body:
(Sorry to send 3 messages in rapid succession, but I have something
I'd like to add, again).

I think the same goes for Indonesian and Malay, which are quite
obviously the same language. Currently, both the Malay and the
Indonesian WPs are quite large. Imagine, Indonesians, Malaysians,
Singaporeans, how much larger it could be if these two were merged?

As you can find out on the English WP, differences between Malay and
Indonesian are comparable to differences between US and UK English:
some minor terminological differences, and a few minor orthographic
differences, none of which prevents them from being over 99% mutually
comprehensible with little to no difficulty.

As a test, I copied an article from the Indonesian WP into MS Word and
used the Malay spellcheck on it... it told me all words were spelt
correctly. Then, I took an article from the Malay WP, and spellcheck'd
it with Indonesian spellcheck in MS Word, and got the same result:
perfect spelling.

These were not short articles.

Last time I inquired about a merger of Malay and Indonesian WPs, the
answer I got was that someone (don't remember who) thinks it's better
separate. Again it seems to me to be more a case of politics than real
linguistics.

Mark

On 09/10/05, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ahh, and I'd like to add a little bit of advice for Elephantus:
>
> Rather than letting politics blind you, why not try to look at things
> from the point of view of "What will be best for the Wikipedia in my
> language?". I think that the answer to this, is a merger of these 3
> Wikipedias, because it will result in a much larger workforce and much
> more power and capability.
>
> Currently, Croatian WP has just over 10000 articles, Serbian WP has
> just over 14000 articles, and Bosnian WP has almost 5000 articles.
> Now, imagine, if all people from all 3 Wikipedias had been working
> together from the start, maybe we'd have 30000 articles in a unified
> Serbocroatian WP already.
>
> Mark
>
> On 09/10/05, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Well, Elephantus apparently hasn't been monitoring the growth of the
> > Serbocroatian WP.
> >
> > The top contributors recently are:
> >
> > OC Ripper,
> > Dejvid,
> > Myself,
> > Pokrajac,
> > Belirac,
> > anonymous user.
> >
> > Now, of all these people, the ONLY ONE who is not a native speaker is ME.
> >
> > Now, if anybody wants to accuse me of spelling and grammatical errors,
> > there are a number of other people they should blame first: 1) The
> > people who wrote the original article, since I have only been copying
> > articles from other Wikipedias; 2) The people who wrote the Serbian,
> > Croatian, and Bosnian spellcheckers for MS Word since I often use them
> > to make sure the source-article has no glaring errors.
> >
> > Now, perhaps you're referring to the fact that the majority of the
> > articles I copy are using Ekavski, which is not used in Croatia. Well,
> > as a form of Serbocroatian, it would hardly be considered incorrect.
> > To be fair, some of the articles I make use Ijekavski, and a couple
> > dozen use a mix of the two. Terms which are obviously split between
> > Serbia and Croatia, like Spanija/Spanjolska (spain), or
> > Jevreju/Hebreju (jewish person), I try to be careful with as well.
> >
> > As regards your wish to lock the Serbocroatian WP:
> >
> > According to you, Serbocroatian was an artificial political construct.
> > That is true to a certain extent, but it is undeniable that Stokavian
> > dialects of Croatian, and all dialects of Bosnian and Serbian are all
> > over 99% mutually intelligible when spoken, but especially when
> > written.
> >
> > These are the only "languages" for which that is the case, with the
> > exception of Moldovan and Romanian, and Dari and Farsi (The Moldovan
> > WP redirects users wanting content in Latin alphabet to the Romanian
> > WP, the Farsi WP includes Dari as well).
> >
> > I recall something about a Croatian law requiring all Serbian movies
> > to be subtitled (or vice-versa?). Rather than reacting with
> > nationalistic pride when seeing these subtitles for a language that is
> > basically identical to their own, moviegoers generally laughed at the
> > attempts of "translation".
> >
> > Now, if the majority of Croatian WPdians do not want a united
> > Wikipedia, that's fine. I think it should be everybody's choice. If
> > you want to work at the Croatian WP and keep pretending that your
> > language is somehow extremely differentiated from Serbian and Bosnian
> > (and the emerging Montenegrin), I have no problem with that, although
> > I think it is counter-constructive.
> >
> > Already, there are Croatians at the SH.wiki, I think...
> >
> > Now, perhaps a good example is Macedonian.
> >
> > Although Macedonian (FYROM, that is, just so we don't offend any
> > Greeks) is very similar to Serbo-Croatian, and it would take little
> > effort to make a unified language, since Macedonian is a bit further
> > from Serbocroatian, I don't hold a hope of Macedonian WP being united
> > to Serbocroatian WP.
> >
> > With Croatian, it seems that people try hard to make it a different
> > language from Serbian, but it isn't really except in a sociolinguistic
> > sense (and even then, not all Croatians perpetuate the idea of a
> > separate Croatian language). Macedonian, on the other hand, has truly
> > different words and spellings, rather than artificial divisions
> > created by linguists for political purposes.
> >
> > Mark
> >
> > On 09/10/05, Arbeo M <arbeo_m at yahoo.de> wrote:
> > > Hi Elephantus!
> > >
> > > Let me just try to answer a few of your points here:
> > >
> > > > The Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia was reopened in June
> > > > after a request from a single user of the Serbian
> > > > Wikipedia -
> > > >
> > > [[sr:User:Покрајац|Pokrajac]].
> > > > This was
> > > > not announced beforehand in any way on the three
> > > > Wikipedias that
> > > > are most affected by this issue ? Serbian,
> > > > Croatian and Bosnian, there was no public discussion
> > > > or
> > > > a vote. The idea was supported here by people
> > > > who weren't part of the growing communities of the
> > > > three Wikipedias.
> > >
> > > Generally speaking, only opening all-new Wikipedias
> > > requires public discussion, prior announcement, voting
> > > or the like. Reopening a previously locked wiki is not
> > > a comparable process. Locking a wiki is only a
> > > temporary measure because of some specific reason, e.
> > > g. vandalism and it can be upheld only as long as that
> > > reason persists to exist. SH had been locked because
> > > of inactivity. As soon as there were people willing to
> > > edit it there was no alternative but to unlock it.
> > >
> > > > The "phenomenal growth" (1,019 articles) of the
> > > > Serbo-Croatian
> > > > is mostly a result of people (some of them with
> > > > little or no
> > > > knowledge of the three languages)
> > > > copy-pasting articles from Serbian (converting those
> > > > to Latin
> > > > alphabet), Croatian or Bosnian Wikipedias.
> > >
> > > I wasn't aware that most of the editing at SH is done
> > > by non-native speakers. Hmm ... you have any idea were
> > > they come from? But there is one fact that one must
> > > admit: the Wikipedia is active now, no matter where
> > > that activity comes from.
> > >
> > > > My question is this: Why aren't Serbian, Bosnian and
> > > > Croatian
> > > > Wikipedias provided the same treatment as e.g.
> > > > Danish and
> > > > Bokmal (Norwegian) which are also mutually
> > > > intelligible
> > > > in the written form? There is no common Dano-Bokmal
> > > > Wikipedia with well-wishing but mostly misguided
> > > > non-native-
> > > > speakers copying articles to it.
> > > >
> > > Well, this type of comparison is always a little bold.
> > > But I'm getting your point. I guess the main reason is
> > > because a "Dano-Bokmal" WP was never requested by
> > > anyone. Interestingly though, there seems to be some
> > > kind of common Scandinavian project going on.
> > >
> > > > Serbo-Croatian has been dead as a political
> > > > collection of
> > > > standard languages for 15 years now (30 years in
> > > > Croatia),
> > > > it is slowly disappearing, except as a historical
> > > > footnote
> > >
> > > I must admit I'm not competent to evaluate the current
> > > situation of Serbo-Croatian and it's future is even
> > > harder to predict. All I can see is that there seems
> > > to be some kind of interest in it here at WP
> > > (actually, even more than in 130 other languages).
> > >
> > > > I'd like to propose a relocking of this Wikipedia
> > >
> > > I am well aware that the whole situation is not
> > > perfectly ideal yet. But all things considered, I
> > > think the current solution is a fairly just and
> > > neutral one. There is a minority that wishes to write
> > > in Serbo-Croatian. Even if you don't like their
> > > standpoint, why exclude them? "Live and let live!"
> > >
> > > > or at least a
> > > > name change (Serbian - Latin, as a temporary bridge
> > > > to
> > > > the Latin conversion system now being tested for the
> > > > Serbian Wikipedia).
> > >
> > > As a total outsider I could imagine that naming it
> > > "Serbian-Latin" would not really be helpful because
> > > that name makes reference to one nation and one
> > > ethnicity exclusively. "Yugoslav(ian)" has just
> > > crossed my mind - would that be an option?
> > >
> > > Best regards,
> > >
> > > Arbeo
> > >
> > > P.S.: My congratulations for your 10,000th article at hr!
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > ___________________________________________________________
> > > Gesendet von Yahoo! Mail - Jetzt mit 1GB Speicher kostenlos - Hier anmelden: http://mail.yahoo.de
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> > >
> >
> >
> > --
> > SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
> > QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
> > POSSIT MATERIARI
> > ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE
> >
>
>
> --
> SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
> QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
> POSSIT MATERIARI
> ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Rafi Ahmad

subject: [WikiEN-l] Frameset doesnt work

body:
Hi there,
I am new to wiki and just became member of wikimedia mailing list.
I have a small problem. I want to use frameset in my wiki webpage so
that i can use .php pages to make it dynamic.

i read the faq page which says removing following lines from
skins/common/wikibits.js   should work, but it doesnt. Please help.

// Un-trap us from framesets
 if( window.top != window ) window.top.location = window.location;

I am using wikimedia 1.5.0 the most recent one.

