from_name: Lee Daniel Crocker

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Metadata (was basement, links, ...)

body:
> > Maybe the metadata in the basement could be written in
> > Basic-English-subset statements?
>
> Wikipedia isn't just in English, folks. An English-dependent syntax
> is *not* acceptable.

And "Basic English" is a crock anyway.

I think the metadata problem overlaps with the citation problem.
Once we have a clean way to cite a specific version of an article,
then we can use those citations as keys to the metadata.  The
metadata doesn't necessarily have to be stored on Wikipedia itself.
In fact I'm sure my time is better spent getting all our existing
features working smoothly before adding any.  But if there were
a reliable way to cite Wikipedia articles, someone else could work
on something like a GUI app for editing and using it (perhaps with
some AI to initialize a minimal set).

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: Article basement (was: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Semantic links (was:

body:
On Tuesday 25 February 2003 06:53 pm, wikipedia-l-request at wikipedia.org wrote:
> Wikipedia isn't just in English, folks. An English-dependent syntax is
> *not* acceptable.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

*cough* HTML (

...) *cough*

We should be better than that but how can you make something human readable if
it isn't written in any human language? Translating the syntax would work
except for the fact that contributors would not be able to copy and adapt
metadata from one language to another. That is, unless we allowed all
translated syntax to be in one "basement" - but then we are back to the
unreadable aspect.

--mav

WikiKarma
Added a bunch of events to [[February 19]]; updated all the year pages and
many of the other articles linked from that page.


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject:
Article basement (was: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Semantic links (was: Labelling
 links))

body:
Neil Harris wrote:
> Don't worry, Lars, I'm not daunted. I know the idea of relations in
> Wikipedia is a good one, and I'm not the only person who has suggested it.
> The problem is making the notation non-frightening.

OK, new crazy approach:
Every article has a "basement", which is just another editable text,
like the article itself. All the meta information (semantic links as an
example) goes there.
Normal people (you know, the other ones;-) will be scared of the
basement, and won't go there, even though they could. So, noone's
bothered, except for a "basement" link on each page.

Magnus


from_name: Jay Bowks

subject: Article basement (was: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Semantic links (was: Labelling links))

body:
From: "Magnus Manske" <magnus.manske at web.de>
> Neil Harris wrote:
> > Don't worry, Lars, I'm not daunted. I know the idea of relations in
> > Wikipedia is a good one, and I'm not the only person who has suggested
it.
> > The problem is making the notation non-frightening.
> OK, new crazy approach:
> Every article has a "basement", which is just another editable text,
> like the article itself. All the meta information (semantic links as an
> example) goes there.
> Normal people (you know, the other ones;-) will be scared of the
> basement, and won't go there, even though they could. So, noone's
> bothered, except for a "basement" link on each page.

Hmmm, somewhat similar to this basement
idea was the putting of the ia.wikipedia.com
articles under all caps for purely organizational
linguistic workings, getting the info just right
for the term of the name of each article which
would appear in regular form e.g. Philosophia
and PHILOSOPHIA aren't the same but
the real article has info on Philosophy and the
all caps just carried info on the different
terminology for getting the common denominator
term Philosophia, such as support in the control
langs etc. In interlingua this is quite a necessary
thing to have enough support for the term to
look like that. So the all caps entries were
pretty much a basement of sorts to keep tabs
on the terminology for the real article. The goal
is to redirect all the all caps entries once the
real articles are viable, that is have enough
support through the IED (Interlingua English
Dictionary) and others like the CEID etc.

Since,
Jay B.


list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wiktionary redirections

body:
The Cunctator wrote:
> Because I love syntactic sugar, I can't help saying that the above can be
> reduced to
>
> while(<>) { s/^(\[\[[A-Z ()]+\]\])/lc $1/e; print }

And people think I'm joking when I tell them that good Perl looks like
someone fell asleep on the keyboard ;-)


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Semantic links (was: Labelling links)

body:
Lars Aronsson wrote:

>Here is a clue: If people go silent, it is because their lives are too
>short to waste on stupid ideas that will never take off.  Instead of
>trying to convince you that the idea is dead on arrival, they want to
>spend their time on ideas they believe in.  Only your relatives or
>very close friends will try to talk you out of a stupid idea.  All
>others will find it easier just to ignore you.
>
This is an important point about people.  Most Wikipedia passengers are
payload specialists who have little understanding about how thew
Wikipedia spaceship works.  They only care that it works, not how it
works.  They are happy to keep contributing, and have a lot to
contribute as long as the techniques for contributing remain stable.
 They're not going to be too concerned when you introduce special
techniques for editing mathematical formulas.  They're perhaps
historians who see this tecnical material as not affecting them; the
mathematicians are welcome to it.

The danger is introducing variations that affect the way they do things,
and insisting that they change with it. You're not going to find these
people following the discussions on the Wikitech mailing list.  They
know that they proudly wouldn't have a clue about what's happening
there, so why should they bother.

The first that they hear of these technical changes comes when they are
implemented.  If the changes are too much for them, they're not going to
hang around arguing about something they don't understand.  They'll
simply go away quietly.

Eclecticology


from_name: Neil Harris

subject:
Article basement (was: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Semantic links (was:
 Labelling links))

body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>On 2/25/03 1:41 PM, "Magnus Manske" <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
>
>
>
>>Neil Harris wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Don't worry, Lars, I'm not daunted. I know the idea of relations in
>>>Wikipedia is a good one, and I'm not the only person who has suggested it.
>>>The problem is making the notation non-frightening.
>>>
>>>
>>OK, new crazy approach:
>>Every article has a "basement", which is just another editable text,
>>like the article itself. All the meta information (semantic links as an
>>example) goes there.
>>Normal people (you know, the other ones;-) will be scared of the
>>basement, and won't go there, even though they could. So, noone's
>>bothered, except for a "basement" link on each page.
>>
>>
>>
>Neil Harris's idea is much better. Or, the basement could exist, but it
>should be able to be automatically generated from normal information in the
>article (or from linkages between articles).
>
>Wikipedia's long-term health and strength comes from a commitment to
>simplicity and readability.
>
>
>
Maybe the metadata in the basement could be written in
Basic-English-subset statements?

--  Neil


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

>On Tue, 25 Feb 2003, Neil Harris wrote:
>
>
>>Maybe the metadata in the basement could be written in
>>Basic-English-subset statements?
>>
>>
>
>Wikipedia isn't just in English, folks. An English-dependent syntax is
>*not* acceptable.
>
>-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
>http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
>
>
>
And the French one would be in Basic-French-subset, and so on... there
would be a translation/parser file for each language, with the
corresponding patterns.

We could even do very simple machine translation between the Wikipedias
for these statements: remember, they should not be more complex than
things like "THE BLUE CUBE IS ON TOP OF THE RED BLOCK" (see [[SHRDLU]]).

See [[Wikipedia:Metalingo]] for more on this.

-- Neil


from_name: Wouter Vanden Hove

subject: [Wikitech-l] Stats on growth wikipedia

body:
Hi

I'm looking for more detailed statistics on the growth on wikipedia. But
more then a few milestones I'm not able to find.

On the mainpage of Wikepedia is it stated: "We started on January 15,
2001 and are already working on XXX articles
<http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_is_an_article> in the
English version."
with XXX the number of articles on a given date. But it would be nice to
see how that evolves over time in a single graph. [yearly, monthly ,weekly]
Is it possible to generate such graphs?

Wouter Vanden Hove


from_name: Lars Aronsson

body:
Neil Harris wrote:

> The problem is making the notation non-frightening. Here's another go at
> the problem: no notation _at all_.
> Instead, we use simple natural language parsing, or simply pattern
> matching of stock phrases, on the article contents. Mining the Wikipedia

Yes, I think this could work.  ISBN numbers work this way.  If you
have a convention of writing a book reviews, one per wiki page, then
ISBN numbers is somehting that people would just write anyway, to
provide the information and to create the bookstore link, but if each
wiki page is about a book, the ISBN can be used as metadata when
searching for a particular (edition of) a book.  It is metadata by
accident.  Parsing ISBN numbers is a lot easier than what you're
suggesting here, but the principle would be the same.  Let the users
work in the natural way, and let metadata happen by accident.  If they
miss (use a syntax that the parser doesn't recognize) and metadata
doesn't happen, someone who knows the metadata system can edit the
text to fit the syntax.  But that syntax has to fit the natural
language.

On http://aronsson.se/telecom/Alexander_Graham_Bell I have such
pattern recognition for dates.  When you click the date, a
chronological search is performed, that finds dates mentioned in other
wiki pages.  (This is a very small wiki.)

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: ISBN (Re: [Wikipedia-l] Semantic links)

body:
Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> writes:

> Yes, I think this could work.  ISBN numbers work this way.  If you
> have a convention of writing a book reviews, one per wiki page, then
> ISBN numbers is somehting that people would just write anyway, to
> provide the information and to create the bookstore link, but if each
> wiki page is about a book, the ISBN can be used as metadata when
> searching for a particular (edition of) a book.

BTW, as long as the ISBN is not used to pull bibliographical data from
a librabry I'll never ever add such a number; I've no interest in
supporting a big book dealer who a) enforced software patents and b)
destroys local bookstores.  I'm more concerned about issue a) though.

Also ISBNs are not unique.  Over the time re-assignments will happen.
And worse, some publishers use the same number for different editions;
the argument is, thus bookseller/customers will always order the most
recent edition...

--
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/             |   (*)/'(*)


list: wikien-l

from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: Protected pages

body:
I like Axelboldt's redirection and unprotection ideas.

