from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Press release : Logo putsch on the French Wikipedia !

body:
This is an ugly copy (non html) of our last internal
press release. To be found on
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AAnnouncements

---------
Press release : Logo putsch on the French Wikipedia !

French Wikipedia always promoting novelty and fun :
Wikipedia-wide approved logo replaced by another, to
celebrate forthcoming Christmas event

During the night between the 9th and the 10th of
december, the french logo was mysteriously changed,
and a new, very colourful and happy one now stands in
place.

12 hours later, no reversion has been done yet to the
grayer version, much to the surprise of external
observers. User:Tim Starling reaction was to shake his
head; his comment on that lack of reaction was
"amazing".
The lack of reaction of french wikipedians might have
several explanations : it may be suggested that some
just did not notice. It may also be that french
wikipedians are all editing under cologne blue skin (a
statistician might be able to give more feed back on
this). User:Anthere also suggested that the old logo
might still be in the "cache" for most users.

External observers reactions were diverse. Some
thought the new logo great. User:Angela commented
"That's so unfair! Fr have such a beuatiful logo for
Christmas and en still have the old boring white one."
She also asked "I hope it does stay. I love it. Do you
think there is any chance it would be allowed on en?".

Some wondered why this logo appeared so early before
Christmas; however, some answered that Christmas fun
time was beginning just after Thanksgiving in the US,
and that Thanksgiving was now over. Other mentionned
the new logo might be POV, and wondered if french
Wikipedia had an equivalent logo during the Ramadan
(nde : the Ramadan just ended last week).

Evidence shows the logo was uploaded by
w:fr:Utilisateur:Guillaume Bokiau, but it is yet
unclear how the official logo could be so easily
replaced without technical input. Some users
mentionned User:Brion VIBBER or User:Eloquence names,
as being likely to be involved in logo change issues.
Rumours also suggest that Guillaume could be the
author of the new logo as well, though this fact has
not been confirmed yet.

ant

__________________________________
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list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Press release : Logo putsch on the French Wikipedia
	!

body:
Well, that's fun!  Perhaps it would be more NPOV (is NPOV fun, though?
ha ha) for it to say "Happy Holidays" if a similar phrase exists in
French?

Anthere wrote:

> This is an ugly copy (non html) of our last internal
> press release. To be found on
> http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AAnnouncements
>
> ---------
> Press release : Logo putsch on the French Wikipedia !
>
> French Wikipedia always promoting novelty and fun :
> Wikipedia-wide approved logo replaced by another, to
> celebrate forthcoming Christmas event
>
> During the night between the 9th and the 10th of
> december, the french logo was mysteriously changed,
> and a new, very colourful and happy one now stands in
> place.
>
> 12 hours later, no reversion has been done yet to the
> grayer version, much to the surprise of external
> observers. User:Tim Starling reaction was to shake his
> head; his comment on that lack of reaction was
> "amazing".
> The lack of reaction of french wikipedians might have
> several explanations : it may be suggested that some
> just did not notice. It may also be that french
> wikipedians are all editing under cologne blue skin (a
> statistician might be able to give more feed back on
> this). User:Anthere also suggested that the old logo
> might still be in the "cache" for most users.
>
> External observers reactions were diverse. Some
> thought the new logo great. User:Angela commented
> "That's so unfair! Fr have such a beuatiful logo for
> Christmas and en still have the old boring white one."
> She also asked "I hope it does stay. I love it. Do you
> think there is any chance it would be allowed on en?".
>
> Some wondered why this logo appeared so early before
> Christmas; however, some answered that Christmas fun
> time was beginning just after Thanksgiving in the US,
> and that Thanksgiving was now over. Other mentionned
> the new logo might be POV, and wondered if french
> Wikipedia had an equivalent logo during the Ramadan
> (nde : the Ramadan just ended last week).
>
> Evidence shows the logo was uploaded by
> w:fr:Utilisateur:Guillaume Bokiau, but it is yet
> unclear how the official logo could be so easily
> replaced without technical input. Some users
> mentionned User:Brion VIBBER or User:Eloquence names,
> as being likely to be involved in logo change issues.
> Rumours also suggest that Guillaume could be the
> author of the new logo as well, though this fact has
> not been confirmed yet.
>
> ant
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard
> http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


list: wikien-l

from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Is MNH someone else?

body:
Only if he's a blocked user who is not supposed to be posting any more.

RickK

Bjorn Lindqvist <bjrn.lindqvist at telia.com> wrote:

1. Does it make any difference at all, if he had an account before MNH
or not?

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from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Glossary for Neutrality and the "majority" view

body:
Ray mentioned "Twelve Angry Men", and Geoff mentioned "Calvinball".

Twelve Angry Men is an old movie about a jury trying to come to a
verdict after a murder trial. The first vote is 11-1 and boy is everyone
mad at Henry Fonda for being the lone hold out! He says that it is
morally wrong (and illegal to, boot) to condemn a man to death while
EVEN ONE juror has a "reasonable doubt". (The more recent remake, with
George C. Scott, has the same plot.)

Calvinball is a game whose rules frequently and spontaneously change as
Calvin and Hobbes (two cartoon characters) play it. No accusation of
cheating can ever stick, because each act is judged according to the
update rules - and either player can change any rule any time. It would
be an understatement to describe the result as chaotic.

Oh, and Ray's mention of "cannon" was a typo; I guess he meant "canon",
i.e., the body of accepted scripture. (The Wikipedia article discusses
WHO does the accepting and WHY.)

Ed Poor


list: wikitech-l

subject:
[Wikitech-l] FW: [WikiEN-l] Wikibot,
	murder and Black Pantherredirects

body:
Thanks for taking such quick action, Andre. :-)

Ed Poor


from_name: limholt at excite.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] REPOST: Neutrality and the

body:
This is a single thought I'd like you to consider. I agree with almost all of your points in the 'expert opinion' or validtion discussion. This note just suggests one more consideration.

An earlire point in thiss or another thread about 'global warming' suggested looking at funding and/or publication counts for journal articles as a way yo determine concensus opinion. I think these two are very tightly coupled.

If funding is available, university types get grants and mae studies. Since their future career also depends on publication, they publish results, usually in terms that will make the grant source happy.

This gets us back to politics and interset. There is only a very diluted (i.e. many people with a very mild interest) desire to prove that warmig is not occuring. There are some very concentrated intersets (i.e. few people, but with a strong interest) hoping to prove it is true. So funding, studies, papers, etc. all tend to one side of the argument.

This does not make it true, just widespread. It doersn't make it false either.

Since I valued most of your points, I wanted to plant this thought with you, hoping for future germination. This is off-list since I don't want to create an extended response or reavtivate global warming.

Regards,  Lou Imholt (LouI at Wiki)

_______________________________________________
Join Excite! - http://www.excite.com
The most personalized portal on the Web!


from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Sodipodi-list] Wikiclips

body:
>>>>> "TB" == Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> writes:

    TB> I was hoping that for SVG it would be practical and even
    TB> useful, and if one is using SVG images, then maybe svgwiki
    TB> already does this.

Ah! That's possibly the source of the misunderstanding. The existing
"SVGWiki" is an (all-text) wiki _about_ SVG (the standard, how to use
it, etc.).

    http://www.protocol7.com/svg-wiki/

This (single-page) whiteboarding demonstration:

     http://purplewiki.blueoxen.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiWhiteboard

...uses SVG and Wiki in a very interesting way, but it's far from an
SVG-based wiki. AFAIK, there is no SVG-based wiki around.

~ESP

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


from_name: Bryce Harrington

body:
On Wed, 10 Dec 2003, Toby Bartels wrote:
> >Diffing images is kinda hard. For vector image formats it's a little
> >easier, and for stuff like SVG it might actually be practical, but for
> >most purposes it's _extremely_ difficult to automatically detect the
> >"difference" between two images. I doubt it would be worth the effort.
>
> I was hoping that for SVG it would be practical and even useful,
> and if one is using SVG images, then maybe svgwiki already does this.
> But for PNGs and JPEGs?  Ha!  No, not worth the effort.

It is possible to diff bitmap images, as this is done with motion
detection in security cameras.  For example, I took a testsuite of SVG's
from W3C and ran them through Sodipodi, then used the image differ to
find where Sodipodi differed from the spec, using a tool called
motiontrack:  http://freshmeat.net/projects/motiontrack/

Bryce


subject: [WikiEN-l] User Leumi

body:
Danny,

Thank you for your comments about Leumi's /method of contributing/. I
understand that you disagree with him on key points, yet I applaud your
determination to let him /describe/ those points.

I believe that it is the Neutrality Policy of the Wikipedia to describe
each major point of view (i.e., "POV") on controversial issues. Clearly,
a topics] such as the origin, living conditions and destiny of Palestine
refugees is a Controversial Issue. Several authors publishing in English
have expressed views on this subject.

It doesn't matter whether I /myself/ endorse the views of the ADL,
Arafat, Begin, Chomsky, Daniel Pipes, Finkelstein, Hilberg, Janner,
Peters, Steinberg, or anyone else. If they or their views are popular,
we had better mention their views in the article.

That doesn't mean we have to endorse anyone's view: the Wikipedia is not
going to say:

* they were forced from their homes; or,
* they left their homes voluntarily

Rather it will say, it MUST say, that Writer X says they were forced
from their homes and that Writer Y says they lef their homes
voluntarily.

Our job is not to settle controversies, it's to describe them.

