subject: [WikiEN-l] [[Ireland]] and [[China]]

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:

>Eclecticology wrote:
>
>Ed Poor wrote:
>
>>>"The official name for any country is the long form..."
>>>I think what he meant (or should have said) is the following, which is
>>>subtly yet crucially different:
>>>The official name for any *government* is the long form.
>>>
>>Although this does not change my agreement about the naming of the
>>articles, I disagree with you factually about the use of long forms.
>>The long form is the formal and official name of a country that it
>>would use in international legal documents.  It is not the name of any
>>particular government, even though the name may be changed by successive
>>governments to reflect their particular points of view.
>>
>
>This disagreement may reflect a peculiar usage
>of the term "government" in the United States.
>I know that in the UK (so I suspect in Canada too),
>the "government" consists of the various ministers in the cabinet,
>and one gets a "new" government every time the parliamentary coalition changes.
>Even in the US, we apply terms this way to parliamentary systems:
>"The government of Prime Minister Tony Blair has fallen,
>and elections have been called for next Thursday." (I wish).
>To an American, however, the government is the whole shebang,
>the cabinet, the legislature (including the opposition party!),
>and especially the reams of bureaucracy that affect one's daily life.
>Just because there's been an election doesn't mean that
>the Department of Motor Vehicles has changed -- it's the same government.
>
I don't think that this is so much a US/UK distinction as it is an
informed/popular distinction.  The popular mind sees all these
administrative and bureaucratic agencies as extensions of government; it
does not easily distinguish them from legistative functions.

>I remember hearing in junior high that the US Constitution is good because
>Italy (say) has had dozens of governments since the end of WWII,
>while we've had the same stable government since 1787.
>I no longer recall if I heard this from an ignoramus or a joker,
>but it's true only if you change the meaning of the word "government"
>between the two halves of the sentence.
>
The Italian example is well known.  In parlimentary contexts it is used
as a straw man by opponents of electoral reform.  "If your proposals for
democratic reform went ahead we too could be unstable like Italy."

>Anyway, the name "People's Republic of China" is not used by the country.
>It's used by the government -- this one, and previous ones back to Mao's.
>It's a political name that wouldn't exist without a government to attach it to.
>
We don't really differ here.  It is used BY governments, and applied BY
govenments as a the name OF or FOR the country.  As different as Fidel
Castro has been from his predecessors he has been quite content to let
"Republic of Cuba" remain unchanged as the formal name for that country.

>If the Chinese abolished government, it would no longer apply to anything,
>yet the country of China would continue to exist.
>Nobody would *change* the name; the Chinese people would continue
>to call the country "China" (Mandarin "Zhong1guo2") then as now as before.
>
Now we need to consider the definition of "country".  Was China in its
various periods of warlordism "a" country during that time, or was it
just a loose arrangement of little countries.  Today's Afghanistan is a
country in name only as long as the goverment in Kabul remains
ineffective in extending its influence over rural warlords.

>We can perhaps avoid further debate by saying that the long form
>is the "official political name" for a country:
>a name imposed on the country (and officially so)
>by the dominant political entity there.
>
OK

>>>China, whether it's "really" one country or not, currently has two
>>>sovereign political divisions: PRC and ROC.
>>>
>>That too is debatable.  I happen to support the view that Taiwan is not
>>a part of China, and that its government has no business calling itself
>>China.  Chinese occupation of Taiwan only began at the end of the Ming
>>dynasty - a fairly short time by Chinese standards.
>>
>Similarly, the PRC's territory includes Tibet, arguably not part of China.
>
Indeed!

>>>If one division claims
>>>jurisdiction over the other, we should mention that in the article. But
>>>we should absolutely not respect one side's claims over the other. We
>>>must remain neutral, even if "everyone knows" that the only legitimate
>>>government of all of China is X.
>>>
I don't mind treating either side's claims with respect as long as that
respect does not imply support.

>>All the more reason for the meaning of [[China]] to be fairly open-ended.
>>
I'm happy to repeat that.  How about "China is a geographical territory
in eastern Asia whose borders have varied over the millenia of its history"?

Compared to [[China]], dealing with [[Ireland]] is easy.

Eclecticology


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia and anti-Semitism

body:
Jonathan Walther wrote:

> Wagner was not defined by his anti-Semitism; he was defined by his
> music, which was universally humanist.  To make his anti-Semitism out to
> be as important as his music is really really unbalanced.  The version
> Ed had was fine.  Noone today reads any of Wagners "anti-Semitic" works,
> but millions listen to his music with pleasure.  It is appropriate that
> it be mentioned Wagner was anti-Semitic, but to devote more than a
> passing mention to it as if it was the man's raison d'etre for existing
> does a gross injustice to a man who is dead and unable to defend himself.
>
> You should be thankful Ed was protecting the page; where Ed left in a
> whole paragraph on Wagners anti-Semitism, I wanted to reduce it to a
> single sentence.  But I can live with Ed's version as an acceptable
> compromise.

Sigh! I have to support Jonathan's view on this one.  Some people
unfortunately treat it as a virtue to emphasize somebody's anti-Semitism.

Eclecticology


from_name: Julie Hofmann Kemp

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Doctrine of Jehovah's Witnesses Wars -- page frozen

body:
Hi All -- I think I just froze this page, since I think it needs a time
out -- I don't really know if I did it correctly, though, because In all
the time I've been here (and gone), I've never actually used my sysop
admin rights.  There wasn't any kind of place to say why, so I'll leave
a message on the talk page.  Hope I wasn't overstepping bounds, and
apologies If I have.  Also, I realize I don't know how long this kind of
thing normally stays in place -- I'll go back in a couple of hours and
unlock it, if no one else has done so by then.

Jules
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body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>And if anyone wants me to stop being a sysop because of this, well, let me just point out that no one seemed to mind the page block when it stopped Jonathan (aka Clutch). In fact, this is the first objection I've heard in a long time (months ^_^).
>
>I will do whatever it takes to make peace, but if I'm told to back off then I'll just let there be war.
>
Ed does try hard to be a peacemaker, but at times he reminds me of the
Richard Scarry character (the name escapes me at the moment) who would
obliviously and blithely walk across an active battlefield inattentive
to the raging battle, and come out unscathed.

Sometimes Mr. Ed has to turn away from the battle to pass the most
appropriate comments.

Eclecticology


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Database queries: (was Languages & namespaces)

body:
On Tue, 2002-12-10 at 08:03, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> If you can't answer any of my questions, I'm going to avoid
> participating. I don't like failure.

Whether we ever use Jonathan's code or not, his asking questions about
how our current code works is a _very good thing_. It gives us a chance
to rethink it and see what can be improved here and now.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Jonathan Walther

subject: [Wikitech-l] Languages & namespaces

body:
On Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 02:54:49PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
>On Tue, 2002-12-10 at 05:43, Jonathan Walther wrote:
>> For the second one, don't we just need to check the existance and type
>> of the linked pages?  Why bother about the size?
>
>For the stub detector. (Optional.)

Ah. I was assuming that empty articles wouldn't exist unless they had
been purposely cleared in an edit war.  *cough*RK*cough*

>> We do also need to get the size of the primary page.
>
>What for? We parse it until we hit the null byte at the end.

Even though we are storing the text in UTF-8?  Is that safe?

>> What do the "restrictions" on a page consist of?  Whether it is
>> readable or editable?
>
>Currently, a comma-separated list of string keys which a user's
>user_rights field must contain to be allowed to edit the page.

Ok, fair enough.  It is the permissions scheme that I was hoping could
be redesigned, but I agree some sort of permissions scheme is needed.

A note about searching: with Postgres we can just set up the UTF-8
collation on the article text fields, and then we can use LIKE clauses
to search for text in the articles and titles, and the characters will
be collated correctly, without any extra coding on our part.  Another
reason I am eager to use Postgres.  The search engine will be trivial.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Languages & namespaces

body:
On Tue, 2002-12-10 at 05:43, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> For the second one, don't we just need to check the existance and type
> of the linked pages?  Why bother about the size?

For the stub detector. (Optional.)

> We do also need to get the size of the primary page.

What for? We parse it until we hit the null byte at the end.

> What do the "restrictions" on a page consist of?  Whether it is
> readable or editable?

Currently, a comma-separated list of string keys which a user's
user_rights field must contain to be allowed to edit the page.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Tom Parmenter

in_reply_to:
<3DF63901.7040405@telus.net> (message from Ray Saintonge on Tue,
	10 Dec 2002 10:57:05 -0800)

body:
This is just ever-so-slightly suspect because it isn't *direct* from
the source but here is a link to the New York City Opera Learning
Resource Center's biography of Wagner, adapted from the Grove
Dictionary of Opera, a well-respected reference work that does not, so
far as I know, go in for flames or polemics.

I know Larry Sanger wants this sort of thing on the talk pages, but I
think it is relevant to the discussion of how far a reference work may
go in expressing an opinion or judgement:

http://www.nycopera.com/www/learn/resource/biographydetails.cfm?ComposerID=12

In this biography, Wagner's essay on Jews in music is described as
"ragingly anti-Semitic".  The biography further states that as Wagner
was completing his final opera, "In the meantime, he continued his
musical and polemical writings, concentrating on 'racial purity'."