Uncle Ed, aka Ed Poor

-----Original Message-----
From: Axel Boldt [mailto:axelboldt at yahoo.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 25, 2003 6:48 PM
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] RE: Protected pages

[[GNU_FDL]] can be unprotected and should redirect to [[GNU Free
Documentation Licence]], not to [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]]. The copyright
link at the bottom of every page should go to [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]]
and not to [[GNU_FDL]].

Axel


from_name: Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Functionality of "Go"

body:
Hello all,

Is this the expected behaviour of the "Go" function (next to "Search") that
when I put in the box "Domenico" there's "Domenico Cimarosa" page displayed
?
This seems to happen consistently so it might be designed that way.

Regards,
Kpjas.


from_name: Youandme

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wiktionary tweaks

body:
As a new Wiktionary "full time" contributor I'm interested
about the development status of software branch meant for Wiktionary.

If the development is suspended for the time being
then please add at least features
that makes life easy on "normal" Wikipedias:
- let "diff" link on Recent Changes point to respective revisions
(currently _every_ diff-link shows differences between current and
last but one revision)
- add "Show preview before edit box and not after it" option

I hope that others will appreciate those improvements
as much as I will. Thanks in advance.
Youandme


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] Functionality of "Go"

body:
> Hello all,

> Is this the expected behaviour of the "Go" function (next to "Search") that
> when I put in the box "Domenico" there's "Domenico Cimarosa" page displayed
> ?
> This seems to happen consistently so it might be designed that way.

Hi Kpjas,

well, I haven't designed it specifically with Domenico Cimarosa in mind
;-), but here's how it works:

        1) Try a case-sensitive (exact) match (but first
           letter always upper case, as is the Wikipedia standard).
           If there's a match, view it and abort.
        2) Try some case variations: all words upper case, capitalized
           etc. If there's a match, view it and abort.
        3) Try an article title search, if there are matches, view
           the first article that matches (which is random) and
           abort.
        4) Try a full text search.

So if there was an article "Domenico", it would view that. There isn't,
however, and if you search for "Domenico", you will get the following
results:

   Article title matches

   1. Domenico Cimarosa (5394 bytes)
   '''Domenico Cimarosa''', [[Aversa]] near [[Naples]] [[1749]] ...
   2. Domenico Alberti (1727 bytes)
   '''Domenico Alberti''' (around [[1710]] - [[1740]]) was an [[...
   3. Domenico Scarlatti (2427 bytes)
   '''Domenico Scarlatti''' ([[October 26]], [[1685]] in [[Naple...

As you can see, Domenico Cimarosa is the first one that comes up, because
it is stored first in the CUR table. This is why it's also the one you see
when you "Go" to Domenico, because there's no exact match.

I will probably improve the behavior regarding namespaces -- it currently
views whatever is stored first, even if that's a talk page; it should only
view the talk page if there's no corresponding subject page, though.

HTH,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Stats on growth wikipedia

body:
Wouter Vanden Hove wrote:

>
> Hi
>
> I'm looking for more detailed statistics on the growth on wikipedia.
> But more then a few milestones I'm not able to find.
>
> On the mainpage of Wikepedia is it stated: "We started on January 15,
> 2001 and are already working on XXX articles
> <http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_is_an_article> in the
> English version."
> with XXX the number of articles on a given date. But it would be nice
> to see how that evolves over time in a single graph. [yearly, monthly
> ,weekly]
> Is it possible to generate such graphs?
>
Dear Wouter,

Please see http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ASize_of_Wikipedia

Neil


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Stats on growth wikipedia

body:
On Wed, 26 Feb 2003, Wouter Vanden Hove wrote:

>
> Hi
>
> I'm looking for more detailed statistics on the growth on wikipedia. But
> more then a few milestones I'm not able to find.
>
> On the mainpage of Wikepedia is it stated: "We started on January 15,
> 2001 and are already working on XXX articles
> <http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_is_an_article> in the
> English version."
> with XXX the number of articles on a given date. But it would be nice to
> see how that evolves over time in a single graph. [yearly, monthly ,weekly]
> Is it possible to generate such graphs?

Check out [[Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia]].

Andre Engels


from_name: mail

subject: [WikiEN-l] election

body:
it looks like we will have a vote to decide what to
call notable u.s. citizens.  the top two choices are
"people from the united states" or "americans"

[[Talk:List of United States people]]

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more
http://taxes.yahoo.com/


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] election

body:
Well, I went to that page, intending to do my Wikic duty and vote, and
have given up.  I consider myself a fairly bright guy, but I cannot make
head nor tail out of the voting methodology in use there.  I can't even
figure out how to cast a vote, to say nothing of figuring out how the
"authorities" are going to determine a winner.

-----Original Message-----
From: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org
[mailto:wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org]On Behalf Of mail
Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2003 15:01
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] election

it looks like we will have a vote to decide what to
call notable u.s. citizens.  the top two choices are
"people from the united states" or "americans"

[[Talk:List of United States people]]


from_name: Leonard Tulipan

subject: [Wikitech-l] Umlaut and other special characters

body:
Hi!
While browsing thru http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Most_wanted_stubs ist stumpled accross this page:
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=T%C3%BCbingen&redirect=no

I  put a redirect on it for the time being but this is not the best behaviour. Basically this page should be "merged" with the correct one witout umlaut( [[Tuebingen]] ), but I don't know how to do this.
When I try to go to "What links here" I am suddenly at a page T?bingen (with the umlaut intact), I am a bit baffled by this, and don't know where to start looking.

Cheers
Leo
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from_name: Zoe

subject: [WikiEN-l] election

body:
The first one is stupid, the second one is all right, I suggested [[List of people from the United States]], and nobody even commented on that.

Zoe

 mail <pholango at yahoo.com> wrote:it looks like we will have a vote to decide what to
call notable u.s. citizens. the top two choices are
"people from the united states" or "americans"

[[Talk:List of United States people]]

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more
http://taxes.yahoo.com/
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

---------------------------------
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from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Old stuff -- humorous logo suggestions

body:
Long long ago, in the before time, when the Wikipedia logo was being
hacked out, there was made a page to house joke entries:

  http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_suggestions--humorous_logos

Unfortunately, the images were hosted on someone's personal site, which is
no longer available:

  http://mmcginn2.sau.edu/~eharmon/wikilogo1.png
  etc

Does anyone have saved copies of these images?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Functionality of "Go"

body:
On 26-02-2003, Erik Moeller wrote thusly :
> > Hello all,
> > Is this the expected behaviour of the "Go" function (next to "Search") that
> > when I put in the box "Domenico" there's "Domenico Cimarosa" page displayed
> > ?
> > This seems to happen consistently so it might be designed that way.
> well, I haven't designed it specifically with Domenico Cimarosa in mind
> ;-), but here's how it works:
>
>         1) Try a case-sensitive (exact) match (but first
>            letter always upper case, as is the Wikipedia standard).
>            If there's a match, view it and abort.
>         2) Try some case variations: all words upper case, capitalized
>            etc. If there's a match, view it and abort.
>         3) Try an article title search, if there are matches, view
>            the first article that matches (which is random) and
>            abort.
>         4) Try a full text search.
>
> So if there was an article "Domenico", it would view that. There isn't,
> however, and if you search for "Domenico", you will get the following
> results:
>
>    Article title matches
>
>    1. Domenico Cimarosa (5394 bytes)
>    '''Domenico Cimarosa''', [[Aversa]] near [[Naples]] [[1749]] ...
>    2. Domenico Alberti (1727 bytes)
>    '''Domenico Alberti''' (around [[1710]] - [[1740]]) was an [[...
>    3. Domenico Scarlatti (2427 bytes)
>    '''Domenico Scarlatti''' ([[October 26]], [[1685]] in [[Naple...
>
> As you can see, Domenico Cimarosa is the first one that comes up, because
> it is stored first in the CUR table. This is why it's also the one you see
> when you "Go" to Domenico, because there's no exact match.
>
> I will probably improve the behavior regarding namespaces -- it currently
> views whatever is stored first, even if that's a talk page; it should only
> view the talk page if there's no corresponding subject page, though.
Hi Erik,

This behaviour is quite sensible but perhaps I wasn't prepared that.
I thought it would redirect me to the search results if there's no
exact or approximate hits.

Thanks for your answer,
Regards,
Kpjas.


subject: [WikiEN-l] silent bans

body:
Since Jimmy Wales said so.
Zoe
 elian <elian at gmx.li> wrote:Second question: Since when is the fact that some user was banned a valid
reason (without giving any other reasons) for deleting entire articles?

good bye,
elian

---------------------------------
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Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, and more
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subject: [WikiEN-l] election

body:
Tom Parmenter wrote:

>It's a troll, folks.  From an IP address.
>
>|From: Zoe
>
>|The first one is stupid, the second one is all right, I suggested [[List of people from the United States]], and nobody even commented on that.
>|
>|Zoe
>|
>|
>| mail <pholango at yahoo.com> wrote:it looks like we will have a vote to decide what to
>|call notable u.s. citizens. the top two choices are
>|"people from the united states" or "americans"
>|
>|[[Talk:List of United States people]]
>
Yep, it looks like the kind of argument that's a great time waster.

Ec.


from_name: Richard Grevers

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: ISBN (Re: Semantic links)

body:
On Wed, 26 Feb 2003 05:14:10 +0100, Karl Eichwalder
<ke at gnu.franken.de> wrote:

> Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> writes:
>
>> Yes, I think this could work.  ISBN numbers work this way.  If you
>> have a convention of writing a book reviews, one per wiki page, then
>> ISBN numbers is somehting that people would just write anyway, to
>> provide the information and to create the bookstore link, but if each
>> wiki page is about a book, the ISBN can be used as metadata when
>> searching for a particular (edition of) a book.
>
> BTW, as long as the ISBN is not used to pull bibliographical data from
> a librabry I'll never ever add such a number; I've no interest in
> supporting a big book dealer who a) enforced software patents and b)
> destroys local bookstores.  I'm more concerned about issue a) though.
>
I've been asked for the ISBN by a library several times when trying to
track down a book, so it certainly seems useful information to have. And I
presume that there is a database somewhere that can match alternate ISBN's
for various editions of the same book?
As for formatting, well I have added ISBN's the way most books (vast
majority?) display them - with spaces - only to have that corrected.