Ed Poor
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from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: FW: [WikiEN-l] Wikibot,
	murder and Black Panther redirects

body:
On Tue, 09 Dec 2003 18:19:17 +0100, Rob Hooft wrote:
<snip>
> I didn't see this particular instance of wiki-violation, but I can say
> that Alexandros as far as I know is the only active user of
> pywikipediabot that, even though I asked him at least twice, is not a
> member of the mailing list for the robot code. I also think he did not
> discuss the use of the robot on en:. I am in favor of using robots
> (especially the ones I help to code), but I am an advocate of only using
> them after proper discussion of their merits. Alexandros does not seem
> to be listening to reason.
>
> Rob

Hello,

I also used the pywikipedia bot on en under my username [[hashar]] to
update about 600 articles that werent pointing on fr: but pointed by fr:

cheers,

--
Ashar Voultoiz
http://fr.wikipedia.org/Utilisateur:Hashar
do not send mail to listme at listme.dsbl.org


from_name: Lightning

subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiTeX

body:
Peter Danenberg wrote:

>Salve,
>
>I've recently developed a module with full support for AMSLaTeX, Lilypond and Chess; and I wanted you to take a look before I incorporate it into Wiki.
>
>WikiTeX introduces a new element, the "rend" element, which comes in
>block and inline form:
>
>	<rend class="music" style="tempo: 50" value="[content]" />
>or:
>	<rend class="math">
>		[content]
>	</rend>
>
>The rend element is indefinitely expansible by class modules, of which
>"math", "music" and "chess" are now supported.
>
>http://69.44.153.14/wikitex.php
>
>

The Music notation thing is really really cool, and so is the chess!!

Lightning


from_name: Sascha Noyes

subject: [WikiEN-l] REPOST: Neutrality and the

body:
On Wednesday 10 December 2003 10:25, limholt at excite.com wrote:
> This gets us back to politics and interset. There is only a very diluted
> (i.e. many people with a very mild interest) desire to prove that warmig is
> not occuring.

Can you provide any proof for this assertion? It would seem to me that the
opposite is true: Namely that a few people have lots to gain by convincing
others that global warming does not exist. (Ie. the industries that do not
want to be (further) regulated with regard to pollution)

Best,
Sascha Noyes
--
Please encrypt all email. Public key available from
www.pantropy.net/snoyes.asc


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] REPOST: Neutrality and the

body:
limholt at excite.com wrote:

>An earlire point in thiss or another thread about 'global warming' suggested looking at funding and/or publication counts for journal articles as a way yo determine concensus opinion. I think these two are very tightly coupled.
>
>If funding is available, university types get grants and mae studies. Since their future career also depends on publication, they publish results, usually in terms that will make the grant source happy.
>
>
>
This one's always fun.  It may or may not be relevant, but one of my
favorite recent articles on the subject is:
Freemantle, N., Anderson, I. M. & Young, P. (2000) Predictive value of
pharmacological activity for the relative efficacy of antidepressant
drugs. Metaregression analysis. British Journal of Psychiatry, 177, 292-302.

Which is a meta-analysis of dozens of studies on anti-depressant drugs
that finds that the strongest predictor of whether a drug "works" or not
is who sponsored the study (i.e. pharmaceutical companies vs.
non-pharmaceutical funding sources).

-Mark


from_name: Bjorn Lindqvist

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Is MNH someone else?

body:
> > Which reminds me (to everybody):
> > Has anybody with that power checked the IP logs for MNH's edits
> > to see if this might be somebody that we've met before?
> > He was quick to point to the weaknesses of our banning procedures
> > and seemed to understand the political wisdom of focusing on RK.
> >
>
> I would like to echo this request.  He strikes me as sometbody who is
> uncannily familiar with the subtleties of Wikipedia politics  for a
> newbie.

I would like to unecho this request. Unless the following questions
can be adequately answered:

1. Does it make any difference at all, if he had an account before MNH
or not?

2. Exactly what has MNH done, that has a large majority of the
involved people thinking he should be banned?

3. Even if you think that he deserves to be banned, why does he
deserve to be "outed"?

BL


from_name: Viajero

subject: [WikiEN-l] User Leumi - correction

body:
Hi all, a correction to my original post.

On 12/09/03  at 04:16 PM, Viajero <viajero at quilombo.nl> said:

> We have a user, Zero0000, who is the Real Thing, a historian with vast
> knowledge of Middle East history from original sources,

Zero, who is not on this list, asked me to convey the following:

<quote>
Just to set the record straight, I am one of those weird people who think
that squinting at mouldy microfilms for a couple of hours is fun, but my
professional training is not in history. Therefore it is not correct to
call me a historian even though I admit to knowing a little about the
subject. </quote>

V.


from_name: Green Mountain

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Hello

body:
Hello Wikipedia community. My username is greenmountainboy and I am very
happy with Wikipedia.  I would like to thank everyone who has been so
hospitable to me.

Yours truly,
Greenmountainboy


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>Ray mentioned "Twelve Angry Men", and Geoff mentioned "Calvinball".
>
>Twelve Angry Men is an old movie about a jury trying to come to a
>verdict after a murder trial. The first vote is 11-1 and boy is everyone
>mad at Henry Fonda for being the lone hold out! He says that it is
>morally wrong (and illegal to, boot) to condemn a man to death while
>EVEN ONE juror has a "reasonable doubt". (The more recent remake, with
>George C. Scott, has the same plot.)
>
>Calvinball is a game whose rules frequently and spontaneously change as
>Calvin and Hobbes (two cartoon characters) play it. No accusation of
>cheating can ever stick, because each act is judged according to the
>update rules - and either player can change any rule any time. It would
>be an understatement to describe the result as chaotic.
>
This only proves proves the the Wikipedia membership at large is a
treasure trove of allusions. :-)

>Oh, and Ray's mention of "cannon" was a typo; I guess he meant "canon",
>i.e., the body of accepted scripture. (The Wikipedia article discusses
>WHO does the accepting and WHY.)
>
Guilty!  Despite taking pride in an extensive vocabulary I do have some
items that I never remember correctly.  If I'm working on an actual
article I would look it up every time.  Cannon law turns out to be quite
a blast. :-)

Ec


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Press release : Logo putsch on the French
	Wikipedia	!

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Well, that's fun!  Perhaps it would be more NPOV (is NPOV fun, though?
>ha ha) for it to say "Happy Holidays" if a similar phrase exists in
>French?
>
All of us who use Google feel a little lighter on those days when they
dress up the logo on their search page for a special occasion.

Ec


from_name: Andre Engels

subject:
[Wikitech-l] FW: [WikiEN-l] Wikibot, murder and Black Panther
	redirects

body:
On Tue, 9 Dec 2003, Poor, Edmund W wrote:

> Is someone's bot out of control?
>
> Developers, please investigate this ASAP.  --Ed Poor

I have posted an extensive analysis of what was going on on wikien-l.
Basically, it looks like Alexandros was running one of the bot-programs to
test it, and did not clean up his mess afterward (he made 4 edits with it,
all 4 incorrect, and I have not seen it being used before or after). On the
mailing list I advised him to only use that specific program on
test.wikipedia.org until he understands it, however:

1) I don't think he is reading the mailing list, and
2) He seems to have already decided to leave Wikipedia.

Andre Engels


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiTeX

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>What about this:

><rend class="math">
>\input /etc/passwd
></rend>

>\input-ting most stuff doesn't work, probably because of
>TeX-special characters in them, but there are the catcode tricks
>to go around this problem. I think that knowing structure
>of the server, or just guessing hard enough, it would be possible
>to get all files owned by apache, including those that contain passwords
>to the database. It's also quite likely that there are some ways
>to takeover the LaTeX process somehow.

>If all these efforts fail, there's still good ol' DOS attack.
>It should be quite easy to create input that require exponential
>effort from TeX, and use a couple of them to destroy the server.

>The moral: in the end you'll need a whitelist of allowed commands.

That moral does not follow.
(If it did, sites like Planetmath.org and arXiv.org would be in trouble!)

\input should simply be forbidden, like \write , \include ,
and, well, just about any command that reads files liberally.
There are only a few of these, and we can check with the above sites
if we want to make extra certain that we have not missed any.

As for exponential computing effort, most TeX installations
normally stop working after a small memory limit has been reached.
Again, we can check with the above sites if we want to check
that this is really enough.

I don't mean to say that Peter, or his helpers, don't have the onus
to check carefully and report to the list why they are sure
that they have removed /all/ bad commands.  But the blacklist is finite.

The moral: when Donald E. Knuth writes a program instead of Microsoft,
then it is not riddled with security flaws. ^_^

-- Toby


from_name: GreenMountain

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Proposal: Introduce Editor Responsibilities?

body:
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Narrowing focus

in_reply_to:
<87d6b075lr.fsf@unicorn.bad-people-of-the-future.san-francisco.ca.us>
	(Evan Prodromou's message of "Sun, 07 Dec 2003 15:09:04 -0500")

body:
>>>>> "EP" == Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org> writes:

    EP> So, I've made this a proposed feature on meta:

    EP> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-value_pairs

    EP> I think I got it close to what came up on this list.

I also added a proposal for applying this feature to categorization;
see here:

        http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorization_with_field-value_pairs

Thanks,

~ESP

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


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from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Press release : Logo putsch on the French
	Wikipedia !

body:
On Dec 10, 2003, at 15:17, Tim Starling wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
>> 12 hours later, no reversion has been done yet to the
>> grayer version, much to the surprise of external
>> observers. User:Tim Starling reaction was to shake his
>> head; his comment on that lack of reaction was
>> "amazing".
>
> Just to clarify, I'm against the Christmas logo, and I was kind of
> hoping a few other people would be too.

Sure, it's dreadful, but that's for the community to decide and deal
with.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
Tim, why are you against it?  It looks fun to me.  I am a bit
concerned about the religious aspect, but other than that I think a
bit of temporary fun with the logo is a good thing.

--Jimbo

Tim Starling wrote:

> Anthere wrote:
> >12 hours later, no reversion has been done yet to the
> >grayer version, much to the surprise of external
> >observers. User:Tim Starling reaction was to shake his
> >head; his comment on that lack of reaction was
> >"amazing".
>
> Just to clarify, I'm against the Christmas logo, and I was kind of
> hoping a few other people would be too.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Thomas Gail Haws

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia Economy

body:
Hubbard EngineeringAs it seems wise to focus on those things which are of
greatest worth, I am wondering if there is a Wiki way to learn which
articles are receiving the greatest web usage (most "read" hits or highest
read to edit ratio).

Tom Haws
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Proposal: Introduce Editor Responsibilities?

body:
On Tue, 9 Dec 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> The wiki model provides good checks and balances, and it seems
> unlikely that we'll ever want to modify it in any substantial way,
> although of course I do think we can tweak it, and that it'll be
> important for "Wikipedia 1.0" to be stable.

