subject: [WikiEN-l] Is this NPOV?

body:
I disagree, Peter.

The main difference between these examples is the amount of
literature available about them, and how widely have these been
written about it in scholarly articles, books, etc. A simple Goggle
test shows that Simon Kimbangu draws 44 results in search (first two
results are from Wikipedia!), while "Sathya Sai Baba draws 364,000
results, and Prem Rawat 219,000 results.

IMO, the isssue is not one of "undue weight" or discrepancies of size
between articles of religions leaders, providing of course that
material used to support the article is well sourced and referenced,
the article is not too self-serving and it is written in a neutral
voice.

-- Jossi

On May 10, 2006, at 5:33 AM, Peter Jacobi wrote:

> If you compare some biographies of gods, gurus or religious
> leaders of denominations in the 100.000 to 10.000.000
> adherents range, there are huge discrepancies in size:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Kimbangu
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%AA_V%C4%83n_Trung
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatius_Zakka_I_Iwas
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sathya_Sai_Baba
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prem_Rawat


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Copyright?

body:
On 5/10/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> "Assume good faith" ignores one important fact: people lie.

"Assume good faith" doesn't mean, believe that someone is telling the
truth despite all evidence to the contrary. It simply means, make a
reasonable effort to interpret people's actions, in the absence of
other evidence, in a positive way. If someone claims to be Celine
Dion, by all  means, be skeptical - but don't block them right off the
bat.

Steve


from_name: Cheney Shill

subject: [WikiEN-l] Is this NPOV?

body:
Jossi Fresco <jossifresco at mac.com> wrote:

    There has been a huge effort to make this article compliant with WP
    content policies. Recently, an attempt to informal mediation took
    place, but unfortunately the mediator had to step down for personal
    reasons. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BostonMA/Mediation

I agree with you.  It looks relatively compliant.  I'm not saying that it couldn't become more NPOV, only that compared to other articles on religious icons, especially those of western-european religions with large followings, the article is equally NPOV.~~~~Pro-Lick

---------------------------------
Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. PC-to-Phone calls for ridiculously low rates.


subject: [WikiEN-l] We need a policy against vote-stacking

body:
On 5/10/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> If anyone works out a way to quantify sanity, they'll win a Nobel Prize.

Point 16: Candidate must appear, through Wikipedia interactions, to be
relatively sane.

Steve


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Copyright question - illegal publications

body:
On 5/10/06, zero 0000 <nought_0000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> In Palestine, then under a Mandate from the League
> of Nations.  So the legal regime at the time has also
> been long ago terminated.  The copyright regulations
> of the time would have been inherited from the
> Ottoman empire, unless the British administration
> specifically changed them.
>
> Zero.

Oh man. I don't know ottoman copyright stuff at all. Under british I'd
guess the original would still be convered by copyright. However I
think this is a case that would require a lawyer.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV majorities/minorities

body:
jf_wikipedia at mac.com wrote:

    On May 9, 2006, at 9:07 PM, Cheney Shill wrote:
    > with it. This email subject is very clearly about applying
    > existing policy and how consensus obstructs and interferes with
    > doing so. I do appreciate you providing an interactive case
    > study.~~~~Pro-Lick

    Is this an argument for the sake if argument? The explanations given
    by several editors is pretty clear, and I fail to understand what
    your point is. Can you succintly explain what is your concern and
    what is your proposal (if you have any) to ameliorate the situation?

No.

This subthread got tied up in a discussion of a belief by Fastfission that everything - every article, every article section - is subject to "social interaction", which seems to be Fastfission's term for consensus.

This thread, however, is about the application of undue weight per the NPOV policy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view#Undue_weight
It has already been determined by consensus.  Not just any scrambled together consensus over a brief period, but including Jimmy too, so trying to undo it with consensus is the same as trying to rewrite policy on the fly and contradicting actual Wikipedia consensus.  Basically, it's an argument that you can apply policy however the current majority of an article sees fit.  Applying the same principle to the current AFD discussion, it's an argument to just count votes.

My proposal remains the same.  Keep consensus out of application of policy as it applies to article content ("Article standards") and leave it with the overall determination of policy and "Working with others".

To quote the consensus guideline itself:
"It is assumed that editors working toward consensus are pursuing a consensus that is consistent with Wikipedia's basic policies and principles - especially NPOV."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Consensus#Consensus_vs._other_policies

"Wikipedia is not a majoritarian democracy, so simple vote-counting should never be the key part of the interpretation of a debate."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Consensus#Consensus_vs._supermajority

The essential problem is that this is repeatedly ignored.  Amelioration involves removing (or at least reducing significantly) ambiguity about this so that consensus is "consistent with Wikipedia's basic policies".

---------------------------------
Love cheap thrills? Enjoy PC-to-Phone  calls to 30+ countries for just 2?/min with Yahoo! Messenger with Voice.


from_name: Chris Lüer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia-X-Files

body:
At 05:45 AM 5/10/2006, Mathias Schindler wrote:

>How the death after a gene therapy was first kept secret and made
>public anonymously via Wikipedia - for 16 minutes

mscrm.de makes several TV news shows. Journalists often learn about
news items that they can't use for the same reasons that Wikipedia
can't use them -- because there is no reliable source, and they will
get in trouble if it turns out to be wrong.

Many people must have known that this gene therapy patient died.
His/her relatives, hospital staff. I would guess that one of them
called a news reporter, who couldn't use the information because the
caller was anonymous and the official sources were still denying it.
So he decided to post it to Wikipedia and see what happened.

         Chl


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Elliott F. Cable

subject: [Wikitech-l] title case mapping and Wiktionary links

body:
I have to say I agree with timwi (-:

On May 10, 2006, at 10:09 AM, Timwi wrote:

>
>> (Someone might ask, "Why provide an interactive question and a link;
>> why not just quietly redirect?"  But that defeats the purpose of
>> being
>> caseful and makes it difficult or impossible to create a second entry
>> with the other case.  If you're going to redirect in this case, you
>> might as well turn on $wgCapitalLinks and be done with it.)
>
> I cannot follow this line of reasoning. The purpose of "being
> caseful",
> as you call it, is to have (1) correct article titles, and (2) the
> potential capability of having separate entries differing only in
> their
> capitalisation. Neither of two have anything to do with redirects.
>
> I would favour an approach where, if the user visits a title that
> doesn't exist but the same title with different capitalisation does
> exist, the software pretends there was a redirect, and displays the
> "redirected from" message that allows you to click back to the
> original
> title in case you actually need to create a separate article. I would
> actually favour the same approach on Wikipedia too.
>
> Timwi
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


body:
which is why I like his idea of treating them as redirects - just
same link (appears in the upper-right hand of the content area in
Monobook) as normal user-created redirects.
On May 10, 2006, at 10:39 AM, Steve Summit wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>> I cannot follow this line of reasoning. The purpose of "being
>> caseful",
>> as you call it, is to have (1) correct article titles, and (2) the
>> potential capability of having separate entries differing only in
>> their
>> capitalisation.
>
> Indeed.
>
> My worry -- which I may not have thought through far enough --
> was that if there was *too* much mapping from the case variant
> that didn't exist to the case variant that did, it would be
> impossible to create that second entry differing only in its
> capitalization.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Justin Cormack

body:
On 10 May 2006, at 03:04, zero 0000 wrote:

>
> I'm hoping someone here can help non a copyright issue.
>
> I want to post a translation (probably on Wikiquote) of
> an article of just over a page that appeared in an illegal
> newspaper in 1943.  There is no author given and the
> underground organization which published the newspaper
> disbanded in 1948.   The article has substantial historical
> importance.
>
> Can I do it legally?  I can't see any explicit clauses in
> copyright legislation that would exclude illegal publications
> from copyright protection, but it is the sort of thing that
> might have come up in court cases.
>
> Any pointers would be appreciated.

If you make the translation, thats no problem at all. The
original author has no rights over translations.

Justinc


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability equating to notability

body:
On 5/10/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/10/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > It's just as easy to say that "being a city isn't notable" or "being a
> > high school district isn't notable" or "being a Pokemon card isn't
> > notable" or "being a Korean children's science-fiction film directed
> > by Kim Cheong-gi and starring Shim Hyung-rae isn't notable" or "being
> > a seiy? isn't notable".
>
> Being a Pokemon card produced by the official makers of Pokemon is
> pretty notable.

I agree that it's notable, but that doesn't mean it isn't quite likely
that there are others who disagree.

> In any case, there is widespread support for the idea
> that certain types of entities escape notability criteria and are
> included for completeness.  Less support for actually formalising what
> those entities might be :)
>
Sure, there's a loud group of people who feel that certain types of
articles should be deleted from Wikipedia.  A lot of them use the
terminology "not notable" to designate those types of articles that
they feel shouldn't be included.

> > Click on random page a few times.  I don't see an indisputable claim
> > to notability for any of the articles I managed to hit.
>
> Heh. "Random page" has never been used as a sign of what a good page
> *should* be.
>
If the vast majority of random pages are candidates for speedy
deletion, then the deletion mechanisms of Wikipedia are utterly
broken.

> > I don't know of a poll to determine if your speculation as to the
> > Wikipedia editors opinion is correct.  In fact, I think a significant
> > portion of Wikipedia editors *does* feel that we should have a
> > Wikipedia article on all chemists.  Not that I think inclusion in
> > Wikipedia should be decided by a poll in the first place.
> >
> > I'd bet there are less than a million chemists in the world.  Not that
> > it matters, I don't see any reason why being in a group which consists
> > of "millions" does not amount to notability.
>
> I'm confused by what is meant by "chemist" here. To me it normally
> means a pharmacist - someone who has a pharmacology degree and sells
> headache pills to customers. If you're talking about published
> academics, that's different...
>
I'm using the term chemist to mean the same as it means in the US
government job occupation database.  In that database, there are
listed to be 90,000 chemists in the US.

> > There is no such high school as Whateverville high school, so that's
> > patently absurd.
>
> Let's work together, eh?
>
Choose a stupid hypothetical, get a stupid result.