--
Richard Grevers


from_name: Tom Parmenter

subject: [WikiEN-l] election

body:
It's a troll, folks.  From an IP address.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88

|From: Zoe <zoecomnena at yahoo.com>
|Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2003 17:09:33 -0800 (PST)
|

|The first one is stupid, the second one is all right, I suggested [[List of people from the United States]], and nobody even commented on that.
|
|Zoe
|
|
| mail <pholango at yahoo.com> wrote:it looks like we will have a vote to decide what to
|call notable u.s. citizens. the top two choices are
|"people from the united states" or "americans"
|
|[[Talk:List of United States people]]
|
|__________________________________________________


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] silent bans

body:
sannse wrote: (abbreviated)

>elian wrote:
>
>>>Second question: Since when is the fact that some user was banned a valid
>>>reason (without giving any other reasons) for deleting entire articles?
>>>
>To expand on Zoe's answer:  the question of contributions from banned users
>came up with the "MIT vandal".
>
>Jimbo said:  "This is a true simple vandal with a track record.  He's banned
>from wikipedia, and that's that.  We must not encourage him by considering
>each of his edits independently.  Anything he writes should be reverted
>instantly, and his username vaporized as fast as possible."
>
This is all too simplistic.Others have contributed to the article in
question too.  This approach only gets people upset when thay would not
otherwise have had any previous contact withe the offender.
Eclecticlology


from_name: elian

subject: [WikiEN-l] silent bans

body:
Hello,

there is usually so much fuzz about banning certain users, weeks of
tedious discussions, scrupulous arguments if someone like Lir should be
really banned or if he/she could learn to work cooperatively in the
end...

I just followed the little edit war in [[Iraq crisis 2003]] and on the
talk page I found the following:

| This article was removed because the user who sumbitted it was banned,
| for reasons which are on the mailing list. Given the reason for the ban,
| it is surprising that this user is taking an anti-war position here!
|
| The conclusion on the mailing list was that they should be banned, and
| therfore they don't get to play here. Period.

First question: I seem to have missed this debate (the user has written
under IPs starting with 142.177.) Could someone direct me to some links in
the archive?

Second question: Since when is the fact that some user was banned a valid
reason (without giving any other reasons) for deleting entire articles?

Third question: I can't reproduce the first reason for the ban:
* 08:12 Jan 13, 2003, Maveric149 blocked 142.177.97.215 (contribs) (racial
insult at Talk:Space Shuttle Columbia: "(On [[January 12]], [[1986]]
Columbia took-off with the first [[Hispanic-American]] astronaut,
Dr. [[Franklin R. Chang-Diaz]].) " Well, that explains where the
Challenger's O-ring went... <-- ;-D")

In the history of [[Talk:Space Shuttle Columbia]] I can find no edits by
this IP. Could someone explain the story of this ban?

And my fourth and last question: Why the hell do you ban users who write
articles like this: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asharites ???

or add substantial content like this one:
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Ijtihad&diff=675212&oldid=650587

or this (not banned, but apparently the same user):
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Muslim_philosophy

Okay, okay...one prefers to let other, more knowledgeable people write
about Islam. These people do also behave very civilly.

good bye,
elian
--
# echo "127.0.0.1 www.wikipedia.org" >> /etc/hosts


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] election

body:
mail wrote:
> it looks like we will have a vote to decide what to
> call notable u.s. citizens.  the top two choices are
> "people from the united states" or "americans"
>
> [[Talk:List of United States people]]

Well, we don't really vote on such things, we seek for consensus.

The poll looks sort of fun, though, so I recommend people play with
it.  Like someone else who wrote, I can't figure out what I'm supposed
to do to 'vote', though.

I, myself, was swayed by the arguments on the page.  The real question
is: What do speakers of English think when they hear "American"?
Well, we know what Americans think, we think it means us.  :-)

But if the following appeared in a British or Australian or other
English-language newspaper, anywhere in the world, would people be
confused?  "The Americans are preparing for war with Iraq by sending
troops to the Middle East."  Would anyone be confused about that?
Would anyone be surprised to read it?

I think, no.  Here's an example of a self-described "americano
from the Latino South" writing in a UK newspaper:
http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,788149,00.html

Throughout, he refers to the U.S as America.

In English, then, referring to "Americans" is unambiguous in most
contexts, is natural, and inoffensive.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] silent bans

body:
I'm not sure right now who 142.177.* is, but perhaps someone will
remind me.  This is the death threat guy, right?  Or am I forgetting?

elian wrote:
> Second question: Since when is the fact that some user was banned a
> valid reason (without giving any other reasons) for deleting entire
> articles?

This is not as easy a question as it first appears.  My own position
is that if someone is sneaking in to edit after a ban, it's really
important to simply revert everything they do, in order to deprive
them of the benefit that they seek.  Debating over the quality of each
individual edit only encourages them to stick around and argue about
it, as if they had never been banned.

> And my fourth and last question: Why the hell do you ban users who write
> articles like this: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asharites ???

Well, here's the thing.  If someone does good work, and *also* behaves
like a royal ass to others, at some point it's necessary to say, hey,
you know, the good work is good, but it's costing us more good work
from other people.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] silent bans

in_reply_to: <004c01c2de39$54acad20$d000a8c0@mshome.net>; from sannse@delphiforums.com on Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 08:21:17AM -0000

body:
sannse wrote:
> Jimbo said: "This is a true simple vandal with a track record.  He's
> banned from wikipedia, and that's that.  We must not encourage him
> by considering each of his edits independently.  Anything he writes
> should be reverted instantly, and his username vaporized as fast as
> possible."
>
> Whether this also applies to those banned for reasons other than simple
> vandalism seems less clear.

Less clear even to me.  I think it will really depend on the
individual case, and on the good judgment of those who are interacting
with the person.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] [robertocasiraghi@iol.it: Can Wikipedia articles be translated or "manipulated" to teach English?]

body:
Can someone help me help Roberto?  He would like to use Wikipedia
texts in a magazine that helps people to learn English.  He would
take our texts and give line-by-line translations.  He is happy to
release his translations under the GNU FDL but wants advice on just
what he needs to do.  What sort of notice should he put on the
articles?

--Jimbo

----- Forwarded message from roberto casiraghi <robertocasiraghi at iol.it> -----

From: "roberto casiraghi" <robertocasiraghi at iol.it>
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2003 15:08:13 +0100
To: <jwales at bomis.com>
Subject: Can Wikipedia articles be translated or "manipulated" to teach
    English?

Hello.

I am the publisher of English4Life, an Italian magazine that teaches English by  providing a double translation into Italian (word by word and in good Italian) and a complete pronunciation guide.

My question is: can I use Wikipedia texts for my purpose? I would leave the texts unchanged but supply suitable translations and comments. Do I have to ask for a special permission in order to do that?

If this particular use of your texts is available under the Open Content license, will I lose my copyright on all the translations and comments (i. e. will they become available too under the Open Content License?).

Kind regards.
Roberto Casiraghi - English4Life
Casiraghi Jones Publishing srl
Via Marconi 28
20091 Bresso (Milano)
website: www.linguefaidate.com

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


from_name: sannse

subject: [WikiEN-l] silent bans

body:
This is a bit long and mostly history, so you might want to skip it...

elian wrote:

>>Second question: Since when is the fact that some user was banned a valid
>>reason (without giving any other reasons) for deleting entire articles?

To expand on Zoe's answer:  the question of contributions from banned users
came up with the "MIT vandal".

In case you missed that one, he was someone who had been in an edit war on
[[woman]] and a couple of other pages.  The [[woman]] page was locked for a
while to let things calm down.  This *really* annoyed him, and he set off on
a campaign of random deletions and deliberately inaccurate edits (changing a
date or a country to make the article wrong and so on).  We had several
hours of intense vandalism under numerous IDs.  He couldn't be blocked
initially because he was logged in each time.  He left saying he would be
back to carry on, with the stated intention of making Wikipedia unusable (he
added this as a comment to his edits).

Anyway.  He was banned (obviously!) but returned under different IPs to
vandalise again (the same random deletions and inaccurate edits) and, more
controversially, to edit some of the articles he was interested in.

Jimbo said:  "This is a true simple vandal with a track record.  He's banned
from wikipedia, and that's that.  We must not encourage him by considering
each of his edits independently.  Anything he writes should be reverted
instantly, and his username vaporized as fast as possible."

Whether this also applies to those banned for reasons other than simple
vandalism seems less clear.

Regards,

sannse


subject: [WikiEN-l] Cultivating your outrage

body:
People are looking for things to become outraged about.

You hold open a door for someone, and they're like, "What, do you think I'm too old to open a door?" Or, "Well! That ladies first nonsense went *out* decades ago, you chauvinist p*****"

Calling a game 'soccer' or 'football' will get you punch in the mouth in certain European pubs.

People will fight to the death over the name of a river; or a "nation" like Quebec; or everyone's favorite: "Judea and Samaria" vs. "occupied Palestinian territories".

Now we will all have to take a few days off to argue about who an "American" is:

* North America = Canada, US, Mexico, Central America + Caribbean Islands
* South America = Columbia and all those other countries south of the Panama Canal

BUT:

* norteamericano = US + Canada
* Latin America = Mexico and all countries south of it

I no longer have time for such games; I have more important crops to plant. If anyone wants to use Wikipedia to cultivate their outrage, go ahead and do it but don't expect me to get excited about it.

