from_name: Zoe

subject: [WikiEN-l] The MIT vandal is back

body:
But is anorexia a female-constant in all cultures?  Is it even as prevalent in Europe as it is in the US?
Zoe
 Tom Parmenter <tompar at world.std.com> wrote:|From: Jonathan Walther
|Content-Disposition: inline
|Sender: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2003 15:21:25 -0800
|
|
|--vkogqOf2sHV7VnPd
|Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
|Content-Disposition: inline
|Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
|
|On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 12:32:27PM -0800, Zoe wrote:
|> It's the exact same wording as the text inserted by the MIT vandal. I
|> asked the person inserting it to give us some information to prove the
|> assertion, and I asked if it was true for the entire world, or only
|> certain cultures. The person declined to do so.
|
|The information is not misogynistic, it is true. Labelling this person
|a vandal does a disservice to the Wikipedia. The traditional treatment
|in the West for hysteria was for the doctor to massage a womans genitals
|by hand until she got some relief. The most extreme forms of hysteria
|are not seen very much in modern times; some attribute this to a greater
|interest in giving sexual satisfaction to women. The milder forms of
|hysteria still abound; if males have a propensity for hysteria, it is
|socialized out of them at a very young age.
|
|Jonathan
|

A misogynist, but not a vandal. Anorexia, bulimia, borderline
personality disorder,, and histrionic personality disorder are
generally more common in women, according to my wife, the
psychotherapist.

She adds, however, that hysteria is the NPOV ringer here, being a 19th
century diagnosis that is no longer used (nor is the treatment
mentioned above). Even in the 19th, men were diagnosed with it, but
not given the analogous treatment.

More common in men than women: anti-social personality disorder. The
prisons are full of them, she says. Also, most psychopaths and
sociopaths are men.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88

_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20030215/b61579de/attachment.htm


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [WikiEN-l] trying hard to do a list right

body:
Lists are a major part of the Wikipedia.  We have lists all over the place.
Zoe
 Jonathan Walther <krooger at debian.org> wrote:On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 10:00:35PM -0500, Tom Parmenter wrote:
>I'm not really wild about either the first idea, list the top 12 in
>each genre, nor the second idea, use the lists from Songwriter Halls
>of Fame, because they are so long.
>
>Even if you aren't interested in songwriters, the issue is a recurring
>one and hard to solve, so maybe you'd like to chime in.

I don't see lists as belonging on the Wikipedia at all. However, I do
see them as an important affiliated project, in a way similar to the
Wiktionary.

Jonathan

--
Geek House Productions, Ltd.

Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone: 604-435-1205
Email: djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC V5R2W2
> ATTACHMENT part 2 application/pgp-signature

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20030215/26ca12d4/attachment.htm


subject: [WikiEN-l] Album listings

body:
I see nothing wrong with keeping them, though it would be nice if the names of the bands were included.
Zoe
 Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:> What do we think about all these pages about music albums, which give
> just a track listing and nothing else?

> Some recent additions don't even bother to give the artist:
> eg [[Hell On Earth]]

Generally, we should expand, not delete. But if this turns out to be too
difficult, put it on Votes for Deletion.

I would have no objections to importing the FreeDB data, which includes
artist/album information.

Regards,

Erik
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20030215/6a1921f8/attachment.htm


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [Wikitech-l] Server clock drift

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Just a thought: in the past, I have always had good results from using
>'rdate' on a chron.  If you set the clock once a day, it never varies
>by more than a second or two, which is very much close enough for our
>purposes.
>
>Real ntp software is amazing, but really overkill for our purposes?
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
>http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>
>
>
I don't think it's overkill, given NTP's ease of use. Points in favour:
* Most Linux distributions include NTP
* It only requires one small config file to be set up and then runs
unobtrusively ever after.
* It's significantly more accurate and reliable than ad-hoc timing
solutions, and
* It's resistant to errors in the up-stream time servers, using a voting
algorithm to resist bogus time settings
* It won't step the clock backwards, which can be a pain for databases
and backups

I'd be glad to help you with the setup, if you want.

Neil


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Other sites running wikipedia code? (rebranding
	and preventing confusion)

body:
On sab, 2003-02-15 at 14:20, t.l.c at vic.australis.com.au wrote:
> Hi,

Welcome!

> I?ve been running the wikipedia code on my personal machine for more
> than a week now and have spent a lot of time rebranding the code (in
> language.php) to ensure that people using this wiki don?t think they are
> editing the wikipedia.

If you haven't already, you might want to join the developers' list:
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

We're planning to change most of those "Wikipedia" references to a
generic variable which can be set (or group of variables for languages
which require different grammatical forms).

> Rebranding is, for the most part, not a problem but there are some points
> (such as when the code generates a ?the wikipedia software doesn?t
> understand
..? page) where people may get confused. I changed the
> error message to read ?the Phase III ?Wikipedia?  code doesn?t
> understand
.? but this doesn?t seem to be much of an improvement.

I think it's getting time to phase in the official unofficial name
"PediaWiki". :)

However a fair number of these messages in the code can just be changed
to "the wiki".

> Also pages such as the Wikipedia:Feature_Requests page
> (Cunnan:Feature_Requests on the wiki I?m setting up) are needless
> duplications of wikipedia pages but I worry that adding a redirect to the
> wikipedia page will lead to users editing the wikipedia page without
> noticing that they are on a different site.

We should probably set up a skeleton database that includes a link to
the bug tracker on the sourceforge project page and explanation of how
to use it and what it means...

> Also does the development of the wikipedia code consider features that
> non-wikipedia sites may require? I?m thinking along the lines of such
> things as only allowing registered users to perform edits (not that I want to
> do such a thing).

We at least try to keep things in mind... A number of things (like TeX
math support) are switchable on a per-installation basis. More could be
added, certainly.

>  Are there even other sites out there that run the wikipedia code?

A few, yes. See:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AProjects_using_Wikipedia_software

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/attachments/20030215/0deb5820/attachment.pgp


from_name: Tom Parmenter

subject: [WikiEN-l] Album listings

body:
|From: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com
|Cc:
|Sender: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2003 10:46:58 -0800
|
|tarquin Wrote:
|>What do we think about all these pages about music albums, which give
|>just a track listing and nothing else?
|
|I've disliked those from the start.  It seems very little thought went
|into them, not even enough to establish barebones context (e.g. artist
|and genre), much less a greater historical or social context (e.g. why
|we should care).  (something we often fail to establish, me included,
|though with the basics down it's easier to get there).
|
|>[[Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band]] - now *that*'s an encyclopedia
|>article!
|
|yes.
|
|kq
|

Certainly, lots of album articles are simply inserted by fans of the
band, and many of them are weak to the point of inanity, but
everything you ask about including albums in the Wikipedia is being
addressed even as we speak by a WikiProject on record albums.  See
[[Wikipedia:WikiProject Albums]] for formatting standards and
discussion and [[Wikipedia_talk::WikiProject Albums]] for a list of
albums that should be covered.  The project is thoughtful and
careful.  I believe [[Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band]] was one
of its first articles, or was at least a model the project looked at.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Do we need the Sep.11 wiki?

body:
On sab, 2003-02-15 at 15:35, Erik Moeller wrote:
> The Sep.11 Wikipedia (http://sep11.wikipedia.org) currently has 12 pages.
> The most relevant page there is "Personal experiences", which is a
> collection of personal accounts from the day, other than that it's mostly
> links to the English Wikipedia.

Its purpose was to hold the various experience and tribute pages that,
it was decided, did not belong on Wikipedia proper. The Cunctator in
particular wanted them preserved, and asked me if I could move a bunch
of pages en masse to the newly separate wiki if given a list, to which I
assented.

I never received the list, and no one seems to have put any effort into
doing it manually, so the pages are still on the English Wikipedia.
Bryan Derksen has just said he'll put together a new list.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/attachments/20030215/a16e52a7/attachment.pgp


from_name: tarquin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Album listings

body:
What do we think about all these pages about music albums, which give
just a track listing and nothing else?

Some recent additions don't even bother to give the artist:
eg [[Hell On Earth]]

I'm wondering whether we should delete them. These are database entries,
not encyclopedia articles.

[[Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band]] - now *that*'s an encyclopedia
article!


subject: [Wikitech-l] A very simple category proposal

body:
On sab, 2003-02-15 at 17:53, Erik Moeller wrote:
> When you visit a Category page, you then automatically get a two-part page
> that consists of
>
> 1) Editable category description
> 2) Result of the "What links here" query

...which itself is *desperately* in need of being made to better handle
large numbers of links. Backlinks for articles linked to by 30,000 US
cities, for instance, are rather hard to navigate.

> Aside from that, we could start categorizing the Wikipedia content itself
> more effectively. Many of our "lists of" could be changed into auto-
> generated category pages. List gets too long? Then nest categories by
> adding a category tag to a category page.

Sorting is usually a significant issue in 'lists of X'. To replace
manually created lists, it would be necessary to be able to specify a
'sort by' string with the categorization, which could be a 'Last, First'
style name, a year, quantity or other numeric sort, etc.

<ugly idea>
[[Category:Novelist|Hemingway, Ernest]]
[[Category:Events in World War II|1941-12-07]]
[[Category:Largest cities by population|-3694820]]
  (negative so the numeric sort begins with the largest pops)
</ugly>

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20030215/977f349e/attachment.pgp>


from_name: Bryan Derksen

body:
At 03:51 PM 15/02/03 -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
>I never received the list, and no one seems to have put any effort into
>doing it manually, so the pages are still on the English Wikipedia.
>Bryan Derksen has just said he'll put together a new list.

