not about en:wikipedia, it is about cooperation between the
> wikipedia's. Your rants and raves are about the en:ToL; how great it is.
> Well, it is and it is provincial because the data in en:ToL is of
> limited use.

Read what I wrote. I mentioned *specifically* that naming conventions are
language-specific. Thus what each language Wikipedia decides to name any
particular article is up to *them*. How is that a rant about how great ToL is
on the English Wikipedia?

> Scenario:
> WikiSpecies has a general usable and available Taxobox. There is a
> parameter to the Taxobox function that is provided on call time by the
> local wikipedia. The parameter holds the local vernacular name, it is
> optional. Your choise. See my point? Nothing lost to en:ToL no problems
> with naming conventions, big gains to all wikipedias.

This is a neat function that Wikimedia Commons should have (as I've stated
about five times now already). Elementboxes used in WikiProject Elements
articles would also benefit from this functionality as well as many other
projects.

> As you dismiss all arguments without seeing further than just en: you
> invalidate all your arguments. To me it is all more of the same.

As you continue to not listen or even consider alternatives that do not consist
of creating a fork, you invalidate all your arguments and lose all your
credibility.

> Unhelpfull, hiding what you stand for .. What do you stand for ? How is
> it helpfull to others, to me ?

Being helpful would be to concentrate effort into Wikipedia and her sister
projects for this, not creating a fork. Being helpful would be to develop
functionality that would make this type of thing possible for other areas
outside of biolgoy (such as the chemistry example I gave). What I stand for is
preventing a huge drain of effort that is now used to create articles on
species in Wikipedia. I also stand against forks.

Since you have not provided a single example where ToL and Wikispecies will not
overlap, I'd say that you are being very unhelpful.

-- mav

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Rebranding VfD

body:
I also support changing the name of VfD to something like Editorial
Review. I also would like to be able to customize the random page
feature to give me articles written by non logged in users, similar to
what I think Dan is suggesting.


from_name: Benedikt Mandl

subject: [Wikipedia-l] RE: start wikispecies

body:
I support your idea and think it is the most sensible thing to do at the
current point. For the interface: Gerard will provide a table with data
that we could play on. I can provide webspace of about 45 MB and the
domain of www.wikispecies.org.

The earlier we have an initial interface and something like a trial-
version, the better. Any pho-people who want to try it?

Benedikt

> I understand Mav's reservations, even though I'm for a wikispecies.  Why
> don't we simply have a trial w-species on that wikispecies.org site, try
> out
> a few interface designs, and back-end stuff, and see if it'll work?
That
> way, it won't be a wikiproject, but it will still exist and let people
use
> it, see if it's popular/used enough, and if it gets the go-ahead from
> Media-Wiki, move whatever was done over to Media-Wiki.
>
> James
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
> [mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Benedikt Mandl
> Sent: Wednesday, August 25, 2004 5:07 AM
> To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Developers needed!
>
> > --- Benedikt Mandl <benedikt.mandl at gmx.at> wrote:
> > > The defined target refered to the question whether wikispecies
> > > should
> > cover
> > > all species that were described or not. It would be wonderful if
> > > this
> > was
> > > possible, but yet it is too big of a project to define - others have
> > done
> > > that before and failed (see the busted http://www.all-species.org/).
> > >
> >Daniel Mayer wrote:
> > OKay - you first state that others have tried and failed.
>
> Great - then let's have a look why "ALL species" failed:
> 1.) They started with a lot of noise, collected a lot of money and
several
> people as full term staff
> 2.) They rented offices as head quarters and hired experts to do some
> programming for a search engine
> 3.) They wasted money on meetings, conventions and media events without
> realising that they were - due to their organisational structure -
totally
> dependent on financial confidence
> 4.) The donations decreased after the dot-com crash
> 5.) Their targets were simply insane - a website for every existing
> species
> within a human generation sounds nice in "New Scientist", but lacks of
> feasibility
> 6.) They busted - much ado about nothing
>
> I don't see any mistake that Wikispecies would make in a similar manner.
> Another thing we can learn from www.all-species.org: there is a whole
list
> of the most eminent taxonomists, all of them supporting the idea of a
> central database of species, indicating an urgent need for that. They
all
> took on the patronage (whatever that means in "ALL species" terms). Mav:
> HOW
> MANY OF THEM DO YOU THINK SUPPORT A GENERAL ENCYCLOPEDIA? How many of
them
> already support the ToL in public?
>
> We need a seperat approach to the species project in addition to
> wikipedia.
> This is the only way to attract specialist authors and users. Mav, you
> made
> it clear that you don't like wikispecies. Many other people disagree
with
> you and I think you should respect their wish for a wikispecies without
> coming up with inappropriate brabbling about a "war".
>
> Benedikt
>
> --
> NEU: Bis zu 10 GB Speicher f|r e-mails & Dateien!
> 1 GB bereits bei GMX FreeMail http://www.gmx.net/de/go/mail
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
NEU: Bis zu 10 GB Speicher f?r e-mails & Dateien!
1 GB bereits bei GMX FreeMail http://www.gmx.net/de/go/mail


body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

> Just to clarify, I think that wikispecies is not overlapping with the
> encyclopedia in any significant way,

Looking through all the messages in this thread, I think you are very
much in the minority by saying that.

Other posters seem to have suggested that
a) there would be overlap, and it would be a good thing or
b) there would be overlap, and it would be a bad thing.

What makes you think there would not be an overlap?

> that it is not a fork, that it is
> a perfectly appropriate use of our resources, and that this discussion
> should end pretty soon.

Much of "this discussion" has been about how the two projects could
scratch each other's backs in the best way. Clearly that needs to be
ongoing.


from_name: Austin Hair

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] new wikipedias: extremaduran and
	galaico-extremaduran

body:
While I am and always have been a strong supporter of language and
dialect preservation, I have some concerns about starting Wikis for
"languages" virtually indistinguishable from one we still have limited
support for (not to take away from our terrific es: contributors in any
way -- quite the contrary).

Sr. Quiles, assuming a knowledge of Spanish consistent with a few years
of casual study focusing on Latin American dialects, would I be able to
distinguish between Castilian and your Extramaduran?  You've already
stated that the two are mutually intelligible; past consensus has nixed
dividing efforts among mere dialects of a language, as with British and
American English, Portuguese and Brazillian Portuguese, and the various
dialects and languages of Germany.  What distinction does this project
merit to warrant a separate Wiki?

I'm not the deciding authority, by any means, but I'm sure I'm not alone
in wanting answers to these questions.

--
Austin D. Hair <austin at austinhair.org>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Callidus
http://www.austinhair.org/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/attachments/20040825/14790672/attachment.pgp


body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

> When fully developed, a wikispecies directory will be a delightful
> resource work as a standalone *and* a nice foundation for *some*
> encyclopedia articles.  But the two are not identical.

The Tree of Life project's aim has always been to write about all
species. I think that ambitious aim has been part of the reason for its
success in becoming the largest wikiproject (tens of thousands of
articles), with the most contributors.

I am personally disappointed that you want to put a stop to that -
presumably coming up with some guideline so that *some* species are
allowed articles, but not all.

It also rides against the overwhelming consensus of this thread, as
mentioned in my other post. Whatever their position on wikispecies,
on-one has suggested crippling wikipedia.

Pete/Pcb21


body:
[Tiger/Great White Shark]

To be fair though, those ultra-well-known animals are the exception
rather than the rule.

To pick a more typical example at random from Josh Grosse's recent
contributions page - how should wikimedia treat ''Naegleria fowleri''?


