body:
"Brion L. VIBBER" wrote:

> I'm beginning to think we should have a convenient article renaming
> function that will preserve editing histories (and, optionally,
> automatically create a redirect page). What think you?

That sounds like a feature that should be on every Wikipedian's
wishlist! I know it's on mine... in fact, after moving a couple of
articles manually it was at the forefront of my mind and I was about to
add it to the Wish List! It would be so much more convenient and save so
much time that could be better used for adding new content.

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating

Love and huggles to all!


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Karen AKA Kajikit

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Suggestion about the meta-wikipedia

body:
I'm a new user and I didn't even know the meta wikipedia was there... I
was about to write my own page of 'questions about the wikepedia' to try
and get some answers. As it is I hadn't done it yet and now I know it
doesn't belong in the main wiki-space at all... I've also found answers
to some of my questions just by browsing, so I don't feel the need to
ask them anymore!

But since I didn't know about the meta-wp, the odds are that nor will
any other newbie, and newbies are just the sort of people with questions
and queries about the nature of the wikipedia... given the nature of the
project I can see a hundred newbies coming in over a period of  time and
making pages entitled 'Things I want to know about the Wikipedia' or 'My
Questions I want answered' etc... either that or I'm just wierd! I've
never been one to lurk and wait - if I think something's a good idea I
tend to jump in with both feet :)

Anyway, to get to the point, my suggestion is that there should be a
clear statement on the front page of the Wikipedia directing people to
the meta-wikipedia for discussions ABOUT the Wikipedia, like the link
sending people back to the main page from the front page of the meta.

Karen Johnson

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating

Love and huggles to all!


from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [Wikipedia-l] 24 is driving me nuts

body:
>
>
>
>Message: 3
>To: wikipedia-l at nupedia.com
>Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] 24 is driving me nuts
>From: Gareth Owen <wiki at gwowen.freeserve.co.uk>
>Date: 08 Apr 2002 17:56:48 +0100
>Reply-To: wikipedia-l at nupedia.com
>
>"Julie Hofmann Kemp" <juleskemp at yahoo.com> writes:
>
>>Speaking of which, I really do wonder where it lives and if it's loony
>>enough to seek out those of us nearby.
>>
>
>California, it would appear.
>(The IP address is a cable supplier in Burlington, CA)
>

I make it

*whois -h whois.arin.net 24.150.61.63*

Cogeco Cable Systems (NETBLK-CGOC-2BLK)	CGOC-2BLK  24.150.0.0 - 24.150.255.255
Cogeco Cable Solutions (NETBLK-CGOC-WERI1-A) CGOC-WERI1-A
						   24.150.48.0 - 24.150.63.255

To single out one record, look it up with "!xxx", where xxx is the
handle, shown in parenthesis following the name, which comes first.

The ARIN Registration Services Host contains ONLY Internet
Network Information: Networks, ASN's, and related POC's.
Please use the whois server at rs.internic.net for DOMAIN related
Information and whois.nic.mil for NIPRNET Information.

which places the writer in Ontario or Quebec.

See

    http://www.cogeco.com/cabletv/local.html

Neil


from_name: Manning Bartlett

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Another loony flag: 66.219.221.xxx

body:
This 66.219.221.xxx  character is another to watch for - I seem to be getting into an edit war with it over its "Orthodox Baha'i Faith" issues. I researched this group a few months back when I was working on the original Baha'i faith article, and my evidence suggested that they are a tiny splinter group (a few hundred members) of a religion with 5 million members.

Anyway, I'd be grateful if you could watch out for this character - I know Brian Vibber has already run into its ideological agenda. I'm leaving for India again in a week or two so I won't be able to watch it closely enough.

Manning
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from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia-l digest, Vol 1 #350 - 9 msgs

in_reply_to: <20020409015258.MUHB15826.rwcrmhc54.attbi.com@there>; from maveric149@yahoo.com on Mon, Apr 08, 2002 at 05:51:09PM -0800

body:
Daniel Lee Mayer wrote:
>> Moreover, one of 24's aims is to change the goals of the
>> project and tell us what we 'should' (in his twisted world-view) be
>> writing about.

My position on this is that so long as someone keeps their "change the
goals" campaign on meta, that's fine.  It's a waste of typing, though,
because the one thing I'm totally dogmatic and inflexible on is NPOV
and the concept of "encyclopedia".  If NPOV is wrong, then so be it,
wikipedia will be wrong.  I'll gladly give an alternative community
free hosting (until I can't afford it) just to defuse the objection
that we're somehow suppressing alternatives.

If someone wants a non-NPOV encyclopedia, or if someone wants a site
that is something _other than_ an encyclopedia, that's fine.  But it
won't be wikipedia.

The thing is, I'm an extremely ideological person.  I'm a hardcore
"libertarian" politically.  I'm an _Atlas Shrugged_-toting-Objectivist
philosophically.  Compared to the average person, I'm "off the scale"
in terms of ideological extremism.  Don't ask me about religion or
communism or the 'greens' unless you want to get an earful about
reason, morality, and individual freedom.  :-)

So I think I _understand_ the desire to write one-sided articles.
Sometimes I'd love to go into articles on topics that I care about and
write a diatribe.  :-) But I don't.  Because to do so would be
_polemics_, not _encyclopedics_.  If even *I*, an "ideological kook"
if there ever was one, can keep the two straight, then so can people
who are just as extreme in some other direction.

It would be wrong to turn Wikipedia into a platform for my opinions --
or 24s.  It's an encyclopedia.  It is a catalog of information aiming
for an approximation to universal agreement.  We have many simple
techniques for achieving this, the most common and easiest being to
"step out a level" and not _engage_ the controversy, but _describe_
the controversy.

>>  In my opinion, he IS vandalizing the project by creating
>> tons of pages that are really indefensible from a NPOV-encyclopedia
>> standpoint.   Banning him would certainly result in tirades of "those
>> people/that clique doesn't like what I say, so they're oppressing me",
>> but this may be the point where we have to make a call on policy.

I'd like to hear Cunctator weigh in on this topic.  He's probably our
current best "conscience" on such matters, in the sense that he's very
opposed to cabalism, and clearly sees the risk.

To me, the risk is two fold.  First, there's the possibility of the
public tirades against our allegedly exclusionary policies, etc.  But
second, there's the danger that we go down a slipperly slope and start
banning people for more and more minor infractions.

maveric149 wrote:
> I really hate to say it, but I think it is time to at least consider voting
> 24 off the island. Maybe give him/her one more chance to reform.

I'm trying to see if I can raise him via private email.  Perhaps I can talk sense
into him.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l]  Some 24 comments and the cabal

body:
lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
> It's odd that 24 brings up this point frequently--that there is
> no "system of governance" as he puts it.  But there is--his name
> is Jimbo.  This is a very effective form of governance called
> "monarchy".  Jimbo owns the box, and what he says goes.  The
> balance to that is the open content license; if a bunch of us
> really hate what he's doing, we can take all of the content to
> another site and do it ourselves--but we're not likely to, because
> Jimbo knows what he's doing.  That also makes me inclined to be
> less tolerant of destructive kooks, because in the end, there's
> nothing preventing Mr.24 from forking the project off onto his
> own site and getting all his green buddies to edit it--and the
> marketplace will decide which site is more useful.

There's REALLY nothing preventing it, because if he asks, I'll host it
for free until such time as the traffic to it starts to cost me too
much money.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] A language question

body:
I am Australian, and so I write my articles using Australian English,
which is pretty much the same as British English... somebody just came
along and re-edited one of my articles, changing most of the terms over
to US English and removing the Australianisms.  I know that most
Americans wouldn't have a clue what a 'milk bar' was, but does that mean
that I should NOT use the term in any of my writing? Australians use the
internet too!

What is the policy on language?

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating

Love and huggles to all!


subject: [Wikipedia-l] green wiki

body:
Gladly, I would.

But I have a feeling that this solution will not be desirable to him.
I don't wish to cast his motives in too negative a light, but I think
he's more interested in changing us, than in promoting his viewpoint.
Or, perhaps I should say, he's aware that changing us would promote his
viewpoint more than he could on his own.

Chuck Smith wrote:

> Hmmm...
>
> Any chance we could just give 24 his own wiki to play
> on?
>
> Chuck
>
> =====
> Come to my homepage!  Venu al mia hejmpagxo!
> http://amuzulo.babil.komputilo.org/
> ====
> Venu al la senpaga, libera enciklopedio
> esperanta reta! http://eo.wikipedia.com/
>
> _________________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Informaci?n de Estados Unidos y Am?rica Latina, en Yahoo! Noticias.
> Vis?tanos en http://noticias.espanol.yahoo.com
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Some 24 comments and the cabal

body:
I've been following the various commentary about 24 with interest, and maybe I can offer some thoughts for consideration.

We have run into at least one character similar to 24 in the past - Cunctator. (Although 24 seems worse). That is - a person who is clearly quite intelligent, capable of making very worthwhile contributions at times, but frequently unable to distinguish between the encyclopedia agenda and their personal agenda.

The solution to 24 is probably the same as with Cunctator - the silent ignore and passive editing approach. Maveric has tried to reason with 24 repeatedly, but when reason is clearly failing there is nothing else to do but protect the project.

As much as people seem to hate admitting it- there is a "cabal" in operation at the Wikipedia. However, rather than being some secretive and exclusive operation, it is a freely admissive assembly: Live by the rules and you're in.

I know of no occasion where someone who accepted the central editorial guidelines was ever made to feel excluded - one's "respect and authority" is purely a measure of one's level of participation and commitment, not a matter of "who you know" or (especially) "how long you've been here". Jimbo retains ultimate control of the project (by virtue of his paying for the damn thing), but the remainder of us are its true authority structure. The Wikipedia Militia was assembled along these lines - some howled with outrage, but most of us understood its purpose.

So this is a time when the "cabal" or "militia" must rise to the occasion - we must simply edit quietly and remove the detritus to either meta or to oblivion, as is appropriate. 24 is chiefly motivated by his ability to engage us - people such as this live for their ability to command the attention of people, and to eliminate his negative behaviour we must remove this incentive. Two things will result - he/she will either learn to play by the rules, or he/she will go away. Either way, the project is better off.