Uncle Ed, aka Ed Poor


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia offline reader

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> I have written a very rudimentary wikipedia offline reader. It can be
> downloaded at
>     http://test.wikipedia.org/upload/WINOL.zip
>
> This contains the current source (GPL), and a Windows exe. You'll also
> need the SQL dump (better stick to en;-)

Perhaps for those of us who are new, you could post a link to the
SQL dump?

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] We should listen to Elian (was: silent bans)

in_reply_to: <E506B3FF6BC1254C9AC1B948C380BC280CF56E@sm-nyny-xm05.nena.wdpr.disney.com>; from Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com on Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 01:11:46PM -0500

body:
Yeah, unlesss someone remembers something useful.

In my opinion, this ban was caused by the 'death threat guy',
suspected to be '24'.  But the ips being blocked are from a very broad
block, 142.177.* belonging to sympatico.ca, a major Canadian ISP.

What I suspect is that the new 142.177, making good contributions, is
entirely unrelated to '24' or 'death threat guy'.  '24' in particular
is very unlikely to be capable of posting anything even remotely
coherent.

--Jimbo


from_name: Tomos at Wikipedia

subject: [Wikipedia-l] most international articles statistics?

body:
>>I asked this before, but I don't think anyone replied.
>>Is there anyway to see a list of articles based on in
>>how many languages they're in?  It would be interested
>>to see which articles are the most international or
>>the most important...

I am not sure if I understand the idea correct, but here are
my thoughts.

1.
There is perhaps no easy way to see the list. It takes a
well-developed wikitionary to find out how "United Nations,"
"Dog," or any other good candidate is spelled in all the
different languages.

We can use inter-language links, but they are not complete.

The only way is to build a list through a interlingual
collaborative research project.

It could be daunting, but the scope of the research could
be limited based on
a) the list of articles in smallerst wikis
and/or
b) to just a list of top 100 most-viewed
articles in each site.

2.
I have some guesses about which articles exist in the
greatest number of languages.

-Wikipedia might be existing in most sites.
-GNU_FDL, because it is linked from most pages, may be
as prevalent.
-Basic academic disciplines such as mathematics, linguistics,
and sociology, because they are likely to be linked from
main pages. Lists of world countries, languages, etc.
would be perhaps as popular.

While these are not unimportant subjects, they do not
represent "what's globally important" well. (I'm assuming
that's what Chuck wanted to observe.)

Beyond that, two types:

Some articles are placed in very inactive site because a
user wants to distribute an article multilingually. I
have seen at least two such articles in Japanese wiki
perhaps machine-translated. In its early stage, I guess,
users of a non-English wikipedia may be dominantly
bilinguals, non-native speakers, and etc. (Well, esperanto
wiki and maybe some others will always remain so. :-)

Then computer related topics would be popular because
of the demographics of early adopters.

With many wikis still in their infancies, those may turn
out to be the ultimate winners, scoring points from the
small-sized wikis.

But I'm not saying the idea of a list of articles based
on # of languages is uninteresting.

If we really construct one, something else may come up,
say, "Beatles" or "European Union," that would be
interesing. I'm curious, indeed.

I would be even more interested if different list exist for
people, country, artist, movie, novel, music, etc.

Did I answer your question? If my take is correct and
you will initiate an interlingual research project,
please let me know.

Tomos

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


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [WikiEN-l] silent bans

body:
sannse wrote in part:

>Jimbo said:  "This is a true simple vandal with a track record.  He's banned
>from wikipedia, and that's that.  We must not encourage him by considering
>each of his edits independently.  Anything he writes should be reverted
>instantly, and his username vaporized as fast as possible."

When a persistent vandal is making several fast edits,
we can't expect people to review each one to see if it's vandalism,
so I think that it's quite reasonable to revert with prejudice.
OTOH, if an ordinary, unbanned user comes along and says
"Unlike the others, this one happens to be a useful contribution,
and I WILL TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR IT as if I'd written it myself.",
then there's no need to revert it just because of who first wrote it.
Such an arrangement should probably be documented on the talk page,
or we could even do a reversion and let the other user unrevert
under their own name (or IP address).

-- Toby


body:
On Thu, 27 Feb 2003, Gareth Owen wrote:
> > Does anyone have saved copies of these images?
>
> I've got wikilogo[34567].png
> ("Fight Club", "Manson", "Who'd Pay", "Hey Britannica" and "10^6 Monkeys").
> I can upload them to the wiki if you want, or stick 'em on my geocities site.

Yes, please do! (to meta.wikipedia.org)

> I think a sysop deleted them first time round as detrimental to the cause

?!!?!!

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Gareth Owen

body:
Brion Vibber <vibber at aludra.usc.edu> writes:

> Does anyone have saved copies of these images?

I've got wikilogo[34567].png
("Fight Club", "Manson", "Who'd Pay", "Hey Britannica" and "10^6 Monkeys").
I can upload them to the wiki if you want, or stick 'em on my geocities site.

I think a sysop deleted them first time round as detrimental to the cause
--
Gareth Owen
"I love the wikipedia, but sometimes I get the impression that certain people
 on this list are very bored, and so argue about something when there's really
 bugger all to argue about. Edit some articles, for god's sake." -- LP


subject: [WikiEN-l] Cultivating your outrage

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>People are looking for things to become outraged about.
>
>BUT:
>* norteamericano = US + Canada
>* Latin America = Mexico and all countries south of it
>
Now hold on!  You can't go around saying that the people of Belize,
Guyana or Surinam are Latins.   :-)

Eclecticology


subject: [WikiEN-l] silent bans

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>I'm not sure right now who 142.177.* is, but perhaps someone will
>remind me.  This is the death threat guy, right?  Or am I forgetting?
>
>elian wrote:
>
>>Second question: Since when is the fact that some user was banned a
>>valid reason (without giving any other reasons) for deleting entire
>>articles?
>>
>
>This is not as easy a question as it first appears.  My own position
>is that if someone is sneaking in to edit after a ban, it's really
>important to simply revert everything they do, in order to deprive
>them of the benefit that they seek.  Debating over the quality of each
>individual edit only encourages them to stick around and argue about
>it, as if they had never been banned.
>
Hmm!  This bout seems to prove my point.   When you start to delete an
offender's work (in addition to his generally accepted banning) you open
up that banning debate to whole new generations of disputatious
individuals.  Do we love these arguments, or what? :-)

Eclecticology


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: silent bans

body:
elian wrote:
>Hello,
>
>there is usually so much fuzz about banning
>certain users, weeks of tedious discussions,
>scrupulous arguments if someone like Lir should
>be really banned or if he/she could learn to
>work cooperatively in the end...
>
>....
>
>First question: I seem to have missed this
>debate (the user has written under IPs starting
>with 142.177.) Could someone direct me to some
>links in the archive?

This person has been determined to be 24 beyond a
reasonable doubt. 24 was banned for making a threat to
Larry and 24 under the new IP made a death threat to
me and the rest of the "cabal."

>....
>Third question: I can't reproduce the first
>reason for the ban:
>* 08:12 Jan 13, 2003, Maveric149 blocked
>142.177.97.215 (contribs) (racial insult at
>Talk:Space Shuttle Columbia: "(On [[January 12]],
>[[1986]] Columbia took-off with the first
>[[Hispanic-American]] astronaut, Dr. [[Franklin
>R. Chang-Diaz]].) " Well, that explains where the
>Challenger's O-ring went... <-- ;-D")
>
>In the history of [[Talk:Space Shuttle Columbia]]
>I can find no edits by this IP. Could someone
>explain the story of this ban?
>

There is no history for it because I deleted the talk
page. If you like I can restore the talk page. The
ban, BTW, was for the stated major violation of
Wikipetiquette and was only supposed to be temporary
but this user later left a death threat on my meta
talk page so the ban was never lifted. The problem is
that this user keeps getting new IPs. Thus another
Wikipedian got sick and tired of dealing with
142.177's edits when 142.177 shouldn't be editing at
all.

>And my fourth and last question: Why the hell do
>you ban users who write articles like this:
>http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asharites ???

Violations of Wikipetiquette and making death threats.
DW also created a lot of valid content - but was
banned for violating Wikipetiquette.

>...

>Okay, okay...one prefers to let other, more
>knowledgeable people write about Islam.
>These people do also behave very civilly.

Hardly.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

WikiKarma:
My usual updates at [[February 20]]

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more
http://taxes.yahoo.com/


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Cultivating your outrage

body:
Richard Grevers wrote:

> On Thu, 27 Feb 2003 11:40:56 -0800, Ray Saintonge
> <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>> Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>>
>>> People are looking for things to become outraged about.
>>>
>>> BUT:
>>> * norteamericano = US + Canada
>>> * Latin America = Mexico and all countries south of it
>>>
>> Now hold on!  You can't go around saying that the people of Belize,
>> Guyana or Surinam are Latins.   :-)
>>
> Doesn't the current President of the USA wich he spoke Latin so that
> he could communicate with them? :-)

Latin and Pig-Latin are not the same, but then the pommies believe that
they can be better understood on the Continent by simply speaking
louder. :-P

Ec.


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

body:
I think we should un-ban whoever this is, that Elian's
talking about.

Elian is a responsible person, and he would never
knowingly sponsor a vandal. And even if by some rare
chance Elian is wrong about this person, it wouldn't
hurt because they could be re-banned if needed.

I say we should listen to Elian in this case and do as
he suggests.

I trust Elian to do the Right Thing.