I just put a list up at [[Talk:September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Memorial
wiki pages]], where I am sure it will either receive great controversy or
complete lack of interest. :) I went through all the "casualty" pages and
filtered out the people who had some other claim to fame than simply being
in the wrong place at the wrong time, but included most of them since IMO
articles about J. Random Accountant don't really belong in an encyclopedia.
They'd go great on a "memorial wiki", though.


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Album listings

body:
> What do we think about all these pages about music albums, which give
> just a track listing and nothing else?

> Some recent additions don't even bother to give the artist:
> eg [[Hell On Earth]]

Generally, we should expand, not delete. But if this turns out to be too
difficult, put it on Votes for Deletion.

I would have no objections to importing the FreeDB data, which includes
artist/album information.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] One more variable needed

body:
One more variable is needed for Polish Wikipedia:
genetive form of name of month.

For dates like `1 stycznia' (1st of January) in Polish language
genetive is used.

Names in genetive are (modulo ASCII-zation of diactrics):
    stycznia
    lutego
    marca
    kwietnia
    maja
    czerwca
    lipca
    sierpnia
    wrzes'nia
    paz'dziernika
    listopada
    grudnia


body:
On sab, 2003-02-15 at 18:53, Erik Moeller wrote:
> > <ugly idea>
> > [[Category:Novelist|Hemingway, Ernest]]
> > [[Category:Events in World War II|1941-12-07]]
> > [[Category:Largest cities by population|-3694820]]
> >   (negative so the numeric sort begins with the largest pops)
> > </ugly>
>
> This would work; hard to implement, though. The "What links here" query
> would need to grep every page for the [[Category:]] string.

Rather, on page save we'd add it to either yet another table or, more
likely, another column in 'links'.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20030215/c2e20a3f/attachment.pgp>


subject: [Wikitech-l] One more variable needed

body:
On Sat, Feb 15, 2003 at 11:54:26AM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
> pl:
> $wgSiteName = "Wikipedia";
> $wgSiteNameGen = "Wikipedii";
$wgSiteNameDat = "Wikipedii";
$wgSiteNameAcc = "Wikipedie,";
$wgSiteNameIns = "Wikipedia,";
$wgSiteNameLoc = "Wikipedii";

modulo diactrics.

Endings exactly as described in http://wiktionary.org/wiki/Polish_language
in table for "komedia".


from_name: t.l.c at vic.australis.com.au

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Other sites running wikipedia code? (rebranding and preventing confusion)

body:
Hi,
I?ve been running the wikipedia code on my personal machine for more
than a week now and have spent a lot of time rebranding the code (in
language.php) to ensure that people using this wiki don?t think they are
editing the wikipedia. I?d like to move this off my local network and onto the
internet but I like some advice first.

I should state right off the bat that the wiki I?m planning is probably to
different to be included under the wikixyz.wikipedia.org umbrella.

Rebranding is, for the most part, not a problem but there are some points
(such as when the code generates a ?the wikipedia software doesn?t
understand?..? page) where people may get confused. I changed the
error message to read ?the Phase III ?Wikipedia?  code doesn?t
understand?.? but this doesn?t seem to be much of an improvement.

Also pages such as the Wikipedia:Feature_Requests page
(Cunnan:Feature_Requests on the wiki I?m setting up) are needless
duplications of wikipedia pages but I worry that adding a redirect to the
wikipedia page will lead to users editing the wikipedia page without
noticing that they are on a different site. This problem becomes worse as
there are likely to be pages with names such as ?the 13th century? on this
wiki that are not written in the style of an encyclopaedia. I?d like to
encourage users to add links to wikipedia articles on the same topics but
again the concern is that they will follow these links and edit the wikipedia
pages as though they were still on the wiki they started on.

I?d like to avoid just changing the article text background to another colour
and I doubt if this would be enough anyway (most users on this wiki will
probably not have seen the wikipedia before and would probably ignore
the colour change).

Also does the development of the wikipedia code consider features that
non-wikipedia sites may require? I?m thinking along the lines of such
things as only allowing registered users to perform edits (not that I want to
do such a thing). Are there even other sites out there that run the wikipedia
code?

Thanks in advance, Tobin Richard.
-----
t.l.c at vic.australis.com.au

---------------------------------------------
InterNet Australis
http://www.australis.com.au/


from_name: Jay Bowks

subject: [Wikitech-l] HELP with batch upload entries

body:
Hi, Just an idea... I need help with...
Is there a way to transfer entries
in batch format?

I have a text file where each line
is an article description entry
and I would like to have each
be its own separate article of course
for the ia.wikipedia.com

Otherwise it's cut and paste page
by page and that would be a
sincere waste of mousage time.
Nevermind a carpal tunnel incident
waiting to happen :-)

Could you point me to a How to
page or send instructions if this
is possible.

I'd very much appreciate your help,
Jay B.


body:
The Sep.11 Wikipedia (http://sep11.wikipedia.org) currently has 12 pages.
The most relevant page there is "Personal experiences", which is a
collection of personal accounts from the day, other than that it's mostly
links to the English Wikipedia. Still we officially promote it as a sister
project. I don't think that's a good idea, and it is just another
Wikipedia to maintain, which means less time to work on much needed
language coordination.

We could move the personal experiences to [[Talk:September 11, 2001
terrorist attack]], linked to from the main Sep. 11 page as "Personal
experiences". This is similar to the way we linked to personal tributes on
the victim pages as "Tributes and Comments".  In both cases, this goes
beyond the purposes of talk pages to be used for writing articles only,
but I think in the case of major disasters, we can make an exception to
this rule.

Thoughts?

Regards,

Erik


body:
> I never received the list, and no one seems to have put any effort into
> doing it manually, so the pages are still on the English Wikipedia.
> Bryan Derksen has just said he'll put together a new list.

That's great, but it should be noted that I have spent quite some time
moving POV statements from the casualty pages to Talk pages. I think most
of the victim pages are OK now, so I wonder if there's really any point in
moving them. If there are verifiable facts - and the NY Times and others
published lots of facts about the victims - we can certainly report them.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Using information from the CDC home page

body:
While looking at the [[Legionnaires' disease]] page, I noticed a lot of information that looked like it had been copied from somewhere.  Indeed, it had come from http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dbmd/diseaseinfo/legionellosis_g.htm.  The person who had put it on the page claimed that it was public domain.  Looking at the CDC's home page, I find "In general all information presented in these pages and all items available for download are for public use."

Does this mean we can use the information at that website?

Zoe

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20030216/bdae96ea/attachment.htm


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

body:
Zoe Wrote:
>Looking at the CDC's home page, I find "In general all information
presented in these pages and all items available for download are for
public use."
>
>Does this mean we can use the information at that website?

I took that to refer to security clearance, not copyright or lack
thereof (it goes on to talk about passwords, etc.)  But most u.s.
federal govt info is in the public domain, as it should be since the
public paid for it.  At the Department of State site everything that
doesn't have an explicity copyright notice is in the public domain;
the CIA releases their World Factbook each year into the public
domain; there are some excellent navy pages on ships and sailors for
people into that stuff, NASA's and NOAA's excellent photos are in the
public domain etc.

kq

wikikarma: [[Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hoods Hills]]
and [[Paradise Lost 2: Revelations]]


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Moving Polish Wikipedia to www.wikipedia.pl /
	Przejscie na www.wikipedia.pl

body:
On dim, 2003-02-16 at 02:09, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> [en]
> We need:
> 1. concensus (is anybody against ?)

I think in general using country codes is going to cause more confusion
when linking using language codes, which are *not* always the same. But
if you guys really want it sitting at that location, I at least see no
reason to stop you.

> 2. changing settings of Wikipedia script

Would be easy to do. Note that old cookies will no longer be valid and
everyone will have to login again.

> 3. reversing DNS redirects from
>     www.wikipedia.pl->pl.wikipedia.org to pl.wikipedia.org->www.wikipedia.pl
>
> Who aministrates both names ?
> Could they please agree how to do the 3rd part ?

www.wikipedia.pl is a DNS-level pointer to pl.wikipedia.org. No
additional changes to domain configuration have to be made, it'll
continue to point to the right place. I would just have to switch the
apache configuration on the web server to prefer one over the other.

(But if wikipedia.pl is to be the official home, make sure you know who
owns the domain!)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20030216/e03f3605/attachment.pgp>


body:
We already have almost everything we need for categorization of articles,
except for

1) A category namespace.

2) Some code to render links to this namespace differently than normal
links, and some code to render pages within the category namespace.

How it would work:

You add a link to

[[Category:stub]]
[[Category:movie]]
[[Category:painter]]

or whatever; on the page this is rendered a bit like the interlanguage
links, separate from the textual content:

 This article belongs into the following categories:
 [[Category:stub]] - [[Category:movie]]

etc.

When you visit a Category page, you then automatically get a two-part page
that consists of

1) Editable category description
2) Result of the "What links here" query

This would allow us to make many, many pages more effective:

- Find or fix a stub could be replaced with [[Category:Stub]] in stub
articles.

- "Links to disambiguation pages" could be replaced with
[[Category:disambiguation]].

- "Pages in need of attention" could be replaced with [[Category:Work
needed]].

All these pages currently work very ineffectively because links are often
not removed when they need to be, and the pages get long and unwieldy. I'm
hesitant regarding "Votes for deletion", but with some additional work
that could also be changed to use the new scheme.

Aside from that, we could start categorizing the Wikipedia content itself
more effectively. Many of our "lists of" could be changed into auto-
generated category pages. List gets too long? Then nest categories by
adding a category tag to a category page.

Thoughts? Objections? I consider implementing this myself if nobody cares
enough to do it.

Regards,

Erik


references:
<8fxQ6hjCpVB@erik_moeller>
	 <1045371722.4126.2.camel@rdaneel.vibber.org>  <3E4F6916.2010008@epost.de>

body:
On dim, 2003-02-16 at 02:33, Magnus Manske wrote:
> Does *anyone* remember what happened when I introduced that category
> link thingy (in Phase 2, IIRC)? I vaguely remember an outcry on
> wikipedia-l...