--
With Regards,

Rafi Ahmad


from_name: Zachary Harden

body:
>From: Ryan Norton <wxprojects at comcast.net>
>Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>To: geni <geniice at gmail.com>,English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Collaboration of the week activity
>Date: Sun, 9 Oct 2005 09:39:59 -0700
>
>
>On Sunday, October 9, 2005, at 09:27  AM, geni wrote:
>
>>On 10/9/05, Chris Jenkinson <chris at starglade.org> wrote:
>>>Hi guys,
>>>
>>>I've noticed over the past few months that the number of people
>>>nominating articles and voting on the collaboration of the week has
>>>fallen quite considerably. I have two questions:
>>>
>>>   - what do you think the causes of this fall in activity are?
>>
>>Burnout
>
>The article improvement drive is stagnating too. Due to people going back
>to school, perhaps?

>From what I noticed: the Featured Article Drive is pretty much dead too.

Zach Harden


list: commons-l

from_name: petrus barbygere

subject: [Commons-l] Re: Re: courriel envoyédepuis Wikimedia Commons

body:
J'ai envoy? un mel ? l'utilisateur en lui proposant mon aide.

Petrusbarbygere.

Anthere a ?crit :

>
> Bonjour,
>
> Je crois que les habitants de Wikicommons ont une
> politique tr?s "ferme" vis ? vis des licences.
>
> Je ne sais pas trop ce que tu as fait... tu ne pouvais
> d?j? pas ?diter sous ip, puisqu'? priori l'upload des
> images requiert un compte utilisateur.
>
> Y a t-il un francophone qui puisse aider ?
>
> Anthere
>
> --- Zivax <zivax at club-intrenet.fr> wrote:
>
>>
>> J'ai implant?? des images de wiki Anglais sur
>> commons...j'ai eu mon I.P de retir??, et depuis je
>> me retrouve dans la panade compl??te, car certaines
>> photos m'??taient donn??es par leurs auteurs.
>> Les articles cr????s sur wikip??dia n'ont plus
>> d'images autoris??es...j'ai commis qqlqs erreurs
>> mais tout retirer je trouve cela peu diplomate...je
>> suis nouveau sur wiki mais honn??te. Je fais mon
>> mea-culpa pour les erreurs mais j???apprends au fur
>> et ?  mesure.
>> Comment rattraper le coup.. ? ? ?
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
> __________________________________
> Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
> http://mail.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: I demand a daily spot for great writing

body:
On 10/9/05, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> I think Tony's point is that we need to recognise well written work
> entirely
> apart from the FA process.

This is it, really. Articles are making FA with mediocre writing, so there's
no great head of pressure in the process to encourage people to polish the
writing.

I'm sure you've all had enough of me pointing out errors of grammar,
organisational problems such as omitting crucial facts from the opening
paragraph, and just plain bad writing in Featured Articles that I've
encountered on the front page. I recognise that my personal bias towards
very short articles tends to make me perhaps unreasonably dismissive of the
Featured Article process as a whole, but my criticism of the writing quality
in those articles is soundly based.

I could go through Featured Articles and polish them; I'm not a great writer
but I can get rid of the worst errors. There are great writers around,
though.

Until recently, the opener of our article on Language was tantamount to a
felonious act against English. It read in full:

"*Language* is a finite system of arbitrary
symbols<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol>combined according to
rules of
grammar <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammar> for the purpose of
communication <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication>. Individual
languages use sounds <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound>,
gestures<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesture>,
and other symbols to represent objects,
concepts<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept>,
emotions <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion>,
ideas<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea>,
and thoughts <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought>."

This kind of writing might win a passing grade in an examination on
theoretical linguistics, but it isn't really useful, or even very
comprehensible, to the general reader.

The opener now reads:

"A *language* is a system <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System> of
expression and communication <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication>.
Individual languages use sound <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound>,
gesture<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesture>,
and other means to express and communicate
concepts<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept>,
emotions <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion>,
ideas<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea>,
and thoughts <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought>. Expressions of a
language are analysable into words <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word>,
whose meanings <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaning> are usually
conventional <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention>. The word "language"
is also used to refer to the common properties of languages."

That isn't perfect, but it's a step in the right direction. The gobbledygook
has been elaborated a little, and some nuances have been expanded. But
there's still some jargon, which is unacceptable in an opening section. For
instance "whose meanings are usually conventional" means, in standard
English, "with meanings usually established by prior agreement and
practice".

Both version suffer from overwikification-nearly all of the sentences
contain wikilinked words. I've spoken to a few people about Wikipedia and
most of them report that a sentence with wikilinks is much harder to read
than a sentence without. This matches my own experience.

Now unless we pick up on improvements in writing style and give them
recognition at the highest level of Wikipedia, I don't see how we'll focus
attention on the quality of the writing in Wikipedia. As I've suggested in
an earlier email, writing quality is especially vulnerable to entropy. While
the quantity and quality of information in an article tends to improve with
editing over time by many people, the quality of writing tends to degrade
under the same conditions.

Now look at the introduction of the article on the same subject in MSN
Encarta. it shows how far we have to go to make a great encyclopedia.

http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761570647/Language.html#s1

That is professional writing. It's not the best, but it's readable,
jargon-free, and provides good coverage. Professional writers do it for
money. We need to find a way to motivate great writers to write into this
palimpsest, knowing that their work may well be slashed to pieces in days,
or even hours. Putting the best writing each day on the front page would be
the least we could do to show them that we value them just as surely as we
need them.


from_name: Michael Turley

body:
On 10/9/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/9/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> >
> > Tony Sidaway wrote:
> > I tend to use wikilinks
> > to help me skim sentences for the important subjects they refer to.
> >
>
> I think the problem with the Language article is that it's far too heavily
> wikified. In some sentences nearly all words are needlessly peppered with
> blue link. As if someone would find himself unable to understand what was
> meant by "sounds" or "gestures" in the opener, and a link to the articles
> for those words would help.

Perhaps you should choose (or design) a skin that doesn't highlight
wikilinks unless you glide your cursor over them.

In general, I would agree that our blue wikilinks are a little too
contrasting with the text body, making them a distraction, and would
prefer something more subtle as the default.

--
Michael Turley
User:Unfocused


from_name: Ilya N.

body:
There's no way to discern a 'good' (adding to the content) wikilink and a
'bad' (not adding to the content, such as [[sound]] or [[the]]...yes I
suppose the latter is an extreme example) wikilink, and I believe that's
what Tony Sidaway is talking about

On 10/9/05, Michael Turley <michael.turley at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 10/9/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 10/9/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > Tony Sidaway wrote:
> > > I tend to use wikilinks
> > > to help me skim sentences for the important subjects they refer to.
> > >
> >
> > I think the problem with the Language article is that it's far too
> heavily
> > wikified. In some sentences nearly all words are needlessly peppered
> with
> > blue link. As if someone would find himself unable to understand what
> was
> > meant by "sounds" or "gestures" in the opener, and a link to the
> articles
> > for those words would help.
>
> Perhaps you should choose (or design) a skin that doesn't highlight
> wikilinks unless you glide your cursor over them.
>
> In general, I would agree that our blue wikilinks are a little too
> contrasting with the text body, making them a distraction, and would
> prefer something more subtle as the default.
>
> --
> Michael Turley
> User:Unfocused
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
~Ilya N.


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Walter van Kalken

subject: Ant: [Wikipedia-l] Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia - a policy question?

body:
>I am well aware that the whole situation is not
>perfectly ideal yet. But all things considered, I
>think the current solution is a fairly just and
>neutral one. There is a minority that wishes to write
>in Serbo-Croatian. Even if you don't like their
>standpoint, why exclude them? "Live and let live!"
>
I wish this attitude was held in relation to more languages like
Cantonese etc.

Waerth/Walter


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: IRC : change of channels and ownership of ...
	channels

body:
By the way...does anyone use #wikipedia-en ? Or do all the english speaking
people simply hang out at #wikipedia ?

--
~Ilya N.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] ko moved to kr

body:
Cross-posted to wikitech-l and wikipedia-l because I thought there might
be wider interest.

The master database server for the Korean Wikipedia has now been moved
to our cluster in Korea. The switch went quite well, with no downtime
and only half an hour of read-only time, most of that due to me mucking
around with the configuration and fixing bugs. All Apache processing for
that wiki is now done in Korea, including serving images. Only commons
images are drawn from Florida.

This is a pilot for full utilisation of the Yahoo cluster, eventually
we'll move ja and the other East Asian wikis there. For now, the Koreans
have a big cluster all to themselves, so they should expect to get pages
back faster than you can blink at any time of the day or night. A life
of sheer bliss that the rest of us can only dream of :)

-- Tim Starling


body:
On 10/9/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
> Tony Sidaway wrote:
> I tend to use wikilinks
> to help me skim sentences for the important subjects they refer to.
>

I think the problem with the Language article is that it's far too heavily
wikified. In some sentences nearly all words are needlessly peppered with
blue link. As if someone would find himself unable to understand what was
meant by "sounds" or "gestures" in the opener, and a link to the articles
for those words would help.


from_name: Kelly Martin

body:
On 10/9/05, Ilya N. <ilyanep at gmail.com> wrote:
> By the way...does anyone use #wikipedia-en ? Or do all the english speaking
> people simply hang out at #wikipedia ?

There are people in #wikipedia-en. Just not very many.  Tends to be
more on-topic than #wikipedia.

Kelly


subject: [Wikipedia-l] ko moved to kr

body:
Cross-posted to wikitech-l and wikipedia-l because I thought there might
be wider interest. People reading via Gmane might see a duplicate.

The master database server for the Korean Wikipedia has now been moved
to our cluster in Korea. The switch went quite well, with no downtime
and only half an hour of read-only time, most of that due to me mucking
around with the configuration and fixing bugs. All Apache processing for
that wiki is now done in Korea, including serving images. Only commons
images are drawn from Florida.

This is a pilot for full utilisation of the Yahoo cluster, eventually
we'll move ja and the other East Asian wikis there. For now, the Koreans
have a big cluster all to themselves, so they should expect to get pages
back faster than you can blink at any time of the day or night. A life
of sheer bliss that the rest of us can only dream of :)

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Christopher Larberg

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] IRC : change of channels and ownership of ...
	channels

body:
On Mon, 2005-10-10 at 12:31 +0800, Mark Ryan wrote:
> The old channels, at #fr.wikipedia and #de.wikipedia, redirect to the
> new channels, so most IRC users won't be adversely affected (except
> for a few that use one Linux client called Irssi or something like
> that).

irssi handles forwarding fine, unless I'm mistaken. I don't recall ever
having a problem.
--
Christopher Larberg ([[w:en:User:Slowking Man]])
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subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: IRC : change of channels and ownership of
	... channels

body:
On Sun, 2005-10-09 at 22:27 -0500, Ilya N. wrote:
> By the way...does anyone use #wikipedia-en ? Or do all the english speaking
> people simply hang out at #wikipedia ?