Uncle Ed, aka Ed Poor


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Cultivating your outrage

body:
No.
That was said about Dan Quayle, though I don't know if he really said it.
Zoe
 Richard Grevers <dramatic at xtra.co.nz> wrote:
Doesn't the current President of the USA wich he spoke Latin so that he
could communicate with them? :-)

--
Richard Grevers

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, and more
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from_name: Chuck Smith

subject: [Wikipedia-l] interlanguage links statistics

body:
> I am not sure if I understand the idea correct, but
> here are
> my thoughts.

No, I don't think you understood my idea correctly.  I
simply wanted a bot to go through the English
Wikipedia and count the interlanguage links for each
article and then list which articles have the most.  I
know it's not going to be perfect, but it's an
estimate.  I mean our article count isn't perfect
either.  ;-)  The statistics count could also measure
how many interlanguage links are for each language as
well.  Could be interesting.

> In its early stage, I guess,
> users of a non-English wikipedia may be dominantly
> bilinguals, non-native speakers, and etc. (Well,
> esperanto
> wiki and maybe some others will always remain so.
> :-)

Yeah, I think we have only have one native speaker of
Esperanto in the Wikipedia.  He really helped out on
our article about native Esperanto speakers though.
:)

Chuck

=====
Learn Esperanto! - http://www.lernu.net/
Enciklopedio: http://eo.wikipedia.org/

___________________________________________________
Yahoo! M?viles
Personaliza tu m?vil con tu logo y melod?a favorito
en http://moviles.yahoo.es


from_name: Dan Keshet

subject: [WikiEN-l] 142

body:
I noticed that you all are discussing 142 again.

I'd just like to point out my experience that, after enthusiastically trying
to start [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Voting Systems]], I just as quickly
abandoned it because I didn't have the time or effort to keep up with the
nonsensical edits of 142.

He has knowledge about the subjects he writes about, but the entries he writes
are often hodgepodges of related subjects, conjoined in a meaningless way.
He frequently uses accepted terminology in non-accepted ways (e.g.
instant-runoff voting) or makes up terminology (e.g. disapproval voting),
then has long arguments over their meanings.

When I've challenged the veracity of articles he's written, he has never
supplied reproducible references (although he has belittled me for failing to
see the obviousness of his prose).  The amount of effort it takes to
challenge an article is more than I'm willing to make anymore.

He also is not willing to join the rest of the community by getting a
username; he says he won't do so because he doesn't want his contributions to
be tracked.  That is part of the reason for the incoherence of this
discussion we're having.

Yes, I'll be sorry if we lose some articles on subjects that he has some
knowledge about.  But, on balance, we're better off without them.  And, the
reason for the silent ban is because this is a decision we have already made,
many times, but could not enforce consistently because he's coming in through
a popular dial-up service.

--dk


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Date Formatter Written

body:
Some discussion has occured in [[Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates
and numbers)]] about the formats of dates; i.e., whether or not
[[January 2]], [[2003]] is American-Imperialist.  (My feeling: yes, but
that's not the only reason I like it.)

A suggestion was made to allow date strings to be wrapped in <date> -
</date> tags which the Wikipediware will parse and render properly.  I
have written a Perl routine to not only do this, but also return either
the American or the European format, based on a flag set in each user's
preferences.

Questions:

How would I go about adding this routine to the Wikipediware?

Should I even bother adding this routine to the Wikipediware?

Does anyone care?

--
 Sean Barrett     | The more you sweat in peace,
 sean at epoptic.com | the less you bleed in war.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Date Formatter Written


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
> No, I don't think you understood my idea correctly.  I
> simply wanted a bot to go through the English
> Wikipedia and count the interlanguage links for each
> article and then list which articles have the most.  I
> know it's not going to be perfect, but it's an
> estimate.

Magnus is working on a vastly improved interlanguage links system, which
will make this kind of data much easier to obtain, as it is stored in a
separate table. The new system will also drastically reduce the amount of
link redundancy.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Re: Cultivating your outrage

body:
Richard Grevers wrote:

> On Thu, 27 Feb 2003 13:16:03 -0800 (PST), Zoe <zoecomnena at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
>> No.
>> That was said about Dan Quayle, though I don't know if he really said
>> it.
>> Zoe
>
> Thanks Zoe - so many of the Dan Quayle gags were recycled for George
> W., but that was one I must have missed the first time round. What
> does this say of the retention span of many Americans? :-)

It shows it to be quite long since they have retained the spirit of Dan
Quayle throughout these many years. :-)

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Date Formatter Written

body:
On Thu, 27 Feb 2003, Sean Barrett wrote:
> Some discussion has occured in [[Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates
> and numbers)]] about the formats of dates; i.e., whether or not
> [[January 2]], [[2003]] is American-Imperialist.  (My feeling: yes, but
> that's not the only reason I like it.)
>
> A suggestion was made to allow date strings to be wrapped in <date> -
> </date> tags which the Wikipediware will parse and render properly.

Why a date tag? Common date formats should be quite easy to find
programmatically; the rare false positives can be <nowiki>'d away. Adding
more new tags (particularly for things like dates, of which we have
many thousands!) would just be a royal pain in the buttocks.

>  I have written a Perl routine to not only do this, but also return
> either the American or the European format, based on a flag set in
> each user's preferences.

Can I get them in 2003-01-02 format instead? :)

> How would I go about adding this routine to the Wikipediware?

It would be a help to post it or a link to it to the wikitech-l list.

> Should I even bother adding this routine to the Wikipediware?
>
> Does anyone care?

(shrug) It's really part of the same issue as US vs UK (and most everyone
else) spellings and word usage. What's normal to one group appears galling
to the other, and we allow both equally and have no official preference.
(Though there may be a de facto greater presence of one or ther other due
to the relative proportions of contributors... additionally, there are the
titles of the day pages, which really should be consistent, whereever they
happen to be at, and however many redirect forms will get you there.)

A separate issue is presentation of dates in, for instance, recentchanges
etc. I for one would prefer to see YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS everywhere. But
then, I leave my timezone setting at UTC so you know I'm a weirdo. ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Date Formatter Written


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia offline reader

body:
I have written a very rudimentary wikipedia offline reader. It can be
downloaded at
    http://test.wikipedia.org/upload/WINOL.zip

This contains the current source (GPL), and a Windows exe. You'll also
need the SQL dump (better stick to en;-)

For those few how tried the last version: Get this one! It doesn't need
the conversion anymore, it reads the articles right from the SQL file.

You'll have to run the "Tools/Index" once on the SQL file, though. This
will create a ~4 MB index of the article titles and the position of
their data set in the SQL file. Takes about 1 min.

Don't expect too much from this version. You can browse the 'pedia, read
all the text and see most of the formatting, but that's about it. No
images, no offline edit, no search function. Yet.

Magnus


from_name: tarquin

subject: [WikiEN-l] silent bans

body:
elian wrote:

>Hello,
>
>there is usually so much fuzz about banning certain users, weeks of
>tedious discussions, scrupulous arguments if someone like Lir should be
>really banned or if he/she could learn to work cooperatively in the
>end...
>
>
>
But Jimbo decided to ban Lir, and I'm pretty sure that Lir is back as
Susan Mason!
(same interests. same style of writing in talk pages. like Lir and Vera,
does not make any comment when asked about his/her identity.

she seems to be getting along okay though


from_name: Nicolas Delahaye

subject: [Wikitech-l] Stats on growth wikipedia

body:
Hi,

Could the stats take into account the size of each article, like the number
of characters that the database contains? It would reflect the amount of
data contributors add each day, whereas some bots once in while "fake" these
existing data by adding massive almost empty articles.

Nicolas

----- Original Message -----
From: "Andre Engels" <engels at uni-koblenz.de>
To: <wikitech-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2003 3:42 AM
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Stats on growth wikipedia

> On Wed, 26 Feb 2003, Wouter Vanden Hove wrote:
>
> >
> > Hi
> >
> > I'm looking for more detailed statistics on the growth on wikipedia. But
> > more then a few milestones I'm not able to find.
> >
> > On the mainpage of Wikepedia is it stated: "We started on January 15,
> > 2001 and are already working on XXX articles
> > <http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_is_an_article> in the
> > English version."
> > with XXX the number of articles on a given date. But it would be nice to
> > see how that evolves over time in a single graph. [yearly, monthly
,weekly]
> > Is it possible to generate such graphs?
>
> Check out [[Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia]].
>
> Andre Engels
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Date Formatter Written

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

>A separate issue is presentation of dates in, for instance, recentchanges
>etc. I for one would prefer to see YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS everywhere.
>
I support that.

>But
>then, I leave my timezone setting at UTC so you know I'm a weirdo. ;)
>
I thought I was the only one that did that -- but then I'm on the west
coast. ;-)

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Date Formatter Written

body:
>I have no time to follow the discussion you are talking about, but...
>While making date syntax more general please remember
>that there are other [[calendar]]s in usage around the world nowadays,
>not only Western invention (ie. [[Gregorian calendar]])
>The number of [[Islamic calendar]] + [[Chinese calendar]] calendar
users
>is quite impressive.
>
>Regards
>Youandme

I will remember that only once Islamic or Chinese (or Jewish or Mayan or
French Revolutionary or Discordian) dates are actually used on
Wikipedia.


from_name: Zoe

body:
I also think it would cause edit wars between people who would insist that their favorite date format is the only way it should be.
Zoe
 Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:> A suggestion was made to allow date strings to be wrapped in -
> tags which the Wikipediware will parse and render properly. I
> have written a Perl routine to not only do this, but also return either
> the American or the European format, based on a flag set in each user's
> preferences.

> Questions:
> How would I go about adding this routine to the Wikipediware?
> Should I even bother adding this routine to the Wikipediware?

I don't want it. With some units (metres vs. feet etc.) I can understand
the desire to provide automatic conversion, because many Europeans don't
know the American system and vice versa. With dates, the common notations
are reaonably unambiguous -- any reader, once familiar with our notation,
can get used to it. As a German, I am already used to reading different
date styles in English texts (mostly "February 27, 2003", "2/27/2003" and
"27th of February, 2003" -- I haven't seen "27 February 2003" much, but
maybe I wasn't paying attention). Having a German-style date in an English
text (27. February 2003), on the other hand, would look alien to me.

Adding tags also further complicates our syntax at little benefit.
And I don't even want to think about converting all the existing dates.

What I do want is a consistent policy on the date style for each language.
We should hold a vote on each Wikipedia to determine the preferred style.

Regards,

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

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subject: [WikiEN-l] silent bans

body:
Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> writes:

> I'm not sure right now who 142.177.* is, but perhaps someone will
> remind me.  This is the death threat guy, right?  Or am I forgetting?

I don't know. I could not find any death threats and I can't remember that
he (142.177.) got mentioned on the mailing list. I read first Aharites and
was delighted to see that Wikipedia finally had attracted some expert in
orientalism. Yesterday I discovered that he had been banned several times
and I unsuccessfully tried to find out why.

> elian wrote:
> > Second question: Since when is the fact that some user was banned a
> > valid reason (without giving any other reasons) for deleting entire
> > articles?
>
> This is not as easy a question as it first appears.  My own position
> is that if someone is sneaking in to edit after a ban, it's really
> important to simply revert everything they do, in order to deprive
> them of the benefit that they seek.  Debating over the quality of each
> individual edit only encourages them to stick around and argue about
> it, as if they had never been banned.

I can accept this for bans where there was a open debate on the
mailing list or in clear cases of vandalism. But this case seems to be
neither (correct me if I am wrong and only missed something)

> > And my fourth and last question: Why the hell do you ban users who write
> > articles like this: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asharites ???
>
> Well, here's the thing.  If someone does good work, and *also* behaves
> like a royal ass to others, at some point it's necessary to say, hey,
> you know, the good work is good, but it's costing us more good work
> from other people.

check for yourself - contributions from the banned IPs:
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=142.177.104.164
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=142.177.104.91
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=142.177.108.203
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=142.177.93.104
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=142.177.104.91
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=142.177.75.53
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=142.177.82.40
(the first IP-ban I cited yesterday is not in the list anymore today)

So, if there happened a repeated ban, it should be possible to provide the
reasons for this.

Why were these IPs banned in the first case?

greetings,
elian


body:
Hello Jimbo, Robert, list;

> Can someone help me help Roberto?  He would like to use Wikipedia
> texts in a magazine that helps people to learn English.  He would
> take our texts and give line-by-line translations.  He is happy to
> release his translations under the GNU FDL but wants advice on just
> what he needs to do.  What sort of notice should he put on the
> articles?

...

> My question is: can I use Wikipedia texts for my purpose? I would leave the
> texts unchanged but supply suitable translations and comments. Do I have to
> ask for a special permission in order to do that?

> If this particular use of your texts is available under the Open Content
> license, will I lose my copyright on all the translations and comments (i.
> e. will they become available too under the Open Content License?).

Please see
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ACopyrights

Yes, you can use Wikipedia articles. They are licensed under the GNU Free
Documentation License, which mainly means that articles that use them also
have to be FDL-licensed. Note that the FDL does not mean that you "lose"
your copyrights, only that others will be able to copy and modify the so-
licensed text. We consider this fair: You use material we have provided,
so we ask you to give something back to the public in return (namely your
translation/additions).

You can find the full text of the license here:
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

What you need to do if you use our material is this:

1) Put a statement under the article (not the entire magazine, just the
article using the Wikipedia article) to the effect that the whole article
is licensed under the GNU FDL. Provide a link to the URL above.

2) Provide a link to the Wikipedia article.

Example notice:

----
"This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, which
means that you can copy it and modify it so long as the entire work
remains under this license. See http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html for
details.  It uses material from the Wikipedia article 'Foo', which you can
find at
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable."
----

You may want to provide a link to the electronic version of the modified
article as well, but we won't bother you if you don't.

Hope that helps,

Erik Moeller


subject: [WikiEN-l] Cultivating your outrage

body:
Ed-
> People are looking for things to become outraged about.

> You hold open a door for someone, and they're like, "What, do you think I'm
> too old to open a door?" Or, "Well! That ladies first nonsense went *out*
> decades ago, you chauvinist p*****"

> Calling a game 'soccer' or 'football' will get you punch in the mouth in
> certain European pubs.

> People will fight to the death over the name of a river; or a "nation" like
> Quebec; or everyone's favorite: "Judea and Samaria" vs. "occupied
> Palestinian territories".

Consider this adage: "Opinions are like asses - everyone has one." (And I
don't think this refers to donkeys.) These naming disputes are an
opportunity for people to contribute to Wikipedia who may not have much
else to say. The best way to solve them is to have a quick vote (not a
braindead manual voting system like the one used here) and get on with
more serious matters. The people who then carry on the disputes are the
ones who seek to cultivate outrage, as you put it.

Even though the voting system used was screwed up and took far too long,
the end result ("List of people from the United States") seems perfectly
acceptable. I would suggest a similar name should we ever have a "List of
people from the European Union".

Regards,

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] silent bans

body:
Zoe <zoecomnena at yahoo.com> writes:

> Since Jimmy Wales said so.

Jimmy doesn't seems to know anything about this case.

elian
--
enlightenment is man's emergence
from his self-incurred immaturity.
                  -- Immanuel Kant


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia offline reader

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Perhaps for those of us who are new, you could post a link to the
> SQL dump?

It is in [[Wikipedia:Database download]]:

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ADatabase_download

Or the en alone : http://www.wikipedia.org/tarballs/cur_table.sql.bz2

65 MB zipped / ~290 MB unzipped (which you'll have to do first).

Magnus


from_name: Axel Boldt

body:
Erik Moeller writes

>Yes, you can use Wikipedia articles. They are licensed under
>the GNU Free Documentation License, which mainly means that
>articles that use them also have to be FDL-licensed. Note that
>the FDL does not mean that you "lose" your copyrights, only
>that others will be able to copy and modify the so-
>licensed text. We consider this fair:

Not all of us, as fighting against intellectual property rights
using the tools of intellectual property strikes some as hypocritical.

Robert has of course the option to use for his translation tutorial
only
those Wikipedia texts that have been released into the public domain,
and
all public domain texts listed on
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3APublic_domain_resources

Axel

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more
http://taxes.yahoo.com/


subject: [WikiEN-l] a vandal with a rotating IP address -- immediate help needed

body:
Someone with IP addresses beginning with 208.188* is vandalizing several pages.  How can we ban someone whose every attack is at a different IP address?

Zoe

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body:
I apparently have failed to be clear why I wrote this function.  The
idea was to allow editors to use any date format they like at the time
they write the article, but only need to mark it as a date.  Thus,
"<date>January 1, 2003,</date> was the Western New Years Day, but
<date>1st of Feb.</date> was the [[Chinese New Year]]" would be a valid
fragment.

Then the rendering engine would look at my preferences and render that
sentence as "[[January 1|1 January]] [[2003]] was the Western New Years
Day, but [[February 1|1 February]] was the [[Chinese New Year]]."
Someone else's preferences may result in "[[2003]]-[[January 1|01-01]]
was the Western New Years Day, but [[February 1|02-01]] was the
[[Chinese New Year]]."

The idea was to provide increased flexibility -- to eliminate formatting
requirements -- not to to impose them.

--
 Sean Barrett
 sean at epoptic.com

>  -----Original Message-----
> From: 	wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org
[mailto:wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org]  On Behalf Of Zoe
> Sent:	Thursday, February 27, 2003 17:59
> To:	wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject:	Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Date Formatter Written
>
> I also think it would cause edit wars between people who would insist
that their favorite date format is the only way it should be.
>
> Zoe
>
>  Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
>
> > A suggestion was made to allow date strings to be wrapped in -
> > tags which the Wikipediware will parse and render properly. I
> > have written a Perl routine to not only do this, but also return
either
> > the American or the European format, based on a flag set in each
user's
> > preferences.
>
> > Questions:
> > How would I go about adding this routine to the Wikipediware?
> > Should I even bother adding this routine to the Wikipediware?
>
> I don't want it. With some units (metres vs. feet etc.) I can
understand
> the desire to provide automatic conversion, because many Europeans
don't
> know the American system and vice versa. With dates, the common
notations
> are reaonably unambiguous -- any reader, once familiar with our
notation,
> can get used to it. As a German, I am already used to reading
different
> date styles in Eng! lish texts (mostly "February 27, 2003",
"2/27/2003" and
> "27th of February, 2003" -- I haven't seen "27 February 2003" much,
but
> maybe I wasn't paying attention). Having a German-style date in an
English
> text (27. February 2003), on the other hand, would look alien to me.
>
> Adding tags also further complicates our syntax at little benefit.
> And I don't even want to think about converting all the existing
dates.
>
> What I do want is a consistent policy on the date style for each
language.
> We should hold a vote on each Wikipedia to determine the preferred
style.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>
>   _____
>
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Tax Center
<http://rd.yahoo.com/finance/mailtagline/*http://taxes.yahoo.com/> -
forms, calculators, tips, and more


body:
Whoops, my typo.  It's 205.188*
Zoe
 Zoe <zoecomnena at yahoo.com> wrote:
Someone with IP addresses beginning with 208.188* is vandalizing several pages.  How can we ban someone whose every attack is at a different IP address?