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Developers needed!

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

> This is a wrong-headed approach...

Fair enough. I don't really care how its implemented. I just care that
there is an easy way to avoid duplication of effort.


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Calling attention to "broken" articles

body:
At 12:32 PM 8/25/2004 -0400, Delirium wrote:
>I think this is definitely true, and not just because people misperceive
>that they have to act now.  Things get caught on recent changes and new
>articles, but if they don't get caught there, they often essentially never
>get caught.  When using the "random pages" feature (as I do quite a bit),
>I've run into complete junk, sometimes outright vandalism (like "bob is
>gay") that has been there since _2002_.
>
>Cleanup is supposed to address some of this problem, but I'm not qualified
>to say whether it's worked or not.

Here's an idea; how about adding a "summon editor attention" link or button
that places the article into a page similar to recentchanges? This way
people who can't or won't fix an article's problems can still very easily
get it noticed by others who might, without all the hassle of going to the
Cleanup page and editing it. This'd be a really quick and dirty way of
saying "hey, I found something that looks broken!", and if it's easy enough
it might even get used by anonymous browsers who otherwise wouldn't bother
to contribute to Wikipedia at all. One shouldn't even need to type in a
reason why attention is being called, since in theory this is for pointing
out obvious stuff.

I suppose it could be abused by spamming the "recentattention" queue with
articles that don't actually need it, but it'd take a pretty dedicated
abuser to make recentattention flood faster than recentchanges does. :)
Since clicking the link doesn't actually do anything to the article, and
stuff on recentattention would drop off on its own after a few days anyway,
I don't see how spamming would do any lasting harm.


body:
Dividing our biology contributor base between two separate projects that
have a great deal of overlap is a HUGE mistake. >
> -- Daniel
>
I think you made your point very clear in several e-mails and there are
other people who support your point of view - but on the other hand I
think it has become obvious that a big number of people supports the
wikiSpecies. Your arguments didn't convince them and repeating them again
and again won't change that.

WikiSpecies will evolve. I understand your worries and will respect them,
please respect other people's ambitions to create wikiSpecies.

Benedikt

--
NEU: Bis zu 10 GB Speicher f?r e-mails & Dateien!
1 GB bereits bei GMX FreeMail http://www.gmx.net/de/go/mail


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Summary & questions    was: Re: Taxoboxes.

body:
--- Marco Krohn <marco.krohn at web.de> wrote:
> Please don't bring it to a personal level who is more "unhelpful". I am sure
> both sides (pro-/contra Wikipspecies) want the "best", in the sense that we
> all want to create as much as possible high quality and free content in the
> long run.

Point taken. I apologize to everybody I've been rude to. This is not an excuse
but I felt (and still feel) that the proposed version of Wikispecies would be a
fork that would greatly harm our coverage of species info in Wikipedia.

I also fear the creation of Wikihistory, Wikiphysics, Wikiwar, Wikiwhatever
forks that would harm our coverage in those areas by diverting eyeballs
(readers) and fingers (contributors) to the separate specialized projects,
leaving Wikipedia impoverished in those areas. (although subject-specific
WikiReaders up to the size of entire encyclopedias can and should be evenutally
created. But those would be selected from Wikipedia.)

The idea of creating a separate project that may be more suitable to
specialists is also counter to our open spirit, IMO (esp when the originator of
the Wikispecies idea suggested restricted editing of entries).

I firmly believe that Wikipedia can contain all these specialized data by
creating detailed [[Biology of ...]] articles where needed and leaving a more
accessible and shorter summary in the animal/taxon article (most of the time
the amount of info - such as in Jimbo's FishBase example - could be put into
the main article on the species/taxon).

Use of Wikimedia Commons to share common data (such as the taxoboxes and
elementboxes) between all Wikimedia projects and language versions is also a
great idea. As well as extending the category system by adding database
functions and adding an advanced search capability so that category-specific
searches and selects can can be conducted.

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


body:
Marco Krohn wrote:

>
>[...] "trivia
>information" which exists in Wikipedia articles, but surely will not part of
>any wikispecies article.
>
>If we strongly limit the Wikipedia "depth" for ToL articles, we still will at
>some point have >100.000 articles, where - except trivia information - the
>Wikipedia articles will be more or the less subset of the information which
>is contained in wikispecies.
>
Just to cherrypick :-), I'm not sure that it's quite accurate to say
that specialists are not interested in "trivia" or connections to pop
culture; consider how popular clownfish experts got a week after
Finding Nemo came out, or look at Howard Scott Gentry's book on
agaves, where a number of difficult species identification problems
are shown to be intertwined with tequila consumption, wealthy
European plant collectors, and Yucatan seaport history. Look
closely and you'll see FishBase has a fish-on-stamps section...

In a way, wikispecies is seeming more like a cut-to-the-chase for
people who already know the background ("what are the species of
blind cavefish in Oklahoma?" in response to "what's that white
thing doing down there, a hundred miles outside its range?!?" :-) ).

Stan


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Taxoboxes.

body:
One of the better longtime contributors on nl:wikipedia
[[nl:Gebruiker:Roepers]] mentioned today that he is not willing to spend
time anymore on taxoboxes. The time needed to create them takes too long
and he said that somebody else can do it. If this does not happen he
will not mind.

The reasons he gives are:
"* There is no agreement among taxonomists about what is correct. It is
hard to express these descrepancies.
 *Creating a taxobox is hard even for people with experience
 *They take up much room and they replace text.
 *New Taxobox technology continues to be created, the old ones are not
upgraded to the latest version
 *Creating a taxobox is dreary work and, who is interested in them anyway."

Copying a taxobox from en: to nl: takes a lot of time. It would be best
to have one taxobox that serves us all.

What is needed to create a truly standard Taxobox?

The Taxobox has to be language independent.
The Taxobox has to be acceptable to multiple wikipedia
The diverse wikipedia have to be willing to work together to create this
standard Taxobox.

At this moment in time people turn there back on ToL things in other
wikipedia because things are not as easy as they can be.
At the same time we cry wolf because valuable resources may end up
somewhere else.

My challenge to all wikipedia people interested in biology and the ToL:
make taxoboxes so easy that it is just a matter of picking things up and
dropping them in the appropriate place. Make it usable for great people
like Roepers !!

Thanks,
   GerardM


from_name: Edward Peschko

subject: [Wikitech-l] new sister project (off of home page) redux

body:
> Wikimedia is not a wiki hosting service. try:
>

... yes I looked at the wiki home page, and I realize now that it would be
improper to link a specific subject off of wikipedia.org.

That being said - I still think there is a big hole that could be
filled in the wikimedia foundation, whilst providing good public service.
And that is in the area of free-form research.

The thing I had in mind was a place where freeform discussion is done on
energy - or other policy - issues, which is copyleft and meant to ultimately
produce multiple books (which may or may not as have an ongoing online presence).
Its also not really an encyclopedia - example subject(s) might be:

    graph - oil use since 1900
    the solar energy constant - space versus earth
    the perils of energy forecasting
    the efficiency of photosynthesis in C3 and C4 plants
    photovoltaics versus solar towers
    percentage of clean coal installations
    EROEIs of various fuels
    oil versus hydrogen as an energy carrier
    Energy feed costs of different types of domesticates
    the shortcomings of windmills

ie - the topics might relate multiple subjects together and talk about
them in tandem as opposed to being talked about separately. And each
is meant to be a research project, they are not meant to be viewed as
text in a book.

