from_name: Jan Hidders

subject: [Wikitech-l] Slow query log

body:
Ian Gilfiallan wrote:
> - it's not the volume of queries, it's often the query that starts the
> backing up. So look at the first query in the log, and the first queries
> after a period of time running OK. Two that I saw this way are:
>
> SELECT cur_id,cur_namespace,cur_title,cur_text
> FROM cur,searchindex
> WHERE cur_id=si_page AND (MATCH (si_text) AGAINST ('math characters') AND
> (cur_is_redirect=0) ) AND (cur_namespace=0) LIMIT 0, 20;

This query looks extremely suspect to me because it seems to combine the worst
of two worlds: the locking overhead of InnoDB tables (for table 'cur')  and
large locking granulatity of MyISAM tables (for table 'searchindex' which
needs to be updated every time an article is saved) . As I said before, I
really don't think we should be using InnoDB tables, but perhaps Ian has some
good arguments why we should.

-- Jan Hidders


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Zoe becoming a sysop

body:
At 12:48 AM 2/11/03 -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>Jonathan Walther wrote:
>
>>On Mon, Feb 10, 2003 at 11:56:09PM -0500, daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
>>
>>>   Zoe is one of the finest contributors Wikipedia has.
>>>   Besides, being a sysop is not some remarkable surge of power. It simply
>>>   makes it easier to revert vandalism. It is pretty obvious to me that Zoe
>>>   would not abuse any additional editorial powers she gets.
>>>
>>>   I suggest that we ask Zoe to reconsider and become a sysop.
>>
>>
>>I second that motion and agree with what Danny has said.  Zoe, please accept
>>the position of sysop, and please take on the role of mentor to Lir.
>>If he
>>acts up in the next 3 months, act in as draconian a manner as you feel is
>>warranted.  We need someone to encourage community standards; I think you
>>would do that admirably.
>
>I want it on record that I have no objection to Zoe as a sysop.  I'm sure
>that if she ever chose to exceed her authority, there would be enough
>others to complain.  Our Mister Ed has experienced that in the past, and
>he is still alive and well.
>
>For the mentorship to work both Zoe and Lir would need to agree to that
>solution.

I agree.

If I were Zoe--having reluctantly asked for this, and found that people
wanted to saddle
me with the task of mentoring someone I distrusted--I wouldn't want it either.

If we agree that Lir should be invited back (I don't, but I'm not the final
voice here)
subject to mentorship, the mentor should be a volunteer.

--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Zoe becoming a sysop

body:
Jonathan Walther wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 11, 2003 at 12:48:56AM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> For the mentorship to work both Zoe and Lir would need to agree to
>> that solution.
>
> Lir can either accept that solution, or not bother coming around the
> Wikipedia.

If Lir agrees to a different trusted Wikipedia sysop as mentor, that
should be just as good.

Eclecticology


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Preview on top etc.

body:
On mar, 2003-02-11 at 05:37, Erik Moeller wrote:
> > Another small thing on this Erik...
> >
> > with the preview before the edit box, a table longer than the text goes
> > under the edit box.  Have a look at my sandbox
> >  http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sannse/Sandbox ) for an example.  Can
> > you stick a line break or something in there?
>
> A linebreak won't help -- align="right" puts content wherever it fits.
> Putting the whole editbox in a 100% width table might do the trick, will have to
> try that out.

Won't a <br clear="all"> do the trick?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] URGENT: problems on polish wikipedia

body:
On mar, 2003-02-11 at 06:00, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> Nothing can be saved on Polish Wikipedia after last software upgrade.
> Example on sandbox:
>
> Wyst?pi? b??d sk?adni w zapytaniu do bazy danych. Mog?o to by? spowodowane przez z?e sformu?owanie zapytania (zobacz Przeszukiwanie Wikipedii) albo przez b??d w oprogramowaniu. Ostatnie, nieudane zapytanie to:
>
> INSERT INTO old (old_namespace,old_title,old_text,old_comment,old_user,old_user_text,old_timestamp,old_minor_edit,inverse_timestamp) VALUES (4, 'Brudnopis', '[[en:Wikipedia:Sandbox]][[nl:Wikipedia:Zandbak]] http://www.3c.1lo.rz.pl strike
> To jest tekst
> ', '', 65, 'TheStructor', '20030206085027', 0, '79969793914972')
> wys?ane przez funkcj? "Article::updateArticle". MySQL zg?osi? b??d "1054: Unknown column 'inverse_timestamp' in 'field list'".

Shit, I missed it when running the schema upgrade. Fixed now.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Software problems on danish wiki after upgrade

body:
On mar, 2003-02-11 at 09:01, Christian List wrote:
> The last software upgrade seems to make it impossible for administrators to
> make SQL queries on the danish wiki.
> When I go to the Speciel:Asksql page I get this message:
>
> Parse error: parse error, expecting `T_OLD_FUNCTION' or `T_FUNCTION' or
> `T_VAR' or `'}'' in /usr/local/apache/htdocs-da/w/SpecialAsksql.php on line
> 67

Couple of slips of the fingers in that file; it should be fixed now.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l digest, Vol 1 #136 - 9 msgs

body:
Jesse Alter wrote:

> Zoe, once again you've taken what I've tried to put across tactfully
> as a personal attack. Did you read my post, or just skim it? My first
> sentence was that I have no objections, and I think it should have
> been clear that I noted that you had an admirable history on
> Wikipedia. My comments could have been applied to anyone who wished to
> become a sysop in order to have some authoritive control over Lir.

I've seen nothing disturbing in Jesse's postings.  He (or she?) is new
and was just trying to understand what was going on.  He simply didn't
see the pool of quicksand that we put just inside the front door.

Eclecticology


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Web of trust

body:
> Hm. Let's see: I check new user's contributions and I sometimes email
> them.
> These features are not available until their user page has been created.

As I said, I changed this a while ago. See
 http://www.scireview.de/oss/userpage.png
for a commented screenshot.

Regards,

Erik

--
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Slow query log

in_reply_to: <1044952537.1043.76.camel@rdaneel.vibber.org>; from brion@pobox.com on Tue, Feb 11, 2003 at 12:35:37AM -0800

body:
On Tue, Feb 11, 2003 at 12:35:37AM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On sab, 2003-02-08 at 14:26, Brion Vibber wrote:
>
> The watchlist:
>
> SELECT DISTINCT
>   cur_id,cur_namespace,cur_title,cur_comment,
>   cur_user,cur_user_text,cur_timestamp,cur_minor_edit,cur_is_new
>   FROM cur,watchlist
>   WHERE wl_user=7457 AND wl_title=cur_title
>         AND (cur_namespace=wl_namespace OR cur_namespace=wl_namespace+1)
>   ORDER BY inverse_timestamp LIMIT 100;
>
> +-----------+------+----------------------------------------------+-----------+---------+--------------------+------+----------------------------------------------------------+
> | table     | type | possible_keys                                | key       | key_len | ref                | rows | Extra                                                    |
> +-----------+------+----------------------------------------------+-----------+---------+--------------------+------+----------------------------------------------------------+
> | watchlist | ref  | wl_user                                      | wl_user   |       4 | const              | 1730 | where used; Using index; Using temporary; Using filesort |
> | cur       | ref  | cur_namespace,cur_title,name_title_timestamp | cur_title |     255 | watchlist.wl_title | 1    | where used                                               |
> +-----------+------+----------------------------------------------+-----------+---------+--------------------+------+----------------------------------------------------------+
>
> Explain doesn't give any different results if the namespace+1 is taken
> out; so adding near-dupe rows to cover talk pages wouldn't help.

Strange. Did you force it to use the index Name_title_timestamp with USE?
MySQL sometimes chooses a smaller index than it should.

> I'm not quite sure how to match up the indexes right. Note that
> watchlist has a composite index on wl_user, wl_namespace, and
> wl_title... but I don't know if it can match those up if part 1 of the
> index is a constant, and parts 2 and 3 match 1 and 2 of the other
> table's index.

They don't have to match. All that is required is that the columns on which
it joins watchlist with cur are a prefix of some index on cur. So without
the namespace+1 part the name_title_timestamp index should do, and with
probably also (but I'm not sure because I don't know how it handles the
OR). As always, EXPLAIN will tell you if it uses the right indices or not.

> Some prolific users have three thousand or more titles in their watchlist;
> the total number of distinct watched pages on the en.wiki is 30409.
>
> Is there any way we could do this without temporary tables & filesorts &
> whatnot?

Yes, there is, you could add an extra inverse_timestamp column to the
watchlist that (very redundantly) stores the inverse_timestamp of the
watched page. Obviously this would have to be updated each time the page is
updated (and when the page is added to the watchlist). If you then have an
index on (wl_user, inv_timestamp) and make sure MySQL uses it then it won't
have to sort.

-- Jan Hidders


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] HTML templates

body:
tarquin wrote:

>
>
> Magnus Manske wrote:
>
>> (Not everything's converted, though - work in progress)
>
>
> either that, or it's not quite what I had in mind.

I added the CSS to the page, in a {{STYLESHEET}} tag. You can work
online, just edit what you like, press Save, and watch the result.

Magnus


from_name: Jesse Alter

body:
Zoe, once again you've taken what I've tried to put across tactfully as
a personal attack. Did you read my post, or just skim it? My first
sentence was that I have no objections, and I think it should have been
clear that I noted that you had an admirable history on Wikipedia. My
comments could have been applied to anyone who wished to become a sysop
in order to have some authoritive control over Lir.


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Tact: a how-to guide

body:
Jesse,

It's not easy to express oneself tactfully when writing on a mailing list. You do well, young Jedi, and all applaud your humility and courage.

Ah, the art of mannerly missives is surely lost in these latter days.
One longs for the leisured prose of yesteryear, books such as Ivanhoe and The Lord of the Rings.

A word of advice, if I may -- learn from one who has been burnt many times by the wax dripping from his own candle, as it were.