Zoe

---------------------------------
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body:
Whoops, my typo.  It's 205.188*
Zoe
 Zoe <zoecomnena at yahoo.com> wrote:
Someone with IP addresses beginning with 208.188* is vandalizing several pages.  How can we ban someone whose every attack is at a different IP address?

Zoe

---------------------------------
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Blocking 205.188*

body:
I have blocked several IP addresses beginning with 205.188.  Seeing the histories of these addresses, it appears that they are joint addresses that have been used for useful additions to the Wikipedia in the past.  If someone wants to review the blocks and unblock them in a while, please do so, but I was trying to stem an attack.

Zoe

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: A policy for albums

body:
On Thursday 27 February 2003 05:33 pm, Erik Moeller wrote:
>....
> Even if this policy is not implemented, I will point out at this juncture
> that I am strongly opposed to an import of the FreeDB data, should that
> ever come up. But to be consistent and to avoid unnecessary work, I think
> we should apply these rules even to existing, manually added album pages.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik

I have no problem with your proposed policy (at least for en.wiki) but
wouldn't it be a good idea if we somehow collaborated with FreeDB? It would
be great if at the end of a freedb entry there was a link to a Wikipedia
article on the album. Just thinking out loud.

-- mav

WikiKarma
The usual at [[February 21]]


body:
Brion Vibber <vibber at lvl-sun701.usc.edu> writes:

> Yes, please do! (to meta.wikipedia.org)

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikilogo3.png
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikilogo4.png
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikilogo5.png
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikilogo6.png
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikilogo7.png

> > I think a sysop deleted them first time round as detrimental to the cause
>
> ?!!?!!

Maybe I just misremembered that Larry removed them from the main logo page...

--
Gareth Owen


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] [robertocasiraghi@iol.it: Can Wikipedia articles
	be translated or "manipulated" to teach English?]

body:
On Thu, 2003-02-27 at 19:09, Axel Boldt wrote:
> Erik Moeller writes
> >Note that the FDL does not mean that you "lose" your copyrights, only
> >that others will be able to copy and modify the so-
> >licensed text. We consider this fair:
>
> Not all of us, as fighting against intellectual property rights
> using the tools of intellectual property strikes some as hypocritical.

It might, if this were a project that fights against intellectual
property rights. It isn't. It's a project that fights *for* intellectual
property rights *for everyone*.

We protect everyone's right to use our material by using a license that
explicitly grants rights of use that are by default denied by
intellectual property law, and protecting the public from third party
abusers who would abridge those rights in regards to derivative works (a
protection not afforded by the public domain, for better or worse).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [WikiEN-l] election

body:
There is no need to discuss this on the mailing list.  It's been discussed to death on two different talk pages.  As it now stands, if it doesn't go to [[List of Americans]], I will object to anything other than [[List of people from the United States]].
Zoe

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subject: [WikiEN-l] election

body:
Nonsense.  Do you really think that there is anyone in the entire world
who would actually be unsure whether [[Pierre Trudeau]] belonged on a
[[List of Americans]]?

-----Original Message-----
From: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org
[mailto:wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org]On Behalf Of james duffy
Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2003 20:59
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] election

I would be dead set against 'List of Americans'. America has two
meanings.
It can be state-specific, the US, or geography-specific, the continent
of
America. We have to be ultra-careful to remember that Wiki is meant to
be a
world-wide sourcebook, which means avoiding causing (1) confusion, (2)
unnecessary offence, (3) inaccuracy.

'Claiming' US = America sets a precedent that poses the question, what
to we
call the 'continent' and how do we refer to people on the continent who
are
not resident in the US? 'Non-American Americans?'

This same problem exists on the island of Ireland.  Ireland can mean one
island or two political entities, Northern Ireland and the Republic of
Ireland, with half the people on Northern Ireland not wanting to be
called
Irish (and taking high offence in being called Irish) and half
'demanding'
it. The solution there is to call the political entities by their formal
name, and the geographic entity (the island) simply as Ireland. (And run
a
mile from a 'List of Irish people' - Calling Ian Paisley Irish and you'd
be
picking your teeth up from the ground. Call Gerry Adams 'British' and
you'd
be trying to find your kneecaps!)

The same is true in the UK. England is NOT the island it is on. Using
England to mean everyone on the island on Great Britain 'english' is
liable
to get you a punch in the face from people in Scotland and Wales, who
will
tell you 'we are bloody well not English and how dare you suggest it!'
Just
because a lot of people thousands of miles might call everyone from that
island 'English' would be NO EXCUSE for us doing it. Ditto with America.
Call the geographic entity 'America' but those who could from the
various
counties/states by the political entity, US, Canada, Mexico.

It may seem pedantic but this is a SERIOUS sourcebook here, not a game
where
we adopt the attitude 'ah shucks, who cares?' Canadians aren't going to
take
a sourcebook seriously that acts as though they don't exist and usupts
the
name of the continent they share for 'one' bit of the continent' just as
Scottish people will treat as rubbish a sourcebook that calls everyone
on
the island of Great Britain as english, Norwegians would hit the roof if
we
presumed that everyone in Scandanavia was Swedish, and the Portuguese
would
practically declare war (without even having a George Bush!) if we
called
everyone on Iberia Spanish.  (And anyone who talks about Ireland as
being
part of the British Isles - or worse still calls us 'British', which
still
happens, would be told in no uncertain manner to 'fuck off, you ignorant
wanker!')

So be VERY VERY careful with terminology, if you want Wikipedia to be
taken
seriously out there.

JT.


body:
> A suggestion was made to allow date strings to be wrapped in <date> -
> </date> tags which the Wikipediware will parse and render properly.  I
> have written a Perl routine to not only do this, but also return either
> the American or the European format, based on a flag set in each user's
> preferences.

> Questions:
> How would I go about adding this routine to the Wikipediware?
> Should I even bother adding this routine to the Wikipediware?

I don't want it. With some units (metres vs. feet etc.) I can understand
the desire to provide automatic conversion, because many Europeans don't
know the American system and vice versa. With dates, the common notations
are reaonably unambiguous -- any reader, once familiar with our notation,
can get used to it. As a German, I am already used to reading different
date styles in English texts (mostly "February 27, 2003", "2/27/2003" and
"27th of February, 2003" -- I haven't seen "27 February 2003" much, but
maybe I wasn't paying attention). Having a German-style date in an English
text (27. February 2003), on the other hand,  would look alien to me.

Adding <date> tags also further complicates our syntax at little benefit.
And I don't even want to think about converting all the existing dates.

What I do want is a consistent policy on the date style for each language.
We should hold a vote on each Wikipedia to determine the preferred style.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Date Formatter Written


from_name: Youandme

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Date Formatter Written

body:
On 27 Feb 2003 at 14:08, Sean Barrett wrote:

> Some discussion has occured in [[Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates
> and numbers)]] about the formats of dates; i.e., whether or not
> [[January 2]], [[2003]] is American-Imperialist.  (My feeling: yes,
> but that's not the only reason I like it.)
>
> A suggestion was made to allow date strings to be wrapped in <date> -
> </date> tags which the Wikipediware will parse and render properly.  I
> have written a Perl routine to not only do this, but also return
> either the American or the European format, based on a flag set in
> each user's preferences.
>
> Questions:
>
> How would I go about adding this routine to the Wikipediware?
>
> Should I even bother adding this routine to the Wikipediware?
>
> Does anyone care?

I have no time to follow the discussion you are talking about, but...
While making date syntax more general please remember
that there are other [[calendar]]s in usage around the world nowadays,
not only Western invention (ie. [[Gregorian calendar]])
The number of [[Islamic calendar]] + [[Chinese calendar]] calendar users
is quite impressive.

Regards
Youandme


from_name: Tom Parmenter

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Please use <!--HTML comments-->

in_reply_to:
<shheaprraq.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de> (message from Karl Eichwalder
	on Fri, 28 Feb 2003 04:57:01 +0100)

body:
|From: Karl Eichwalder <ke at gnu.franken.de>
|Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 04:57:01 +0100
|
|erik_moeller at gmx.de (Erik Moeller) writes:
|
|> I see in many articles that people add comments like: "To do: .." or
|> "needs to be expanded" or "who was this?".
|
|It's a good thing to display those remarks; don't hide them in comments!
|
|Otherwise it's a nice feature that we can write comments.
|
|--

The html comments are kind of cute, but the talk pages are a better
place for discussing the faults of articles.  Since there are very few
articles that couldn't be expanded or don't need work, comments,
displayed or not, don't add much.  If they are displayed, they look
kind of amateurish.

I usually edit out any unecessary html I find, and move comments like
"who is this?" to the talk page.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88


subject: [Wikipedia-l] A policy for albums

body:
I'm posting this to wikipedia-l as it concerns all Wikipedias; albums are
in that respect language independent.

As you may know, freedb.org provides a huge open content database of
existing music CDs. Overall, the statistics page currently lists 882172
individual CDs. For each album it provides the name, band, track
information (including length) and sometimes other details such as the
genre.

In part because FreeDB already exists, I believe we need a strict policy
against mere CD database entries for Wikipedia that provide no additional
information about an album. If there are no objections, I will create the
respective policy page on the English Wikipedia.

My reasoning:

1) If we imported all entries from FreeDB into Wikipedia, some facilities
of Wikipedia would become unusable. "Random page" would lose much of its
current value. The search would be massively slowed (because the database
size would drastically increase) and return many useless hits, because
song titles use pretty much every word in every language. Possible future
facilities such as an "Ancient pages" feature to view the pages that have
been edited the longest time ago would also be drastically impaired.

2) Much of the imported information would be neglected -- FreeDB database
entries are generated automatically by running an application on a
computer while a CD is inserted, which is why there are so many of them.
We cannot and should not keep up with this process. We would only
duplicate existing work.