Before our time, old man. :)

> I think it would be more reasonable to
> 1. Expand the Phase 3 software to be used at the sifter project (meaning
> improved user rights management, new skin, and a special import page,
> basically). I'll start on that soon at the test site.
> 2. Set up sifter project (my preference would be on the wikipedia server ;-)
> 3. Implement a category scheme there. It would use drop-down boxes or
> the like rather than text edits since, well, noone can edit a sifter page...

Bleah! No offense. :)  However, a category system must IMHO be:

1) open-ended -- I need to be able to add [[Category:California cities]]
or [[Category:Esperanto literature]]. Maybe only two people are
interested in the category, but that should be enough.

2) **Integrated** -- filtering of Recentchanges by a selection of
categories would be more powerful than the current watchlist system (in
a sort of meta-sense, the watchlist establishes a category of 'pages
user X is interested in'). If it's sitting only on sifter, it's 100%
useless to me. With thousands of edits per day on the wiki, I as an
editor *need* to have a useful way to track things that will be of
interest to me, and that's where I need the categories.

Whatlinkshere, recentchangeslinked, and watchlist are crude movements in
the direction of what is needed. But they are limited:

* Watchlist requires that you personally add things to it. New topics
that will be of interest to you won't show up until you find them in
some other way.

* What links here doesn't distinguish between essential links that
indicate a categorical relation and incidental links, and performs no
useful ordering or organization. And it does not handle large numbers of
links at all well.

* Recent changes linked plus a topic list page isn't half bad, but
centralized topic lists get neglected and fall out of sync. Pages are
renamed, deleted, or added and the list isn't updated. (On the up side,
potential pages can be listed in the topic list and will show up once
they're created.) For tracking edits in a category it's ok, but you
can't presently combine multiple categories in one display short of
physically combining the lists into one page (and again the sync
problems!)

Category tags with a better list/backlink system aren't perfect either.
They would handle some problems:
* A renamed page will be carried over automatically (vs rclinked)
* If another editor adds a page to a category you're watching, you see
it too (vs watchlist)

but have others:
* Nonexistent pages can't be categorized; a newly created page will
appear in no category until someone edits it and adds a link.

There are perhaps ways around this. Like the proposed new system for
language links, a secondary table could store category information even
for 'potential' pages. But that brings us back to extensibility and
editability problems.

A "shared watchlist" might be a direction to go in; category pages could
be created at will, there could be a table listing category connections
and some programmatic way of adding pages to them like adding to the
per-user watchlist (with an extra step of selecting a category). If
you're watching a category page, you get the pages in that category
highlighted in rc as well. That still leaves the issue of sorting and
presentation of category lists, but that may be easier in an add form
than in a funky link.

There's also the possibility of automatic categorization based on
checking the categorization of linking pages, but this way leads
artificial intelligence and the end of life as we know it. :)

Anyway, just thoughts.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20030216/1fae2621/attachment.pgp>


body:
> Sorting is usually a significant issue in 'lists of X'. To replace
> manually created lists, it would be necessary to be able to specify a
> 'sort by' string with the categorization, which could be a 'Last, First'
> style name, a year, quantity or other numeric sort, etc.

> <ugly idea>
> [[Category:Novelist|Hemingway, Ernest]]
> [[Category:Events in World War II|1941-12-07]]
> [[Category:Largest cities by population|-3694820]]
>   (negative so the numeric sort begins with the largest pops)
> </ugly>

This would work; hard to implement, though. The "What links here" query
would need to grep every page for the [[Category:]] string. Of course, the
magic we could do with that might be worth it. This came up before
regarding the paper version, and we ultimately have to think about a
solution (preferably one which allows several sorting criteria). What I'm
worried about is mostly the UI, anything that's not part of the article
text adds UI complexity. (The other side of the coin: Any logic we add to
page contents adds code complexity.)

But this is advanced stuff, I think we should first implement a basic
version for the stubs, disambiguation pages etc. and then think about
issues like advanced sorting. Having names in person lists under the first
rather than the last letter would not be so terrible for the moment
either.

Regards,

Erik


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Moving Polish Wikipedia to www.wikipedia.pl /
 Przejscie na www.wikipedia.pl

body:
On lun, 2003-02-17 at 03:30, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> IIRC Jimbo was dead set against this type of move (but redirection from a
> county domain to the .org one is fine). IMO it is bad enough already that
> xx.wikipedia.org looks like a different domain.
>
> I thought we were all one big project at one domain on one server - having
> different domains will only tend to enforce a sense of separateness.

Compare: http://google.com/ http://google.fr/ http://google.pl/ etc. Do
you think they are separate organizations? The Wikipedia name is much
more unifying and significant than the .org / .com / .pl / whatever.

The most important thing is that we're all working to create an open,
free encyclopedia, using the GFDL license that enables us to share and
share alike. It's really pretty frickin' irrelevant what the domain name
is, much less the top-level domain.

Disadvantages of putting everything under wikipedia.org include:

* .org is exotic and unfamiliar to many potential users; a country
domain is more familiar and comfortable (and recognizable as a web
address!) and will have more local flavor.

* Some search engines limit to the local country's top-level domain
(possibly meant as a crude language filter; if 90% of your users are
middle-aged housewives who don't speak anything but Foobarian there's
little reason to return results outside of the .foo domain; the outside
world is another market that bigger search engines like google have
wrapped up), and may not index .org. Having a secondary redirect domain
doesn't really help here, as 99% of links will be to the canonical URL,
and a redirect may not get indexed at all.

Disadvantages of putting languages preferentially under national domains
include:

* Many people have asked for a unified login system so you don't have to
login separately in each language. Using different top-level domains
will greatly limit the usefulness of this once it's put in place; even
if usernames and passwords are synchronized, login cookies will be
separate for each domain and you'll have to login separately (at least
once per domain if you tell it to save your password, otherwise on every
visit).

* Many languages are not easily associated with countries, and many
countries are not clearly associated with a single language.
(www.wikipedia.be directs to a page where you can choose French, Dutch,
or Frisian; meanwhile there is no TLD for Esperanto.) Further, in many
cases there are mismatches between language codes and country codes --
.my is Malaysia, but my is the language code for Burmese; .uk is the
United Kingdom, but uk is the language code for Ukrainian (TLD .ua).
Inconsistency between naming and linking will lead to increased
confusion.

However I'm generally willing to let in a little confusion here to get
rid of more confusion there; for instance the wikis for several European
languages are set to display European standard time by default rather
than UTC, since _most_ of their users are in a single time zone. I'd
rather it were in UTC, but hey big deal! The overwhelming bulk of users
can better decide what they want than I; my own personal settings can
change the default timezone to my heart's content, but the default
should be whatever's most appropriate for most people.

>  Also
> what happens if the owner of the domain doesn't or can't pay the bill for it
> or decides to yank it (not that I think Kpjas would ever do that)? If
> something does happen then a lot of links will be broken and I thought that
> was something that was greatly frowned upon around here.

Well, mav, what happens to Wiktionary if you were to forget to pay the
bill for or decide to yank the plug on wiktionary.org?

If the foundation happens, I like to think that the various domains
would be donated to it. (I know you've said you'd do that for
wiktionary.org.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/attachments/20030216/1cef855f/attachment.pgp


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Moving Polish Wikipedia to www.wikipedia.pl /
	Przejscie na www.wikipedia.pl

body:
On lun, 2003-02-17 at 03:30, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> IIRC Jimbo was dead set against this type of move (but redirection from a
> county domain to the .org one is fine). IMO it is bad enough already that
> xx.wikipedia.org looks like a different domain.
>
> I thought we were all one big project at one domain on one server - having
> different domains will only tend to enforce a sense of separateness.

Compare: http://google.com/ http://google.fr/ http://google.pl/ etc. Do
you think they are separate organizations? The Wikipedia name is much
more unifying and significant than the .org / .com / .pl / whatever.

The most important thing is that we're all working to create an open,
free encyclopedia, using the GFDL license that enables us to share and
share alike. It's really pretty frickin' irrelevant what the domain name
is, much less the top-level domain.

Disadvantages of putting everything under wikipedia.org include:

* .org is exotic and unfamiliar to many potential users; a country
domain is more familiar and comfortable (and recognizable as a web
address!) and will have more local flavor.

* Some search engines limit to the local country's top-level domain
(possibly meant as a crude language filter; if 90% of your users are
middle-aged housewives who don't speak anything but Foobarian there's
little reason to return results outside of the .foo domain; the outside
world is another market that bigger search engines like google have
wrapped up), and may not index .org. Having a secondary redirect domain
doesn't really help here, as 99% of links will be to the canonical URL,
and a redirect may not get indexed at all.

Disadvantages of putting languages preferentially under national domains
include:

* Many people have asked for a unified login system so you don't have to
login separately in each language. Using different top-level domains
will greatly limit the usefulness of this once it's put in place; even
if usernames and passwords are synchronized, login cookies will be
separate for each domain and you'll have to login separately (at least
once per domain if you tell it to save your password, otherwise on every
visit).

* Many languages are not easily associated with countries, and many
countries are not clearly associated with a single language.
(www.wikipedia.be directs to a page where you can choose French, Dutch,
or Frisian; meanwhile there is no TLD for Esperanto.) Further, in many
cases there are mismatches between language codes and country codes --
.my is Malaysia, but my is the language code for Burmese; .uk is the
United Kingdom, but uk is the language code for Ukrainian (TLD .ua).
Inconsistency between naming and linking will lead to increased
confusion.