So, assuming that the quotes are correct, Wikipedia could cop out on
this whole thing and quote Grove, but I don't see any problem with our
going ahead and stating well-established information directly without
weasling.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88


subject: [Wikitech-l] Languages & namespaces

body:
On Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 03:16:51PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
>> Ah. I was assuming that empty articles wouldn't exist unless they had
>> been purposely cleared in an edit war.  *cough*RK*cough*
>
>The stub detector marks links to articles below an (arbitrary,
>user-selectable) size as with a distinct link class.

Well, IF we are not going to store article sizes separately, then we
need to retrieve the text of all articles linked to when we render an
article page.  And THAT means I can do this with a single query after
all, instead of three.

>> A note about searching: with Postgres we can just set up the UTF-8
>> collation on the article text fields, and then we can use LIKE clauses
>> to search for text in the articles and titles, and the characters will
>> be collated correctly, without any extra coding on our part.  Another
>> reason I am eager to use Postgres.  The search engine will be trivial.
>
>Will that be reasonably fast? How would we rank pages in the search?

Yes, quite fast.  We can rank pages however we want; we could use an
ORDER BY clause to sort results by article title, or by timestamp, or
anything.

How is searching currently done?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Languages & namespaces

body:
On Tue, 2002-12-10 at 14:51, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 02:54:49PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
> >On Tue, 2002-12-10 at 05:43, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> >> For the second one, don't we just need to check the existance and type
> >> of the linked pages?  Why bother about the size?
> >
> >For the stub detector. (Optional.)
>
> Ah. I was assuming that empty articles wouldn't exist unless they had
> been purposely cleared in an edit war.  *cough*RK*cough*

The stub detector marks links to articles below an (arbitrary,
user-selectable) size as with a distinct link class.

> >> We do also need to get the size of the primary page.
> >
> >What for? We parse it until we hit the null byte at the end.
>
> Even though we are storing the text in UTF-8?  Is that safe?

The only time a null byte ever appears in UTF-8 is to represent the null
character. Since the null is generally considered d?class? in
human-readable text, I think we're safe. :)

> A note about searching: with Postgres we can just set up the UTF-8
> collation on the article text fields, and then we can use LIKE clauses
> to search for text in the articles and titles, and the characters will
> be collated correctly, without any extra coding on our part.  Another
> reason I am eager to use Postgres.  The search engine will be trivial.

Will that be reasonably fast? How would we rank pages in the search?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Languages & namespaces

body:
On Tue, 2002-12-10 at 15:15, Jonathan Walther wrote:
(stub detector needs size of linked articles)
> Well, IF we are not going to store article sizes separately, then we
> need to retrieve the text of all articles linked to when we render an
> article page.  And THAT means I can do this with a single query after
> all, instead of three.

Is retrieving, transferring, and separately counting the length of the
text of potentially hundreds or thousands of linked articles *really*
more efficient than a second query for LENGTH(text), a value which the
database should already know and thus does not have to spend time
zipping through strings looking for null bytes?

(using LIKE for searches)
> >Will that be reasonably fast? How would we rank pages in the search?
>
> Yes, quite fast.  We can rank pages however we want; we could use an
> ORDER BY clause to sort results by article title, or by timestamp, or
> anything.
>
> How is searching currently done?

http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Fulltext_Search.html

For multi-word searches we AND and OR multiple MATCH/AGAINSTs together
in one query, which may not the best way to do it. MySQL 4.0 has boolean
features built right in, but we're using the more stable 3.x.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] On the subject of relativism

body:
Julie wrote:

> 1) Yes, Erik is Eloquence, and has been involved in many edit wars on
> subjects which he has little expertise.

Care to back this up with facts? Or should I counter this claim by
pointing out that you have written a significant number of articles that
are not NPOV, but written from a relativist (some would say apologist)
perspective? That you wanted to delete facts from the Galileo article
because you didn't like the source, as you regarded it as biased,
without being able to prove it wrong? You and Michael Tinkler have done
a lot of work on Wikipedia, and I respect that, but both of you have
written articles on subjects of Christian history which I consider far
from NPOV, often entirely ignoring church-critical positions (likely
because you are not even aware of them, although Tinkler tends towards
sincere apologism, he's a devout Catholic after all).

Julie responds -- Erik, this is one of the things I had in mind.  The
subject in which you demonstrably have little expertise is historical
method and in thinking like an historian.  The source you wanted to have
a major part in the article was one generally regarded by historians as
having been untrustworthy, particularly because of his biases.  It was
not difficult to demonstrate then that the author is beloved mostly by
anti-Christians, nor that specialists in the period disregard him.  What
you didn't like was that Michael Tinkler and I were able to e-mail
scholars and recall our own grad school experiences and felt confident
in relying  on them.

As for ignoring church-critical positions, that's nonsense -- primarily
because for the most part those positions did not occur for the time
periods in question.  As Jeff Russell put it so nicely, the history of
the Western Church is one of Prophecy and Order --  or of actual
spiritual belief tied in with the fallacies of human administration,
administration constantly subject to both corruption and reform.  That
reform was within a very narrow context, however.  Except for a fairly
small Jewish population, Europe as Roman Christian.  While people may
have wished to reform the habits of the clergy, no one ever thought of
himself as anything other than a Christian.  Even groups like the
Albigensians thought of themselves as good Christians -- there were, in
effect, no church-critical positions in the sense of there being an
option to Roman Christianity.  To say so is disingenuous, and to think
so plainly idiotic.  Moreover, historians generally try to avoid
judging, because what we want to do is explain how people thought and
felt at the time.  What you seem to want is  articles that condemn
certain practices of the Church, and you argue that to not condemn them
is to be relativistic.    You can condemn them all you want, but doing
so in a 'pedia article is POV, and implying that such criticism existed
at the time is anachronistic and inaccurate.

Erik said:
I still find your following statements from the Inquisition talk page
quite
remarkable: "What happened to NPOV? Yes, the Inquistions[sic] to us are
pretty scary, but could we please try to remember that, to the vast
majority of people living at the time of the first two Inquisitions
discussed in this article, heresy was a BAD thing. Heresy existed, and
not because of some conspiracy by Authority[sic]. Heretics not only went
to hell, but their very presence in society put others at risk. At
least, that's how your average medieval Christian would see it. CONTEXT
IS IMPORTANT." That's cultural relativism at its best -- let's turn
cause and effect around until they no longer are recognizable. I can
live with this view being *represented*, but I can not accept it being
*presented* as if it was NPOV. If this is still your understanding of
NPOV, it is deeply flawed.

Julie responds:

What I said above.  And please just stop.  It's silly.  We are not, for
example, talking about people in the modern world who participated in
genocide and trying to say, "well, in those times, everybody felt that
way" -- because that's patently untrue because the modern world is one
where people are generally able to try on different world views and
defend them.  The medieval world view was pretty narrow and relatively
uniform.  Next, you'll say that we should write articles that imply that
Ancient Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Hebrews,
etc., were morally flawed because they took other people's lands and
held slaves.  The idea that these things were wrong would not have
occurred to people in these societies -- they were integral parts of
them (some more than others).  Right and wrong don't really come into it
for historians -- instead, we look at the part slavery played in those
societies and the nature of slavery in those societies -- and we do it
neutrally, objectively, because that's our job.

Erik says:
Because of this relativism from interested parties, it will be a lot of
work to add, for example, accurate information about the books of the
Bible and their individual history, the historical person of Jesus,
persecution of pagans and destruction of temples and libraries,
Christian book burnings and censorship, medieval fakery, Christian
anti-Semitism, Christian anti-scientism, church attempts to destroy
knowledge about contraception, modern church support for dictatorships
and mass murder etc. etc. The long historical tradition that correctly
views the Dark Ages as dark is not accurately represented on Wikipedia.
Your alleged expertise is not an argument. It may be an argument in
Larry's world, but it is not here. Modern medievalism in particular is
often an attempt to "invent the Middle Ages", as Norman Cantor, a
medievalist himself, called it. I am happy that the NPOV policy will
make this impossible in the long term.

Julie replies:

Horseshit.  The fact is, Erik, that you have a vested interest in
presenting things in what you call a church-critical perspective. But
there is a difference between thinking critically and judging critically
and presenting information critically,  and what you want, which is to
present articles that make the Christian church out to be the unilateral
bad guy.  FYI, when I teach the history of the Church, which I often do,
I start with Jesus as a Jew, discuss (using documents from the time) the
changes of treatment of Jews and Christians by the Romans, and discuss
the fact that Christianity was only one of many minor mystery cults for
quite a long time.  The students are ready for this anyway, because
they've read other resurrection myths -- they also learn that the
Gospels were not written by people who knew Jesus, and that there were
Gospels that were thrown out -- and that early Christians fought very
hard to define doctrine.  When we talk about the Middle ages, we talk
about the Crusades in all their less pleasant aspects, and in the Late
Middle Ages and Renaissance, we talk about the nature of the papacy and
the idea of papal monarchy.    Articles on similar subjects should
mention the downside -- but in a way that leaves people thinking --
e.g., "the crusades were done in the name of God, yet thousands of
people, including Christians, are killed by the crusaders -- wow!  How
could they reconcile those things?"  Historians give the information to
answer those questions, but we don't say whether we think the answers
were good or bad.  Another, shorter example:  My class reads a lot of
primary source documents having to do with women in society -- One of
the things that I try to teach is that "women were treated unfairly" is
not an objective statement, and not neutral BUT "the evidence indicates
that Athenian women were considered less important and had fewer legal
rights than men" IS valid.