I'm not so sure about those 'checks and balances' of the wiki model. I
know one article where I strongly feel that it is not NPOV because it
presents the ideas of one historian as if they are established fact. But
I don't dare get into a discussion or edit war about it, because it also
seems clear that the person who put it there is more knowledgeable
about the subject than me - and probably more knowledgeable than any
other Wikipedian.

On the other hand, I have written a number of stubs on subjects that I
do not know that much about, which have not be corrected at all since
then. Now, it could be that what I wrote was just good - but I don't
see that as the most likely explanation. More likely there simply is
noone here who does have the knowledge to improve them. Or if there
are, they either have not seen the article, or had no lust to work on
it (I know at least one article where I as the 'more knowledgeable'
party had the latter reaction as well).

Now, I don't intend this to be arguments for an editorial model. It
would not solve these, at least not the first (as you write, either I
or the other side would be editor, and could just lock the article in
their preferred state), and probably not the second (although it might
have a good effect in specifying where the problems are). I do intend
it to say that the wiki model also is no panacea.

Improvements might come through various proposed voting systems,
especially if people are invited to specify their level of expertise
and vote especially on those subjects they think they know about. We
should certainly have something in for version 1.0 to deal with this
problem, but it would not at all hurt to do so earlier.

I guess I would like to see something like editors for an article,
but in a more Wiki-like manner - that is, make it easier to become
an editor, and also editors do not approve or disapprove edits, but
only judge their value and/or that of the resulting article. This
judgement could then be shown somewhere, either on the article page
itself or on its edit page. Pages with high scores could be shown
on some kind of "showcase" page, and would be more likely to get
into version 1 than would be the case based on the importance of
the subject alone, pages with low scores could be candidates for a
full rewrite instead of the normal piecewise editing.

Andre Engels


from_name: Peter Danenberg

subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiTeX

body:
Salve,

I've recently developed a module with full support for AMSLaTeX, Lilypond and Chess; and I wanted you to take a look before I incorporate it into Wiki.

WikiTeX introduces a new element, the "rend" element, which comes in
block and inline form:

	<rend class="music" style="tempo: 50" value="[content]" />
or:
	<rend class="math">
		[content]
	</rend>

The rend element is indefinitely expansible by class modules, of which
"math", "music" and "chess" are now supported.

http://69.44.153.14/wikitex.php

Best,
Peter Danenberg


subject: [Wikitech-l] Proposed table restructuring

body:
There's been talk for some time of reworking the cur/old split into a
table of page information and a table of edit revision information.
Attached is a proposed (untested!) schema for page and revisions tables
and the transformation from the current ones.

The main expected benefit is to simplify code that has to deal with
both old and current revisions: recentchanges, contribs, history, and
of course saving of pages, renaming, etc. Instead of jumping through
hoops to deal with the same kind of data in cur and old, all
same-purpose data should stay in the same place.

This will simplify renames by avoiding the need to touch the revisions
table; only page (and of course links, searchindex...). Saves won't
have to duplicate information from cur to old; just insert the new row
to revisions and update the current revision pointer in page.

Additionally, the current revisions of pages will have an ID number
consistent with the old revisions, so we can create revision-specific
citation URLs. [Though the deletion system will need to be munged to
make it possible to preserve these across delete/undelete cycles.]

A few notes:
I think we can get rid of inverse_timestamp. It was needed on MySQL 3.x
because it didn't support reverse sorting on indexes and was dog slow;
but MySQL 4.0 has been 'in production' for a while now and if you're
running a large wiki on 3.x it's your own fault. :)

The schema includes a place for a title sort key in page. With
appropriate munging (see docs somewhere on unicode.org) this can be
used to get language-appropriate sorting of titles in display. That
would be a good thing.

There's also a rev_prior key to link to the previous revision. The old
table had this back in phase 2 but it wasn't generally used and got
dropped; however this is needed to make it feasible to put diff links
into user contribs and other places where we don't necessarily have the
next revision sitting in a buffer already.

I've dropped the unused old_flags (though maybe we should have another
flag field to indicate future compression options -- gzip and diff have
been suggested). Also cur_is_new is dropped in favor of rev_prior; you
could key on rev_prior=0 to find new versions.

Comments? Ideas? Complaints?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
On Dec 10, 2003, at 21:24, Green Mountain wrote:
> In addition, I believe that it should have been put up during
> Chrismtas, instead of during the time when everybody acts like it is
> christmas, and by the time that christmas actually starts, everyone had
> gotten sick of hearing "jingle bells." for the 500000th time.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3291889.stm

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiTeX

body:
On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 04:10:35PM -0100, Peter Danenberg wrote:
> Salve,
>
> I've recently developed a module with full support for AMSLaTeX, Lilypond and Chess; and I wanted you to take a look before I incorporate it into Wiki.
>
> WikiTeX introduces a new element, the "rend" element, which comes in
> block and inline form:
>
> 	<rend class="music" style="tempo: 50" value="[content]" />
> or:
> 	<rend class="math">
> 		[content]
> 	</rend>
>
> The rend element is indefinitely expansible by class modules, of which
> "math", "music" and "chess" are now supported.
>
> http://69.44.153.14/wikitex.php

Do you do anything about security ?


subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiTeX

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>As for exponential computing effort, most TeX installations
>>normally stop working after a small memory limit has been reached.
>>Again, we can check with the above sites if we want to check
>>that this is really enough.

>That's fine for a cracker. To DoS Wikipedia you'd need to send
>only N requests per minute, for some rather small N, and for each request
>smaller than 1kB. "Computational complexity DoS" isn't anything new.

Do you mean N individual requests to TeX something?
Sure, that's a DoS attack, but how is texvc safe from that?
How is the regular wiki parser safe from that, for that matter?

>>The moral: when Donald E. Knuth writes a program instead of Microsoft,
>>then it is not riddled with security flaws. ^_^

>You're wrong, because there are so many modules available, and each of them
>may introduce new dangerous functions in some new version.
>You'd need to check every single functions whether it's safe or not,
>and ban all functions not checked, thus getting a nice whitelist.
>Otherwise, you're just asking for troubles.

None of the many modules for TeX is capable of introducing new I/O commands.
So you check each relevant module for its use of these commands.

>TeX is extremely complex and it wasn't written with security in mind.
>Putting it on CGI isn't a very wise idea.

Then DoS PlanetMath or arXiv and see how well you do.
I mean, state specifically, if it is possible, what you would do.
You never explained this the last time we had this conversation,
to me or anybody else.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiTeX (for Chem formulas!)

body:
Peter Danenberg wrote:

>Good point; here's what people had to say about <math> tags in
>2002:

>From: "Derek Moore" <jizzbug at hotmail.com>
>>What about <math> ... </math> conflicting with MathML?

>From: Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu>
>>A simple equation like <math>x + y = z</math> looks ugly.

I'm pretty sure that I was talking about how texvc ''rendered'' that input.
Anyway, <math> is much less ugly than <rend class="math">, right? ^_^

-- Toby


from_name: Anthere

body:
Joyeuses f?tes sounds perfect for that matter...

That leaves the issue of the end of the Ramadan we missed...
But we can do just as in any wikipedia article. Information missing does
not really make an article pov, it just makes it a work in progress.

Jimmy Wales a ?crit:
> Well, that's fun!  Perhaps it would be more NPOV (is NPOV fun, though?
> ha ha) for it to say "Happy Holidays" if a similar phrase exists in
> French?
>
>
> Anthere wrote:
>
>
>>This is an ugly copy (non html) of our last internal
>>press release. To be found on
>>http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AAnnouncements
>>
>>---------
>>Press release : Logo putsch on the French Wikipedia !
>>
>>French Wikipedia always promoting novelty and fun :
>>Wikipedia-wide approved logo replaced by another, to
>>celebrate forthcoming Christmas event
>>
>>During the night between the 9th and the 10th of
>>december, the french logo was mysteriously changed,
>>and a new, very colourful and happy one now stands in
>>place.
>>
>>12 hours later, no reversion has been done yet to the
>>grayer version, much to the surprise of external
>>observers. User:Tim Starling reaction was to shake his
>>head; his comment on that lack of reaction was
>>"amazing".
>>The lack of reaction of french wikipedians might have
>>several explanations : it may be suggested that some
>>just did not notice. It may also be that french
>>wikipedians are all editing under cologne blue skin (a
>>statistician might be able to give more feed back on
>>this). User:Anthere also suggested that the old logo
>>might still be in the "cache" for most users.
>>
>>External observers reactions were diverse. Some
>>thought the new logo great. User:Angela commented
>>"That's so unfair! Fr have such a beuatiful logo for
>>Christmas and en still have the old boring white one."
>>She also asked "I hope it does stay. I love it. Do you
>>think there is any chance it would be allowed on en?".
>>
>>Some wondered why this logo appeared so early before
>>Christmas; however, some answered that Christmas fun
>>time was beginning just after Thanksgiving in the US,
>>and that Thanksgiving was now over. Other mentionned
>>the new logo might be POV, and wondered if french
>>Wikipedia had an equivalent logo during the Ramadan
>>(nde : the Ramadan just ended last week).
>>
>>Evidence shows the logo was uploaded by
>>w:fr:Utilisateur:Guillaume Bokiau, but it is yet
>>unclear how the official logo could be so easily
>>replaced without technical input. Some users
>>mentionned User:Brion VIBBER or User:Eloquence names,
>>as being likely to be involved in logo change issues.
>>Rumours also suggest that Guillaume could be the
>>author of the new logo as well, though this fact has
>>not been confirmed yet.
>>
>>ant
>>
>>__________________________________
>>Do you Yahoo!?
>>Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard
>>http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree
>>_______________________________________________
>>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>>Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>>
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiTeX

body:
> Do you do anything about security ?

That was in particular what I wanted you to take a look at, Tomasz.
The templates exposed by the classes are limited; shell access is
disabled (LaTeX); Python is running in safe (Lilypond); but I'm going
to have to deal with \include elements, etc. ad hoc.  And ad hoc runs
contrary to texvc's methodology.