As far as I'm concerned, this type of activity is just as basic - and just
as needed as a free encyclopedia or dictionary, because it brings people
of multiple disciplines together on scientific issues. And IMO it belongs
front and center - I truly believe that the right interdisciplinary
research projects could change the world. For example, just look at
Vaclav Smil's 'Biospheres' or 'Energies'. If everyone in the world
truly understood what he had to say, we would be a lot better off.

Anyways, I'm not sure what I would call this type of sister project:
wiki research? wiki policy? wiki interdiscipline?

Ed

(ps - is the foundation-l list the right place to talk about this stuff?
If so, I'll post there.)

----
context

> ok, here goes.. (I'll keep it brief)

context

> I'm pretty dismayed about the energy situation out there, and in particular,
> how popular literature has distorted the energy picture out there, for either
> economic or political agendas.
>
> Hence, I'm trying to create a 'comprehensive energy picture' that is as
> free as agendas as possible. The idea is to get the 'big ideas and numbers'
> and put them in a format that makes it easy for the average educated
> reader to understand. Then, to distribute them as *wide* as possible -
> the goal is to make it a focal point for people's discussion, and cover
> energy issues from all perspectives.
>
> I've talked to a hell of a lot of energy analysts in various disciplines, and
> have come to the conclusion that the best way to do this would be via wiki.
> The project would consist of two parts:
>
>     1) an open, public wiki that is in the form of hierarchical discussion pages
>        which sort out basic facts and principles.
>
>     2) paper publication(s) based on the first wiki, also in wiki form (I'm in the
>        process of writing a wiki based on the media wiki schema which provides
>        services like pagination, typesetting and index support).

> The second one(s) would be endorsed, supported, and if possible edited by
> as recognizable names as possibly can be found - hopefully due to the large
> public reach of wiki, this would be someone or someones *very* recognizable.
> Anything to make the public at large listen.


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject:
Wiki-login [was: RE: [Wikipedia-l] Tabular data in Wikipedia
	(Wikispecies->	Wikicommons)]

body:
James R. Johnson wrote:

>So, can I simply have one login, and access every wiki-project, and every
>language wiki, without having to re-register for every single one?
>
>
That's the idea. Exception, of course, if your user name is already used
by someone else on another wiki. For these cases, it would stay just as
it is now.

Magnus


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Developers needed!

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- "James R. Johnson" <modean52 at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>
>
>>I understand Mav's reservations, even though I'm for a wikispecies.  Why
>>don't we simply have a trial w-species on that wikispecies.org site, try out
>>a few interface designs, and back-end stuff, and see if it'll work?  That
>>way, it won't be a wikiproject, but it will still exist and let people use
>>it, see if it's popular/used enough, and if it gets the go-ahead from
>>Media-Wiki, move whatever was done over to Media-Wiki.
>>
>>
>
>That is what the Wikimedia Commons is for.
>
>
Really? I was under the impression it should become a repository for
free images and multimedia files.

Or do you mean playing with the interface? We can do that too.

Magnus


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Mintguy RFC

body:
Eugene Gill <minty at keergill.wanadoo.co.uk> wrote:

> I think Netohlic's recent behaviour is beneath contempt. Not this spurious RFC,
> I can live with that. But his disgraceful behaviour in overuling most other
> peoples wishes on the television naming convention page and claiming a
> consensus that doesn't exist. It is just totally out of order. But as I am now
> the subject of this RFC I don't feel I can rectify the situation without
> drawing more fire.

I have faith that this sort of [[Wikipedia:Nonsense on stilts]] (an
article which doesn't exist, but I swear I'm tempted to write it)
will come out in the wash. As appears to be happening. I eagerly
await my own RFC, probably next time [USER NAME DELETED] reappears ...

- d.


body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>Dividing our biology contributor base between two separate
>projects that have a great deal of overlap is a HUGE mistake.
>
>
* Biology is a little more than a species directory :-)
* We (wikipedians) can directly incorporate data from the big data dump
that wikispecies will become, where demmed appropriate
* _If_ it turns out that we have a huge overlap, wikispecies can be
integrated into wikipedia at any point, if there is consensus

IMHO there's a chance for a development boost in this project. Think of
it as an evolutionary step. We had a mutation step from HTML to wiki,
where the wikipedia and its software have become a very successful
model. The wikispecies project, however, has demands that are a little
different from "normal" wikis and wikipedia. We have a chance to
introduce new functionalities (database-like functions, tree diagrams)
and smoothen the old ones (categories, templates) into the software on a
"blank page" testing field. They will be in the MediaWiki software and
in the pages. Once these have stabelized and proven useful, we can take
these successful concepts back to wikipedia, and some day, maybe the
contents as well, if we (people in both projects!) see fit.

Magnus


from_name: Dan Drake

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Dartmouth follies

body:
On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 23:17:24 UTC, Daniel P.B.Smith
<dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:

> These article all fall squarely in the "borderline"
> category.

Best line of the day.

Saving it for later, probably frequent, use.


body:
On Thu, Aug 26, 2004 at 04:16:41AM +0200, Ivan Krstic wrote:
> Edward Peschko wrote:
> >That being said - I still think there is a big hole that could be
> >filled in the wikimedia foundation, whilst providing good public service.
> >And that is in the area of free-form research.
>
> I would second Tim's suggestion to look at wiki hosting providers. If
> the free ones don't cut it, one of the MediaWiki developers offers a
> paid, supported service at http://www.wikidev.net. If you would like to
> easily include links to wikipedia articles inside your wiki, your
> installation of MediaWiki could be trivially extended to do so.

I understand that there are alternatives, but I don't get it... I'm asking for
feedback on an idea (one that I think would do a lot of good IMO)

In any case, in making a:

	a) generic research platform inside of wiki
	b) specific research platform on energy issues

I think I would be doing a great public service. Why should I have to pay for
it (more than any other contributor to wikipedia) I mean, I'd be willing
to donate for equipment to the wiki foundation, but moving it to a paid
supported service seems like the wrong place for it. And in any case, the subject
covered is of utmost importance and should get as much traffic as it could possibly
get IMO.

What am I missing here?

Ed


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Rebranding VfD

body:
On Wed, 25 Aug 2004 13:40:41 UTC, daniwo59 at aol.com
wrote:

> a) Change the name of Votes for Deletion to something like Editorial Review.
>
> I like this a lot, as I like the entire process suggested by Dpsmith a lot. It is a step toward greter quality control without being a radical departure from our Wiki norms. I heartily second the entire proposal.

I third the motion. But it would really be nice if there were a way I
could say "Gimme a randomly selected article that has never been vetted by
anybody who matters." A lot of people working part-time in this mode with
a reasonable guarantee of non-duplication of effort could make a big
difference.

Deliberately stated so as to emphasize the difficulties, both technical
and sociological; but a workable substitute might be possible.


from_name: Marco Krohn

body:
On Wednesday 25 August 2004 18:16, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

> > What makes you think there would not be an overlap?
>
> Well, I should clarify what I meant by "any significant way".
> Obviously, there will be overlap in a sense, since articles about
> species are perfectly valid.
>
> But the point I meant is that the overlap is not significant because
> it is the same _sort_ of overlap (or non-overlap) as we have between
> wikipedia and wiktionary.
>
> Compare:
> http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Economics
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics

Jimbo, I don't consider this as a strong indication that there is much overlap
between wikitionary and wikipedia. We are not talking about article _names_,
but about the _content_ of the articles. If you compare the content they are
not even close to being similar. A small correction in the Wikipedia article
about "economics" would in 99% of the cases not lead to a need to correct the
corresponding article in wiktionary and vice versa.