Take pains, ye that would be tactful, to emphasize all the wonderful things about those ye would address. Forbear to imply or even hint anything critical about any individual, but express the confidence that all members of this august company are equally ardent supporters of all that is just and good.

Uncle Ed Poor

wikikarma: http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Faramir&diff=0&oldid=660116


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Naming convention: popularity vs. correctness

body:
mav-
> > William of Ockham should reside under that title, as he does, which
> makes
> > the fact that "Occam's" Razor is misspelled even more egregious.
>
> Hm. You had to mention a specific case. Which academics are you going to
> let
> decide this one? Many different disciplines lay some claim to the concept
> of
> Occam's Razor and many of these disciplines use one of two different
> spellings. Mathematicians and scientists generally use the Latinized
> spelling
> while most historians use the "Ockham" spelling. Which academics do you
> think
> are correct?

I do not think there is any actual disagreement about the spelling of
Ockham's name. Some academics simply use the spelling "Occam's Razor" by
convention; in that, they are no different than other people who use that spelling. The
question we should ask for which title to use is (in this case and others):
Is there any factual disagreement that this name is correct? In this case,
one side says "Look, the guy's name is William of Ockham, not Occam, it's silly
to spell the philosophical concept differently". The other side says "Maybe,
but we've been spelling it Occam for so long, we're not going to change it
now". So we have one historically correct spelling, and one which is somewhat
more popular. It's hard to find a threshold, but unless there's an order of
magnitude of difference in popularity, I think it's proper for us to use (and
redirect to) the correct spelling.

It would be different if the mathematicians said: "No, we also spell William
of Occam that way, because we generally latinize names". Then we should fall
back on popularity because there's an actual controversy about which term is
historically correct. But there isn't.

> In cases where the common name of a subject is misleading (For example:
> [[Pennsylvania Dutch]] is misleading since it really is a dialect of
> German),
> then it is sometimes reasonable to fall back on a well-accepted
> alternative
> ([[Pennsylvania German]], for example). Also, some terms are in common
> usage
> but are unreasonably offensive to large groups of people (Eskimo, Black
> American and Mormon Church, for example).. In those cases use widely known
>
> alternatives (Inuit, African-American, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter
> day
> Saints, for example).
>
> This does not mean that we should avoid using widely-known pseudonyms like
>
> Mark Twain, Marilyn Monroe, Billy the Kid, or widely-known common names of
>
> animals and other things. But it does mean that we need to temper common
> usage when the commonly used term is unreasonably misleading or offensive
> to
> one or more groups of people.
>

I could accept that rephrasing.

> PS I just did a spell check and "Ockham" came up as a misspelling but
> "Occam"
> did not.

Bad spellchecker. See http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=occam

Regards,

Erik

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


body:
Zoe-

> You keep saying that it's unprofessional to use the terms you don't like
> (not those which are incorrect, because that's only your interpretation),

No, it's the interpretation of everyone who actually talks about the terms.

> but you haven't responded to my pointing out that Britannica, perhaps the
> most professional of encyclopedias, calls it Pennsylvania Dutch.

And they call Ockham's Razor Ockham's Razor. My guess is that Britannica
uses whatever spelling the authors of the article in question prefer. In any
case, as I said, it's reasonable to refer to the people as "Pennsylvania Dutch"
if they call themselves that.

Regards,

Erik

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Sysop status

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>I just wanted to say that becoming a sysop is *not a big deal*.
>
>...
>
>
>I don't like that there's the apparent feeling here that being granted
>sysop status is a really special thing.
>
>
I totally agree. But, maybe we could cut back a little on the initiation
rites. C'mon, the ceremony takes forever, and you *never* get the blood
out of the robes again (except for Jimbo's high-priest red one, of
course) ;-)

Magnus


subject: [WikiEN-l] Sysop status

body:
> I just wanted to say that becoming a sysop is *not a big deal*.
>
> I think perhaps I'll go through semi-willy-nilly and make a bunch of
> people who have been around for awhile sysops.  I want to dispel the
> aura of "authority" around the position.  It's merely a technical
> matter that the powers given to sysops are not given out to everyone.
>
> I don't like that there's the apparent feeling here that being granted
> sysop status is a really special thing.

There are a few problems:

1) Page deletion. We have an undelete feature, but it is painfully slow
because we haven't cleared the archive of deleted pages for -- well, ever, I
guess. It is also not chronologically sorted so you have to check both the
deletion log and the undelete list to get somewhere. That's why deletions are
currently not reviewed much by other sysops (the only ones who can see the text of
the deleted pages). There have been deletions I disagreed with, although
rarely. My guess is that one reason Cunctator is wary of giving sysop status
away too freely is because of the lack of review in this area.

2) Protected pages. We haven't implemented the cool "edit a copy of a
protected page and let that replace the page after n hours" feature yet. We also
don't have a list of protected pages, as far as I can tell, and are not logging
page protection/unprotection. Since page protection is a rather severe
action, I'm worried that there might be a hidden inflation of protected pages,
especially in the Wikipedia: namespace (where I already disagree with most
protections that are in place). Sometimes protections also stay in place
accidentally.

3) IP blocks. Blocking an IP is very easy, but currently IP blocks do not
expire. For some reason, sysops also seem to be afraid of unblocking IPs other
people blocked, so we still have IP blocks that are a few months old. Again,
I don't think our current system can accomodate much more sysops in this
area.

All of these problems can be solved through software and some better
explanations on the respective pages. However, currently they still exist, so I
think you should take the sysop nomination process a bit more seriously.

Regards,

Erik

--
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from_name: sannse at delphiforums.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Preview on top etc.

body:
Another small thing on this Erik...

with the preview before the edit box, a table longer than the text goes
under the edit box.  Have a look at my sandbox
 http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sannse/Sandbox ) for an example.  Can
you stick a line break or something in there?

sannse

> > Erik wrote:
>
> >> Just a small but useful feature: You can now set an option to show the
> >> preview before the edit box and not after it.
>
> > I like this, much better.
>
> > But for those using the old format, the reminder that you are in preview
and
> > haven't saved might need to go back to the bottom of the page (maybe as
well
> > as the top?)
>
> Sure, I'll try some different formats.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Preview on top etc.

body:
> Another small thing on this Erik...
>
> with the preview before the edit box, a table longer than the text goes
> under the edit box.  Have a look at my sandbox
>  http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sannse/Sandbox ) for an example.  Can
> you stick a line break or something in there?

A linebreak won't help -- align="right" puts content wherever it fits.
Putting the whole editbox in a 100% width table might do the trick, will have to
try that out.

Regards,

Erik

--
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NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr f?r 1 ct/ Min. surfen!


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
Nothing can be saved on Polish Wikipedia after last software upgrade.
Example on sandbox:

Wyst?pi? b??d sk?adni w zapytaniu do bazy danych. Mog?o to by? spowodowane przez z?e sformu?owanie zapytania (zobacz Przeszukiwanie Wikipedii) albo przez b??d w oprogramowaniu. Ostatnie, nieudane zapytanie to:

INSERT INTO old (old_namespace,old_title,old_text,old_comment,old_user,old_user_text,old_timestamp,old_minor_edit,inverse_timestamp) VALUES (4, 'Brudnopis', '[[en:Wikipedia:Sandbox]][[nl:Wikipedia:Zandbak]] http://www.3c.1lo.rz.pl strike
To jest tekst
', '', 65, 'TheStructor', '20030206085027', 0, '79969793914972')
wys?ane przez funkcj? "Article::updateArticle". MySQL zg?osi? b??d "1054: Unknown column 'inverse_timestamp' in 'field list'".


subject: [Wikitech-l] page counters back?

body:
On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, Jan Hidders wrote:
> Is it correct that the page counters are turned back on?

No. Someone overwrote Skin.php and, probably accidentally, re-enabled
counter display, but they were still not being updated. I have since
disabled display again, since it just gets people in a tizzy to see those
unmoving, not correct, never were correct, never will be correct, numbers.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Vandal again

in_reply_to: <1044939292.1043.5.camel@rdaneel.vibber.org>; from brion@pobox.com on Mon, Feb 10, 2003 at 08:54:52PM -0800

body:
Could the fellow who looked into this before (I'm sorry, I've
misplaced the email and forgotten the name!), the alum.mit.edu person,
followup and look into this one as well.

I'm sure it's not necessary for me to say this, but PLEASE do not
harass or complain directly to (someone).  There's always the
possibility that he doesn't know anything about this, and so I've
approached him first.

I will say that in his first (hostile) letter to me, he did not deny
it, but instead said some angry things about wikipedia people
harassing him.  That's why I'm asking for a followup confirmation on
the more recent incident.

--Jimbo

Brion Vibber wrote:

> Kosana's and DrFreud's edits come from various addresses in the subnet
> 18.187.0.*. These appear to be Sun workstations in a computer lab at
> MIT.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>


from_name: Giskart

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Software problems on danish wiki after upgrade

body:
The same problem at Wikipedia NL

--
Contact: giskart AT wikipedia.be
Ook een artikeltje schrijven? WikipediaNL, de vrije GNU/FDL encyclopedie
http://www.wikipedia.be


from_name: Christian List

body:
The last software upgrade seems to make it impossible for administrators to
make SQL queries on the danish wiki.
When I go to the Speciel:Asksql page I get this message:

Parse error: parse error, expecting `T_OLD_FUNCTION' or `T_FUNCTION' or
`T_VAR' or `'}'' in /usr/local/apache/htdocs-da/w/SpecialAsksql.php on line
67

Fatal error: Cannot instantiate non-existent class: sqlqueryform in
/usr/local/apache/htdocs-da/w/SpecialAsksql.php on line 13

Regards
Christian List

_________________________________________________________________
F? Hotmail p? mobilen http://www.msn.dk/mobile


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Preview on top etc.

body:
Brion-
> Won't a <br clear="all"> do the trick?

Ah, I didn't know that one. Thanks for the tip!