I'd be especially interested if we could crack it in its present form,
however; or prove some crack concepts.

Best,
Peter


body:
On Dec 10, 2003, at 17:06, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Brion-
>> Comments? Ideas? Complaints?
>
> Possible performance drawbacks when dealing with huge MySQL tables?

The revisions table would be about the size of the present old table.
It would have some more rows, but would no longer have the overhead of
duplicate title information. Meanwhile, some functions that deal with
page titles but don't care about their contents (whatlinkshere,
allpages, orphans, etc) may well be faster by having a smaller page
table instead of the text-bloated cur.

> Limits?

The maximum size for an InnoDB table (as the total InnoDB table space)
is apparently 4 billion pages, with a default page size of 16kb. That's
64 terabytes.

As the wiki is edited more and more, the relative number of current
revisions compared to old revisions will continue to shrink;
storage-related limits wouldn't be significantly different than with
the present schema.

> More time needed to fix corruptions? (If a corruption occurs in CUR,
> fixing that table should be enough. If it occours in the big ass table
> for
> all pages, prepare to wait.)

And if there's corruption in the big old table in the old schema? Or
the smaller page table in the new schema?

> More difficult backup+table export (for those who want just CUR and not
> OLD), but that can be dealt with.

It's already inconvenient for anyone who wants regular updates, there's
a lot of work can be done on that front. A format that can be sensibly
read and organized rather than a big SQL statement dump might be
useful.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Proposed table restructuring

body:
Apparently the archives for the list ate everything but the GPG
signature, so here it is again as plaintext:

On Dec 10, 2003, at 16:33, Brion Vibber wrote:

> There's been talk for some time of reworking the cur/old split into a
> table of page information and a table of edit revision information.
> Attached is a proposed (untested!) schema for page and revisions
> tables and the transformation from the current ones.
>
> The main expected benefit is to simplify code that has to deal with
> both old and current revisions: recentchanges, contribs, history, and
> of course saving of pages, renaming, etc. Instead of jumping through
> hoops to deal with the same kind of data in cur and old, all
> same-purpose data should stay in the same place.
>
> This will simplify renames by avoiding the need to touch the revisions
> table; only page (and of course links, searchindex...). Saves won't
> have to duplicate information from cur to old; just insert the new row
> to revisions and update the current revision pointer in page.
>
> Additionally, the current revisions of pages will have an ID number
> consistent with the old revisions, so we can create revision-specific
> citation URLs. [Though the deletion system will need to be munged to
> make it possible to preserve these across delete/undelete cycles.]
>
> A few notes:
> I think we can get rid of inverse_timestamp. It was needed on MySQL
> 3.x because it didn't support reverse sorting on indexes and was dog
> slow; but MySQL 4.0 has been 'in production' for a while now and if
> you're running a large wiki on 3.x it's your own fault. :)
>
> The schema includes a place for a title sort key in page. With
> appropriate munging (see docs somewhere on unicode.org) this can be
> used to get language-appropriate sorting of titles in display. That
> would be a good thing.
>
> There's also a rev_prior key to link to the previous revision. The old
> table had this back in phase 2 but it wasn't generally used and got
> dropped; however this is needed to make it feasible to put diff links
> into user contribs and other places where we don't necessarily have
> the next revision sitting in a buffer already.
>
> I've dropped the unused old_flags (though maybe we should have another
> flag field to indicate future compression options -- gzip and diff
> have been suggested). Also cur_is_new is dropped in favor of
> rev_prior; you could key on rev_prior=0 to find new versions.
>
> Comments? Ideas? Complaints?
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
> <patch-revisions.sql>

-- Change cur/old into page/revisions

-- page_sortkey will contain a munged version of the title for
---             language-specific sorting
-- page_current is a foreign key on revisions.rev_id
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS page;
CREATE TABLE page (
   page_id int(8) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
   page_namespace tinyint(2) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
   page_title varchar(255) binary NOT NULL default '',
   page_sortkey varchar(255) binary NOT NULL default '',
   page_restrictions tinyblob NOT NULL default '',
   page_counter bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
   page_is_redirect tinyint(1) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
   page_random real unsigned NOT NULL,
   page_touched char(14) binary NOT NULL default '',
   page_current int(8) unsigned NOT NULL default 0,
   UNIQUE KEY page_id (page_id),
   UNIQUE KEY namespace_title (page_namespace,page_title),
   KEY (page_random),
);

-- rev_page is a foreign key to page.page_id
-- rev_prior will key to another rev_id for the previous revision, to
simplify
--           making diff links etc
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS revisions;
CREATE TABLE revisions (
   rev_id int(8) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
   rev_page int(8) unsigned NOT NULL default 0,
   rev_prior int(8) unsigned NOT NULL default 0,
   rev_text mediumtext NOT NULL default '',
   rev_comment tinyblob NOT NULL default '',
   rev_user int(5) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
   rev_user_text varchar(255) binary NOT NULL,
   rev_timestamp char(14) binary NOT NULL default '',
   rev_minor_edit tinyint(1) NOT NULL default '0',
   rev_current tinyint(1) NOT NULL default 0,
   UNIQUE KEY rev_id (rev_id),
   ADD INDEX (rev_timestamp),
   ADD INDEX page_timestamp (rev_page,rev_timestamp),
   ADD INDEX user_timestamp (rev_user,rev_timestamp),
   ADD INDEX usertext_timestamp (rev_user_text,rev_timestamp);
);

-- Import old revisisons from old to revisions
INSERT INTO revisions
	(rev_id,rev_page,rev_text,rev_comment,rev_user,rev_user_text,
	rev_timestamp,rev_minor_edit,rev_flags)
   SELECT
	old_id,cur_id,old_text,old_comment,old_user,old_user_text,
	old_timestamp,old_minor_edit,old_flags)
	FROM old,cur
	WHERE old_namespace=cur_namespace and old_title=cur_title;

-- Import cur revisions from cur to revisions
-- This will create new rev_id revisions keys.
INSERT INTO revisions
	(rev_page,rev_text,rev_comment,rev_user,rev_user_text,
	rev_timestamp,rev_minor_edit,rev_cur_edit)
   SELECT
	cur_id,cur_text,cur_comment,cur_user,cur_user_text,
	cur_timestamp,cur_minor_edit
	FROM cur;

-- Import page definitions from cur to page
INSERT INTO page
	(page_id,page_namespace,page_title,page_restrictions,
	page_counter,page_is_redirect,page_random,page_touched,
	page_current)
   SELECT
	cur_id,cur_namespace,cur_title,cur_restrictions,
	cur_counter,cur_is_redirect,cur_random,cur_touched,
	rev_id
	FROM cur,revisions
	WHERE cur_id=rev_page and rev_is_current;

-- rev_prior and page_sortkey need to be filled out by a php script?


subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiTeX

body:
On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 05:37:42PM -0100, Peter Danenberg wrote:
> > Do you do anything about security ?
>
> That was in particular what I wanted you to take a look at, Tomasz.
> The templates exposed by the classes are limited; shell access is
> disabled (LaTeX); Python is running in safe (Lilypond); but I'm going
> to have to deal with \include elements, etc. ad hoc.  And ad hoc runs
> contrary to texvc's methodology.
>
> I'd be especially interested if we could crack it in its present form,
> however; or prove some crack concepts.

What about this:

<rend class="math">
\input /etc/passwd
</rend>

\input-ting most stuff doesn't work, probably because of
TeX-special characters in them, but there are the catcode tricks
to go around this problem. I think that knowing structure
of the server, or just guessing hard enough, it would be possible
to get all files owned by apache, including those that contain passwords
to the database. It's also quite likely that there are some ways
to takeover the LaTeX process somehow.

If all these efforts fail, there's still good ol' DOS attack.
It should be quite easy to create input that require exponential
effort from TeX, and use a couple of them to destroy the server.

The moral: in the end you'll need a whitelist of allowed commands.


subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiTeX

body:
> The moral: in the end you'll need a whitelist of allowed commands.

Beautiful! 1 down, x to go.  Negative security does require constant vigilance; and I believe you may have happened upon the end of all such implementations.

Best,
Peter


from_name: Mark Krueger

subject: AW: [Wikitech-l] WikiTeX (for Chem formulas!)

body:
Peter, really impressed by your LaTeX features. I am (unfortunately) still
user of LaTex and dont actually know how to implement macros. Therefore I
just want to inform you about a macro for chemical structure formulas which
can be found (inside the famous article by Haas/Kane) at:
http://math-cs.cns.uni.edu/~okane/cgi-bin/newpres/papers/tex/ I hope this
helps a little bit to make WP step by step the one and only invincable
encyclopedia (more as it is already, great compliments to all the
programmers - hope to join soon...).
Cheers, Mark

-----Ursprungliche Nachricht-----
Von: wikitech-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
[mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org]Im Auftrag von Tomasz
Wegrzanowski
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 10. Dezember 2003 18:14
An: Wikimedia developers
Betreff: Re: [Wikitech-l] WikiTeX

On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 05:37:42PM -0100, Peter Danenberg wrote:
> > Do you do anything about security ?
>
> That was in particular what I wanted you to take a look at, Tomasz.
> The templates exposed by the classes are limited; shell access is
> disabled (LaTeX); Python is running in safe (Lilypond); but I'm going
> to have to deal with \include elements, etc. ad hoc.  And ad hoc runs
> contrary to texvc's methodology.
>
> I'd be especially interested if we could crack it in its present form,
> however; or prove some crack concepts.

What about this:

<rend class="math">
\input /etc/passwd
</rend>

\input-ting most stuff doesn't work, probably because of
TeX-special characters in them, but there are the catcode tricks
to go around this problem. I think that knowing structure
of the server, or just guessing hard enough, it would be possible
to get all files owned by apache, including those that contain passwords
to the database. It's also quite likely that there are some ways
to takeover the LaTeX process somehow.

If all these efforts fail, there's still good ol' DOS attack.
It should be quite easy to create input that require exponential
effort from TeX, and use a couple of them to destroy the server.