Since English is the lingua franca of freenode, and since the English
edition is the largest Wikipedia, #wikipedia tends to be oriented
towards en. We did have an influx of people from the Spanish edition a
while ago.
--
Christopher Larberg ([[w:en:User:Slowking Man]])
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list: foundation-l

from_name: Jakob Voss

subject: [Foundation-l] Is Wikip/media politic?

body:
Hi!

A friend of mine is searching for a quote of Jimbo meantioning that
Wikipedia or Wikimedia is not political. Maybe Jimbo said something like
this during the Politics of Wikimedia panel at Wikimania or related to
comparing Wikimedia with the Red Cross or it's because something with
tax in the US. Does anybody has a quote with a source?

In my opinion every encyclopaedia is politic; Jean-Baptiste Soufron
wrote about "The political importance of the Wikipedia Project" [1]:

"It seemed to me that, first of all, a real encyclopedia should be a
place directed toward a political project of its own, and not only
toward some sort of simple scientific dictionnary project."

There is several distinct questions:
1. Is Wikipedia politic?
2. Does the community think that Wikipedia is politic
3. Is Wikimedia Foundation a politic organisation?

I think the answer to the first question is "yes", the answer to the
second is "some do, some don't" and the answer to the third is "no"
(isn't it?) - but how do you explain the difference in the answers?

Greetings,
Jakob

[1] http://soufron.free.fr/soufron-spip/article.php3?id_article=71

P.S: Mathias pointed me to two German newspaper articles that also
mention politics and Wikipedia - but you know that you cannot believe
everything that journalists write, especially when there is only a
German translation and no original quote of who said what:

http://www.faz.net/s/Rub4C34FD0B1A7E46B88B0653D6358499FF/Doc~E197429C5610645CAB70619D096D35BC5~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html
http://www.weltexpress.info/index.php?artikel_id=983&rubrik=5&lan=de


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Is Wikip/media politic?


from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject: [Wikitech-l] rename user

body:
The option "rename user" is disappeared. Any hope we will see it return?
--
Ook een artikeltje schrijven? WikipediaNL, de vrije GNU/FDL encyclopedie
http://www.wikipedia.be


from_name: Alphax

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: New mailing list for newbies?

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Timwi wrote:
>
>> You may have already found this out, but it's called Helpdesk-l :
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/helpdesk-l
>
>
> Does that mailing list have a gmane newsgroup equivalent?
>

It doesn't look like it, at least searchs for "wikipedia" and
"wikimedia" didn't turn it up...

- --
Alphax                      |   /"\
Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iQEVAwUBQ0k0M7MAAH8MeUlWAQjrtgf/eGpxpReaERb9gPGkYgmRae9xKx9k5kd9
8uk+U2rw36g+JNh/QQY6cvARrzeX5YlZPPnyqhZuf0cwJDqBVcfoBGfj7hI/Wlpa
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L+Hjn9lenlxwT5pE23edepsU1IUgvz2TfxtzP74F4BKc3aUJsDXrhtn+kwop4uk2
MR+1DvVEHkLeddKoezHsO1wlszCPObGVXrRf0i23B4ONZ/PErkjTBg+nVLLbyB+i
TU3DXFwdHNn1I98b5qOU6+qqPeBmSdER8QI4EgS9yxcv/Pzcw2t3rw==
=6wxe
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] The 3RR is an electric fence, not an entitlement.

body:
actionforum at comcast.net wrote:

>-------------- Original message --------------
>
>
>>>Who cares what consensus is? What matters is what is right. Edit
>>>waring has it's uses. For some reason it seems to be an effective way
>>>of increaseing the number of citations.
>>>
>>>
>>The problem with believing that being right is paramount is that it
>>tends to shut out other views which may be just as right.
>>
>>
>No, that is the problem with being wrong.  It is those who are
>wrong that want to shut out the views that may be right.
>That is how you get gulags, political prisoners, censorship,
>whole nations that are gulags of cheap captive labor where
>emigation and escape are prohibitted.
>
Thank you for proving my point.  I was talking about Wikipedia articles,
and you want to talk about Guantanamo.

Ec


from_name: Mark Williamson

body:
Before you reply next time, please read the entire e-mail.

Nobody is trying to force anything on anybody.

I said it is my hope that the 3 wikis will DEMOCRATICALLY merge.

That means that if there is a vote, and the majority of Croatians
votes against it, then of course Croatian WP won't merge.

But the vast rest of my e-mail you didn't reply to, namely the parts
about that you're fooling yourself when you say that you speak a
different language from the Serbians, and that it is harmful to
Wikipedia because it limits possible number of articles. This is just
a suggestion, I don't want to force anything on anyone, but I really
think that  everybody would be better off here with a single WP where
all standards is converted and/or accepted.

Mark

On 10/10/05, elephantus <elephantus at net.hr> wrote:
> >Well, Elephantus apparently hasn't been monitoring the growth of the
> >Serbocroatian WP.
>
> >The top contributors recently are:
>
> >OC Ripper,
> >Dejvid,
> >Myself,
> >Pokrajac,
> >Belirac,
> >anonymous user.
>
> >Now, of all these people, the ONLY ONE who is not a native speaker is ME.
>
> [[sh:User:Dejvid]] is also not a native speaker and his main activity
> was also copy/pasting articles from the other three Wikipedias.
> So two out of the top three contributors aren't native speakers and
> what they're doing is basically making an internal fork.
>
> >From the standpoint of the Croatian Wikipedia, there are two main
> problems about Serbo-Croatian Wiki:
>
> 1. User confusion. Nontechnical, casual passers-by who stumble
> upon Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia and, in many cases, automatically assume
> that there is no Croatian (or Serbian, for that matter) Wikipedia.
> I tried to make a partial fix for this by adding a banner
> to the top of the S-C Main Page pointing people to the other 3
> Wikis, but you and Pokrajac removed this.
>
> 2. Fragmentation of user base. The people who consider their
> language to be Serbo-Croatian form a small minority, with political
> views which are usually at the left end of the political spectrum.
> By providing these people with their own Wiki you're possibly
> depriving the three of small, but potentially valuable
> contributions and a diversity of opinion necessary for a successful
> Wiki. If we were to create, say, a German-Marxist Wikipedia, would
> that be welcomed by the majority of contributors to the German
> Wiki?
>
> As for the politics of the issue, I don't really care one
> way or the other. I cooperate well with the folks
> on the Serbian Wikipedia who don't try to convince me that
> I'm wrong and they're right. But I really think that you should
> respect the will of a great majority of the three peoples
> and not try to force a common identity or language upon us.
> Proclaiming the many contributors to the three Wikipedias
> and other ordinary folks "nationalists" because they decided
> to go their separate ways shows a certain lack of respect or
> detailed and nuanced knowledge about things. It's not
> a simple copy/paste/merge operation, as shown in the past
> 90 years or so. Sorry.
>
> Elephantus (from Croatian Wikipedia)
>
>
> --
> Odaberite XXLadsl i iskoristite 60 dana neograni?enog surfanja za samo 1 kn!
> Uz svaki XXLadsl poklanjamo Iskonov glazbeni CD. http://www.iskon.biz/xxladsl
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


from_name: Lyndagayle62 at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Current events

body:
Hello,
Out of curiosity, I have followed the threads to this one of a last site I
will research today

 What are you? Are you self-appointed? Why is the word "bias" chosen  explain
your existence and goal? Are you not attempting to do the very thing you  are
attempting to re-write? We all have an opinion, so why the Hawaiian
"wiki-wiki" word base to everything that is your opinion? This seems like  another
attempt to re-write history, is it? To what goal/purpose? It seems you  are using
the thing you are trying to describe that you are/do, to describe what  you
are/do?

Why such confusion? Are you not satisfied with things the way they  have been
for hundreds of years, even to all of our advantages, or are you  attempting
to simply impose your own points of view into society to justify  something
that has not been accepted? Have you given serious thought that there  is valid
reason why things originated this way? Can you add one day to your own  life,
for example, by changing how things are into something you wished they  were?

It's a novel idea but going where? There is nothing Nu/New about NewAge nor
is there anything of true value that's "new under the sun". ..i.e., ."all is
vanity".

Is this witchcraft? Would you admit it if it were? What is witchcraft?
Rebellion to how things
were designed to be by the Designer Himself, who never changes. Have you
believed a lie?Can the clay tell the Potter what to make?

Just blogging around, wondering why these words had to replace  the perfectly
good/valid word "looking". Seems like some sort of  nupig-latin? Yes, each
generation wants to contribute
and make it's mark, but most things don't need reinventing, regardless of
what Mr. Clinton
thinks. Wasn't there a movie back in the 50's called ,"The Blog"? or  was it
"The Blog
that Ate New York"? Has this just oozed out in need of a place to  puddle?
LOL.(incidentally,
my sister's nick-name is "lol",  our never dreaming it too would  become a NU
thang 4 U.)

There needs to be a separate topic called, "Personal Relationship", in the
"Religious"
section before you try to wipe it out, too, leaving no choices but yours to
consider.

This whole idea of yours is most offensive to those of us who should have
done the same
sort of thing to your generation, right after you learned what works, what
things are called,
the who, where, and whens.

Actually, I apologize!  Perhaps we did similar things? I remember my
generation following our ancestors in teaching infants to speak  as early as
possible, encouraging them to speak more with each  year, and to think of
questions/topics/imagination.

Then we supported their teachers who required that they be totally silent,
to sit perfectly still in a particular posture, to speak  only when spoken to,
to be monitored, to leave the room only when an  emergency/breaks, to write
rather than to speak, to listen  twice as much as they speak, to get permission
to  speak, and to accept the status quo, with few if any,  questions.