Oh -- and my expertise in being a professional historian isn't alleged.
And the dig at Larry was not very nice.

Finally, I have no interest in taking anything off-line.  You have just
managed to remind me of why I stopped contributing.  For that, I thank
you.

Jules


from_name: The Cunctator

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] My goodness, people!!! Aka WTF?  (was  Wikipedia
	and anti-Semitism)

body:
On Tue, 2002-12-10 at 15:37, Julie Hofmann Kemp wrote
> 3 )An historian might deal with this by saying something like, "Wagner
> is seen by many to have been anti-Semitic, or at least to have supported
> the idea of anti-Semitism  This belief is generally based on one of
> Wagner's own works [insert name here], in which he describes the Jews
> as..."  In this was, no one is labeling or falsely accusing anybody of
> anything -- just offering a generally held conclusion and the basis
> therefore.   Speaking of which, I hope there is something similar in the
> article about that nice Mr. Luther...

That said, unnecessary qualifications and hedging don't help the picture
either.

The world is thought by many to exist, even though we could all be
brains in a jar.

But we don't need to include that hedge except for a discussion of
"existence" or observables.

Similarly, when we make claims about the past, such as "There were ice
ages" or "Wagner was anti-Semitic", we mean "There is evidence of ice
ages in the past, where 'ice age' has a specific meaning" and "There is
evidence that Wagner was anti-Semitic, or at least supported the idea of
anti-Semitism".

It's inappropriate to claim "There were ice ages" without providing the
supporting evidence, but the claim itself is fine.


body:
>Not at all. I hope enough people will realize that religion, especially
>fundamentalism, is a dangerous influence on all societies, simply from looking at
>the facts. Early (late antiquity) Christians were very similar to the
>Taliban in their methods and probably also in their neuropsychology.

I object to this.  Only in weak and intolerant societies is religion any
sort of danger.  In most societies religion is a powerful force for
good.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
> I'm not really asking for a chorus of opinions from the list, but an
> authoritative, once-and-for-all pronouncement from the Founders.

That's all nice and good, but before you do so, you should present an
accurate and complete summary of the facts that made you pose this question.

1) Since Clutch started an Edit War by unilaterally removing large parts of
the Richard Wagner article on the English Wikipedia (one of several edit wars
he got involved in yesterday), that article has been edited back and forth.

2) Specifically, it has been debated whether statements about Wagner's
anti-Semitism should be part of the article, or moved into a separate article
because they "distract" from Wagner's work as Clutch argued. Unfortunately, so
far, Clutch has succeeded in separating this part from the main article, even
though we include dubious and extensive claims about anti-Semitism in the Noam
Chomsky article.

3) That Wagner was an anti-Semite has not seriously been disputed by anyone,
including Clutch. Wagner's publication "Das Judenthum in der Musik", where
he accuses Jews of being hateful, greedy, powerful and heartless matches any
reasonable definition of anti-Semitism perfectly.

4) Ed has repeatedly used his administrative powers to protect the page in
an attempt to prevent edit conflicts. At first, I had no problem with that,
but now he is getting involved in the debate and locking the page from further
edits to protect his version at the same time.

5) Ed holds the position that, even if nobody disagrees with the fact that
Wagner was an anti-Semite, it should be attributed, even if the attribution is
something as fishy as "is universally regarded as".

6) I have countered this position with the analogy of requiring similar
attribution for statements like "Wagner attended university at ..".

The point here is, if there is no disagreement about facts among people
whose opinions are verifiable and should be included in the article, I see no
point in attributing any claims, regardless of the nature of the statement. As
someone (Jimbo?) pointed out in the North Korea example, if North Korea
actually disputes the numbers, that's a verifiable fact. If somebody, say, disputed
the authenticity of Wagner's publication, that would be a verifiable fact.
In these cases, we would clearly have to tone down the claims. But if there
are no counter-opinions, why should we?

Furthermore, I consider Ed's use of his administrative privileges to protect
articles he is involved in an abuse of said privileges. He should only use
them in the way he initially did, as a "time out" to direct discussions in
case of conflicts to the talk page, but he should not even do that if he states
a position in the matter. Otherwise he is no longer a sysop or a moderator
but an editor, which is not the function assigned to him. If I recall
correctly, this is not the first time this has come up, so I think some kind of
reaction is in order.

Regards,

Erik

--
+++ GMX - Mail, Messaging & more  http://www.gmx.net +++
NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr f?r 1 ct/ Min. surfen!


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

body:
Oh, right. I didn't mean he should shut up. At least not on *this* mailing list :-)

Sorry if I gave that impression, Jon.

Ed


body:
On Tue, 2002-12-10 at 16:26, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 04:29:55PM -0500, The Cunctator wrote:
> >It's inappropriate to claim "There were ice ages" without providing the
> >supporting evidence, but the claim itself is fine.
>
> Actually, there is a lot of evidence from scientists, atheist and
> otherwise, that earths cool periods never were ice ages, in the sense
> of huge ice sheets covering more than a quarter of the earths surface area.
>
Not credibly. Glaciations leave wonderfully clear geologic records. But
let's not get into this here.

Thank you for serving my point that there are people who will argue
against just about any claim; that is why it's better to err on the side
of not adding qualifiers to every statement.


list: wikien-l

subject: [WikiEN-l] request that Ed Poor's sysop powers be frozen

body:
Dan,

I just brought the same issue up on wikipedia-l. As I (User:Eloquence) noted
on the Talk page to [[Richard Wagner]], I agree that Ed's use of sysop
powers in this matter is unacceptable, and I remember a similar incident where Ed
was accused of wrongly protecting a page. He seems to be the only sysop who
regularly does so.

I still think Ed is, in general, trustworthy. He has, so far, done a good
job of clueing in newbies and reverting obvious vandalism. In spite of some of
his rather extreme viewpoints, he usually manages to stay on the right side
of NPOV.  If he can agree to a more narrow definition of sysop
responsibilities than the one he currently seems to follow, I have no problem with him
holding these privileges.

Regards,

Erik (non-sysop and proud of it ;-)

--
+++ GMX - Mail, Messaging & more  http://www.gmx.net +++
NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr f?r 1 ct/ Min. surfen!


subject: [Wikipedia-l] RFC: Flamewar markup [flame]


subject: [Wikipedia-l] No personal attacks, please

body:
A contributor wrote:

If you want to take personal attacks to the list, I can do that.

I'm not naming any names, but if the shoe fits, would you kindly leave it outside? You can have a nice warm pair of slippers and sit down on this big comfy chair. Would you like some hot cocoa? How about some cookies? ^_^

Uncle Ed


body:
> Well, that seems like a good way to compromise.  It doesn't soft-pedal
> anything, but it gets us out of the business of making a potentially
> controversial judgment.

Jimbo, I know you like compromise, but I generally prefer consistency. If we
do this in this article, we should use a phrase such as "is universally
regarded as" in any sentence that falls into the same class, i.e. makes a value
statement about a person that the majority sees as negative, but which is
nevertheless not disputed. Is this a policy you would want?

> I don't know must about Wagner's anti-semitism (though I don't doubt
> it), so I don't know if anyone disputes it.  Would Wagner have disputed
> it?

Hard to tell. Perhaps he would have called himself "anti-Jewish". I have not
read any of the countless books about Wagner (I just got involved after the
edit-war with Clutch broke out), but the summaries I have found of even  the
more revisionist books of which there are plenty state something like "Wagner
was an anti-Semite, there can be no doubt about it. But .."

> Do you want sysop access, Erik?  You should have it.

"I'm just not ready for that kind of commitment" ;-). I think it's good for
some of the more involved people to keep an eye on how it looks from down
here instead of up there, if you know what I mean.

Regards,

Erik

--
+++ GMX - Mail, Messaging & more  http://www.gmx.net +++
NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr f?r 1 ct/ Min. surfen!


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX, release candidate 2

body:
Main changes:
* matrices support
* more characters inside \mbox are allowed
* more AMS symbols supported

I think texvc is ready for Wikipedia now, but I'd prefer if it
received more testing before that happens.

The only thing that yet has to be done is to integrate math.sql
with the rest of SQL code for creation/upgrade of Wikipedia database.
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subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX, release candidate 2

body:
On Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 09:45:12AM -0800, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> I would really prefer using a Math or TeX namespace instead of <math>
> tags.

It doesn't introduce any new kind of articles or links,
so it makes no sense to make it namespace.


from_name: elian

body:
what the heck... couldn't you start this debate at another time than four
days before my master's exam? ;-)

Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> writes:

> But the gist was that anti-Semitism is
> a nationalist philosophy originiating in the 19th century
> that goes beyond merely accepting a society's dominant prejudices.

Toby gets the problem: Anti-Semitism is a concept of the 19th century. And
its full consequences showed up in the 20th century (holocaust). Today,
under the background of the holocaust, the term is one of the most evil
reproaches you can think of. At least here in Germany, if you accuse
someone successfully of anti-semitism, he can forget any career forever.

So, if Wagner called himself an Anti-semite, he did this under totally
different circumstances and in the meanwhile the term changed its
connotations - from stupid mainstream ressentiments against Jews to a
very likely support of Hitler's murder of Jews. Would he also have
called himself Anti-Semite if he knew of the Holocaust?