The moral: in the end you'll need a whitelist of allowed commands.
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: James Duffy

subject: [WikiEN-l] Is MNH somebody else?

body:
I agree. There is something highly suspicious about

1.  his rather too in-depth knowledge of wikipedia for a newbie;
2. His targeting of RK. Longtime users know RK has a short fuse and a
tendency to overreact. Of the large numbers of contributors, how did MNH
know, when barely a wet weekend in the place, /who/ to target not just on
talk pages but personally?

There is something fishy about MNH. I think the issue isn't /is/ MNH a
former wikipedian back to cause trouble, but which one is he.

JT

>
>On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 12:22:14AM +0000, wikien-l-request at Wikipedia.org
>wrote:
> >
> > Which reminds me (to everybody):
> > Has anybody with that power checked the IP logs for MNH's edits
> > to see if this might be somebody that we've met before?
> > He was quick to point to the weaknesses of our banning procedures
> > and seemed to understand the political wisdom of focusing on RK.
> >
>
>I would like to echo this request.  He strikes me as sometbody who is
>uncannily familiar with the subtleties of Wikipedia politics  for a
>newbie.
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

_________________________________________________________________
MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus


from_name: The Cunctator

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Press release : Logo putsch on the
	FrenchWikipedia !

body:
On 12/10/03 8:55 PM, "Guillaume Blanchard" <gblanchard at arcsy.co.jp> wrote:

>> Green-
>>> I like the logo too.  I saw it on FR and thought, "wow, too bad en isn't
>>> this liberal."
>>
>> We're liberal. We just don't like kitsch.
>>
>> Regards,
>
> We? I'm sure many English-speaker like kitsch ;o)
> Put colors on the main page was also consider as kitsch in the past,
> now it is a standard for almost all Wikipedias.
>
It's still ugly. I still strongly think that the colors should be just one
of the stylesheets.


body:
On Dec 10, 2003, at 22:19, Lightning wrote:
> I like it, I just have one question, and pardon my ignorance, but why
> the use of binary fields? are they faster or smaller or less easly
> corrupted?

'binary' on char and varchar fields just tells it not to try to match
those fields in a case-insensitive fashion (which it would muck up
anyway, having a poor understanding of multiple character sets and no
knowledge of Unicode).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] [Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia Economy]

body:
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From: "Thomas Gail Haws" <hawstom at despammed.com>
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia Economy
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 15:38:04 -0700
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body:
Done; the new tag is <rend class="chem"></rend>.  I ended up going with
the slightly more modern PPCH-TeX package; you can read about it under
"documentation".

If you're particularly wedded to the CHEM-TeX package you mentioned, let
us know.

Best,
Peter


from_name: John C. Penta

body:
----- Original Message -----
From: Guillaume Blanchard <gblanchard at arcsy.co.jp>
Date: Wednesday, December 10, 2003 8:55 pm
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Press release : Logo putsch on the FrenchWikipedia !

> > Green-
> > > I like the logo too.  I saw it on FR and thought, "wow, too
> bad en isn't
> > > this liberal."
> >
> > We're liberal. We just don't like kitsch.
> >
> > Regards,

Apologies to Aoienko for stealing his post, but...

Kitsch is good.

Santa is kitsch, but Santa is GOOD.:-)


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia Economy

body:
From: "Thomas Gail Haws" <hawstom at despammed.com>
Reply-To: hawstom at despammed.com, wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 15:38:04 -0700
To: <wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia Economy

As it seems wise to focus on those things which are of greatest worth, I am
wondering if there is a Wiki way to learn which articles are receiving the
greatest web usage (most "read" hits or highest read to edit ratio).

Tom Haws

This can be done, but worth has to do with quality and significance, not
with hits.

Fred

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body:
> Tell me, where do I find the documentation?

Whoops; try

	http://69.44.153.14/wikitex_doc.htm

Curious to hear what you think before I incorporate it into the local
Wiki.

Best,
Peter


from_name: Thomas R. Koll

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia Economy

body:
On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 03:38:04PM -0700, Thomas Gail Haws wrote:
> Hubbard EngineeringAs it seems wise to focus on those things which are of
> greatest worth, I am wondering if there is a Wiki way to learn which
> articles are receiving the greatest web usage (most "read" hits or highest
> read to edit ratio).

www.wikipedia.org/stats/
(or was it en. ?)

I'm sure you can find them yourself.

good night, tom

--
http://www.tomk32.de - just a geek trying to change the world
   -.-       http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32
   /|>	           http://tomk32.bookcrossing.com
   / \                 http://tinyurl.com/u6de


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Peter-

I would prefer to have the tags called
<math>,
<music>,
<chess>,
<chem>,
<greek>

etc.

The basic idea of wiki is to make everything fast and easy to learn. Why
should people have to type <rend class="music"> when they could just type
<music>? Using the above scheme would also eliminate the need for
converting existing <math> tags, but that's a minor advantage.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiTeX

body:
On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 02:46:49PM -0800, Toby Bartels wrote:
> Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>
> >What about this:
>
> ><rend class="math">
> >\input /etc/passwd
> ></rend>
>
> >\input-ting most stuff doesn't work, probably because of
> >TeX-special characters in them, but there are the catcode tricks
> >to go around this problem. I think that knowing structure
> >of the server, or just guessing hard enough, it would be possible
> >to get all files owned by apache, including those that contain passwords
> >to the database. It's also quite likely that there are some ways
> >to takeover the LaTeX process somehow.
>
> >If all these efforts fail, there's still good ol' DOS attack.
> >It should be quite easy to create input that require exponential
> >effort from TeX, and use a couple of them to destroy the server.
>
> >The moral: in the end you'll need a whitelist of allowed commands.
>
> That moral does not follow.
> (If it did, sites like Planetmath.org and arXiv.org would be in trouble!)
>
> \input should simply be forbidden, like \write , \include ,
> and, well, just about any command that reads files liberally.
> There are only a few of these, and we can check with the above sites
> if we want to make extra certain that we have not missed any.
>
> As for exponential computing effort, most TeX installations
> normally stop working after a small memory limit has been reached.
> Again, we can check with the above sites if we want to check
> that this is really enough.

That's fine for a cracker. To DoS Wikipedia you'd need to send
only N requests per minute, for some rather small N, and for each request
smaller than 1kB. "Computational complexity DoS" isn't anything new.

> I don't mean to say that Peter, or his helpers, don't have the onus
> to check carefully and report to the list why they are sure
> that they have removed /all/ bad commands.  But the blacklist is finite.
>
> The moral: when Donald E. Knuth writes a program instead of Microsoft,
> then it is not riddled with security flaws. ^_^

You're wrong, because there are so many modules available, and each of them
may introduce new dangerous functions in some new version.
You'd need to check every single functions whether it's safe or not,
and ban all functions not checked, thus getting a nice whitelist.
Otherwise, you're just asking for troubles.

TeX is extremely complex and it wasn't written with security in mind.
Putting it on CGI isn't a very wise idea.


from_name: Green Mountain

body:
I like the logo too.  I saw it on FR and thought, "wow, too bad en isn't
this liberal."   I think it should be done for all religious holidays
however.  In addition, I believe that it should have been put up during
Chrismtas, instead of during the time when everybody acts like it is
christmas, and by the time that christmas actually starts, everyone had
gotten sick of hearing "jingle bells." for the 500000th time.
On Wed, 2003-12-10 at 18:35, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Tim, why are you against it?  It looks fun to me.  I am a bit
> concerned about the religious aspect, but other than that I think a
> bit of temporary fun with the logo is a good thing.
>
> --Jimbo
>
> Tim Starling wrote:
>
> > Anthere wrote:
> > >12 hours later, no reversion has been done yet to the
> > >grayer version, much to the surprise of external
> > >observers. User:Tim Starling reaction was to shake his
> > >head; his comment on that lack of reaction was
> > >"amazing".
> >
> > Just to clarify, I'm against the Christmas logo, and I was kind of
> > hoping a few other people would be too.
> >
> > -- Tim Starling
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > 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
>


from_name: Brian Corr

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Press release : Logo putsch on the French
	Wikipedia !

body:
I just created an account at fr: and I noticed the logo this afternoon and
was a little surprised to see it. I personally think it's cute (although
I'm not generally and advocate of *cute* I must admit that I like it when
Google a logo of the day). I share the concerns about the Christian
message, and I like Jimbo & Anthere's suggestion of "Joyeuses f?tes" as an
alternative.

Just my 2 centimes....

Brian


body:
Green-
> I like the logo too.  I saw it on FR and thought, "wow, too bad en isn't
> this liberal."

We're liberal. We just don't like kitsch.

Regards,

Erik


body:
Brion-
> Comments? Ideas? Complaints?

Possible performance drawbacks when dealing with huge MySQL tables?
Limits?

More time needed to fix corruptions? (If a corruption occurs in CUR,
fixing that table should be enough. If it occours in the big ass table for
all pages, prepare to wait.)

More difficult backup+table export (for those who want just CUR and not
OLD), but that can be dealt with.

Regards,

Erik


body:
Peter-

>> What about <math> ... </math> conflicting with MathML?

Just make a <mathml> tag if that ever becomes an issue (about 2010 when
MathML gets mainstream support).

> A simple equation like <math>x + y = z</math> looks ugly.

I don't get this one. And I don't think <rend class="math" value="x+y=z"/>
is prettier.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiTeX

body:
> Peter, or his helpers

None yet; takers? If you have the time or inclination, Toby; maybe we
can get in touch with PlanetMath as regards their security model.