This discipline failed, because instead  it produced generations  of their
confusion beginning at an early age, intellectual  imbalance, rebellion to
parents/teachers, bitter  challenges and their
questioning/irrelevant topics/improper fantasies,  outspoken at inappropriate
times, continual disruption,  anxiety, attention deficit disorders,
hyperactivity/hypersensitivity, unrest, inattention  to posture/rules, underground
newspapers full of their  anger/hatred/rage, total disregard for the laws of
their parents/forefathers, need for attention at all costs, lack of  respect for
elders, foul speech regardless of consequence because  it was their
"constitutional right", refusing to seek  permission/acknowledge authority, refusal to
comply/cooperate,  scandalizing the society with on-going questions/needs for
change. In  other words, it produced a different type of discipline, not of
self, but of  self-imposed discipline upon others....sort of what we attempted to
do,  but for the opposite reasons.

It was our goal to give our offspring momentum,  impetus, a refinement of
what we had received, a boost toward a higher goal, integrity, appreciation for
self-discipline and what it had produced in the past for our ancestors,
opportunity to advance farther, focus on the future
and what they could achieve with such guidance/application, greater
financial support, goods
and services they needed,  ancestral  values/morals support, stability, the
American Dream
on a godly foundation of basic goodness and the Golden Rule,  regardless of
how inept each
of us might have been.

Once we are gone, the powers that be can continue in their rebellion, rid
themselves of all
signs of us and our belief in the God of Heaven and Earth and all the hosts
therein, correct
our mistakes, mock and entertain themselves by turning good to evil,  calling
evil good,
sit on the seat of the scorners, reinvent a more politically correct
discipline, and not look
back, plowing head on into what lies ahead, in mass to what they have
created, right through the wide gates, totally missing the narrow path we tried  to
stay and walk upon, plunging into what the future they have chosen holds, in
their blogstorm, with  tablets of wikimedium, and nupediae, thumbing their
upturned noses and pointed fingers at the fools who tried to hold their hands
and lead them on the same path but loved them enough to let them fall, in  hopes
that they would dust themselves off and begin again?

No stone thrown.
Lyndagayle62


from_name: Roman Maurer

body:
Arbeo M pravi:

> As a total outsider I could imagine that naming it
> "Serbian-Latin" would not really be helpful because
> that name makes reference to one nation and one
> ethnicity exclusively. "Yugoslav(ian)" has just
> crossed my mind - would that be an option?

No, former Yugoslavia (the SFRY, that is) had three official languages:
Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian and Macedonian.
--
	Pozdrav,
	  Roman


body:
Stephen Bain wrote:

> One could simply cite an authority (or authorities) who believes that
>
>Castro fits within the definition of "dictator", and cite an authority
>(or authorities) who believes the opposite. Then it's up to the reader
>who they believe.
>
True enough, but why bother?  It's a characterization that leads us
nowhere, and arguing the point in the article only succeeds in making
the article less readable   I can appreciate that if calling Castro a
dictator violates NPOV, so too  is using the same term for Batista or
the even more deadly Machado.  I can draw my own conclusion from the
data, I don't need anybody to tell me what conclusions I should draw
from that data.

Ec


body:
actionforum at comcast.net wrote:

>------------- Original message --------------
>
>On 10/10/05, Tony Sidaway wrote:
> >
> > > Wrong, it hasn't gotten worse, at least Batista is no longer
> > > called a dictator, as he once was. That is how much the clique, did
> > > not want Castro labeled a dictator. Note that Batista still has a regime,
> > > which has been regarded as POV on other pages. Batista did not shoot
> > > people trying to escape Cuba, Castro does.
> >
> > Well, do you not see that all you're talking about is a tit-for-tat affair?
> > What does the issue of killing people trying to escape Cuba have to do with
> > the question of whether we call Batista or Castro dictators? Both of them
> > instituted a government by force of arms, so they would both fit the
> > traditional standard. Shah Pahlavi, for that matter, when dismissed by
> > Massadeq, was reinstalled by military force, so I guess we could call him a
> > dictator too. But the editors of the Pahlavi article, for whatever reason,
> > are not squabbling.
>
>You can call it tit-for-tat, but when a clique has control of a page, and is
>claiming a certain standard in rejecting your edits such as "dictator" being
>POV and pejorative even when applied to a world class dictator like
>Fidel Castro, you can at least embarass them some with their hypocrisy
>if they insist on maintaining the term for a petty corrupt dictator such
>as Batista.  His oppression only extended to the measures necessary
>to keep him in power and luxury.  There  is a difference between
>being anti-democratic for selfish reasons, and essentially enslaving
>(because they can't leave) a pool of cheap labor to implement
>your grand plans for the economy.
>
If this weren't so hilarious I would be tempted to see it as the ravings
of an anti-Catro lunatic.  The notion that a person who bases his
dictatorship on personal gain and profit is morally superior to one who
does so in order to achieve honest reforms is beyond belief.

Ec


body:
Hi Josip,

In the future sh.wiki hopes to implement an automatic converter
between Cyrillic, Latin, Ijekavski, and Ekavski, so these
stylistic/dialect/variety issues won't be a problem anymore.

Now, with such conversion, you wouldn't have to worry about edit wars
over what norm is used, because no matter what norm it is written in,
it is displayed in the chosen norm (possibly based on IP range-- users
in Croatia and Bosnia get Ijekavian, users in Serbia get Ekavian;
users in Croatia, Bosnia, and Montenegro get Latin alphabet, users in
Serbia get Cyrillic, but of course you can change these preferences).

Mark

On 10/10/05, Josip Rodin <joy at srce.hr> wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 09, 2005 at 06:35:12PM -0700, Mark Williamson wrote:
> > Rather than letting politics blind you, why not try to look at things
> > from the point of view of "What will be best for the Wikipedia in my
> > language?". I think that the answer to this, is a merger of these 3
> > Wikipedias, because it will result in a much larger workforce and much
> > more power and capability.
> >
> > Currently, Croatian WP has just over 10000 articles, Serbian WP has
> > just over 14000 articles, and Bosnian WP has almost 5000 articles.
> > Now, imagine, if all people from all 3 Wikipedias had been working
> > together from the start, maybe we'd have 30000 articles in a unified
> > Serbocroatian WP already.
>
> Yes, you might have 30K articles, but you also wouldn't have an
> encyclopedia, because the articles would fluctuate in
> language/style/whatever randomly. And as an added bonus, you'd have a
> massive potential for an edit war in every single article, as people
> couldn't agree on the norm used.
>
> I myself have complained at the sh: editors already for being silly and
> combining things that were never combined even during SFRY, but I'm not
> particularly interested in shutting their version down. It's clutter, but
> it's fairly harmless. Combining all four into one, now that would be a
> particularly ghastly idea.
>
> --
>      2. That which causes joy or happiness.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


body:
> On the matter of unity vs. separateness:
> Bitter (and sometimes bloody) experience has shown us that any
> gains made by having a larger number of speakers/writers are
> more than offset by the energy wasted in petty bickering and/or
> ill-will generated by the neccessary compromises on many things.
> Normally, I wouldn't have anything against ill-informed people
> trying this out one more time for themselves and banging
> their head against a wall, but in this case I'm interested
> in the well-being and progress of Croatian Wikipedia.

"Generated by the neccessary compromises on many things"... do you
mean NPOV? NPOV is not optional.

If you mean compromises on which norm is used, that's only a temporary problem.

> I tried to put a banner on the Main Page pointing the
> way to the three other Wikipedias after several people asked
> me why the Croatian Wikipedia is named "Serbocroatian". You, Dejvid
> and Pokrajac removed this without a word of explanation, even
> calling it "vandalism". Now you may or may not be aware of this,
> but many people from the former Yugoslavia, when they see a
> project (organization, institution) having a "Serbocroatian"
> section automatically assume that people there haven't yet switched
> to the three separate languages and simply turn around and walk away.
> This is what I'd like to avoid.

Well, someone might as well ask you why the Serbian Ijekavian Latin WP
is named "Croatian". Or why the Bosnian WP is named Croatian.

Do you want a huge banner on your front page saying "OH MY
GOSH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111 THESE WIKIPEDIAS ARE ALSO HERE!!!!!!!!!!111111
YOU MAY USE THEM OMG !!! RTLOFLO"? Neither do we.

Mark


from_name: Paul D. Buck

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Minor issue with upload permission and restricted
	rights

body:
If you have the desire and need to restrict editing of the wiki,
version 1.5 has nice features.

However, if you want to allow uploading of files, you set a global
variable. However, this now shows the upload link to all viewers. It
should only show the link if you are logged in and have rights.

Adding the following snippet to the "toolbox" code:

           <?php
             global $wgUser;
             if( $wgUser->isAllowed( 'upload' ) ) {
               $TmpLinksArray = array('contributions', 'emailuser',
'upload', 'specialpages');
             } else {
               $TmpLinksArray = array('contributions', 'emailuser',
'specialpages');
             }
           ?>
           <?php foreach( $TmpLinksArray as $special ) { ?>

In place of the line:

           <?php foreach( array('contributions', 'emailuser',
'upload', 'specialpages') as $special ) { ?>

now will only show the upload link when appropriate. You will no
longer be showing a link to those people that cannot use it.

I am not sure if the additional test for blocked is needed/required
for completeness. If it is, then of course my logic needs to be
inverted and the test should be:

if( !$wgUser->isAllowed( 'upload' ) || $wgUser->isBlocked() )

Or am I missing the point somewhere? I would love to know if this is
the kind of thing you want fed back to you or not ... I am well past
48 hours on the migration from 1.4 to 1.5  ... Not that 1.5 is bad,
just that so many options have been added and the old way of doing
things has changed. Of course, the deaths, database configuration
issues, normal stuff that comes up when you try to do anything real ...

Other than that, and a change to enable Google searching ...

Paul


body:
> Still, the situation is now that there are separate wikis AND a merged
> one. Apparently I am not the only one who thinks that that is a
> strange and unwanted situation. Either Serbocroatian has to go, or the
> other three have to go (after moving the articles of course), in my
> opinion. The democratical thing seems to be to not merge - there seem
> to be more people interested in the Serbian and Croatian Wikipedias
> than in the Serbocroatian one.