> > As for my definition of notability, unless someone else comes up with
> > a better one (which was one of the goals of this thread), I'd say
> > notability = worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia.  Since I think every
> > high school student who plays football and listens to RHCP should be
> > included in Wikipedia, I think they're all notable.
>
> That's sort of ok, but leads to a circular reference ("we only include
> people who are notable. what's notable? people worthy of inclusion").
> It would just cause us to seek another word to explain *why* someone
> is worthy of inclusion. "Interesting" etc.
>
Well sure, I don't think the term "notable" is useful.  And I don't
think it should be used in a speedy deletion criterion.  Because, like
you say, it's circular reasoning.

> Better to say: We include things in Wikipedia because either:
> a) They're inherently notable amongst their class
> b) Because they are part of a class small enough that it's feasible
> and worthwhile including all members
> c) Because it would offend too many people to remove them
>
You might want to say that, but I don't think it's true.  If it was,
then you could point to a number of members of the class that is a
cutoff, and there wouldn't be significant deviations on either side.
There are probably a lot more baseball players than there are haz-mat
- is a haz-mat driver part of a class small enough that it's feasible
to include all the members.

And then, your criteria are just as circular as my definition.  What
is "inherently notable amongst their class"?  What makes a class
"worthwhile" to talk about?

> Of course I don't think all high school students who play football are
> notable, and they don't meet the other two criteria either.
>
Well, I think they are.  I also think it's feasible and worthwhile to
include all members, at least all members that something verifiable
can be written about (and that wouldn't amount to a violation of
privacy rights).

> >From my understanding of Wikipedia policies, the default presumption
> > is *always* inclusion.  It used to be a sentence directly in the
> > policy: "When in doubt, don't delete."  I haven't bothered to check
> > whether that sentence has been deleted or not.
>
> There have been edit wars over it.
>
> Steve


from_name: Mark Bergsma

subject: [Wikitech-l] 10k

body:
Jeff Carr wrote:

>> today we came over 10k HTTP requests per second

> Wow. That is a cool statistic. Way to go on tuning those systems.
> *10k/sec is a lot* Time to think about writing an article for the Linux
> Journal? Hmmm, "Performance Tuning at the Wikipedia"...

Yeah but it's old news, we're at 12k/s already... ;)

--
Mark

mark at nedworks.org


list: commons-l

from_name: David Benbennick

subject:
[Commons-l] Implementing a "soft block" (blocked from uploading
	only)

body:
On 5/10/06, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> >From my extremely limited knowledge of MediaWiki, it seems like the
> solution would be to create a usergroup 'bannedupload', and the only
> different permission they have is ['upload'] = false.
>
> But I don't know who has permission to change user groups (ie
> add/remove people). Probably Bureaucrats by default since they make
> sysops and bots.

Nope, not Bureaucrats.  Bureaucrats only have access to
[[Special:Makesysop]], [[Special:Makebot]], and
[[Special:Renameuser]].  Possibly Stewards at Meta could do it.


body:
On 10 May 2006, at 11:07, Steve Bennett wrote:

> On 5/10/06, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
>> If you make the translation, thats no problem at all. The
>> original author has no rights over translations.
>
> I think you might be mistaken - that would lead to a logical
> contradiction, as you could translate back into the original language,
> and claim copyright over the result, which would be very similar to
> the original.

Hmm, further research suggests I am wrong.

http://www.artslaw.com.au/ArtLaw/Archive/01Translations.asp

You own the copyright in the translation, but it can still
infringe on the copyright of the original.

Justinc


from_name: Mathias Schindler

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia-X-Files

body:
Just when you think you've seen it all.

This is the spookiest story I've experienced in Wikipedia so far. And
it began just harmless.

On April 7, 2006, we received an email in the OTRS queue:

> wir von Planetopia Online planen einen Beitrag ?ber Wikipedia und unter
> anderem auch ?ber einige Fake-Eintr?ge der Seite.
> Ich habe im Humorarchiv einen Artikel gelesen, der den Namen
> "Schnorchelspinne" tr?gt. Meines Wissens ist der Artikel schon gel?scht...

(rough translation: We from Planetopia Online are planning an article
about wikipedia and among it, about some fake entries on this page. I
have seen the article "Schnorchelspinne" (snorkel spider) in the
BJAODN archive. AFAIK, this article has been deleted.)

The OTRS people made a formal and friendly reply to his comments and
questions, trying to explain it and so on.

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Avatar/Planetopia

On April 10, 2006, a posting appeared on a German BBS:

http://www.winfuture-forum.de/index.php?act=ST&f=1&t=69191

wir von Planetopia Online suchen Menschen, die negative Erfahrungen
mit Wikipedia gemacht haben. Gesucht werden demnach alle, die dort in
irgendeiner Form verleumdet wurden, deren Angaben unberechtigt als
falsch gewertet wurden oder die durch falsche Angaben Probleme
bekommen haben. Sollte jemand Interesse haben, seinen Fall vor der
Kamera zu schildern und uns bei unserem Beitrag zu unterst?tzen, w?rde
ich mich ?ber eine Email freuen.

(rough translation: "we from Planetopia Online are looking for people
who made negative experiences with Wikipedia. We are looking therefore
for all who were libelled in any way, whose data were unjustified
considered wrong or who experienced problems due to wrong information.
In case someone has interest in sharing his case in front of a TV
camera and in supporting our broadcast, I am thankful for an email")

Planetopia is a TV magazine in Germany's private TV station "Sat 1"
which has worked hard in getting a certain reputation in the last
years.

However, the story about Planetopia (google for it, the second hit is
"Planetopia lies") preparing an article about made it to the german
language blogosphere with the usual kind of response.

On April 12, 2006, I was on recentchanges patrol and a friend came
across a rather interesting edit:

http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gentherapie&diff=15597765&oldid=15496532

The article is about Gene therapy and consists maily about the
technology itself and 2 gene therapy projects. The edit was adding the
following sentence:

>Am 12.04.2006 ist einer der beiden erfolgreich therapierten Patienten
aus noch ungekl?rten Umst?nden verstorben.

(rough translation: On April 12, one of the patients who were
successfully treated, died for unknown reasons)

The edit came from IP 62.206.89.218. As the edit was without a source
and other news sources did not contain this story or anything similar,
I decided to revert this edit and asked the IP on his user talk page
for a source.

There was no reply.

As it turns out, the information was (mostly) correct - the patient
had died on April 10.

The information about the death of this patient was first released to
other scientists on a conference 13 days later. A journalist picked it
up and it became a public information on April 27.

Here is the strange part: The header files from the author from
planetopia's email reveal that the email was sent from 62.206.89.218.

The IP is some kind of proxy server (mail.mscrm.de) belonging to a
company in the city of Mainz which is producing the Sat1 regional news
and Planetopia.
http://www.mediaservicecenter.de/main.php?page=fernseh_main

The story about Wikipedia as an encyclopedia which has scooped even
the scientific community for two weeks has now hit the media again:

S?ddeutsche Zeitung (quality paper from Munich) has a story in today's issue:

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wissen/artikel/519/75444/
Medienkrimi in Frankfurt
Wer wann was wusste

Wie ein Todesfall nach einer Gentherapie zun?chst verheimlicht und bei
Wikipedia anonym ?ffentlicht gemacht wurde ? f?r 16 Minuten.

Media thriller in Frankfurt
Who knew when what

How the death after a gene therapy was first kept secret and made
public anonymously via Wikipedia - for 16 minutes

----

>From a Wikipedia point of view, it was correct to remove this sentence
as there was no other source to confirm it. Even if the information
was correct. It is still unknown who exactly made this edit but the
link to Planetopia is simply amazing. I think I will pass this file to
Scully and Moulder.


from_name: Shinjiman

subject: [Wikitech-l]The lang tag in <HTML> ain't identical	to	$wgContLanguageCode

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

>
> Shinjiman wrote:
> > The issue has been mentioned at
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-
> > l/2006-March/034397.html in wikitecl-l, and also in BugZilla:5790
> > http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5790.
> >
> > Hi all,
> >
> > As I've mention that pages above, some Wiki sites has the incorrect lang
tags
> > which neither assiciated with ISO-693 nor IANA language tags. So I've
examined
> > this issue, and have a patch sibmitted to BugZilla. However the patch I've
> > made cannot be accepted as Brian said that this would break up the caching
> > system.
>
> There was not any such patch for this, and it would be totally unnecessary to
> make one. Just let us know what the incorrect ones are and we'll fix the
> configuration.
>
> Are you maybe thinking of the patch for something totally different which
tries
> to guess the visitor's language variant and change the lang attribute based
on it?
>

For Example:
For Simple English Wikipedia, it's show the lang tag as "simple" which do not
exists neither ISO639 nor IANA language tag tag. For 'Simple English', the
lang code should be "en" (English).

And for Traditional Chinese readers reads a Traditional Chinese webpage, it's
supposed to read a page using the Traditional Chinese font. However this does
not apply to Wikipedia (and various wiki site running MediaWiki). As the
Chinese Wikipedia (and various Chinese based wiki sites that running
MediaWiki) has been introduced the LanguageConverter class. The lang tag
is "zh" (Chinese). It's not the problem for the Simplified Chinese readers
while the (major) browsers will using the Simplified Chinese fonts. However,
it's having a problem for Traditional Chinese readers to reading the Chinese
context using a Simplified Chinese font.

As your opinion mentioned, to use the language variant to determine the
language code that the user is using, it's quite impossible to determine the
lang tag by languge variant. Since currently many users in Chinese Wikipedia
sets to disable the language variant by default because the Chinese words
conversion cause much problems currently have. (This is the main point of the
issue) Including me, I'am also using a Traditional Chinese (UI language = zh-
hk) interface language and _without enable_ any of language variants (Variant
= zh). So as the patch I've submitted, it's not to determine the lang tag only
by the language variant, but checks with both interface language and
$wgContLanguageCode (Global interface language).