There is no shame is using our "collective authority" - we do not need any special measures. We edit, delete, and watch each other. If Maveric, Vibber, JHK, Jimbo, KQ or someone similarly respected elects to delete content of 24, I'm probably going to be fairly accepting of their judgment. This is motivated by my trust of them as rational beings who understand the purpose of Wikipedia. This trust is not absolute, but certainly substantial (and I mean no disrespect - absolute trust is not possible as we are all fallible)

If the "Militia" were an exclusive operation, then there would be shame to it, but that has never been the case, nor could it ever be (without some seriously fundamental changes to the structure of Wikipedia, which I suspect would never happen.)

Why do people like 24 appear? Well the 'pedia is growing in stature. Everyone wants to have their voice heard (including us), and when you have an agenda, it is a lot easier to try and usurp the audience of an existing structure rather than build your own. The difference is - we have elected to live within the rules of Wikipedia while getting our voice heard.

So I do not think there is any reason to be afraid to exercise our collective authority. The day will come when entire teams of people will attempt to attack or hijack the project - as Wikipedia grows in stature its prominence will be too enticing to resist for certain "agenda-driven" elements of the cyber-community. There will be marginal areas, where some of us feel the content is appropriate and others don't. But it's always been like that. We've always managed to sort those problems out.

However, entire articles which usurp recognised terms for personal dogma are not controversial at all - they have to go, and that's that. Collectively it is our responsibility to get rid of them.

Warm regards
Manning
Sydney, Australia

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from_name: lcrocker at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] green wiki

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] The t-word

body:
I see that 24 is very upset about the people who are in favor of the
Singularity.  (Eliezar Yudkowsky, for example).  I think this is very
odd.  I mean, it's odd to be _upset_ by a very small group of people who
are basically not having any particular impact on the world.  I mean, he's
upset about people who are interested in "downloading" their consciousness
into computers, which is basically a science fiction concept at the moment.
Why be upset about it?

Many of his other comments are very odd, as well.

I think that the word "troll" is very overused.  To my way of
thinking, it refers to a person who is "trolling" as a joke or
something.  Sincere people with strange ideas are not trolls.  Even
sincere people who are hostile, argumentative, uncooperative are not
trolls.  A troll is _insincere_, that is, they say things only for the
shock value, only for the purpose of upsetting people.

But consider this statement:
Someone wrote:
>24: "the people" don't need you to speak for them. They're capable of speaking for themselves,

24 responded:
>several classes of people apparently do - Great Apes, those in
>Developing nations without much net access or English vocabulary, and
>even those Anti-globalization movement types who don't participate in
>net or Global Greens top-down games.  If they come here and say
>anything, they will soon be driven away by LDC, Axel Boldt, yourself,
>and other white trash.

Great apes (bonobos, gorillas, etc.) are a class of people for whom 24
alleges to speak?  "white trash"?  To me, these don't sound like
positions sincerely held, but positions chosen simply to generate more
heat than light.

--Jimbo


from_name: Tobias Hoevekamp

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A note from Jason Harris, author of AstroInfo

body:
Dear Wikipedians,

I've received the following mail from Jason Harris on my inquiry
about including his GFDLed articles in KStars handbook on astronomy
in Wikipedia.

> Hello,
>
> Sure!  I'm a big fan of Wikipedia and the like...I always meant to submit
> the AstroInfo articles myself, but I haven't found the time to do so.
> Thanks for letting me know; will you be adding any other AstroInfo
> articles?
>
> cheers,
> Jason

Though not being an expert in astronomy, I do like his articles on astronomy
and told him that I'll incorporate his articles in Wikipedia :-)

Bye

Tobias

-------------------------------------------------
This mail sent through IMP 3.0 at http://email.ethz.ch/horde/imp


body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
> But, meta is supposed to be about the whole project, not just the English project, so
> incorporating it as a namespace in English privileges English unwisely.  Or does it?
>
> Anyhow, my thinking has always been that Meta is about the entire project and so it
> should be a separate domain name, as it is.
>
> kband at www.llamacom.com wrote:

So then make the same links back to it from all the other-language
versions of the Wikipedia... but people cannot use it appropriately if
they do not know it is there or how to get to it!

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating

Love and huggles to all!


subject: [Wikipedia-l] A language question

body:
Vicki Rosenzweig wrote:
>
> At 09:56 AM 4/9/02 +1000, Kakajit wrote:
> >I am Australian, and so I write my articles using Australian English,
> >which is pretty much the same as British English... somebody just came
> >along and re-edited one of my articles, changing most of the terms over
> >to US English and removing the Australianisms.  I know that most
> >Americans wouldn't have a clue what a 'milk bar' was, but does that mean
> >that I should NOT use the term in any of my writing? Australians use the
> >internet too!
> The policy is, basically, that any standard form of English is cool--US, Oz,
> UK, Canada, NZ, India, etc. If all the other person did was replace Australian
> usage with American, I'd say you're justified in reverting; if they also added
> information or otherwise improved the article, best to leave it, I think. (The
> second sentence here is one Wikipedian's opinion, not policy.)

Ok, thanks guys... I just figured out how to reincorporate 'my'
information into the article. I'll just make a sentence that says that
'in Australia ice cream is sold in milk bars' etc and then I can
cross-reference milk bar to an entry of its own.

Sorry to be pedantic... I'm not really that hung up about it!

PS. I just asked my American fiance if he knew what a milk bar was and
he said he didn't know anything about Australian chocolate bars and
could I send him a photo! [giggles] It's actually a kind of shop. :)

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating

Love and huggles to all!


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Brion L. VIBBER

subject: [Wikitech-l] Automatic wikification (plus: watchlist changes)

body:
On dim, 2002-04-07 at 14:51, Magnus Manske wrote:
> I checked in a basic version of the long promised "auto-wikification" button
> on the edit page.
[...]
> Please, check it for bugs, and add some features!

I accidentally hit the auto-wikification button while testing something
else, and found an interesting phenomonen. In an article titled "Ludoj",
the first line was:

  *[[Kartludoj]]

which got changed to:

  *[[Kart'''Ludoj''']]

I don't think that's exactly right... :)

Also, I've made some changes to the watchlist; it now marks pages
independently of the namespace. Principally, this means that if you put
a page in your watchlist, you'll also see changed to the talk page in
there... which seemed like something anyone watching changes to pages
would want. Additionally, watchlist entries are now bolded in the
RecentChanges list, so you don't *have* to go to the watchlist page.

I think I still have to clean up a few cases for adding/removing things
from the watchlist in other namespaces, but it seems to be generally
working.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: kband at www.llamacom.com

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Daniel Lee Mayer wrote:
[snip]
> >>  In my opinion, he IS vandalizing the project by creating
> >> tons of pages that are really indefensible from a NPOV-encyclopedia
> >> standpoint.   Banning him would certainly result in tirades of "those
> >> people/that clique doesn't like what I say, so they're oppressing me",
> >> but this may be the point where we have to make a call on policy.
>
> I'd like to hear Cunctator weigh in on this topic.  He's probably our
> current best "conscience" on such matters, in the sense that he's very
> opposed to cabalism, and clearly sees the risk.
>
> To me, the risk is two fold.  First, there's the possibility of the
> public tirades against our allegedly exclusionary policies, etc.  But
> second, there's the danger that we go down a slipperly slope and start
> banning people for more and more minor infractions.

I have to admit I missed most of the 24 stuff since I was actually
doing stuff other than Wikipedia for a while, so I'm not entirely sure
what people are talking about. I saw the stuff labeled as (24) on
meta, which seems to be intelligently motivated but written in a way
that's guaranteed to antagonize/confuse people.

What did 24 do on wikipedia.com?

I really don't think people need to even consider banning 24. If I
hadn't read all these posts on the mailing list or scanned meta, I
wouldn't even have known such a person existed.

But again, I really have no idea what the scale of 24's actions are.
Though perhaps that should be taken as an indication that the community
response was already sufficient in assimilating 24's contributions.

--tc


from_name: magnus.manske at epost.de

subject: [Wikipedia-l] AW: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Suggestion about the meta-wikipedia

body:
>What if we had the ability to include multiple wikis in the
>RecentChanges list? e.g., English AND meta and perhaps French and
>Esperanto wikipedias all together in one list? It would make my life
>more convenient, anyway.

Two (or more) languages in the same "Recent Changes" would seem confusing
to me. There could be an additional "International Recent Changes", though,
with user-defined settings.
This would also work for the meta-wiki, but one of the original reasons
to give the meta discussion its own site was to get the "flame war light"
off the Wikipedia Recent Changes.

>Yes. Yes, it's madness, I know. Besides, I'd probably be the one who had
>to figure out how to make it work cleanly. (ugh)

And fast! Just imagine the server load with everybody getting Recent CHanges
from every database - the last 10.000, of course, you don't want to miss
a change somewhere...

________________________________________
Zeitschriftenabos online bestellen - jetzt neu im Infoboten! http://www.epost.de


subject: [Wikipedia-l] The t-word

in_reply_to: <20020410000839.15806.qmail@operamail.com>; from guardian-tor@operamail.com on Wed, Apr 10, 2002 at 09:08:39AM +0900

body:
Guardian Tor  wrote:

> 1. The Cunctator is not a troll. He sincerely cares about the
>project and has contributed a lot of valuable material, including our
>current logo. He is also a shit-disturber (I say that with some
>affection) and got into a personal feud with Larry Sanger. That
>doesn't make him a troll.

I agree.

> 2. Mirwin is not a troll. He came into Wikipedia and, like many
>newcommers, brought up what he considered to be major issues, but most
>people disagreed with his assessments. He has some unusual ideas, has
>a rather rambling style of expressing himself, and seems to be quite
>fond of the idea of forking the project, but I haven't seen him do any
>intentional trolling.

I missed all of this, so I know little about him.  I emailed him this
morning asking some questions -- he voiced some concern about the NPOV
policy, but I don't know what his concerns are, exactly.

> 3. I'm not sure whether 24 means to troll or not. He has been
>downright prolific on the meta, pumping out his ideas on what he sees
>as the major problems of Wikipedia, and the possible solutions. He
>seems intelligent, but very narrowly focused, and desires to change
>the basic nature of Wikipedia. He ignores community standards, and
>gets upset that we even call ourselves a community. He also has
>extensive insults for people that don't want to play his game by his
>rules. Strange? Yes. Troll? Not sure. Ban him? No way. It would set a
>dangerous precident, and wouldn't be very effective anyway. It's
>trivial to alter one's apparent IP address over the web.