Yeah... the people who agree with you are, lets see, Elephantus, and,
Elephantus. Josip said that he thinks they shouldn't be merged, but he
doesn't mind sh.wiki's existance.

Now, it seems natural to me that more people are interested in the
Serbian and Croatian Wikipedias, after all they are much, much, much
bigger.

> That's nice, but what will this mean for the Serbocroatian Wikipedia?
> Will it mean that it will remain as it is, will it be put out of
> existence or will it become the serbocroatian-except-croatian
> wikipedia?

It would mean that Bosnian and Serbian would merge into it. Remember,
Serbocroatian encompasses 3, not 2, other Wikipedias' "languages". So,
unless only 1 votes to merge (which would make it almost pointless),
it could still be a better solution than 3 separate Wikis, with 2
instead of 3.

> I don't know how much different the languages/dialects are. I do know

Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian have only a handful of differences in vocabulary.

Serbian _usually_ uses the Ekavian standard, and Croatian and Bosnian
_always_ use the Ijekavian standard. However, lossless conversion
between the two is easily possible.

Now, if the languages have only been diverging since the breakup of
the former Yugoslavia, prior to which most people would've thought it
outrageous to claim to speak "Serbian" or "Bosnian", that would mean
that there are almost no changes. Those changes which do exist since
then are partly artificial, as Croatian linguists try to get people to
use "authentic Croatian words" which are mostly artificial.

> that from both sides people are moving towards separate languages. If

That's actually not really true. It's a very complicated question.
Although many Serbs, Bosnians, and Croats will tell you they speak
"Serbian", "Bosnian", or "Croatian", most will hesitate if you ask
them "Is that a different language than (one of the others)?".
Obviously, some nationalists will immediately and proudly respond
"yes", but the majority is unsure. So, while they're sure that the
language they speak isn't called "Serbocroatian", they're often not so
sure as to whether their language is a single language as the other
members of "Serbocroatian".

> we consider languages to be variations with at least a given amount of
> difference, they are indeed dialects of the same language. But if we

It seems that's how we're doing it now. Only exceptions are
Serbian/Bosnian/Croatian, Malay/Indonesian, and Moldovan/Romanian
(though that is partly a division along the boundaries of scripts
which cannot lossless conversion).

> consider languages to be dialects with a special formal status,
> they're different languages.

That's definitely not how we're doing it. Some linguists would say
that Yiddish is a dialect (or at least a sociolect) of German. Yiddish
has no special formal status of any kind; however, we treat it as a
separate language.

> If, as seems to be the case, the users themselves prefer to go
> separate ways, there is not much gained by having an extra Wikipedia
> where you may write in both forms.

Note that so far, the only people who have weighed in are 2 Croatians.
No feedback so far from Serbians, Bosnians, Metohijans, or
Montenegrins, or any of the other... well, let's just call them
"places". And 2 is definitely a small number -- for all you know, the
two who have weighed in so far might be the only two opposed out of
all Croatian Wikipedians (although that is _extremely_ unlikely
statistically). And one out of the two seems to oppose for the reason
of differing reguls, which is an issue easily resolved...

Cheers
Mark W


subject: [Wikitech-l] Google search code

body:
I added a slightly more refined google search code to the page:

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

Let me know if you have a suggestion for improvements.

Paul


body:
Lexical conversion can be implemented as well for such vocabulary.
What is important, is that the majority of the parts of the language
is the same. The rest can be converted easily using Zhengzhu's
conversion software, lossless-ly.

Mark

On 10/10/05, elephantus <elephantus at net.hr> wrote:
> > In the future sh.wiki hopes to implement an automatic converter
> > between Cyrillic, Latin, Ijekavski, and Ekavski, so these
> > stylistic/dialect/variety issues won't be a problem anymore.
> >
> > Now, with such conversion, you wouldn't have to worry about edit wars
> > over what norm is used, because no matter what norm it is written in,
> > it is displayed in the chosen norm (possibly based on IP range-- users
> > in Croatia and Bosnia get Ijekavian, users in Serbia get Ekavian;
> > users in Croatia, Bosnia, and Montenegro get Latin alphabet, users in
> > Serbia get Cyrillic, but of course you can change these preferences).
> >
> > Mark
>
> Differences between standard Serbian and Croatian are larger than
> just differences of ekavian/ijekavian. A text in Serbian converted
> to ijekavian feels to us just a little less Serbian (somewhat Bosnian)
> than the original, it's not somehow magically transformed into
> Croatian. And please, don't throw NPOV phrases at me, because how
> on earth are you going to NPOV-ize loads of technical, scientific
> and everyday vocabulary, syntax etc.? Do you plan to write slashes
> between variants? Write the same sentence twice? Believe me,
> all of this has been tried before, immense force, threats, everything
> was applied and the end result was the same – zero.
>
> Elephantus (from Croatian Wikipedia)
>
>
> --
> Odaberite XXLadsl i iskoristite 60 dana neograni?enog surfanja za samo 1 kn!
> Uz svaki XXLadsl poklanjamo Iskonov glazbeni CD. http://www.iskon.biz/xxladsl
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

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POSSIT MATERIARI
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body:
Ahh, and what you said about "not magically transformed into Croatian" is funny.

Can you give me an example of a WP article where there is more than 3
unique words that are different in Serbian than Croatian, excluding
Ijekavian/Ekavian differences?

If you can, most of them will probably be minor spelling differences
(sc vs st, for example), or it will be an article about Europe
(because Romania, Moldova, Spain, Portugal, etc. have different names
in Serbian and Croatian).

But the vast majority of articles, like the vast majority of words,
are identical with the exception of Ijekavian and Ekavian differences.

You are trying to pass Croatian off as if it were only distantly
related to Serbian, to the people on this list who may not be as well
informed.

It should be clear to anybody that upon any examination of the issue,
it makes absolutely 0 sense that one year there is 1 language, by 10
years later it is magically transformed into 3.

What is really going on here is a change of how important are the same
differences that have always existed.

Ladies and gentlemen, other than Ijekavski/Ekavski, the differences
between Serbian and Croatian are perhaps just a little bit more than
US and UK English. The differences progress a little bit further in
that: Croatian always uses "Native" name for months, while Serbian
generally uses loanwords; Serbian and Croatian have some different
names for a few dozen countries (for example Spain, Moldova, Portugal
which are Spanija/Spanjolska, Moldavija/Moldova,
Portugalija/Portugal).

Other than this, differences in vocabulary are probably about as many
and as frequent as between American and British English.

Now back to you, Elephantus.

In your e-mails, you've also been trying to play up the importance of
Ijekavski and Latin alphabet. As noted before, that problem is easily
solved, so the fact that you keep mentioning it is pure FUD.

Lexical conversion (ie, replacing words which are different) is also
relatively easy to resolve but obviously not as easy as orthographic
or alphabet conversion, but it's already being done on the Chinese
Wikipedia. For example, the term that means both "computer" and
"calculator" to Mainland Chinese, means only "calculator" in Taiwan.
So it is converted. They have different words for "internet", so
that's converted. Some countries and people have different names,
which are converted.

Now, if you don't have to worry about the little different words, the
Ijekavski vs Ekavski, and the Latin vs Cyrillic, what is there left to
worry about but the name of the language?

Mark

On 10/10/05, elephantus <elephantus at net.hr> wrote:
> > In the future sh.wiki hopes to implement an automatic converter
> > between Cyrillic, Latin, Ijekavski, and Ekavski, so these
> > stylistic/dialect/variety issues won't be a problem anymore.
> >
> > Now, with such conversion, you wouldn't have to worry about edit wars
> > over what norm is used, because no matter what norm it is written in,
> > it is displayed in the chosen norm (possibly based on IP range-- users
> > in Croatia and Bosnia get Ijekavian, users in Serbia get Ekavian;
> > users in Croatia, Bosnia, and Montenegro get Latin alphabet, users in
> > Serbia get Cyrillic, but of course you can change these preferences).
> >
> > Mark
>
> Differences between standard Serbian and Croatian are larger than
> just differences of ekavian/ijekavian. A text in Serbian converted
> to ijekavian feels to us just a little less Serbian (somewhat Bosnian)
> than the original, it's not somehow magically transformed into
> Croatian. And please, don't throw NPOV phrases at me, because how
> on earth are you going to NPOV-ize loads of technical, scientific
> and everyday vocabulary, syntax etc.? Do you plan to write slashes
> between variants? Write the same sentence twice? Believe me,
> all of this has been tried before, immense force, threats, everything
> was applied and the end result was the same – zero.
>
> Elephantus (from Croatian Wikipedia)
>
>
> --
> Odaberite XXLadsl i iskoristite 60 dana neograni?enog surfanja za samo 1 kn!
> Uz svaki XXLadsl poklanjamo Iskonov glazbeni CD. http://www.iskon.biz/xxladsl
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
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> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

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POSSIT MATERIARI
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from_name: Andrew Lih

subject: [Foundation-l] Is Wikip/media politic?

body:
This may or may not be what you're interested in:

The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, keeper of Wikipedia, was created
to be "politically neutral," says Wales. "But on a deeper level there
is something profoundly political about what we're saying ? which is
that everybody should have access to information."

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:ITAAW

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On 10/10/05, Jakob Voss <jakob.voss at nichtich.de> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> A friend of mine is searching for a quote of Jimbo meantioning that
> Wikipedia or Wikimedia is not political. Maybe Jimbo said something like
> this during the Politics of Wikimedia panel at Wikimania or related to
> comparing Wikimedia with the Red Cross or it's because something with
> tax in the US. Does anybody has a quote with a source?
>
> In my opinion every encyclopaedia is politic; Jean-Baptiste Soufron
> wrote about "The political importance of the Wikipedia Project" [1]:
>
> "It seemed to me that, first of all, a real encyclopedia should be a
> place directed toward a political project of its own, and not only
> toward some sort of simple scientific dictionnary project."
>
> There is several distinct questions:
> 1. Is Wikipedia politic?
> 2. Does the community think that Wikipedia is politic
> 3. Is Wikimedia Foundation a politic organisation?
>
> I think the answer to the first question is "yes", the answer to the
> second is "some do, some don't" and the answer to the third is "no"
> (isn't it?) - but how do you explain the difference in the answers?
>
> Greetings,
> Jakob
>
> [1] http://soufron.free.fr/soufron-spip/article.php3?id_article=71
>
> P.S: Mathias pointed me to two German newspaper articles that also
> mention politics and Wikipedia - but you know that you cannot believe
> everything that journalists write, especially when there is only a
> German translation and no original quote of who said what:
>
> http://www.faz.net/s/Rub4C34FD0B1A7E46B88B0653D6358499FF/Doc~E197429C5610645CAB70619D096D35BC5~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html
> http://www.weltexpress.info/index.php?artikel_id=983&rubrik=5&lan=de
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Is Wikip/media politic?


body:
Hi Milos,

There is no pressure for merging.