So summarising my statement above, I've suggested to adding a new attribute to
assign the lang tag correctly, by using arrays, or something like to provides
a similar functionally. For example:

 Language code            | Language tag
 -------------------------+----------------------------------------------
  en                      | en
  de                      | de
  simple (Simple English) | en
  zh-cn                   | zh-cn <= originally supposed to be zh-hans (R1)
  zh-sg                   | zh-sg <= originally supposed to be zh-hans (R1)
  zh-tw                   | zh-hant
  zh-hk                   | zh-hant
  zh-mo                   | zh-hant
  zh-min-nan              | zh-hant <= (R2)
  zh-yue                  | zh-hant <= (R2)

*Remarks:
 1. The tags is used as zh-cn/zh-sg instead of zh-hans for browsers
compatibility (likely IE6 will misunderstand the zh-hans lang tag).
 2. The tags is used as zh-hant instead of zh-min-nan/zh-yue browsers
compatibility (likely both IE/Firefox will misunderstand both zh-min-nan and
zh-yue lang tag).

For that table about is about to construct a lang tag mapping against various
languages.

And after this kind of language mapping is done, it's need to modify the
OutputPage.php (for older skins) and Monobook.php (for newer skins) to output
the <html xml:lang"XXX" lang="XXX"> correctly ("XXX" is the correct lang code
instead using the $wgContLanguageCode directly) to address this issue.

Hope my information I've proveded would help you to ongoing and addressing
this kind of issue more smoothly. :)

regards
Shinjiman


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] SoC: MediaWiki Export

body:
Jay R. Ashworth schrieb:
> On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 05:26:12PM +0100, Ben Francis wrote:
>
>> Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
>>
>>> I've
>>> badly wanted to see something like this for some time, and would be
>>> glad (with 20 years system analyst experience :-) to kibitz on the
>>> design, if you like.
>>>
>> That's cool, thanks.
>>
>>
>>> My personal target was mostly being able to extract a partial tree from
>>> a running MW install, and dump it into a DocBook source file,
>>>
>> When you say a "partial" tree, how would you define the boundaries of
>> said tree?
>>
>
> Well, this is where you diverge from the translation part to the
> extraction part, the part I don't think Magnus' tool deals with yet
> (though I haven't looked deeply into it).
>
BTW, the tool has now moved to
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/wiki2xml/w2x.php

The current version can also work as an extension within a MediaWiki
installation, where it appears as a Special Page. Just put some
link/button into your MediaWiki skin, and you have your export :-)
> There are 2 issues that I can see, off hand:
>
> 	1) Limiting what you extract (and handling it properly, viz a
> 	viz, say, "actual pages" vs "glossary items", and suchlike)
>
> 	and
>
> 	2) Properly handling cross references
>
When my tool coverts all given articles into XML, it keeps a record of
the converted article names. IIRC, the DocBook export then creates
internal links to articles that have been converted. This works nicely
in DocBook-based HTML and PDFs, for example.
> The first can probably be handled by category tagging and some
> configuration files; the latter will likely require some indepth
> knowledge of how DocBook handles such things, since you can't do
> hyperlinks on many of DocBook's target formats (like, um, paper :-),
> and you can't bind traditional cross-references until you have real
> page numbers.
>
Just put an arrow in front of a reference ;-)
> On the specific issue of trimming the tree, part of it is going to have
> to be discipline on the part of the maintainers of the wiki not to
> introduce loops -- it will likely be necessary to have a pre-pass
> switch on the driver engine that extracts and displays the "table of
> contents" in a raw unnumbered mode (in addition, of course, to one that
> generates a formattable ToC) so you can see if it ever ends.
>
It might be best to have a starting page (Main Page), use every link on
there as level one, every link on these as level two etc. Or use CatScan
(on the toolserver as well, somewhere;-) to get a category tree.

A simple way to pass this to my script would then be putting spaces in
front of the article names - one space per depth. Leading spaces Should
be filtered out right now, but I could make them part of the XML output.

In case you didn't know, my script can do a full conversion, e.g.
XML->DocBook->PDF, if configured properly. I have a local test setup on
a Window$ machine with some out-of-the-box tools to do the last step,
just didn't bother to do that on my test site, since I don't really have
experience with DocBook...

Magnus

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body:
On 5/10/06, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
> If you make the translation, thats no problem at all. The
> original author has no rights over translations.

I think you might be mistaken - that would lead to a logical
contradiction, as you could translate back into the original language,
and claim copyright over the result, which would be very similar to
the original.

Steve


from_name: Denny Vrandecic

subject: [Wikitech-l] Developing an extension in the Mediawiki SVN?

body:
Hello all,

sorry if this Mail should reach you twice. My connection is somewhat
less then spectacular these days, and so sometimes I am not sure if a
Mail got through or not.

I am [[en:Denny]], one of the developers of the Semantic Mediawiki
extension to the Mediawiki code. Right now, we are using the
SourceForge-CVS service for the development of our code. As you know,
this sucks a whole lot.

We would like to ask kindly if we may move from the SF CVS to the
MediaWiki SVN and continue to develop there, as a module. If there are
any requirements we have to fulfill, or anything else we have to do,
please tell us so. The license is the same as Mediawiki, so I guess
there should be no problem with that part. 'twould be great if this were
possible?

Thanks in advance,
Denny Vrandecic


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] The lovely world of celebrities

body:
Mathias Schindler wrote:

>"Meantime, I left the Time Warner center just as my pal Ann Coulter
>was busy chastising Jimmy Wales about her Wikipedia entry, and finding
>out from him how to change it.
>
Does anybody else find it interesting how so many of these people's
top concerns about WP revolve around the articles about themselves?
No doubt Coulter could find a thousand articles that represent
conservative viewpoints poorly and need improvement, but in this
little episode she reveals what she really cares about the most.

Stan


from_name: Andreas Hoerstemeier

subject: [WikiEN-l] Zergeisterung

body:
A massive cross-language spam run has been done with the article
[[en:zergeisterung]], which has become a blocked lemma in the German
wikipedia some time ago already as being an invented term without any
sources. Now almost every Wikipedia has both a [[Zergeisterung]] and
[[Talk:Zergeisterung]], containing the text which is currently on Afd
already (and looks like it will be a clear delete), or even worse a
babelfish translate. As it is very tedious to blank the text in each
edition manually, and then it isn't gone completely anyway - is the
cleanup of this mess a possible action which can be done by a beaurocrat?

Bye,
    [[User:Ahoerstemeier]]


from_name: jf_wikipedia at mac.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Category:Criminals // Category:American Criminals

body:
I would like to hear your opinion on these categories and their
compliance with [[Wikipedia:Categorization of people]]
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorization_of_people)

My concern is that people are using Category:Criminals //
Category:American Criminals as a way to push negative POVs aginst
such persons (regardless if the person is alive or dead). The reason
for  my concern is that it indiscriminately group people as diverse
as  person that was convicted from stealing a pair of jeans at Wal-
Mart with serial killers, rapists and the like.

See for example the bio of [[Ron_Karenga]] (http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Ron_Karenga). In his biography it is described that "in 1965,
and in 1971 was convicted of felony assault of two of the group's
female members, for which he spent time in prison", so he was added
to the Category:Criminals. That IMO, is not acceptable.

One possibility would be to restrict the addition to people to the
main category "Criminals" and request that people are added to a
specific sub-category of[[:Category:Criminals]]. And if such sub-
category does not exists, either to create a new subcat, or simply
not adding a category.

I am interested to hear what other editors think on this matter, and
what can be done to curtail abuse of this category.

-- Jossi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Is this NPOV?

body:
Peter Jacobi wrote:

>
>Quite often, when I stumble by accident into an article,
>perhaps interwiki-ing from/to de.wikipedia, I find dozens
>of weblinks and not a single book given, even when they are
>easy to find, even for me.
>
>At some point of time we must stop trying to evolve
>into a backup copy of the WWW and draw from other
>sources.
>
Amen to that, and there are a bunch of editors who've evolved past
the "first 10 hits from Google" stage. It's remarkable how little is
online, compared to a university library; try picking random pages
of random books, oftentimes the net might have a mention of a word
or two, but none of the page's factual content.

Stan


subject: [WikiEN-l] systemic bias

body:
Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:

    On 10/05/06, Raphael Wegmann wrote:
    > Since the majority within the Wikipedia community is Christian,
    > I don't see much disrespect towards them.

    Considering that 67.4% of statistics (incl. this) are pulled out of
    people's backsides, can we have something to support that claim?

This seemed an interesting enough question, so...
Currently 740 active admins.  So I decided to sample.  Everyone on the arbitration committee was sampled, a few admins active on this list, several I've personally come accross while editing articles, and a few random clicks down the admin list.  Yes, you and JZG were included.  No regular users.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_administrators
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitrators

Christian 6
Jewish 0
Muslim 0
Hindu 0
Buddhist 0
Atheist 2
Unknown - based in a judeochristian country 19
Unknown - based in a non-judeochristian country 1
~~~~Pro-Lick

---------------------------------
Love cheap thrills? Enjoy PC-to-Phone  calls to 30+ countries for just 2?/min with Yahoo! Messenger with Voice.


from_name: Minh Nguyen

body:
Steve Summit wrote:
> Elliott Cable wrote:
>> What are these {{#if things and lcfirst and all that? I don't
>> remember these... am I totally missing something?
>
> #if is brand new; see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ParserFunctions
> for info.  I haven't found {lcfirst} yet, but I expect it'll be
> pretty obvious once I start looking.

<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Magic_words#Formatting>.

--
Minh Nguyen <mxn at zoomtown.com>
AIM: trycom2000; Jabber: mxn at myjabber.net; Blog: http://mxn.f2o.org/


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Regarding "civility"

body:
I am somewhat at a loss as to how the arbitration request regarding
Monicasdude has anything to do with mental disability. It seems to
have a lot more to do with him being nasty about nominations for
deletion.

Fred

On May 8, 2006, at 12:07 PM, Wiliam J. Clinton wrote:

> I was disgusted, but not terribly surprised, to see that six
> members of the
> Arbitration Committee -- Dmcdevit, Fred Bauder, JamesF/James D.
> Forrester,
> Sean Barrett/The Epopt, Charles Matthews and Jayjg -- condone hate
> speech
> and hateful epithets directed at the mentally disabled, and consider
> condemnation of that hate speech to be unacceptable behavior on
> Wikipedia --
> behavior, in fact, so unacceptable that they say they find it a
> compelling
> reason to punish me.
>
> I was a bit more surprised when an earlier form of this letter
> (differing
> only in describing the status of the pending arbitration, aside
> from this
> paragraph) was banned without explantion from the Wikipedia mailing
> list
> where such topics could supposedly be discussed. But I was appalled
> when
> discussions on that list, regarding a named editor, turned to open
> derision
> of the editor's supposed emotional/mental impairments, and that one
> Arbitration Committee member participated in the abuse.
>
> As someone who has been involved for more than thirty years,
> professionally
> and nonprofessionally, in attempting to protect and to advance the
> rights of
> the mentally disabled, and as someone who for many years has
> served, and
> continues to serve as a guardian for such disabled members of my
> community.
> I find the use of such epithets grossly offensive; they are clearly
> inconsistent with Wikipedia's supposed commitment to civility. They
> form no
> part of civil discourse in any circumstances. They are particularly
> deserving of condemnation because they are directed toward, in very
> real
> terms attack, and have the greatest tendency to injure, a class of
> people
> who are less able, sometimes unable, to defend themselves, to
> resist the
> impact, or to respond on equal terms. [And, as a note to the
> politically
> correct, it is for that reason that I will not use the abominable term
> "mentally challenged," because it denies (sometimes grossly
> minimizes) the
> imbalances of social power that inhere in the relationships between
> the
> mentally disabled and the "unchallenged" elements of any community.]
>
> It should be no secret, no obscure facet of social fabric, that the
> mentally
> disabled, particularly the mentally retarded, are at greater risk than
> almost any other segment of a society.  More likely to be the
> victims of
> physical attacks. More likely to be neglected by governments,
> particularly
> when their needs are greatest.  In the relatively rare instances
> when they
> have substantial assets, they are more likely to have their assets
> stolen,
> particularly at the hands of those actors on whom a government has
> conferred
> power over them. They are more likely to be degraded and exploited by
> industries which purport to protect them and to serve their
> interests. More
> like to be the victims of sexual assaults, particularly of
> organized, group
> sexual assaults.
>
> The casual use of such hateful epithets does not only harm the
> individuals
> it targets. It causes pain, often great pain to many others. It
> regularly
> inflicts pain on those with brothers and sisters, with parents, with
> children, with friends, with acquaintances, even with clients, who are
> abused and dehumanized by such behavior. It regularly inflicts pain
> on so
> many of those who deal, day by day, with lesser mental and emotional
> impairments, whether they choose to acknowledge those impairments,
> publicly
> or privately, or not.
>
> I am quite proud that a self-styled community which apparently
> condones such
> behavior and condemns opposition to it finds me such a danger to it
> and its
> values that it is preparing to forcibly separate me from it.
> Nothing I have
> contributed to this curious place makes me more proud, and I doubt
> anything
> else could.
>
> User: Monicasdude
>
> Not licensed, no rights released
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Philip Welch

subject: [WikiEN-l] Regarding "civility"

body:
On May 10, 2006, at 11:55 AM, Katefan0 wrote:

> I suspect he was referring to the recent thread(s) regarding Julie
> Harding.
>
> k

It was a tangential issue in his RfAr. As I recall, someone called
someone else a retard and he played the "that's offensive to retarded
people" card. Overall, a weird distraction from the issues at hand.

--
Philip L. Welch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch


from_name: Mark Wagner

subject: [WikiEN-l] Is this NPOV?

body:
On 5/10/06, Peter Jacobi <peter_jacobi at gmx.net> wrote:

> Quite often, when I stumble by accident into an article,
> perhaps interwiki-ing from/to de.wikipedia, I find dozens
> of weblinks and not a single book given, even when they are
> easy to find, even for me.
>
> At some point of time we must stop trying to evolve
> into a backup copy of the WWW and draw from other
> sources.

Of course, sometimes it's quite hard to find non-web sources.  For
example, I've written articles on a number of World War II-era German
AFVs.  My local library doesn't have a single scholarly work on the
subject - possibly a legacy of the neo-Nazis in the next state over -
and I'm not about to write a Wikipedia article from a book targeted at
ten-year-olds.  I've been working from websites that reference those
scholarly works, instead.

It's quite frustrating having a list of three dozen possible print
sources, and not being able to find a single one of them in a library
within reasonable driving distance.

--
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]


body:
On May 8, 2006, at 11:04 PM, Steve Bennett wrote:

>> Because then the judges (closing admins) have discretionary power,
>> and in that situation, decisions are made by admin aristocracy, not
>> consensus.
>
> Consensus already requires interpretation by admins, who have
> discretinary power to ignore it.

That power is strictly limited to upholding policy and Office
actions. There's a difference between admins interpreting consensus,
and abandoning consensus while delegating decision-making power to
admins alone. The latter is utterly unacceptable.

--
Philip L. Welch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch


from_name: Domas Mituzas

subject: [Wikitech-l] 10k

body:
>> *10k/sec is a lot* Time to think about writing an article for the
>> Linux
>> Journal? Hmmm, "Performance Tuning at the Wikipedia"...
>
> Yeah but it's old news, we're at 12k/s already... ;)

Fortune (or Times, Nature, etc) magazine: "Performance Tuning at the
Wikipedia"

--
Domas


body:
On May 9, 2006, at 12:07 AM, Steve Bennett wrote:

> It can be established with logic if we define what we mean by notable,
> and some up with some guidelines. This has helped a lot with articles
> on music groups.

You suggest we devise a Grand Unified Theory to judge notability of
Wikipedia articles, and develop it until there are no false positives
or false negatives  (or else some process, be it admin fiat or
consensus, will have to overrule when the policy fails). That
obviously will never happen--at least not until years after Wikipedia
is completed anyway.

--
Philip L. Welch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch


body:
On May 10, 2006, at 12:57 PM, jayjg wrote:

> There has already been a discussion on this topic on the list.

Jay, do you remember what was the conclusion, if any, of these
discussions?

Tx,

-- Jossi


from_name: thomas bulliard

subject: [Wikitech-l] External link on document [files://xxx] don’t work, please help

body:
Hello,

I use wikimedia on intranet and I want to make a document (and folder) link
(for download it)

But I read in the wiki's help, than can't possible to use
[files:\\toto\folder\tata.pdf] where toto is name server (windows). I can't
make alias on folder with Apache (I'm not system root in my work, only
advance user)

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Aide:URL  ->  # 1 URL dans les liens externes

I don't want a use ftp for publishing doc.

If someone have solution....
ps: sorry for my English write.


from_name: Angela

subject: [Wikitech-l] wiki for lyrics and general music info

body:
On 5/10/06, Elliott F. Cable <ecable at avxw.com> wrote:
> There's another one somewhere - tabwiki I think, and another one just
> for lyrics.

There's lots of them. The original tabwiki, at what was Wikicities,
closed due to copyright violations. But then, I've not yet seen a
lyrics/tab wiki that wasn't full of copyright violations. Anyway, the
wikitech list isn't an appropriate place to advertise other wikis.
It's specifically for discussing technical issues on Wikimedia
projects.

Angela.


body:
On 5/10/06, Elliott F. Cable <ecable at avxw.com> wrote:
> Sorry, I didn't mean to advertise them, I just replied! [X-:]

I meant the original poster, not you. Sorry for the confusion. :)

Angela.


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [WikiEN-l] Copyright?

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Guettarda wrote:
>
>> On 5/3/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> SPUI has repeatedly tagged http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sbekele
>>> as a copyvio of http://www.cbsintl.com/people.htm.  I refused to
>>> speedy it on that basis, so SPUI blanked it and added the copyvio
>>> template.  Sbekele self-identifies as Sophia Bekele, CEO of CBS
>>> International, and therefore presumably the copyright owner.  Since
>>> this is user space, and the content is an "about us" bio, not
>>> commercial content, I think that blanking and deletion are a bit
>>> excessive.  On the other hand, copyright is copyright I guess.  What
>>> does the panel think?
>>>
>>>
>> Yeah, it's a copyvio.  Since the user doesn't appear to have explicitly
>> released the material under a GFDL-compatible license, and since the user
>> has not provided an proof that they are who they say they are, it's correct
>> to consider it a copyvio.  Please note, the original says:
>>
>> *Copyright (c) 1997-2005 CBS International All rights reserved.*
>>
> Such notices are irrelevant to the determination of whether something is
> copyright, except perhaps in establishing when the copyright will
> expire, but that problem is moot until 2067.
>
> Release under GFDL is implicit whenever anyone saves an edit.  Why
> should it be any more explicit in this case?
>
> Whether she is who she says she is is more problematic.  What kind of
> proof are you looking for?  Can we ever be sure that anyone who posts
> with his "real" name is identifying himself truthfully?  "Assume good
> faith" favours keeping the material.  If you doubt the good faith, you
> would do better by trying to contact the person through independant
> channels.
>

"Assume good faith" ignores one important fact: people lie.

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia-X-Files

body:
On 5/10/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 10/05/06, Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> > I've got a feeling that the factorisation of an RSA number (either
> [[RSA-200]]
> > or [[RSA-640]], I forget which) was scooped by Wikipedia last year; or
> at
> > least, I couldn't find any public announcement that predated it at the