Best,
Peter


from_name: Lightning

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

>>
>>
>> Comments? Ideas? Complaints?
>>
>> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>> <patch-revisions.sql>
>
>
> -- Change cur/old into page/revisions
>
> -- page_sortkey will contain a munged version of the title for
> ---             language-specific sorting
> -- page_current is a foreign key on revisions.rev_id
> DROP TABLE IF EXISTS page;
> CREATE TABLE page (
>   page_id int(8) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
>   page_namespace tinyint(2) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
>   page_title varchar(255) binary NOT NULL default '',
>   page_sortkey varchar(255) binary NOT NULL default '',
>   page_restrictions tinyblob NOT NULL default '',
>   page_counter bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
>   page_is_redirect tinyint(1) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
>   page_random real unsigned NOT NULL,
>   page_touched char(14) binary NOT NULL default '',
>   page_current int(8) unsigned NOT NULL default 0,
>   UNIQUE KEY page_id (page_id),
>   UNIQUE KEY namespace_title (page_namespace,page_title),
>   KEY (page_random),
> );
>
> -- rev_page is a foreign key to page.page_id
> -- rev_prior will key to another rev_id for the previous revision, to
> simplify
> --           making diff links etc
> DROP TABLE IF EXISTS revisions;
> CREATE TABLE revisions (
>   rev_id int(8) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
>   rev_page int(8) unsigned NOT NULL default 0,
>   rev_prior int(8) unsigned NOT NULL default 0,
>   rev_text mediumtext NOT NULL default '',
>   rev_comment tinyblob NOT NULL default '',
>   rev_user int(5) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
>   rev_user_text varchar(255) binary NOT NULL,
>   rev_timestamp char(14) binary NOT NULL default '',
>   rev_minor_edit tinyint(1) NOT NULL default '0',
>   rev_current tinyint(1) NOT NULL default 0,
>   UNIQUE KEY rev_id (rev_id),
>   ADD INDEX (rev_timestamp),
>   ADD INDEX page_timestamp (rev_page,rev_timestamp),
>   ADD INDEX user_timestamp (rev_user,rev_timestamp),
>   ADD INDEX usertext_timestamp (rev_user_text,rev_timestamp);
> );
>
> -- Import old revisisons from old to revisions
> INSERT INTO revisions
>     (rev_id,rev_page,rev_text,rev_comment,rev_user,rev_user_text,
>     rev_timestamp,rev_minor_edit,rev_flags)
>   SELECT
>     old_id,cur_id,old_text,old_comment,old_user,old_user_text,
>     old_timestamp,old_minor_edit,old_flags)
>     FROM old,cur
>     WHERE old_namespace=cur_namespace and old_title=cur_title;
>
> -- Import cur revisions from cur to revisions
> -- This will create new rev_id revisions keys.
> INSERT INTO revisions
>     (rev_page,rev_text,rev_comment,rev_user,rev_user_text,
>     rev_timestamp,rev_minor_edit,rev_cur_edit)
>   SELECT
>     cur_id,cur_text,cur_comment,cur_user,cur_user_text,
>     cur_timestamp,cur_minor_edit
>     FROM cur;
>
> -- Import page definitions from cur to page
> INSERT INTO page
>     (page_id,page_namespace,page_title,page_restrictions,
>     page_counter,page_is_redirect,page_random,page_touched,
>     page_current)
>   SELECT
>     cur_id,cur_namespace,cur_title,cur_restrictions,
>     cur_counter,cur_is_redirect,cur_random,cur_touched,
>     rev_id
>     FROM cur,revisions
>     WHERE cur_id=rev_page and rev_is_current;
>
> -- rev_prior and page_sortkey need to be filled out by a php script?
>

I like it, I just have one question, and pardon my ignorance, but why
the use of binary fields? are they faster or smaller or less easly
corrupted?

In any case, good work Brion, this schema will simplify things and make
the overall code a lot cleaner.

Lightning


from_name: Evan Prodromou

body:
>>>>> "BV" == Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> writes:

    BV> Comments? Ideas? Complaints?

Well, my first feeling is that this looks very, very sweet and I think
it is probably a big step in the right direction.

My second feeling is that maybe we should brainstorm a bit about some
common features of the software, and make sure that we know how
they're going to work with this new schema. Some things off the top
of my head:

   * Given a title, display a page
   * When displaying a page, show broken links
   * Display an old version of a page
   * Display the history of a page
   * Display the diffs between two version
   * Save a new page
   * Save a new version of an existing page
   * RecentChanges
   * Newpages
   * Show user contributions
   * Full-text search
   * Go button
   * Long pages, short pages
   * Stub detection
   * Redirecting
   * What links here

As I'm going through this list, nothing here sticks out at me as being
particularly awkward in the design you gave. Which is probably good.

Oh, OK, so, I have one more feeling, which is: these are pretty major
tables, so this would be a pretty sweeping change. It'll destabilize
the software for a while, with only some marginal benefit to end-users
(better performance, probably, and probably some more robust query
features).

Anyways, my $0.02.

~ESP

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


body:
Good point; here's what people had to say about <math> tags in
2002:

From: "Derek Moore" <jizzbug at hotmail.com>
> What about <math> ... </math> conflicting with MathML?

From: Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu>
> A simple equation like <math>x + y = z</math> looks ugly.

I thought a modular approach might avoid some confusion and simplify
expansion in the future; but the simpler forms you're suggesting
actually process more efficiently.

Keep in mind there's an optional condensed form:

	<rend class=math value="$e=mc^2$" />

I'm wedded to neither, and we might be able to offer both during a
transitional phase.

Best,
Peter


body:
Indeed; if no one defends the modular approach we can save ourselves the
typing:

	<rend class=music style="tempo: 50">

would actually become

	<music tempo=50>!

Best,
Peter


subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiTeX

body:
On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 05:02:54PM -0800, Toby Bartels wrote:
> Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>
> >Toby Bartels wrote:
>
> >>As for exponential computing effort, most TeX installations
> >>normally stop working after a small memory limit has been reached.
> >>Again, we can check with the above sites if we want to check
> >>that this is really enough.
>
> >That's fine for a cracker. To DoS Wikipedia you'd need to send
> >only N requests per minute, for some rather small N, and for each request
> >smaller than 1kB. "Computational complexity DoS" isn't anything new.
>
> Do you mean N individual requests to TeX something?
> Sure, that's a DoS attack, but how is texvc safe from that?
> How is the regular wiki parser safe from that, for that matter?

> >TeX is extremely complex and it wasn't written with security in mind.
> >Putting it on CGI isn't a very wise idea.
>
> Then DoS PlanetMath or arXiv and see how well you do.
> I mean, state specifically, if it is possible, what you would do.
> You never explained this the last time we had this conversation,
> to me or anybody else.

I mean, something like this:

<rend class="math">
\renewcommand{\a}{xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx}
\renewcommand{\b}{\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a}
\renewcommand{\c}{\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b}
\renewcommand{\d}{\c\c\c\c\c\c\c\c\c\c}
\d
</rend>

Then, http://69.44.153.14/wikitex.php stops rendering
if I make the input much bigger. Is it on so purpose or does it have
real performance problems even with such a short piece of TeX ?

You can't use such tricks with texvc or Wiki parser.

> >>The moral: when Donald E. Knuth writes a program instead of Microsoft,
> >>then it is not riddled with security flaws. ^_^
>
> >You're wrong, because there are so many modules available, and each of them
> >may introduce new dangerous functions in some new version.
> >You'd need to check every single functions whether it's safe or not,
> >and ban all functions not checked, thus getting a nice whitelist.
> >Otherwise, you're just asking for troubles.
>
> None of the many modules for TeX is capable of introducing new I/O commands.
> So you check each relevant module for its use of these commands.

Are you willing to check every module in TeX distro that it doesn't use
I/O commands in a way that could be abused by a cracker ?
Or is there maybe some version of TeX that simple doesn't contain
any dangerous commands ? That would really be much nicer.

Of course, I'm paranoid. Probably nobody would care enough to look for a hole,
no matter how big it was. But I'd feel much better if there were a few lines
of Perl somewhere, implementing security whitelist, even without
any correctness validation.


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] User Leumi

body:
tarquin wrote:

>
> Viajero wrote:
>
>> He is another young teenager with Asperger's; maybe this has
>> something to do with it.
>>
>>
> Is this beginning to be a problem on Wikipedia?
> What can we do to help new users with impairments that affect their
> social skills?

I'd say just treat them like everyone else.  If someone is impaired by a
"mental illness" or impaired by "just has no social skills," it comes
out the same for the purposes of a community, so just try to find a way
to get people to work together.  I can only see things turning out badly
if we try to cater to specific "mental illnesses" and so on.  Now if we
want to help new users who lack social skills in general fit in with our
model, that's another matter entirely.

-Mark


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Offline most of today

body:
I'll be offline most of today.

Those who have volunteered for mediation committee since the original
appointments, don't fear.  You're all approved as far as I know, it's
just that I have to gather the list together and repost the details.
Is there a wiki page with the list, so I can compare to my piece of
paper notes?

--Jimbo


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Broken titles rejected

body:
I just applied a fix to Title.php which explicitly rejects titles that
contain invalid characters instead of silently removing the bad
characters.

For one thing, there was a flaw in the way it was done such that it
could end up leaving illegal whitespace, so a page renamed to "* abc"
ends up at "_abc", but a visit to "_abc" trims the whitespace to "abc"
and you can't get to the page using its given title.

Since this can be used to (accidentally or deliberately) "disappear"
pages such that it's a pain to restore them, I've gone ahead and
installed it right away. I don't _think_ it will negatively affect
anything, but there's a small chance that some links that used to work
(because invalid characters were filtered out) will no longer do so.

If there's a good reason to revert to the previous behavior (silent
dropping) with the whitespace bug fixed, this could be done, but I'd
rather not.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Press release : Logo putsch on the	FrenchWi
	kipedia !

body:
Constans, Camille (C.C.) wrote:
> Each wikip?dia has his own rules. Often the same than en:, but not
>everytime. I think each wikipedia must have his own rules. Respecting
>some choosed by the wikimedia fundation, npov for instance.

I wanted to just say that although the parameters of this are
naturally open to question, I support this in concept.  A lot of
customs (I wouldn't use the word 'rules') are going to be
culture-specific and there are many options where there is no
universally "correct" answer.  NPOV is non-negotiable everywhere,
but a lot of the details are going to work out differently in
different languages.

Americans and Japanese people, for example, are culturally very
different.  So naturally what is considered rude behavior on the two
wikis is going to be different.  Americans wear their shoes in the
house, as filthy as that sounds.