I simply said, along with my announcement of 1000th article on shwiki,
that I hope that at some point in the future, even if it's in 10
years, I hope it can be merged.

In response to this, Elephantus posted an angry comment.

Cheers
Mark

On 10/10/05, Milos Rancic <millosh at mutualaid.org> wrote:
> Just to say that at least very small minority (maybe one contributor
> on sr: ) agrees to merge sr, hr and bs Wikipedias into one. Even it is
> so, Serbian and Croatian communities cooperate very good.
>
> There are some ideas how to make cooperation better, but, please,
> don't force talks about merging because such ideas make cooperation
> harder.
>
> And about sh: Wikipedia: Yes, Elephantus is right when he says that
> our communities (Serbian and Croatian) have problems with sh:
> Wikipedia. People who want to cooperate would prefer sh: Wikipedia and
> we would have only strong nationalists on our projects. Unfortunately,
> there are more strong nationalists then people who want to cooperate
> in Balkans. The consequences are: big Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian
> Wikipedias with a lot of nationalist POV and small Serbo-Croatian
> Wikipedia with specific NGO POV from Balkans.
>
> Also, I want to say again: sh: Wikipedia was reopened too early. It is
> opened and I don't think that it would be better to close it again.
> But, we have some problems and I don't know how to solve it... And,
> please, don't make pressure for merging sr:, hr: and bs:.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
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POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


from_name: uninvited at nerstrand.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] Article quality deterioration (was: a valid criticism)

body:
I too have noticed this phenomenon.  It is not limited to biographical
articles.  It can be observed in any general-interest article where
there is considerable public controversy.

The problem is that people come along and make incremental changes each
of which, taken alone, is unremarkable -- neither helpful nor
especially detrimental to the article.  In aggregate, such changes
destroy the organization of the article and compromise any stylistic
unity that may be present.

Such changes should really be reverted when they are made, with a kind
note offered to the other editor.

But Responsible Wikipedians Don't Revert Changes.  They compromise, and
discuss, and don't bite the newbies, and revert as a last resort.
Especially not on articles where there are POV warriors already
reverting each other, because in that case it is too easy for a good
editor trying to organize the article to be mistaken for a POV warrior.

I ran into this on [[cult]] and [[surrealism]].  In each case I did some
real-world research, at a library where they had books (you know, paper
ones).  Both articles are awful and I have given up because I'm not
willing to become a revert warrior for the sake of these articles.

We have a culture of egalitarianism and a culture where reverting
changes is strongly discouraged.  These are important elements of our
culture and I am not suggesting that we weaken them.  But if we hope to
understand what happens to this class of articles we best consider these
factors.


from_name: actionforum at comcast.net

body:
------------- Original message --------------

On 10/10/05, Tony Sidaway wrote:
 >
 > > Wrong, it hasn't gotten worse, at least Batista is no longer
 > > called a dictator, as he once was. That is how much the clique, did
 > > not want Castro labeled a dictator. Note that Batista still has a regime,
 > > which has been regarded as POV on other pages. Batista did not shoot
 > > people trying to escape Cuba, Castro does.
 >
 > Well, do you not see that all you're talking about is a tit-for-tat affair?
 > What does the issue of killing people trying to escape Cuba have to do with
 > the question of whether we call Batista or Castro dictators? Both of them
 > instituted a government by force of arms, so they would both fit the
 > traditional standard. Shah Pahlavi, for that matter, when dismissed by
 > Massadeq, was reinstalled by military force, so I guess we could call him a
 > dictator too. But the editors of the Pahlavi article, for whatever reason,
 > are not squabbling.

You can call it tit-for-tat, but when a clique has control of a page, and is
claiming a certain standard in rejecting your edits such as "dictator" being
POV and pejorative even when applied to a world class dictator like
Fidel Castro, you can at least embarass them some with their hypocrisy
if they insist on maintaining the term for a petty corrupt dictator such
as Batista.  His oppression only extended to the measures necessary
to keep him in power and luxury.  There  is a difference between
being anti-democratic for selfish reasons, and essentially enslaving
(because they can't leave) a pool of cheap labor to implement
your grand plans for the economy.
                   -- Silverback


from_name: Anthere

body:
Hiya,

When spanish editors contacted me yesterday about their own channel
registered by an unknown person, I checked the french channel as well,
and was glad to see you registered it Mark. You could have stayed our
owner you know ;-)

Thanks
Mark Ryan wrote:

> Hi Anthere. I read this naming policy a few months ago and registered
> #wikipedia-fr and #wikipedia-de on behalf of those channels, and sent
> memos to their existing channel contacts telling them of this. Would
> you like me to set it over to you? Or just unregister them so you can
> re-register them as you see fit?
>
> ~Mark Ryan
>
> On 10/9/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>Hello;
>>
>>I post it here, though it is not restricted to wikipedia. But many read
>>this list, so that might do.
>>
>>Freenode is changing is channel naming policy.
>>
>>The channel names beforehand #xx.wikipedia will be changed in #wikipedia-xx
>>
>>Some people already reported that some of these channels (like the
>>spanish one) were already registered by unknown people... or people who
>>have left the projects.
>>
>>If this is the case of your language channel, please do together agree
>>on a new owner, then please contact Fennec to make the change :
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fennec
>>
>>Fennec is the contact for freenode.
>>
>>Thanks
>>
>>Anthere
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>>Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>>


references:
<diah78$bat$1@sea.gmane.org>	<a4a70770510091826t60c4fa7dudb856b51293f96c8@mail.gmail.com>
	<did163$3hm$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
oh, by the way Mark...if you are the owner of several channels and take
care of migration and information for all, would you possibly write a
short note on the implications on meta (something like, "no worry, no
changes of nicknames", "this is a change of freenode policy not of
wikimedia foundation" etc...), so that each time there is a migration,
you can point out the new channel to that note ?

I suggest this only because I see the perplexity of french irc users
this morning ;-) Might save time not to explain it each time ...

Cheers

Ant

Anthere wrote:

> Hiya,
>
> When spanish editors contacted me yesterday about their own channel
> registered by an unknown person, I checked the french channel as well,
> and was glad to see you registered it Mark. You could have stayed our
> owner you know ;-)
>
> Thanks
> Mark Ryan wrote:
>
>> Hi Anthere. I read this naming policy a few months ago and registered
>> #wikipedia-fr and #wikipedia-de on behalf of those channels, and sent
>> memos to their existing channel contacts telling them of this. Would
>> you like me to set it over to you? Or just unregister them so you can
>> re-register them as you see fit?
>>
>> ~Mark Ryan
>>
>> On 10/9/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello;
>>>
>>> I post it here, though it is not restricted to wikipedia. But many read
>>> this list, so that might do.
>>>
>>> Freenode is changing is channel naming policy.
>>>
>>> The channel names beforehand #xx.wikipedia will be changed in
>>> #wikipedia-xx
>>>
>>> Some people already reported that some of these channels (like the
>>> spanish one) were already registered by unknown people... or people who
>>> have left the projects.
>>>
>>> If this is the case of your language channel, please do together agree
>>> on a new owner, then please contact Fennec to make the change :
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fennec
>>>
>>> Fennec is the contact for freenode.
>>>
>>> Thanks
>>>
>>> Anthere
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Wikipedia-l mailing list
>>> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>>>


body:
-------------- Original message --------------
> actionforum at comcast.net wrote:
>
> >-------------- Original message --------------
> >
> >
> >>>Who cares what consensus is? What matters is what is right. Edit
> >>>waring has it's uses. For some reason it seems to be an effective way
> >>>of increaseing the number of citations.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>The problem with believing that being right is paramount is that it
> >>tends to shut out other views which may be just as right.
> >>
> >>
> >No, that is the problem with being wrong. It is those who are
> >wrong that want to shut out the views that may be right.
> >That is how you get gulags, political prisoners, censorship,
> >whole nations that are gulags of cheap captive labor where
> >emigation and escape are prohibitted.
> >
> Thank you for proving my point. I was talking about Wikipedia articles,
> and you want to talk about Guantanamo.

Really?  Integrity and character, fairness, tolerance
and equality under the rules matter on little things
such as wikipedia articles too.  When a clique, gets
ahold of a page, the wikipedia rules no longer apply,
they make the rules.  Sometimes you can shame them
a bit with their hypocrisy, sometimes they are shameless.
But being a clique or a "consensus" doesn't make them
right.

Guantanamo is an embarrassment, but wars are messy,
I'm probably a pacifist myself (I'm not quite sure), but
what seems plain is that the non-pacifists who oppose
the war in Iraq and who somehow have supported some
other war and how that war was fought, are probably
among the worlds greatest hypocrits.  The U.S. has
liberated Iraq without using conscript/slaves, with careful
targeting to avoid unnecessary damage to civilians and
civilian infrastructure, with no territorial ambitions, and
without using "allies" that are beneath contempt such
as Stalin, certain warlords in Afghanistan or the U.N.

                    -- Silverback


from_name: Mark Ryan

body:
Hi Anthere. I read this naming policy a few months ago and registered
#wikipedia-fr and #wikipedia-de on behalf of those channels, and sent
memos to their existing channel contacts telling them of this. Would
you like me to set it over to you? Or just unregister them so you can
re-register them as you see fit?