> time.
>
> We beat the media by a day or so on the death of... damn, I completely
> forget. Famous feminist who died last year. We removed the claim,
> though, since we couldn't get a source until the story was confirmed
> on the Monday morning...
>
> Andrea Dworkin. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Andrea_Dworkin/Archive1#Death_confirmation


body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 5/9/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
>> Then he ran for RfA.  He was opposed on many counts, including general
>> immaturity, low-level creepiness, having an huge edits-per-article
>> average (because of his obsession with Article X), and having a really
>> annoying way of using talkpages (coloured text and a big .sig).  He
>> attempted to argue that, since he was a "Wikipedian in good standing",
>> because he had the minimum cited edit count at the time, we owed him
>> adminship.  He even complained to Jimbo about it.
>>
>>
>> As long as we persist in expecting admins to have the support of the
>> community, there should be a way for us to have input on candidates who
>> may meet all the requirements but who nevertheless should not be allowed
>> to ever touch those extra buttons.
>
> Every time I explain my idea, I do it badly :) When I say, "we check
> that the candidate meets all the requirements", I don't imply that
> those requirements are simply numerical. I would hope they would
> include things like "little evidence of incivility", "no edit warring
> in 2 months preceding nomination", "little evidence of treating
> Wikipedia as MySpace" etc. I would hope for a healthy debate over what
> we expect from an admin. Rather than a debate over every individual
> candidate who runs, rehashing the same arguments again and again.
>

If anyone works out a way to quantify sanity, they'll win a Nobel Prize.

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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body:
Kirill Lokshin wrote:
> On 5/9/06, Steve Block <steve.block at myrealbox.com> wrote:
>> The only thing that isn't undoable as an admin is image deletion.  The
>> rest has become pretty much fixable.  Yes there are wheel warring
>> dangers and the like, but once you take an eventualist approach, it all
>> settles down a lot.
>
> Err, not quite.  There are a number of other things that are
> "undoable" -- in the sense that once an admin does them, they can't be
> directly reversed -- leaking deleted revisions chief among them.
> Whether this is a real problem is up for debate, of course; but it's
> worth pointing out that the question of admin trust is a bit more
> complicated than merely "will he go on an image deletion spree?"
>

Indeed. If that was the only criteria that people looked at for RFA, I'd
have been made an admin on en: long ago - after all, I haven't deleted
everything on Commons yet.

The unfortunate thing is, we don't have a trust model. Short of people
writing down lists of people that they consider "problem users", it's
roughly "Do they sound like a nice person? Do I like their userpage? Do
I like their answers to the questions? Do I like their signature? Do
they agree with my idea of what Wikipedia is?"

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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subject: [WikiEN-l] systemic bias

body:
Mark Wagner wrote:
> On 5/8/06, Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at> wrote:
>> charles matthews wrote:
>>> Actually the only way not to offend anyone is  to avoid all controversial
>>> topics.  It was decided, long ago, not to do that, and not to give the kind
>>> of treatment you might find in government-approved history books.
>> I disagree. It is possible to present controversial topics in
>> a non-offensive way by presenting the differing point of views,
>> balancing their weight and establishing a consensus among all
>> interested parties. It happens all the time on Wikipedia.
>
> Good luck.  Many Turks find it offensive simply to suggest that Turks
> killed hundreds of thousands of Armenians, while Armenians find
> mention of the Turkish view equally offensive.  The only way to offend
> neither side is to ignore the subject entirely -- and then you'll get
> accused of censorship.
>

[[WP:NOT]] censored for the protection of your puny brain, human!

More to the point, [[WP:NOT]] censored for the protection of your POV. I
think we've got a policy about it somewhere... NOTPOV? NPOV?

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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from_name: Peter Jacobi

subject: [WikiEN-l] Is this NPOV?

body:
Hi JzG, All,

> Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> The article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sathya_Sai_Baba reads to me
> like a hagiography, but is that just my Western bias?

In my not so humble opinion, this is not a problem of NPOV
(which we can handle), but of undue weight (which we decided,
we won't handle and hope for the best in the future). "Undue
weigh" has some (semi-policy?) status, but only within one
article.

If you compare some biographies of gods, gurus or religious
leaders of denominations in the 100.000 to 10.000.000
adherents range, there are huge discrepancies in size:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Kimbangu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%AA_V%C4%83n_Trung
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatius_Zakka_I_Iwas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sathya_Sai_Baba
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prem_Rawat

You need some paasionate adherents as editors to have
a long biography, or at least some passionate apostats.

Regards,
Peter Jacobi
[[User:Pjacobi]]

>
> Guy (JzG)
> --
> http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
"Feel free" - 10 GB Mailbox, 100 FreeSMS/Monat ...
Jetzt GMX TopMail testen: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/topmail


subject: [WikiEN-l] systemic bias

body:
Raphael Wegmann wrote:
>
> Phil Boswell wrote:
>> Raphael Wegmann-2 wrote:
>>> I have agreed to the linkimage compromise long time ago. IMHO it is
>>> neither necessary nor favourable to suppress the cartoons. But it
>>> is necessary to show respect by accepting a compromise
>>> (i.e. a linkimage template).
>>>
>> Respect to whom?
>
> Muslims
>

Right. As a Christian, I *DEMAND* that you remove (insert long list of
stuff which Christians might find possibly offensive); etc. etc. ad.
absurdium. If you'd like some more grease on that slipperly slope of
yours, just holler...

>> and for what?
>
> for being humans as well.
>

I have a nice list of strawmen that we could clog the list with to
argue... well, anything you want really.

>> Is this the kind of "respect" which is demanded by teenage muggers who then
>> proceed to carve up their victims for insufficient amounts thereof?
>
> No.
>

See above.

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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from_name: Steve Summit

body:
Timwi wrote:
> I cannot follow this line of reasoning. The purpose of "being caseful",
> as you call it, is to have (1) correct article titles, and (2) the
> potential capability of having separate entries differing only in their
> capitalisation.

Indeed.

My worry -- which I may not have thought through far enough --
was that if there was *too* much mapping from the case variant
that didn't exist to the case variant that did, it would be
impossible to create that second entry differing only in its
capitalization.


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Berto

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Conflict re:Belarusan WP

body:
My fivepence worth. I live in Kiev, so I have a bit of a closer POV on
what's going on therem, hopefully it can help.

A number of wikis have problems connected with the existence of alternative
scripts. I suppose a common official policy for such cases would help. As
per experience with non-govt backed european minority languages, often the
most suitable way out of the fight is:
1) have the interface in the most spread variant (which would be cyrillic,
in this case)
2) have the articles that come in "other" flavours translated in the main
script-space and the original page saved and referred to from the translated
page.
3) allow all variants to exist simoultaneously on any discussion pages

This may help into giving space to everyone without compressing freedom of
expression and local variants of the culture/script/grammar.

The problem with Belarus' is in that their wonderful language is in a pretty
much decaying state, so it's a very small number of people taking care of
it. These people often are politically radicalised, and may clash with each
other. In this dynamic, a wiki may become "just another battlefield", which
is something we should really avoid. I agree with Mark here. Maybe it could
make sense to have three indipendent editions, yet the number of possible
contributors is so small that I do wonder whether it makes any sense to do
it (and it's something the three communities should decide themselves, in
anyway).

In any case I urge you not to find an "ad hoc" solution for Belarus, but to
address the problem of concurrent scripts as such in instead. I believe this
is going to be a recurrent problem in many an endangered culture, and often
it is going to be associated with local political tension. A neutrally
"general" policy would be much easier to implement, than a direct involvment
in the practical life of one single wiki.

As per making belorussian popular... sadly, it takes much more than this.
Decaying languages do need to become "trendy" in order to be used by youth
and be saved. Usually a clash in script policy is a very bad marker, as per
the health of a language. And if belorussian was really used as much as
statistics claim, nobody in his mind would have used a script that is not
understood by anyone to make a nationalistically oriented political
campaign...

As a matter of fact you can hear it mostly in the countryside, where it's
hard to imagine that internet will get soon... No way for it to exist on TV,
apart from some episodes a minor govt channel, and the youth in Minsk rates
trendy to be "russian". That is, to use as many english words as they can,
while speaking russian.

IMHO belarusian definitely is an endangered language, and should be helped
out of its unpleasant situation as much as possible. In doing this a wiki
has mostly one big function: it's a meeting place for native speakers to use
the language, exchange and "save" information, and at least virtually live
in a 100% belarusian environment, which is already impossible in reality.
This is what a wiki can do for a language, any language. In exchange,
wikimedia gets an indepth level of knowledge on local
life/traditions/everyday problems that no foreign speakers will ever be able
to put in. It's actually a fair deal, since this information can later be
translated into other wiki editions and make its way to a mainstream public
after having been collected and organized in its own original cultural
environment.

Yet I would not expect a quick rise in the number of BY contributors just
because we solve the script problem. These are very slow processes. Pretty
much will depend on the marketing, but this is going to be a hard thing to
do, if they wish to remain as politically neutral as needed by the general
wiki policies. It really depends on their capability to involve the "normal"
population, outside the radically oriented clubs. And, obviously, it heavily
depends on the access to internet that can be granted to native speakers in
the countryside, those who really still use the language in everyday's life.

My best wishes to them. It's a grand culture in a great land, and I
personally do love the place. It's great canals there for a guy in love with
boating on inland waters, and I really wish to get as much information as I
can on the canal system connecting the EU to the Dnepr and the Black Sea :)
Especially since I can personally read basic bielorussian (only in the
cyrillic variant, though).

B?rto

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Williamson" <node.ue at gmail.com>
To: <wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 10, 2006 3:15 AM