To put this problem on a meta-level: can we apply a concept or a term of
the 20th century to something prior to it?

Can we call Plato's conception of state totalitarian? Is it appropriate to
call the Prophet Muhammad, living in the 7th century an anti-semite?

Is it okay to call Aristoteles a sexist and criticize him for denying women
the right to vote?

There is no right or final answer to these questions, but we have to think
about it.

Just a small glance in the future: _if_ the Israelis adopted suddenly a
policy of exterminating systematically _all_ Palestinians (some say they
do already) - is then everybody who says today "I don't like these
quarreling people, the Israelis are right to fight them" (like some
American journalists and politicians do) a supporter of genocide?

Will Wikipedia in 50 years write "Dick Armey was
Anti-Palestinian" and this will carry the same meaning as if you would
say today someone is anti-semite? [1]

Concerning Ed's alleged abuse of sysop power: it should be noted that no
other sysop on Wikipedia is so engaged in "hot" topics and trying to
settle edit wars. I don't consider protecting pages a good way to achieve
this but opinions may differ here. I support that Ed keeps his sysop
status.

Rather I'd suggest a temporary ban of RK because of repeated NPOV abuses,
if that didn't entail accusations of Anti-Semitism on Wikipedia.

For people who like to write good articles about anti-semitism, I want
to point out that there is some work to do at
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AThe_dark_side_of_Wikipedia
As I have already said to Ed, I won't touch these articles.

greetings,
elian
[1] http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article569.shtml
BTW, _if_ this interview transcript is correct - I don't trust the source
entirely -, replace Israel with Germany and Palestinians with Jews and
these sentences could pass for a Nazi's statement of the 1920ties. For the
people not familiar with German history: longtime there was no mention of
actually killing Jews, mostly the  Nazis called for a "transfer of the
Jews" and held that "Germany belonged to the Germans", where Germany was
meant to comprise also the "vast spaces in the East", settled by the
Polish etc. - these people should also be "transfered"...


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] [[Ireland]] and [[China]]

body:
On Monday 09 December 2002 04:00 am, Larry Sanger wrote:

> A comment from Mav (whose judgment and hard work I admire virtually always
> :-) ) suddenly turned a light on in my head (i.e., I had a sudden
> realization)....

Thank you. Coming from you I consider that to be a great compliment.

>....
> I think I understand now why Mav and some others were so seemingly (to me)
> peremptory about the issue.  It's because they are working on
> [[WikiProject Countries]], and they take it to be in they brief to find
> the appropriate short form name of every country on the list.  I suspect
> the people at work on this WikiProject see "People's Republic of China"
> and say, quite reasonably, that people call the PRC "China"--that's the
> popular name.  Similarly for the case of "Republic of Ireland" and
> "Ireland.  But again, that doesn't mean that "China" always means the PRC,
> or that "Ireland" always means the Republic.  The PRC and the Republic
> have been around for less than 100 years, and China per se and Ireland per
> se are ancient and far greater and ultimately more important than the
> modern states.

Yes, I guess this is the main reason why Jeronimo, me et al. favored China =
PRC. We developed a naming convention for countries that was an extension of
the official common name naming convention. Our focus for the WkiProject is
on the modern states so I guess we lost the big picture.

>...... In the
> context of an encyclopedia, it seems pretty obvious that "China" should be
> used to mean China--not just part of it--*all* of China, its whole
> history, its many languages, its people (all of them), etc.  This,
> unfortunately or not, means that the article about the modern state, the
> PRC, cannot dominate the page called [[China]].  Similarly, the article
> about the modern state, the Republic of Ireland, cannot dominate the page
> called [[Ireland]].  China and Ireland as topics are much bigger than
> those states.

As you should know from reading [[talk:Ireland]] I've already expressed the
opinion that [[Ireland]] should be about the island, Irish culture, music and
ancient history. The republic and northern UK-dependent territory should have
their own articles.

This issue and reading your email provoked me to reevaluate my previous
position on China (thus my silence on this issue so far - which is very
unusual considering this is a naming issue).

It should be noted, though, that what you state above is not as obvious as you
may think:

Princeton University's WordNet Dictionary
China
     n 1: a communist nation that covers a vast territory in eastern
          Asia; the most populous country in the world

Also, Britannica Concise
http://education.yahoo.com/search/be?lb=t&p=url%3Ac/china

Republic, E Asia. Area: 3,700,000 sq mi (9,583,000 sq km). Population (1997
est.): 1,227,740,000). Capital: Beijing. ....

Of course we aim to be better than Britannica and other sources. So I guess it
comes down to how much work we want to do and whether or not we want to be
lumpers or dividers. I've always been more of a divider myself so what you
say above has a certain appeal to me. (NOTE: Much of previous debate on this
was based on NPOV issues relating to Taiwan's claims. I was also reacting to
a suggestion that [[China]] be turned into just a disambiguation page! This
made me see red and probably clouded my judgement.).

You also mention a very valid ambiguity issue; China and the PRC really are
two different things in spite of common usage. The reason is that the vast
majority of Chinese history and the development of Chinese, art, science and
culture occurred before the PRC. As our naming conventions state;  "..article
naming should give priority to what the majority of English speakers would
most easily recognize with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity.." I now see
ambiguity that needs to be corrected.

So I favor moving [[History of China]] to [[China]] and moving [[China]] to
[[People's Republic of China]]. This will require some work on all the
affected articles though (a lot of text needs to be rearranged and moved
around). Then the history of the PRC will officially start in 1949 with an
explanation of the major events of the revolution that preceded it. [[China]]
will then be the main article that will introduce all things Chinese and link
to more detailed articles on various topics - which includes the current
republic at [[People's Republic of China]].

But now we have a bigger problem; What about France, The Netherlands, Germany,
Denmark, Mexico, and many many other nations whose current government was
started way after our histories on them begin? With the new logic, it doesn't
seem appropriate to have [[History of the French Republic]] mention Louis XIV
or Napoleon. Or the history of the United States of Mexico say much about the
Aztecs. This will require a great deal of work to sort out and can't be
solved by just renaming articles.

Yours in the WikiWay,

Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

WikiKarma payment. Have you had your Wiki today?
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Starck (new)
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Huguenot&diff=475924&oldid=475818


from_name: Larry Sanger

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] My goodness, people!!! Aka WTF?  (was  Wikipedia and
 anti-Semitism)

body:
From: Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de>

>> Your alleged expertise is not an argument. It may be an argument in
Larry's world, but it is not here.

Erik, if you want to know what they are, you can ask, and if I have time,
I'll attempt to explain them to you, although I have my doubts that you'd
be able to understand them.

>> I consider your intentions to be good and much of your information to
be reasonably accurate.

Oh, isn't that nice of him, Julie?  He considers your intentions to be
good and your information to be reasonably accurate.  How about that.
What a guy!

Larry
--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell


subject:
[flame] :-) Good idea, Brion [Wikipedia-l] My goodness, people!!!
 Aka WTF? (was Wikipedia and anti-Semitism)

body:
Sorry, I left out the referent of my pronoun. I wrote: "...if you want to
know what they are..."

They = my views about expertise, which Erik simply hasn't a clue about.

Larry
--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Not a flame, but a statement for you all on NPOV and expertise

body:
Right --

This is somewhat in response to Eloquence's last, but I'd like to  use
it to point out something that has to do with Lir, Ark, and Helga as
well.

1)  Historians are trained to try to put aside their own personal
prejudices before writing.  We assume this when we talk about NPOV
--that writers will try to write objectively.  Historians also try to
explain things in term of the temporal context.  It's something else we
are trained to do.  What historians of the late 20th and 21st centuries
consider to be the best way to approach something is different than the
approach followed by people a hundred years ago.  Historians are
expected to be reasonably conversant in the different schools of thought
and what's acceptable.  Finally (on this point), a recent NPR interview
pointed out that History is the academic discipline that offers students
the best opportunity to learn expository, analytical writing -- and that
it is being neglected in US K-12 courses.

2) all of the stuff initially written on NPOV and similar policies
points out that not all theories are equally valid, and that those that
aren't should receive proportionately less space than the predominant
theories.  When theories are crank theories, or when they have fallen
into disrepute, we don't need to put them in -- or should mentions this.

3) Most Medievalists (and many historians focusing on later periods),
these days reject the notion of the Dark Ages (except in Greece between
about 1100 BC and 800 BC), because we now know that a lot was going on,
much of it having to do with learning.  Moreover, we can now speak of
the Northumbrian, Carolingian, Ottonian, and 12th century renaissances
-- to a certain degree, this has made the Renaissance a bit less unique.

4) Just because much of the modern world view began in the Enlightenment
doesn't mean it's the best view.

5) Not all people accept that religion is a destructive force in society

6) Erik, who comes at the world believing that religion is by nature (or
application) socially destructive, that post-Enlightenment thought is in
some way, more correct, and that the world before the Renaissance was
somehow a lesser thing to be judged  by modern standards, seems unable
to keep these views from influencing many of his contributions.  What
makes it seem more reasonable in Erik's case is that he assumes that his
views are both correct and universally accepted as sensible.  This is
about as neutral as, for example, Helga with her anachronistic
nationalist backwards projections or Ark with his dogmatic acceptance of
deMause's marginal theories.    If bans were imposed on Helga and Lir
(with his own prejudicial notions) and Ark (if he didn't just leave),
then I don't understand why we don't hold Eloquence to the same standard
-- He is equally incapable of neutrality and equally anti-social -- one
has only to read the Galileo talk to see that his inability to work with
others and his lack of respect for people who disagree with him is
clear.

Y'all might at some point notice that you've lost most of the people who
actually are specialists in History and who actually work in that field
as a profession.  And you might ask why -- except, I think, that you
don't really care.  It's funny, when you realize just how much of the
stuff in the 'pedia falls under the stuff historians do for a living.

Pax

Jules

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subject: [flame] :-) Good idea, Brion [Wikipedia-l] My goodness, people!!! Aka WTF? (was Wikipedia and anti-Semitism)

body:
Thanks, Larry -- and to those of you who feel I've spoken to you
unfairly, my apologies.  I'm just sick and tired of dealing with
patronizing attitudes like Erik's and people who ask me to defending
myself by proving negatives.  I've read through all of Erik's websites,
and there is an agenda.  I had hoped that most people here know me and
my work well enough to know that I don't have an agenda, except to put
out articles that are encyclopedic in the truest sense and to take
advantage of the immediacy of the technology to make sure those articles
are up-to-date in the presentation of generally accepted thought,
although perhaps reflecting newer trends than some people are
comfortable with.  The last sentence aside, I also try to make articles
readable ;-)  I don't by any means claim to be an expert in everything,
but I can generally tell you when something is basically false from a
historical perspective.  That was once thought to be a valuable asset.

Jules
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subject: [WikiEN-l] [[Ireland]] and [[China]]

body:
On Monday 09 December 2002 04:00 am, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> I don't dispute the factual correctness of Mav's statement (or his hard
> work and dedication), but I disagree with the conclusions that he draws
> from that statement.  I find him to prone to decide issues based on his
> genuflections to the Google God.

Hm. With all due respect to you and your contributions, I take some issue with
your oversimplified analysis of me and don't think such an analysis is really
appropriate in the first place. I've stated on many occasions that Google is
simply a tool to be used that can give an impression of usage when the most
proper usage is in question. That data can then be used as one important
external factor to help decide what we should be naming things. If and when a
naming conflict arises or there is otherwise an ambiguity issue presented,
then alternates need to be sought.

>With deepest respect I see Mav as a
> dedicated simplifier who would very much like to see knowledge in neatly
> wrapped little packages; sometimes that means cutting off the sharp and
> thorny bits just to get the gift to fit into the package.  Once we get
> into that box it is more difficult to look out and see the other
> possibilities.

Also with the deepest respect, I think your oversimplication of me as a
"dedicated simplifier" is a bit off the mark (yet does have a thin veneer of
truth to it). For me, its not the knowledge itself but how that knowledge
interelates with other knowledge and how everything fits together in a
cohesive whole in order to make something superior to the sum of its parts
(similar to the role of chemistry and physiology in creating the emergent
property we call life). Granted, the use of the short forms of country names
was a bit simplistic, but it fit into our established naming conventions and
is also the form that most people would expect - thus its perceived overall
usefulness for both readers and contributors won the day.

This makes perfect sense until the fact that a modern nation like the PRC is
not the same as the historical China. So, upon reflection, a more complicated
system is needed for naming countries in order to bypass the ambiguity
between the two different (yet related) entities and write on-topic articles.
I in fact enjoy complex solutions so long as the result is logical, useful
and is reasonably self-consistant with the minimum of exceptions. In short, I
adhere to Einstein's call to make things as simple as possible, but no
simpler. Note the "no simpler" part.

So I focus on many details at once and track how those many details might
combine to form the big picture. Sometimes the detailed work leads to blind
corners (or failed metabolic pathways) because I fail to take related details
into account or fail to see their importance (or even their existence). This
is what occurred with the China issue; I failed to compute the detail on what
in fact was the best and most useful way for the article itself to present
and organize its data since I overlooked the fact that the PRC and China are
really separate entities.

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

WikiKarma payment. Have you had your Wiki today?
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Bacillus&diff=0&oldid=476532


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

body:
I'm unsubscribing from this list.  If I shouldn't be a sysop while not
following the list, then make it so.

kq


subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX, release candidate 3 and details again

body:
This version fixes a few minor problems and adds support for even more TeX.
Now it compiles more than 99% of legal equations from PlanetMath corpus.

= TeX =
Of 6302 tests:
* 5574 (88.4%) passed
    * in 5136 (92.1%) cases it was able to produce HTML
    * in 438 (7.9%) cases it couldn't
* 1 (0.0%) failed due to lexer
* 11 (0.2%) failed due to parser
* 716 (11.3%) failed due to 188 unknown \-codes
    * 179 \-codes in 684 (10.8%) equations were illegal (couldn't be compiled
      by LaTeX with ams* packages)
    * 9 \-codes in 35 (0.6%) equations were legal
* So 47 (0.7%) failed due to reasons other than genuinely illegal \-codes
* So of 5618 equations not containing genuinely illegal \-codes, 5571
  could be compiled by texvc, what makes up for 99.15%, more than
  promised 99%.

= Performance =
It got some 20% slower since version 12. Yet it's still fast as hell.
Should you ever want to use texvc to process a few megabytes of TeX code
per second, there are many obvious ways how performance could be improved
even more.

real    0m0.244s
user    0m0.210s
sys     0m0.000s

real    0m0.240s
user    0m0.240s
sys     0m0.000s

real    0m0.236s
user    0m0.240s
sys     0m0.000s
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body:
Jonathan Walther <krooger at debian.org> writes:

> On Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 07:32:36PM +0100, elian wrote:
> >Rather I'd suggest a temporary ban of RK because of repeated NPOV abuses,
> >if that didn't entail accusations of Anti-Semitism on Wikipedia.
>
> My earlier statements requesting clarification of Wikipedia policy came
> from my observing the way RK on the one hand, ignores it, and on the
> other hand accuses others of ignoring it.
>
> I too would support a temporary ban of RK.  He is always biasing things.

You misunderstood. I don't call for a ban of RK.

First, I consider myself (like you, too) in regard to RK's writings as
clearly biased and not able to judge if he deserves a ban.
It seems to me that he really has NPOV in mind, but is too mangled in his
hatred against anything he considers as anti-semitic to realize how biased
his own writings are. However, I would prefer if anybody whose emotions go
that high refrains voluntarily from writing in this area. I trust people
like Julie more to write accurately and adequately about Wagner's
anti-semitism.

Second, I consider a ban as really dangerous. As I already pointed out in
my previous posting, even a rumour of anti-semitism (justified or
unjustified) is likely to seriously harm Wikipedia.

Better be anti-Arab, it is politically a lot more opportune...

greetings,
elian
--
There are two ways to be rich:
earning more or desiring less.


from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [flame] :-) Good idea, Brion [Wikipedia-l] - Peace

body:
I am sure it escaped nobody that all this conversation
is taking place on the main list - not on the english
list.

So, on top of supporting adding [flame] in the
subject, I'll be glad if - should you go on on the
subject (sigh) - you could move it to the list where
it belongs. English matters.

NB : I don't mean antisemitism is only an english
matter ;-) Sure is not.

This
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-December/008154.html
is a general matter

This
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-December/008182.html
maybe is not.

This
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-December/008157.html
maybe is not

This
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-December/008194.html
maybe is not.

I know, it's tricky. Maybe a good part of this
conversation could have been on a talk page also ?

Main list is for general matters. Not for english
banning, english page protection, english flame wars.

People should not unregister from a list dealing with
general issues on encyclopedia building, one of the
places where internationals can meet, just because an
english flame war is at the wrong place!
Or should I go to the english list to bother you about
our last conversations with Iala ???

I am catholic. It is the advent time. So peace on you all.

__________________________________________________
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subject: [flame] :-) Good idea, Brion [Wikipedia-l] - Peace


from_name: Giskart

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia mailling lists to usenet

body:
Is there objection if I enter a request to add Intlwiki-l and Wikitech-l
to Gmane?

gmane.sciencs.linguistics.wikipedia.technical
gmane.sciencs.linguistics.wikipedia.international

Giskart


body:
> People should not unregister from a list dealing
> with
> general issues on encyclopedia building, one of the
> places where internationals can meet, just because
> an
> english flame war is at the wrong place!

Ah ! and since some are captious (?) about writing
style and meanings, what I mean here is

"people should not feel like they have no other choice
than unregistering from this list to avoid being
showered with unfriendly mails"

I didnot mean it is wrong of them to do so.

Just to be sure. Wish you all - and kq - a good day.

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Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
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body:
> Also, if you find yourself writing an entry that you
> want to add a
> [flame] header to, that means you probably shouldn't
> send it.

agreed

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] My goodness, people!!! Aka WTF?  (was  Wikipedia and anti-Semitism)

body:
Julie wrote:

> 1) Yes, Erik is Eloquence, and has been involved in many edit wars on
> subjects which he has little expertise.

Care to back this up with facts? Or should I counter this claim by pointing
out that you have written a significant number of articles that are not NPOV,
but written from a relativist (some would say apologist) perspective? That
you wanted to delete facts from the Galileo article because you didn't like
the source, as you regarded it as biased, without being able to prove it wrong?
You and Michael Tinkler have done a lot of work on Wikipedia, and I respect
that, but both of you have written articles on subjects of Christian history
which I consider far from NPOV, often entirely ignoring church-critical
positions (likely because you are not even aware of them, although Tinkler tends
towards sincere apologism, he's a devout Catholic after all).

I still find your following statements from the Inquisition talk page quite
remarkable: "What happened to NPOV? Yes, the Inquistions[sic] to us are
pretty scary, but could we please try to remember that, to the vast majority of
people living at the time of the first two Inquisitions discussed in this
article, heresy was a BAD thing. Heresy existed, and not because of some
conspiracy by Authority[sic]. Heretics not only went to hell, but their very presence
in society put others at risk. At least, that's how your average medieval
Christian would see it. CONTEXT IS IMPORTANT." That's cultural relativism at its
best -- let's turn cause and effect around until they no longer are
recognizable. I can live with this view being *represented*, but I can not accept it
being *presented* as if it was NPOV. If this is still your understanding of
NPOV, it is deeply flawed.

Because of this relativism from interested parties, it will be a lot of work
to add, for example, accurate information about the books of the Bible and
their individual history, the historical person of Jesus, persecution of
pagans and destruction of temples and libraries, Christian book burnings and
censorship, medieval fakery, Christian anti-Semitism, Christian anti-scientism,
church attempts to destroy knowledge about contraception, modern church support
for dictatorships and mass murder etc. etc. The long historical tradition
that correctly views the Dark Ages as dark is not accurately represented on
Wikipedia. Your alleged expertise is not an argument. It may be an argument in
Larry's world, but it is not here. Modern medievalism in particular is often
an attempt to "invent the Middle Ages", as Norman Cantor, a medievalist
himself, called it. I am happy that the NPOV policy will make this impossible in
the long term.

Furthermore, the claim that I have participated in "many" edit wars is
simply wrong. Often, however, editing back and forth, changing words here and
there, is the only way to reach an acceptable compromise. This happened with you
on the Galileo article, and with Clutch during his vandalism of Lir's page
(where several people, including myself, reverted his changes) and now during
his trolling of the Wagner article. If you read the list archive, you will
notice that I have argued for a better and more reliable decision making process
based on democratic voting by interested participants. Until we have that,
our process remains flawed. It is true that I like to work on articles about
controversial subjects, so I'm more likely to run into these process problems
than someone who, say, is only interested in getting the entire Tolkien
mythology online [note: not referring to Julie here].

If you want to take personal attacks to the list, I can do that, too -- it's
called "tit for tat". That being said, I still think it is possible to work
with you on writing NPOV articles. I consider your intentions to be good and
much of your information to be reasonably accurate. I also noticed your
statement on one Talk page that you "like your Middle Ages, warts and all"
(paraphrased) -- it's good to know that you are interested in reporting the truth.
It's much harder to work with someone like Clutch.

Regards,

Erik (Eloquence)

--
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subject: [WikiEN-l] [[Ireland]] and [[China]]

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>So I favor moving [[History of China]] to [[China]] and moving [[China]] to
>[[People's Republic of China]]. This will require some work on all the
>affected articles though (a lot of text needs to be rearranged and moved
>around). Then the history of the PRC will officially start in 1949 with an
>explanation of the major events of the revolution that preceded it. [[China]]
>will then be the main article that will introduce all things Chinese and link
>to more detailed articles on various topics - which includes the current
>republic at [[People's Republic of China]].
>
I think we have most of an agreement.  Still, I don't see the need to
move [[History of China]].  [[China]] will be the article that brings
'''everything''' together, not just the history. I can commit myself to
review some of the articles that now link to [[China]], and, where
appropriate, change that link to PRC.  Piping some of these links to
simply [[PRC]] rather than [[People's Republic of China]] would make the
work easier, but some people may object to pipes which are only to a
redirection page.

>But now we have a bigger problem; What about France, The Netherlands, Germany,
>Denmark, Mexico, and many many other nations whose current government was
>started way after our histories on them begin? With the new logic, it doesn't
>seem appropriate to have [[History of the French Republic]] mention Louis XIV
>or Napoleon. Or the history of the United States of Mexico say much about the
>Aztecs. This will require a great deal of work to sort out and can't be
>solved by just renaming articles.
>
Hold on!  Let's not get carried away!  This most recent debate affected
only a handful of countries with very special problems.  For most
countries the short form is not problematical, and these articles can
carry on just as they are.  [[History of the French Republic]] may be a
perfectly valid article when [[History of France]] needs to broken into
smaller chunks, but it's not an immediate necessity.  It would help
nobody if we started to develop solutions for problems that don't exist.
 The problem countries will make themselves obvious when then time comes.

Eclecticology


body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>On Wed, 2002-12-11 at 02:14, Anthere wrote:
>
>>I am sure it escaped nobody that all this conversation
>>is taking place on the main list - not on the english
>>list.
>>
>>So, on top of supporting adding [flame] in the
>>subject, I'll be glad if - should you go on on the
>>subject (sigh) - you could move it to the list where
>>it belongs. English matters.
>>
>
>It doesn't belong on wikien-l either.
>
Being so poorly conversant in the subtleties that distinguish one list
form another, when I respond to somebody else's post, I simply click on
the reply icon.  The person to whom I'm responding must have known what
he was doing when he sent his message, so replying to the same place
can't be wrong. :-D

Eclecticology


from_name: Paul Ebermann

body:
"Giskart" skribis:

> Is there objection if I enter a request to add Intlwiki-l and Wikitech-l
> to Gmane?
>
> gmane.sciencs.linguistics.wikipedia.technical
> gmane.sciencs.linguistics.wikipedia.international

I have no objection - but please add a description line
(which ideally would contain an URL).

gmane.sciencs.linguistics.wikipedia.nederlands
now doesn't have such a description line.

Paul


body:
OK, this is quickly turning into a flamewar. Not the first on wikipedia-l,
mind you, and probably not the last. Since some policy issues esp. regarding
NPOV are involved, I still consider this debate to be sufficiently on-topic,
but if the administrators decide that it should be taken off the list, I will
comply. Otherwise, if it bugs you, just ignore this thread.

> Julie responds -- Erik, this is one of the things I had in mind.  The
> subject in which you demonstrably have little expertise is historical
> method and in thinking like an historian.  The source you wanted to have
> a major part in the article was one generally regarded by historians as
> having been untrustworthy, particularly because of his biases.

Uh, yeah, the same argument again. "This historian is unreliable because of
his biases". There's no need to refute specific claims or even to cite
criticisms if you can just put up a good argument ad verecundium, eh?

>  It was
> not difficult to demonstrate then that the author is beloved mostly by
> anti-Christians,

So? I have no problem with the attribution "wrote from an anti-clerical
perspective". And if another author, such as Jeff Russell (I presume you are
referring to the flat earth Russell), who believes in resurrection and in Satan,
writes a book to "debunk" a conspiracy by secular humanists to claim that MA
Christians believed in a flat earth, I think it's perfectly appropriate and
NPOV to describe his background as well.

For myself, I do not like the term "anti-Christian", though. I am a secular
humanist, my focus is not solely on Christianity. The problem is that
Christianity, as you correctly point out, dominated much of Europe for a long time,
so it had plenty of opportunities to wreck havoc.

>  What
> you didn't like was that Michael Tinkler and I were able to e-mail
> scholars

Wow! The wonders of modern technology. Too bad you didn't post any of these
alleged exchanges as something close to debatable evidence.

> and recall our own grad school experiences and felt confident
> in relying  on them.

Wow! The wonders of, uh, grad school experiences. I can't really say that I
don't *like* you relying on grad school experiences, I can, however, say that
I find it greatly amusing and somewhat depressing at the same time.

> As for ignoring church-critical positions, that's nonsense

After you just told me again that you don't want White's claims presented
because he's not a good Christian, um, sorry, not trustworthy?

> -- primarily
> because for the most part those positions did not occur for the time
> periods in question.  As Jeff Russell put it so nicely, the history of
> the Western Church is one of Prophecy and Order

That's one way to describe "murder and bloodshed", not the one I prefer,
though. Your argument is besides the point anyway as I never tried to present my
positions as the only valid ones (also, I always try to attribute properly
where necessary). I do think that the fact that the Christians were quick to
kill anyone who disagreed with them about the existence of God doesn't mean
that we shouldn't include *later* church critical positions in historical
articles.

> While people may
> have wished to reform the habits of the clergy, no one ever thought of
> himself as anything other than a Christian.

Gee, and you don't think this might have had something to do with this whole
"killing everyone who disagrees" thing? Even the Catholic Encyclopedia
contains countless mentions of the persecution of pagans, usually among many other
great things the early "saints" did. The followers of Artemis and Priapus
didn't all suddenly wake up and say "Well, maybe this Messiah thing isn't such
a bad idea at all" and convert to Christianity as the One True Way[TM].
Theodosius triumphantly standing on the ruins of the Serapeum, which is depicted
on one surviving papyrus, is the usual way it was done.

> Moreover, historians generally try to avoid
> judging, because what we want to do is explain how people thought and
> felt at the time.

That's fine, and I agree that people like White were overly polemic in their
writings. Unfortunately, many later writers are overly apologist or even
revisionist. I also agree that the facts should speak for themselves. We just
don't agree about what the facts are. The solution? NPOV dictates that we
present different opinions accurately.

> What you seem to want is  articles that condemn
> certain practices of the Church,

Nonsense.

> and you argue that to not condemn them
> is to be relativistic.

Not at all. The belief system that condemns them needs to be represented in
some, but not all cases. Most importantly, different interpretations of what
happened must be there.

> You can condemn them all you want, but doing
> so in a 'pedia article is POV

You don't need to give me any NPOV lessons, Julie.

> What I said above.  And please just stop.  It's silly.  We are not, for
> example, talking about people in the modern world who participated in
> genocide and trying to say, "well, in those times, everybody felt that
> way" -- because that's patently untrue because the modern world is one
> where people are generally able to try on different world views and
> defend them.  The medieval world view was pretty narrow and relatively
> uniform.  Next, you'll say that we should write articles that imply that
> Ancient Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Hebrews,
> etc., were morally flawed because they took other people's lands and
> held slaves.

I'm not saying anything at all about morality - I do not believe in good or
evil. I'm saying something about cause and effect. Christianity was spread by
exterminating and outlawing unbelievers and making the church the only
acceptable form of media. This in turn led to the tragic events that followed. I'm
not saying this is the only valid interpretation, I'm saying this is one
interpretation that must be presented. I'm also not trying to glorify antiquity
-- it had its high points and was culturally on a higher level than what
followed, technologically in some areas unparalleled until the 19th century, but
it had many social weaknesses which led to its decline. Such modern
interpretations clearly have their place on Wikipedia.

I'm also saying that your understanding of NPOV seems to be to present
*only* the view in which cause and effect are no longer recognizable, a view that
entirely defeats the lessons of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. I have
no problem with this view being *among* the ones presented.

> The idea that these things were wrong would not have
> occurred to people in these societies

Well, they certainly occurred to people in the society that preceded the
Dark Ages. We are writing *about* the Dark Ages, we're not writing *in* the Dark
Ages.

> Horseshit.  The fact is, Erik, that you have a vested interest in
> presenting things in what you call a church-critical perspective.

That's completely true, but I do not delete other views, I merely add to the
articles. I do admit that I sometimes neglect to present views that I do not
hold, but I'm trying to be as fair as possible.

> But there is a difference between thinking critically and judging
critically
> and presenting information critically,  and what you want, which is to
> present articles that make the Christian church out to be the unilateral
> bad guy.

Not at all. I hope enough people will realize that religion, especially
fundamentalism, is a dangerous influence on all societies, simply from looking at
the facts. Early (late antiquity) Christians were very similar to the
Taliban in their methods and probably also in their neuropsychology.

>  FYI, when I teach the history of the Church, which I often do,
> I start with Jesus as a Jew, discuss (using documents from the time) the
> changes of treatment of Jews and Christians by the Romans, and discuss
> the fact that Christianity was only one of many minor mystery cults for
> quite a long time.

Julie, I never suggested that you were a Bible-thumping bigot.

> Articles on similar subjects should
> mention the downside -- but in a way that leaves people thinking --
> e.g., "the crusades were done in the name of God, yet thousands of
> people, including Christians, are killed by the crusaders -- wow!  How
> could they reconcile those things?"  Historians give the information to
> answer those questions, but we don't say whether we think the answers
> were good or bad.

Sure, we don't say anything about good or bad, unless it's attributed and
then only if it has a place in the article (i.e. a purely historical article
doesn't need to have attributed statements about later value judgments).

> Oh -- and my expertise in being a professional historian isn't alleged.

Please, don't tell me about your grad school experiences.

Regards,

Erik

--
+++ GMX - Mail, Messaging & more  http://www.gmx.net +++
NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr f?r 1 ct/ Min. surfen!


body:
On Wed, 2002-12-11 at 02:14, Anthere wrote:
> I am sure it escaped nobody that all this conversation
> is taking place on the main list - not on the english
> list.
>
> So, on top of supporting adding [flame] in the
> subject, I'll be glad if - should you go on on the
> subject (sigh) - you could move it to the list where
> it belongs. English matters.
>

It doesn't belong on wikien-l either.

Also, if you find yourself writing an entry that you want to add a
[flame] header to, that means you probably shouldn't send it.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Languages & namespaces

body:
On Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 04:07:04PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
>Is retrieving, transferring, and separately counting the length of the
>text of potentially hundreds or thousands of linked articles *really*
>more efficient than a second query for LENGTH(text), a value which the
>database should already know and thus does not have to spend time
>zipping through strings looking for null bytes?

In fact, I was assuming the opposite; that doing a second query to find
the size and existance of all the links would be much more efficient.

I also think we see significant savings (if not now, in the future when
there are more pageviews than edits) of CPU by storing the article size,
instead of calculating it every time we access it.

>> How is searching currently done?
>
>http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Fulltext_Search.html
>
>For multi-word searches we AND and OR multiple MATCH/AGAINSTs together
>in one query, which may not the best way to do it. MySQL 4.0 has boolean
>features built right in, but we're using the more stable 3.x.

Thank you for pointing that out, Brion.  I did some more research;
PostgreSQL has a contributed fulltext searching module which we can enable
to get the same functionality.  It will definately be preferable to using a
LIKE clause.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Languages & namespaces

body:
On Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 09:15:14AM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>Any savings you predict are only guesses. I don't think we can predict
>the performance benefits of cutting down the *number* of separate
>queries.
>
>If you think otherwise, what is your basis?

My basis is that each query requires a separate parsing, planning,
optimization, and execution stage.  Although execution may happen fast,
cutting the other stages out of the loop can provide dramatic speed
improvements.  Amortized over thousands of queries, the effect is really
dramatic.

My basis is years of experience applying Chuck Moores FORTH philosophy
to factor, refine, and do ONLY what is necessary, and no more.

There is a certain required amount of complexity for this project.  But
we should not let it expand beyond that.  Complexity begets complexity
in an unholy upward spiral.

In this design stage we are finding out what is needed.  Later on we can
work on simplifying, etc.

For inspirational reading, here is an essential essay from Mr. Moores
protege, Jeff Fox:

  http://ultratechnology.com/forth.htm

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: reply to Ed Poor's questions (Re: [Wikitech-l] Languages & namespaces)

body:
On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 03:32:13PM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>What is the problem we are trying to solve?

The problem *I* am trying to solve is that I like the Wikipedia style of
Wiki, but MySQL will get installed on my machine over my dead body, and
I don't like CamelCase linking or CVS backends or having to use PHP or
Java on my secure box to run a halfway decent Wiki.

There is also the problem of scalability (current generation of software
has already reached it's limits).

Then there is the desire to fold the other language Wiki's back in as
smoothly as possible.

Finally, I want to be able to easily adapt the software for use with
other organizations.

>How does the current software help solve this problem?

You mean the current design work on mod_wiki?

It solves the MySQL problem by using Postgresql.

It solves the scalability problem by reducing the amount of database
accesses and "work" to be done by the CPU, while still allowing other
Wikipedias to run independantly on other boxes.

It solves the use by other oganizations by factoring out the
SQL statements and HTML snippets into proper files, templates, and
customizable database tables of their own.

>What does the current software do to cause this problem or make this
>problem worse?

Current software is too monolithic to be able to easily make the kind of
broad changes I want to.

>What will the proposed solution do, to address the above.

Be modularly designed.  Also, written in C as an Apache module.  May
also include adding additional functions to Postgres, written in C.

The idea is to put the code where it can do it's work with the least
amount of shuttling data around that is possible.

>How can we test the proposed solution?

You download the source code from a link I provide, compile and run it.
There will be no source code until I am satisfied I have at least a
passable first working draft of a design document though.  The better
the design, the less coding work I have to do.

If you have any more questions, please post them to this list.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [WikiEN-l] [[Ireland]] and [[China]]

body:
Eclecticology wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>To an American, however, the government is the whole shebang,
>>the cabinet, the legislature (including the opposition party!),
>>and especially the reams of bureaucracy that affect one's daily life.
>>Just because there's been an election doesn't mean that
>>the Department of Motor Vehicles has changed -- it's the same government.

>I don't think that this is so much a US/UK distinction as it is an
>informed/popular distinction.  The popular mind sees all these
>administrative and bureaucratic agencies as extensions of government; it
>does not easily distinguish them from legistative functions.

What would you call these instead?  The "state"?
That would be confusing in the US, since "State"
names one particular level of our government.

>>I remember hearing in junior high that the US Constitution is good because
>>Italy (say) has had dozens of governments since the end of WWII,
>>while we've had the same stable government since 1787.

>The Italian example is well known.  In parlimentary contexts it is used
>as a straw man by opponents of electoral reform.  "If your proposals for
>democratic reform went ahead we too could be unstable like Italy."

Yes, they certainly have had a lot of governments since the end of WWII,
but not in the sense that the US has had the same government since 1787.

>>Anyway, the name "People's Republic of China" is not used by the country.
>>It's used by the government -- this one, and previous ones back to Mao's.
>>It's a political name that wouldn't exist without a government to attach
>>it to.

>We don't really differ here.  It is used BY governments, and applied BY
>govenments as a the name OF or FOR the country.  As different as Fidel
>Castro has been from his predecessors he has been quite content to let
>"Republic of Cuba" remain unchanged as the formal name for that country.

But even that term is a reference to a form of government.
Had he adopted the title of "king" ("rey"), he'd have changed it.