For other articles this is even more obvious, e.g.,

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Building
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building

which is just one example from about 10 articles I compared.

> Consider:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger
>
> This is a perfectly normal and typical species article.  It's pretty
> good if you ask me.
>
> But notice that it links to [[Siegfried & Roy]], and discussed Rudyard
> Kipling and William Blake's perspective on the tiger.  Calvin and
> Hobbes is discussed, as is Tigger, Winne-the-Pooh's friend.

Agreed, but as Pete already pointed out these are just "those ultra-well-known
animals". This is nothing against the ten-thousands of articles we talk about
and which we need to keep in sync in case of a partial-fork.

IMHO a closer comparison than a sister-project is another language, like "en"
and "de". But this time the difference is that we risk to lose a lot or even
all experts of the field to a more specialized project. I don't see who then
will sync these articles with Wikipedias. And I don't see why we should
duplicate effort before we are sure that there is no way around it. I would
much prefer a technical solution, where our user base is not forked.

The only argument I consider valid so far in favour of wikispecies is that a
spezialized project could attract more experts from the field in a shorter
time frame. This is probably true for every subproject, like physics,
mathematics and so on. And I already can see that wikispecies will eventually
divide into more subprojects using the same arguments. I really am not sure
if such a fragmentation is a good thing.

best regards,
  Marco


from_name: Daniel Kinzler

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Technical problems with images originating on Mac
	OS X	on UTF-8 Wikipedia

body:
hello peter.

Please see <http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=215>, which i
filed earlier today. If you can contribute more details, please do it there.

daniel


list: foundation-l

from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Foundation-l] Developer poll results

body:
Anthere-

thanks for taking the time to poll the developers and summarize their
opinions. It looks like it was a lot of work.

I think almost all of us agree that a developer conference/meetup would be
a good idea. It could be expensive but also quite efficient. It has been
suggested, for example, to have a meetup at the CCC Chaos Communication
Congress (21C3) in Berlin this year:
http://www.ccc.de/congress/2004/

It seems to me that it would be a good idea to make this a general
conference for developers working on wiki technologies, as this is a quite
large and growing field with a huge need for standardization, but we as
Wikimedia would of course only reimburse developers working on MediaWiki.
I've created a short stub that can be developed further by interested
parties:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiDevCon

The developers of TikiWiki (a popular wiki engine) meet regularly in so-
called TikiFests already:
http://tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php?page=TikiFest

Maybe we can coordinate with them and other makers of wiki engines.
There's a general #wiki channel on irc.freenode.net where developers
working on different engines hang out.

> Second, money in exchange of tasks. This would be
> money directly paid by the Foundation to thank some
> developers for their work.
> The board is willing to give it a try.

I presume that means you, Angela and Jimbo agree. Have you also talked to
Michael and Tim? Are they involved in these meetings?

What amount of money do you anticipate can be allocated for this trial
period, if we proceed further on this?

I would suggest a setup wherein a team (committee) of two or three people
within Wikimedia who
a) do *not* want to be reimbursed for development work
b) have a solid technical understanding
decide upon tasks which they consider to be of high priority to the
foundation. Developers can *propose* tasks to this team through a defined
process (e.g. mailing list or board).

I would then suggest that the current page "Development tasks" on Meta
(which is presently somewhat redundant with the roadmap) be turned into an
official Wikimedia page, where only the aforementioned team can put up
tasks, and any developer can then state:
- when they can start working on the task
- how long they believe they will need to finish the task
- under which conditions (for free/contract/etc.) they would be willing to
complete the task.

The committee could immediately *decline* certain offers, but they would
have to wait at least about 7 days before accepting an offer for any
particular task, so that all developers have a chance to volunteer.

Money is paid depending on the conditions which the developers and the
committee agree on. Validation may in some cases occur in stages, but
again, this depends on the individual committee/developer relationship.

Is this general process agreeable to you?

Regards,

Erik


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Developer poll results


subject: [WikiEN-l] Mailing List Software

body:
On 08/25/04 19:05, Poor, Edmund W wrote:

> Does anybody know of any free or low-cost way to set up a mailing list?
> My church's seminary wants me to set up and run a mailing list for its
> 900 alumni (based in part on the glowing recommendations I've gotten
> from you all here *blush*).
> Big problem: they only know Windows.
> Is there anything on the Web, or is it better to have one's own mail
> server, or what?

If they don't mind a third-party provider and ads, Yahoo Groups is
good - http://www.yahoogroups.com/

- d.


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Dartmouth follies

body:
Andrew Lih wrote:

>I guess this could be cast as a finer grain interpretation of
>inclusionism and deletionism.
>
>Absolute inclusionist - any and everything should be in Wikipedia
>Optimistic inclusionist - maybe not good now, but it may be, keep and
>check back later
>Pessimistic deletionist - may be good sometime, but delete it now, and
>keep only when good
>Absolute deletionist - it's not "encyclopediac", get rid of it
>
Hey, you left out eventualism, which will ultimately triumph over both
inclusionism and deletionism (eventually, of course).

Absolute eventualist - Ignore VfD at all costs, because it just breeds
hostility and flame wars, and trust that in the end, the community will
keep/delete articles appropriately, even if they don't make the right
call the first time around (or sometimes even the second and third time)
Optimistic eventualist - Occasionally try and intervene by commenting on
VfD or attempting to salvage articles, to try and speed up the process
of reaching the right outcome eventually
Pessimistic eventualist - Believes that Wikipedia is eventually going to
fail anyway, so doesn't bother to participate in any of it

--Michael Snow


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Dartmouth follies

body:
Rick wrote:
> I've never understood the mentality that it's okay to keep trash
> articles around for some unknown period of time.  Months, now?!  Do
> you not understand what it says about Wikipedia when Google and
> Yahoo! mirror all of the crap and that's the face that Wikipedia
> presents to the world?  How are we supposed to maintain even the idea
> that we're creating a real, useable encyclopedia if anybody is
> allowed to put whatever trash they want to put into it and nobody
> seems to be the least motivated to clean it up?

How does having articles of borderline interest make it unusable?
If I type "George Washington" into Google and end up at the excellent
Wikipedia article of the same name, Wikipedia has proved very usuable.
It is completely irrelevant whether a borderline article such as "George
from Rainbow" is also available *for those who search for it*

Having said the idea that "anybody is allowed to put whatever trash they
want to" in, is completely false and you know it.

Pete/Pcb21


body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- "James R. Johnson" <modean52 at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>
>
>> I wouldn't mind having the current wiki catergory system expanded to
>>include (for biology) the various taxonomic categories of a life-form
>>(Kingdom, Phylum, Sub-phylum....Genus, Species).  That would (I think) allow
>>someone to search for a creature or article based on its scientific name.  I
>>don't, however see it as dividing the biology base, but rather, allowing
>>them to create a basic directory, which the wikipedia expounds upon, with
>>links from the wikispecies article on, say, felis domesticus [having basic
>>scientific information], linking to the wikipedia article for more prosaic
>>style, distribution around the world, role in mythology, cat-worship in
>>ancient Egypt, etc.
>>
>>
>
>The "science stuff" needs to be part of the Wikipedia article as well. This
>makes Wikispecies redundant.
>
>
I think the point is that yes, we can include everything into wikipedia,
but then we'll have
* normal people bored and scared away by a flood of dull data
* scientists (who are to be considered borderline-normal people;-)
taking their field so seriously that they'll simply refuse to work on an
article about cats that links to [[catwoman]]

The proposed solution therefore is
* let normal people have their encyclopedia article, with an "in-house"
link to the dull, boring flood of data at wikispecies
* let scientists work on the cool, exciting data at wikispecies, amongst
their own where they are comfortable, and provide a link to the "other
stuff" at wikipedia

Magnus


body:
Jimmy (Jimbo Wales originally wrote:

 >>a wikispecies directory will be a delightful
 >>resource work as a standalone *and* a nice foundation for *some*
 >>encyclopedia articles.  But the two are not identical.