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Conflict re:Belarusan WP

The Belarusan language is spoken by 9,081,102 people worldwide
according to the Ethnologue; in Belarus it is spoken by 6,715,000, or
65% of the population (most of the rest are native speakers of
Russian, Trasianka, Yiddish, Polish, or Ukrainian).

In Belarusan schools, the Belarusan language is a cumpulsory subject
for all students who wish to graduate, totalling on average between
75,000 and 100,000 per year (graduates).

The Belarusan language used in schools and by the government and by
the vast majority of the Belarusan people is called Narkamauka,
codified in the 1960s.

However, some Belarusan nationalists favour a return to the older
Belarusan codified in the 1920s, called Tarashkievitsa. Some of the
more radical nationalists also favour a switch to the Latin alphabet,
called Latsinka.

Currently there is a fight on Meta between proponents of the official
Belarusan and proponents of the alternative Belarusan.

By sheer chance, the proponents of the alternative style were the
first to arrive at be.wikipedia, and all of the administrators there
write in the alternative style, and the entire interface is written in
it too.

New articles are supposedly allowed to be written in either variety,
however the vast majority of existing articles are written in the
alternative style. According to proponents of the official
orthography, this makes it intimidating to newcomers, and they give
that as the reason why the Belarusan Wikipedia is so small still.

You can see the entire debate here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages#Present_Belarusian_.286_support.2C_13_oppose.29

Now, obviously the answer to such questions is generally "resolve
within the community". However, in this case some people are claiming
that the community leaders are acting improperly by deleting new
articles in Narkamauka and then a few minutes later posting the same
articles written in Tarashkievitsa. People also allege that policy on
be.wp favours the alternative spelling over official spelling, and
that it is not possible to change it without outside help because the
admins at be.wp are a dictatorship.

In this case I think it is appropriate for the international Wikimedia
community to get involved. Clearly a neutral third party is needed to
evaluate the claims of both sides and make things right.

Mark

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] Regarding "civility"

body:
I suspect he was referring to the recent thread(s) regarding Julie Harding.

k

On 5/10/06, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>
> Wiliam J. Clinton wrote:
> > I was disgusted, but not terribly surprised, to see that six members of
> the
> > Arbitration Committee -- Dmcdevit, Fred Bauder, JamesF/James D.
> Forrester,
> > Sean Barrett/The Epopt, Charles Matthews and Jayjg -- condone hate
> speech
> > and hateful epithets directed at the mentally disabled, and consider
> > condemnation of that hate speech to be unacceptable behavior on
> Wikipedia --
> > behavior, in fact, so unacceptable that they say they find it a
> compelling
> > reason to punish me.
>
> I stopped reading here because there were no links to any actual
> evidence. I scrolled through the rest of the posting and found no links
> at all.
>
> Try again.
>
> Timwi
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Arwel Parry

subject: [WikiEN-l] Admins without validated e-mail addresses (was: RfAs)

body:
In message
<f1c3529e0605092318k6d56bd74i55eec9dcd5172b85 at mail.gmail.com>, Steve
Bennett <stevage-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> writes
>On 5/10/06, Ilmari Karonen
><nospam-z14hNZ2kBDGsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> I believe it says in some guideline (if not policy) or other that admins
>> should be contactable by e-mail.  Even if it's not mandatory, it's still
>> a damn good idea for a number of reasons.
>>
>> If you're on RfA and haven't validated your address, go do it.  It'll
>> take you less then five minutes.  If you're lazy or stubborn enough not
>> to do it after you've been told about it, I'd say that in itself sends a
>> rather strong signal about your suitability for adminship.
>
>I certainly agree that admins should validate their email addresses.
>If a candidate hadn't done that, I would even suggest that they do.
>But voting against them for not having done so is just an example of
>using RfAs to exert power over candidates. In the normal course of
>events, there is no power you could exert over either admin or
>non-admin who hadn't validated. Only in that moment of vulnerability
>do you have a stick to whack him with, and that technicality is a
>pretty minor one to whack him for.
>
>Steve

I got a curious email last week letting me know that I hadn't validated
my email address on Meta. I was a bit surprised and took a look, and was
shown as having validated it two months ago. I wonder if there might not
be a technical bug somewhere.

Anyway, yes, I agree that all admins /should/ to have a valid email
contact address, and really ought to be de-adminned if they don't
provide one.

--
Arwel Parry
http://www.cartref.demon.co.uk/


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] SVN:  [14157] trunk/phase3

body:
Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
> brion at svn.leuksman.com wrote:
>> We require PHP 5 now, make sure the installer requires this.
>> Uncertain of the exact minimum version requirement; checking for 5.0.0+
>
> Can we start committing code using protected / private / public stuff
> for classes ?

As long as it actually works, sure...

> The try { } catch {} looks great too :)

I'd like to see the database errors changed to exceptions, so a try/catch block
can be easily used to catch and restart deadlocked transactions.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Rotem Liss

subject:
[Wikitech-l] The lang tag in <HTML> ain't identical to
	$wgContLanguageCode

body:
As for the problem in the Simple English Wikipedia, I think its
$wgLanguageCode should be changed to "en", because it uses the English
messages.

Shinjiman wrote:

>Brion Vibber <brion at ...> writes:
>
>
>
>>Shinjiman wrote:
>>
>>
>>>The issue has been mentioned at
>>>
>>>
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-
>
>
>>>l/2006-March/034397.html in wikitecl-l, and also in BugZilla:5790
>>>http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5790.
>>>
>>>Hi all,
>>>
>>>As I've mention that pages above, some Wiki sites has the incorrect lang
>>>
>>>
>tags
>
>
>>>which neither assiciated with ISO-693 nor IANA language tags. So I've
>>>
>>>
>examined
>
>
>>>this issue, and have a patch sibmitted to BugZilla. However the patch I've
>>>made cannot be accepted as Brian said that this would break up the caching
>>>system.
>>>
>>>
>>There was not any such patch for this, and it would be totally unnecessary to
>>make one. Just let us know what the incorrect ones are and we'll fix the
>>configuration.
>>
>>Are you maybe thinking of the patch for something totally different which
>>
>>
>tries
>
>
>>to guess the visitor's language variant and change the lang attribute based
>>
>>
>on it?
>
>
>
>For Example:
>For Simple English Wikipedia, it's show the lang tag as "simple" which do not
>exists neither ISO639 nor IANA language tag tag. For 'Simple English', the
>lang code should be "en" (English).
>
>And for Traditional Chinese readers reads a Traditional Chinese webpage, it's
>supposed to read a page using the Traditional Chinese font. However this does
>not apply to Wikipedia (and various wiki site running MediaWiki). As the
>Chinese Wikipedia (and various Chinese based wiki sites that running
>MediaWiki) has been introduced the LanguageConverter class. The lang tag
>is "zh" (Chinese). It's not the problem for the Simplified Chinese readers
>while the (major) browsers will using the Simplified Chinese fonts. However,
>it's having a problem for Traditional Chinese readers to reading the Chinese
>context using a Simplified Chinese font.
>
>As your opinion mentioned, to use the language variant to determine the
>language code that the user is using, it's quite impossible to determine the
>lang tag by languge variant. Since currently many users in Chinese Wikipedia
>sets to disable the language variant by default because the Chinese words
>conversion cause much problems currently have. (This is the main point of the
>issue) Including me, I'am also using a Traditional Chinese (UI language = zh-
>hk) interface language and _without enable_ any of language variants (Variant
>= zh). So as the patch I've submitted, it's not to determine the lang tag only
>by the language variant, but checks with both interface language and
>$wgContLanguageCode (Global interface language).
>
>So summarising my statement above, I've suggested to adding a new attribute to
>assign the lang tag correctly, by using arrays, or something like to provides
>a similar functionally. For example:
>
> Language code            | Language tag
> -------------------------+----------------------------------------------
>  en                      | en
>  de                      | de
>  simple (Simple English) | en
>  zh-cn                   | zh-cn <= originally supposed to be zh-hans (R1)
>  zh-sg                   | zh-sg <= originally supposed to be zh-hans (R1)
>  zh-tw                   | zh-hant
>  zh-hk                   | zh-hant
>  zh-mo                   | zh-hant
>  zh-min-nan              | zh-hant <= (R2)
>  zh-yue                  | zh-hant <= (R2)
>
>*Remarks:
> 1. The tags is used as zh-cn/zh-sg instead of zh-hans for browsers
>compatibility (likely IE6 will misunderstand the zh-hans lang tag).
> 2. The tags is used as zh-hant instead of zh-min-nan/zh-yue browsers
>compatibility (likely both IE/Firefox will misunderstand both zh-min-nan and
>zh-yue lang tag).
>
>For that table about is about to construct a lang tag mapping against various
>languages.
>
>And after this kind of language mapping is done, it's need to modify the
>OutputPage.php (for older skins) and Monobook.php (for newer skins) to output
>the <html xml:lang"XXX" lang="XXX"> correctly ("XXX" is the correct lang code
>instead using the $wgContLanguageCode directly) to address this issue.
>
>Hope my information I've proveded would help you to ongoing and addressing
>this kind of issue more smoothly. :)
>
>regards
>Shinjiman
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>

--
#define Name RotemLiss
#define Mail mailSTRUDELrotemlissDOTcom
#define Site www.rotemliss.com


body:
In message <20060510143513.43013.qmail at web34515.mail.mud.yahoo.com>,
Pete Bartlett <pcb21-/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> writes
>>Arwel wrote:
>
>> I agree that all admins /should/ to have a valid email
>>contact address, and really ought to be de-adminned if they don't
>>provide one.
>
>Once again assumes that the set of all admins is equal to the
>set of admins who get involved in contentious actions.
>
>We really must stamp out this false assumption.
>
>There are many many admins who never do something sufficiently contentious
>to warrant the use of email. I personally have made admin actions numbering
>in the hundreds and have _never_ been emailled about them.
>
>Only if you are going to go round contentiously banning people do you need
>your email available....
>
>Pete

Hmm, no... how about when a user has a run-in with an admin and wants
another admin to review the situation? I've had a few people ask me to
look at something, even though I usually agree with the other admin. Few
of the people I've blocked (anons, usually, or blatant vandals) have
complained, though like anybody else I'm human and admit I can make
mistakes - only last week I accidentally blocked the wrong anon user in
a fast-moving  spate of vandalism, but reversed myself in about 5
minutes...

--
Arwel Parry
http://www.cartref.demon.co.uk/


list: foundation-l

from_name: GerardM

subject:
[Foundation-l] The need for identifying languages properly for
	lexicological use

body:
Hoi,
When there is a vote for "yet another" wikipedia, it is necessary to
have a code that identifies the new database. As Wikipedias are
written in a language, we use a code that identifies that language.
Typically people say we use the ISO-639 codes for that. This would
imply that a code used has a relation to the language that is being