3) Wikipedia is not a mirror for source material. As far as only album
data is entered, in my opinion the criterion of "source material" is
satisfied.

4) Not allowing the import of FreeDB entries but allowing manual entry of
album track lists is even worse. We create an extremely incomplete list,
and encourage our users to duplicate existing work.

What we should do instead, I think, is this:

1) Make a clear policy that pages which only contain track lists and
nothing else of value can be deleted (they still need to be put on the
"Votes for deletion" page or equivalent on other Wikipedias, but they can
be deleted quickly).

2) Make another policy that pages about bands should *not* contain links
to the individual albums. These links should be created on demand, not for
all album titles. Instead, add an external link to the FreeDB query for
that band to the band page.

3) Supply criteria for what kind of pages about albums are acceptable --
provide good examples. For instance, a detailed discussion of the music on
a particular album, with excerpted lyrics, notes etc. is certainly
acceptable. In such a discussion, a track listing could also be added to
the article.

Please note: This is not at all intended as an offense against the Albums
WikiProject. Good, comprehensive articles about albums should most
definitely be added. What I believe we should avoid is to turn Wikipedia
into Everything2 and to import everything that could possibly at some
point be turned into an article. This is also not a general policy against
bot import of articles, only in this case, where there is already a
collaborative open content project that fulfills the need perfectly and no
point for us to duplicate its work.

Even if this policy is not implemented, I will point out at this juncture
that I am strongly opposed to an import of the FreeDB data, should that
ever come up. But to be consistent and to avoid unnecessary work, I think
we should apply these rules even to existing, manually added album pages.

Regards,

Erik


body:
Wikipedia supports HTML comments. You can enclose text in
<!-- and -->. This means that while the text will still be visible in
wikisource, it will not be visible on the displayed page.

I see in many articles that people add comments like: "To do: .." or
"needs to be expanded" or "who was this?". Some pages also have "Notes to
Wikipedia editors" and the like.

In case of detailed discussions, this should of course be moved to the
Talk page. But if it is useful to have directly in the text but only
useful for editors, we should use HTML comments for these kind of meta-
remarks. A non Wikipedia editor should not be exposed to meta-content like
this.

So when you see such a remark and don't want to delete it, please enclose
it in <!-- and --> to hide it from the rendered page, but not from those
who edit it. You *must* use this exact character sequence, the shorter
<!- foo -> or other variants like <- foo -> will *not* work.

Thanks!

Erik


body:
> Erik Moeller writes

>> Yes, you can use Wikipedia articles. They are licensed under
>> the GNU Free Documentation License, which mainly means that
>> articles that use them also have to be FDL-licensed. Note that
>> the FDL does not mean that you "lose" your copyrights, only
>> that others will be able to copy and modify the so-
>> licensed text. We consider this fair:

> Not all of us, as fighting against intellectual property rights
> using the tools of intellectual property strikes some as hypocritical.

> Robert has of course the option to use for his translation tutorial
> only
> those Wikipedia texts that have been released into the public domain,

Are there any? I know that you release all of your contris into the public
domain, but once someone else starts working on them, they become FDL
licensed.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Wouter Vanden Hove

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] [robertocasiraghi@iol.it: Can Wikipedia articles
 be translated or "manipulated" to teach English?]

body:
>
>
>Not all of us, as fighting against intellectual property rights
>using the tools of intellectual property strikes some as hypocritical.
>

The most briljant move of the GPL is *using* the copyright framework in
order to reverse it.
It's not hypocritical, it's pure genius. It converts the public domain
from a
"tragedy of the commons" to a "comedy of the commons".

W.


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Date Formatter Written

body:
Brion Vibber <vibber at aludra.usc.edu> writes:

> Can I get them in 2003-01-02 format instead? :)

I'm all for it; cf. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 ; even in
Germany and in some other country it's an official notation (beside the
traditional way to write date and time).  In wikipedia article we can
use the ISO format and there could be a configuration option how the
reader likes to see the day.

Unfortuantely, hackers often are more biased in adopting the ISO style
than we, the normal crowd ;)

> A separate issue is presentation of dates in, for instance, recentchanges
> etc. I for one would prefer to see YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS everywhere.

Me too!

> But then, I leave my timezone setting at UTC so you know I'm a
> weirdo. ;)

--
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/             |   (*)/'(*)


in_reply_to:
<8ghSIyFhpVB@erik_moeller> (erik_moeller@gmx.de's message of
 "28 Feb 2003 02:16:00 +0100")

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

> I see in many articles that people add comments like: "To do: .." or
> "needs to be expanded" or "who was this?".

It's a good thing to display those remarks; don't hide them in comments!

Otherwise it's a nice feature that we can write comments.

--
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: james duffy

subject: [WikiEN-l] election

body:
I would be dead set against 'List of Americans'. America has two meanings.
It can be state-specific, the US, or geography-specific, the continent of
America. We have to be ultra-careful to remember that Wiki is meant to be a
world-wide sourcebook, which means avoiding causing (1) confusion, (2)
unnecessary offence, (3) inaccuracy.

'Claiming' US = America sets a precedent that poses the question, what to we
call the 'continent' and how do we refer to people on the continent who are
not resident in the US? 'Non-American Americans?'

This same problem exists on the island of Ireland.  Ireland can mean one
island or two political entities, Northern Ireland and the Republic of
Ireland, with half the people on Northern Ireland not wanting to be called
Irish (and taking high offence in being called Irish) and half 'demanding'
it. The solution there is to call the political entities by their formal
name, and the geographic entity (the island) simply as Ireland. (And run a
mile from a 'List of Irish people' - Calling Ian Paisley Irish and you'd be
picking your teeth up from the ground. Call Gerry Adams 'British' and you'd
be trying to find your kneecaps!)

The same is true in the UK. England is NOT the island it is on. Using
England to mean everyone on the island on Great Britain 'english' is liable
to get you a punch in the face from people in Scotland and Wales, who will
tell you 'we are bloody well not English and how dare you suggest it!' Just
because a lot of people thousands of miles might call everyone from that
island 'English' would be NO EXCUSE for us doing it. Ditto with America.
Call the geographic entity 'America' but those who could from the various
counties/states by the political entity, US, Canada, Mexico.

It may seem pedantic but this is a SERIOUS sourcebook here, not a game where
we adopt the attitude 'ah shucks, who cares?' Canadians aren't going to take
a sourcebook seriously that acts as though they don't exist and usupts the
name of the continent they share for 'one' bit of the continent' just as
Scottish people will treat as rubbish a sourcebook that calls everyone on
the island of Great Britain as english, Norwegians would hit the roof if we
presumed that everyone in Scandanavia was Swedish, and the Portuguese would
practically declare war (without even having a George Bush!) if we called
everyone on Iberia Spanish.  (And anyone who talks about Ireland as being
part of the British Isles - or worse still calls us 'British', which still
happens, would be told in no uncertain manner to 'fuck off, you ignorant
wanker!')

So be VERY VERY careful with terminology, if you want Wikipedia to be taken
seriously out there.

JT.

>
>
>The first one is stupid, the second one is all right, I suggested [[List of
>people from the United States]], and nobody even commented on that.
>
>Zoe
>
>
>  mail <pholango at yahoo.com> wrote:it looks like we will have a vote to
>decide what to
>call notable u.s. citizens. the top two choices are
>"people from the united states" or "americans"
>
>[[Talk:List of United States people]]
>
>__________________________________________________
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from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] 142

body:
Dan Keshet wrote:
> many times, but could not enforce consistently because he's coming
> in through a popular dial-up service.

My main concern here is that we ought to be careful that we don't
unfairly assume that anyone coming through sympatico is the same
person.  Can we more completely characterize "bad 142" so that we're
generally aware of strengths and weaknesses?

If "bad 142" is reading this, and is offended, then I recommend that
he or she get an anonymous email account -- a throwaway hotmail
account would do -- and come here and chat about it.  Educate us.

I can really understand concern for privacy and anonymity.  I
understand it a lot less in this context than in most, because what
we're doing is as uncontroversial as stamp collecting in most
jurisdictions.  But if people want privacy and anonymity, hey, that's
great with me, because I support those things generally.

But this idea "I won't log in because I don't want to be tracked"
doesn't really make sense.  From the viewpoint of privacy and
anonymity, it's exactly backwards.  It's a real pain in the neck for
anyone, even me, to figure out an ip number for a logged in user, by
the design of the software.

The only reason I can think of for someone like this to not want to
log in is a reason that I don't think we can say is valid: the desire
to make independent edits that are not watched by the community.
Someone with a bad mission, either vandalism or pov, may want to pop
in numerous times and make edits without anyone realizing it's the
same person again.

--Jimbo


in_reply_to: <r5in0kh4hvh.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk>; from wiki@gwowen.freeserve.co.uk on Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 07:56:50PM +0000

body:
Gads, I don't know how I missed this stuff the first time around.
These are hysterical, everyone of them in their own way.

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_suggestions--humorous_logos


in_reply_to: <1046407591.2124.0.camel@frank.vibber.org>; from brion@pobox.com on Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 08:46:32PM -0800

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> > Not all of us, as fighting against intellectual property rights
> > using the tools of intellectual property strikes some as hypocritical.
>
> It might, if this were a project that fights against intellectual
> property rights. It isn't. It's a project that fights *for* intellectual
> property rights *for everyone*.

I prefer Brion's formulation, if I had to pick one, but I feel
compelled to say here that we're not *primarily* a project that
"fights" for or against anything related to intellectual property
rights.  We're primarily a free encyclopedia.  If our work has some
beneficial educational effects on people's thinking about how
copyrights should be handled, that's a good thing, too.

--Jimbo