Hmm, I think I mis-parsed this original comment. I took it to mean that
only *some* wikispecies articles could be imported on Wikipedia, and
that others should not be. Your next response makes clear that it is not
what you meant. Sorry about that.

However as you have said to mav, all the information in a typical
fishbase entry would be welcome information on the equivalent WP entry.
Here you've said that every species would be welcome.

Thus this means that *all data* in a wikispecies project is ripe for
inclusion on WP. Hence wikispecies is effectively a subset of WP - that
is much much more of an overlap than the limited overlap between
wiktionary and wikipedia!

Thus wikispecies is essentially about providing a different layout or
"skin", and omitting some "pop culture"-style information.

With all this in mind, I think it is obvious why mav (strongly) and I
(cautiously) have been ranting on about the dangers of two databases and
duplicated effort. It really does seem to me that *some* solution along
the lines of "one data, two display filters" is the way to go.

Having the common data (taxobox info) on WikiCommons with fancy new
import capabilities - each project imports in a different way is one
appealing suggestion. Making such data language-independent and
providing a set of filters

"English Wikipedia filter"
"Dutch Wikipedia filter"
"Wikispecies scientific filter"

would do wonders for internationalization.

Pete/Pcb21

p.s. I take your point - it is possible that one day Naegleria fowleri
will appear on The Simpsons, or perhaps some other popular animated
series, but the truth is that for the vast majority of "boring" species
(this has got to 99%), the only people interested are scientists, and
the only facts known are scientific ones.

Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

> Pete/Pcb21 wrote:
>
>>The Tree of Life project's aim has always been to write about all
>>species. I think that ambitious aim has been part of the reason for its
>>success in becoming the largest wikiproject (tens of thousands of
>>articles), with the most contributors.
>
>
> I fully support this, as I think it is an absolutely excellent thing
> to be doing.
>
>
>>I am personally disappointed that you want to put a stop to that -
>>presumably coming up with some guideline so that *some* species are
>>allowed articles, but not all.
>
>
> Huh?  Why would we put a stop to that?  Why would we come up with
> guidelines to prohibit some species from wikipedia?  I do not support
> any such thing.
>
>
>>It also rides against the overwhelming consensus of this thread, as
>>mentioned in my other post. Whatever their position on wikispecies,
>>on-one has suggested crippling wikipedia.
>
>
> Especially not me!  I wonder if you misunderstood something I said,
> because I absolutely agree that Wikipedia and the Tree of Life project
> should have a very ambitious goal of every species.
>
> If anything, it makes more sense to say that I think that WikiSpecies
> should be "crippled" in that it should not have references to Tigger
> and Jaws, because it is not a general encyclopedic reference work but
> a specialized database.  But I don't accept that this amounts to
> "crippling" anymore than wiktionary is crippled by our insisting that
> a dictionary is not an encyclopedia.
>
> --Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Taxoboxes.

body:
James R. Johnson wrote:

> To make the Taxobox language-independent, why not use Latin?  Isn't that
> what is the standard?  Anything making the taxobox easier is welcome.

The current taxobox templates have names like {{Taxobox classis entry}}

The first word is a neologism specific to Wikipedia.
The second word is Latin.
The third word is English.

You are right - there is room for improvement in this area!

Pete/Pcb21


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Article - Librarian: Don't use Wikipedia as source

body:
Andrew Lih wrote:

>Librarian: Don't use Wikipedia as source
>Wednesday, August 25, 2004
>AL FASOLDT
>STAFF WRITER
>
>
<snip>

>Stagnitta gives two quotes from the Wikipedia site that illustrate the problem.
>
>>From the home page:
>
>"Wikipedia is an encyclopedia written collaboratively by its readers.
>The site is a Wiki, meaning that anyone, including you, can also edit
>any article right now by clicking on the edit this page link that
>appears at the top of every Wikipedia article."
>
Actually, this quote is not taken from the home page, but from
[[Wikipedia:Welcome, newcomers]].

All I can say is if that kind of sloppy journalism is representative of
their work, I'll put our reliability up against theirs anytime.

But Andrew's right, criticism is bound to appear because to the media,
we're a subject to be treated with their own version of NPOV. Usually
that means when the coverage has been too slanted in one direction,
there will be attempts at debunking the misperceptions. This one is
mildly amusing, not worth getting riled up about, and still brings us
free publicity.

--Michael Snow


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Article - Librarian: Don't use Wikipedia as source


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Technical problems with images originating on Mac OS
	X on UTF-8 Wikipedia

body:
Does it work when using UFS as opposed to HFS+ ?

On Wed, 25 Aug 2004 08:13:10 +0000 (UTC), Peter Jacobi
<peter_jacobi at gmx.net> wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> Since switching de.wikipedia to UTF-8 a problem with image uploads
>  from Mac OS X surfaced. The Mac OS X filesystem, IMHO contrary to
> most other ones, stores the filenames in decomposed Unicode.
>
> As an example look at a file named "?" (small u-umlaut):
>
> Normal use is the Unicode codepoint:
>  U+00FC LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS
>
> This is
>  0xC3 0xBC in UTF-8
>  "%C3%BC" as URL
>
> Mac OS X use is this Unicode copdepoint sequence:
>  U+0075 LATIN SMALL LETTER U
>  U+0308 COMBINING DIAERESIS
>  0x75 0xCC 0x88 in UTF-8
>  "u%CC%88" as URL
>
> Now uploading images from a Mac will give them the unusual
> filenames, which cannot be spotted by sight in most cases.
> Using the images will fail, if you simply type image name
> as you see it. Copy'n'paste the "Mac" umlaut filename will
> work but will make everything even less transparent.
>
> Example image:
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:To%CC%88o%CC%88a%CC%88a%CC%88st.jpg
>
> German discussion Page:
> de:Wikipedia_Diskussion:UTF8-Probleme#Umlaute_in_Upload_Dateinamen_bei_Mac_OS_X
>
> The most foolproof solutions seems to me, to normalize incoming
> filenames to NFC (composed) form by the server software.
>
> Regards,
> Peter Jacobi
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Rebranding VfD

body:
Andrew Lih wrote:

>I'm all for reevaluating how VfD works, but I'd like to oppose the
>name "Editorial Review."
>
>Not only does it sound Nupedia-ish, but I have a strange image of a
>salon with leather chairs, Ivy League professors smoking cigars and
>sipping cognac while deciding the fate of articles from commonfolk.
>The name "votes for deletion" makes the barrier high, meaning an
>article stays unless you put yourself on the record for endorsing a
>destructive act.
>
>This may come as a surprise to those who've found me a "deletionist",
>but I think adopting the "Editorial Review" moniker makes Wikipedia
>less wiki-like. It makes Wikipedia sound really stuffy and formal,
>which it really is NOT.
>
I share at least some of Andrew's concerns about the choice of name,
though perhaps not so much that I would say "Votes for deletion" is
necessarily better than "Editorial review". But at a minimum, we would
need to do something that doesn't confuse the process with "Peer
review", which we already have a page for, and which is very different
from the deletion process.