used and, it should also imply that a wikipedia is indeed in a
particular language as recognised by the code.

The way the Wikipedia are is a matter of history and the continued
abuse of codes makes for often heated political discussions about
languages, it only make things more complicated.When you are
interested in reading more details on this subject, you can read what
I wrote on my blog.
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2006/05/languagecodes-on-wikimedia-foundation.html

In many projects we use "Babel" templates to indicate the language
proficiency of people. Particularly in Wiktionary and in WiktionaryZ,
we have to be precise when we indicate a  language. It means that when
we are to indicate that a word is in a specific language, it has to be
THAT language and not another language.

I propose for WiktionaryZ and for the Babel proficiency to exclusively
use the ISO-639-3 codes. When there are not enough codes in ISO-639-3
we will have to use codes that are clearly not ISO-639-3. These codes
may indicate orthographies, dialects and different scripts and even
languages that have not yet been considered to be a language.

The use of well defined codes will allow us to have our data used
reliably and to define our content better. This will enable people to
use our data and make WiktionaryZ a success

Where possible we will try to connect the codes used by Wikipedia to
ISO-639-3 codes. This will not be possible for several languages like
Albanian; the als code has been squatted by what ISO-639 considers a
language family.

Thanks,
   GerardM


list: wikimedia-l


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] The need for identifying languages properly for
	lexicological use


list: wiktionary-l

subject:
[Wiktionary-l] The need for identifying languages properly for
	lexicological use


from_name: Rob Church

body:
On 10/05/06, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> There's lots of them. The original tabwiki, at what was Wikicities,
> closed due to copyright violations.

That's "infringement".

Rob Church


from_name: jf_wikipedia at mac.com

body:
On May 10, 2006, at 2:09 PM, Anthony DiPierro wrote:

>> One possibility would be to restrict the addition to people to the
>> main category "Criminals" and request that people are added to a
>> specific sub-category of[[:Category:Criminals]]. And if such sub-
>> category does not exists, either to create a new subcat, or simply
>> not adding a category.
>>
> Hmm, did you go ahead and implement that?  Because it seems to be the
> case right now.

I removed all people from the main category, and added these to the
appropriate sub-cat.

I started a thread on this issue at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Category_talk:Criminals#Use_of_this_category

-- Jossi


from_name: jayjg

body:
On 5/10/06, jf_wikipedia at mac.com <jf_wikipedia at mac.com> wrote:
> I would like to hear your opinion on these categories and their
> compliance with [[Wikipedia:Categorization of people]]
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorization_of_people)
>
> My concern is that people are using Category:Criminals //
> Category:American Criminals as a way to push negative POVs aginst
> such persons (regardless if the person is alive or dead). The reason
> for  my concern is that it indiscriminately group people as diverse
> as  person that was convicted from stealing a pair of jeans at Wal-
> Mart with serial killers, rapists and the like.
>
> See for example the bio of [[Ron_Karenga]] (http://en.wikipedia.org/
> wiki/Ron_Karenga). In his biography it is described that "in 1965,
> and in 1971 was convicted of felony assault of two of the group's
> female members, for which he spent time in prison", so he was added
> to the Category:Criminals. That IMO, is not acceptable.
>
> One possibility would be to restrict the addition to people to the
> main category "Criminals" and request that people are added to a
> specific sub-category of[[:Category:Criminals]]. And if such sub-
> category does not exists, either to create a new subcat, or simply
> not adding a category.
>
> I am interested to hear what other editors think on this matter, and
> what can be done to curtail abuse of this category.

There has already been a discussion on this topic on the list.  These
Categories are problematic at best; perhaps they should be changed to
"Americans convicted of a crime" or something similar.

Jay.


subject: [Wikitech-l]External link on document [files://xxx] don’t work, please help

body:
On 10/05/06, thomas bulliard <thomas.bulliard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I use wikimedia on intranet and I want to make a document (and folder) link
> (for download it)
>
> But I read in the wiki's help, than can't possible to use
> [files:\\toto\folder\tata.pdf] where toto is name server (windows). I can't
> make alias on folder with Apache (I'm not system root in my work, only
> advance user)

The real problem isn't that you can't tell MediaWiki to render
file://foo as a link, but that a lot of modern browsers won't show
such links for various security reasons.

See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgUrlProtocols.

Rob Church


subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV majorities/minorities

body:
On May 10, 2006, at 10:18 AM, Cheney Shill wrote:

> Basically, it's an argument that you can apply policy however the
> current majority of an article sees fit.

My understanding is different. Editor's consensus cannot be used to
bypass policy

See:

"NPOV is one of Wikipedia's three content-guiding policy pages. The
other two are Wikipedia:Verifiability and Wikipedia:No original
research. Jointly, these policies determine the type and quality of
material that is acceptable in the main namespace. Because the three
policies are complementary, they should not be interpreted in
isolation from one other, and editors should therefore try to
familiarize themselves with all three. The three policies are also
non-negotiable and cannot be superseded by any other guidelines or by
editors' consensus."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NPOV

I am missing something?

-- Jossi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Is this NPOV?

body:
On May 10, 2006, at 12:21 PM, Peter Jacobi wrote:

> Quite often, when I stumble by accident into an article,
> perhaps interwiki-ing from/to de.wikipedia, I find dozens
> of weblinks and not a single book given, even when they are
> easy to find, even for me.
>
> At some point of time we must stop trying to evolve
> into a backup copy of the WWW and draw from other
> sources.

I agree, Peter.

Too much emphasis is given to online sources. IMO, nothing beats a
trip to the library.

-- Jossi


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Regarding "civility"

body:
06:13, February 28, 2002 (hist) (diff) m User:Fredbauder (Basic info)

But there were a slew of people already editing.

Fred

On May 10, 2006, at 4:15 PM, geni wrote:

> On 5/10/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
>
>> (b) he's been here since forever
>>
>
> As far as I can figure his first edits were 1st nov 2004 as Minority
> Report. You predate that. I predate that. Generaly the "been here
> forever" tag is probably best resurved for the likes of Fred Bauder (1
> November 2002)
>
> --
> geni
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Steve Bennett

body:
On 5/10/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> It's just as easy to say that "being a city isn't notable" or "being a
> high school district isn't notable" or "being a Pokemon card isn't
> notable" or "being a Korean children's science-fiction film directed
> by Kim Cheong-gi and starring Shim Hyung-rae isn't notable" or "being
> a seiy? isn't notable".

Being a Pokemon card produced by the official makers of Pokemon is
pretty notable. In any case, there is widespread support for the idea
that certain types of entities escape notability criteria and are
included for completeness.  Less support for actually formalising what
those entities might be :)

> Click on random page a few times.  I don't see an indisputable claim
> to notability for any of the articles I managed to hit.

Heh. "Random page" has never been used as a sign of what a good page
*should* be.

> I don't know of a poll to determine if your speculation as to the
> Wikipedia editors opinion is correct.  In fact, I think a significant
> portion of Wikipedia editors *does* feel that we should have a
> Wikipedia article on all chemists.  Not that I think inclusion in
> Wikipedia should be decided by a poll in the first place.
>
> I'd bet there are less than a million chemists in the world.  Not that
> it matters, I don't see any reason why being in a group which consists
> of "millions" does not amount to notability.

I'm confused by what is meant by "chemist" here. To me it normally
means a pharmacist - someone who has a pharmacology degree and sells
headache pills to customers. If you're talking about published
academics, that's different...

> There is no such high school as Whateverville high school, so that's
> patently absurd.

Let's work together, eh?

> As for my definition of notability, unless someone else comes up with
> a better one (which was one of the goals of this thread), I'd say
> notability = worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia.  Since I think every
> high school student who plays football and listens to RHCP should be
> included in Wikipedia, I think they're all notable.

That's sort of ok, but leads to a circular reference ("we only include
people who are notable. what's notable? people worthy of inclusion").
It would just cause us to seek another word to explain *why* someone
is worthy of inclusion. "Interesting" etc.

Better to say: We include things in Wikipedia because either:
a) They're inherently notable amongst their class
b) Because they are part of a class small enough that it's feasible
and worthwhile including all members
c) Because it would offend too many people to remove them

Of course I don't think all high school students who play football are
notable, and they don't meet the other two criteria either.

>From my understanding of Wikipedia policies, the default presumption
> is *always* inclusion.  It used to be a sentence directly in the
> policy: "When in doubt, don't delete."  I haven't bothered to check
> whether that sentence has been deleted or not.

There have been edit wars over it.

Steve


references:
<9quj52516ae6uduabloj303ebkjmqqlmps@4ax.com>
	<20060504162119.16845.qmail@web34512.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
	<f1c3529e0605041136l69084de1m3e24ca47de32cb80@mail.gmail.com>
	<44611F7E.5050904@vyznev.net>
	<44611F7E.5050904-z14hNZ2kBDGsTnJN9+BGXg@public.gmane.org>
	<f1c3529e0605092318k6d56bd74i55eec9dcd5172b85@mail.gmail.com>
	<0bkduoDfKfYEFwcY@cartref.demon.co.uk>

body:
On 5/10/06, Arwel Parry <arwel at cartref.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> Anyway, yes, I agree that all admins /should/ to have a valid email
> contact address, and really ought to be de-adminned if they don't
> provide one.

I might agree with you if you replace "don't" with "refuse upon
repeated request".

Steve


from_name: Guillaume Paumier

body:
> I might agree with you if you replace "don't" with "refuse upon repeated
request".

+1

g.

On 5/10/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 5/10/06, Arwel Parry <arwel at cartref.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> > Anyway, yes, I agree that all admins /should/ to have a valid email
> > contact address, and really ought to be de-adminned if they don't
> > provide one.
>
> I might agree with you if you replace "don't" with "refuse upon
> repeated request".
>
> Steve
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Guillom
"Je sers la science et c'est ma joie" - Basile le Disciple
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guillom


from_name: Raphael Wegmann

subject: [WikiEN-l] systemic bias

body:
Alphax wrote:
> Raphael Wegmann wrote:
>> Phil Boswell wrote:
>>> Raphael Wegmann wrote:
>>>> I have agreed to the linkimage compromise long time ago. IMHO it is
>>>> neither necessary nor favourable to suppress the cartoons. But it
>>>> is necessary to show respect by accepting a compromise
>>>> (i.e. a linkimage template).
>>>>
>>> Respect to whom?
>>
>> Muslims
>>
>
> Right. As a Christian, I *DEMAND* that you remove (insert long list of
> stuff which Christians might find possibly offensive); etc. etc. ad.
> absurdium.

That's the worst slippery slope argument I've ever read.
You didn't even bother to bring a single example.

> If you'd like some more grease on that slipperly slope of
> yours, just holler...

It's your slippery slope.

>>> and for what?
>>
>> for being humans as well.
>>
>
> I have a nice list of strawmen that we could clog the list with to
> argue... well, anything you want really.

The "teenage muggers", Phil Boswell brought up, are strawmen:

>>> Is this the kind of "respect" which is demanded by teenage muggers who
>>> then
>>> proceed to carve up their victims for insufficient amounts thereof?

Before you put grease on your slipperly slope, I'd like to note,
that I definitely plead for respect towards Christians as well.
Since the majority within the Wikipedia community is Christian,
I don't see much disrespect towards them.

--
Raphael


from_name: Mark Wagner

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wasting Time. The most efficient way :)

body:
On 5/10/06, Mathias Schindler <mathias.schindler at gmail.com> wrote:
> Google has released a great tool which lets you explore how other
> people search. Or something like that.
>
> It's free and it's fun. And of course, it is pointless :)
>
> http://www.google.com/trends?q=wikipedia%2C+britannica%2C+encyclopedia&ctab=0&date=all&geo=DE

I find this one rather interesting:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=wikipedia%2C+microsoft&ctab=0&date=all&geo=all

We're not yet more popular than sex, though:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=wikipedia%2C+sex%2C+drugs%2C+rock+and+roll&ctab=0&date=all&geo=all

--
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
On 5/10/06, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
> Mathias Schindler wrote:
>
> >"Meantime, I left the Time Warner center just as my pal Ann Coulter
> >was busy chastising Jimmy Wales about her Wikipedia entry, and finding
> >out from him how to change it.
> >
> Does anybody else find it interesting how so many of these people's
> top concerns about WP revolve around the articles about themselves?

Seems reasonable.  If you had a Wikipedia article about you, wouldn't
you be concerned about it?

Anthony


body:
As for myself, most of the time emails are sent from people who are
unfamiliar with our talk pages system, and for who it's simpler to send an
email. Most frequent email being : "Why have you deleted my article ?"

Emails are also used by regular editors/admins who simply don't want to
write some of their messages on my public talk page. This can happen during
edit wars or other conflicts.

Last but not least, I've received emails from blocked editors asking me to
unblock them because admin X had blocked them "unfairly".

g.

On 5/10/06, Pete Bartlett <pcb21 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> Mark wrote:
> >I (like to think I) have never gone around "contentiously banning
> >people", but I receive emails about Wikipedia all the time ... sometimes
> >even when I'm on wikibreak.
>
> >Perhaps I just have an open, inviting face?
>
> Out of interest, what sort of emails do you get?
>
> I get lots of emails because of Wikipedia - normally asking
> for hi-res versions of my photos - but that's independent
> of me being an admin.
>
> Pete
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Guillom
"Je sers la science et c'est ma joie" - Basile le Disciple
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guillom


body:
On 5/10/06, jf_wikipedia at mac.com <jf_wikipedia at mac.com> wrote:
> I would like to hear your opinion on these categories and their
> compliance with [[Wikipedia:Categorization of people]]
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorization_of_people)
>
> My concern is that people are using Category:Criminals //
> Category:American Criminals as a way to push negative POVs aginst
> such persons (regardless if the person is alive or dead). The reason
> for  my concern is that it indiscriminately group people as diverse
> as  person that was convicted from stealing a pair of jeans at Wal-
> Mart with serial killers, rapists and the like.
>
It's a high level category, so it doesn't group the different types of
criminals directly together (and in that sense isn't much different
from Mother Theresa and Hitler both being grouped under the category
"People").

As for it being a negative POV, I was going to comment about some
seeing the category as more of a badge of honor, but then I realised
Thoreau *wasn't* in the category, even indirectly.

> One possibility would be to restrict the addition to people to the
> main category "Criminals" and request that people are added to a
> specific sub-category of[[:Category:Criminals]]. And if such sub-
> category does not exists, either to create a new subcat, or simply
> not adding a category.
>
Hmm, did you go ahead and implement that?  Because it seems to be the
case right now.

Anthony


body:
On 10/05/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
> Oh, you know.  "ADMIN X HAS ABUSED HIS POWER", "You deleted article Y.
> Could you please explain why?", "YOU THINK YOU CAN BLOCK ME?  I'M AT
> UNIVERSITY, I AM.  YOU CAN'T BLOCK SHIT."  "Could you please intervene
> at Z, I'm having trouble with some problem users."

Admin X is abusive, eh? Abusive? You don't know the MEANING of the
word. You want some abuse? I'll effing well abuse you...where's my
hammer?

I *promise* the 50kV through the chair is planned for MediaWiki 1.7...

Rob Church


from_name: Matt R

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia-X-Files

body:
I've got a feeling that the factorisation of an RSA number (either [[RSA-200]] or [[RSA-640]], I forget which) was scooped by Wikipedia last year; or at least, I couldn't find any public announcement that predated it at the time.

Incidentally, factorisations of challenge numbers are one of those exceedingly rare occasions where researchers can publish original research on Wikipedia without it being a problem for us.

-- Matt


from_name: Daniel Kinzler

subject:
[Commons-l] Implementing a "soft block" (blocked from uploading
 only)

body:
Hi

I think the ability to block users from uploading only would be very
useful. However, "blocking" does not (at the moment) change the user
groups - the two concepts are orthogonal. Maybe they could/should be
combined, but probably not.

Anyway, I think an "upload block" would be useful - please file a
feature request on Bugzilla - thanks!

-- Daniel

--
Homepage: http://brightbyte.de


body:
> Anyway, I think an "upload block" would be useful - please file a
> feature request on Bugzilla - thanks!

Oh, it's already there - see
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4995

--
Homepage: http://brightbyte.de


subject: [Wikitech-l] New committers and restricted SVN shell

body:
Added two new SVN committers: Dominic Arkwright (dom) and Grace Pastorelly
(grace). They're contractors working on multilingual stuff for WiktionaryZ /
WikiData; they'll be working in a branch for now.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_MediaWiki

Also, I've set up a restricted shell on the SVN server for most of the accounts.
Please let me know if it breaks anything, or if you need an open shell to fiddle
with something else on the server. (Currently Tim's got a full shell so that he
can add new committer accounts if I'm unavailable.)

I spent some time poking around the web for nice, lightweight restricted shells
with a convenient option for Subversion, but couldn't find anything that didn't
look dreadful. So I whipped up a quick crappy one in Python:

http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/tools/sillyshell/

As far as I know it should not be any less secure than the Subversion server
program itself, though it might be buggy.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Jossi Fresco

subject: [WikiEN-l] Is this NPOV?

body:
On May 10, 2006, at 4:14 PM, geni wrote:

>> Too much emphasis is given to online sources. IMO, nothing beats a
>> trip to the library.
>>
>> -- Jossi
>
> That depends. In areas where things change books in libaries can be
> horibly dated.

Maybe. But in WP, I would argue that we are better off with an
outdated description from a reputable source, than a recent report
from an online source that has not an established reputation.

Of course, if we have a reputable on-line source, that is another
matter.

-- Jossi


body:
On May 10, 2006, at 4:14 PM, Mathias Schindler wrote:
> It's free and it's fun. And of course, it is pointless :)

Not so pointless. I think it is fascinating...

See:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=wikipedia

-- Jossi


subject: [WikiEN-l] systemic bias

body:
On 10/05/06, Raphael Wegmann <wegmann at psi.co.at> wrote:
> Before you put grease on your slipperly slope, I'd like to note,
> that I definitely plead for respect towards Christians as well.
> Since the majority within the Wikipedia community is Christian,
> I don't see much disrespect towards them.

Considering that 67.4% of statistics (incl. this) are pulled out of
people's backsides, can we have something to support that claim?

Rob Church


body:
On May 10, 2006, at 6:38 PM, jf_wikipedia at mac.com wrote:

> Not so pointless. I think it is fascinating...

even more fascinating:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=encyclopedia+britannica%2C
+wikipedia&ctab=0&date=all&geo=all


from_name: maru dubshinki

body:
On 5/10/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> Welcome to Wikipedia. We endorse mindless violence and a disregard for
> others in exchange for free-licencing of contributions and a brief
> altruistic feeling.
>
> > Assumeing you want to do something that would not completly mess up
> > the rest of your life politician may be an option. Some of the less
> > major olympic sports might be worth a try.
>
> What? Politicans DON'T have messed-up lives? I want some of what you're smoking.
>
> > They are not. All academics above a certian level are generaly
> > accapted as notable
>
> Irony is to die for.
>
>
> Rob Church

No, no, no- it's "publish or perish".

~maru


from_name: Cheney Shill

subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV majorities/minorities

body:
jf_wikipedia at mac.com wrote:

    On May 10, 2006, at 10:18 AM, Cheney Shill wrote:
    > Basically, it's an argument that you can apply policy however the
    > current majority of an article sees fit.

    My understanding is different. Editor's consensus cannot be used to
    bypass policy

    See:

    "NPOV is one of Wikipedia's three content-guiding policy pages. The
    other two are Wikipedia:Verifiability and Wikipedia:No original
    research. Jointly, these policies determine the type and quality of
    material that is acceptable in the main namespace. Because the three
    policies are complementary, they should not be interpreted in
    isolation from one other, and editors should therefore try to
    familiarize themselves with all three. The three policies are also
    non-negotiable and cannot be superseded by any other guidelines or by
    editors' consensus."

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NPOV

    I am missing something?

No, except that we agree completely.  I'm not, nor have I ever argued, that consensus should bypass policy.  I'm simply repeating the claim made by Fastfission and the majority of admins and users I've had contact with while editing that consensus is more important than policy.  Fastfission seemed to be paraphrasing the beginning of the consensus guideline that says "Wikipedia works by building consensus." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Consensus  I'm not sure when that was put in or if it was snuck in at some point, but given what the rest of the guideline states, not to mention policies, it's definitely taken out of context.  Maybe the fix is simply removing that sentence.  This view seems so prevalent, however, it probably wouldn't be taken seriously unless Jimmy himself emailed every admin with an attached photo of a clue bat.

Anyway, I'm open to suggestions on how to solve it.~~~~Pro-Lick

---------------------------------
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