>>If the Chinese abolished government, it would no longer apply to anything,
>>yet the country of China would continue to exist.
>>Nobody would *change* the name; the Chinese people would continue
>>to call the country "China" (Mandarin "Zhong1guo2") then as now as before.

>Now we need to consider the definition of "country".  Was China in its
>various periods of warlordism "a" country during that time, or was it
>just a loose arrangement of little countries.  Today's Afghanistan is a
>country in name only as long as the goverment in Kabul remains
>ineffective in extending its influence over rural warlords.

Here you seem to be using the term "country" to refer to a political entity.
IME, it's a vaguer term that says more, and less, than that.
Wales and Scotland are not the same country, but North and South Korea are.
This is why it's meaningful to claim that Tibet and China
are different countries -- and why this claim isn't quite the same as
a call for Tibetan (political) independence.

>>We can perhaps avoid further debate by saying that the long form
>>is the "official political name" for a country:
>>a name imposed on the country (and officially so)
>>by the dominant political entity there.

>OK

This probably settles the matter for purposes of Wikipedia,
however much we may argue about things in the above paragraphs.
(Well, it would settle it if we were the only two people in Wikipedia.)

>How about "China is a geographical territory
>in eastern Asia whose borders have varied over the millenia of its history"?

Except that "geographical territory", in this context, means "country" ^_^.

>Compared to [[China]], dealing with [[Ireland]] is easy.

-- Toby


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Advanced search issue

body:
If one does a search in other namespaces, and then presses 'Next 100', one
gets the 101st to 200th of the normal search rather than the changed search.

Andre Engels


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia and anti-Semitism

in_reply_to: <20021210202013.GA6366@reactor-core.org>; from krooger@debian.org on Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 12:20:13PM -0800

body:
Jonathan Walther wrote:
> I too would support a temporary ban of RK.  He is always biasing things.

We aren't going to get into banning people like RK, unless he's doing
things that I'm not aware of.

> RK may be a Jew, but banning him for his persistent and long-standing
> disrespect for the NPOV policy does NOT constitute anti-Semitism.

No, of course not.  I don't think anyone would seriously suggest
otherwise.  Your mentioning it seems unwarranted in this context.

The wiki process and a social culture of co-operation gives us plenty
of tools to deal with bias.

--Jimbo


body:
elian wrote:
> It seems to me that he really has NPOV in mind, but is too mangled in his
> hatred against anything he considers as anti-semitic to realize how biased
> his own writings are.

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with you about RK, because I haven't
read much of the relevant writings, but I suspect that virtually
everyone has some "hot button" issue where NPOV writing will be
difficult.  I wouldn't trust myself, for example, to write an article
on John Kenneth Galbraith, who I consider a fascist blithering idiot.
:-)

> However, I would prefer if anybody whose emotions go
> that high refrains voluntarily from writing in this area.

Certainly good advice.  Unfortunately, it is also true that people
tend to know a lot about their "hot button" issues, and therefore have
the ability to write a lot about them.

> Better be anti-Arab, it is politically a lot more opportune...

Better, still, of course, is to not get involved on the level of
advocacy at all.

--Jimbo


body:
On Wed, Dec 11, 2002 at 04:59:28AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>Certainly good advice.  Unfortunately, it is also true that people
>tend to know a lot about their "hot button" issues, and therefore have
>the ability to write a lot about them.

Jimmy, I caught RK pulling 'facts' out of his ass, and provided a link
to it.  Bias is one thing, but outright fabrication should be taken
seriously.  Do you take it seriously?  Do we as an encyclopedia take it
seriously?  I personally take it very seriously.

>> Better be anti-Arab, it is politically a lot more opportune...
>
>Better, still, of course, is to not get involved on the level of
>advocacy at all.

I believe what elian was saying is, he is both afraid, and too exhausted
to correct the Zionist bias RK keeps inserting into articles.  He is
not alone; there are an incredible number of others in the same
situation.  RK frequently abuses the "Vandalism in Progress" page and
yells at contributors who are interested in the NPOV.

I'd like to know which is more important to you: RK, or NPOV?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
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body:
On Wed, Dec 11, 2002 at 09:53:01AM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>It sounds like your primary interest is porting Wikipedia software to
>your own machine, rather than improving the operation of the Wikipedia
>itself. Is this correct?

No, that was my initial interest.  But if I'm going to do a redesign, my
perfectionist streak says "Let's do it RIGHT".  Doing it The Right Way
means solving the current problems with the software as well, including
scalability etc.  I do entertain a little fantasy that the software
might one day be used to run the Wikipedia, and that I could put that on
my resume, but I recognize:

a) I can't make a replacement for the current Wikipedia software by
myself, without input from others

b) Someone else may come up with other software that the Wikipedia
community feels more comfortable developing.

So I leave myself a fallback position; even if Wikipedia doesn't adopt
the software, coding it won't have been a waste of my, or other peoples,
time.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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body:
On Wed, Dec 11, 2002 at 10:18:30AM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>I wish someone with good technical writing skills would document the
>Wikipedia software. I'd like something more than just a bare listing of
>the fields of each table in the database. But something a lot faster to
>read than the full source code with embedded comments.
>
>Do you know anyone capable and willing to do this?

Brion already did this in the past month; you can find it in the list
archives.  He explained what each table and field was for.  Other list
members also did this at around the same time, in response to my pasting
the entire table schema to the list, with questions.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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body:
On Wed, Dec 11, 2002 at 10:36:38AM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>I want more than a description of what each table and field is for.
>That's only a database schema. It provides a necessary foundation, but
>it's not the whole building.
>
>I want to know about the interaction of the client software with the
>database.

Wasn't it Fred Brooks that wrote in the Mythical Man month: give me your
data structures, and I won't need your algorithms; give me your
algorithms, and they will mean nothing without your data structures?

The interaction as I see it is a PHP module in the Apache web server
runs some custom PHP code that connects to a MySQL database, runs
queries, and uses the results to construct the appropriate pages.

That isn't meant to sound flippant; it is just the best summary I can
think of of how it all works.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

Phone:   604-435-1205
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Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Moderation

body:
> From: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com
>
> I'm unsubscribing from this list.  If I shouldn't be a sysop while not
> following the list, then make it so.

I'm highly inclined to do this myself--again.  I can totally sympathize.

On the occasion of one of my posts, some have suggested, rather
ironically, that all flames be banned from the list--or at least
self-censored.

I fully support such a rule, and if we adopt it, I'll pledge to follow it
and, if necessary and appropriate, enforce it.  But how *would* we
*enforce* such a rule?

If there is no enforcement of any sort, the rule would be absolutely
worthless, and I won't support it.  There are members of this community
that pride themselves on flouting rules, and they would take only too much
joy in flaming away at people who felt morally obliged, by the rule, not
to reply in kind.  Moreover, in the current atmosphere, there is no
serious possibility to shame the offenders into silence, because
unfortunately our worst offenders are literally shameless.

I have a suggestion--and I know this will be a highly unpopular
suggestion, but let me get the idea out there anyway.  I'm beginning to
think the list should be moderated.

In my eight years' continuous and active experience on mailing lists and
Usenet, I have discovered that some lists can remain productive and useful
while remaining unmoderated.  This is because there is a preponderance of
full-fledged adults on the list who are polite, and who know how to reply
witheringly to the occasional eedjit; in short, there's a huge base of
great contributors and a very large shame culture involved.

Now, the value of many other unmoderated lists--like this one--is
undermined by continuous flame wars by battling, enormous egos, to say
nothing of the worthless newbie posts that come from people who have not
read the FAQ.

One of the very best mailing lists I was on (and I think others involved
with it would agree with this assessment) was one that I, and then Ben
Kovitz, moderated.  It was a philosophy mailing list.  There was a strict
policy of politeness as well as a minimum requirement of philosophical
cogency.  I think the list would have suffered hugely if it had been made
unmoderated, because there were a lot of people who would have otherwise
been given to flame wars involved; it was the fact that it was moderated
that gave it a lot of its value, because there was a guarantee of quality.

I am very familiar with the arguments for and against moderation, and of
course one main argument against list moderation in all cases is that it
quells "free speech."  Being a lover of freedom, I can understand very
much.  But the fact of the matter is that some lists just wouldn't exist,
or they wouldn't be a fraction as interesting as they actually are, if
they weren't moderated.  Moderation is, we might say, a necessary evil in
some cases.

In the case of Wikipedia, I'm beginning to think it is a necessary evil.
I for one would be overjoyed if Wikipedia-l were to become moderated and
the moderator were empowered to deal appropriately with flaming and with
trolls.

Larry


from_name: Jason Richey

subject: [Wikitech-l] mod_wiki

body:
Would anybody see the value in having a separate list for mod_wiki
development questions/arguments?

--
"Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>


from_name: Jonathan Walther

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Moderation

body:
On Wed, Dec 11, 2002 at 06:45:20PM +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
>I'm not entirely opposed to moderation. Julie's personal attack against me
>would not have made it to the list with proper moderation in place, and the
>same goes for Larry's flames against TheCunctator et al. However, as someone

I saw a reasoned criticism of your actions from Julie, not an "attack".
If moderation means that Julie would have been cut out, while your
baiting of Julie would be allowed in, then I can't support it.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

Phone:   604-435-1205
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Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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