I also agree with RickK, in that I think most of the problems can be
addressed by improving the atmosphere, through renaming the page and/or
providing better instructions on what the process is for. If this is
done, I think the existing process can handle the issues just fine. For
example, I definitely disagree with the suggestion that all new pages
should be sent into a special editorial review process; they get that
already with the wiki system and recent changes. Whatever we call it,
VfD is for special cases that need something beyond that.

--Michael Snow


from_name: James R. Johnson

body:
Alrighty.  Whom do we ask or get to add a taxonomic addition to any living
organism's wikipedia entry?  How do we create that - database, or what?  And
as for having it on wikicommons, that's perfect, and have each individual
language wikipedia have its own species name (homme, man, hombre, whatever,
for homo sapiens) show up in its respective wiki.  I don't know how that'd
be done, but why don't we try that, see how it works, and if not, go with
the w-species.

So long as the database has all the kingdom, phylum,...order...genus,
species, then local name, such as:

DB: species
| Kingdom | .... |  Order  |  Family  | ... | Genus | Species | English |
Deutsch | Francais | Englisc | Dansk |
  Animalia         Primata   Hominidae        Homo    Sapiens   Human
Mensch     homme     mann      Mann

And then have the local name used in each respective wikipedia, so that if a
user is in the French Wiki, then he'll see "Animalia...Sapiens" and "Homme"
as the common name.

Is that what you're talking about?

James

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Daniel Mayer
Sent: Wednesday, August 25, 2004 9:17 PM
To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Summary & questions was: Re: Taxoboxes.

--- Marco Krohn <marco.krohn at web.de> wrote:
> Please don't bring it to a personal level who is more "unhelpful". I
> am sure both sides (pro-/contra Wikipspecies) want the "best", in the
> sense that we all want to create as much as possible high quality and
> free content in the long run.

Point taken. I apologize to everybody I've been rude to. This is not an
excuse but I felt (and still feel) that the proposed version of Wikispecies
would be a fork that would greatly harm our coverage of species info in
Wikipedia.

I also fear the creation of Wikihistory, Wikiphysics, Wikiwar, Wikiwhatever
forks that would harm our coverage in those areas by diverting eyeballs
(readers) and fingers (contributors) to the separate specialized projects,
leaving Wikipedia impoverished in those areas. (although subject-specific
WikiReaders up to the size of entire encyclopedias can and should be
evenutally created. But those would be selected from Wikipedia.)

The idea of creating a separate project that may be more suitable to
specialists is also counter to our open spirit, IMO (esp when the originator
of the Wikispecies idea suggested restricted editing of entries).

I firmly believe that Wikipedia can contain all these specialized data by
creating detailed [[Biology of ...]] articles where needed and leaving a
more accessible and shorter summary in the animal/taxon article (most of the
time the amount of info - such as in Jimbo's FishBase example - could be put
into the main article on the species/taxon).

Use of Wikimedia Commons to share common data (such as the taxoboxes and
elementboxes) between all Wikimedia projects and language versions is also a
great idea. As well as extending the category system by adding database
functions and adding an advanced search capability so that category-specific
searches and selects can can be conducted.

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Duties of Mailing List admins

body:
Poor, Edmund W a ?crit:
> Anthere,
>
> I have placed my idea of what a mailing list admin should do, here:
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_list#Duties_of_administrator

Thanks a lot Ed :-)

> Ed Poor
> WikiEN-l admin emeritus
>
> P.S. "Emeritus" means you weren't fired and didn't quit, but you're not
> actively doing it any more -- but can be called back into service if
> needed.

Nod.
I hope your boss is being okay with you :-)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Developers needed!

body:
Daniel Mayer a ?crit:
> --- Benedikt Mandl <benedikt.mandl at gmx.at> wrote:
>
>>I don't see any mistake that Wikispecies would make in a similar manner.
>>Another thing we can learn from www.all-species.org: there is a whole list
>>of the most eminent taxonomists, all of them supporting the idea of a
>>central database of species, indicating an urgent need for that. They all
>>took on the patronage (whatever that means in "ALL species" terms). Mav: HOW
>>MANY OF THEM DO YOU THINK SUPPORT A GENERAL ENCYCLOPEDIA? How many of them
>>already support the ToL in public?
>
>
> You must first demonstrate that such functionality could not be added to
> Wikipedia (which is *NOT* a general encyclopedia but a collection of many
> specialized ones). Several people have already proposed ways to do *exactly*
> that.
>
> -- Daniel

Just for the record, I think Wikipedia is a general encyclopedia. ant


from_name: 100025727 at telefonica.net

subject: [Wikipedia-l] new wikipedias: extremaduran and galaico-extremaduran

body:
My name is Carlos Quiles and I am the co-writer of a cultural newspaper,
www.iventia.com, written in extremaduran and a fala (or
'galaico-extremaduran'), both regional languages of Spain, and both with
international recognition (ethnologue.com, proel.org, mercator media,
the wikipedia itself and some universities around the world which have
interest in recording ressources about every possible language).

Me and some other members of the extremaduran APLEx society
(www.aplexextremadura.com) are interested in creating a wikipedia in
both regional languages, to promote the use of them.

The galaico-extremaduran has official recognition in the Autonomous
Community of Extremadura, and is spoken by some 20.000 people.
The extremaduran is recognized neither in the A.C. of Extremadura nor in
the A.C. of Castile and Leon, partly because of its similarity with the
castilian dialect with the same name (see the wikipedia: extremaduran
language, for more information), and partly because it is so endangered
that only the oldest men speak it still. But there is a great advantage
of creating the wikipedia in extremaduran: almost every extremaduran can
understand to a good degree the language, even if they already speak the
castilian dialect, so having probably more than 1.500.000 million people
able (and possibly willing) to write and read it.


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- "James R. Johnson" <modean52 at comcast.net> wrote:

> Alrighty.  Whom do we ask or get to add a taxonomic addition to any living
> organism's wikipedia entry?  How do we create that - database, or what?  And
> as for having it on wikicommons, that's perfect, and have each individual
> language wikipedia have its own species name (homme, man, hombre, whatever,
> for homo sapiens) show up in its respective wiki.  I don't know how that'd
> be done, but why don't we try that, see how it works, and if not, go with
> the w-species.
>
> So long as the database has all the kingdom, phylum,...order...genus,
> species, then local name, such as:
>
> DB: species
> | Kingdom | .... |  Order  |  Family  | ... | Genus | Species | English |
> Deutsch | Francais | Englisc | Dansk |
>   Animalia         Primata   Hominidae        Homo    Sapiens   Human
> Mensch     homme     mann      Mann
>
> And then have the local name used in each respective wikipedia, so that if a
> user is in the French Wiki, then he'll see "Animalia...Sapiens" and "Homme"
> as the common name.
>
> Is that what you're talking about?

Yes - that would be most useful. What we *could* do is have the scientific name
as a template for each taxon and species name or just link to the that name
directly and depend on redirects to get the user in the right place.

Either way a separate page on each wiki will be needed to make the links work
(either a redirect or a template with the correct link).

For example: {{Animalia}} would be used on the Commons in all taxoboxes for
animals. On the German Wikipedia there would be a template named [[Bearbeiten
von Vorlage:Animalia]] whose only content would be [[Tiere]] (German for
'animal'). Thus all animal taxoboxes work as if a direct link to the German
article on animals were in them.

Or [[Animalia]] could just be a redirect to [[Tiere]]. But that is a bit of a
kludge if you ask me (although such a redirect would still be good to have for
other reasons).

The ability to call upon that from any Wikimedia wiki and have updates to the
Wikimedia Commons version instantly propagate to every wiki, would be great.

Wikimedia Commons will be created and there is a lot of support for it and
nobody still opposes the idea AFAIK. The only question still before us is if we
wait for the software functionality to come first or do we just go ahead and
start adding images, media files, and other common data now and just hope
somebody codes the features. Last time I checked we were strongly leaning
toward starting now and coding later.

Coordinating project-wide aspects of WikiProjects from the Commons would also
be a neat idea since Meta is more geared toward community development instead
of language-neutral content management (which is what managing taxoboxes and
element data would be).

-- mav

_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Express yourself with Y! Messenger! Free. Download now.
http://messenger.yahoo.com


from_name: Jens Ropers

subject: [WikiEN-l] Pcw and USENET

body:
Good observations, but Usenet was just an example and copyleft
unfamiliarity was just a guess (and in a sense a rhetorical one, to
make the point that his "faults" in the leading his  caravan into
quicksand are very human and I have definitely made worse ones -- even
though I'm less sympathetic as regards any hubris aspect possibly
involved).

J

On 25 Aug 2004, at 20:43, wikien-l-request at Wikipedia.org wrote:

> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 8:21:12 -0500
> From: <dpbsmith at verizon.net>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Pcw and USENET
> To: <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<20040825132112.RPDN8887.out005.verizon.net at outgoing.verizon.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
>> From: Jens Ropers <ropers at ropersonline.com>
>> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Dartmouth class project now on VFD
>> The instructor has really gotten his knickers in a twist with this:
>>
>> He's obviously got an IT background (at least to some extent) or he
>> would hardly be an instructor at all (maybe I'm too optimistic ;-).
>> However, as we all like to forget, IT has ''somewhat'' diversified in
>> the last two decades or so and somebody might be an old pro who knows
>> his x86 assembly language by heart but has somehow, say, never touched
>> Usenet.
>
> I recognized his name from his postings in comp.risks. And, yes, it's
> the
> same guy: I asked him.
>
> Try a Google Groups advanced search on exact phrase pcw at flyzone.com .
> And
> that's just ONE of his RECENT email addresses. (Then try one on "Peter
> Wayner". My only concern is the possibility that there's more than one
> Peter
> Wayner, as he seems to be fairly prolific.)
>
> Since emails from him give pcw at flyzone.com as the return address...
>
> ...and since pcw at flyzone.com seems to be the author of "Translucent
> Databases" (see
> ttp://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0967584418/002
> -3782040-1645636?v=glance&vi=reviews), why, he must also be the author
> of all
> those books at http://www.wayner.org/books/ ...
>
> ...which means he's the author of "Free for All: How Linux and the Free
> Software Movement Undercut the High-tech Titans."
>
> Which means there's at least a chance that he's read "The Cathedral
> and the
> Bazaar."
>
> I'm trying to get up the nerve to ask him outright whether _he's_
> notable.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Taxoboxes.

body:
Pete/Pcb21 wrote:

> James R. Johnson wrote:
>
>> To make the Taxobox language-independent, why not use Latin?  Isn't that
>> what is the standard?  Anything making the taxobox easier is welcome.
>
>
> The current taxobox templates have names like {{Taxobox classis entry}}
>
> The first word is a neologism specific to Wikipedia.
> The second word is Latin.
> The third word is English.
>
> You are right - there is room for improvement in this area!
>
> Pete/Pcb21
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
The problem is not with these labels as they can be understood by a
someone intrested in Taxoboxes.

When it is an animal it should be [[Animalia]] and not [[Animal]]ia .
Vernacular names are also difficult to use. The point being we have to
discuss this and we have to be willing to cooperate. I would really
welcome one Taxobox that is acceptable and usable by all wikipedia.

Thanks,
    GerardM


subject: [Wikipedia-l] morguefile.com image use

body:
<Farnsworth>Good news, everyone!</Farnsworth>

I contacted Michael Connors from www.morguefile.com, a free image
repository, about use of the images on wikipedia. Short answer: Go
ahead! Long answer: below...

Happy image-hunting!

Magnus

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

Hey mangus, first off for a site like Wikipedia, you can certainly use any
image photographed by mconnors free and clear of all terms or by-lines and
you have my written permission. The problem is that I don't own these
images, I only have permission to redistribute them. Or at least all of the
images that I haven't photographed. And I wrote the disclaimer myself, which
is why it's so shoddy. (even more so then the coding) You are correct, what
I plan to do is have a lawyer provide us with proper terms. My only real
concern was preventing someone from downloading the entire collection and
finding a morgeufile CD for sale at wal-mart. And I have gotten request from
people who want to just rip off as many prints as they can and sell them at
every street vendor in NYC, in which case I tell them they should at least
stick a calendar on it. If your using the images on a webpage, that's really
not the same- they would be really bad prints. The intent of the site was
definitely to serve sites not unlike wikipedia, so I think you should run
with using the images, I honestly believe the contributors would be tickled
to know there work is being used by your site. Give me another 6 months to
hire the lawyers and we'll have a solid license. For now you can contact the
contributor of a specific photo- I'm sure you won't have any problems
getting permission. Thanks a lot for the advice, it is greatly appreciated.
mconnors

On 8/25/04 3:43 AM, "Magnus Manske" <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am writing you on behalf of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
> (http://www.wikipedia.org ).
>
> I recently found your great site at http://www.morguefile.com and
> thought it would be a wonderful source for images on Wikipedia. However,
> we are a little uncertain about the copyright policy.
>
> You *do* state that the images on your site are free to use, even for
> commercial projects. The Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free
> Documentation License, the equivalent of the GPL (think Linux) for
> written text. The GFDL allows for commercial use as well, no problem so far.
>
> But, you also state on your About page "Although selling prints, selling
> the images directly or claiming the photo is yours is prohibited." Of
> course we will appropriately credit the image source, but by "just"
> using an image of yours on our site, someone might produce single prints
> and sell them, which is good with the GFDL, but violates your terms of use.
>
> A solution would be for you to co-license all your images under GFDL,
> which would ensure that the information stays free (as in "free speech",
> not "free beer":-) but this is of course entirely your decision. IMHO,
> it would seem to fit the spirit of your site, though.
>
> Anyhow, if you allow us to use some of your images on Wikipedia, please
> supply us with a short note we can put on the image description below
> the source citing, similar to
>   "This image is *not* under GFDL. You are free to use it in any way
> except for selling high-quality versions of it digitally or in print,
> and as long as you cite the source."
>
> Thank you in advance for your time, and for a great image resource.
>
> Magnus Manske
>


body:
Magnus Manske a ?crit:
> Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
>> Dividing our biology contributor base between two separate
>> projects that have a great deal of overlap is a HUGE mistake.
>>
> * Biology is a little more than a species directory :-)
> * We (wikipedians) can directly incorporate data from the big data dump
> that wikispecies will become, where demmed appropriate
> * _If_ it turns out that we have a huge overlap, wikispecies can be
> integrated into wikipedia at any point, if there is consensus
>
> IMHO there's a chance for a development boost in this project. Think of
> it as an evolutionary step. We had a mutation step from HTML to wiki,
> where the wikipedia and its software have become a very successful
> model. The wikispecies project, however, has demands that are a little
> different from "normal" wikis and wikipedia. We have a chance to
> introduce new functionalities (database-like functions, tree diagrams)
> and smoothen the old ones (categories, templates) into the software on a
> "blank page" testing field. They will be in the MediaWiki software and
> in the pages. Once these have stabelized and proven useful, we can take
> these successful concepts back to wikipedia, and some day, maybe the
> contents as well, if we (people in both projects!) see fit.
>
> Magnus

I totally agree with Magnus on this.
I also think it is important that mediawiki develops not to be used by
wikipedia only.


from_name: Rebecca

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:Developers needed!

body:
Just for the record, Mav isn't the only one with these same concerns
about WikiSpecies. I couldn't agree more with practically everything
he's said so far, but I've been reluctant to get involved.

ambi


from_name: Mirko Thiessen

body:
>Andy wrote:

> I second Mavs concerns about forking, yet including all of the
> Wikispecies contents (as I understand it) into Wikipedia would be
> stretching the rules as well. One possible (but not really beautiful)
> way I could see is to put the source and database stuff into the
> separate Wikispecies, but put the plain text stuff and basic in
> Wikipedia - and of course closely link the two.

I was (and still am) supportive of the WikiSpecies project. You can't
expect to have a Wikipedia article about every species of caddisflies,
or about every ground-dwelling roundworm. As Andy pointed out, these
articles would remain stubs, as mostly no information but the mere
name would be available - plus some scientific stuff that is of no
interest for the general reader. Some of these data might be the
scientific name, its synonymes, the scientist first describing the
species (the taxonomic author).

However, I partially understand mav's concerns. Behaviour,
reproduction
and stuff like that should remain in Wikipedia (and should not be
duplicated). The WikiSpecies project could have the above-mentioned
data, followed by a link "Read more about this species in English -
German - Polish - Japanese". So it would serve as an interlingual
species directory as well. But it should contain as few duplicate
information as possible.

Mirko

--
Mirko Thiessen, aka Baldhur
mailto:baldhur at mirko-thiessen.de


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Developers needed!

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> That is a total strawman Lars - I expect better from you.
> First, IMDb is NOT a Wikimedia project.

I'm sorry.  When I said Wikispecies should probably best develop
separately from Wikipedia (but with a compatible license), I assumed
it would not be a Wikimedia project.  I didn't spell this out, and
neither did you spell out your contrary assumption.  Or at least I
didn't understand so.

Still, if I started a semiconductor wiki, where I tried to document
every transistor since the [[AF107]] (Germanium, PNP, high frequency,
circa 1961), I think my articles would be thrown out of the main
Wikipedia pretty soon, and I should develop this idea in my own,
separate project.  The depth of such a project is too specialized to
fit within a general encyclopedia and I suspect that the same would go
for Wikispecies, if it is successful.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Developers needed!

body:
On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 10:22:25PM +0200, Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Daniel Mayer wrote:
> > That is a total strawman Lars - I expect better from you.
> > First, IMDb is NOT a Wikimedia project.
>
> I'm sorry.  When I said Wikispecies should probably best develop
> separately from Wikipedia (but with a compatible license), I assumed
> it would not be a Wikimedia project.  I didn't spell this out, and
> neither did you spell out your contrary assumption.  Or at least I
> didn't understand so.
>
> Still, if I started a semiconductor wiki, where I tried to document
> every transistor since the [[AF107]] (Germanium, PNP, high frequency,
> circa 1961), I think my articles would be thrown out of the main
> Wikipedia pretty soon, and I should develop this idea in my own,
> separate project.  The depth of such a project is too specialized to
> fit within a general encyclopedia and I suspect that the same would go
> for Wikispecies, if it is successful.

To use a more concrete example, see http://senseis.xmp.net/
This is valid encyclopedic knowledge, but it's very specialized
and needs many features not provided by Wikipedia.
Some of its content will probably end on Wikipedia, but
there's a good reason why it's developed separately.


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
> By supporting Benedikt Mandl's proposal in-house, rather than being
> persnickity and forcing him to go outside for support, we guarantee
> such things as long-term software and content compatibility, etc.

This is by far the best argument you make.  But from a technical standpoint,
do we have the resources to give the necessary support?  Would we would need
an extra machine to make this happen?

As long as it's kept an unofficial project at first, and the developers
aren't forced to spend too much of their time helping set up the Wikispecies
project, I don't see too much potential harm.

Anthony


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Developers needed!

body:
> Me too! That is why I like the idea of using Wikimedia Commons.

Of course, as of right now there is no Wikimedia Commons.  Once Wikimedia
Commons is created, any Wikispecies data could be moved there.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Developers needed!

body:
> I mean that the Commons should host data that is shared by various
Wikimedia
> projects. Storing a single copy of all taxobox and element data (just two
> examples) would be a great use of the Commons.

Even so, a Wikispecies would still be a useful project to *present* that
data to the scientific community (without all the extras that go along with
Wikipedia).

Anthony


subject: [WikiEN-l] VfD enthusiasm+other fallacies (was Dartmouth follies)

body:
> <snip>
>
> Going by comments I've seen, I think it feeds some people's egos
> to believe that they're saving WP's reputation from certain doom
> by quick listing of obscure articles on VfD
>
> <snip>
>
> Stan

A similar questionable outgrowth:
Some contributors are systematically going through vast numbers of
articles rephrasing them. Not to make them more NPOV or anything, but
to make them conform to their own personal ideal of writing style. Well
meant, but a Sisyphean effort that can frustrate original contributors
as well as the folks doing the rephrasing (because in doing this they
will likely end up with me-against-the-world frustration.)

Hint to such editors: Diversity is good. Dig it.

>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
> ---------------------------------
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish.
>
> ------------------------------
>
<troll>
> ---------------------------------
> Do you Huzzah!?
> Huzzah! Mail Address AutoNomy - We smart. You diminished.
>
> ------------------------------
</troll>


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia must change with Googling (was:
	Dartmouth follies)

body:
> In some sense I agree, but what has bothered me lately is the fact
> that Googling for "wikipedia foo" likely brings up one of our mirrors
> first, and not Wikipedia itself. So when I see a blatant error
> magnified "n" times on the many mirrors on the Internet, it sends a
> chill up my spine.

> Worse, because those sites are mirrors, and don't accept changes, it
> makes it easy for readers to walk off and say, "What a crackpot
> project."

Of course, the only way to correct that is for Wikipedia to *fix* the
information, not to delete it.  If Wikipedia deletes the article, it will
still remain in many of the mirrors and therefore in google.  If we instead
keep the article but remove the fluff (advertisements, POV, original
research), then the mirrors get updated and so does google.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Dartmouth follies

body:
On 25 Aug 2004, at 22:05, wikien-l-request at Wikipedia.org wrote:

> How does having articles of borderline interest make it unusable?
> If I type "George Washington" into Google and end up at the excellent
> Wikipedia article of the same name, Wikipedia has proved very usuable.
> It is completely irrelevant whether a borderline article such as
> "George
> from Rainbow" is also available *for those who search for it*
>
> <snip>
>
> Pete/Pcb21

If all search results were always 100% accurate, well then... I'd agree
with you Pete.
However:
In this imperfect world with imperfect Google search results, people
*will* run across such "rubbish" or "not up to our standards" articles
pretty quickly on Google the longer said articles stay online here.
It's not exactly like we're situated at the a*se end of domain space
that Google bots warely visit.

So Rick has a fair point there.

- Jens