However I'm generally willing to let in a little confusion here to get
rid of more confusion there; for instance the wikis for several European
languages are set to display European standard time by default rather
than UTC, since _most_ of their users are in a single time zone. I'd
rather it were in UTC, but hey big deal! The overwhelming bulk of users
can better decide what they want than I; my own personal settings can
change the default timezone to my heart's content, but the default
should be whatever's most appropriate for most people.

>  Also
> what happens if the owner of the domain doesn't or can't pay the bill for it
> or decides to yank it (not that I think Kpjas would ever do that)? If
> something does happen then a lot of links will be broken and I thought that
> was something that was greatly frowned upon around here.

Well, mav, what happens to Wiktionary if you were to forget to pay the
bill for or decide to yank the plug on wiktionary.org?

If the foundation happens, I like to think that the various domains
would be donated to it. (I know you've said you'd do that for
wiktionary.org.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20030216/1cef855f/attachment.pgp>


subject: [Wikitech-l] patch for CURMONTHNAMEGEN

body:
On dim, 2003-02-16 at 04:12, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> Tested on local instalation.
>
> Please apply it to Polish Wikipedia as soon as possible
> (and to others, it doesn't really affect them).

Installed and committed to CVS.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20030216/f7dc35dc/attachment.pgp>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Quick thoughts on testing

body:
I've been chugging away some more at updating (well, rewriting) the
UseMod conversion script, and have started adding some automated testing
to make sure that various operations are working as intended.

(Very prelim code in cvs: importUseModWiki.php, importTests.php in the
maintenance subdir.)

We would probably benefit from a unit test suite that could
automatically test the various pieces of the wiki code more or less in
isolation. (Though we have a lot of globals, funky dependencies, and
mixing together of backend and interface code which makes testing rather
harder... we should clean this stuff up anyway!)

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?UnitTesting
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PhpUnit
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?UnitTestsAndDatabases

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20030216/45a56868/attachment.pgp>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Old bug with URLs and ) character still present

body:
On dim, 2003-02-16 at 04:26, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> Please change regular expressions used to match URLs so
> that final `)' isn't matched.

The trouble with ) is of course that various pages on Wikipedia (and
perhaps elsewhere) _do_ end with a close-paren. However, unless there is
an open-paren in the URL, we can likely ignore it. It should be possible
to come up with a fun regexp for that. :)

> Probably some other characters should be disallowed too,
> like comma and dot.

OutputPage::subReplaceExternalLinks():
# this is  the list of separators that should be ignored if they
# are the last character of an URL but that should be included
# if they occur within the URL, e.g. "go to www.foo.com, where .."
# in this case, the last comma should not become part of the URL,
# but in "www.foo.com/123,2342,32.htm" it should.
$sep = ",;\.:";

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20030216/02eefcb4/attachment.pgp>


body:
On dim, 2003-02-16 at 04:38, Erik Moeller wrote:
> > Does *anyone* remember what happened when I introduced that category
> > link thingy (in Phase 2, IIRC)? I vaguely remember an outcry on
> > wikipedia-l...
>
> Nope. Got any links?

(google google)
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-January/thread.html#1046

> As for Brion's remark that non-existent pages would not be listed on a
> category page, every category page would have an editable and an
> autogenerated part; in the editable part it would be possible to add a
> "list of pages that need to be written" for every category. Such a clear
> visual separation might actually make sense and encourage people more to
> write missing articles.

Visual separation is one thing, but functional separation is what I'm
hoping to avoid. :)  Automatically categorizing new articles under
category(ies) whose pages link them might do it.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20030216/bb5d6ceb/attachment.pgp>


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

in_reply_to:
<8fxQ4USCpVB@erik_moeller> (erik_moeller@gmx.de's message of
 "16 Feb 2003 00:35:00 +0100")

body:
erik_moeller at gmx.de (Erik Moeller) writes:

> The Sep.11 Wikipedia (http://sep11.wikipedia.org) currently has 12
> pages.

Please, do not (mis)use the the wikipedia.org domain for those special
purposes; those subdomains defeat the overall idea.

I wouldn't mind somehting like wiki.sep11.org, though...

--
ke at suse.de (work) / keichwa at gmx.net (home):              |
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |      ,__o
Free Translation Project:                                |    _-\_<,
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/             |   (*)/'(*)


from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] The MIT vandal is back

body:
Note: forwarded message attached.

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day
http://shopping.yahoo.com
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded message was scrubbed...
From: Anthere <anthere6 at yahoo.com>
Subject: [WikiEN-l] The MIT vandal is back

Date: Sun, 16 Feb 2003 06:49:35 -0800 (PST)
Size: 2128
Url: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20030216/57dc29e0/attachment.eml


from_name: Richard Grevers

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: SERIOUS HELP NEEDED NOW!

body:
On Sat, 8 Feb 2003 14:36:20 +0100, Pedro M.V.
<macv=5S5SrBBoGx2H0oMTQjrRWA at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> What about don?t allow a user utilize more than one  IP ??. And create an
> IP control review tool ??.
>

Not possible - that's not the way IP addresses work.

If I am on dial-up, every time I connect I am assigned a different IP from
the pool of IP's owned by my ISP. My ISP has about 200,000 customers, so
it's likely they have a block of around 64,000 IP addresses.
In actual fact, I'm on DSL. My router "leases" an IP by the hour. It
usually gets the same one back, but if it disconnects, (which it sometimes
does if I answer the phone) it usually reconnects to a different IP
address.

For the same reason you cannot block an IP address to stop a vandal who is
not logged in. And banning an ISP's entire IP block prevents their entire
customer pase from contributing to Wikipedia.

--
Richard Grevers


from_name: Jimmy Wales

in_reply_to: <sh3cmoamq1.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>; from ke@gnu.franken.de on Sun, Feb 16, 2003 at 05:11:34AM +0100

body:
Karl Eichwalder wrote:
> Please, do not (mis)use the the wikipedia.org domain for those special
> purposes; those subdomains defeat the overall idea.
>
> I wouldn't mind somehting like wiki.sep11.org, though...

I tend to agree.  Having encyclopedic pages is important.  Having
tribute pages is important and valid... but not necessarily for
wikipedia per se.  I'd be happy to acquire and host another domain
specifically for this.

In the meantime, having some of this stuff on sep11.wikipedia.org is
fine for the short run -- that is, I feel no urgency about moving it
-- but it's pretty clear to me that a proper memorial site _need not
be NPOV_, and that therefore probably shouldn't be on a wikipedia
domain.

--Jimbo


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Moving Polish Wikipedia
	to www.wikipedia.pl / Przejscie na www.wikipedia.pl

body:
On dim, 2003-02-16 at 08:35, Giskart wrote:
> Karl Eichwalder <ke=hk2eryHRqo3U+lsBXctR8g at public.gmane.org> wrote in
> news:sh4r748b5a.fsf at tux.gnu.franken.de:
> > I'm wondering how Google's filter actually works?  If you are right
> > this would be an argument.
>
> There is no reasen to use a country ccTLD for the real domain of a
> wikipedia for a search engine to find it. The find also redirects or "pick
> your language-pages".

Google is not the only search engine in the world, and while it may do
the right thing that doesn't say anything about the actual capabilities
of other sites. However, I would like to see some actual examples of
domain-filtering search engines.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/attachments/20030216/88019660/attachment.pgp


subject: [Wikitech-l] Moving Polish Wikipedia to www.wikipedia.pl / Przejscie na www.wikipedia.pl

body:
[pl]
Takie przejscie wymaga:
1. konsensusu (czy ktos zglasza sprzeciw ?)
2. operacji na ustawieniach skryptu Wikipedii PL
3. odwrocenia kolejnosci przekierowan w DNSie
    z www.wikipedia.pl->pl.wikipedia.org na pl.wikipedia.org->www.wikipedia.pl

Kto administruje tymi nazwami ?
Czy te osoby moglyby ustalic jak wykonac punkt 3-ci ?

[en]
We need:
1. concensus (is anybody against ?)
2. changing settings of Wikipedia script
3. reversing DNS redirects from
    www.wikipedia.pl->pl.wikipedia.org to pl.wikipedia.org->www.wikipedia.pl

Who aministrates both names ?
Could they please agree how to do the 3rd part ?


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
Does *anyone* remember what happened when I introduced that category
link thingy (in Phase 2, IIRC)? I vaguely remember an outcry on
wikipedia-l...

I think it would be more reasonable to
1. Expand the Phase 3 software to be used at the sifter project (meaning
improved user rights management, new skin, and a special import page,
basically). I'll start on that soon at the test site.
2. Set up sifter project (my preference would be on the wikipedia server ;-)
3. Implement a category scheme there. It would use drop-down boxes or
the like rather than text edits since, well, noone can edit a sifter page...
(4. If a wikipedia majority likes it, we can use it on wikipedia as well...)

Magnus


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [WikiEN-l] Album listings

body:
On Sat, Feb 15, 2003 at 07:43:00PM +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
> > What do we think about all these pages about music albums, which give
> > just a track listing and nothing else?
>
> > Some recent additions don't even bother to give the artist:
> > eg [[Hell On Earth]]
>
> Generally, we should expand, not delete. But if this turns out to be too
> difficult, put it on Votes for Deletion.
>
> I would have no objections to importing the FreeDB data, which includes
> artist/album information.

We could also link to them, something like [[cddb:misc:8c08f90a Bochum]]
could be made a link in the text pointing to
http://www.freedb.org/freedb_search_fmt.php?cat=misc&id=8c08f90a

Best regards,

	JeLuF


body:
On Sun, Feb 16, 2003 at 02:42:17AM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On dim, 2003-02-16 at 02:09, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> > [en]
> > We need:
> > 1. concensus (is anybody against ?)
>
> I think in general using country codes is going to cause more confusion
> when linking using language codes, which are *not* always the same. But
> if you guys really want it sitting at that location, I at least see no
> reason to stop you.