~Mark Ryan

On 10/9/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hello;
>
> I post it here, though it is not restricted to wikipedia. But many read
> this list, so that might do.
>
> Freenode is changing is channel naming policy.
>
> The channel names beforehand #xx.wikipedia will be changed in #wikipedia-xx
>
> Some people already reported that some of these channels (like the
> spanish one) were already registered by unknown people... or people who
> have left the projects.
>
> If this is the case of your language channel, please do together agree
> on a new owner, then please contact Fennec to make the change :
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fennec
>
> Fennec is the contact for freenode.
>
> Thanks
>
> Anthere
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: elephantus

body:
>Well, Elephantus apparently hasn't been monitoring the growth of the
>Serbocroatian WP.

>The top contributors recently are:

>OC Ripper,
>Dejvid,
>Myself,
>Pokrajac,
>Belirac,
>anonymous user.

>Now, of all these people, the ONLY ONE who is not a native speaker is ME.

[[sh:User:Dejvid]] is also not a native speaker and his main activity
was also copy/pasting articles from the other three Wikipedias.
So two out of the top three contributors aren't native speakers and
what they're doing is basically making an internal fork.

>From the standpoint of the Croatian Wikipedia, there are two main
problems about Serbo-Croatian Wiki:

1. User confusion. Nontechnical, casual passers-by who stumble
upon Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia and, in many cases, automatically assume
that there is no Croatian (or Serbian, for that matter) Wikipedia.
I tried to make a partial fix for this by adding a banner
to the top of the S-C Main Page pointing people to the other 3
Wikis, but you and Pokrajac removed this.

2. Fragmentation of user base. The people who consider their
language to be Serbo-Croatian form a small minority, with political
views which are usually at the left end of the political spectrum.
By providing these people with their own Wiki you're possibly
depriving the three of small, but potentially valuable
contributions and a diversity of opinion necessary for a successful
Wiki. If we were to create, say, a German-Marxist Wikipedia, would
that be welcomed by the majority of contributors to the German
Wiki?

As for the politics of the issue, I don't really care one
way or the other. I cooperate well with the folks
on the Serbian Wikipedia who don't try to convince me that
I'm wrong and they're right. But I really think that you should
respect the will of a great majority of the three peoples
and not try to force a common identity or language upon us.
Proclaiming the many contributors to the three Wikipedias
and other ordinary folks "nationalists" because they decided
to go their separate ways shows a certain lack of respect or
detailed and nuanced knowledge about things. It's not
a simple copy/paste/merge operation, as shown in the past
90 years or so. Sorry.

Elephantus (from Croatian Wikipedia)

--
Odaberite XXLadsl i iskoristite 60 dana neograni?enog surfanja za samo 1 kn!
Uz svaki XXLadsl poklanjamo Iskonov glazbeni CD. http://www.iskon.biz/xxladsl


body:
-------------- Original message --------------
> >You can call it tit-for-tat, but when a clique has control of a page, and is
> >claiming a certain standard in rejecting your edits such as "dictator" being
> >POV and pejorative even when applied to a world class dictator like
> >Fidel Castro, you can at least embarass them some with their hypocrisy
> >if they insist on maintaining the term for a petty corrupt dictator such
> >as Batista. His oppression only extended to the measures necessary
> >to keep him in power and luxury. There is a difference between
> >being anti-democratic for selfish reasons, and essentially enslaving
> >(because they can't leave) a pool of cheap labor to implement
> >your grand plans for the economy.
> >
> If this weren't so hilarious I would be tempted to see it as the ravings
> of an anti-Catro lunatic. The notion that a person who bases his
> dictatorship on personal gain and profit is morally superior to one who
> does so in order to achieve honest reforms is beyond belief.

Try believing it.  One at least lets you leave and even come back if
you want to, without holding your family hostage.  Sure the
totalitarian is will to improve his stock of slaves by educating
them because he knows he will get to reap the benefits, after
all, they will find it difficult to escape.
                    -- Silverback


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Is Wikip/media politic?

body:
Hi,

Andrew Lih wrote:
> The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, keeper of Wikipedia, was created
> to be "politically neutral," says Wales. "But on a deeper level there
> is something profoundly political about what we're saying ? which is
> that everybody should have access to information."
>
> See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:ITAAW

Thanks for pointing me to this interesting experiment i didn't know.

In danger of beeing pedantic: The quote of Jimbo above was included in
the article revision written by the journalist AJ Jacobs with "a bunch
of intentional mistakes" as he wrote (posted by Notafish of 16:58, 20
September 2005). By the way it also contains the famous
"IBM-5-minutes-vandalism"-myth (see below). So as a serious researcher I
cannot trust the source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:ITAAW - but
personally I believe that Jimbo said what is quoted ;-)

== The famous "IBM-5-minutes-vandalism"-myth ==

It is stated frequently:

 > IBM researchers found that most vandalism on Wikipedia was
 > reverted in less than five minutes.

I doubt that anybody has ever read the paper of Vi?gas, Wattenberg and
Dave. They write:

"The instances of mass deletion were fixed so quickly that they cannot
be seen when revisions are spaced by date. This pattern appeared in
almost every instance of a vandalized page that we examined by hand."
(page 4, right)

"We defined a mass deletion a version that was at least 90% smaller than
the previous maximum size for the page [...] Mass deletions where the
remaining text included the word 'fuck [were] labeled 'MD obscene' [...]
We then looked at the survival time, that is, the total time that these
edits remained on the site." (page 5, left)

The results are shown in table 1: Survival time for different kinds of
revisions (page 5, right)

Revision Type: All content (618,502 times)
mean time=22.3 days, median time=90.4 minutes

Revision Type: Mass delete (3,574 times)
mean time=7.7 days, median time=2.8 minutes

Revision Type: MD obscene (47 times)
mean time=1.8 days, median time=1.7 minutes

So you should better say "Half of the deletions of more then 90% of a
page are reverted within 3 minutes". As far as I know they never wrote
that most vandalism on Wikipedia was reverted in less than five minutes
- it's just a myth like the myths around who invented Wikipedia (Wales
or Jimbo or both nobody of them?).

Greetings,
Jakob


body:
actionforum at comcast.net wrote:

>-------------- Original message --------------
>
>
>>actionforum at comcast.net wrote:
>>
>>
>>>-------------- Original message --------------
>>>
>>>
>>>>>Who cares what consensus is? What matters is what is right. Edit
>>>>>waring has it's uses. For some reason it seems to be an effective way
>>>>>of increaseing the number of citations.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>The problem with believing that being right is paramount is that it
>>>>tends to shut out other views which may be just as right.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>No, that is the problem with being wrong. It is those who are
>>>wrong that want to shut out the views that may be right.
>>>That is how you get gulags, political prisoners, censorship,
>>>whole nations that are gulags of cheap captive labor where
>>>emigation and escape are prohibitted.
>>>
>>>
>>Thank you for proving my point. I was talking about Wikipedia articles,
>>and you want to talk about Guantanamo.
>>
>>
>Really?  Integrity and character, fairness, tolerance
>and equality under the rules matter on little things
>such as wikipedia articles too.  When a clique, gets
>ahold of a page, the wikipedia rules no longer apply,
>they make the rules.  Sometimes you can shame them
>a bit with their hypocrisy, sometimes they are shameless.
>But being a clique or a "consensus" doesn't make them
>right.
>
Leave it to the anti-Castro clique to declare that principles should
only be applied when to do so would be of minimal consequence.

>Guantanamo is an embarrassment, but wars are messy,
>I'm probably a pacifist myself (I'm not quite sure), but
>what seems plain is that the non-pacifists who oppose
>the war in Iraq and who somehow have supported some
>other war and how that war was fought, are probably
>among the worlds greatest hypocrits.  The U.S. has
>liberated Iraq without using conscript/slaves, with careful
>targeting to avoid unnecessary damage to civilians and
>civilian infrastructure, with no territorial ambitions, and
>without using "allies" that are beneath contempt such
>as Stalin, certain warlords in Afghanistan or the U.N.
>
So you would have us believe that the warlords with whom the U. S. has
allied itself in Afghanistan are more virtuous than the ones it
opposes!  That may be the case on your planet, but not on earth.

Some of us do believe in respecting the views of others, and I do know
that there are others here who might share some of your POV.  The point
is that this started off with your, "What matters is what is right."  As
much as I may disagree with that position, I can recognize it as being
relevant to writing an encyclopedia.  But what do Fidel Castro and the
Iraq War have to do with it?  Do these topics represent your extension
of Goodwin's Law?  If you have nothing better to do than attempt to
inflame passions maybe you should just go away.

Ec


from_name: slimvirgin at gmail.com

body:
On 10/10/05, uninvited at nerstrand.net <uninvited at nerstrand.net> wrote:
> The problem is that people come along and make incremental changes each
> of which, taken alone, is unremarkable -- neither helpful nor
> especially detrimental to the article.  In aggregate, such changes
> destroy the organization of the article and compromise any stylistic
> unity that may be present.
>
> Such changes should really be reverted when they are made, with a kind
> note offered to the other editor.
>
> But Responsible Wikipedians Don't Revert Changes.
>
> We have a culture of egalitarianism and a culture where reverting
> changes is strongly discouraged.

Right, this is a real problem. We've got an RfC going at the moment
about an editor accused of reverting too much, when what he was doing
was trying to preserve halfway-decent writing, and one of the people
who has commented here in praise of good writing has criticized this
editor in the RfC for reverting too much, which strikes me as somewhat
contradictory.

What are we supposed to do when editors cause the writing in an
article to deteriorate, if  not revert? Are a bunch of people who care
about good writing supposed to be on hand constantly to carefully tidy
up after others, just so that we can avoid wholesale reverting? It
simply isn't realistic to expect that. The fact is that lots of
editors add material that is badly written, badly sourced, unsourced,
and wrong -- and reverting, including repeatedly reverting, is
sometimes the only practical way to keep the page reasonably
encyclopedic looking.