Regards,

Erik

--
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Zoe is now a sysop

body:
Zoe,

You asked to become a sysop and promised to be on your best behavior, and not act abruptly. Despite one objection from elian and one dire prediction from the Cunctator, everyone else (including me) either supports the idea or thinks it's "not a big deal" anyway.

So, *POOF* you're a sysop.

"Uncle Ed", aka Ed Poor

-----Original Message-----
From: Jimmy Wales [mailto:jwales at bomis.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 11, 2003 6:55 AM
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Sysop status

I just wanted to say that becoming a sysop is *not a big deal*.

I think perhaps I'll go through semi-willy-nilly and make a bunch of
people who have been around for awhile sysops.  I want to dispel the
aura of "authority" around the position.  It's merely a technical
matter that the powers given to sysops are not given out to everyone.

I don't like that there's the apparent feeling here that being granted
sysop status is a really special thing.
_______________________________________________


from_name: Zoe

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Zoe becoming a sysop

body:
I haven't said I would do that.  I don't WANT to be Lir's mentor.  That would involve my having to deal with him, and I have no interest in doing that.
Zoe
 Jonathan Walther <krooger at debian.org> wrote:On Tue, Feb 11, 2003 at 12:48:56AM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>For the mentorship to work both Zoe and Lir would need to agree to that
>solution.

Lir can either accept that solution, or not bother coming around the
Wikipedia.

Jonathan

--
Geek House Productions, Ltd.

Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
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subject:
[Wikitech-l] Need help with tweaking new pages (was: Welcome
	to the "Wikitech-l" mailing list

body:
On mar, 2003-02-11 at 21:09, Jay Bowks wrote:
> Hi, I've posted a request for help at the
>  intlwiki-l but have received no answer
> yet on how to change to the new software
> for vo.wikipedia.com to vo.wikipedia.org

Nice to see that Rev. Schleyer's dream is still alive. :)

> Can someone here help?

I'm still finishing up the rewrite of the conversion script to upgrade
the old-old wikis to the new-new software.

Previously we had a script to upgrade from the old-old wikis to the
new-old wiki, then another to ugprade from the new-old wiki to the
old-new wiki, and then there's a bunch more scripts to update the
database layout to the new-new wiki. Well, suffice to say the process is
a little messy. So I'm consolidating it into a single step, which I can
then run in one big batch on all the remaining languages.

And that will be good. :)

Patience! It'll be a couple days.

>   Also, could you point me to how-to's
> on page background tweaking etc.
> Does this entail the software client or
> is it through the web that it can be
> accomplished?

On the new software, the 'skin' for the site can be selected per user,
with a couple different options. The old software that vo.wikipedia.com
etc are still running doesn't do that.

You can pretty things up a bit within the page though; see eg
http://fr.wikipedia.org/

>  I like the job the Eo group have done
> with the look of the Esperanto Wikipedia.
> Kudos!

Dankon!

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] New users Jonah and Anne

body:
Two people logged in as Jonah and Anne have decided between them to delete every reference in the Wikipedia to all Hebrew texts.  I think we've managed to revert all of them so far, but let's keep an eye out, okay?  Anne has been here before, and didn't seem to have this problem before today, but Jonah is new.

Zoe

---------------------------------
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Zoe becoming a sysop

body:
At 07:51 PM 2/11/03 -0800, Zoe wrote:

>I haven't said I would do that.  I don't WANT to be Lir's mentor.  That
>would involve my having to deal with him, and I have no interest in doing
>that.

Nobody believes you have to. Jimbo has made that very clear.

Vicki
--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


subject: [Wikitech-l] page counters back?

body:
Is it correct that the page counters are turned back on?

-- Jan Hidders


from_name: Jay Bowks

subject: [Wikitech-l] Need help with tweaking new pages (was: Welcome to the "Wikitech-l" mailing list

body:
Hi, I've posted a request for help at the
 intlwiki-l but have received no answer
yet on how to change to the new software
for vo.wikipedia.com to vo.wikipedia.org
Can someone here help?

 Also, could you point me to how-to's
on page background tweaking etc.
Does this entail the software client or
is it through the web that it can be
accomplished?

 I like the job the Eo group have done
with the look of the Esperanto Wikipedia.
Kudos!

 Cheers,
Jay B.


from_name: Dan Koehl

subject: [Wikitech-l] New link: My contributions

body:
Am I slowly senile, or is there a new link on the left side saying "My contributions"? I tried to find this on the Swedish language file to translate but couldnt see it.

- Dan Koehl


subject: [Wikitech-l] Caching thoughts

body:
I probably won't get to any of this for a while as I've promised to fix
up that conversion script, but some thoughts...

Client-side caching of page-views and and recentchanges are allowed
(currently only for IE 5.5+ as Mozilla and IE 5.0 have had difficulties
refreshing and I haven't had chance to test with other browsers).

The reported last-modified date is the edit date of the article revision
(or for Recentchanges, the last modified article). On load, the browser
sends this back to us in an if-modified-since header; if it's identical,
we tell it to use its cached version, else we send out the new time and
continue (see OutputPage::checkLastModified() ). We force this check on
every attempt to load the page by pre-expiring it and sending a
'must-revalidate' cache-control header (see OutputPage::output() ); this
requires a round-trip to the server, but we avoid most of the heavy
lifting by doing the time check quick and getting out before querying a
hundred links and parsing whole pages of gunk.

(Recentchanges changes so often there's probably no point to caching it
though...)

Some problems: this does not take into account secondary changes: linked
articles are created and deleted, users log in and out or change their
display preferences. This can lead to incorrect display, which isn't
always cleared by a refresh -- by default, refresh in IE sends the
if-last-modified and obeys the 304 Not Modified. Users don't generally
know about the Ctrl+Refresh force reload trick.

Links might be solvable by adding a "last_touched" timestamp field to
cur; this would be set to edit timestamp on save, and whenever a page is
created or deleted, all pages linking to it would have their
last_touched reset to the current time. We then use this as our basis
for cache comparisons, forcing reloads of pages whose links should show
different. (And if changes to the software are made that change
rendering, we can invalidate caches for the whole wiki with a sweeping
UPDATE statement.)

Things like user settings and logging in and out might be solvable with
session variables; an invalidating event would set a sort of 'cache from
here on' time, and any earlier last mod would get pushed up to there.

Other problems: I added the caching support in the first place because
with the pages marked as uncacheable IE was forcing reloads on every
pass through the 'back' and 'forwards' buttons. Usually this is simply
an inconvenience -- more time spent waiting for the server, and more
load on the server increasing the time spent waiting. When editing,
however, this can cause data loss; some people will click the links from
the sidebar to get additional information, then hit 'back' to return to
their editing session. Oops! The page was reloaded. Is it safe to mark
the edit pages as cacheable? What do we have to do to them to mark them
properly?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Hide user

body:
On mer, 2003-02-12 at 01:04, Erik Moeller wrote:
> On Mit, 2003-02-12 at 05:48, Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
> > I see you added a [talk] option in the recent change next to the user name.
> > What do you think about to add a [hide] option to be able to display the
> > recent-change without the modifications of a specific user.

> We already have an option for bots; they need to be registered as such
> and can then be hidden in RC.

And more importantly still, we need the "show bots" option to be clearly
visible! The RC options need to be reconstructed.

>  Other users should IMHO not be hidden.

Although it would be very nice to have a 'watch this user' to
_highlight_ edits by certain users.

(And it might be nice to have a 'try to ignore this user' -- gray out
their edits so they are distinguishable as a separate category, but not
leaping out to the eye as something to look at. You still want them to
be listed just in case a) you forget! or b) they try to pull a fast one
and edit something you would want to know about.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Google is not indexing "w"

body:
I have noticed Google is not finding anymore articels that contain "w" from Wikipedia NL

I think the Esperanto and German Wikipedia have the same problem.
The French, Polish and English seems to have no problem.

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woestijnvis

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=woestijnvis+nl.wikipedia.org&btnG=Google+Search

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Charles+Darwin+nl.wikipedia.org&btnG=Google+Search

Giskart


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikitech-l] Hide user

body:
--- Erik Moeller <e.moeller at fokus.gmd.de> wrote:
> On Mit, 2003-02-12 at 05:48, Guillaume Blanchard
> wrote:
> > Bonjour everybody,
> > I see you added a [talk] option in the recent
> change next to the user name.
> > What do you think about to add a [hide] option to
> be able to display the
> > recent-change without the modifications of a
> specific user. It can be useful
> > when bots are acting or when someone make
> repetitive change on a large list
> > of articles. I imagined this option as volatile.
> That mean we don't have to
> > save it in the user preference and just post it as
> a URL option like this :
> >
> > Special:Recentchanges?hide=Aoineko,Anthere

I deeply wonder why you choose these two pseudos...

Do you want to hide Pour certains, pour d'autres edits
maybe ? :-)

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Reforming meta

body:
There was some discussion last week about reforming meta.  I finally
had a chance to look around there this morning, and I see that there
is a lot of absolute crap on there.

In particular, "Saprtacus" has been using it as his own personal
anarchist bulletin board.  That's not appropriate, and so I'm going to
delete all of it.

It's perfectly fine to have non-objective essays on meta, but they
need to be essay *about wikipedia*, at least tangentially.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Please let Lir back

body:
My friends, after talking privately with Lir I feel it is only fair for us to withdraw our objections to his participation on Wikipedia. He has agreed to be good, and that is good for all of us.

I suppose some of us may want a sort of statement from him, or may still want to express concerns. I ask only that you be gentle and considerate, bearing in mind as always that "example is the best teacher".

Uncle Ed, aka Ed Poor
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from_name: wiki pedista

subject: [WikiEN-l] Sysop = Position of Power?

body:
Hello All,
    I came across in some posts with the idea that
giving Zoe sysop status gave her more "power" or
"authority" to deal with Lir. Forgive me if I missed
something, but last time I checked the sysop was an
administrative status, and we do not have power to
ban registered users, and the protecting of pages
is very highly discouraged, so, I do not see where
that "power" could come from; unless now the
title "Sysop" now has some hidden significance. And
I remember also that trying to use "Sysop" as a title
was discouraged a while ago (Isn't that right,
Uncle Ed?).

The only way that someone could be granted the power
to deal with Lir and others would be investing them
with a "Jimbo Walesship", and I haven't seen that
happen.

AstroNomer

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


subject: [Wikitech-l] Hide user

body:
On Mit, 2003-02-12 at 05:48, Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
> Bonjour everybody,
> I see you added a [talk] option in the recent change next to the user name.
> What do you think about to add a [hide] option to be able to display the
> recent-change without the modifications of a specific user. It can be useful
> when bots are acting or when someone make repetitive change on a large list
> of articles. I imagined this option as volatile. That mean we don't have to
> save it in the user preference and just post it as a URL option like this :
>
> Special:Recentchanges?hide=Aoineko,Anthere

We already have an option for bots; they need to be registered as such
and can then be hidden in RC. Other users should IMHO not be hidden.

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de


subject: [WikiEN-l] Sysop = Position of Power?

in_reply_to: <20030212174432.9482.qmail@web41403.mail.yahoo.com>; from wikipedista@yahoo.com on Wed, Feb 12, 2003 at 09:44:32AM -0800

body:
wiki pedista wrote:
>     I came across in some posts with the idea that
> giving Zoe sysop status gave her more "power" or
> "authority" to deal with Lir. Forgive me if I missed
> something, but last time I checked the sysop was an
> administrative status, and we do not have power to
> ban registered users, and the protecting of pages
> is very highly discouraged, so, I do not see where
> that "power" could come from; unless now the
> title "Sysop" now has some hidden significance.

That's basically right.  What we want to preserve is the co-operative
spirit, without an atmosphere of powerful people lording over the
weak.

We *are* working on a way for sysops to ban registered users, but this
power should only be used as usual, i.e. for banning "simple vandals".
This change is coming about because we had a vandal last weekend who
kept a lot of good people busy for a long time repairing damage.

--Jimbo


from_name: rednblack at alum.mit.edu

subject: [WikiEN-l] Vandal again

body:
I can't do much without the exact IP addresses and times.. is there some
way I can get this without bothering sysops?

Saurabh

------
The slogan "A land without a people for a people without a land" was nothing
but a gimmick for purposes of internal conviction, for silencing the conscience
and for maintaining good public relations. - Ze'ev Sternhell

In message <20030211154143.F24758 at joey.bomis.com>, Jimmy Wales said:
>Could the fellow who looked into this before (I'm sorry, I've
>misplaced the email and forgotten the name!), the alum.mit.edu person,
>followup and look into this one as well.
>
>I'm sure it's not necessary for me to say this, but PLEASE do not
>harass or complain directly to (someone).  There's always the
>possibility that he doesn't know anything about this, and so I've
>approached him first.
>
>I will say that in his first (hostile) letter to me, he did not deny
>it, but instead said some angry things about wikipedia people
>harassing him.  That's why I'm asking for a followup confirmation on
>the more recent incident.
>
>--Jimbo
>
>
>Brion Vibber wrote:
>
>> Kosana's and DrFreud's edits come from various addresses in the subnet
>> 18.187.0.*. These appear to be Sun workstations in a computer lab at
>> MIT.
>>
>> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
>http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Meta ?

body:
Could we hope to have a warning when you will delete
the french stuff, or should we plan to save everything
in case ? I didn't write anything in editors, for it
is often poorly transformed (the quotes in
particular), and I thought nothing could really be
lost. If it is not, it would be wiser to save all in
case. I suppose french wikipedians will not accept
that copies are put on the encyclopedia site since it
is pov.
Whether or not there will be warning before deletion
is an information probably important enough to inform
non-english wikipedians. Please ? Anthere

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


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Sysop = Position of Power?

body:
As a practical matter some folks abuse their position and authority
regardless of policy and Jimbo's good intentions.

Fred

> From: wiki pedista <wikipedista at yahoo.com>
> Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2003 09:44:32 -0800 (PST)
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Sysop = Position of Power?
>
>
> Hello All,
> I came across in some posts with the idea that
> giving Zoe sysop status gave her more "power" or
> "authority" to deal with Lir. Forgive me if I missed
> something, but last time I checked the sysop was an
> administrative status, and we do not have power to
> ban registered users, and the protecting of pages
> is very highly discouraged, so, I do not see where
> that "power" could come from; unless now the
> title "Sysop" now has some hidden significance. And
> I remember also that trying to use "Sysop" as a title
> was discouraged a while ago (Isn't that right,
> Uncle Ed?).
>
> The only way that someone could be granted the power
> to deal with Lir and others would be investing them
> with a "Jimbo Walesship", and I haven't seen that
> happen.
>
> AstroNomer
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day
> http://shopping.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Meta ?

body:
Anthere wrote:
> Could we hope to have a warning when you will delete
> the french stuff, or should we plan to save everything
> in case ?

The French stuff poses a bit of dilemma for me.  I don't know what it
is, really.  If it's French stuff *about wikipedia*, then it's fine.
And we can be pretty liberal about how we construe that, too.  General
speculation on the future of free content, for example, would be fine.

> Whether or not there will be warning before deletion
> is an information probably important enough to inform
> non-english wikipedians. Please ? Anthere

Sure, that sounds good.  But I'm not likely to delete stuff that I
can't read.  That's not necessarily a good thing.

I encourage people to keep meta on-topic.  It's primarily for
discussion of wikipedia itself.  In the past, we copied some POV
essays over there, but that's gotten out of hand so I'd like to
discourage it.

The main principle here is that we're not a free homepage service, and
if people want free homepage service for their political theorizing or
whatever, then (a) there's always Geocities and (b) if someone REALLY
wants it, I can find space for it on a non-wikipedia domain.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Meta ?

in_reply_to: <1045078298.12962.31.camel@mercury.mit.edu>; from cunctator@kband.com on Wed, Feb 12, 2003 at 02:31:37PM -0500

body:
The Cunctator wrote:
> Jimmy didn't mean he was going to delete all of meta. Just what
> Spartacus wrote.

Right.  And possibly some other stuff, if it's really way off topic,
but I didn't see anything else obvious.

I think that a lot of the older stuff should be refactored.  A lot of
it is pretty out of date now.

--Jimbo


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Google is not indexing "w"

body:
On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, Giskart wrote:
> I have noticed Google is not finding anymore articels that contain "w" from Wikipedia NL
>
> I think the Esperanto and German Wikipedia have the same problem.
> The French, Polish and English seems to have no problem.

They all have identical robots.txt files; I can't imagine what problem
there could be on our end. (Perhaps google is indexing in alphabetical
order and just hasn't got that far??)

-- brion


subject: [WikiEN-l] Sysop = Position of Power?

body:
On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, The Cunctator wrote:
> Sysops have the power to delete and lock articles, effectively banning
> other editors if they so wish.

And, as a reminder, any other sysop can undo these.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Merchandise?

body:
I just saw that PlanetMath offers merchandise through CafePress:
http://www.cafeshops.com/planetmath


subject: [Wikitech-l] html comments handling bug

body:
Fixed. Now uses ungreedy match.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

> Wiki text:
>     <!-- ala -->ma<!-- kota -->.
> PHP matches <!--.*-->, so output is:
>     .
> instead of:
>     ma.
>
> Fix:
>     change to <!--.*?-->
>
> Around line 1026 in OutputPage.php
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>
>


from_name: Eugene Gill

subject: [WikiEN-l] New users Jonah and Anne

body:
Looking at the old edits of Anne, the behaviour reported by Zoe didn't seem to make sense. I had a hunch that it might have been hacked, so I made a guess at the password, and got it right first time. I just logged straight back out.

Mintguy

----- Original Message -----
  From: Zoe
  To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
  Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2003 6:21 AM
  Subject: [WikiEN-l] New users Jonah and Anne

  Two people logged in as Jonah and Anne have decided between them to delete every reference in the Wikipedia to all Hebrew texts.  I think we've managed to revert all of them so far, but let's keep an eye out, okay?  Anne has been here before, and didn't seem to have this problem before today, but Jonah is new.

  Zoe

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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  Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Merchandise?

body:
On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, Axel Boldt wrote:
> I just saw that PlanetMath offers merchandise through CafePress:
> http://www.cafeshops.com/planetmath
>
> From what I read on the site, you upload your pictures and they
> manufacture and sell the merchandise, at no cost to you. You set the
> prices; if you decide to charge more than their base price, you'll get
> a check in the mail.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Sysop = Position of Power?

body:
On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, The Cunctator wrote:
> Realistically, undoing deletion is very unlikely; the mechanisms for
> deleting articles are much easier to use than those for undeleting them.
> This is not to disparage the existence of page-restoration. We just
> shouldn't imply parity between the deletion and restoration
> functionality.

Do you have concrete ideas for improving the system?

For instance, revamping the deletion log to include links directly into
the undelete system would be a big help; the generic list of all deleted
pages isn't really easy to look through, as it doesn't keep track of how
long ago deletions were performed and (so far) the rubbish bin has never
been emptied.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] html comments handling bug

body:
Wiki text:
    <!-- ala -->ma<!-- kota -->.
PHP matches <!--.*-->, so output is:
    .
instead of:
    ma.

Fix:
    change to <!--.*?-->

Around line 1026 in OutputPage.php


subject: [Wikitech-l] Offline reader

body:
On Sun, Feb 09, 2003 at 11:21:39PM +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
> I have a preliminary version of the promised offline reader with parser
> working. Some issues:
>
> * The parser is basically single-pass. I do an additional pass for the
> <nowiki> elements, though.
> * The parser already supports all wiki syntax, except <math>.
> * It doesn't check for correct HTML, though.
> * I am only using the article namespace. All other namespaces are linked
> to the online version, with a different color.
> * No images yet, but basically because I didn't bother with the download ;-)
> * There's also a function that converts the database dump into many
> files, one per article. This would be run on the "vendor" side.
>
> I have tried the German database, and it works pretty well. I am a
> little worried about the wxWindows HTML component, though. One thing it
> doesn't support are HTML entities like "Ӓ", which I automatically
> replace with a "?".
>
> There's no search function yet, and no fulltext index is created. But,
> that shouldn't take a lot of work, compared with the parser.
>
> I can mail a Windows .exe (~600 KB zipped) to anyone who'd like, and a
> howto for converting the mysql dump.

Could you send us sources of the parser ?


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] Sysop = Position of Power?

body:
On Wed, 2003-02-12 at 12:44, wiki pedista wrote:
>
> Hello All,
>     I came across in some posts with the idea that
> giving Zoe sysop status gave her more "power" or
> "authority" to deal with Lir. Forgive me if I missed
> something, but last time I checked the sysop was an
> administrative status, and we do not have power to
> ban registered users, and the protecting of pages
> is very highly discouraged, so, I do not see where
> that "power" could come from; unless now the
> title "Sysop" now has some hidden significance. And
> I remember also that trying to use "Sysop" as a title
> was discouraged a while ago (Isn't that right,
> Uncle Ed?).
>
> The only way that someone could be granted the power
> to deal with Lir and others would be investing them
> with a "Jimbo Walesship", and I haven't seen that
> happen.
>
Sysops have the power to delete and lock articles, effectively banning
other editors if they so wish.

But you're right, it doesn't give them authority over other editors.


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Hide user

body:
Bonjour everybody,
I see you added a [talk] option in the recent change next to the user name.
What do you think about to add a [hide] option to be able to display the
recent-change without the modifications of a specific user. It can be useful
when bots are acting or when someone make repetitive change on a large list
of articles. I imagined this option as volatile. That mean we don't have to
save it in the user preference and just post it as a URL option like this :

Special:Recentchanges?hide=Aoineko,Anthere

What do thing about this ?

Aoineko


subject: [Wikitech-l] Hide user


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikipedia-l] OpenFacts, a "Wikipedia" for Open Source Projects

body:
Hi,

the BerliOS project has now officially launched the OpenFacts project, which
is a Wikipedia-based wiki for open source projects. Press release in wiki
form below. Next time someone wants to put an unedited HOWTO on Wikipedia or
use it to promote an open source project, please point them to the OpenFacts
project.

I have written a brief summary of the differences for Wikipedia users:

http://openfacts.berlios.de/index-en.phtml?title=Tips_for_Wikipedia_users

The English version is still a bit empty, but I'm sure it will grow quickly.
Let me know if you want to see OpenFacts in another language or want to help
with the project.

Regards,

Erik

== BerliOS OpenFacts Project Launched ==

=== A free knowledge database for the collaborative creation of software
documentation ===

'''http://openfacts.berlios.de'''

Open Source Software (OSS) is increasingly used by governments and
companies. The idea of software which is collaboratively developed and can be
distributed for free works in practice, and big IT players are jumping the bandwagon:
Sun (OpenOffice.org), AOL (Mozilla web browser) and IBM (Linux solution)
support OSS development. But many OSS applications lack complete and accurate
documentation. So-called HOWTOs explain precisely how certain solutions in the
world of Linux, FreeBSD & Co. can be solved; these are often maintained by
single individuals, however, and many of them have not been updated for years.

In January of this year, the Wikipedia project (http://www.wikipedia.org),
an open content encyclopedia, announced its 100,000th article. How was this
rapid success after only two years possible? Wikipedia uses the wiki principle,
which allows every visitor to immediately edit any article without even
having to create an account. The user community keeps an eye on the edits that
are made and can restore previous revisions of an article if necessary. Should
a user violate the rules repeatedly, he can be banned from the system.

Wikipedia has demonstrated that the wiki idea (from Hawaiian, "wiki wiki")
works to create articles even about controversial subjects. The BerliOS
project now wants to apply this successful model to open source documentation. "It
is a bit daring, but we believe that this approach can be useful. After all,
we are neither dealing with politics nor with religion," BerliOS project
leader Lutz Henckel explains tongue-in-cheek. BerliOS has supported the
development of the open Wikipedia software, which is also used by the OpenFacts
project.

OpenFacts allows all open source projects to maintain their documentation
collaboratively online, but OpenFacts pages can also be used for feature
suggestions or problem reports. "We also want to import existing HOWTOs and FAQs,"
BerliOS staffer Erik M?ller remarks. For this purpose, special import
filters were developed which convert the documents used by the Linux Documentation
Project and the German Linux HOWTO Project into the easy-to-read,
easy-to-edit wiki format. "Fortunately, most HOWTOs allow free modification as per the
GNU licenses," M?ller says. Some German and English HOWTOs have already been
imported. All material written specifically for OpenFacts is released into the
public domain unless otherwise noted.

The new wiki does not see itself as competition to existing projects.
Documents that have been created using OpenFacts could, for example, be certified
by the Linux Documentation Project in regular intervals, which would solve a
major problem of the wiki principle: the lack of authority behind the texts.

Besides OpenFacts, the government sponsored BerliOS project also offers a
hosting platform for open source projects (http://developer.berlios.de), a news
service for documentation (http://docswell.berlios.de), a developer database
(http://devcounter.berlios.de) and an announcement service for open source
software (http://sourcewell.berlios.de). BerliOS tries to be an OSS
coordination center, and to provide the "missing link" between open source developers
and companies.

More information:
* OpenFacts project: http://openfacts.berlios.de
* Berlios homepage: http://www.berlios.de

Contact:

Lutz Henckel

Telefon: +49/30/3463-7237

FAX: +49/30/3463-8000

e-mail: berlios-contact at mail.berlios.de

Web: http://www.berlios.de/

FOKUS

Fraunhofer Institut f?r Offene Kommunikationssysteme

Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee 31

10589 Berlin

Germany

--
+++ GMX - Mail, Messaging & more  http://www.gmx.net +++
Bitte l?cheln! Fotogalerie online mit GMX ohne eigene Homepage!


from_name: Jason Richey

subject: [Wikitech-l] Pipe trick should work differently

body:
I have made myself moderator for the announce-l list...

Jason

elian wrote:

> erik_moeller at gmx.de (Erik Moeller) writes:
>
> > IMHO when I write
> >
> >         [[Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines|]]
> >
> > this should not be turned into
> >
> >         [[Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines|Policies and guidelines]]
> >
> > after saving. Instead, the link should stay the same, but the "Wikipedia:"
> > part should still be omitted.
> > Thoughts?
>
> I think you are right. My question: when was this nice little feature
> introduced and where was it announced? I would have documented it for the
> German wikipedia if I had known it.
>
> [x] announce-l at wikipedia.org would be a good place, even if there is no
> moderator...
>
> greetings,
> elian
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Meta ?

body:
On Wed, 2003-02-12 at 14:13, Anthere wrote:
> Could we hope to have a warning when you will delete
> the french stuff, or should we plan to save everything
> in case ? I didn't write anything in editors, for it
> is often poorly transformed (the quotes in
> particular), and I thought nothing could really be
> lost. If it is not, it would be wiser to save all in
> case. I suppose french wikipedians will not accept
> that copies are put on the encyclopedia site since it
> is pov.
> Whether or not there will be warning before deletion
> is an information probably important enough to inform
> non-english wikipedians. Please ? Anthere
>
Jimmy didn't mean he was going to delete all of meta. Just what
Spartacus wrote.


from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [WikiEN-l] Please let Lir back

body:
At 09:09 AM 2/12/03 -0500, Ed Poor wrote:

>My friends, after talking privately with Lir I feel it is only fair for us
>to withdraw our objections to his participation on Wikipedia. He has
>agreed to be good, and that is good for all of us.
>
>I suppose some of us may want a sort of statement from him, or may still
>want to express concerns. I ask only that you be gentle and considerate,
>bearing in mind as always that "example is the best teacher".

The problem here is twofold. First, Lir agreed to be good once before, and then
didn't. (That's beyond the implicit agreement to be good that everyone who
works
on a project like this, with defined goals, is making.)

Second, since this was a private discussion between Ed and Lir, I don't
know what
"be good" means in this case. Ed, can you elaborate?

--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


subject: [WikiEN-l] Sysop = Position of Power?

body:
On Wed, 2003-02-12 at 14:54, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, The Cunctator wrote:
> > Sysops have the power to delete and lock articles, effectively banning
> > other editors if they so wish.
>
> And, as a reminder, any other sysop can undo these.
>
Realistically, undoing deletion is very unlikely; the mechanisms for
deleting articles are much easier to use than those for undeleting them.
This is not to disparage the existence of page-restoration. We just
shouldn't imply parity between the deletion and restoration
functionality.


from_name: Tom Parmenter

subject: [WikiEN-l] Please let Lir back

body:
|X-Sender: vr at smtp.panix.com
|From: Vicki Rosenzweig <vr at redbird.org>
|Sender: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2003 15:04:20 -0500
|
|At 09:09 AM 2/12/03 -0500, Ed Poor wrote:
|
|>My friends, after talking privately with Lir I feel it is only fair for us
|>to withdraw our objections to his participation on Wikipedia. He has
|>agreed to be good, and that is good for all of us.
|>
|>I suppose some of us may want a sort of statement from him, or may still
|>want to express concerns. I ask only that you be gentle and considerate,
|>bearing in mind as always that "example is the best teacher".
|
|The problem here is twofold. First, Lir agreed to be good once before, and then
|didn't. (That's beyond the implicit agreement to be good that everyone who
|works
|on a project like this, with defined goals, is making.)
|
|Second, since this was a private discussion between Ed and Lir, I don't
|know what
|"be good" means in this case. Ed, can you elaborate?
|
|
|--
|Vicki Rosenzweig
|vr at redbird.org
|http://www.redbird.org
|
|_______________________________________________
|WikiEN-l mailing list
|WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
|http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
|

My vow of no conflict is still in place.  I've got a short list of
people whose presence in an article means my absence from it.  Vera
Cruz and Lir are both on it.  It will be watchful waiting for me, but
at the moment I am still cringing from this person's previous
incarnations.  What has this person acknowledged about past behavior,
after apparently weeks of private discussion with Jimbo and now Ed
Poor, that would make anyone want to see this person back?

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] search doesnt work on Polish wiki

body:
WystB?pi? b??d sk?adni w zapytaniu do bazy danych. Mog?o to by? spowodowane przez z?e sformu?owanie zapytania (zobacz Przeszukiwanie Wikipedii) albo przez b??d w oprogramowaniu. Ostatnie, nieudane zapytanie to:
SELECT cur_id,cur_namespace,cur_title,cur_text FROM cur,searchindex WHERE cur_id=si_page AND ( (MATCH (si_title) AGAINST ('caU8c582ka')) ) AND (cur_namespace=0) LIMIT 0, 20
wys?ane przez funkcj? "SearchEngine::showResults". MySQL zg?osi? b??d "1191: Can't find FULLTEXT index matching the column list".


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Please let Lir back

body:
Well, Lir, I assume you're still reading this mailing list.

Tom/Ortolan is looking for an acknowledgement about past behavior, and Vicki wants to know what "being good" is going to mean.

Is there anything you would like to say to the Wikipedia community?

"Uncle Ed", aka Ed Poor


from_name: Bridget

from_email: Bridget

subject: [WikiEN-l] Asimov-still POV

body:
Asimov began contributing stories to science fiction magazines in 1939; his short story "Nightfall" (1941) is described in Bewildering Stories, issue 8, as one of "the most famous science-fiction stories of all time" [1], and is thought by many to be the finest science fiction short story ever written.

The article currently reads as above, the latter part "and is thought by many to be the finest science fiction short story ever written." needs to either be removed or credited to some source. We can all think of several science-fiction stories which instantly qualify for "and is thought by many to be the finest science fiction short story ever written" My personal vote would be for "Cold Equations" and Im sure "many" agree with me that Cold Equations is the best science-fiction short story ever written. Im sure many feel that "You See But Do Not Observe" is the best science-fiction short story, as Im sure many feel that something by Stephen King might qualify. Perhaps it was Ray Bradbury that wrote the best science fiction short story, or was it Jules Verne or perhaps MaryJanice Davidson or Raylan Conley??

The article remains POV as it contains a POV statement which has been given no source. In the Erwin Rommel article I could say, "Erwin Rommel is considered to be the greatest general ever". So are Mannstein, Patton, Caeasar, Napoleon, Eisenhower, MacArthur, Montgomery, etc etc etc. The earlier version was even more POV:

Asimov began contributing stories to science fiction magazines in 1939; his most famous single story is "Nightfall" (1941).

Is not, "Bewildering Stories, issue 8" enough? Do we need to say, "Not only does Bewildering Stories issue 8 argue that Nightfall is ONE of the greatest, but be assured, by wikipedia and our ardent NPOV, that Nightfall is considered by many to actually be THE greatest science fiction short story EVER.

---------------------------------
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Reforming meta

body:
> There was some discussion last week about reforming meta.  I finally
> had a chance to look around there this morning, and I see that there
> is a lot of absolute crap on there.

> In particular, "Saprtacus" has been using it as his own personal
> anarchist bulletin board.  That's not appropriate, and so I'm going to
> delete all of it.

Thank you, Jimbo. I hope you did give the person(s) involved some advance
warning to save their stuff (remember not everyone writes in a text
editor), although technically you didn't have to. I for one would love to
use Meta for organizing some aspects of development, and the very low S/N
ratio made that hard.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Offline reader

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>Could you send us sources of the parser ?
>
>
Here it is (wikiparser.h and wikiparser.cpp). It is currently set for
offline display, so especially links are generated differently, and as I
said, there's no <math> and no HTML checking.

The other files are wxWindows for the GUI, for those who like ;-)

Magnus
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from_name: Imran Ghory

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Idea for a wiki

body:
I had an idea, which I think might interest people here,

Have a prior-art wiki that lets people post Prior Art arguements against
specific patents. Such a site would help battle against the ridiculous
number of inane patents being issued, by firstly preventing legal action
being taken as prior art is easily available and secondly providing
evidence for campaigners arguing that prior art searches are failing to do
their job.

Imran
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran


subject: [Wikipedia-l] readability of recentchanges

body:
elian wrote:

>Hello,
>
>After the last update which included the links to the user:discussion page
>(which is certainly useful) I have problems to scan RecentChanges for the
>really important things, i.e. the articles which were modified. In English
>it is not such a big problem because "diff" and "hist" and "talk" (and
>"block") are a lot shorter than "Unterschied" "Versionen", "Diskussion"
>and "blockieren" but German RecentChanges are at the moment almost
>unreadable for me.
>
>
Ich empfehle die Einstellung "Erweiterte letzte ?nderungen" :-)
Recommending "Extended Recent Changes"

>comparison table:
>en: diff hist talk block
>de: Unterschied Versionen Diskussion blockieren
>
Vielleicht als K?rzel? / How about "pseudo-icons"?
de (neu) : [-] [...] [D:] [X]

Magnus


from_name: elian

body:
Hello,

After the last update which included the links to the user:discussion page
(which is certainly useful) I have problems to scan RecentChanges for the
really important things, i.e. the articles which were modified. In English
it is not such a big problem because "diff" and "hist" and "talk" (and
"block") are a lot shorter than "Unterschied" "Versionen", "Diskussion"
and "blockieren" but German RecentChanges are at the moment almost
unreadable for me.

Example:
* (Unterschied) (Versionen) . . M Tannh?user; 02:17 . . Hunne (Diskussion) (wikifiz)
* (Unterschied) (Versionen) . . M Krieg; 02:16 . . Nerd (Diskussion) (Vorheriges tlw wiederherigestellt)
* (Unterschied) (Versionen) . . Tannh?user; 02:16 . . Hunne (Diskussion) (aus dt. LIt. d. Ma.)
* (Unterschied) (Versionen) . .N Occams Rasiermesser; 02:15 . . Morken? (Diskussion?)
* (Unterschied) (Versionen) . . Karl Popper; 02:15 . . 217.85.236.108 (Diskussion? | blockieren)
* (Unterschied) (Versionen) . . Jurist; 02:13 . . Juergen (Diskussion?) (erweitert und umformuliert)
* (Unterschied) (Versionen) . .N Neidhart von Reuental; 02:13 . . Hunne (Diskussion) (aus dt. Lit. d. Ma.)
* (Unterschied) (Versionen) . . M Quecksilber; 02:13 . . MarianSz (Diskussion?)
* (Unterschied) (Versionen) . . Deutsche Literatur (Mittelalter); 02:13 . . Hunne (Diskussion) (wikifiz)
* (Unterschied) (Versionen) . .N Wolfram von Eschenbach; 02:11 . . Hunne (Diskussion) (aus dt. Lit. d. Ma.)
* (Unterschied) (Versionen) . . M Krieg; 02:11 . . Nerd (Diskussion) (biologistischen Standpunkt kenntlich gemacht)
* (Unterschied) (Versionen) . . Diskussion:Der K?renberger; 02:10 . . Hunne (Diskussion) (@62.178.228.146 und Kurt Jansson)

Suggestion: my first idea was to display the article in bold but this
would conflict with the watchlist feature. But it should be possible to
display at least some parts in a smaller fontsize: "Diskussion" and
"blockieren" and maybe also "Unterschied" and "Versionen".

What do you think? Could someone please change this, at least for the
German wikipedia?

greetings,
elian

comparison table:
en: diff hist talk block
de: Unterschied Versionen Diskussion blockieren
es: diferencias historia discusion ?
sv: skillnad historia Diskussion ?
eo: malsamoj historio Diskuto ?


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Merchandise?

body:
This seems like a good way to generate money for the nonprofit, eh?

That will be set up before the end of the month.

Axel Boldt wrote:

> I just saw that PlanetMath offers merchandise through CafePress:
> http://www.cafeshops.com/planetmath
>
> >From what I read on the site, you upload your pictures and they
> manufacture and sell the merchandise, at no cost to you. You set the
> prices; if you decide to charge more than their base price, you'll get
> a check in the mail.
>
> Should we go for it?
>
> Axel
>
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day
> http://shopping.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] Please let Lir back

in_reply_to: <3E4AC224.8080008@planetunreal.com>; from tarquin@planetunreal.com on Wed, Feb 12, 2003 at 09:52:36PM +0000

body:
tarquin wrote:
> a) Vera Cruz-Lir stirring for the fun of it b) Vera Cruz-Lir not
> understanding what NPOV means and when it should be applied I am not
> sure which answer would make me more likely to support Lir's return

I'd be interested in hearing a mature and thoughtful discussion of
these and related points from Adam, myself.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Asimov-still POV

in_reply_to: <20030213013046.17460.qmail@web40707.mail.yahoo.com>; from lapollutionestsimauvaise@yahoo.com on Wed, Feb 12, 2003 at 05:30:46PM -0800

body:
Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:
> The article currently reads as above, the latter part "and is
>thought by many to be the finest science fiction short story ever
>written." needs to either be removed or credited to some source.

I don't agree.  It's perfectly fine as written.  It could be improved,
of course, by crediting it to a source, but it's an uncontroversial
comment as it stands.

> We can all think of several science-fiction stories which instantly
>qualify for "and is thought by many to be the finest science fiction
>short story ever written".

That's true, but so what?  We could say the same thing in a number of
articles, and it would be equally uncontroversially true in all of
them.

It is not POV, so long as it is actually true that many people do
believe it.  "Many" is contextually determined here, so don't try to
play funny tricks with that.

> The article remains POV as it contains a POV statement which has
>been given no source. In the Erwin Rommel article I could say, "Erwin
>Rommel is considered to be the greatest general ever".

Notice how you've dropped a *key* phrase, i.e. "by many".

It is perfectly fine to say "Erwin Rommel is considered by many to be
the greatest general of modern times."  It's much better to say who
the 'many' are, and to give a cite that involves some kind of actual
counting.  But neither are _required_ if it is in fact widely so
thought.

--Jimbo


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Please let Lir back

body:
I would only support allowing Lir back if Lir resolve's Lir identity
crisis and operates under his real name, taking responsibility for
his actions, and accepting criticism for dissenting views. I don't
really think he has an excuse for anonymity, seeing as he has
evidently abused of this in the past.

Anything short of that is, in my opinion, going to generate hundreds
of emails and an eventual ban.

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] (someone)

body:
It appears at the present time that (someone) is an innocent
bystander in the recent vandalism incident (last Saturday).  He tells
me that he has changed his password and expresses his sincere hope
that no further incidents will take place.

Apparently, someone stole his password and used his account to
misbehave.

--Jimbo


from_name: Youandme

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Meta ?

references: <1045078298.12962.31.camel@mercury.mit.edu>; from cunctator@kband.com on Wed, Feb 12, 2003 at 02:31:37PM -0500

body:
On 12 Feb 2003 at 11:39, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> The Cunctator wrote:
> > Jimmy didn't mean he was going to delete all of meta. Just what
> > Spartacus wrote.
>
> Right.  And possibly some other stuff, if it's really way off topic,
> but I didn't see anything else obvious.

I think creating a new page
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion
would be a kind of warning for interested parts
and a mean to inform those who can't understand
some languages.

Regards
Youandme


from_name: tarquin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Please let Lir back

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>Well, Lir, I assume you're still reading this mailing list.
>
>Tom/Ortolan is looking for an acknowledgement about past behavior, and Vicki wants to know what "being good" is going to mean.
>
>Is there anything you would like to say to the Wikipedia community?
>
>
>
I would like to know if the big fuss over a single sentence in the
Asimov article was due to:

a) Vera Cruz-Lir stirring for the fun of it
b) Vera Cruz-Lir not understanding what NPOV means and when it should be
applied

I am not sure which answer would make me more likely to support Lir's return

>
>


from_name: Giskart

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Google is not indexing "w"

body:
Brion Vibber <vibber=pP0CIj1Nv7XQAyQhgwMYSA at public.gmane.org> wrote in
news:Pine.GSO.4.33.0302121136270.16218-100000 at aludra.usc.edu:

> On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, Giskart wrote:
>> I have noticed Google is not finding anymore articels that contain
>> "w" from Wikipedia NL
>>
>> I think the Esperanto and German Wikipedia have the same problem.
>> The French, Polish and English seems to have no problem.
>
> They all have identical robots.txt files; I can't imagine what problem
> there could be on our end. (Perhaps google is indexing in alphabetical
> order and just hasn't got that far??)
>
> -- brion

I see also no logical reason. And the are not new pages.
The used to be found by google. I will follow it.

At least the Esperanto (W)ikipedia will not have much problems whit it.

--
Contact: giskart AT wikipedia.be
Ook een artikeltje schrijven? WikipediaNL, de vrije GNU/FDL encyclopedie
http://www.wikipedia.be


subject: [WikiEN-l] Asimov-still POV

body:
Jimbo wrote me an email:
I think this one basically screwed your chances of being allowed
back in, ever. Why don't you just give up and go away now?
----
Excuse me? I don't see how it is inappropriate to note that the statement should be attributed to a source. You asked for my opinion and you got it. If I had advocated adding to every presidents page:
George Washington is viewed by  many to be the best president.
Abraham Lincoln is viewed by many to be the best president

etcetc

Bush is viewed by many to be the best president.
It would be a bit redundant, no? As you said, "We could say the same thing in a number of articles, and it would be equally uncontroversially true in all of them." Does that merit inclusion in the article? Should we state that Iowa is the most beautiful state (to many), as is Georgia, Wisconsin, Louisiana, California, Texas, and New York? Should we go on to note that Pink Floyd is considered (by many) to be the best band, as is KISS and System of a Down. Should we note that the Blues Brothers is the best movie (as viewed by many) as is Aliens and Chicago?

 "Erwin Rommel is considered by many to be the greatest general of modern times." hardly seems to be informative. Especially when the reader will find the same statement at the page for every single famous general.

I do not see why you are taking offense at my suggestion that a source be accredited whenever a pov statement is being made. I myself was earlier criticized for saying "Many people believe such and such" as somebody wanted to know WHO these many people are. Now that I agree with the earlier wikipedia consensus I am confronted by yet another contradictary wikipedia consensus. I do not see how it is a "troublesome" or {trollish" or "vindicative" or "immature" for me to try and discuss this with you.

---------------------------------
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body:
Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at epost.de> writes:

> >After the last update which included the links to the user:discussion page
> >(which is certainly useful) I have problems to scan RecentChanges for the
> >really important things, i.e. the articles which were modified. In English
> >it is not such a big problem because "diff" and "hist" and "talk" (and
> >"block") are a lot shorter than "Unterschied" "Versionen", "Diskussion"
> >and "blockieren" but German RecentChanges are at the moment almost
> >unreadable for me.
> >
> Ich empfehle die Einstellung "Erweiterte letzte ?nderungen" :-)
> Recommending "Extended Recent Changes"

*oops* I didn't notice these were already incorporated.
But actually, it made things only worse. Now I have "?nderungen,
Versionen", "Aktuell, Letzte" "(2x)" or "(3x)" and a list of all people
who changed something...

I asked my boyfriend to simulate a newbie who is trying to understand what
all this does - it took us quite some time to figure out what each link
actually does.

Some questions:
- are the times a user changed something (2x) really worth
being displayed? You have the overall number of changes and if you display
the thread you can count the per-user changes.
- Am I right in guessing that the line which is displayed in the "closed"
state and the first line of the "opened" state refer to the same edit?
- Does "Aktuell" (or "cur") actually show the diff to the _last_ edit,
i.e. does it do the same as the link which is titled "Unterschied" or
"diff" in the old recentchanges?
- Does "?nderungen" ("changes") at multiple edits do the same as "Aktuell"
("cur") at a single edit (which does the same...see above)?
- how many people use/need/like the history link on recentchanges? I just
realized I never use it. I use "diff" to see the modifications or I read
the article and eventually go from there to the history if I am interested
in it. I dare to say that the history is only of interest if one has
already read the article.

suggestions for both versions of recent changes:
- use the tool tips to display something useful, pleeaaase! at the moment
diff, hist, changes, older versions, cur, last, next, the article link
itself  and whatever display all the same: the article title! I dream of
something like "display differences to the last version" or "edit history
of the article".  (The German Wikipedia has no tool tips at all)
-exclude the history links (if there are no protests of people who use them)

suggestions for the modern recentchanges:
-exclude the "(2x, 3x...)"
-use the same names for the same things (older version=hist, changes=cur=diff)

other suggestions:
- provide a link from Special:Preferences to the explanation of all the
settings at:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AUser_preferences_help and
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AHandbuch_-_Einstellungen
it is necessary, really...

> >comparison table:
> >en: diff hist talk block
> >de: Unterschied Versionen Diskussion blockieren
> >
> Vielleicht als K?rzel? / How about "pseudo-icons"?
> de (neu) : [-] [...] [D:] [X]

d for Diskussion and x for block are fine (I have a webcommunity in which
admins can delete stuff (even whole users)  with an "x", but despite my
fears I never accidentally deleted something in two years)
u for "Unterschied", v for "Versionen" combined with a good description in
the tooltips and/or in the introduction (next to "Below are..")  should
help, too.

I really like the lots of functions the wikipedia software provides but I
fear we steer too much away from the original wiki concept of "keeping it
simple".

greetings,
elian


body:
IMHO when I write

        [[Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines|]]

this should not be turned into

        [[Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines|Policies and guidelines]]

after saving. Instead, the link should stay the same, but the "Wikipedia:"
part should still be omitted. Otherwise, on many pages that have lots of
links with the namespace prefix omitted, you get lots and lots and lots of
redundant information, and it becomes very hard to read. The same goes for

        [[The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (movie)|]]

which should not become

        [[The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (movie)|The
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring]].

The (movie) part should instead be omitted "on the fly". This also makes
it easier to change the pipe trick behavior should that ever be necessary.
I believe this behavior would be more intuitive. In fact, I expected it to
work this way and was surprised when I noticed that it doesn't.

A comparison would be the "slash trick" which I have developed for
subpages.

        [[/foo/]]

becomes a link called "foo" to the subpage /foo of the current page, but
it is *not* converted into [[/foo|foo]] for this purpose.

Thoughts?

Regards,

Erik


body:
> Hello,

> After the last update which included the links to the user:discussion page
> (which is certainly useful) I have problems to scan RecentChanges for the
> really important things, i.e. the articles which were modified. In English
> it is not such a big problem because "diff" and "hist" and "talk" (and
> "block") are a lot shorter than "Unterschied" "Versionen", "Diskussion"
> and "blockieren" but German RecentChanges are at the moment almost
> unreadable for me.

I like neither the long version nor the short version, and the Enhanced RC
is a mess when it comes to link titles (sorry, Magnus). The fact that
we're not using tables yet makes RC even harder to navigate.

I'm considering the following:

1) Use tables, as shown here:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_Changes_redesign

2) Use icons for some stuff (User talk, block IP, diff, history, perhaps
the minor/new identifiers which are confusing to newbies)

3) Use two lines per change if necessary to get decent link titles

The "cur/last" links are IMHO the most confusing of them all, and "hist"
is pretty bad as well. Even by trial and error it's tricky to find out how
the diff stuff works, and that is really one of our most elementary
functions.

So, yes, this needs to be overhauled. I'm currently hacking on the history
page, and I hope I'll find some time to work on RC as well.

Regards,

Erik


body:
> - are the times a user changed something (2x) really worth
> being displayed?

We need this, in some form. The original version didn't have it, and it
was very hard to keep track of who edited what (many people make two or
more changes before saving, but they do not remember this, so when they
see "3 changes", they don't know if these are 3 changes by them, in which
case they do not have to review them, or changes by someone else). We
ended up expanding changes a lot when we really shouldn't have, and Magnus
decided to provide an edit summary to avoid this. So this was actually a
change that grew out of a real need :-).

The information could probably be better presented, though.

> - how many people use/need/like the history link on recentchanges? I just
> realized I never use it. I use "diff" to see the modifications or I read
> the article and eventually go from there to the history if I am interested
> in it. I dare to say that the history is only of interest if one has
> already read the article.

Hmm, good point. I never used it either.

> - use the tool tips to display something useful, pleeaaase!

Agree, but the tooltips should not be an excuse for bad link titles.

> -use the same names for the same things (older version=hist,
> changes=cur=diff)

Absolutely, but before we can do this, we need to change the layout to
allow long link titles. Or use icons, which saves us translation work :-)

Regarding diff, we also need to think about which kind of diffs we really
need in RC. Most likely, only the "diff to last" and the "changes" link
for a summary diff.

> - provide a link from Special:Preferences to the explanation of all the
> settings at:
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AUser_preferences_help and
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AHandbuch_-_Einstellungen
> it is necessary, really...

Hopefully, we can make it unnecessary. But yes, we need a good design
*and* prominent help links.

> I really like the lots of functions the wikipedia software provides but I
> fear we steer too much away from the original wiki concept of "keeping it
> simple".

Yeah, RC has gotten somewhat out of control. For the old hands all the
links are nice to have, but for a newbie it's really overwhelming. I'm
afraid our RC layout might even have driven some people away already.

Regards,

Erik


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

> IMHO when I write
>
>         [[Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines|]]
>
> this should not be turned into
>
>         [[Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines|Policies and guidelines]]
>
> after saving. Instead, the link should stay the same, but the "Wikipedia:"
> part should still be omitted.
> Thoughts?

I think you are right. My question: when was this nice little feature
introduced and where was it announced? I would have documented it for the
German wikipedia if I had known it.

[x] announce-l at wikipedia.org would be a good place, even if there is no
moderator...

greetings,
elian


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Asimov-still POV

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:
>
>>The article currently reads as above, the latter part "and is
>>thought by many to be the finest science fiction short story ever
>>written." needs to either be removed or credited to some source.
>>
>
>I don't agree.  It's perfectly fine as written.  It could be improved,
>of course, by crediting it to a source, but it's an uncontroversial
>comment as it stands.
>
>>We can all think of several science-fiction stories which instantly
>>qualify for "and is thought by many to be the finest science fiction
>>short story ever written".
>>
>
>That's true, but so what?  We could say the same thing in a number of
>articles, and it would be equally uncontroversially true in all of
>them.
>
>It is not POV, so long as it is actually true that many people do
>believe it.  "Many" is contextually determined here, so don't try to
>play funny tricks with that.
>
>>The article remains POV as it contains a POV statement which has
>>been given no source. In the Erwin Rommel article I could say, "Erwin
>>Rommel is considered to be the greatest general ever".
>>
>
>Notice how you've dropped a *key* phrase, i.e. "by many".
>
>It is perfectly fine to say "Erwin Rommel is considered by many to be
>the greatest general of modern times."  It's much better to say who
>the 'many' are, and to give a cite that involves some kind of actual
>counting.  But neither are _required_ if it is in fact widely so
>thought.
>
I dod not take part in the Asimov debate when it was hot, and I just noe
skimmed through the debate on the talk page,  I also looked at the
"Bewildering Stories" stories link.  The point in dispute seems to have
as much to do with the antipathy which some people have for Lir as
anything about the apparent matter in dispute.  People start getting
pissed off not because of what is said, but because of who said it.
 "Bewildering stories is horribly misquoted.  What it says is:

> Asimov met editor Frederik Pohl, who discussed Asimov's rejections and
> later printed a number of stories in Astonishing Stories and
> Super-Science Stories (Clute and Edwards 56; Asimov, "Letters" 12).
> These stories led to the publication of some of the most famous
> science-fiction stories of all time: the positronic robot stories, the
> Foundation stories, and "Nightfall."

I searched the page to be certain that this passage includes the only
use of "the most famous" in the entire article.  It does not single out
"Nightfall" alone but cites it as one of three items in a list.  The
issue of the most famous Asimov story is a mug's game.  It ranks right
up there with the question whether chocolate or vanilla ice cream is the
better -- to use an example presented to children when trying to explain
critical thinking..  We have a subjective determination which in our
parlance is inherently POV; that's often the case when superlatives are
at issue.  Citing a source, or making an indefinite attribution to
"some" or "many" merely creates a Neutred POV instead of a Neutral one.
 In many cases of unnecessary controversy these subjective comments are
often best unsaid.  Asimov's stature will not be diminished by omitting
to say that a particular writing of his is most famous.

I confess that I place myself on the more liberal end of the spectrum
when it comes  to banning and other punishment issues,  In the context
of the Asimov talk page alone I find Vera to be better behaved than some
of his opponents.  He may have been a little insistent with his
interpretation of NPOV, but most of us have done that on various
occasions.  Personal characterizations came from others.

Eclecticology


body:
Jason Richey <jasonr at bomis.com> writes:

> I have made myself moderator for the announce-l list...

Thank you, Jason :-) I put a description of announce-l on
[[Wikipedia:Mailinglists]]

add apologies to Giskart for the neglection of his initial proposal...

greetings,
elian


from_name: Jesse Alter

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l digest, Vol 1 #139 - 15 msgs

body:
Either Lir is a troll/kook who feels that his/her vandalism/views must
be posted on the Wikipedia to such a degree that he is speaking
privately to people, promising to abide by the rules, even helping
research an article I'd like to contribute to just to betray us all and
be one of the bad ones who do everything that they can to make Wikipedia
work...

Or they're a generally nice guy, capable of being a good contributor,
who started off on the wrong foot and didn't understand the rules or the
spirit of Wikipedia and looked like a jackass as a result.

When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.

Users can be banned again, articles can be reverted, and vandalism never
lasts long. If there's a strong sign that Lir truly has mended their
evil ways, why not give 'em a shot?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Four Concertos

body:
Penned in 1723 they remain among the most popular concertos in all music

is something I feel is POV

Penned in 1723 they remain popular

is something I feel needs improvement. After all, everything by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, etc. is also quite popular. However, Im sure the reader would be interested to know that the music is still popular amongst symphonies (or on CDs or something) in which case it should be quite easy to "flesh the statement out", perhaps with a POV from a famous conductor, a discussion of attendance rates at such and such an event, or the like.

I would rewrite the intro as so:

The Four Seasons (Ital: Il quattro stagione) is the name given to four violin concertos (Opus 8, # 1-4) written, in 1723,  by Antonio Vivaldi. The concertos, which are still played by modern musicians, are named after the seasons: "Spring", "Summer", "Autumn", and "Winter". Vivaldi, via his music, attempted to represent the "mood" or "essence" of these seaons. For example, one might view "Winter" as being dark and somber, whilst "Summer" might remind one of chirping birds and buzzing flies.

This being opposed to:

The Four Seasons (Il quattro stagione in the original Italian) is the name given to the four violin concertos by Antonio Vivaldi, Opus 8, No. 1-4. Penned in 1723, they remain among the most popular concertos in all music.
Each of The Four Seasons are named after a season: "Spring", "Summer", "Autumn", and "Winter". The texture of each movement is varied, resembling its respective season. For example, "Winter" is dark and somber, whereas "Summer" has sounds reminiscent of birds chirping and flies buzzing.

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subject: [WikiEN-l] The Bewildering Stories Quote

body:
Although I disagree with stating that many people feel Nightfall is the bestest sci-fi short story ever (as it leads to a ridiculous degree of redundancy where every article will assert its importance and popularity) I do think the quote should more or less remain, although perhaps it should be somewhat modified given the above-mentioned re-quoting:

Asimov met editor Frederik Pohl, who discussed Asimov's rejections and
> later printed a number of stories in Astonishing Stories and
> Super-Science Stories (Clute and Edwards 56; Asimov, "Letters" 12).
> These stories led to the publication of some of the most famous
> science-fiction stories of all time: the positronic robot stories, the
 Foundation stories, and "Nightfall."

Certainly there is no need to restate the whole paragraph, but note that the robot stories are ALL short stories, with Nightfall being a standalone of note.

I would rewrite the relevant section as so:

Asimov began contributing stories to science fiction magazines in 1939; his short story "Nightfall" (1941) is described in Bewildering Stories, issue 8, as one of "the most famous science-fiction stories of all time" [1], along with his robot stories.

The robot stories, many of which were collected in I, Robot (1950), promulgated a set of ethical rules for intelligent machines (see Three Laws Of Robotics), an idea which greatly influenced other writers and thinkers. One such short story, The Bicentennial Man has been made into a movie.

In 1942 he began the Foundation stories, later collected in the Foundation Trilogy: Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953), which recount the collapse and rebirth of an interstellar empire. Years later, he continued the series with Foundation's Edge (1982) and Foundation and Earth (1986) and then wrote the prequels, Prelude to Foundation (1988) and Forward the Foundation (1992).

He also wrote a spoof science article The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline in 1948 which he feared would affect the obtaining of his degree.

My version, no longer refers to the empire of foundations as being vast (as certainly there have ben sci-fi empires in comparison to which this one was small and insignificant) nor does it refer to Foundations as Asimov's most famous work. (Which begs the question of whether Nightfall or Foundations is more famous and popular) It also fails to note that Robin Williams was the star of Bicentennial Man, as that seems to be information which belongs on the page for Bicentennial Man, and is hardly directly relevent to the topic at hand. My version also mentions the word "robots" a little less and does not note that the effects of the Rules of Robotics were mostly limited to people writing in the same field as Isaac Asimov, that being somewhat obvious. My version also does not describe the empire of Foundations as being "futuristic", as talk of an interstellar empire and science fiction is inherently futuristic. Even Star Wars, despite being technically in the past, is still so clearly futuristic that to mention it is over-stating and redundant.

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