--Jimbo


from_name: Constans, Camille (C.C.)

body:
>-----Message d'origine-----
>De : tarquin [mailto:tarquin at planetunreal.com]
>Envoy? : jeudi 11 d?cembre 2003 10:38
>? : wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>Objet : Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Press release : Logo putsch on the
>FrenchWikipedia !
>
>
>
>
>Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
>
>>>Green-
>>>
>>>
>>>>I like the logo too.  I saw it on FR and thought, "wow, too
>bad en isn't
>>>>this liberal."
>>>>
>>>>
>>>We're liberal. We just don't like kitsch.
>>>
>>>Regards,
>>>
>>>
>>
>>We? I'm sure many English-speaker like kitsch ;o)
>>Put colors on the main page was also consider as kitsch in the past,
>>now it is a standard for almost all Wikipedias.
>>
>>
>>
>Yes, and it's a great pity.
>The colours on the main page are more than kitsch, they are revolting.
>The community on fr: seem far more concerned with style over
>content. I
>understand that there is a natural desire to make our environment
>"pretty", but this xmas logo is a step too far.

What is revolting with having some fun ? Why do you say we prefer work on
style intead of working on content ? And as I remember I dont see you often
on fr:. Google has logo for xmas, do you think they working only on style ?

>I will no longer be working on fr: until this situation is resolved.

Good bye then. I didn't see you talk about this on fr....

When you say that fr prefer work on style, you say that all our work is
crap. I cant agree with you, maybe some pages are stubs, but some are very
nice articles.

Shaihulud


from_name: Thomas Gail Haws

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia Thrift

body:
Is there a Wiki way to judge the viewing popularity of articles?  It seems
it would be prudent to focus most editing effort on those pages that are
viewed most heavily.  And it seems it would be nice to be able to access a
edits to views ratio for each article.

Tom Haws
"And [the angel] said unto me: Knowest thou the condescension of God? And I
said unto him: I know that he loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not
know the meaning of all things."


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Press release : Logo putsch on the FrenchWi
	kipedia !

body:
>
>Just as Tarquin would put it (and put it on fr actually), the french
>wikipedia is very much French, not french speaking. Some
>outside call it
>Wikipedia Fran?aise :-( Because it is essentially poved by
>France culture.

Most of people one fr are french.... It will be nice if we could have some africans or canadian to work with us.

>Some articles on french cities, do not mention the city is in France,
>because it is obvious :-)

We dont think about other country :) But I make the same mistake for cities in other country, when I speak about Orlando, I think a Orlando in Florida...

>Date articles, current events, are focused on french events

We're french :)

>When two words are used, one canadian, one french, some think the
>*correct* one is the french (see previous discussion about gay
>and gai,
>and what is "correct" anyway)

Difficult question. Why dont using the two words ? with a redirect

>And this is not even mentionning that the proper way to write
>is the one
>suggested by the French Academy or the French Typographic
>Code. Perhaps
>Canada has a chance as well here, but I doubt a decree in
>Algeria about
>how to use french would be given much consideration :-)

Difficult question too, i would like to know it works between American People and british people ?

>We seek to have images legal issues respect the "french" legislation.

Because most of wikipedians are french, and they hope to be able to speak or distribute the french wikip?dia "in law".

>The association will be set in France.

Others could be set in Belgium, Canada, and I hope in Senegal....

>A hosting server would be in France likely.

It's juste an idea, because the french association could be work on it. Why an another  server in an another contry ?

>The idea of local association is good. But here, it will just add a
>layer of cultural weight.

The goal of this association is not to take the power on the french wikipedia, this association could just help the wikipedia with funds, publicity, forums, etc...

>France culture is already *so* heavy, that a Christmas logo, which in
>itself *could be* npov if other celebrations were respected as
>well, is
>*smelling* culture dominency again.

Yeah, it's true. But it could had a bit of fun :)

>It is just another step. Dominancy over content, over style, logo :-)))

Do you think we're really pov ? We're working to prevent that, I hope...

>Of course, many editors are french, so that is not so surprising. But
>that does not mean we should not try to compensate our bias.

Agree

>Not a long time ago, on ml, there was a discussion over how to reach
>npov on international wikipedias, given that the variety of
>participants
>is more limited than on en. This is worrying me deeply as well. We are
>not currently trying to work toward npov I fear, we are still
>trying to
>understand the concept. Of course, some will disagree with
>that opinion
>of mine :-)

Juste your opinion Anthere, I think most of people try to work npov. See all the battles on religious articles.

>18 months ago, I thought that if I could attract more french speaking
>people on the french wikipedia, from the en: stock, they could help us
>to fight France cultural dominancy.
>
>I also thought that if some french users could also work on
>the english
>wikipedia, that would help, if they could see how people were doing in
>another place. That is what I did, even if I am not really part of the
>english wikipedia.
>
>That is why I hoped so much for mixing all of us.
>That, if it was hard for some of us to understand npov, international
>mixing could help.
>That, if it was hard for some of us, to accept the one different,
>international mixing could help.
>That, if it was hard for us to solve conflict resolution, because we
>have no expert on this, international cooperation, mediation, where
>international would be welcome in english commitee, even at observers,
>to learn, it would help. Or if international commitee could be
>set, that
>would help.
>
>But yeah, right, no. There is here, and there. No confusion.
>One belongs
>here, or belongs there.
>I do not know what to think of what is going on. Except that each time
>there is a discussion on something on fr, it can't stay polite.

Sometime it stay polite :) We have some latin blood ;-)

>So when Tarquin says he wants to talk about it on the international
>list, one answer is "that he should keep his ridiculous threats for
>himself". This is how disagreement and willingness to talk with other
>members of the same project is interpretated : a threat.

Tarquin present this as a war declaration : I wont work on fr wikip?dia until some things changes ! And He said : I will say to international ml that fr is npov and prefer to work on style than on content. As if we were small children who didn't respect the rules! Personnaly I dislike this !

>As a matter of interest, I would be curious to know how those
>internationals, that are split between wikipedias assume that. I find
>extremely disconcerting to see two parts of a "common" project
>being so
>different. It is a bit like that psychological disorder :-)

Do you think we're really different ? I'm sure there's some probleme as ours on en, de, nl, oc,   oups not oc, there's no yet enough people :)

>I hope this issue be solved Tarquin, because fr needs you badly.

As I said, leaving is not a solution. Tarquin choose to leave, it's his choice. Athymik does it some weeks ago.


body:
>
>
>Constans, Camille (C.C.) wrote:
>
>>What is revolting with having some fun ? Why do you say we
>prefer work on
>>style intead of working on content ? And as I remember I dont
>see you often
>>on fr:. Google has logo for xmas, do you think they working
>only on style ?
>>
>>
>Google is a commercial site. It's completely different.

Not really, we want to do a professional work.

>>
>>>I will no longer be working on fr: until this situation is resolved.
>>>
>>>
>>
>>Good bye then. I didn't see you talk about this on fr....

Sorry about that, it was a bit rude.

>>When you say that fr prefer work on style, you say that all
>our work is
>>crap.
>>
>>
>Not what I meant.

It's what I understood. Look into the french wikipedia, there is some very good article. I wont be surprised to see some of the same quality on the universalis encyclopedia (french encyclopedia as brittanica I think)
You dont think the wikipedia project need this pain ? The wikipedia project is a very good project, maybe the more interesting I've seen. Look at Anthere, sometimes she really wants to leave, but at the end, her action had gone to the goal.


body:
>Anthere wrote:
>
>> As a matter of interest, I would be curious to know how those
>> internationals, that are split between wikipedias assume
>that. I find
>> extremely disconcerting to see two parts of a "common" project being
>> so different. It is a bit like that psychological disorder :-)
>
>I feel this too.
>When I try to provide "crosstalk" from En: policies to Fr: and
>vice-versa, I get no results.
>fr: says "but we're not en:"
>en: says "but we are en:!"

Each wikip?dia has his own rules. Often the same than en:, but not everytime. I think each wikipedia must have his own rules. Respecting some choosed by the wikimedia fundation, npov for instance.

It could be a work for the wikimedia fundation ?


body:
>
>>Google has logo for xmas, do you think they working only on style ?
>
>Google is not npov...

It's true, but it's fun :) Dont forget to take some pleasure to work on wikipedia :)

>>>I will no longer be working on fr: until this situation is resolved.
>>
>>
>> Good bye then. I didn't see you talk about this on fr....
>
>Oh yes he did Shai ! He did on le bistro. And on the french mailing
>list. And here http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilisateur%3ATarquin

I missed it. Sorry.

>> When you say that fr prefer work on style, you say that all
>our work is
>> crap. I cant agree with you, maybe some pages are stubs, but
>some are very
>> nice articles.
>
>hopefully, the abribus...

I didn't follow the problem on abribus, then I cant understand, sorry :)

>> Shaihulud
>
>thanks again for the pict Shai...

Which pictures ? :) You dont have to thank me. (I havent finished Aioneko pictures yet)


body:
>
>Constans, Camille (C.C.) wrote:
>
>>>Date articles, current events, are focused on french events
>>>
>>>
>>
>>We're french :)
>>
>>
>>
>But part of NPOV is taking an international persepctive, and
>not writing
>for a french audience.

I understand. I wanted to say we're writing on a french perspective because we're french ! It's difficult and not natural to think in anothers ways.
Some of us are trying. I hope we'll get some canadian writers....

Sorry for my poor english :) I dont write often in english, if you dont understand some stuffs that I wanted to said, wirte me a mail :)

Shaihulud


from_name: tarquin

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Press release : Logo putsch on
	the	FrenchWikipedia !

body:
Guillaume Blanchard wrote:

>>Green-
>>
>>
>>>I like the logo too.  I saw it on FR and thought, "wow, too bad en isn't
>>>this liberal."
>>>
>>>
>>We're liberal. We just don't like kitsch.
>>
>>Regards,
>>
>>
>
>We? I'm sure many English-speaker like kitsch ;o)
>Put colors on the main page was also consider as kitsch in the past,
>now it is a standard for almost all Wikipedias.
>
>
>
Yes, and it's a great pity.
The colours on the main page are more than kitsch, they are revolting.
The community on fr: seem far more concerned with style over content. I
understand that there is a natural desire to make our environment
"pretty", but this xmas logo is a step too far.