Eveyone expects Polish website names to end in .pl and
Polish search engines don't like anything that doesn't.

At least in this case the code is the same.

> > 3. reversing DNS redirects from
> >     www.wikipedia.pl->pl.wikipedia.org to pl.wikipedia.org->www.wikipedia.pl
> >
> > Who aministrates both names ?
> > Could they please agree how to do the 3rd part ?
>
> www.wikipedia.pl is a DNS-level pointer to pl.wikipedia.org. No
> additional changes to domain configuration have to be made, it'll
> continue to point to the right place. I would just have to switch the
> apache configuration on the web server to prefer one over the other.
>
> (But if wikipedia.pl is to be the official home, make sure you know who
> owns the domain!)

Kpjas owns www.wikipedia.org name.


from_name: Tucci

subject: [WikiEN-l] empty album pages, years in MTV and KROQ, Baha Men...

body:
I just banned an anonymous user who had created many
of the track-listing only album pages, future-releases
on 2003 in music, plus list of years in KROQ, a
fact-free article on the Baha Men and, most recently,
list of years in MTV and related pages.  See User
talk:64.175.250.205 for the sordid details of the MTV
stuff, which was what made me finally do it.

I hesitated because he has entered true and relevant
information, it just takes me three times as long to
fix it than it took him to write it.  Plus, the Baha
Men thing scared me, because I would never have
bothered to check the facts if somebody hadn't pointed
out that the article said they formed in 1987 and 1988
-- a quick trip to allmusic shows they released their
debut in 1979, and that many of the other facts were
simply wrong as well.

Maybe the ban should be lifted in a day or two, as he
has at least discovered talk pages.  Anyway, I just
wanted to make a note here on the mailing list since
I'm normally opposed to banning users who have made
valuable edits in the past.

Tokerboy

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day
http://shopping.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Miser mode lifted

body:
Since performance is generally up again and some people are itching to
use the special pages (Most Wanted etc), I've gone ahead and re-enabled
them during off-peak hours and weekends.

Please be gentle with them though; these functions still haven't been
optimized and can slow things down. If it's problematic, they'll be
disabled again until they're rewritten.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20030216/c6879683/attachment.pgp


subject: [Wikitech-l] patch for CURMONTHNAMEGEN

body:
Tested on local instalation.

Please apply it to Polish Wikipedia as soon as possible
(and to others, it doesn't really affect them).
-------------- next part --------------
diff -ru newcodebase.orig/Language.php newcodebase/Language.php
--- newcodebase.orig/Language.php	2003-02-05 13:44:28.000000000 +0100
+++ newcodebase/Language.php	2003-02-16 13:01:44.000000000 +0100
@@ -1110,6 +1110,13 @@
 		return $wgMonthNamesEn[$key-1];
 	}

+	/* by default we just return base form */
+	function getMonthNameGen( $key )
+	{
+		global $wgMonthNamesEn;
+		return $wgMonthNamesEn[$key-1];
+	}
+
 	function getMonthAbbreviation( $key )
 	{
 		global $wgMonthAbbreviationsEn;
diff -ru newcodebase.orig/LanguagePl.php newcodebase/LanguagePl.php
--- newcodebase.orig/LanguagePl.php	2003-02-13 08:23:40.000000000 +0100
+++ newcodebase/LanguagePl.php	2003-02-16 13:06:33.000000000 +0100
@@ -217,6 +217,12 @@
 	"grudzie??"
 );

+/* private */ $wgMonthNamesGenPl = array(
+	"stycznia", "lutego", "marca", "kwietna", "maja", "czerwca",
+	"lipca", "sierpnia", "wrze??nia", "pa??dziernika", "listopada",
+	"grudnia"
+);
+
 /* private */ $wgMonthAbbreviationsPl = array(
 	"sty", "lut", "mar", "kwi", "maj", "cze", "lip", "sie",
 	"wrz", "pa??", "lis", "gru"
@@ -1110,6 +1116,12 @@
 		return $wgMonthNamesPl[$key-1];
 	}

+	function getMonthNameGen( $key )
+	{
+		global $wgMonthNamesGenPl;
+		return $wgMonthNamesGenPl[$key-1];
+	}
+
 	function getMonthAbbreviation( $key )
 	{
 		global $wgMonthAbbreviationsPl;
@@ -1136,7 +1148,7 @@
 		  (int)substr( $ts, 0, 4 ) );
 		return date( "YmdHis", $t );
 	}
-
+
 	function date( $ts, $adj = false )
 	{
 		if ( $adj ) { $ts = $this->userAdjust( $ts ); }
diff -ru newcodebase.orig/OutputPage.php newcodebase/OutputPage.php
--- newcodebase.orig/OutputPage.php	2003-02-12 21:02:56.000000000 +0100
+++ newcodebase/OutputPage.php	2003-02-16 13:00:35.000000000 +0100
@@ -1017,6 +1017,8 @@
 		$text = str_replace( "{{CURRENTMONTH}}", $v, $text );
 		$v = $wgLang->getMonthName( date( "n" ) );
 		$text = str_replace( "{{CURRENTMONTHNAME}}", $v, $text );
+		$v = $wgLang->getMonthNameGen( date( "n" ) );
+		$text = str_replace( "{{CURRENTMONTHNAMEGEN}}", $v, $text );
 		$v = date( "j" );
 		$text = str_replace( "{{CURRENTDAY}}", $v, $text );
 		$v = $wgLang->getWeekdayName( date( "w" )+1 );


body:
Please change regular expressions used to match URLs so
that final `)' isn't matched.

Probably some other characters should be disallowed too,
like comma and dot.


body:
> Does *anyone* remember what happened when I introduced that category
> link thingy (in Phase 2, IIRC)? I vaguely remember an outcry on
> wikipedia-l...

Nope. Got any links?
I don't care too much about sifter (I think it's a good idea, but the
outcome depends on the people involved), and I think a basic category
scheme is useful for Wikipedia proper. Note that first and foremost I want
to use it to fix the typically outdated "pages needing attention" pages.
Advanced stuff like filtering RC by category is nice, but not immediately
needed.

As for Brion's remark that non-existent pages would not be listed on a
category page, every category page would have an editable and an
autogenerated part; in the editable part it would be possible to add a
"list of pages that need to be written" for every category. Such a clear
visual separation might actually make sense and encourage people more to
write missing articles.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Zoe

subject: [WikiEN-l] The MIT vandal is back

body:
Anthere, you're a woman, aren't you?  Are you trying to claim that my fight on this subject is somehow gender-based?
Zoe
 Anthere <anthere6 at yahoo.com> wrote:
Note: forwarded message attached.

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day
http://shopping.yahoo.com > ATTACHMENT part 2 message/rfc822 Date: Sun, 16 Feb 2003 06:49:35 -0800 (PST)
From: Anthere
Subject: [WikiEN-l] The MIT vandal is back

To: wikien-l at wikipedia.com

On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 12:32:27PM -0800, Zoe wrote:
>> It's the exact same wording as the text inserted
by the MIT >>vandal. I asked the person inserting it
to give us some >>information to prove the assertion,
and I asked if it was true >>for the entire world, or
only certain cultures. The person >>declined to do
so.

>The information is not misogynistic, it is true.
Labelling >this person a vandal does a disservice to
the Wikipedia. The >traditional treatment in the West
for hysteria was for the >doctor to massage a womans
genitals by hand until she got some >relief. The most
extreme forms of hysteria are not seen very >much in
modern times; some attribute this to a greater
interest >in giving sexual satisfaction to women. The
milder forms of
>hysteria still abound; if males have a propensity for
hysteria, >it is socialized out of them at a very
young age.

>Jonathan

Interesting comment Jonathan

Made me think of what Clement Rosset says about
passion and hysteria...

He usually approaches notions by paradox, and studied
fallacious causes of suffering, in particular the
generally accepted idea by which love is the main
passion. He says love becomes a passion only when it
ceases aiming at a real person, but rather toward an
person or an object absent or unreal. Becoming a
passion makes it cease being love. Passion would be
the stuborn research of misfortune (or unhappiness),
and as such be related to hysteria.

It's interesting Zoe is fighting so much against the
addition ''more women than men suffer from
[[hysteria]]''...There's no article on hysteria on
wikipedia by the way.

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day
http://shopping.yahoo.com

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20030216/80cc030b/attachment.htm


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Ancient changes page (AC)

body:
Ooh.  This is a very good idea.
Zoe
 "Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz" <kpj at gower.pl> wrote:Hello all,

Perusing Wikipedia articles I see more and more of them have not
been updated (reviewed) for a long time. It is quite obvious
with 100000+ articles.

Suppose I wanted to watch out and review indecently old articles.
Perhaps the Ancient Changes list/page (the equivalent of Recent Changes)
might come in handy.

Regards,
Kpjas.
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/attachments/20030216/a64749f8/attachment.htm


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [WikiEN-l] Miser mode lifted

body:
On dim, 2003-02-16 at 12:54, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Since performance is generally up again and some people are itching to
> use the special pages (Most Wanted etc), I've gone ahead and re-enabled
> them during off-peak hours and weekends.
>
> Please be gentle with them though; these functions still haven't been
> optimized and can slow things down. If it's problematic, they'll be
> disabled again until they're rewritten.

Server load with miser mode off:
 10:48pm  up 12 days, 15:07,  2 users,  load average: 15.51, 11.79, 9.73
                                                      ^^^^^!
Server load with miser mode back on:
 10:57pm  up 12 days, 15:15,  2 users,  load average: 2.71, 6.47, 8.31
                                                      ^^^^

The heavy special pages are again disabled until further notice.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20030216/6e1c629e/attachment.pgp


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Ancient changes page (AC)

body:
On dim, 2003-02-16 at 14:46, Zoe wrote:
> Ooh.  This is a very good idea.