Right, well, there's a problem we will face someday, if not now.  What
happens when someone comes in with bad intentions and is relentless
with bad edits?  If we don't ban, we just give up which is obviously
not right.  The ultimate goal is the NPOV encyclopedia -- the openness
is a tool to that end.  But if we do ban, we perhaps only provoke
someone even MORE, someone who would have gotten bored sooner rather
than later.

24 keeps saying that he's not sure if it's worth contributing.  Maybe
he'll decide that it isn't.  Maybe he'll decide that we're very
insistent on producing something that the 3 billionth reader will not
like, as he's fond of saying.  He speaks for the Great Apes, he says,
and they surely will find our project uninteresting.

He revels in his anonymity, but I know who he is.  Many people are
ill-mannered on the net who are perfectly nice when contacted by some
other means.  Maybe I should call him on the phone.

--Jimbo


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [Wikitech-l] Speed, today link

body:
Wikipedia seems to have been slowing down lately...

The today link (e.g., "April 9, 2002") should at a
minimum be escaped so that it's

instead of the current

which crushes some browsers.

However, I must say that I'm not at all a fan of the link as it now
stands; it duplicates exactly the Current Events page without any added
features. I'd much rather we have April 9, 2002
instead, unless we implement some more complex templating mechanism to
set up some automation.

--tc


from_name: Daniel Lee Mayer

body:
On Monday 08 April 2002 09:08 pm, Brion wrote:
> Okay, crazy idea time:
>
> What if we had the ability to include multiple wikis in the
> RecentChanges list? e.g., English AND meta and perhaps French and
> Esperanto wikipedias all together in one list? It would make my life
> more convenient, anyway.
>
> Yes. Yes, it's madness, I know. Besides, I'd probably be the one who had
> to figure out how to make it work cleanly. (ugh)
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

What an excellent idea! However, we would probably have to set up user
preferences a bit differently -- perhaps have options on which namespaces
and/or languages to display in RecentChanges. If we do this craziness, then
we should probably set the default NOT to show meta:namespace or its
equivalent  ("meta" is not very intuitive for me, and I'm not sure if it is
the best name for the function it will serve) or any other languages beyond
the user's/visitor's native one (which can be determined by them choosing
their language on the Main Page).

maveric149


subject: [Wikipedia-l] More on our friend 24

body:
On Tuesday 09 April 2002 12:01 pm, Jimbo wrote:
> I'm trying to see if I can raise him via private email. ?Perhaps I can talk
> sense into him.

On three separate occasions I have either told 24 about the mailing list or
invited him/her to join in --- if for no other reason than to see what we are
up to with policy and other discussions. Each time, I even included a link to
the mailing list wikipedia page for his/her convenience.

FYI here is something 24 has recently wrote in response to a statement I made
about contacting the mailing list about his/her actions
(from [[Talk:Military fiat]]):

"you are quite welcome to have a "party" or "clique" discussion on what your
mailing list clique wishes to do about the Governance of this project.  I
will proceed as I am until someone writes a [[m:Status quo]] that identifies
some action of mine as a problem, or until someone else achieves consensus on
a means of [[m:Governance]] on the project now that Larry is gone. -24" (I of
course had to sign 24's comment for him/her -- still doesn't get that
convention either...)

If I read this right, then this person is purposely trying to force us into
joining his "wikipedia governance" project! And if we don't, 24 will continue
doing the same darn things in the same way as he/she is already doing them.

I don't know about ya'all, but I don't like being coerced.

Some more stuff 24 has been up to:
(you might want to check out the meta Jimbo)


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Cologne Blue HTML Template

body:
> The blue is a bit dull compared with the current "Cologne Blue" which I
> was enjoying. In fact, I prefer the current version.

The current colors are already replaced with the "new" (real) ones in the
CVS, as I failed to correctly convert the blue tomes the first time. Maybe
we should vote on the blue tone (!), but IMHO you'll be the minority...

> One suggestion: There appears to be no link back from a 'talk:blah' page
> to the 'blah' page provided automatically on the current "Cologne Blue"
> For example if I am looking at "Talk:Differential equations" how do I
> get back to "Differential equations" without doing a search?

This, among other things, is already taken care of in the CVS. It will go
online with the next software update.


from_name: Zundark

subject: [Wikitech-l] Warnings by the dozen

body:
I've installed the Wikipedia software on my machine, so I can start
hacking at it.  It seems to be working OK, except that I get huge
numbers of PHP warning messages at the top of each page.  I can get
rid of them by turning down the level of PHP warnings, but this is a
really bad idea from a bug-prevention point of view.

Looking through some of the old bug reports I see that at least one
of the major bugs was caused precisely by ignoring such messages.
So I have to assume that this is not my just a bad installation on my
part, and that the Wikipedia code really doesn't work properly with
error_reporting turned up full.  Clearly this ought to be fixed.  But
I can't do this on my own, since in some cases it's unclear what the
purpose of the code is.  For example, the first five warnings come from
the following section of wikiSettings.php:

  # Namespace backgrounds
  $wikiNamespaceBackground = array () ;
  $wikiNamespaceBackground[$wikiTalk] = "#eeFFFF" ;
  $wikiNamespaceBackground["user_talk"] = $wikiNamespaceBackground["talk"] ;
  $wikiNamespaceBackground["wikipedia_talk"] = $wikiNamespaceBackground["talk"] ;
  $wikiNamespaceBackground[$wikiUser] = "#FFeeee" ;
  $wikiNamespaceBackground[$wikiWikipedia] = "#eeFFee" ;
  $wikiNamespaceBackground["log"] = "#FFFFcc" ;
  $wikiNamespaceBackground["special"] = "#eeeeee" ;

Here, $wikiTalk, $wikiNamespaceBackground["talk"], $wikiUser and
$wikiWikipedia are all undefined.  I've no idea how to clean this
up, because I don't understand what it's supposed to look like.
Why are some of the indices variables and other constants?
In particular, what is the intended distinction between
$wikiNamespaceBackground["talk"] and $wikiNamespaceBackground[$wikiTalk]?
What should be done with this code?

--
Zundark


in_reply_to: <20020410021840.6524.qmail@www.llamacom.com>; from kband@www.llamacom.com on Tue, Apr 09, 2002 at 09:18:40PM -0500

body:
kband at www.llamacom.com wrote:
> Are there other entries? Or is the hooplah mostly about his meta-rants?

I'd like to second the call for lists of entries on the main site that he's
screwed up.  It'd help if we were all "on the same page" in terms of knowing
what he's doing.

His meta-rants are annoying and strange, but can easily be ignored if absolutely
necessary.

> I don't see that much evidence that he's trying to violate the mission
> of Wikipedia, or even subvert it to his own kooky ends. He seems to
> respect the mission, and thinks that people don't have the right
> understanding of what NPOV means.

Well, he's so incoherent that it's sort of hard to say...

--Jimbo


from_name: wojtek pobratyn

body:
| On Saturday, April 6, 2002, at 03:58  AM, wikipedia-l-
| request at nupedia.com wrote:
| > Please have a look at
| > http://www.ds.fh-koeln.de/~marian/wikipedia/template.html and test it
| > with
| > all browsers on earth.

It also looks ok on M$ Explorer on WinCE (Ipaq) ;-)

regards.
[[user:WojPob]]


in_reply_to: <20020410093452.U17046@trell.vic.bigpond.net.au> from "Robert Graham Merkel" at Apr 10, 2002 09:34:52 AM

body:
>
>
> On Wed, 10 Apr 2002 07:06:58 kband at www.llamacom.com wrote:
> > What did 24 do on wikipedia.com?
>
> For examples see "particle physics", "money", "Artificial Intelligence".

Deleting particle physics was certainly a dumb thing to do (though easy
to deal with).

His contributions to the "money" article, if he did revision 6, seem
to me to be quite good. It looks like he took a very brief article and
usefully expanded the history, from commodity money to fiat money.
Even his "agenda-based" paragraphs are properly put into context,
by stating that it's a "green economist" position.

His edits to "artificial intelligence" didn't help much, but the
article was already a mostly incomprehensible mish-mash, and what he
did is certainly no worse than what just about every editor I know
(including myself) has done at least one point.

Are there other entries? Or is the hooplah mostly about his meta-rants?

I don't see that much evidence that he's trying to violate the mission
of Wikipedia, or even subvert it to his own kooky ends. He seems to
respect the mission, and thinks that people don't have the right
understanding of what NPOV means. I personally think that NPOV concept
has flaws as being the guiding principle for Wikipedia, since it's
such a semantically flexible term.

That said, he's obviously self-centered and self-righteous. Has he
made any edits in the last few days?

--tc


subject: [Wikitech-l] Warnings by the dozen

body:
> I've installed the Wikipedia software on my machine, so I can start
> hacking at it.  It seems to be working OK, except that I get huge
> numbers of PHP warning messages at the top of each page.  I can get
> rid of them by turning down the level of PHP warnings, but this is a
> really bad idea from a bug-prevention point of view.

I think we all work with "standard settings", and there are no warnings
showing up, just like the Bomis server uses standard and doesn't show
anything like that, either. Me, I'm still surprised that it's running at all
;)

<snip>
> Here, $wikiTalk, $wikiNamespaceBackground["talk"], $wikiUser and
> $wikiWikipedia are all undefined.  I've no idea how to clean this
> up, because I don't understand what it's supposed to look like.
> Why are some of the indices variables and other constants?
> In particular, what is the intended distinction between
> $wikiNamespaceBackground["talk"] and $wikiNamespaceBackground[$wikiTalk]?
> What should be done with this code?

The reason (without looking at the code right now) is probably the missing
"global" statement at the beginning of the function.
The purpose of the indices being variables is that the German wikipedia, for
example, uses "/Diskussion" instead of "/Talk", and will get a "Diskussion:"
namespace instead of "Talk:". The reason for the mix with constants is that
we're too lazy to convert them all to variables...

Magnus


subject: [Wikipedia-l] More on our friend 24

in_reply_to: <20020410021403.HXCK1143.rwcrmhc51.attbi.com@there> from "Daniel Lee Mayer" at Apr 09, 2002 07:12:36 PM

body:
maveric wrote:
> "you are quite welcome to have a "party" or "clique" discussion on what your
> mailing list clique wishes to do about the Governance of this project.  I
> will proceed as I am until someone writes a [[m:Status quo]] that identifies
> some action of mine as a problem, or until someone else achieves consensus on
> a means of [[m:Governance]] on the project now that Larry is gone. -24" (I of
> course had to sign 24's comment for him/her -- still doesn't get that
> convention either...)
>
> If I read this right, then this person is purposely trying to force us into
> joining his "wikipedia governance" project! And if we don't, 24 will continue > doing the same darn things in the same way as he/she is already doing them.
>
> I don't know about ya'all, but I don't like being coerced.

Aren't you trying to coerce him into joining the mailing list? He doesn't have any power to coerce you, so I don't know what you're worrying about. He's harmless.

> >From [[m:Best cases]]
>
> "The Militia, 20 users granted sysop status by Larry, defend the users
> visions to the near-death (well, maybe a really drunken stupor with a head
> injury or two from falling on the ground in drunken camraderie) and all of
> these best cases are realized, and none of the threats come to pass."
>
> 	24 seems to be feeding on our inaction so far.

What do you mean? He's presenting that as a bes

> Also from [[m:Best cases]]
>
> ".....Wiki gradually evolves into the center of discourse on controversial
> topics because of its vaunted fairness, and its commitment to evolving as
> close to a [[m:natural point of view]] as the [[w:Neutral point of view]] of
> the target [[m:three billionth user]] will permit.  Other encylopedias
> gradually give up or are bought out by donors who like wiki - and wiki rather
> than a search engine becomes the first stop for most researchers in the
> world.  Gradually, universities kind of fade away as centers of research but
> flourish as centers of ethical training, moral example, brainstorming, wild
> and uninhibited art, and true creative vision.  Nobel Prize winners thank
> wiki on the stand as they accept their rewards - and historians credit it
> with breaking down barriers between academic, populist, and economic views of
> the world - coming slowly to a consensus... "
>
> Can anyone say CRACKPOT! This person seems to have MAJOR plans for the
> 'pedia. We all better bow down and kiss this person's feet before he/she  has
> the "Anti-globalization movement .... flood [wikipedia] with 3000 versions of
> [[m:natural point of view]] all at once." This is dangerous folks, I think we
> have, as Larry recently pointed out on the meta, 'fed the troll' way too much
> already.
>
> 24 has stated before that he/she has no ideology -- I would counter that this
> person is one of the most ideological people that I have come across. Both
> 24 and mirwin want to subvert the project to their own purposes. Mirwin is
> mostly harmless but 24 is most certainly not.
>
> maveric149
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] More on our friend 24

in_reply_to: <20020410022226.6957.qmail@www.llamacom.com> from "kband@www.llamacom.com" at Apr 09, 2002 09:22:26 PM

body:
Sorry about the last message. I was writing a reply, then thought
better of the tone, but accidentally sent instead of deleting. Thus
the unfinished reply. I hope that didn't throw any fat on the fire.
I trust it'll all work out for the best.

--tc


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [Wikitech-l] Cologne Blue

body:
Right now, the search box and last date of change appears to the
right, not centered. Is that intentional?

Also, I noticed on Mozilla that the article text is very close to the
left border of the browser, much closer than in the other skins. It
looks strange.

Axel


from_name: Guardian Tor

subject: [Wikipedia-l] The t-word

body:
> I think that the word "troll" is very overused.  To my way of
> thinking, it refers to a person who is "trolling" as a joke or
> something.  Sincere people with strange ideas are not trolls.  Even
> sincere people who are hostile, argumentative, uncooperative are not
> trolls.  A troll is _insincere_, that is, they say things only for the
> shock value, only for the purpose of upsetting people.

Agreed. I think the word is slung around a little too freely.

1. The Cunctator is not a troll. He sincerely cares about the project and has contributed a lot of valuable material, including our current logo. He is also a shit-disturber (I say that with some affection) and got into a personal feud with Larry Sanger. That doesn't make him a troll.

2. Mirwin is not a troll. He came into Wikipedia and, like many newcommers, brought up what he considered to be major issues, but most people disagreed with his assessments. He has some unusual ideas, has a rather rambling style of expressing himself, and seems to be quite fond of the idea of forking the project, but I haven't seen him do any intentional trolling.

3. I'm not sure whether 24 means to troll or not. He has been downright prolific on the meta, pumping out his ideas on what he sees as the major problems of Wikipedia, and the possible solutions. He seems intelligent, but very narrowly focused, and desires to change the basic nature of Wikipedia. He ignores community standards, and gets upset that we even call ourselves a community. He also has extensive insults for people that don't want to play his game by his rules. Strange? Yes. Troll? Not sure. Ban him? No way. It would set a dangerous precident, and wouldn't be very effective anyway. It's trivial to alter one's apparent IP address over the web.

-- Stephen G.
--

________________________________
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia
   http://www.wikipedia.com

_______________________________________________
Download the free Opera browser at http://www.opera.com/

Powered by Outblaze


from_name: Gareth Owen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] The t-word

in_reply_to: "Guardian Tor "'s message of "Wed, 10 Apr 2002 09:08:39 +0900"

body:
"Guardian Tor " <guardian-tor at operamail.com> writes:

> He seems intelligent, but very narrowly focused

I disagree.  I admit he seems educated.
Obduracy and a refusal to engage or compromise with anyone who disagrees with
him is not only not a sign of intelligence, its a sign of non-intelligence.
--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
 are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Wikipedia performance and caching of responses --
	some questions

body:
On mer, 2002-04-10 at 05:10, Neil Harris wrote:
> My best guess is that the parsing and lookups on regular pages are
> currently the main load, not editing or exotic database queries -- is
> this right?

Not a clue. Initially, the database certainly was the main load, but I
haven't heard any newer figures. Jimbo?

> Jimbo has mentioned that the machine has a lot of RAM, so disk I/O is
> unlikely to be the bottleneck: it's more likely to be CPU and
> inter-process locking problems.
>
> If so, I think careful page content caching could greatly improve
> performance, by reducing the number of page parsings, renderings and
> lookups across the board, at the cost of a slight increase in the cost
> of page deletion and creation. However, by freeing up resources,
> performance should improve across the board on all operations.

We used to cache rendered articles, but Jimbo disabled this feature some
time ago, claiming he was unable to find a performance advantage. (See
mailing list archives circa February 13.)

Personally, I've always find that idea suspicious; caching is definitely
faster on my test machine, and is going to be a particularly big help
with, say, long pages full of HTML tables! But then, my test machine has
a much much lower load to deal with than the real Wikipedia. :)
Nonetheless, if cacheing really isn't helping, that's because it's not
doing something right. It should be found, fixed, and reenabled.

(There were also side issues with the caching -- the meta keyword tags
and the interlanguage links didn't get filled out when viewing a cached
page. But again, these should be fixed, and aren't a reason for
disabling caching altogether.)

> If I'm right, I think suitably intelligent caching could be applied not
> only to ordinary pages, but also to some special pages, without any
> major redesign or excessive complexity.

For a brief time we cached the contents of RecentChanges when using the
default settings, and I believe the Orphans page was manually refreshed;
but these were removed after the queries were made more efficient.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Robert Graham Merkel

subject: [Wikipedia-l] The t-word

body:
On Wed, 10 Apr 2002 03:31:07 Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Great apes (bonobos, gorillas, etc.) are a class of people for whom 24
> alleges to speak?  "white trash"?  To me, these don't sound like
> positions sincerely held, but positions chosen simply to generate more
> heat than light.
>

AFAICT, 24 sincerely believes (or has at least consistently taken the
position) that Great Apes deserve the rights
of personhood.  This came up in an argument I had with him on the
Artificial Intelligence article (which still needs a fair bit of work).

He's not enitrely alone in this:

http://www.greatapeproject.org/gaphome.html

I've no idea how much support they have, though.

I don't think 24 is a troll.  I think he's a kook who rejects
the goals of our project and is actively attempting to change
the project to fit his own ideas.

--
------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Merkel	                           rgmerk at mira.net

Go You Big Red Fire Engine
-- Unknown Audience Member at Adam Hills standup gig
------------------------------------------------------------


subject: [Wikipedia-l] The t-word

body:
I think the greatest damage that 24 is doing is wasting our resources. By this I mean
_human_ resources. I nearly got a heart attack after seeing my mailbox this morning
and the amount of discussion going on. Some useful points have been made but I'm still
not sure if it is all worth the hassle. Imagine all that time spent on writing articles....

regards,
[[user:WojPob]]


from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia performance and caching of responses -- some questions

body:
I have been thinking about the performance of Wikipedia, and how it
might be improved.

Before I go off and investigate in detail, I'd just like to check my
basic concept of how the code works,
(based on reading this list -- I haven't pulled down the CVS to look at
it yet).

=== Total guesswork follows ===

Am I right in thinking that, for each ordinary page request,

* the raw text is pulled out of the database
* the taxt is parsed and reformatted
* links are looked up to see if they are linked and treated appropriately
* final page generation to HTML, with page decorations as per theme is added

My general impressions about activity rate is:

* about 100 pages per day are created or deleted
* roughly one edit every 30 seconds
* roughly one page hit every second

Packet loss seems negligible, so you don't seem to be running out of
bandwidth.

Although I guesstimate the hit rate at around one-per-second, pages seem
to be taking around 5 seconds to serve,
suggesting that the system is probably running at a loadav of say 5 or so.

My best guess is that the parsing and lookups on regular pages are
currently the main load, not editing or exotic database queries -- is
this right?

Jimbo has mentioned that the machine has a lot of RAM, so disk I/O is
unlikely to be the bottleneck: it's more likely to be CPU and
inter-process locking problems.

If so, I think careful page content caching could greatly improve
performance, by reducing the number of page parsings, renderings and
lookups across the board, at the cost of a slight increase in the cost
of page deletion and creation. However, by freeing up resources,
performance should improve across the board on all operations.

If I'm right, I think suitably intelligent caching could be applied not
only to ordinary pages, but also to some special pages, without any
major redesign or excessive complexity.

Before I start to look at things in more detail, could anyone confirm
whether I am even vaguely making sense?

-- Neil


subject: [Wikipedia-l] FYI, Baha'i

body:
Without any actual knowledge, I think it reasonable to suppose that
Manning Bartlett is not a Baha'i of any kind.  By "lot more of us than
you", I think he was referring to the Wikipedia community, er,
"regular participants" as 24 would prefer I say.

I will respond to this fellow, and seek your counsel.

I have omitted identifying details of the person who wrote me.

The essential facts, in case you don't feel like reading all of this:

66.219.221.xxx is a member of the "Orthodox" Baha'i religion.  This is
a small splinter group from the main Baha'i faith.  The exact size is
a matter of some dispute.  '66' claims that the larger sect engages in
extreme shunning of the smaller sect, and that they are attempting to
suppress information on the wikipedia.  '66' suspects (incorrectly,
I'm pretty sure) that Manning Bartlett is a Baha'i who is trying to
marginalize him.

Someone, 'Rabo', apparently wrote to a Baha'i newsgroup seeking
knowledgeable people to help deal with '66'.  '66' feels that this was
yet another attempt to marginalize his group.

This has been long predicted, although I never thought that the Baha'i
faith would be the source of friction.  I thought maybe the
Scientologists would find us, or the anti-Scientologists, and their
decades-long Usenet flamewar would spill over here.

Anyhow, please take a look.  I guess we don't really care about their
religious argument; we only care to make the article(s) NPOV.  But
some of usual techniques (describing the conflict rather than engaging
in the conflict) are perhaps difficult to apply in situations where the
parties are arguing over whether the conflict is important enough to be
described prominently in the main article.

--Jimbo

------------------------- Forwarded message --------------

Hello again,

I wrote you sometime back abnout a problem with a article on wekepedia
and you were kind enough to respond.  I was at the time being totaly
erased and raised the possibility that a group of Baha'is from the
larger sect (Ibelong to the smaller one) were possibly doing this as
they try to shun us completely.

I agreed with you that this should be a wait and see thing.

Recently the article on the Orthodox Baha'i Faith has been continually
reedited by several people some of the editing i found to be helpful,
but a lot was for the purpose of marganilizing the article in facor of
the larger group.

I came coincdentally across an article ont he larger Baha'i news group
which urged all baha;is to go there and rewrite the article so as to
put the larger group in the best light.  I am enclosing a copy of that
news group article.  Also, you will find that the main individual
claiming not to be a bahai who has rededited allot, in teh history of
the editing has put comments in like there are a "lot more of us than
you", whihc I can only take as reference to him and other baha'is.

Below is also a copy of that statemnt in the history section along
with a letter I have sent out to all Orhtodox baha'is on my mailing
list letting them know what is happening to the article on their
beliefs.  Over the past few days the Orhtodox Baha'i site has
continually been reedited in an attempt to marganalize the Orhtodox
Faith.  At this point on the talk section of wedkepdia Orhtodox Bahai
Faith is my response to someone reediting who claims not to be a
Baha'i the article on soc.religion.bahai which i refer to in my repoly
appeared over the past few days as well.

The real reason is best summarrized from an article written on
soc. religon. bahai where the writer urged baha'is to rerwrite the
article in order to reduce the influence of the Orhtodox group.  I
have there fore writtten the people in charge of wikipediea today to
express my concerns that what is being done is really for the purpose
of non-nuetrality on the larger groups part yuour professions of not
being a baha'i notwithstadning.  copy of exceprtps from article on the
larger Baha'i Board fololow:

"Hello All

Several month back I posted on this newsgroup requesting contributions
for the Baha'i entry in a encyclopedia project:
http://www.wikipedia.com

Well an article was written, and time went by.

In recent weeks, a contributor who we only know by his/her IP address
of 66.219.221.xxx (Which is myself) has commenced a campaign of
championing the Orthodox Baha'i position.

When I originally researched the Baha'i Faith, I quickly concluded
that apart from the plethora of webpages the OB division was extremely
small (as in barely hundreds of members), (My Comment: as an Orhtodox
Again the figures this writer gives are inaccurate) and therefore
while it was fair to mention it, it was also fair to place it within a
proper perspective.

Hence I am writing to ask if someone can return to the website,
examine the articles and help those of us who are insufficiently
informed to paint a true picture.

The antagonist in the dispute has one extremely valid point however -
the article on the Orthodox Baha'is does cover the Baha'i principles
in great depth, and frankly the Baha'i article tends to focus solely
on history and buildings. We (the editors) feel that the principles of
the Faith should be encapsulated in the main Baha'i article and we
should limit the OB article to the point of distinction (ie. the
dispute about succession of the Guardianship). But none of us feel
suitably qualified to redress this imbalance.

The Wikipedia is a growing resource, it now has nearly 30000 articles
(after only 16 months) and a viewcount extending into the millions per
month. Certainly there are numerous issues about the actual quality of
our articles, but that's why I am writing to a newsgroup where I could
reasonably expect to find "experts".

Regards Rabo

http://www.wikipedia.com

To find related pages - enter Bahai in the search box. "

I also have written a reply put on the other two bahai newsgroups
since as you know censorship rpevails on the group this artricle
appeared in and orhtodox are shunned:

Hello All

An article appeared on alt.soc.bahai which called for the larger Bahai
group to martial its forces to put the Orhtodox Artciles om a
particular website "in its proper persecptive" meaning reduce its size
and influence.

The writer did admit however that::

"The antagonist (that's the Orhtodox Bahai) in the dispute has one
extremely valid point however - the article on the Orthodox Baha'is
does cover the Baha'i principles in great depth, and frankly the
Baha'i article tends to focus solely on history and buildings. We (the
editors) feel that the principles of the Faith should be encapsulated
in the main Baha'i article and we should limit the OB article to the
point of distinction (ie. the dispute about succession of the
Guardianship). But none of us feel suitably qualified to redress this
imbalance. "

Hence the call for others to come in and try by all means to reduce
the Orhtodox article to non influence while admitting the better
article ont he Faith's principles was doen by the Orhtodox!

Needless to say I have sent a copy fo this letter to the heads of the
particular website with the point that what ever the main group does
there is for the obvious purpose of reducing the Orhtodox arrticle and
is intself an obvious attempt at non-neutrality which the particular
site in question requires.

Again so that people will know what our priicples are and wehter they
differ from the alrger group i Have again rededited and will
contiually reedit the Orhtodox article until i hear from the staff of
wekepedia on this.

Additionally the hisoty section which shows when and who edited the section finds these comments:

Tuesday, April 9, 2002
  a.. (diff) Orthodox Bahai Faith; 23:05 . . . 66.219.221.xxx [*I have sent a letter of concern to the wakepedia staff on this as the openig paragraph wording is definately not NPOV, per the talk article]
Monday, April 8, 2002
  a.. (diff)  Orthodox Bahai Faith (1); 16:46 . . . Rgamble [-/Talk]
  b.. (diff)  Orthodox Bahai Faith (2); 16:37 . . . Manning Bartlett [NPOV restored, duplicate content removed again: If you want an edit war then fine - but there are more of us than there are of you]
  c.. (diff)  Orthodox Bahai Faith (3); 14:41 . . . 66.219.221.xxx
  d.. (diff)  Orthodox Bahai Faith (4); 13:54 . . . 66.219.221.xxx
Thanks for your prompt attention, as I would liek to avert what is likely to become a contentious issue if allowed to drift,

----- End forwarded message -----


subject: [Wikitech-l] Warnings by the dozen

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:

> I think we all work with "standard settings", and there are no warnings
> showing up, just like the Bomis server uses standard and doesn't show
> anything like that, either.

But at least one major Wikipedia bug was caused by ignoring these
warnings, so this certainly isn't a good idea.  (In development, that is.
The Bomis server is obviously a different matter.)

> > Here, $wikiTalk, $wikiNamespaceBackground["talk"], $wikiUser and
> > $wikiWikipedia are all undefined.  I've no idea how to clean this
> > up, because I don't understand what it's supposed to look like.
> > Why are some of the indices variables and other constants?
> > In particular, what is the intended distinction between
> > $wikiNamespaceBackground["talk"] and $wikiNamespaceBackground[$wikiTalk]?
> > What should be done with this code?
>
> The reason (without looking at the code right now) is probably the missing
> "global" statement at the beginning of the function.

No, it's caused by using them before they are defined.  The file
wikiTextEn.php which defines them is included later on.  (This doesn't
apply to $wikiNamespaceBackground["talk"], which isn't defined anywhere.
I assume it's a mistake for $wikiNamespaceBackground[$wikiTalk].)
For the same reason, $wikiCharset is also used before being defined.

So the values in $wikiNamespaceBackground need to be assigned
after wikiTextEn.php (and any other language-specific setting file)
has been included.  But these files can modify $wikiNamespaceBackground
(at least, the Esperanto one does - perhaps it shouldn't), so the only
solution appears to be to declare $wikiNamespaceBackground first,
then include the language-specific files, then assign values to
$wikiNamespaceBackground, but making sure not to overwrite any values
that have already been assigned.  I'll post a patch for this later.

--
Zundark


subject: [Wikipedia-l] FYI, Baha'i

body:
See also duplicate of the complaint post and further discussion,
including Manning's response, on the wiki at:
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Talk%3AOrthodox%20Bahai%20Faith

While I do get the general impression that the mainstream Baha'is don't
seem to like the Orthodox Baha'is very much, I've seen no evidence of
misbehavior in the case of the wikipedia articles except on the part of
66.219.221.xxx him/herself, which he/she has yet to explain.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] question(s) about article headers...

in_reply_to: <3CB4D123.15FA24CB@labyrinth.net.au>; from kaji@labyrinth.net.au on Thu, Apr 11, 2002 at 09:56:19AM +1000

body:
I think someone more in tune with the technical situation should answer
by the punctuation...

> If I want to make a sub-page for a topic, say 'Possums', what's the
> protocol for naming it? I see a lot of entries have used backslashes,
> but I read that the slashes don't mean anything anymore. I'm confused!
> Just say I wanted to make subpages on possum dietary requirements, how
> to keep possums as pets, and how possums breed. [not that I know
> anything about possums, but it's an example that came to mind.]

If you want to write about [[possum dietary requirements]], [[possums
as pets]], or [[possum breeding]], then you should.  Of, if you're
from Alabama like me, you can write about [[possum for dinner]].  And
you'll probably also want to go to the main [[possum]] page and add
links to these pages.

> And, lastly, if I wanted to break my user: page up into subpages with
> projects I'd like to do on one page and projects I've already started on
> another, what should I call it? I'm getting confused. I looked at the
> FAQ and help pages but I didn't really understand their explanation... I
> got lost at about the point where I was told to use brackets to make
> categories more logical.

I'm a little confused about this one, myself.

> And about those brackets, which subject header would be more correct -
> lime, fruit lime/fruit or lime (fruit). I've seen entry titles using all
> three formats.

I think that the parenthesis form is the consensus favorite.

--Jimbo


body:
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body:
On mer, 2002-04-10 at 16:56, Karen AKA Kajikit wrote:
> The search engine on the wikipedia rejects punctuation, so does that
> mean that for best search results we should leave it out of entry
> titles?
>
> eg. There was no entry for 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone'
> until I made one, but there was an entry already there for 'Harry Potter
> and the Philosophers Stone' without the [correct] apostrophe. Which one
> should be the main article and which one should be the redirect?

You should consider that a temporary bug in the search engine; hopefully
the articles will remain long after the bugs are gone... But
punctuationless redirects won't hurt anything, and can help with the
buggy search in the meantime.

Personally, I would prefer the "most correct" title to be attached to
the actual article; that generally means full names, apostrophes,
hypens, and diacritics (so far as Latin-1 allows). Others may disagree,
though, particularly on diacritics.

As far as the subpage questions, Jimbo said pretty much what I was going
to say.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
Jim accidentally sent this just to me, I'm sending it back to the list:

On mer, 2002-04-10 at 18:27, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Brion L. VIBBER wrote:
> > > My best guess is that the parsing and lookups on regular pages are
> > > currently the main load, not editing or exotic database queries -- is
> > > this right?
> >
> > Not a clue. Initially, the database certainly was the main load, but I
> > haven't heard any newer figures. Jimbo?
>
> I'll reset the slow-query log and make a new version available after a few
> hours of data collection.
>
> > We used to cache rendered articles, but Jimbo disabled this feature some
> > time ago, claiming he was unable to find a performance advantage. (See
> > mailing list archives circa February 13.)
>
> But, I'm willing to try it again.
>
> > Personally, I've always find that idea suspicious; caching is definitely
> > faster on my test machine, and is going to be a particularly big help
> > with, say, long pages full of HTML tables! But then, my test machine has
> > a much much lower load to deal with than the real Wikipedia. :)
> > Nonetheless, if cacheing really isn't helping, that's because it's not
> > doing something right. It should be found, fixed, and reenabled.
>
> I would say that I agree with that.
>
> Here's a question for everyone.
>
> Let's say we have some portion of the page pre-calculated and cached.
> Is it faster to keep that cached text *in the database*, or *on the
> hard drive*?
>
> I'm very strongly biased towards thinking that keeping it on the hard
> drive is faster, and by a significant margin, but only because I've
> never tested it and because I know (from long experience at Bomis) that
> opening up a text file on disk and spitting it out can be *really* fast,
> if the machine has enough ram such that the filesystem can cache lots of
> popular files in memory.
>
> But, everything I read about MySQL talks about how screamingly fast it
> allegedly is, so...
>
> --Jimbo
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 24 response to kband

body:
On Wednesday 10 April 2002 01:49 am,  kband at www.llamacom.com wrote:

> maveric wrote:
> >?"you are quite welcome to have a "party" or "clique" discussion on what
> > your mailing list clique wishes to do about the Governance of this
> > project. ?I will proceed as I am until someone writes a [[m:Status quo]]
> > that identifies some action of mine as a problem, or until someone else
> > achieves consensus on a means of [[m:Governance]] on the project now that
> > Larry is gone. -24" (I of course had to sign 24's comment for him/her --
> > still doesn't get that convention either...)
> >?
> >?If I read this right, then this person is purposely trying to force us
> > into joining his "wikipedia governance" project! And if we don't, 24 will
> > continue > doing the same darn things in the same way as he/she is
> > already doing them.
> >?I don't know about ya'all, but I don't like being coerced.
>
> Aren't you trying to coerce him into joining the mailing list? He doesn't
> have any power to coerce you, so I don't know what you're worrying about.
> He's harmless.

Please read what people have said before you jump in with abrasive comments
directed at another person on the mailing list -- this isn't Slashdot.

With that said....

All I stated was that I mentioned there was a mailing list (on two occasions)
and on one occasion I invited him/her to join the list.

I disagree with your other statement; He does seem to think that he has the
power to coerce us into joining his "governance" project by willfully not
abiding by our standards and policies.

maveric149


subject: [Wikipedia-l] tc, disregard the "Slashdot" remark

body:
On Wednesday 10 April 2002 01:49 am, tc wrote:
> Sorry about the last message. I was writing a reply, then thought
> better of the tone, but accidentally sent instead of deleting. Thus
> the unfinished reply. I hope that didn't throw any fat on the fire.
> I trust it'll all work out for the best.
>
> --tc

Apology accepted. BTW please disregard the "Slashdot" remark -- I too
sometimes write and then delete inflammatory stuff in an email before sending
it. I even on occasion accidently send an email before deleting the negative
remarks.

Cheers!

maveric149


body:
On mer, 2002-04-10 at 18:27, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Here's a question for everyone.
>
> Let's say we have some portion of the page pre-calculated and cached.
> Is it faster to keep that cached text *in the database*, or *on the
> hard drive*?
>
> I'm very strongly biased towards thinking that keeping it on the hard
> drive is faster, and by a significant margin, but only because I've
> never tested it and because I know (from long experience at Bomis) that
> opening up a text file on disk and spitting it out can be *really* fast,
> if the machine has enough ram such that the filesystem can cache lots of
> popular files in memory.

That's a good question, and one which I haven't made any attempt to
test. As it is, we'll already be digging into the database to check
things like the user settings, page view count, last edited date, and
language links and meta-tag keywords (these last two gleaned from the
list of links during parsing, and thus left out altogether when using
the existing cache code). So it's probably not significantly slower to
grab the stored HTMLized article while we're there.

On the other hand, some of this stuff (except for the page view count
and user settings) could also be stored in a cache file and plunked
ready-made into the output along with the HTML. User settings perhaps
could be stored in a session cookie, refreshed only when the user first
visits/logs in/changes preferences, saving a little extra on database
access as well.

Worth it? No idea. But, hey, it's a suggestion.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] patch for wikiSettings.php

body:
Here's a patch for wikiSettings.php that fixes the problem of variables
being used before they are defined.  See my previous post for some of the
rationale for this patch.

This fix makes the code actually work, so the pages end up being in the
colours assigned here.  But we don't really want multicoloured pages, so
I've changed most of the colours to #FFFFFF so that there is no effective
change of page colouring.

This patch also fixes the problem of using $wikiCharset before it is
defined.  I've just used "iso-8859-1" and "Latin-1" instead.

Zundark

*** wikiSettings.php.old Tue Feb 26 18:17:10 2002
--- wikiSettings.php Wed Apr 10 17:46:38 2002
***************
*** 21,33 ****
  $wikiDBconnection = "";  # global variable to hold the current DB
      # connection; should be empty initially.

! # Namespace backgrounds
  $wikiNamespaceBackground = array () ;
! $wikiNamespaceBackground[$wikiTalk] = "#eeFFFF" ;
! $wikiNamespaceBackground["user_talk"] = $wikiNamespaceBackground["talk"] ;
! $wikiNamespaceBackground["wikipedia_talk"] = $wikiNamespaceBackground["talk"] ;
! $wikiNamespaceBackground[$wikiUser] = "#FFeeee" ;
! $wikiNamespaceBackground[$wikiWikipedia] = "#eeFFee" ;
  $wikiNamespaceBackground["log"] = "#FFFFcc" ;
  $wikiNamespaceBackground["special"] = "#eeeeee" ;

--- 21,30 ----
  $wikiDBconnection = "";  # global variable to hold the current DB
      # connection; should be empty initially.

! # Namespace backgrounds. (Those with variable indices are assigned later.)
  $wikiNamespaceBackground = array () ;
! $wikiNamespaceBackground["user_talk"] = "#FFFFFF" ;
! $wikiNamespaceBackground["wikipedia_talk"] = "#FFFFFF" ;
  $wikiNamespaceBackground["log"] = "#FFFFcc" ;
  $wikiNamespaceBackground["special"] = "#eeeeee" ;

***************
*** 41,48 ****
  include_once ( "wikiLocalSettings.php" ) ;

  # Initialize list of available character encodings to the default if none was set up.
! if ( ! isset ( $wikiEncodingCharsets ) ) $wikiEncodingCharsets = array($wikiCharset);
! if ( ! isset ( $wikiEncodingNames ) ) $wikiEncodingNames = array($wikiCharset); # Localised names

  #
  # This file loads up the default English message strings
--- 38,47 ----
  include_once ( "wikiLocalSettings.php" ) ;

  # Initialize list of available character encodings to the default if none was set up.
! if ( ! isset ( $wikiEncodingCharsets ) )
!     $wikiEncodingCharsets = array("iso-8859-1");
! if ( ! isset ( $wikiEncodingNames ) )
!     $wikiEncodingNames = array("Latin-1"); # Localised names

  #
  # This file loads up the default English message strings
***************
*** 54,59 ****
--- 53,68 ----
      include_once ( "wikiText" . ucfirst ( $wikiLanguage ) . ".php" ) ;
  }

+ # More namespace backgrounds, now that the required variables have
+ # been defined.  We must be careful not to overwrite any values that
+ # have been assigned elsewhere.
+ if ( ! isset ( $wikiNamespaceBackground[$wikiTalk] ) )
+     $wikiNamespaceBackground[$wikiTalk] = "#FFFFFF" ;
+ if ( ! isset ( $wikiNamespaceBackground[$wikiUser] ) )
+     $wikiNamespaceBackground[$wikiUser] = "#FFFFFF" ;
+ if ( ! isset ( $wikiNamespaceBackground[$wikiWikipedia] ) )
+     $wikiNamespaceBackground[$wikiWikipedia] = "#FFFFFF" ;
+
  # Functions

  # Is there any reason to localise this function? Ever?


subject: [Wikipedia-l] list of 24's "contributions" already on the 'pedia + some reflections....

body:
On Wednesday 10 April 2002 01:49 am, Jimbo wrote:
> kband at www.llamacom.com wrote:
> >?Are there other entries? Or is the hooplah mostly about his meta-rants?
>
> I'd like to second the call for lists of entries on the main site that he's
> screwed up. ?It'd help if we were all "on the same page" in terms of
> knowing what he's doing.
>
> His meta-rants are annoying and strange, but can easily be ignored if
> absolutely necessary.
>
> >?I don't see that much evidence that he's trying to violate the mission
> >?of Wikipedia, or even subvert it to his own kooky ends. He seems to
> >?respect the mission, and thinks that people don't have the right
> >?understanding of what NPOV means.
>
> Well, he's so incoherent that it's sort of hard to say...
>
> --Jimbo

Somebody has something at [[wikipedia utilities/Pages needing attention]] --
you can also check out 24's list of contribs which is accessed through
his/her user page at [[user:24.150.61.63]]. I have no idea why the
contributions link works since Ed Poor created the page -- not 24 by a login.
Also, I don't know if the contribs link is accurate or up to date (does this
work for any IP?).

Most of what he/she contributes is discoherent -- although some is actually
mildly interesting after you cut out the fat. I gave up on trying to keep up
with edits to this person's material because there is just so much of it.
Others seem to jump in quite often though -- God bless them.

Much of the most recent stuff really isn't THAT non-NPOV -- although it
takes an entire article of words for this person to say, maybe, a couple of
sentences of information (much of the leftover stuff is even not as non-NPOV
as what Ed Poor or the Cruncrator contributes....). It is a bear to wade
through this stuff. Apparently this person is beginning to understand that
NPOVing his/her stuff at least a little helps prevent a quick REVERT or
removal of text to a talk page. As I stated before, this person doesn't seem
to engage in edit wars -- which I still think is strange (given all the other
things this person has done).

Perhaps the power of the wiki is beggining to take its effect -- we can only
hope. WojPob is right; this issue is taking up WAY too much of our human
resources --- It's still a good idea for Jimbo to proceed with trying to
contact this person and see what he/she is about. And for all of us to keep a
watchful eye to make sure 24 has been tamed a bit. If this person is on a
similiar non-NPOV level as Ed or Crunc I can live with that. (talking about
level of severity, not ideology)

Although, the current lull in 24's submits may just be causing me to
automatically (once again) give this person the benefit of the doubt when
this person really doesn't deserve it.   I guess we will see when he/she
starts to massively submit again.

maveric149


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Article on Wikipedia/Nupedia in swiss news
	magazine

body:
On ?a?, 2002-04-11 at 02:57, Tobias Hoevekamp wrote:
> There is an article about Wikipedia and Nupedia in the latest issue
> of Switzerland largest weekly news magazine (http://www.facts.ch).
> It's in german though and not available online...
>
> Anyhow, if you don't have a chance to buy a copy of 'facts' you might
> want to have a look at a jpg-image of the 2 page article (300 kByte)
> http://www.vt.ilw.agrl.ethz.ch/~hoevekam/tmp/facts.jpg. (I'll ask
> the author of the article to provide an online version...)
>
> I think it's a nice article giving a well-balanced introduction to
> - mainly - Wikipedia. OK, the picture of Larry with it's title is
> kind of out-dated and it wasn't clear to me, that they will include
> it, when I 'proof-read' the article. BTW, I am the guy hiding behind
> some books on the second picture...

Cool! Time to break out the old Woerterbuch...

> Hope that makes up for some of the trouble with 24 etc...

More good news: the Orthodox Baha'i guy has seen the error of his ways
and is working to improve the NPOVized article rather than constantly
reverting the page to his old version. Hurray! See, *some* people learn
to work with the community, errrr group of regular participants. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] The t-word

body:
> > He seems intelligent, but very narrowly focused
>
> I disagree.  I admit he seems educated.
> Obduracy and a refusal to engage or compromise with anyone who disagrees with
> him is not only not a sign of intelligence, its a sign of non-intelligence.

Not necessarily. It can also mean that someone has been totlly convinced to except a extreme position. Such a person would view comromise as a step backward. It's a sign of arrogance.

- Stephen G.
--

________________________________
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia
   http://www.wikipedia.com

_______________________________________________
Download the free Opera browser at http://www.opera.com/

Powered by Outblaze


subject: [Wikipedia-l] The t-word

body:
> I think the greatest damage that 24 is doing is wasting our resources. By this I mean
> _human_ resources. I nearly got a heart attack after seeing my mailbox this morning
> and the amount of discussion going on. Some useful points have been made but I'm still
> not sure if it is all worth the hassle. Imagine all that time spent on writing articles....

Exactly. I've decided not to reply to his long posts on meta, and now I'll stop chatting about him here.

- Stephen G.
--

________________________________
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia
   http://www.wikipedia.com

_______________________________________________
Download the free Opera browser at http://www.opera.com/

Powered by Outblaze


from_name: Julie Hofmann Kemp

subject: [Wikipedia-l] 24, possums, and is the site really slow lately??

body:
Hi all --

Just thought I'd point out that 24 has at least made it to "rules to
consider" , read through, and signed (either for or against.  A couple
of the 'against' don't give me warm fuzzies, but at least he/she is
expanding his/her horizons a bit.

On the subject of possums (or, as we call them in my family for reasons
unknown, possels), I think that the article already exists under Opossum
;-)

And is the site really slow lately??  It seems to take forever for pages
to load, and I'm not getting that at other sites....

Have a good day, all!

Jules

_________________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com


from_name: Chuck Smith

subject: [Wikipedia-l] hey, I'm a non-person

body:
Hmmm... I finally agree with Larry that 24 is a troll.

On Meta:TheWikipediaCommunity:

-
your non-reply is good - that suits us both.  I don't
consider you a person, since you accept non-persons
and non-interactions in your non-community as an
equal.24
-

I never realized I wasn't a person before.  Good thing
24 is here to enlighten me.  I say we just reverse all
the changes he makes until he comes to his senses...

Mr. non-person,
Chuck

=====
Come to my homepage!  Venu al mia hejmpagxo!
http://amuzulo.babil.komputilo.org/
====
Venu al la senpaga, libera enciklopedio
esperanta reta! http://eo.wikipedia.com/

_________________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Informaci?n de Estados Unidos y Am?rica Latina, en Yahoo! Noticias.
Vis?tanos en http://noticias.espanol.yahoo.com


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: FYI, Baha'i

in_reply_to: <009b01c1e105$68bd3140$5b8aadcb@oemcomputer>; from manning@bartlett.net on Thu, Apr 11, 2002 at 01:03:07PM +1000

body:
Manning Bartlett wrote:
> 4 - By "us" I was making the assumption that the majority of the
>community would support my editorial stance on this - something I'm
>still fairly confident of. So far this person has had three 'pedians
>give them the same story (SJK, BV and myself), although none of us
>have communicated amongst ourselves AFAIK.

*nod* Me, too, also without communication.  This is the beauty of the
NPOV, I think; this is the beauty of the concept of "encyclopedia".
The shared vision makes a lot of these questions pretty easy to
answer.

> Sorry to have you dragged into this, Jimbo. I hope I'm still allowed
> to come to the company social.

But of course!

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Article on Wikipedia/Nupedia in swiss news magazine

in_reply_to: <1018519041.3cb55e014de17@email.ethz.ch>; from tobias.hoevekamp@ilw.agrl.ethz.ch on Thu, Apr 11, 2002 at 11:57:21AM +0200

body:
Very cool.  All day today I will go around saying "zusammengetragen".  I like the
sound of that.  zusammengetragen zusammengetragen zusammengetragen zusammengetragen.
I know German speakers are smart!  They must be, their words are so long!

:-)

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] [phma@webjockey.net: HTTP response from wikipedia takes too long]

body:
Pierre, thanks for your comment... I'm forwarding it to wikitech-l, which is where
the developers hang out.  Coincidentally, we are just now discussing performance
issues.  Would you be interested in joining us?

----- Forwarded message from Pierre Abbat <phma at webjockey.net> -----

From: Pierre Abbat <phma at webjockey.net>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 09:14:25 -0400
To: webmaster at wikipedia.com
Subject: HTTP response from wikipedia takes too long

I am trying to read Wikipedia and Konqueror frequently times out, resulting
in an edit conflict if I'm trying to submit something. Trying to access
ross.bomis.com does not result in long times. Can you fix it?

phma
---
[phma at neofelis abi]$ time webserver ross.bomis.com
Server: Apache/1.3.23 (Unix) PHP/4.0.6 mod_fastcgi/2.2.12
0.11user 2.00system 0:10.61elapsed 19%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (1095major+404minor)pagefaults 0swaps
[phma at neofelis abi]$ time webserver ross.bomis.com
Server: Apache/1.3.23 (Unix) PHP/4.0.6 mod_fastcgi/2.2.12
0.09user 0.10system 0:00.91elapsed 20%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (1052major+404minor)pagefaults 0swaps
[phma at neofelis abi]$ time webserver ross.bomis.com
Server: Apache/1.3.23 (Unix) PHP/4.0.6 mod_fastcgi/2.2.12
0.10user 0.09system 0:00.44elapsed 42%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (1052major+404minor)pagefaults 0swaps
[phma at neofelis abi]$ time webserver www.wikipedia.com
Server: Apache/1.3.23 (Unix) PHP/4.0.6 mod_fastcgi/2.2.12
0.11user 0.22system 0:32.39elapsed 1%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (957major+376minor)pagefaults 0swaps
[phma at neofelis abi]$ time webserver www.wikipedia.com
Server: Apache/1.3.23 (Unix) PHP/4.0.6 mod_fastcgi/2.2.12
0.10user 1.02system 1:17.12elapsed 1%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (1125major+404minor)pagefaults 0swaps
[phma at neofelis abi]$ time webserver www.wikipedia.com

Looking up www.wikipedia.com.
Making HTTP connection to www.wikipedia.com.
Sending HTTP request.
HTTP request sent; waiting for response.
Alert!: Unexpected network read error; connection aborted.
Can't Access `http://www.wikipedia.com/'
Alert!: Unable to access document.

lynx: Can't access startfile
Command exited with non-zero status 1
0.10user 2.28system 5:16.30elapsed 0%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (1176major+406minor)pagefaults 0swaps

----- End forwarded message -----


from_name: Karen AKA Kajikit

body:
I've tried to work it out but I'm still a bit confused, so I've got a
couple of questions that maybe you can help me with.

The search engine on the wikipedia rejects punctuation, so does that
mean that for best search results we should leave it out of entry
titles?
eg. There was no entry for 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone'
until I made one, but there was an entry already there for 'Harry Potter
and the Philosophers Stone' without the [correct] apostrophe. Which one
should be the main article and which one should be the redirect?

If I want to make a sub-page for a topic, say 'Possums', what's the
protocol for naming it? I see a lot of entries have used backslashes,
but I read that the slashes don't mean anything anymore. I'm confused!
Just say I wanted to make subpages on possum dietary requirements, how
to keep possums as pets, and how possums breed. [not that I know
anything about possums, but it's an example that came to mind.]

And, lastly, if I wanted to break my user: page up into subpages with
projects I'd like to do on one page and projects I've already started on
another, what should I call it? I'm getting confused. I looked at the
FAQ and help pages but I didn't really understand their explanation... I
got lost at about the point where I was told to use brackets to make
categories more logical.

And about those brackets, which subject header would be more correct -
lime, fruit lime/fruit or lime (fruit). I've seen entry titles using all
three formats.

Thanks in advance!

Karen

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating

Love and huggles to all!


in_reply_to: <20020411025755.RIZY15826.rwcrmhc54.attbi.com@there> from "Daniel Lee Mayer" at Apr 10, 2002 07:56:18 PM

body:
> you wrote:
[snip]
> Much of the most recent stuff really isn't THAT non-NPOV -- although it
> takes an entire article of words for this person to say, maybe, a couple of
> sentences of information (much of the leftover stuff is even not as non-NPOV
> as what Ed Poor or the Cruncrator contributes....). It is a bear to wade
[snip]
> watchful eye to make sure 24 has been tamed a bit. If this person is on a
> similiar non-NPOV level as Ed or Crunc I can live with that. (talking about
> level of severity, not ideology)

It's "cunctator", not "crunctator".

Do you actually have any awareness of any biased material I have
contributed, or are you just going on hearsay? I'd really like to know
if my conception of my contributions is incorrect, or if you're at
fault.

I just want you to know how what you write makes me feel, which is
rather hurt and insulted, inasmuch as my contributions have been
predominantly to the creation of the most popular entries on the site
(in terms of hits and interlinking) and careful editing of other
entries, and not to the propagation of any particular agenda.

I have been forceful of my opinions about the nature of Wikipedia, but
that's separate from being on a "non-NPOV level" like Ed.

Am I wrong?

yours,
tc


from_name: Tobias Hoevekamp

body:
Dear Wikipedians!

There is an article about Wikipedia and Nupedia in the latest issue
of Switzerland largest weekly news magazine (http://www.facts.ch).
It's in german though and not available online...

Anyhow, if you don't have a chance to buy a copy of 'facts' you might
want to have a look at a jpg-image of the 2 page article (300 kByte)
http://www.vt.ilw.agrl.ethz.ch/~hoevekam/tmp/facts.jpg. (I'll ask
the author of the article to provide an online version...)

I think it's a nice article giving a well-balanced introduction to
- mainly - Wikipedia. OK, the picture of Larry with it's title is
kind of out-dated and it wasn't clear to me, that they will include
it, when I 'proof-read' the article. BTW, I am the guy hiding behind
some books on the second picture...

Hope that makes up for some of the trouble with 24 etc...

Bye

Tobias

TOBIAS HOEVEKAMP
mailto:tobias.hoevekamp at ilw.agrl.ethz.ch
http://www.vt.ilw.agrl.ethz.ch/~hoevekam
WORK: ETH Zurich, LFO E21, CH-8092 Zurich, +41 1 632 3304
HOME: Anna Heer-Str. 2,  CH-8057  Zurich,  +41 1 350 5986

-------------------------------------------------
This mail sent through IMP 3.0 at http://email.ethz.ch/horde/imp


from_name: Manning Bartlett

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: FYI, Baha'i

body:
Yeah, Jimbo, I guess we need a staff meeting on this one - JHK said she'll bring the donuts.

OK - I'm not a Baha'i and my reasons for my editorial stance are fairly straightforward:

1 - The Orthodox Baha'is are a TINY fringe group (sub-2000 members) of a religion with 6 Million members. Hence any article should give fair balance to that proportionality.
2 - I have maintained since the beginning that the main Baha'i article should contain the principles of the faith (common to all divisions) and any other pages on divisions should focus on the nature and manner of the distinction.
3 - The main Baha'i article IS weak on outlining the principles. Not feeling adequately informed, I approached the newsgroup to summon other "experts" to enhance the main Baha'i article.. If any 'mainstream" Baha'is were then to attempt to eliminate the OB article, the same rules of NPOV would apply and I would defend the OB page.
4 - By "us" I was making the assumption that the majority of the community would support my editorial stance on this - something I'm still fairly confident of. So far this person has had three 'pedians give them the same story (SJK, BV and myself), although none of us have communicated amongst ourselves AFAIK.

Sorry to have you dragged into this, Jimbo. I hope I'm still allowed to come to the company social.

Cheers
Manning

PS - Rabo Karabekian is a character from Kurt Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions", I've been using is as a handle on NGs for years.

Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] FYI, Baha'i
From: "Brion L. VIBBER" <brion at pobox.com>
To: wikipedia-l <wikipedia-l at nupedia.com>
Date: 10 Apr 2002 15:08:11 -0700
Reply-To: wikipedia-l at nupedia.com

See also duplicate of the complaint post and further discussion,
including Manning's response, on the wiki at:
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Talk%3AOrthodox%20Bahai%20Faith

While I do get the general impression that the mainstream Baha'is don't
seem to like the Orthodox Baha'is very much, I've seen no evidence of
misbehavior in the case of the wikipedia articles except on the part of
66.219.221.xxx him/herself, which he/she has yet to explain.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Kurt Jansson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Word Wide Lexicon

body:
Maybe my mail about the "Word Wide Lexicon"-project got lost in the
discussion about 24, Baha'i, etc., but did someone find this interesting
and contact Brian McConnell?

At least we should tell him that we're not interested in working with
his project, if this is so.

I'm sorry that I don't have enough overview and technical knowlege about
this.

Kurt


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Word Wide Lexicon


subject: [Wikipedia-l] The Cunctator email

body:
I responded to tc directly concerning Thu, 11 Apr 2002 10:55:50 -0500 (CDT)
email. Much apologies to the mailing list for turning it into a Slashdot
forum.

maveric149


from_name: kband at www.llamacom.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] The Cunctator email

in_reply_to: <20020412040521.FSQY15826.rwcrmhc54.attbi.com@there> from "Daniel Lee Mayer" at Apr 11, 2002 09:03:35 PM

body:
>
> I responded to tc directly concerning Thu, 11 Apr 2002 10:55:50 -0500 (CDT)
> email. Much apologies to the mailing list for turning it into a Slashdot
> forum.

Same for me. I meant to send my message directly to maveric.

Of course, if this really were a Slashdot forum, one of use would have
mentioned hot grits by now.

Getting back on topic, one thing I've noticed which is not a serious
problem but could become one is that the developer group de facto
determines what changes are made to the Wikipedia software. More
specifically, if two people each have a pet bug they think needs to be
fixed, and one person is a developer and one isn't, the developer's
pet bug will be fixed.

Same thing for feature requests.

Note: this is not a major deal, since most of the time the consensus
problems are worked on, and the benefits of a volunteer developer
community are great, etc. I consider this a molehill, not a mountain.

But I think we should keep this in mind as we grow, since as the
community and Wikipedia gets larger, it's important to be aware of
sources of invisible decision-making.

--tc
cunctator at kband.com


from_name: Brion L. VIBBER

subject: [Wikipedia-l] a couple of pages to delete

body:
On ven, 2002-04-12 at 03:36, Karen AKA Kajikit wrote:
> I'm not sure where to put suggestions for pages to delete - I've been
> moving info around all day and I'm leaving a trail of outdated empty
> entries behind me.

[[Wikipedia utilities/Page titles to be deleted]] is the usual place,
though it's cleverly hidden.

> - Bipolar disorder/An older, deprecated, version of this page [now a
> redirect, but nobody's going to want to type all that into their
> browser!]
> - Harry Potter/Quidditch [moved to Quidditch (Harry Potter)]
> - Harry Potter/broom [still has info but totally irrelevant and
> duplicated in the Quidditch entry]

Personally, I would really, REALLY, prefer that these kinds of pages be
made redirects, *not* deleted outright.

Even if you fix all the links *within* Wikipedia, what about search
engines that haven't re-indexed the site yet? What about people who
bookmarked the old page and want to come back to it? What if somebody
linked to an article from another site?

I think they'd be much happier being redirected to the new article than
seeing "Describe the new page here."

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


in_reply_to: <1018635076.21670.0.camel@rdaneel.moisty.org>; from brion@pobox.com on Fri, Apr 12, 2002 at 11:11:15AM -0700

body:
Brion L. VIBBER wrote:
> > - Bipolar disorder/An older, deprecated, version of this page [now a
> > redirect, but nobody's going to want to type all that into their
> > browser!]
> > - Harry Potter/Quidditch [moved to Quidditch (Harry Potter)]
> > - Harry Potter/broom [still has info but totally irrelevant and
> > duplicated in the Quidditch entry]
>
> Personally, I would really, REALLY, prefer that these kinds of pages be
> made redirects, *not* deleted outright.

I agree.  One of the cardinal rules of good web practice is to try not
to break old urls if people may still be using them somehow.

--Jimbo


body:
Julie Hofmann Kemp wrote:

> On the subject of possums (or, as we call them in my family for reasons
> unknown, possels), I think that the article already exists under Opossum
> ;-)

Not THOSE possums!!!!!!!! I always thought it was wierd that people
considered them vermin, until I saw a picture of them on webshots -
uck!!!!! furry rats with pink noses and tails! Possums are furry
friendly grey marsupials who like to eat leaves and fruit from our trees
and who leave possum droppings underneath them for us to step in, and to
'erk' outside my window and cannonball across the roof when I'm trying
to sleep at night... hang on - why did I say they were cute? They're
just bigger vermin! lol

> And is the site really slow lately??  It seems to take forever for pages
> to load, and I'm not getting that at other sites....

The site is really REALLY slow over the last few days... it must be all
the extra contributions I've been making! lol

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating

Love and huggles to all!


from_name: lcrocker at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Middle Earth redux

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