I will no longer be working on fr: until this situation is resolved.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Stylesheet update

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:

> I have updated the wikistandard.css stylesheet on pliny and larousse
> with the one from CVS, in order to get my table toys working ;-)
>
> Now
>
> {| class=rimage
> | [[image:someimage.jpg]]
> |--
> | Caption
> |}
>
> will align the image to the right, choose a smaller font, etc.
>
> Should we move these table classes to a separate tables.css file and
> "include" it with its own statement into the HTML file? That would
> ensure table classes working on all skins.
>

Good idea.
Perhaps all "body text" formatting should be moved into a stylesheet,
but this can probably wait until we reorganise skins in the future.


from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Press release : Logo putsch on the
	FrenchWi kipedia !

body:
At 01:33 PM 12/11/03 +0000, Tarquin wrote:

>Constans, Camille (C.C.) wrote:
>
>>>Date articles, current events, are focused on french events
>>>
>>
>>We're french :)
>>
>>
>But part of NPOV is taking an international persepctive, and not writing
>for a french audience.

Oui.

I would expect the French-language wikipedia to emphasize things of interest
to the Francophonie--but that's not just France.

(I don't have enough French to post in French, alas.)


subject: [WikiEN-l] User Leumi

body:
Viajero wrote:

>He is another young teenager with Asperger's; maybe this has
>something to do with it.
>
>
Is this beginning to be a problem on Wikipedia?
What can we do to help new users with impairments that affect their
social skills?


from_name: Richards,Michael

body:
>> Possible performance drawbacks when dealing with huge MySQL tables?

>The revisions table would be about the size of the present old table.
>It would have some more rows, but would no longer have the overhead of
>duplicate title information. Meanwhile, some functions that deal with
>page titles but don't care about their contents (whatlinkshere,
>allpages, orphans, etc) may well be faster by having a smaller page
>table instead of the text-bloated cur.

Surely most of the current queries done on the database are on cur: logged in and non-logged in users viewing and editing the most recent version of pages. Relatively few queries access old: mostly viewing old versions of pages. I don't know what the exact split is but it is probably 90/10 or something.

By merging cur and old, won't that mean that most of the queries will now access the much larger revisions table? So a relatively small number of queries will get faster, but most will get slower?

Isn't this the original reason for the split of all the page data into the cur and old tables?

I don't know the exact impact combining them back will have to response times. Presumably most of the accesses to revisions will use unique indexes, and will scale well, so maybe the cleaner code is worth it if the access times do not degrade much.

Do any of the developers have a feel for how much slower the queries on revisions would be compared to cur? Just viewing an old revision seems to take about the same time as viewing the current revision, but that is just one piece of code that queries the cur table among many.

-- Michael Richards (Nanobug)


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Anthere wrote:
> 12 hours later, no reversion has been done yet to the
> grayer version, much to the surprise of external
> observers. User:Tim Starling reaction was to shake his
> head; his comment on that lack of reaction was
> "amazing".

Just to clarify, I'm against the Christmas logo, and I was kind of
hoping a few other people would be too.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Fantasy at joachim.net

subject: [Wikitech-l] it.wikipedia.org (Admins)

body:
Hi Brion,

Thanks a lot for updating IT, now working there is much more fun! ;-)

Could you please enable Frieda and me as Admins on IT?

Thanks a lot, great job you did (as usual ;-)

Fantasy :-)


from_name: John C. Penta

subject: [WikiEN-l] User Leumi

body:
----- Original Message -----
From: tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com>
Date: Thursday, December 11, 2003 4:47 am
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] User Leumi

>
>
> Viajero wrote:
>
> >He is another young teenager with Asperger's; maybe this has
> >something to do with it.
> >
> >
> Is this beginning to be a problem on Wikipedia?
> What can we do to help new users with impairments that affect
> their
> social skills?

It may be, though I dunno. I personally don't have Asperger's, but am very similar; I have, ahem...minimal social skills. It probably doesn't show up online, but only because my main issue doesn't come through, in that I can't read facial expressions or tone of voice*.

John
* Yes, this means I have *extreme* difficulty understanding sarcasm.


from_name: Jake Nelson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Broken # links

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> Look at the "manual TOC" on
> http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_of_the_world
>
> New bug?

I was about to send an email about this as well, noticed it on
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Orphaned_Articles

My guess is that it's due to that title-legality checking Brion was talking
about, but I could be wrong.

-- Jake


subject: [Wikitech-l] Broken # links

body:
On Dec 11, 2003, at 08:33, Jake Nelson wrote:
> My guess is that it's due to that title-legality checking Brion was
> talking
> about, but I could be wrong.

Should be fixed now.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

body:
> Green-
> > I like the logo too.  I saw it on FR and thought, "wow, too bad en isn't
> > this liberal."
>
> We're liberal. We just don't like kitsch.
>
> Regards,

We? I'm sure many English-speaker like kitsch ;o)
Put colors on the main page was also consider as kitsch in the past,
now it is a standard for almost all Wikipedias.

Aoineko


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiTeX

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>Then DoS PlanetMath or arXiv and see how well you do.
>>I mean, state specifically, if it is possible, what you would do.
>>You never explained this the last time we had this conversation,
>>to me or anybody else.

>I mean, something like this:

><rend class="math">
>\renewcommand{\a}{xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx}
>\renewcommand{\b}{\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a}
>\renewcommand{\c}{\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b}
>\renewcommand{\d}{\c\c\c\c\c\c\c\c\c\c}
>\d
></rend>

>Then, http://69.44.153.14/wikitex.php stops rendering
>if I make the input much bigger. Is it on so purpose or does it have
>real performance problems even with such a short piece of TeX ?

My local TeX installation has no problem with this,
but if I go on to use \newcommand{\e} and make one more step,
then it stops with this error:

 ! TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [main memory size=1000001].

Naturally, TeX is designed this way on purpose!
This is /why/ it does not overload the server,
because it has artificially limited memory capacity.
By messing with our local TeX installation,
we can set this limiting capacity to whatever we want,
in order to ensure that TeX uses up only so much of our computing power.

>You can't use such tricks with texvc or Wiki parser.

It's not much of a trick.  It's certainly not a DoS attack;
all that happens is that TeX stops running and the input is not rendered.
This is basically the same thing that happens when texvc gets
<math> \SomeCommandThatDoesNotExist </math>; the program exits with an error.

Now, maybe wikitex doesn't handle this error properly!
If wikitex crashes the server (to speak in hyperbole)
when it gets an input that it can't properly compile,
then that is bad.  But if it instead prints
"! TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [main memory size=1000001].",
then it handles errors about as well as texvc does.

(In fact, the prototype at <http://69.44.153.14/wikitex.php>
prints nothing at all, which is a user-friendliness problem,
but hardly a security flaw.)

>>None of the many modules for TeX is capable of introducing new I/O commands.
>>So you check each relevant module for its use of these commands.

>Are you willing to check every module in TeX distro that it doesn't use
>I/O commands in a way that could be abused by a cracker ?
>Or is there maybe some version of TeX that simple doesn't contain
>any dangerous commands ? That would really be much nicer.

First, we don't have to check every module in any TeX distribution;
we only have to check those modules that we choose to allow.
If we don't have the module installed, then they can't use it!
By itself, TeX has a few file I/O commands like \input and \write ;
no module has file I/O commands that don't work by calling these.
LaTeX has had a great deal of tasting, and its commands should be trusted,
so this gives us several additional file I/O commands to look for.
Yet most modules never use any of these!  We can refuse to install those
that use file I/O commands that we haven't checked thoroughly.

Peter should assure us that he has gone through, say, the chess module
and checked that it doesn't use any file I/O commands other than, say,
\wlog (which writes to the log and cannot access any other file).
Otherwise I would not trust the module in question.

>Of course, I'm paranoid. Probably nobody would care enough to look for a hole,
>no matter how big it was. But I'd feel much better if there were a few lines
>of Perl somewhere, implementing security whitelist, even without
>any correctness validation.

Actually, I think that this is a perfectly reasonable security doublecheck.
I don't think that we have any need for the kind of TeX programming
that defines new commands; if we disable \renewcommand as well as \input ,
then I don't think that anything that Axel or I want to do with TeX is lost.
If this changes later on, then we can revisit the issue when that happens,
because in the end, I don't think that it is really necessary;
but until then, it should be reasonable to satisfy you in this way.
Do you see any problem with this, Peter?  What if Tomasz submits a patch
that does this?

BTW to Peter:

I see that <rend class="math"> simply puts us inside LaTeX.
I think that it ought to put us directly inside the {equation*} environment.
Users don't want to have to type \begin{equation*} and \end{equation*}.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikitech-l] Database oddities on fr:

body:
On Dec 11, 2003, at 10:56, Nicolas Weeger wrote:
> A direct SQL query gives, for image #14318, the description 'Angraecum
> photo perso GFDL'
> Going to the page yields the description (even forcing the refresh
> with ctrl-f5):
>    Description : Angraecum photo perso
>    Source : Jeffdelonge
>    Licence : GFDL

Can you provide an image name and URL so I can check this?

> Also, in links, a page 'MERCOSUR' has >20 links outside, when it is a
> REDIRECT!!!!

May be some problems with updating the tables.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Database oddities on fr:

body:
On Dec 11, 2003, at 11:26, Nicolas Weeger wrote:
>> Can you provide an image name and URL so I can check this?
>
> Image link is:
> http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Angraecum_sesquipedale_small.jpg
> Request for its info is:
> SELECT img_size, img_name, img_description, img_user, img_timestamp
> FROM image
> WHERE img_description NOT LIKE '%licence%'
> ORDER BY img_timestamp DESC LIMIT 0,1
> (first in table, hopefully)

Nothing looks amiss, the page was just edited after the initial upload:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Image:
Angraecum_sesquipedale_small.jpg&action=history

>> May be some problems with updating the tables.
>
> I saved the page again (without any change), but links weren't
> updated...

Well, I saved it *with* changes and they weren't updated. Will have to
look into it later...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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