Well, start with pages that haven't been touched since conversion from
the old software a year ago:
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&limit=50&offset=215&target=Conversion+script

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] SQL query interface is not very convenient

body:
In case of syntax error one shouldn't have to press Back (and cause
previous query to be resubmitted).

There should be textarea with contents of submitted query
and a Submit button also in case of submitting wrong query.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Tom Parmenter wrote:

>Lists are less useful in a print encyclopedia, but invaluable in an
>online encyclopedia, particularly if they are not just names, but
>names annotated with some kind of one-liner identifying the name.
>
That's about the way I feel.  The other thing that would help would be
some browse function that would allow us to see a list of articles in a
particular part of the alphabet.  We do have a special page to see
articles by title but that's useless when you need to start from the top
of the list and scroll through over 100,000 titles.   Even the article
[[A]] is currently number 5430 on that list.

Eclecticology


body:
On dim, 2003-02-16 at 15:52, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> The other thing that would help would be
> some browse function that would allow us to see a list of articles in a
> particular part of the alphabet.  We do have a special page to see
> articles by title but that's useless when you need to start from the top
> of the list and scroll through over 100,000 titles.

Yeah, it's kinda ugly.  How about something like the alphabetical index
for the online AHD: http://www.bartleby.com/61/s0.html ?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20030216/43f6194c/attachment.pgp


subject: [Wikitech-l] Alphabetical sorting

body:
An item that's been burning on my bug fix todo list for some time is
sort order.

Alphabetical ordering is used in the user account list and the 'all
pages' list (rarely used, but people like that kind of index and an
improved version should be made -- which makes correct ordering more
important), and maybe here and there elsewhere. Sort orders can vary
from language to language, and of course we have a mix of latin1 and
utf-8...

MySQL does support selectable modules for sort order -- but only on a
server-wide basis. This would not handle our multiple language issues at
all even if we switch everyone to utf-8; there is no 'universal' sort
order that will work right for every language.

One possibility is to pull another ugly hack: add a canonical-sort-key
field and have a per-language function to munge strings into something
that will sort correctly in a traditional ascii-order sort.

Better suggestions are welcome.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20030216/340c38b8/attachment.pgp>


from_name: Giskart

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Moving Polish Wikipedia to www.wikipedia.pl / Przejscie na www.wikipedia.pl

body:
Karl Eichwalder <ke=hk2eryHRqo3U+lsBXctR8g at public.gmane.org> wrote in
news:sh4r748b5a.fsf at tux.gnu.franken.de:
> I'm wondering how Google's filter actually works?  If you are right
> this would be an argument.

There is no reasen to use a country ccTLD for the real domain of a
wikipedia for a search engine to find it. The find also redirects or "pick
your language-pages".

www.google.com -> "wikipedia" = www.wikipedia.org

www.google.be  -> (option "search only pages from Belgium") "wikipedia" =
www.wikipedia.be (*.wikipedia.org not found)

www.google.nl  -> (option "serach only dutch pages") "wikipedia" =
 nl.wikipedia.org (nr 3 = www.wikipedia.nl)

www.google.pl  -> (option "serach only pages from Poland") "wikipedia" =
pl.wikipedia.org (nr 3 = www.wikipedia.pl)

--
Contact: giskart AT wikipedia.be


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Moving Polish Wikipedia to
 www.wikipedia.pl / Przejscie na www.wikipedia.pl

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

> * .org is exotic and unfamiliar to many potential users; a country
> domain is more familiar and comfortable (and recognizable as a web
> address!) and will have more local flavor.

"Local flavor" I'd rate as a bad thing.  Writing in the Wikipedia about
local issues is good, but alway try writing with international readers
using a special language in mind.  That's why .org is a very good top
level domain name.

> * Some search engines limit to the local country's top-level domain
> (possibly meant as a crude language filter;

I'm wondering how Google's filter actually works?  If you are right
this would be an argument.

--
ke at suse.de (work) / keichwa at gmx.net (home):              |
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |      ,__o
Free Translation Project:                                |    _-\_<,
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/             |   (*)/'(*)


subject: [WikiEN-l] trying hard to do a list right

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

>On dim, 2003-02-16 at 15:52, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>>The other thing that would help would be
>>some browse function that would allow us to see a list of articles in a
>>particular part of the alphabet.  We do have a special page to see
>>articles by title but that's useless when you need to start from the top
>>of the list and scroll through over 100,000 titles.
>>
>
>Yeah, it's kinda ugly.  How about something like the alphabetical index
>for the online AHD: http://www.bartleby.com/61/s0.html ?
>
That would be a definite improvement over what we don't have now!

Eclecticology


from_name: Youandme

subject: [Wikitech-l] $mlink

body:
While reinstaling Wikipedia on my system
I've encountered a small problem with the scope of $mlink variable
(causing error messages across recentchanges page)
I guess that it is obsolete since it was used to hide minor changes
on Recentchanges and Recentchangeslinked pages.

I suggest commenting out (if not removing) line 155 from SpecialRecentchanges.php
	$note = str_replace( "$3", $mlink, $note );
The value of $mlink was set by another functions and passed "illegaly"
$3 corresponded here to the third argument of extinct version of 'rclinks' text.

Seems that this solution works for me for the time being.

Alternative: passing $mlink as an argument of rcDayLimitLinks function
(tested with success as well, should I send a patch for that solution?)

Youandme


subject: [WikiEN-l] The MIT vandal is back

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> Most of what these people write is nonsense
>>or offensive, and is justifiably deleted.  If, however, in some rare
>>instance our same vandal happened to write something meaningful and
>>useful, there is no reason why that particular bit of writing should be
>>deleted out of spite. Each contribution should be judged on its own merits
>>
>
>I disagree in most cases.  There must be flexibility, of course.
>However, it is not *just* pointless and stupid for us to look at every
>edit of the MIT vandal and study whether it is NPOV or not.  It's
>actually worse than that.
>
>If we start treating him as "semi-banned", then he has strong
>encouragement to keep coming back.  He knows that if he can write
>something semi-plausible, he can trick us into debating it, discussing
>it, and so forth.  That's a big mistake.
>
>The best way to get rid of a vandal is to simply erase everything he
>does immediately.
>
>In the real world, the most effective anti-grafitti campaigns involve
>simply cleaning it up as fast as possible.  It would only encourage it
>to convene artistic committees to study the artistic quality of each
>one to determine if it's an improvement.
>
This is really just a difference in perspective.  Whereas I was
approaching this from the perspective of the article, it appears that
you are appraoching it from the perspective of the contributing vandal.
 Of course it's ridiculous to try to imagine someone as "semi-banned".
 Once he's banned, that's it.  It's pointless to speculate about what he
might have done if he were allowed to continue.

If the comment that women are more prone to anorexia were added to an
article where it at least has a modicum of relevance, a person watching
this article who otherwise might not have crossed paths with our vandal
could easily see the unexplained removal of that comment as being itself
vandalism.

Eclecticology


from_name: Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz

subject: [Wikipedia-l] (Harmless) bug in a series of articles

body:
Hello all,

There is a harmless bug in a succession of articles incorporating
tables with Scientific classification ([[Human]], [[Carnivore]],
[[Gorilla]] etc)

s/cellpading/cellpadding/

It doesn't impair the layout of the tables.

Regards,
Kpjas.


subject: [Wikitech-l] (Harmless) bug in a series of articles


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Ancient changes page (AC)

body:
Hello all,

Perusing Wikipedia articles I see more and more of them have not
been updated (reviewed) for a long time. It is quite obvious
with 100000+ articles.

Suppose I wanted to watch out and review indecently old articles.
Perhaps the Ancient Changes list/page (the equivalent of Recent Changes)
might come in handy.

Regards,
Kpjas.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Ancient changes page (AC)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Categories

body:
OK, if we're going to have categories (which I'm basically all in favor
of), I'd like to point out that IMHO it should be a separate table in
the database for these, at least for the links. Look at the mess we
(I;-) made with the language links.

I imagine the following tables
# "categories" : cat_name, cat_id
# "cat_structure" : cat_parent_id, cat_child_id
# "art_in_cat" : article_id, category_id

That means we can have, for example, "Biochemistry" as child of both
"Chemistry" and "Biology", as it should be. That would require several
SQL queries, though, in order to display something like
"Science/Biology/Biochemistry/Proteomics". The alternative would be
# "cat_structure" : category_id, category_full_parent_name
and the parse the category_full_parent_name (e.g.
"Science/Biology/Biochemistry") for "/" in order to display something like

"[[category:science|Science]]/[[category:biology|Biology]]/[[category:Biochemistry|Biochemistry]]/[[category:Proteomics|Proteomics]]"

which will be a lot fater, but probably harder to maintain.

In any case, a Special Page should be used to manage both categories
itself and the articles that belong into them.

*If* we won't have separate tables (for whatever reason), I suggest we
do it like this:
# There's an (editable) category namespace; maybe we won't have to make
it "special" at all, though; I am talking more about an agreement on
that prefix rather than yet another namespace
# On saving an edit to [[category:crap]], all articles linked from there
get "[[category:crap]]" appended to their text, and the appropriate link
set in the linked table.
# On saving an article containing "[[category:crap]]", this article is
appended to the list on that page, if it is not there already.
# All these "edits" could show up on Recent Changes, commited by
"system" or something.

I agree it looks a little patchy (because we don't use a new table!),
but it will be much faster to look up the "what categories does this
page belong to" when displaying it. It will also reduce the display of
the category page to a normal article display.

Magnus


subject: [Wikitech-l] $rcrows

body:
Heh, I've found out another unused(?) variable causing some
rubbish to appear on the screen, namely $rcrows on line 72
of SpecialContributions.php:
	if ( 0 == $nCur && 0 == $nOld && 0 == $rcrows ) {
And this is the only place in the _whole_ code where
this variable appears.
Is the code in CVS up to date?

Regards
Youandme
P.S. I'm using PHP 4.3.0
Is it a killer to all the bugs? :-)


from_name: Tom Parmenter

subject: [WikiEN-l] The MIT vandal is back

body:
Reply way down at the bottom.

|From: Anthere <anthere6 at yahoo.com>
|Date: Sun, 16 Feb 2003 06:53:20 -0800 (PST)
|
|Note: forwarded message attached.
|
|
|__________________________________________________
|
|Date: Sun, 16 Feb 2003 06:49:35 -0800 (PST)
|From: Anthere <anthere6 at yahoo.com>
|Subject: [WikiEN-l] The MIT vandal is back
|
|To: wikien-l at wikipedia.com
|
|On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 12:32:27PM -0800, Zoe wrote:
|>>   It's the exact same wording as the text inserted
|by the MIT >>vandal.  I asked the person inserting it
|to give us some >>information to prove the assertion,
|and I asked if it was true >>for the entire world, or
|only certain cultures.  The person >>declined to do
|so.
|
|>The information is not misogynistic, it is true.
|Labelling >this person a vandal does a disservice to
|the Wikipedia.  The >traditional treatment in the West
|for hysteria was for the >doctor to massage a womans
|genitals by hand until she got some >relief.  The most
|extreme forms of hysteria are not seen very >much in
|modern times; some attribute this to a greater
|interest >in giving sexual satisfaction to women.  The
|milder forms of
|>hysteria still abound; if males have a propensity for
|hysteria, >it is socialized out of them at a very
|young age.
|
|>Jonathan
|
|Interesting comment Jonathan
|
|Made me think of what Clement Rosset says about
|passion and hysteria...
|
|He usually approaches notions by paradox, and studied
|fallacious causes of suffering, in particular the
|generally accepted idea by which love is the main
|passion. He says love becomes a passion only when it
|ceases aiming at a real person, but rather toward an
|person or an object absent or unreal. Becoming a
|passion makes it cease being love. Passion would be
|the stuborn research of misfortune (or unhappiness),
|and as such be related to hysteria.
|
|It's interesting Zoe is fighting so much against the
|addition ''more women than men suffer from
|[[hysteria]]''...There's no article on hysteria on
|wikipedia by the way.
|

If we had an article on hysteria it would be described as a
discredited 19th century diagnosis closely tied to the sexual
repression of women that nonetheless was a major stimulus to Sigmund
Freud's thinking.  No one is diagnosed as hysterical today and much of
Freud's thinking is regarded as historically important but
non-scientific at this point.

It's interesting that when people want to slip in something dubious,
they start with the phrase "It's interesting . . . "  If you want to
state that someone is being hysterical here, say so and take the
consequences.

The other disputed diagnoses, histrionic personality disorder, etc.,
are more common among women (in the west), just as antisocial
personality disorder is more common among men, but the diagnosis of
hysteria is simply not given to either men or women.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88


from_name: Jesse Alter

subject: [WikiEN-l] Suicide note: appropriate response

body:
Sure, there was a delay before an action was made, but I think that the
action was fairly swift. The extreme opposite is the case of [[Brandon
Vedas]] whose suicide was encouraged. I agree with what has already been
said: that the IP addresses of posters should be available to sysops,
and that if someone's life ever appears to be in danger, an effort
should be taken to contact the police as near to the endangered as
possible, as soon as possible.

Consider this a success. Someone's life was in danger, and action was
taken quickly enough that they could receive local attention to protect
their life.


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Categories

body:
On Sun, Feb 16, 2003 at 06:12:05PM +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
> OK, if we're going to have categories (which I'm basically all in favor
> of), I'd like to point out that IMHO it should be a separate table in
> the database for these, at least for the links. Look at the mess we
> (I;-) made with the language links.
>
> I imagine the following tables
> # "categories" : cat_name, cat_id
> # "cat_structure" : cat_parent_id, cat_child_id
> # "art_in_cat" : article_id, category_id

I don't think such categorization would do any good.
It's too ambiguous.

I'm rather for categorizing what thing is,
not what area of knowledge it is from:
    Person
    Event
    Software
    Book
    Year
    Day of year
    Math theorem
    Math structure
    ...
(planetMath also uses such categorization iirc)


from_name: s

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bandwidth and anon ips

body:
Would it make sense, as I've been experiencing bandwidth limitations, on
occasion, (assuming the problem may be general) to limit, by some ratio, the
server request speed to anon users, and thereby allowing logged in users
some degree of greater access?

-Stevertigo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Categories

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>I don't think such categorization would do any good.
>It's too ambiguous.
>
>I'm rather for categorizing what thing is,
>not what area of knowledge it is from:
>    Person
>    Event
>    Software
>    Book
>    Year
>    Day of year
>    Math theorem
>    Math structure
>    ...
>
>
OK, but both can be done:
/Humanity/People (=Person) {could also be /History/People, but
*simultaniously* /Science/Scientist, /Arts/Music/Musician, ...)
/History/Event
/Science/Computer Science/Software
...

all with [[category:event]] automagically using /History/Event


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Asimov-still POV

body:
In this case the word best was used by a specific group, the Science Fiction
Writers of America at a specific time, 1968. Thus stated, the possibility of
other groups making a selection of the best at another time is implied.
Never the less, in this particular matter, for the classic period, a state
of truth as opposed to opinion is approached.

Fred

> From: Richard Grevers <dramatic at xtra.co.nz>
> Organization: Dramatic Design
> Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2003 09:50:49 +1300
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Asimov-still POV
>
> On Wed, 12 Feb 2003 17:30:46 -0800 (PST), Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons]
> <lapollutionestsimauvaise=/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> Is not, "Bewildering Stories, issue 8" enough? Do we need to say, "Not
>> only does Bewildering Stories issue 8 argue that Nightfall is ONE of the
>> greatest, but be assured, by wikipedia and our ardent NPOV, that
>> Nightfall is considered by many to actually be THE greatest science
>> fiction short story EVER.
>>
> The words "ever" and "never" are absolutes and should have no place in
> Wikipedia except in a direct quotoation. After all, best ever also implies
> that no better story will be written in the future, somthing that we simply
> do not know.
> This hyperbole is commonly repeated, however, particularly at the closing
> ceremonies of the Olympic Games :-(
> "Best yet" and "best to date" are possible alternatives, although once
> again "best" is to subjective to use without a particular reference.
> --
> Richard Grevers
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Sheldon Rampton

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: A very simple category proposal

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Thoughts? Objections? I consider implementing this myself if nobody cares
>enough to do it.

I think there are some problems with the idea of creating a separate
category namespace.

(1) It creates an ambiguation problem. For example, should an article
about "events in U.S. history" appear in the main Wikipedia namespace
or in the the "category" namespace?

(2) It could fragment the Wikipedia. All of the other namespaces --
Talk, User, Wikipedia, etc. -- serve some sort of "meta" function
with respect to the actual "encyclopedia" part of Wikipedia, so it
makes sense to compartmentalize them in a separate namespace. This
isn't the case with "category" articles, which are themselves part of
the encyclopedia.

(3)

In addition to these problems, creating a category namespace only
provides limited utility. Thinking ahead a bit, I think something
more flexible and powerful would better serve the project as it grows
and matures. Rather than simply creating a category namespace, I
think it would be better to develop a system of object typing like
the one I described awhile ago. The Wiki syntax could be expanded to
include ways of marking object types and properties, which could then
be used in turn to support data mining. For example, if we had a way
of marking certain articles as "people" objects with properties such
as first name, last name, date of birth, etc., the software could
autogenerate lists of people sorted either alphabetically or by date
of birth. Also, the autogenerated lists could include selected
properties extracted from each of the articles in the list. Here's
some pseudocode to give an idea of how someone might generate a list
of U.S. presidents:

<LIST ORDER=year of inauguration>*'''[U.S. President->name]''', [U.S.
President->year of inauguration], [U.S. President->party affiliation]
</LIST>

The idea is that this would expand to the equivalent of:

*'''James Earl Carter''', 1976, Democrat
*'''Ronald Wilson Reagan''', 1980, Republican
*'''George Herbert Walker Bush''', 1988, Republican
*'''William Jefferson Clinton''', 1992, Democrat
*'''George W. Bush''', 2000, Republican

This sort of thing could be coded into Wikipedia with an object
model, but I don't see how creating a category namespace would make
it possible.
--
--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
--------------------------------


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: A suicide note on the Wikipedia?????

body:
On Saturday 15 February 2003 01:34 pm, wikien-l-request at wikipedia.org wrote:
> I agree with Daniel on this one.  We should have acted faster.  As for
> me, when I saw it, it was already a few hours old and I assumed that
> something had been done, or it was too late.  In retrospect, I would
> have acted differently.
>
> So, what's the proper course of action in a case like this?  I mean,
> who should one call?  The police in that town?
>
> --Jimbo

Well in this case we did exactly the right thing but about two hours later
than we should have. Like I said before, when we see something that looks
like a suicide letter it is our moral obligation to track down the IP and
inform the local authorities - we shouldn't waste much time at all debating
whether or not the thing is legit (finding that out is the job of the cops).

Everying crystallized once I asked if somebody had called the cops. So asking
this question on the relevant talk page and then having a volunteer call the
correct authorities is probably the best route. I made the mistake of
emailing the school's webmaster (of all people) as my first action - which
was dumb since it was 2 AM in Connecticut at the time.

Hm. This might be one reason to forget my complex "hide the IP from sysops but
allow them to block logged-in users" idea. It might be best to simply make
this information readily available to sysops for cases like this (mouse-over
text with the IP address is all that would be needed).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
WikiKarma
Added a bunch of events to [[February 8]]; updated all the year pages and many
of the other articles linked from that page.


subject: [WikiEN-l] on why I am changing my name

body:
I am posting this to explain why I am changing my user
name from Tokerboy to TUF-KAT.  I was asked via e-mail
if, as a completely voluntary request, I would
consider changing my name.  I had already decided to
do so, of my own volition, if somebody asked.

I would be lying if I said I didn't choose this name
partially out of a desire to ruffle certain feathers.
However unjust it is, such a name will be perceived as
unprofessional by academics and reporters and other
people whom Wikipedia should want to impress with its
professionalism.  In my daily life, I do not hide the
fact that I smoke weed on a daily basis because I
regard it as my inalienable right that no law can
supersede, and because without it I have no doubt that
I would be either dead or homeless and alcoholic right
now.  I have experienced discrimination as a result; I
find this deplorable, but I am willing to accept it in
order to make those of my tastes gradually fit into
mainstream society.  I have the right to do this, to
bring discrimination upon myself, but I do not have
the right to force the same upon Ed Poor or Zoe or
Ortolan or RK or Mav or the anonymous users that
contribute to the Wikipedia, and by subjecting the
project to unfair discrimination, I am doing just
that.  The best way to accomplish my goal is to write
neutral, concise and informative articles at
[[cannabis]], [[medical marijuana]] and the [[War on
Drugs]], and, if Wikipedia is perceived as
professional, the information therein will be trusted
and the truth, that marijuana and all drugs should be
legalized, will prevail, as the truth always does.

In conclusion, I am offering a prize of 3.5 points
added to your [[Coolness Quotient]] if you can guess
why I chose TUF-KAT and I hope that this decision will
not raise a ruckus, a brouhaha nor shenanigans of any
sort.  I do this of my own volition, because it is the
right thing to do.

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day
http://shopping.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] on why I am changing my name

body:
Tucci wrote:

>I am posting this to explain why I am changing my user
>name from Tokerboy to TUF-KAT.
>
>I would be lying if I said I didn't choose this name
>partially out of a desire to ruffle certain feathers.
>However unjust it is, such a name will be perceived as
>unprofessional by academics and reporters and other
>people whom Wikipedia should want to impress with its
>professionalism.  In my daily life, I do not hide the
>fact that I smoke weed on a daily basis because I
>regard it as my inalienable right that no law can
>supersede, and because without it I have no doubt that
>I would be either dead or homeless and alcoholic right
>now.  I have experienced discrimination as a result; I
>find this deplorable, but I am willing to accept it in
>order to make those of my tastes gradually fit into
>mainstream society.  I have the right to do this, to
>bring discrimination upon myself, but I do not have
>the right to force the same upon Ed Poor or Zoe or
>Ortolan or RK or Mav or the anonymous users that
>contribute to the Wikipedia, and by subjecting the
>project to unfair discrimination, I am doing just
>that.
>
The association of the name with smoking pot has always been obvious,
but there is absolutely nothing objectionable about it.  That being
said, I don't see your usage of the name as forcing anything on anybody.
 Certainly those who engaged in this discrimination without the courage
to appear publicly should be reprimanded.  Score one for the dinosaurs.


subject:
Alphabetical article index  (was [WikiEN-l] trying hard to do a
	list right)

body:
(Moved from wikien-l to wikipedia-l; discussion of revamped alphabetical
page index affects all languages.)

On dim, 2003-02-16 at 17:17, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
> >How about something like the alphabetical index
> >for the online AHD: http://www.bartleby.com/61/s0.html ?
> >
> That would be a definite improvement over what we don't have now!

Okay, very preliminary version (code is in CVS):
  http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Allpages

Note that the test wiki contains nearly all pages starting with 'A', so
the index seems a little oddly weighted. ;)

There's probably some wiggle room in the ideal number of links per page
and whatnot. It needs to be made prettier, with backlinks to the top
level index and forward/back browsing, but the basic functionality is
there.

Also we need to get a proper sorting system in (see my recent post on
wikitech-l); for instance if I put this on the Esperanto wiki all the
accented letters pile up at the end instead of in their proper places:
  http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciala:Allpages

Other things: currently the list includes redirects. Some redirects
should definitely stay -- alternate names that would not appear near
each other, for instance. Others (spelling, caps variations) could maybe
be dropped, but that's harder to do consistently. Or more simply, we
could just italicize redirects or something.

The generation of the top level index is currently pretty inefficient;
it makes a separate database query for each chunk of 480 articles, and
takes a while to generate on a wiki with 100,000+ articles. Before
putting it on the English wiki live, it'll need to have some sort of
caching mechanism if it can't be made a lot faster.

Here's a saved copy of the toplevel index for the big English Wikipedia
just to give an idea of scale (the links don't work):
  http://test.wikipedia.org/upload/c/cd/Allpages-demo.html

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20030217/e9438f65/attachment.pgp


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Alphabetical article index  (was [WikiEN-l] trying hard to do a
 list right)

body:
(Moved from wikien-l to wikipedia-l; discussion of revamped alphabetical
page index affects all languages.)

On dim, 2003-02-16 at 17:17, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
> >How about something like the alphabetical index
> >for the online AHD: http://www.bartleby.com/61/s0.html ?
> >
> That would be a definite improvement over what we don't have now!

Okay, very preliminary version (code is in CVS):
  http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Allpages

Note that the test wiki contains nearly all pages starting with 'A', so
the index seems a little oddly weighted. ;)

There's probably some wiggle room in the ideal number of links per page
and whatnot. It needs to be made prettier, with backlinks to the top
level index and forward/back browsing, but the basic functionality is
there.

Also we need to get a proper sorting system in (see my recent post on
wikitech-l); for instance if I put this on the Esperanto wiki all the
accented letters pile up at the end instead of in their proper places:
  http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciala:Allpages

Other things: currently the list includes redirects. Some redirects
should definitely stay -- alternate names that would not appear near
each other, for instance. Others (spelling, caps variations) could maybe
be dropped, but that's harder to do consistently. Or more simply, we
could just italicize redirects or something.

The generation of the top level index is currently pretty inefficient;
it makes a separate database query for each chunk of 480 articles, and
takes a while to generate on a wiki with 100,000+ articles. Before
putting it on the English wiki live, it'll need to have some sort of
caching mechanism if it can't be made a lot faster.

Here's a saved copy of the toplevel index for the big English Wikipedia
just to give an idea of scale (the links don't work):
  http://test.wikipedia.org/upload/c/cd/Allpages-demo.html

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/attachments/20030217/e9438f65/attachment.pgp


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Moving Polish Wikipedia to www.wikipedia.pl / Przejscie na www.wikipedia.pl

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

>On lun, 2003-02-17 at 03:30, Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
>>IIRC Jimbo was dead set against this type of move (but redirection from a
>>county domain to the .org one is fine). IMO it is bad enough already that
>>xx.wikipedia.org looks like a different domain.
>>
>>I thought we were all one big project at one domain on one server - having
>>different domains will only tend to enforce a sense of separateness.
>>
>
>Compare: http://google.com/ http://google.fr/ http://google.pl/ etc. Do
>you think they are separate organizations? The Wikipedia name is much
>more unifying and significant than the .org / .com / .pl / whatever.
>
If we are going to have a non-profit organization, would it be prudent
to spend a lot of money maintaining a long list of national domains?
 Any one of them is no big deal by itself -- but things can add up.

>The most important thing is that we're all working to create an open,
>free encyclopedia, using the GFDL license that enables us to share and
>share alike. It's really pretty frickin' irrelevant what the domain name
>is, much less the top-level domain.
>
Hmm.  This could be taken as an argument either for or against the proposal.

>Disadvantages of putting everything under wikipedia.org include:
>
>* .org is exotic and unfamiliar to many potential users; a country
>domain is more familiar and comfortable (and recognizable as a web
>address!) and will have more local flavor.
>
I personally don't like having a .net instead of a .ca address, but then
I don't seek to present myself as an international organization.  Are we
really seeking a local flavor?

>* Some search engines limit to the local country's top-level domain
>(possibly meant as a crude language filter; if 90% of your users are
>middle-aged housewives who don't speak anything but Foobarian there's
>little reason to return results outside of the .foo domain; the outside
>world is another market that bigger search engines like google have
>wrapped up), and may not index .org. Having a secondary redirect domain
>doesn't really help here, as 99% of links will be to the canonical URL,
>and a redirect may not get indexed at all.
>
If the problem that we are trying to solve has to do with searching for
Polish language sites would it not be sufficient to allow wikipedia.pl
to be an authorized mirror site for pl.wikipedia.org?

>> Also
>>what happens if the owner of the domain doesn't or can't pay the bill for it
>>or decides to yank it (not that I think Kpjas would ever do that)? If
>>something does happen then a lot of links will be broken and I thought that
>>was something that was greatly frowned upon around here.
>>
>Well, mav, what happens to Wiktionary if you were to forget to pay the
>bill for or decide to yank the plug on wiktionary.org?
>
>If the foundation happens, I like to think that the various domains
>would be donated to it. (I know you've said you'd do that for
>wiktionary.org.)
>
Some of these national domains may only be transferable to other people
who have some connection with the country.  Transfer to the foundation
may not be allowed.


subject: [WikiEN-l] FYI - sysops

body:
I accidentally nuked the sysop list on the English Wikipedia thanks to
an SQL typo; I think I've got everyone put back, but I may have missed
one or two.

So if you're a sysop and suddenly notice that you're, well, not anymore,
it's nothing personal -- just give a shout and you'll be restored.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20030217/3a1997a8/attachment.pgp