Sarah


body:
actionforum at comcast.net wrote:

>-------------- Original message --------------
>
>
>>>You can call it tit-for-tat, but when a clique has control of a page, and is
>>>claiming a certain standard in rejecting your edits such as "dictator" being
>>>POV and pejorative even when applied to a world class dictator like
>>>Fidel Castro, you can at least embarass them some with their hypocrisy
>>>if they insist on maintaining the term for a petty corrupt dictator such
>>>as Batista. His oppression only extended to the measures necessary
>>>to keep him in power and luxury. There is a difference between
>>>being anti-democratic for selfish reasons, and essentially enslaving
>>>(because they can't leave) a pool of cheap labor to implement
>>>your grand plans for the economy.
>>>
>>>
>>If this weren't so hilarious I would be tempted to see it as the ravings
>>of an anti-Catro lunatic. The notion that a person who bases his
>>dictatorship on personal gain and profit is morally superior to one who
>>does so in order to achieve honest reforms is beyond belief.
>>
>>
>Try believing it.  One at least lets you leave and even come back if
>you want to, without holding your family hostage.  Sure the
>totalitarian is will to improve his stock of slaves by educating
>them because he knows he will get to reap the benefits, after
>all, they will find it difficult to escape.
>
See Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer"
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060505915/qid=1128966765/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/104-7661251-9976723?v=glance&n=507846

You may find solace in the fact that there are people at the other
extreme whose position is just as ridiculous.

Ec


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Foundation-l] New project : movies.mediawiki.org?

body:
I am currently writing an application to manage my movie collection, and
looked around for online sources I can use to aid me in entering movie
information. I found amazon, which has a nice SOAP interface to their
DVD section. Then I looked at IMDB, which AFAIK is owned by amazon as
well, only to discover that they
* charge for database access /starting at $10000/
* explicly forbid HTML scraping

I remembered Jimbos 10-point-speech at Wikimaina. "Free the TV
programs"? Maybe we should free the movie information as well.

A wiki site based on WikiData (how's it going, BTW?;-) would be ideal to
do this. It would
* provide information for all the wikipedias
* provide information for the fre TV program listings :-)
* prove information for applications like the one I'm working on

For such a service, I would volunteer to integrate an upload function
into my software, making it possible to gather/write movie information
within the software and then upload it to WikiVideos (tm).

So, how about it? Or is there some large, free (in both ways) online
database that I've missed?

Magnus
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body:
I am currently writing an application to manage my movie collection, and
looked around for online sources I can use to aid me in entering movie
information. I found amazon, which has a nice SOAP interface to their
DVD section. Then I looked at IMDB, which AFAIK is owned by amazon as
well, only to discover that they
* charge for database access /starting at $10000/
* explicly forbid HTML scraping

I remembered Jimbos 10-point-speech at Wikimaina. "Free the TV
programs"? Maybe we should free the movie information as well.

A wiki site based on WikiData (how's it going, BTW?;-) would be ideal to
do this. It would
* provide information for all the wikipedias
* provide information for the fre TV program listings :-)
* prove information for applications like the one I'm working on

For such a service, I would volunteer to integrate an upload function
into my software, making it possible to gather/write movie information
within the software and then upload it to WikiVideos (tm).

So, how about it? Or is there some large, free (in both ways) online
database that I've missed?

Magnus
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body:
I am currently writing an application to manage my movie collection, and
looked around for online sources I can use to aid me in entering movie
information. I found amazon, which has a nice SOAP interface to their
DVD section. Then I looked at IMDB, which AFAIK is owned by amazon as
well, only to discover that they
* charge for database access /starting at $10000/
* explicly forbid HTML scraping

I remembered Jimbos 10-point-speech at Wikimaina. "Free the TV
programs"? Maybe we should free the movie information as well.

A wiki site based on WikiData (how's it going, BTW?;-) would be ideal to
do this. It would
* provide information for all the wikipedias
* provide information for the fre TV program listings :-)
* prove information for applications like the one I'm working on

For such a service, I would volunteer to integrate an upload function
into my software, making it possible to gather/write movie information
within the software and then upload it to WikiVideos (tm).

So, how about it? Or is there some large, free (in both ways) online
database that I've missed?

Magnus
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body:
I am currently writing an application to manage my movie collection, and
looked around for online sources I can use to aid me in entering movie
information. I found amazon, which has a nice SOAP interface to their
DVD section. Then I looked at IMDB, which AFAIK is owned by amazon as
well, only to discover that they
* charge for database access /starting at $10000/
* explicly forbid HTML scraping

I remembered Jimbos 10-point-speech at Wikimaina. "Free the TV
programs"? Maybe we should free the movie information as well.

A wiki site based on WikiData (how's it going, BTW?;-) would be ideal to
do this. It would
* provide information for all the wikipedias
* provide information for the fre TV program listings :-)
* prove information for applications like the one I'm working on

For such a service, I would volunteer to integrate an upload function
into my software, making it possible to gather/write movie information
within the software and then upload it to WikiVideos (tm).

So, how about it? Or is there some large, free (in both ways) online
database that I've missed?

Magnus
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Odd installation side effect

body:
To allow me to keep my wiki on line while upgrading, uploading files
and so forth ... I had "proven" a scheme where I would create a new
directory say "b-w" where I would make sure I had all the files, like
the images and so forth. When ready to upgrade, I would put a
"Maintenance" version of index.php in the actual directory, then do
the install/upgrade scripts in the new directory, make sure
everything was working, then, rename off the old site, rename in the
new site and off we go ... minimum down time.

With version 1.5, it is MUCH more insistent that it be installed in
the target directory with no if, ands or buts. even when the
configuration file SHOULD only need the one variable with the path
name changed, this does not seem to properly take effect. Restarting
apache does not seem to change things, nor does dumping the cache.

Renaming the directory back to the new "bad" name resurrects all pages.

I am not using, or at least I did not intend to use server side
caching as I do not have direct access to the servers I use to host
the Wiki (not all of us can afford that).

So, I only have upload to hosting dirs with FTP, and access to the
database via phpMyAdmin. To this point I have no access to run local
php maintenance files, though that is another issue for another day ...

Any thoughts? This one has me stumped. I "seem" to have it working on
the live site now, but no idea why. trying to make the residual
change to the local mirror on my hard drive does not seem to want to
allow the "proper" name. More interesting, take out the config files
and it still does not see the "index" page, rename it back, and there
it is ...

Any suggestions might be friendly ... :)

Paul


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

body:
> Simple technical solution: Each article gets a special
> counter. After X
> days, or X edits, or not-minor edits, or X bytes changed, or some
> combination thereof, the article gets added to a special
> "review" list.
> This is for people who like to specialize is
> style/flow/structure/etc of
> articles. These can then be reformatted/reworded. Calling it "review"
> might help to suppress edit wars; after all, this is not because of a
> special edit, but because some criteria say "this might need
> restructuring". Also, it is not to remove information, rather to
> rearrange it into readable form.
>
> Magnus

Please program this, and create a special page listing articles which
need review.

Ed Poor


body:
Milos Rancic wrote:

>Just to say that at least very small minority (maybe one contributor
>on sr: ) agrees to merge sr, hr and bs Wikipedias into one. Even it is
>so, Serbian and Croatian communities cooperate very good.
>
>There are some ideas how to make cooperation better, but, please,
>don't force talks about merging because such ideas make cooperation
>harder.
>
>And about sh: Wikipedia: Yes, Elephantus is right when he says that
>our communities (Serbian and Croatian) have problems with sh:
>Wikipedia. People who want to cooperate would prefer sh: Wikipedia and
>we would have only strong nationalists on our projects. Unfortunately,
>there are more strong nationalists then people who want to cooperate
>in Balkans. The consequences are: big Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian
>Wikipedias with a lot of nationalist POV and small Serbo-Croatian
>Wikipedia with specific NGO POV from Balkans.
>
>Also, I want to say again: sh: Wikipedia was reopened too early. It is
>opened and I don't think that it would be better to close it again.
>But, we have some problems and I don't know how to solve it... And,
>please, don't make pressure for merging sr:, hr: and bs:.
>
I basically agree.  I think that there is a big difference between
encouraging the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, and insisting that the other
three be merged into it.  Before a merger can be possible the partisans
need to be shown that co-operation can work.  It's hard to say whether
the sh:wikipedia was opened too early; for some any opening would be too
early. The challenge at this stage is for those on the combined project
to find ways of co-operating.  I'm sure that all three projects have
some relatively uncontroversial articles that can be copied into the
combined project.  Can an active edit history be copied as well?

For a merger to happen (and all three do  not need to happen at the same
time) the participants in the separate projects need to feel that their
participation there is a waste of time, and just let that project fade
away.   When it is obvious that a project has no participants, and all
the contents have been copied into the sh project it can be allowed to
fade away.  That will take as long as it needs to take.  Until then it
is an individual option to work on the separate or combined projects.

Ec


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
2005/10/10, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com>:
> Before you reply next time, please read the entire e-mail.
>
> Nobody is trying to force anything on anybody.
>
> I said it is my hope that the 3 wikis will DEMOCRATICALLY merge.

Still, the situation is now that there are separate wikis AND a merged
one. Apparently I am not the only one who thinks that that is a
strange and unwanted situation. Either Serbocroatian has to go, or the
other three have to go (after moving the articles of course), in my
opinion. The democratical thing seems to be to not merge - there seem
to be more people interested in the Serbian and Croatian Wikipedias
than in the Serbocroatian one.

> That means that if there is a vote, and the majority of Croatians
> votes against it, then of course Croatian WP won't merge.

That's nice, but what will this mean for the Serbocroatian Wikipedia?
Will it mean that it will remain as it is, will it be put out of
existence or will it become the serbocroatian-except-croatian
wikipedia?

> But the vast rest of my e-mail you didn't reply to, namely the parts
> about that you're fooling yourself when you say that you speak a
> different language from the Serbians, and that it is harmful to
> Wikipedia because it limits possible number of articles. This is just
> a suggestion, I don't want to force anything on anyone, but I really
> think that  everybody would be better off here with a single WP where
> all standards is converted and/or accepted.

I don't know how much different the languages/dialects are. I do know
that from both sides people are moving towards separate languages. If
we consider languages to be variations with at least a given amount of
difference, they are indeed dialects of the same language. But if we
consider languages to be dialects with a special formal status,
they're different languages.

If, as seems to be the case, the users themselves prefer to go
separate ways, there is not much gained by having an extra Wikipedia
where you may write in both forms.

--
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels