list: foundation-l

from_name: Aphaia

subject: [Foundation-l] stewards elections

body:
On Sat, 5 Mar 2005 16:05:22 -0800 (PST), Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales schreef:
> Why don't I just make them all 3 stewards and we are
> done with it?
> [cut]
> >
> > Having big public elections for everything is a bad
> idea.  People will not be elected unless they are famous, but the way
> to get famous is not  the same thing as the way to be qualified for a
> technical position.

Agreed, but a technical position could be a political position at the
same time, I would like to add.

And, I should add, some of users will think it a political matter too.
I assume that is why some wise and prudent persons among us love the
idea of "steward poll". I think at any rate  if the community feel the
necessity to participant to a certain decision making process and if
there is no clear reason it haven't to, it would be strongly better to
let the community do so.

Some polls among us are really messy. But at least the current
stewards were elected by polls and some of them are inactive on
English Wikipedia, if I recall correctly. So in my feeling, you, to
JImbo, become a bit sensitive to this matter. If the possibility of
too much En inclined result is a problem, you can modify the poll with
caps, for example, 3 of 10 should be the users who are mainly active
on other projects than En.

> So, right now, Jimbo, you should nominate
>
> Britty
> Waerth
> Yann
> Aurevilly
> Fire
> Oscar

For clarification: Britty hereby is identical with Aphaia on the
project (see [[meta:IRC channels]]).

As for your list, I have nothing to say. Even if nothing will come of
nothing. So please don't say to me "speak again",  I would like to add
something only for keeping the openness of decision making.

> It would be fair to wait for possibly 2 weeks so that
> the fact non-elections will occur be public and any
> intersted person can candidate.

If stewards will be appointed, in my humble opinion, such openness is
necessary. Any Wikimedia project participants can apply.

And in my opinion It would be better the board, not one Trustee, even
if he is the Founder and 'benevolent dictator" of the entire project
make a decision who would be appointed, because in my observation some
of us think it as a community matter, not only a technical issue. And
I don't think such feeling can be easily ignored. Two of trustees
represent the whole users and it would be always expected their voice
are esteemed, hence their participation to decision making.

--
Aphaea@*.wikipedia.org
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [Foundation-l] stewards elections


list: wikien-l

from_name: Geoff Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Proposal on VFD: enforcement of nomination policy

body:
On Sun, 6 Mar 2005, David Gerard wrote:

> Bryan Derksen wrote:
>
> > So why not add non-notability to the deletion policy? If it's one of the
> > most commonly used reasons for listing an article and yet it isn't
> > actually listed as a valid reason for deletion in the deletion policy,
> > it seems there's already a pretty big problem either with the VfD
> > process or with the deletion policy.
>
>
> Mostly because it'll be too damn subjective to fly.
>
The times I've cited "non-notable" as a reason for VfD have all been in
regards to entries about people. It's my shorthand for saying "this person
hasn't done anything important enough to merit an entry." And it's a judgement
based on the contents of the first sentence or two of the article -- which
should give the reader a quick answer of why this person is important. If
you can't tell me why this person matters in the first paragraph, then
it's clearly a non-notable entry.

For example, if the entry begins "Joe Blow is a husband of 14 years to Jane
Blow, has 3 kids & 2 dogs", then it's clearly non-noteable; if the man
did something that argues he should be included in Wikipedia (say, he
invented the cursor or patented the Smiley), it should say that in the first
sentence -- or the second, if the first is devoted to saying he's an
engineer, computer enthusiast or convicted sex offender. If the article
begins "Joe Blow is the maintainer of the Open Source project [[Road kill]]"
then it's not an automatic non-noteable call; even if it turns out that
you can't find any mention of Road Kill at the usual Open Source/Free Software
download sites (like Freshmeat), it's still not non-noteable -- I'd label
it either "vanity" or "hoax" -- especially if that sentence is the entire
article.

Sadly, even limited to this catagory, this word has a lot of candidates:
for some reason countless people think Wikipedia needs to have an article
about themselves, their girlfriends, or their best friend. Even if said
person's most important achievement in life was survivng birth.

I'd probably use this term for other catagories, but I've lost the battle
whether public high schools are non-noteable or not. (My own high school is
non-noteable, yet other editors insisted on creating an article about it.)
And it's easier to argue that an article about a public high school should
be deleted because it's unverifiable than non-noteable, whereas with people
it's the other way around. ("But you can't say [[Joe Blow]] is unverifiable!
Take a look in the phone book -- his name is there! Call him & you'll see
that he really exists!")

Geoff


from_name: Olivier Bilodeau

subject: FW: [WikiEN-l] Moving to wiktionary and deleting

body:
I just want to be sure that once the entry exists on Wiktionary and I
add {{delete}} that I won't be told that I'm bypassing the VfD process
or that my csd doesn't fit the established criteria, or worse, that the
admin who actually deletes the items gets accused of the above. I was a
bit sarcastic in my reply to your post, but I wanted your opinion on the
matter to be clarified (which you did, and I appreciate).

>What I failed to communicate is that I don't think deletion policies
>apply.  The articles in question are already listed for moving; I think

>that moving them doesn't involve the deletion process, speedy or
otherwise.
>
>--
>  Sean Barrett     | I don't see you, so don't pretend you're there.
>  sean at epoptic.com |
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] ArbCom - too attached to 'equal treatment'?

body:
On Sun, 6 Mar 2005, Ray Saintonge wrote:

> AndyL wrote:
>
> >on 3/6/05 6:18 AM, sannse at sannse at tiscali.co.uk wrote:
> >
> >
> >>A much better analogy is of a school headmaster sorting out who did what
> >>after a playground fight. We want to know who hit first, who hit most,
> >>and who chucked in a sly boot from the side-lines.
> >>
> >>
> >That's quite an insulting example actually and elevates the ArbComm to
> >headmaster while denigrating the rest of us to the status of children.
> >School is the closest most of us get to being in a dictatorship - I don't
> >think that's really a great model to emulate. The difference between the
> >quasi-judicial model and the "headmaster" model is that the former puts
> >limits on the ArbComm. While I can see why the ArbComm would prefer to have
> >no limits and be able to do what they wish, including initiate
> >investigations, I don't think that would be healthy for Wikipedia.
> >
> It also denigrates children, who rarely behave as badly as adults.
> (e.g. sports parents shouting obscenities from the stands)  A comparison
> to a bar fight might have been closer to reality.
>
Well, we could always compare this to a domestic dispute -- the one situation
that I understand all police officers hate to get called into. (At least in
the US; it may be different elsewhere.) Not only do the officers have to
figure out just who did what, but also deal with the fact that not only will
their intervention likely fail to make a difference, but that the aggrieved
party is likely to side with her/his adversary -- either at the time of
the intervention (e.g. a battered wife attacking the police officer arresting
the husband), or later (e.g. the other party pleading to have the charges
dropped).

Love makes people do strange things. Why should love of knowledge be any
different?

Geoff


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Richard Holton

subject: [Wikitech-l] ORDER BY and partial field indexes

body:
A question for you MySQL gurus out there:

Currently, the categorylinks table uses the index

cl_sortkey(cl_to,cl_sortkey(128)),

Note that the cl_sortkey field in the table is varchar(255).

In the categoryPage query, there is an ORDER BY clause on cl_sortkey.
However, this query ends up using a filesort. I've found that if the
index is changed to use the full width of the cl_sortkey field, then
the ORDER BY does not need the filesort.

Does anyone know how to eliminate the need for a filesort without
having to expand the index to the full width of cl_sortkey? Or should
we just bite the bullet and use the full width?

I've tried ORDER BY LEFT(cl_sortkey,128), but that doesn't help
(probably no big surprise).

-Rich Holton
en.wikipedia:User:Rholton


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
A full investigation will improve the quality of our decisions. A partial or
poor investigation restricted by artificial rules will reduce their quality.
It's pretty much summed up by "The more you know..."

Fred

> From: AndyL <andyl2004 at sympatico.ca>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Sun, 06 Mar 2005 21:17:51 -0500
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] ArbCom - too attached to 'equal treatment'?
>
> on 3/6/05 9:50 AM, Fred Bauder at fredbaud at ctelco.net wrote:
>> We need
>> to be free to investigate, not be bound by whatever the litigants choose or
>> are able to bring to us.
>>
>> Fred
>
> You are expressing your desire as a member of the ArbComm to be able to
> expand your authority but you do not explain why this is necessary or why
> this is good for wikipedia.
>
>
> Andy
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Matthew Trump

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Nofollow vote results on en.wikipedi

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

>I think it's disingenuous to speak of "the will of the community"

>What do you suggest?

Brion, I apologize if I sounded a little too awkwardly pompous. Like
others, I was a bit confused about the right procedure to follow
during all this.

To clarify, I meant the "will" only in the Rousseauian sense of an
election result, which is always imperfect. Perhaps it would have
been better to state that: "it was *not* the will of the community to
implement nofollow, as it currently is available, until a better
option is available"

I agree with you, in that there is a wide range of opinion, but I
believe it is possible to reach a broad consensus with the right
engineering. My impression, shared and expressed by others, is that
if a software feature were available such that links could mature
into being "rewarded", then I think this would almost certainly gain
a broad consensus to implement.

There will certainly remain a group of users who are, on principle,
against sharing pagelink no matter what, but I think (this is just a
guess) this groups comprises maybe half of the "keep" voters in the
recent vote. Others opposed it purely on spam-related reasons, and
more than a few have expressed a desire for this kind of system. If a
software feature were available, it would become a matter of how long
to let links mature.

In regards to the software option, just thinking off the top of my
head, it would obviously necessitate the creation an additional
database field, say 'externallinks', and that the parser would pull
these links out, like it does category links right now. There would
obviously be a timestamp assigned for each new link, as well as
perhaps the user who added it (perhaps useful for quick rollbacks of
spamlinks). Perhaps interwiki links could be identified as such.

One can imagine right away such cases as a vandal blanking an
establshed page, which in the simplest case would reset the clock.
This is hardly ideal, of course, but dealing with such cases might
come down the road as the refined. A more sophisticated version might
pull out the domain name of the link, and that domains which mature
can be whitelisted for links across the board.

>From these database fields, there could obviously be searchable
special pages, where one could pull up external links and display
them, alphebetized, or by adding user, by namespace, or domain, etc.
This actually might be a very useful thing to have, overall, and
become a popular feature of the software. Just a hunch. Other
boutique-type special pages might display "most linked to domains",
etc., if there was a desire for it.

One benefit of having such special pages would be to allow easy
checking for stale external links across many pages.

I personally am a big believer in interwiki communication and
colloboration, and of having software features that enhances it, so I
would personally enjoy using and having such features in the
software, but I'm a nutcase, so I can't speak for others :)

Matt


from_name: John Lee

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Evidence as to VFD being unusably big

body:
Pete/Pcb21 wrote:

> David Gerard wrote:
>
>> I just saved [[WP:VFD]] as of a few minutes ago. The HTML alone is
>> 1,324,734
>> bytes. The associated files are 28,964 bytes.
>>
>> I have a Pentium II 450MHz with 768MB memory running Netscape 7.2. It
>> takes
>> a minute or two just for the page to render.
>>
>> So to vote on VFD, you must have a broadband connection - anyone on
>> dialup
>> is pretty much barred - and preferably be browsing with an Athlon 64. Or
>> maybe a Cray.
>>
>> Here's one suggestion: make the main VFD page just links to the day
>> pages,
>> rather than transcluding every one of them.
>>
>>
>> - d.
>
>
> Has splitting VfD by subject area also been proposed?
>
[[Wikipedia:Categorized deletion]].

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Boris Lohnzweiger

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Saterlandic Frisian Wikipedia

body:
Hi Wouter !

First of all, let me point out that I fully agree that there is no sense in including Saterlandic Frisian articles in the existing West Frisian Wikipedia. The language (along with North Frisian and its dialects) is just too distinct for that. I think Mark got it right  - even though living in Arizona! - when he was writing about three Frisian languages. One might add that - as far as I know - Saterlandic is the only surving dialect of the East Frisian language which formerly covered basically the whole region of East Frisia (including the East Frisian islands). By the way, in Germany only the terms "Saterl?ndisch" or "Saterfriesisch" are used for the language while "Ostfriesisch" nowadays refers to the regional variant of Lox Saxon (Plattdeutsch) spoken in East Frisia. When talking about the Frisian language spoken in the north of the Netherlands Germans generally use the term "Westfriesisch" in order not to confuse it with Frisian spoken in Germany. However the Dutch simply call it "Fries" or "Frysk" and many might not be aware of the variants spoken in Germany because they have relatively few speakers compared to West Frisian.

Having said all that, here's my main point. I value your enthusiasm and I am in favour any appropriate means for preserving and promoting endangered minority languages (which are a precious cultural heritage) such as Saterlandic Frisian. However, I think it's just impossible to create a useful online encyclopedia depending on volunteer editors out of a community of barely 2000 native speakers. Please think about it. From looking at your name, I guess you are not a native speaker, are you? Please don't get me wrong. Of course, you can set up a Saterlandic wikipedia technically. But once it is installed would it ever have the slightest chance of becoming a useful, reliable source of information? Could it ever really flourish? If so, great! But given the small number of Saterlandic speakers I really doubt that. And please remember that even for those, say, 1.800 people the language they read and write in is German.

How many editors does a wikipedia need to work (even if only at a very modest level)? E. g. the Dutch wikipedia (with c. 55,000 articles) currently has 9,333 registered editors, out of a language community of maybe 23 million. That equals a ratio of 0.04 % editors - and even if that number might still grow in the future, most wikipedia languages probably won't even reach that percentage. Now try to break that down for Saterlandic! In my opinion the only way for a wikipedia to become a success is to bring together a large number of people to cooperate. As far as Saterlandic is concerned, that is just not possible. That is a pity, of course. But it's the truth.

If you think I am too pessimistic please have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multilingual_ranking_February_2005, ranks 86 through 161. It's not that those wikipedias have just been established recently. Matter of fact, most of them have existed for quite some time now. Some of them have been around for a couple of years or more. And all of them have been them have been set up with the best of intentions by committed people just like you. And many of those languages have millions of speakers. But nevertheless, those wikipedias just aren't running. I always get kind of sad when I look at them. I surely wouldn't like to see a Saterlandic edition ending up like that.

Just some thoughts that crossed my mind

Boris

wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org schrieb am 04.03.05 20:43:28:

I would like to apply for a Wikipedia in Saterlandic (East) Frisian. Further
details can be read at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saterlandic_Frisian_language and soon at the
requests page.

Thanks in advance,

Caesarion

_________________________________________________________________
Altijd in contact met de kleinkinderen: MSN Messenger
http://messenger.msn.nl/

_______________________________________________
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Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
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from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Page move vandal - there is a feature that can help
	with it ...

body:
David Gerard said:
>
> Just had the following conversation with Tim Starling on
> #mediawiki. Log quoted with permission.
>
> Basically: there is a feature. Present version is unsubtle
> in its restriction (last 10% of created accounts, which is
> possibly a bit harsh to get consensus. A timed version
> would be nice, but someone interested in it will have to
> write the code.
>
> Of course, if that restriction isn't considered too onerous
> for the moment, it can just be switched on, and it will stop
> Willy On Wheels! in his tracks.

Why shouldn't it be used?  Anybody who needs a page just needs to find one
other person who has been around for a while and will agree to do it.  We
already have the discussion mechanism set up on [[WP:RM]]. --~~~~


from_name: AndyL

body:
on 3/6/05 5:25 PM, Ray Saintonge at saintonge at telus.net wrote:

>>
> Countersuits are a normal part of the civil judicial process, but not of
> the criminal process.  They provide for the limited right of the
> respondent to raise issues against his accuser.  It does not operate to
> allow the court to initiate new complaints, nor does it allow for third
> party meddling.
>
> Ec

But it is not the court that initiates countersuits but the respondent.
That's where we're getting it wrong.


body:
on 3/6/05 9:50 AM, Fred Bauder at fredbaud at ctelco.net wrote:
> We need
> to be free to investigate, not be bound by whatever the litigants choose or
> are able to bring to us.
>
> Fred

You are expressing your desire as a member of the ArbComm to be able to
expand your authority but you do not explain why this is necessary or why
this is good for wikipedia.

Andy


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
Ben Brockert wrote:
> Get rid of nofollow; developers shouldn't be making policy decisions; it
> was stupid to add it in the first place.

Ah, personal insults and spurious claims.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] alphabetical order

body:
Richard Holton wrote:
> One question that comes to my mind is how to define
> $wgCharOrder_en_cat.  Obviously for proof of principle, you have only
> implemented A-Z and a-z. But isn't UTF8 quite large? Will
> wgCharOrder_en_cat need to include every possible character code? This
> could get quite cumbersome.

Start here: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
zhengzhu wrote:
> Interested parties please visit the test site and provide comments
> either at the site or this list. If this seems to be a reasonable
> solution I will check it into cvs. Test site is running 1.4 from cvs.

Please don't put something large and experimental like this into the 1.4
release branch.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] rollback destroying a revision

body:
Delirium wrote:
> Err, weird.  After shift-reloading, the edit by 198.169.169.32 is back
> in the article's history again.

Temporary database slave update delay.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: David Gerard

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
> David Gerard said:

>>Just had the following conversation with Tim Starling on
>>#mediawiki. Log quoted with permission.
>>Basically: there is a feature. Present version is unsubtle
>>in its restriction (last 10% of created accounts, which is
>>possibly a bit harsh to get consensus. A timed version
>>would be nice, but someone interested in it will have to
>>write the code.
>>Of course, if that restriction isn't considered too onerous
>>for the moment, it can just be switched on, and it will stop
>>Willy On Wheels! in his tracks.

> Why shouldn't it be used?  Anybody who needs a page just needs to find one
> other person who has been around for a while and will agree to do it.  We
> already have the discussion mechanism set up on [[WP:RM]]. --~~~~

Heh. Think it'll fly? Could do. What's a good name for such a page?
Anyone? What are good places to announce it?

- d.


from_name: Marc O'Morain

subject: [Wikitech-l] Patch: Remove a function call and some stale comments

body:
Hi,

This is my first ever patch submission for Wikipedia. I have been
reading the source to get my head around it, before I try to add any
major features :)

This is a minor fix to remove a function call, and to get rid of some
comments in CategoryPage.php that were copied and pasted from
ImagePage.php.

Patch is against 1.4rc1

Best Regards,

Marc O'Morain

--- includes/CategoryPage.php       2005-02-03 08:39:50.000000000 +0000
+++ includes_modified/CategoryPage.php  2005-03-06 21:42:48.730722000 +0000
@@ -18,17 +18,16 @@
 class CategoryPage extends Article {

        function view() {
-               if ( NS_CATEGORY == $this->mTitle->getNamespace() ) {
+
+               $show_category = NS_CATEGORY == $this->mTitle->getNamespace();
+
+               if ($show_category) {
                        $this->openShowCategory();
                }

                Article::view();

-               # If the article we've just shown is in the "Image" namespace,
-               # follow it with the history list and link list for the image
-               # it describes.
-
-               if ( NS_CATEGORY == $this->mTitle->getNamespace() ) {
+               if ($show_category) {
                        $this->closeShowCategory();
                }
        }


from_name: Wouter Steenbeek

body:
Hi Boris!

Thanks for your feedback. The objections you pointed out certainly make
sense, and I have been fully aware ever since the idea of creating a
Saterfrisian Wikipedia came to my mind.

First: We might disagree slightly on the aim(s) of the Wikipedia project.
Its main goal is, of course, providing freely editable and downloadable
information. A second aim is to create encyclopaedias in as many languages
as possible.
You might be right in pointing out that a language with only less than 2,000
speakers is unlikely to achieve the size of, say, the Dutch one. But should
we care? A small encyclopaedia of only a few thousand articles would do
well, I think.

Second, you point out, by reason, the apparent lack of interest with
speakers of many languages whose Wikipedias do not expand. But there is no
direct link between the number of speakers and the number of articles;
indeed, small languages like Cornish (perhaps twice as much speakers as
Seeltersk) do relatively well, while numerous other major or middle sized
language Wikipedias seem never to emerge from their slumber. It is for a
great deal a PR matter. If some of those young Saterfrisians who became
fluent acquired speakers in recent days can be enthousiasmed for this
project, it will have at least a chance to succeed.

Third, you pose, by reason, that all of the Seeltersk speakers comprehend
(both High and Low) German. The German wikipedia, being the second largest
of all, can indeed provide sufficient information for everything the
Saterfrisians wish to know. But that argument, if used against this and
similar initiatives, would take the base away under the Westlauwer, Low
Saxon, Alemannic, Limburgish, Friulian, Romansch, Proven?al and many other
Wikipedias. A language is not only, though mainly, a means of communication,
but also an important bearer of culture. Endangered and small languages need
to be cultivated and, in these modern days, they can only survive if they
are frequently used in situations formerly reserved to the major languages
they are threatened by. I my opinion, a Wikipedia in the concerning language
would enhance its status and support its claims and struggle for recognition
(though Seeltersk is already recognised).

Finally, you are right in pointing out I am not a native speaker; I speak
Dutch (proper) as my native language. But checking the Requests list on
Wikimedia you must encounter Scott Gall, who recently proposed several new
Wikipedias in languages that are not his native one (and some of which are
even smaller and more endangered than Seeltersk). It seems to be not so
unusual. Actually, that zealous user directly inspired me to request a
Wikipedia in Seeltersk.

Wouter Steenbeek

_________________________________________________________________
MSN Webmessenger overal en altijd beschikbaar http://webmessenger.msn.com/


body:
David Gerard said:
> Tony Sidaway wrote:
>> David Gerard said:
>
>>>Just had the following conversation with Tim Starling on
>>>#mediawiki. Log quoted with permission.
>>>Basically: there is a feature. Present version is unsubtle
>>>in its restriction (last 10% of created accounts, which is
>>>possibly a bit harsh to get consensus. A timed version
>>>would be nice, but someone interested in it will have to
>>>write the code.
>>>Of course, if that restriction isn't considered too onerous
>>>for the moment, it can just be switched on, and it will stop
>>>Willy On Wheels! in his tracks.
>
>> Why shouldn't it be used?  Anybody who needs a page just needs to find
>> one other person who has been around for a while and will agree to do
>> it.  We already have the discussion mechanism set up on [[WP:RM]].
>> --~~~~
>
>
> Heh. Think it'll fly? Could do. What's a good name for such a page?
> Anyone? What are good places to announce it?
>

WP:RM/N

Wikipedia:Requested moves/new users

New user lists a move he wants done, explains why.  Someone able to do so
moves it if he thinks it should be done. --~~~~


body:
>
> The categorylinks tables will have to be rebuilt if this is to be
> deployed at the live sites. Not sure how expensive that will be.
>
> Interested parties please visit the test site and provide comments
> either at the site or this list. If this seems to be a reasonable
> solution I will check it into cvs. Test site is running 1.4 from cvs.
>

One question that comes to my mind is how to define
$wgCharOrder_en_cat.  Obviously for proof of principle, you have only
implemented A-Z and a-z. But isn't UTF8 quite large? Will
wgCharOrder_en_cat need to include every possible character code? This
could get quite cumbersome.

Barring that, the idea seems quite elegant.

--
Rich Holton
en.wikipedia:User:Rholton


from_name: Lars Aronsson

body:
The most respected Mr. Mark Williamson wrote:

> I once had an idea, that we could set up a Hopi Wikipedia, and then
> work on promotion of it on Hopi, get elders and teenagers involved,
> try to get middle-aged people involved as well, and eventually hope
> for 90% community involvement of Hopi speakers. When such a point is
> reached, it is a virtual mirror of the real-life community, except it
> is also working towards building an encyclopaedia.

Instead of only reporting on your hopes and dreams, I wish that you
would, once each month or so, take the time to report on what you have
indeed accomplished.  Which new language Wikipedias did you succeed to
get started, and how many articles have been produced there?  So far,
I get the impression that this number is zero, and that surely must be
wrong.  So please enlighten me.

> Unfortunately I don't have the time or the resources to begin such a
> project,

But you certainly have the time to write a lot of messages on this
list.

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


body:
That's encouraging and interesting Mark. Indeed I am convinced good
communication is more important than the creative process itself.

You mention the Limburgish wikipedia. Did you know that its recent expansion
is largely my work? I speak Limburgish, though I do so with an accent, I can
write it and I know some of its speakers. The creator of the Limburgish
Wikipedia does speak Limburgic, but realised that he could speak it far
better than he could write it, so he was reluctant to write all to much.
Anyway, I began to work and in my slipstreams a few other joined; thus we
expanded the Limburgish wiki from 9 to the present 309 articles.

In this case, there are enough speakers, enough competent writers, but
virtually no-one knew of the project. Currently we are doing more PR, and
hope to attract more attention. In my opinion, I should learn from this and
start my PR in Time...

Wouter

>From: Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com>
>Reply-To: Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com>,wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>To: wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org
>Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Saterlandic Frisian Wikipedia
>Date: Sun, 6 Mar 2005 14:23:26 -0700
>
> > Having said all that, here's my main point. I value your enthusiasm and
>I am in favour any appropriate means for preserving and promoting
>endangered minority languages (which are a precious cultural heritage) such
>as Saterlandic Frisian. However, I think it's just impossible to create a
>useful online encyclopedia depending on volunteer editors out of a
>community of barely 2000 native speakers. Please think about it. From
>looking at your name, I guess you are not a native speaker, are you? Please
>don't get me wrong. Of course, you can set up a Saterlandic wikipedia
>technically. But once it is installed would it ever have the slightest
>chance of becoming a useful, reliable source of information? Could it ever
>really flourish? If so, great! But given the small number of Saterlandic
>speakers I really doubt that. And please remember that even for those, say,
>1.800 people the language they read and write in is German.
>
>I for one think that a smaller community (even a "microcommunity"
>perhaps) is more conducive to the Wiki concept because unlike such
>large communities as Dutch or German speakers, it is very conceivable
>that /every single speaker/ of Saterlandic Frisian could become
>involved in such a Wikipedia.
>
>I once had an idea, that we could set up a Hopi Wikipedia, and then
>work on promotion of it on Hopi, get elders and teenagers involved,
>try to get middle-aged people involved as well, and eventually hope
>for 90% community involvement of Hopi speakers. When such a point is
>reached, it is a virtual mirror of the real-life community, except it
>is also working towards building an encyclopaedia.
>
>Unfortunately I don't have the time or the resources to begin such a
>project, and generally Hopi people are very distrusting of white
>people in such matters (and with good reason, too) and although a
>medium level of involvement may be reached, it might be hard to get
>elders involved in what they see as a possible attempt by whites to
>poison or kill Hopi language and culture.
>
>However, in the future I will consider this idea, but I think there
>are more ideal communities, for example the community of Havasupai
>speakers living at the bottom of the Grand Canyon - there are less of
>them, only a few hundred, but unlike Hopi, the entire community speaks
>the language. (there are at least 3 monolinguals, although there are
>more for Hopi) With the already developing advanced infrastructure of
>the community, it is much more conceivable that total community
>involvement in a Havasupai-language Wikipedia could be reached,
>including everybody from the elders to the schoolchildren, all of whom
>speak the language and are isolated by their location (at the bottom
>of the Grand Canyon).
>
> > How many editors does a wikipedia need to work (even if only at a very
>modest level)? E. g. the Dutch wikipedia (with c. 55,000 articles)
>currently has 9,333 registered editors, out of a language community of
>maybe 23 million. That equals a ratio of 0.04 % editors - and even if that
>number might still grow in the future, most wikipedia languages probably
>won't even reach that percentage. Now try to break that down for
>Saterlandic! In my opinion the only way for a wikipedia to become a success
>is to bring together a large number of people to cooperate. As far as
>Saterlandic is concerned, that is just not possible. That is a pity, of
>course. But it's the truth.
>
>Why is it not possible? When you have such a small speaker community,
>promotion is easier - you could even go door-to-door!
>
>Even at the worst case, I think that 30% community involvement is
>there, given promotion effort.
>
> > If you think I am too pessimistic please have a look at
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multilingual_ranking_February_2005,
>ranks 86 through 161. It's not that those wikipedias have just been
>established recently. Matter of fact, most of them have existed for quite
>some time now. Some of them have been around for a couple of years or more.
>And all of them have been them have been set up with the best of intentions
>by committed people just like you. And many of those languages have
>millions of speakers. But nevertheless, those wikipedias just aren't
>running. I always get kind of sad when I look at them. I surely wouldn't
>like to see a Saterlandic edition ending up like that.
>
>Most of these Wikipedias were requested by people who had the notion
>"I have heard of this language. There is no Wikipedia in it. It should
>be created." but were never followed up after their creation.
>
>In addition, even these ill-requested Wikipedias are picking up speed,
>one-by-one... look at the flurry of activity on ka:, li:, hy:, etc.
>which had previously been inactive for months (li: actually had 0
>pages)! ka: and hy:, two important languages of the Caucasus region
>(Georgian and Armenian), now have over 100 articles and are quickly
>growing more! Unfortunately it seems that such success is limited
>almost exclusively to European languages and more recently Indic
>languages to a certain degree, although African languages (examples
>are Bambara bm:, Wolof wo:, Amharic am:, Lingala ln:) have seen some
>unexpected activity recently.
>
>However, it seems to me that Wouter has some connection to this
>language (given his intimate knowledge of the specific differences
>from West Frisian), and given that he has said he started a test
>Wikipedia on Meta, I don't think this is idle talk from a non-speaker.
>
>Mark
>_______________________________________________
>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

_________________________________________________________________
Spreek vrienden en familie met MSN Messenger http://messenger.msn.nl/


body:
>From: Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se>
>Reply-To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Saterlandic Frisian Wikipedia
>Date: Sun, 6 Mar 2005 22:47:24 +0100 (CET)
>
>The most respected Mr. Mark Williamson wrote:
>
> > I once had an idea, that we could set up a Hopi Wikipedia, and then
> > work on promotion of it on Hopi, get elders and teenagers involved,
> > try to get middle-aged people involved as well, and eventually hope
> > for 90% community involvement of Hopi speakers. When such a point is
> > reached, it is a virtual mirror of the real-life community, except it
> > is also working towards building an encyclopaedia.
>
>Instead of only reporting on your hopes and dreams, I wish that you
>would, once each month or so, take the time to report on what you have
>indeed accomplished.  Which new language Wikipedias did you succeed to
>get started, and how many articles have been produced there?  So far,
>I get the impression that this number is zero, and that surely must be
>wrong.  So please enlighten me.
>
> > Unfortunately I don't have the time or the resources to begin such a
> > project,
>
>But you certainly have the time to write a lot of messages on this
>list.

Please, POLITESSE! Let's play the ball, not the man! The question is whether
or not such small projects can succeed, not what mr. Williamson does in his
free hours or which of his projects succeed(ed).

_________________________________________________________________
Speel online games via MSN Messenger http://messenger.msn.nl/


from_name: zhengzhu

subject: [Wikipedia-l] alphabetical order

body:
On Sun, 20 Feb 2005 22:54:42 +0100, James R. Johnson
<modean52 at comcast.net> wrote:
> Hey,
>
>             Is there any way to alter the alphabetical order used to sort
> lists of articles?  In the OE wiki, the letter ? (a and e together) should
> be alphabetized after a, so that "?etan, ?niman, ?fter" show up in that
> order, and ? and ? are arranged after d and t, respectively.  There are also
> accented vowels that should show up in their unaccented versions as well, so
> that and, ?niman, and ?nl?epig are all under the letter "A".
>
> James
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

The zh community have a more serious problem: they want different
sorting orders for Traditional and Simplified Chinese...

So I was looking at the related code, and it seems not too hard to
implement specific (but fixed) sorting order within one language.
However I only have limited time to work on this right now, and I
don't fully understand how the category thing works.So I put up a test
site with the basic implementation at http://tinyurl.com/5l24b. The
test site is in English, and the sorting order is altered so that x,
y, z come first, followed by a, b, c, etc.

The categorylinks tables will have to be rebuilt if this is to be
deployed at the live sites. Not sure how expensive that will be.

Interested parties please visit the test site and provide comments
either at the site or this list. If this seems to be a reasonable
solution I will check it into cvs. Test site is running 1.4 from cvs.

--
zhengzhu


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] alphabetical order

body:
A related issue is: If I type in the address bar a the URL of an
article in TC, but the article is actually located at the SC title, I
won't end up at the right place unless there is a redirect. Does this
mean we need a redirect for most articles on zh:? Or can we have a
computerised way to solve this?

And why is it that when I change from TC to SC, any time I click on a
link it switches back?

Mark

On Sun, 6 Mar 2005 23:01:39 -0500, zhengzhu <zhengzhu at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 20 Feb 2005 22:54:42 +0100, James R. Johnson
> <modean52 at comcast.net> wrote:
> > Hey,
> >
> >             Is there any way to alter the alphabetical order used to sort
> > lists of articles?  In the OE wiki, the letter ? (a and e together) should
> > be alphabetized after a, so that "?etan, ?niman, ?fter" show up in that
> > order, and ? and ? are arranged after d and t, respectively.  There are also
> > accented vowels that should show up in their unaccented versions as well, so
> > that and, ?niman, and ?nl?epig are all under the letter "A".
> >
> > James
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
> The zh community have a more serious problem: they want different
> sorting orders for Traditional and Simplified Chinese...
>
> So I was looking at the related code, and it seems not too hard to
> implement specific (but fixed) sorting order within one language.
> However I only have limited time to work on this right now, and I
> don't fully understand how the category thing works.So I put up a test
> site with the basic implementation at http://tinyurl.com/5l24b. The
> test site is in English, and the sorting order is altered so that x,
> y, z come first, followed by a, b, c, etc.
>
> The categorylinks tables will have to be rebuilt if this is to be
> deployed at the live sites. Not sure how expensive that will be.
>
> Interested parties please visit the test site and provide comments
> either at the site or this list. If this seems to be a reasonable
> solution I will check it into cvs. Test site is running 1.4 from cvs.
>
> --
> zhengzhu
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


body:
On Sun, 6 Mar 2005 22:18:14 -0600, Richard Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > The categorylinks tables will have to be rebuilt if this is to be
> > deployed at the live sites. Not sure how expensive that will be.
> >
> > Interested parties please visit the test site and provide comments
> > either at the site or this list. If this seems to be a reasonable
> > solution I will check it into cvs. Test site is running 1.4 from cvs.
> >
>
> One question that comes to my mind is how to define
> $wgCharOrder_en_cat.  Obviously for proof of principle, you have only
> implemented A-Z and a-z. But isn't UTF8 quite large? Will
> wgCharOrder_en_cat need to include every possible character code? This
> could get quite cumbersome.
>
> Barring that, the idea seems quite elegant.
>
> --
> Rich Holton
> en.wikipedia:User:Rholton
>

I think each language will have a specific sorting order of it's own
alphabet, which should be of manageable size. (Obviously not true for
Chinese...) That should cover most of the articles of that specific
wikipedia.
--
zhengzhu


from_name: Ben Brockert

body:
On Sunday, March 6, 2005, at 07:21  PM, Thomas Gries wrote:
> Can we return to the KISS principle in this mailing list, please ?
> KISS = keep it short and simple

Very well:

Get rid of nofollow; developers shouldn't be making policy decisions;
it was stupid to add it in the first place.

Ben
[[User:Brockert]]


from_name: Delirium

body:
I've only seen one instance of this, but it seems like something that
really shouldn't happen, so I thought I'd report it.

On [[en:Talk:Politics of Japan]], an anon had blanked the page a while
back with nobody noticing; yesterday I noticed and hit "rollback".
Instead of my rollback adding a new revision after the anon's, it seems
like it actually *deleted* the anon's revision from the article
history... so it looks like I'm making a null-edit, with an edit summary
claiming to be reverting a non-existent edit.  The page-blanking edit is
still listed in the user's edit history though
([[en:Special:Contributions/198.169.169.32]]), so the article and user
edit histories are now inconsistent.

-Mark


body:
Delirium wrote:

> On [[en:Talk:Politics of Japan]], an anon had blanked the page a while
> back with nobody noticing; yesterday I noticed and hit "rollback".
> Instead of my rollback adding a new revision after the anon's, it
> seems like it actually *deleted* the anon's revision from the article
> history... so it looks like I'm making a null-edit, with an edit
> summary claiming to be reverting a non-existent edit.  The
> page-blanking edit is still listed in the user's edit history though
> ([[en:Special:Contributions/198.169.169.32]]), so the article and user
> edit histories are now inconsistent.

Err, weird.  After shift-reloading, the edit by 198.169.169.32 is back
in the article's history again.

-Mark


from_name: Sebastien BARRE

subject: [Wikitech-l] ACL, Access Control List, cur_restrictions

body:
Hi,

OK, I know one of key feature of a Wiki is "unrestricted access to
everyone", but there are some times when you definitely want to have a
subpart of a Wiki to be more "private", or "read only", using a more
sophisticated scheme than white-lists (no, I don't want to create a
separate wiki).

So, I'm willing to give it a stab and see if I can turn that out into an
extension, as a small spare-time project (that would probably be completed
in 2012 I guess). In the meantime would you guys be open to add some hooks
into 1.4 / 1.5 ? Or pointing out where to put them ?

For example, I have the feeling Title::userCanEdit() and
Title::userCanRead() would be two interesting places to put event/hooks.

I'm not exactly sure what userCanRead() prevent from though, any clue ? For
example, if I check the "Special::Recent Changes", it seems to me that if
user can not read a given page P, he should certainly not be able to see
the comments that were entered when someone else modified that page P
(neither should he be able to see the "diffs"). My fear is that I miss one
of the many ways to see the contents of a page.

Actually I just checked 1.4 and it seems there is a new
Title::userCan($action) that seem to be called by
userCanRead/userCanEdit... A hook near the end maybe, before 'return true'
? It uses getRestrictions(), which seems to pull something out of the
cur_restrictions field, but this is not really documented, what's the
format of that column in 'cur', something like
edit:user1,user2;move:user3,user2, etc ?

Thanks

--
Sebastien Barre


body:
Mark Williamson wrote:
> > But you certainly have the time to write a lot of messages on this
> > list.
>
> Again, I think perception of this is distorted somewhat and largely
> based on a set period of time a while ago - when I first joined this
> list I posted short posts often thrice in a row, flooding the list

I'm sorry to say that this perception is created anew every week, as
long as this list is dominated by messages from you discussing your
principal stance ("theory") rather than actual achievements
("practice").  Especially the long and tiresome discussion of various
tongues from China seemed to be of very little practical use.

> Also, it doesn't take much time to write an e-mail, at least for me,

It still takes a lot of time, at least for me, to read all the
messages on this list.  I wish there was more substance in them.

I'm also sorry to add to the impression that I'm only complaining.
So let me end by telling that last month I scanned a public domain
Finnish encyclopedia of 4 volumes and that more than 100 articles or
stubs from it have already been imported into the Finnish Wikipedia,
as shown by the category
http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luokka:Pienest%C3%A4_tietosanakirjasta_tuodut_artikkelit

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


from_name: Matt Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] Antiwikipedia site - are there any solutions?

body:
On Mon, 07 Mar 2005 12:35:40 +0600, Arno M <redgum46 at lycos.com> wrote:
> If some had been arranged for this fellow [Sollog] earlier, this anti-wikipedia
> site MAY have been avoided.

I highly doubt it.  This individual's behavior in other forums before,
including Usenet (where he was branded "Kook of the month") and the
courts, does not encourage any believe in his ability to work well
with others or stand a neutral view of himself.

Some people are incorrigible.  Yes, many can be reached, but not all.

-Matt (User:Morven)


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Rules, expertise, and encyclopedic standards

body:
Sean Barrett wrote:

> Ray Saintonge stated for the record:
>
>> ... the members
>> of the ArbCom need a keen ability to distinguish between gravitons
>> and levitons.
>
> Which we have, of course: gravitons are what give our decisions their
> all-important gravitas, and levitons are planned communities, the
> first one of which was constructed in Pennsylvania.

Thank you for letting my mind wander in yet another direction.  There is
no community named Leviton in the USA. The place in Pennsylvania is
really Levittown, and there are three places with that name.  The first
one was in Nassau County, NY, then the one in PA, and finally a third
one in Puerto Rico, all developed by the same William Levitt.  See
http://www.capitalcentury.com/1951.html

This kind of makes him the father of ticky-tacky.

Ec


body:
Mark Williamson wrote:
> So now not only are you complaining, but you're bragging? Great job,
> Lars. Great job.

Sorry Mark, if you wanted to put me down, you failed.  You must try a
lot harder to succeed with that.  I'll be quiet now and watch you
build your own reputation on this list and elsewhere.

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


body:
on 3/6/05 9:32 PM, David Gerard at dgerard at gmail.com wrote:

> AndyL wrote:
>> on 3/6/05 5:25 PM, Ray Saintonge at saintonge at telus.net wrote:
>
>>> Countersuits are a normal part of the civil judicial process, but not of
>>> the criminal process.  They provide for the limited right of the
>>> respondent to raise issues against his accuser.  It does not operate to
>>> allow the court to initiate new complaints, nor does it allow for third
>>> party meddling.
>
>> But it is not the court that initiates countersuits but the respondent.
>> That's where we're getting it wrong.
>
>
> Let's get back to the point. You're so far not convincing me that your
> model works better to get an encyclopedia written than the current one.
> How does it better achieve that goal?

It wouldn't artificially discourage people from making legitimate complaints
for fear that they too would be penalised or at a minimum tempbanned from
editing an article until the hearing is complete.


from_name: Thomas Gries

body:
Can we return to the KISS principle in this mailing list, please ?
KISS = keep it short and simple


body:
AndyL wrote:
> on 3/6/05 5:25 PM, Ray Saintonge at saintonge at telus.net wrote:

>>Countersuits are a normal part of the civil judicial process, but not of
>>the criminal process.  They provide for the limited right of the
>>respondent to raise issues against his accuser.  It does not operate to
>>allow the court to initiate new complaints, nor does it allow for third
>>party meddling.

> But it is not the court that initiates countersuits but the respondent.
> That's where we're getting it wrong.

Let's get back to the point. You're so far not convincing me that your
model works better to get an encyclopedia written than the current one.
How does it better achieve that goal?

- d.


from_name: Sj

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Deletion of my images

body:
On Mon, 07 Mar 2005 07:47:47 +0100, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> When I uploaded this picture, I specifically agreed on a little text
> saying something like "By uploading a file to which you hold the
> copyright, you agree to licence it under the terms of the
> GNU Free Documentation License.".

I agree that this should be either binding or stricken.

We should set up a quarantine where all images which have not been
validated or license-verified can be put.  Then there will be no
un-repealable deletion, save for
vandalism images and known copyvios.  Please.

> * wikinews does not allow uploading images, hence preventing the easy
> use of images to non english speakers (since they can not easily manage
> wikicommons)

Why is this?

--
+sj+


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Deletion of my images

body:
Anthere wrote:

> So, why do we have to agree on this little text when we upload and why
> are we asked under which license we give our images since it does not
> matter ?

Well, a lot of people agreed to that text without reading it, and
uploaded images they don't own, so Wikipedia has a bunch of nonfree
images on it---which is the reason for the whole image-tagging project
in the first place.  But it's supposed to be standard to ask the
uploader about an image before deleting it, so that part wasn't done
correctly.

-Mark


body:
steven l. rubenstein wrote:

> This is clearly different from ArbCom which as members of ArbCom have
> made abundantly clear deals only with conflicts between two or more
> users, and matters of behavior, not content.  Although two users can
> and often do come into conflict over NPOV or NOR, this is
> categorically different from the kinds of conflicts ArbCom deals
> with.  ArbCom deals with violations of certain policies (specifically
> behavioral) caused by a conflict between users.  What I and I think
> 172 and SlimVirgin are talking about is conflicts between users caused
> by violations of other policies (concerning content).
>
> Obviously in order to intervene in a conflict over NPOV or No original
> research a committee would have to be very attentive to content.  But
> I am sure that no matter what one's beliefs about Jesus, Zionism, or
> fascism, experienced editors can reach an agreement over what does or
> doesn't constitute NPOV or original research.

The current hope is that the community can deal with this, if people who
behave badly are taken out of the system.  That is, the community will
spot and remove original research, and if someone keeps readding it
despite a consensus that it should be removed, the person will
eventually be banned.

I'd be open to a committee policing for original research at some point,
if that turns out to be necessary.  Policing for NPOV is a lot more
complicated.

-Mark


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] wikibreak

body:
Okay

This has little to do with a supposed "upper circle".
I guess everyone has a need for a break from time to time.
If I just consider recent times with people around me :
Tim has consider entirely giving up wikipedia for a while, and is hopefully back though with less activity
Elian was on a wikibreak about 3 weeks ago
Sannse is currently on wikibreak though I do not know why. I just heard it was because of my proposal on OTRS. I know nothing more.
Ellisllk has decided to quit wikipedia recently, asking me to unsysop him on wikipedia and wikiquote
Danny is on wikibreak due to me not telling him what he expected, and he made at least 3 or 4 wikibreaks in the past months
Sj has been on and off since december
Yourself, Villy, has been on a big wikibreak in january and part of february (right ?)
Dunno about you, but I do not see a lot of Angela these days. Love is getting her busy.
Aphaia quit participating to some projects
Etc...
And likely, dozen of wikipedians are everyday on a break

We do not always know why they do it.
Some people live wikipedia passionately, others have more of an equal mood. Not everyone is equal in front of stress and disappointment.

Yeah, I thought of explaining more why I am currently tired. But really, this should be obvious by the past days mails here. The rest of it is private issues.

Perhaps I can only add four points.

First, in the past few days, I did not sufficiently listened to others. I should have listened more. Or I should just have keep my mouth shut entirely. So perhaps it is more loss of faith in myself than in the project ?

Second, to listen more to others however, it would be helpful that they talk. When they do not talk, it is really hard to know where to put feet, and it is hard to represent mute people. Typical example would be the proposal for OTRS. I may be the one concerned by the amount of mails to answer, but we might be all concerned by what we want the Foundation to become, a family kinda stuff, or something a bit more organised. If so, I would love to hear opinions on this. Please see the amount of feedback on this. I may have a responsability toward users, but I think that in a similar sort of way, users have a responsability toward me. Either one of support, or one of criticism, or suggesting other ideas... dunno... uh... something... less silent possibly ?

Third, I had some bad proprietary thoughts. I still think that images I uploaded on wikipedia are mine in a sense. I should not. If someone delete them, I should just not mind at all. Many of the texts I added to Wikipedia in three years have disappeared, remix in other people texts. They never asked me if they could remove my inputs. I think it is okay. I should not mind either that my images are deleted from Wikipedia (if I repeat it every morning, I should get convinced perhaps ?)

Fourth, I really physically need a break. Aside from all above considerations. The last week has been very heavy for me at work, very little sleep. No heat at home for 4 days while outside temperature was below -10?C. I slept the whole saturday afternoon, which did not prevent me from falling asleep at 10 pm the same day. As I have already announced to a couple of wikipedians, I am waiting for a third baby, and I feel I need rest badly right now. I am tired. At least, I should focus on what is really important. Perhaps answering the pile of mails left in my mail box. Oh well. Whatever.

---------------------------------
Celebrate Yahoo!'s 10th Birthday!
 Yahoo! Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web


subject: [Foundation-l] wikibreak


subject: [Foundation-l] wikibreak

body:
Anthere,

Please let it be a very short break.  Already you are dearly missed...

If this lack of faith has anything to do with my own sarcasm about
love letters, you should know that I still have enormous faith in
love, and ever moreso in the project; despite being wary of the former
this month.

--
+sj+

On Mon, 07 Mar 2005 07:52:40 +0100, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I am on a wikibreak for unknown time.
> I am lacking faith in the project as is now.
>
> Anthere
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


subject: [Foundation-l] wikibreak


subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: A proposal for better communication on
	Foundation issues

body:
One source of communication trouble may be that the default email
address for just about anything related to the site, appears to be
board at wikimedia.org .

en: Wikipedia:About and Wikipedia:Contact_us
   Press inquiries : Terry (phone), jwales (email)
   Other: write to the mailinglists; wikien-l and wikitech-l

wmf: Contact Us
    board at wikimedia,  jwales at wikia
    info at wikimedia.de, wikimediafr-l at wikimedia.org
    board at wikimedia, again, for "feedback"

meta: Designated Agent
    board at wikimedia

Many of these issues are unlikely to involve high-privacy requests.  Making
the board address a more reserved one, not the catch-all for feedback, might
help reduce the number of random emails that come through.

--
+sj+


body:
On Mon, 07 Mar 2005 01:02:33 -0800, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Sean Barrett wrote:
> > Which we have, of course: gravitons are what give our decisions their
> > all-important gravitas, and levitons are planned communities, the
> > first one of which was constructed in Pennsylvania.
>
> Thank you for letting my mind wander in yet another direction.  There is
> no community named Leviton in the USA. The place in Pennsylvania is
> really Levittown, and there are three places with that name.  The first
> one was in Nassau County, NY, then the one in PA, and finally a third
> one in Puerto Rico, all developed by the same William Levitt.  See
> http://www.capitalcentury.com/1951.html
>
> This kind of makes him the father of ticky-tacky.
>
> Ec

I love the way that, on wikipedia mailing lists, segues from heated
discussion into random trivia are somehow supremely on-topic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Levitt

--
+sj+


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: wikibreak

body:
--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> It will just be for a couple of days so that I sleep, think and recover.
> So, do not worry. Won't make much of a difference dearie.

I'm glad to hear that. Rest well Ant, you deserve it. :)

--mav

__________________________________
Celebrate Yahoo!'s 10th Birthday!
Yahoo! Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web
http://birthday.yahoo.com/netrospective/


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: wikibreak


subject: [Wikitech-l] restoring a deleted image

body:
Could someone please restore the image missing on

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Anthere/PictInsectes&oldid=10140585

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image%3AColeo1(s).jpg

It was deleted with no warning to me, and I think it was a good picture.

Please

Anthere


subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion of my images

body:
For the second time this month, one of my images was deleted on the
english wikipedia.

I was not warned at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Anthere/PictInsectes&diff=0&oldid=10140585

I'll be frank, I AM PISSED OFF.

It is written clearly on my talk page, and my user page that all my
images are gfdl. All my insects pictures listed on my user subpage are
labelled, but this one.

Just as I already said on the pump less than 2 weeks ago, I think it is
really pure disrespect to delete an image without asking the author, and
then only AFTER deletion, to go on this user subpage to remove the link
to the deleted image. If there is time to go on my user subpage to
remove a link, then there is time to drop by my user talk page and talk
to me. Of there is time to read the mention on my user and user talk
page and to read my warning about the status of my images and to update
the image status.

I am sorry, but I really find this of the latest rudeness.

 From now quite far away, as I have no more time to edit the english
wikipedia, I have the horrible feeling the english wikipedia has become
a very very cold place, where there is no respect for editors except
those well known possibly. If feels like if one is not among the major
editors, he does not count, and his feelings are not important at all.
It looks like a machine. An automate. Not a great human construction.

We are all here because we believe in what we do, but what we do is only
good because we do it together and because we trust each other.

Well, at least, some people trust other people. And if it is not
possible to trust someone who spent already 3 years on wikipedia, I
wonder how newbies are treated.

In case you feel like telling me "yeah, but this is just one case you
know, not everybody does that", I will then ask why Quadell is trusted
to delete images. I do not trust him to do so. Not because he does not
do this according to rules, but because he does not do this while taking
human feelings into account. And wiki only works thanks to human power.

Anthere


from_name: zero 0000

body:
Fred wrote:
> A full investigation will improve the quality of our decisions. A
> partial or
> poor investigation restricted by artificial rules will reduce their
> quality.
> It's pretty much summed up by "The more you know..."

I think you are missing the point.  I don't see anyone wanting to
limit the AC's ability to look wherever they like.  The issue is of
who they have the right to impose penalties on.

Again:  if someone is accused by a RfA listing, they have the
opportunity to write in their own defence and to have their
fellows write in their defence.  Then the AC imposes a penalty
on a different person who had no such opportunity since they
didn't know it was necessary.  It is fundamentally unfair.

The accuser is treated worse than the accused.

The solution: except perhaps in emergencies, the AC should
only be able to impose penalties on someone who has had an
opportunity to mount a defence.  There should be a rule on
how much opportunity must be given.

Zero.

__________________________________
Celebrate Yahoo!'s 10th Birthday!
Yahoo! Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web
http://birthday.yahoo.com/netrospective/


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Deletion of my images

body:
There was no administrative error.
This was done on purpose as the image was missing a gfdl tag.
When I uploaded these images, tags were not mandatory yet. And my insect
images had tags *but not* this one.

I complained to Quadell directly and asked him to restore the image.
But iMeowbot nicely restored it from a mirror.

The point is, this is *not the first time it happens*.

When I uploaded this picture, I specifically agreed on a little text
saying something like "By uploading a file to which you hold the
copyright, you agree to licence it under the terms of the
GNU Free Documentation License.".

So, I agree, but it does not matter I agree at all.

I was also asked some time ago to indicate under which licence I give my
images. But the license I mention does not matter.

So, why do we have to agree on this little text when we upload and why
are we asked under which license we give our images since it does not
matter ?

And why do I give images to Wikipedia for them to be deleted ?

Actually, I recently gave many of Algeria, but the more time goes by,
the less I give.

The reasons are

* some english wikipedians delete images uploaded in good faith without
warning
* images deleted are not easily recoverable
* wikimedia projects do not respect the license by not always displaying
clearly that images uploaded on wikicommons are under gfdl nor by
mentionning authorship on the local projects
* wikicommons does not provide a link to where the images are used, so
do not allow editors to check whether the way images are used are
following legal requirements or not
* uploading images unfortunately takes time, even more on wikicommons
where issues of duplicate in names begin to appear
* wikicommons is in english only, hence limiting access to those non
english speaking
* wikinews does not allow uploading images, hence preventing the easy
use of images to non english speakers (since they can not easily manage
wikicommons)

The more time goes by, the less motivating it is to provide images imho.
I admire those who continue doing so. It needs real faith.

Anthere

Arno M a ?crit:
> I suspect there was an administrative error here, and anthere has
> complained to Quadell directly about this.
>
> Hopefully this will gets sorted out to everyone's satisfaction.
>
> Arno
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com>
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion of my images
> Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 06:03:44 +0100
>
>
>>For the second time this month, one of my images was deleted on the
>>english wikipedia.
>>
>>I was not warned at all.
>>
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Anthere/PictInsectes&diff=0&oldid=10140585
>>
>>I'll be frank, I AM PISSED OFF.
>>
>>It is written clearly on my talk page, and my user page that all my
>>images are gfdl. All my insects pictures listed on my user subpage
>>are labelled, but this one.
>>
>>Just as I already said on the pump less than 2 weeks ago, I think
>>it is really pure disrespect to delete an image without asking the
>>author, and then only AFTER deletion, to go on this user subpage to
>>remove the link to the deleted image. If there is time to go on my
>>user subpage to remove a link, then there is time to drop by my
>>user talk page and talk to me. Of there is time to read the mention
>>on my user and user talk page and to read my warning about the
>>status of my images and to update the image status.
>>
>>I am sorry, but I really find this of the latest rudeness.
>>
>> From now quite far away, as I have no more time to edit the
>>english wikipedia, I have the horrible feeling the english
>>wikipedia has become a very very cold place, where there is no
>>respect for editors except those well known possibly. If feels like
>>if one is not among the major editors, he does not count, and his
>>feelings are not important at all. It looks like a machine. An
>>automate. Not a great human construction.
>>
>>We are all here because we believe in what we do, but what we do is
>>only good because we do it together and because we trust each other.
>>
>>Well, at least, some people trust other people. And if it is not
>>possible to trust someone who spent already 3 years on wikipedia, I
>>wonder how newbies are treated.
>>
>>In case you feel like telling me "yeah, but this is just one case
>>you know, not everybody does that", I will then ask why Quadell is
>>trusted to delete images. I do not trust him to do so. Not because
>>he does not do this according to rules, but because he does not do
>>this while taking human feelings into account. And wiki only works
>>thanks to human power.
>>
>>Anthere
>>
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>WikiEN-l mailing list
>>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>


subject: [Foundation-l] wikibreak

body:
I am on a wikibreak for unknown time.
I am lacking faith in the project as is now.

Anthere


subject: [Foundation-l] wikibreak


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Can arbitration really support policy?

body:
Fred Bauder wisely observed:

"Arbitration is not a tool to be used in struggle with other
editors. If you are struggling with other editors rather
than complaining in good faith about violations of Wikipedia
policy you are probably violating Wikipedia policies
yourself."

However, users (of all ranks):

* Generally regard arbitration as a HIM vs. YOU matter.

* Often use arbitration as a weapon with which to carry on struggles
with other editors.

What we need instead is a board which enforces rules in HIM vs. US
paradigm. That is, a user's conduct or speech is evaluated in terms of
how well it supports or thwarts the aims of Wikipedia.

If someone's name-calling is really bugging others, distracting them
from writing superb articles, and making them want to kick the dust of
this crummy little town off their shoes -- well, I'd say then that HIS
NAME-CALLING is out of line and ought to be squelched somehow. It would
be good to have a rule on hand, which we can pull off a shelf, dust off,
and apply. (YOU ARE BLOCKED FOR X AMOUNT OF TIME.) The time-out gives
the rest of us a chance to recover from his annoying behavior, and get
back into the normal, everyday routine of cooperative editing. And he
might even *choose* to adhere more closely to the rules when we let him
come back.

Let's stop making it a "dispute resolution process" between two EQUALS
who happen to disagree. Maybe ONE of them is actually in the RIGHT, and
the other guy is MESSING THINGS UP. In such a case, it's not a matter of
smoothing over a 'conflict' between two people. It's enforcing the rules
of the COMMUNITY so we can get on with furthering the aims of our
project.

Let's send this message to all and sundry:
"You wanna help us build a great encyclopedia? Fine, and welcome! You
want to advance your own agenda? Stop right here: learn to do it our
way, or simply DO IT SOMEWHERE ELSE."

Uncle Ed Poor
Wikipedia's First Elected Bureaucrat
Developer Emeritus
...and all around nice guy!


from_name: David Sabel

subject: [WikiEN-l] Introducing upto11.net - seeking advice

body:
We just launched upto11.net, a music recommendations and search community that integrates articles about musical artists, albums and songs.

Currently we feature articles current as of late September 2004, but will be updating them and moving to a "real time" incremental process shortly. Next to each article is a link, back to an edit page at the Wikipedia, that encourages users to "add to or edit this article."  Over time we expect to bring new users to the Wikipedia which should increase the number and depth of articles about music.

So far, I've added us to the Friends of Wikipedia page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_Wikipedia/Specialized_search_engines

and, I created a "project" page which further introduces our site

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dsupto11

Are there othere pages where links might be appropriate? We'd like get the word out to the Wikipedia community, but do it in a way that is appropriate.

Thanks in advance,

David Sabel


from_name: actionforum at comcast.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: This is backwards (was Re: 172 de-sysopped)

body:
-------------- Original message --------------
TBSDY wrote:
> Those who are not admins would not know how easy it is to make a
> mistake. You judge harshly: admins aren't paid, they cop abuse all the
> time and they do make mistake in judgement. I know I do. There are
> checks and balances: admins will often reverse the decision of other
> admins if they see a problem with the decision made. That's one of the
> reasons I created [[WP:AN]] - to allow admins to see what other admins
> are doing and to fix problems/mistakes.
>
> Maybe if you became an admin you'd understand. Until then, I think it's
> fair you critique admins. This helps keep us accountable. However, keep
> those facts I just outlined in perspective!

Even if other admins step in a reverse the damage fairly quickly, the abusing
admin will have gotten a little satisfaction from using their power and
imposing their will, and worse, they will have been unfair to a member
of the community and gotten away with it.  That is not good for community
morale.

These are not the kind of admins we need.  Admins are not in short supply,
and it is wrong to claim they can't behave themselves.  Yes there are people
who will strike their spouses or children, or use spiteful words their "loved
ones" will never be able to forget.  But it is possible to find people that can
show restraint, and more people will show restraint if there is a zero tolerance
policy.    It is a simple mental discipline, before you act, you ask yourself a couple
of questions about whether you are angry and why you are doing this.  Even then
if you still must strike out, you can still make the decision to use only user capabiliies and not the sysop powers you have been trusted with.  You don't
steal from or violate the community because you are mad at someone.

Yes, there are passionate people that we all love, but we and they need to
recognized that they are not cut out to be sysops or parents or spouses,
they can serve in other ways.   Perhaps they are not really bad people
in everyday life where people have faces and actions have consequences,
but if anonymity lowers their inhibitions they don't need to be sysops,
and we are doing them a favor by relieving them of this temptation.

                 -- Silverback


from_name: Jean-Christophe Chazalette

subject: [Foundation-l] wikibreak

body:
This is going cryptic. Can't we have a word of explanation? Can we know why
Danny quit? It is possible to consider us, people caring for Wikimedia and
spending on it most of our free time, different from brainless worms? This
is becoming like Freemasons : if you're not in the upper circle, you have no
chance to understand.

~~ villy

----- Original Message -----
From: "Anthere" <anthere9 at yahoo.com>
To: <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Monday, March 07, 2005 7:52 AM
Subject: [Foundation-l] wikibreak

|I am on a wikibreak for unknown time.
| I am lacking faith in the project as is now.
|
| Anthere
|
|
| _______________________________________________
| foundation-l mailing list
| foundation-l at wikimedia.org
| http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


subject: [Foundation-l] wikibreak


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
I think it clear that we should notice in anyone who has become involved.
For example, although we have a warning on each arbitration page (the main
page, not the evidence page) that editing the page enters you into the case,
folks may not read or understand that. So unless the person made the
original complaint or joined in it, if they latter add to the complaint, it
may not be clear to them that they have become a "plaintiff" and subject to
a "counterclaim".

Fred

> From: zero 0000 <nought_0000 at yahoo.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2005 06:45:07 -0800 (PST)
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] ArbCom - too attached to 'equal treatment'?
>
> Fred wrote:
>> A full investigation will improve the quality of our decisions. A
>> partial or
>> poor investigation restricted by artificial rules will reduce their
>> quality.
>> It's pretty much summed up by "The more you know..."
>
> I think you are missing the point.  I don't see anyone wanting to
> limit the AC's ability to look wherever they like.  The issue is of
> who they have the right to impose penalties on.
>
> Again:  if someone is accused by a RfA listing, they have the
> opportunity to write in their own defence and to have their
> fellows write in their defence.  Then the AC imposes a penalty
> on a different person who had no such opportunity since they
> didn't know it was necessary.  It is fundamentally unfair.
>
> The accuser is treated worse than the accused.
>
> The solution: except perhaps in emergencies, the AC should
> only be able to impose penalties on someone who has had an
> opportunity to mount a defence.  There should be a rule on
> how much opportunity must be given.
>
> Zero.
>
>
>
>
>
> __________________________________
> Celebrate Yahoo!'s 10th Birthday!
> Yahoo! Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web
> http://birthday.yahoo.com/netrospective/
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


body:
Right, if you want to play a game, try BatMUD.

Fred

> From: "Tony Sidaway" <minorityreport at bluebottle.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2005 14:59:28 -0000 (GMT)
> To: <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] ArbCom - too attached to 'equal treatment'?
>
> zero 0000 said:
>> Fred wrote:
>>> A full investigation will improve the quality of our decisions. A
>>> partial or
>>> poor investigation restricted by artificial rules will reduce their
>>> quality.
>>> It's pretty much summed up by "The more you know..."
>>
>> I think you are missing the point.  I don't see anyone wanting to
>> limit the AC's ability to look wherever they like.  The issue is of who
>> they have the right to impose penalties on.
>
> The arbcom is empowered to make such decisions.  There is no issue that I
> can see here, except for those who want editors to be free to complain
> about other editors without suffereing the consequences of their own
> behavior where this has been deleterious to Wikipedia.
> It's all a matter of what you think arbcom is for. Is it to be a catspaw
> with which adept procedure-manipulators can wage war on their less adept
> enemies, or is it (as I believe to be the case) a body elected by the
> editors and delegated by Jimmy Wales to stop editors doing harm to
> Wikipedia by their actions?  If the latter, it should levy penalties to
> all who merit such penalties.  If it only ever penalizes the people
> nominated by the petitioners, then it can only ever be driven by the
> perceptions of, and the prejudices of, the cleverer, more adept, editors.
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Rob

body:
>If some had been arranged for this fellow earlier,
this anti-wikipedia
> site MAY have been avoided.

Did you bother to look at the talk page or the history
of the article?  Did you bother to look at the history
of vandalism from Sollog and his minions?  He had
literally dozens of sockpuppets - so many that we made
a template to mark them all - and vandalized not only
[[Sollog]] but many other articles, including many
that were on the main page. Unless you can point to
exactly *what* we should have done and *when* we
should have done it, your suggestion is worse than
useless, it is insulting to all those editors who
worked to undo Sollog's vandalism while at the same
time creating an NPOV article on the person who was
attacking us.

__________________________________
Celebrate Yahoo!'s 10th Birthday!
Yahoo! Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web
http://birthday.yahoo.com/netrospective/


subject: [WikiEN-l] Evidence as to VFD being unusably big

body:
>Nonsense.  I have a dialup connection and have little
>problem working with the VfD page.

Not everyone on dialup is so lucky.  I don't even
bother attempting to load the vfd page anymore.

__________________________________
Celebrate Yahoo!'s 10th Birthday!
Yahoo! Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web
http://birthday.yahoo.com/netrospective/


subject: [WikiEN-l] ArbCom - too attached to 'equal treatment'?

body:
--- JAY JG <jayjg at hotmail.com> wrote:
> In my experience (and as I've said before on this list) people-related RfCs
> do no good whatsoever, and are simply a necessary bit of bureaucracy one
> must slog though in order to prepare for the real event, ArbCom.

This is not true at all in my experience as an arbcom member. If and when I
know an RfC exists on a user, I *always* look at that in order to see what
interested people in the community think about the user's behavior. RfCs are
very important in that regard.

-- mav

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


from_name: Rick

body:
--- Theresa Knott <theresaknott at gmail.com> wrote:
> > It wouldn't artificially discourage people from
> making legitimate complaints
> > for fear that they too would be penalised or at a
> minimum tempbanned from
> > editing an article until the hearing is complete.
>
> Is there any evidence that this has actually
> happened in the past?

{Waves hand}

RickK

__________________________________
Celebrate Yahoo!'s 10th Birthday!
Yahoo! Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web
http://birthday.yahoo.com/netrospective/


from_name: slimvirgin at gmail.com

body:
> >> It wouldn't artificially discourage people from making legitimate
> >> complaints for fear that they too would be penalised <snip>
Theresa Knott said:
> > Is there any evidence that this has actually happened in the past? . . .
> >I am not aware of a legit complaint not having been made out of fear.

I was reluctant to bring the case against the LaRouche editor
Herschelkrustofsky because of uncertainty about arbcom attitudes.
Herschel was operating a couple of sockpuppets and for months the
three user accounts engaged in absurd POV editing and original
research, as well as trying to goad editors into making personal
attacks. I couldn't prove they were sockpuppets, and twice asked a
developer for help but got no response, so I couldn't bring a case.
They started attacking me in November, and I managed to last several
weeks of daily snide remarks and POV editing, when I finally broke
down and called one of them a "toxic troll" twice within half an hour,
the only time I had said anything that could be called a personal
attack. The context was that, after days of negotiation with Herschel
to have an NPOV tag taken down, we finally reached an agreement, took
down the tag, and then one of his sockpuppets put it straight back up
again. Hence my troll comment. Herschel was pleased as punch that I'd
finally weakened and he went straight to the arbcom page and asked for
a penalty against me. Fred Bauder responded by saying that if I ever
showed up at the arbcom, I'd be banned for a day or two at least.
This, without having seen any evidence or asking for my side of the
story. That definitely made me reluctant to bring a case, though I did
in the end.

In January, I asked David Gerard for help regarding my sockpuppet
suspicion. He was able to get a developer to check the accounts, and
it was confirmed that they appeared to be sockpuppets, so I took the
case to the new, recently elected arbcom. In the course of it,
Herschel complained about my toxic-troll comment on an arbcom talk
page. He submitted no evidence on the evidence page, and provided no
diffs, but the arbcom took his comment as evidence and found the diffs
for him. I didn't know they would do this, and hadn't prepared a
defense. I wasn't penalized but I was formally warned.

When the proposed decision against Herschel was being written up, Fred
also made a couple of remarks about the need to deal with "the POV
warriors on the other side," and named one editor, but he said
warriors plural, so I assume he also meant me and/or one of the other
editors. This meant we had to spend more time submitting defenses for
ourselves. Fred provided no evidence of POV-pushing on our part, no
examples, diffs, nothing, so we didn't even know what we were
defending ourselves against.

These were minor things, but they were annoying, because several
editors had spent a lot of time dealing with Herschel for eight
months, and we were doing it for Wikipedia, not for our own benefit.
None of us had personal POVs that we were pushing, except a desire for
accuracy. Keeping him and the two other accounts at bay was hard work,
as was putting up with his constant snide remarks, and then putting
the arbcom case together; yet it felt as though we were on trial too.

If we'd had an editorial review committee, editors could have gone
there about his original-research and NPOV violations when he first
turned up in May, without having to wait for sockpuppet checks or for
him to violate other conduct-related policies.

I should add to this, however, that I'm grateful to the arbcom for the
decisions they reached in the end, as they managed to stop his
activities here completely.

Sarah


from_name: Nicolas Weeger

subject: [Foundation-l] wikibreak

body:
I'll agree with Jean-Christophe. I'm sorry Anthere, but you have some responsability towards users, so you can't just break without at least a short explanation :)
(which, granted, can wait a few days)

And if those are issues that concern everyone, you should just spill'em on the mailing lists, so that everyone knows what is happening. And if totally private, well... ill-luck.

Nicolas

Acc?dez au courrier ?lectronique de La Poste : www.laposte.net ;
3615 LAPOSTENET (0,34?/mn) ; t?l : 08 92 68 13 50 (0,34?/mn)


subject: [Foundation-l] wikibreak


from_name: csherlock at ljh.com.au

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: A nasty and weird site

body:
Arno M wrote:
> Here's a site that is rather critical of wikipedia. In fact, its very critical.
>
> http://www.wikipediasucks.com/
>
> Some interesting popups appear when you leave the site which perhaps indicate what its worth.
> Its claim that "There are now thousands of pages if you search for 'wikipedia sucks' in
> any search engine." is wrong - the supplied does a google search for pages with the words wikipedia or sucks, which not surprisingly does yield thousands of results. But a search for the phrase brings
> out 149 instead. And whats all this about Sollog, the Temple of 'Hayah, and a $10 million fine for
> "religious hate crimes"? Bizarre!
>
> However, I do feel compelled to ask : who are those cute young friends on the yacht with Jimbo?
>

As noone seems to have answered this to any degree of satisfaction
(except for the answer about the babe), I recommend that Arno check out
[[Sollog]]. That's who runs the site.

TBSDY


from_name: JAY JG

body:
>From: Delirium <delirium at hackish.org>
>
>The current hope is that the community can deal with this, if people who
>behave badly are taken out of the system.  That is, the community will spot
>and remove original research, and if someone keeps readding it despite a
>consensus that it should be removed, the person will eventually be banned.
>
>I'd be open to a committee policing for original research at some point, if
>that turns out to be necessary.  Policing for NPOV is a lot more
>complicated.

Well, as I noted on the list a couple of days ago, policing for original
research seems equally difficult, when even long time editors consider
original research to be "simple facts" or "simple deductive reasoning."
Perhaps the [[Wikipedia:No original research]] page needs to be updated with
examples which make that point that if it really is that simple, someone
else will have done the work for you already, and all you need to do is
quote them.

Jay.


from_name: dpbsmith at verizon.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: upto11.net

body:
>From: "David Sabel" <david at sabels.org>
>Subject: [WikiEN-l] Introducing upto11.net - seeking advice
[snip]
>We just launched upto11.net, a music recommendations and search community
that integrates articles about musical artists, albums and songs.
>
>So far, I've added us to the Friends of Wikipedia page
>
>Are there othere pages where links might be appropriate? We'd like get the
word out to the Wikipedia community, but do it in a way that is appropriate.
>
>Thanks in advance,
>
>David Sabel

1) THANKS FOR ASKING. Good move.

2) One very good approach would be to encourage _your_ user base to do useful
work editing Wikipedia articles, create accounts, and _identify themselves as
upto11.net members on their usage page._ You can... let me phrase this
carefully so nobody will jump on me too hard... get away with a reasonable
amount of promotion on user pages, which can be personal chatty diaries or
pretty much whatever you want.

You can certainly create such a user page yourself. And Google does index
Wikipedia user pages.

3) DO caution your user base _against_ inserting links to your site on any
pages that are in the "main" name space--that is, in actual encyclopedia
articles. This will raise hackles unless the link provides useful information
that is very clearly pertinent to the article and is not easily found
elsewhere.

4) I was just on your site. Jeez, I wish Wikipedia were as fast. (Wikipedia is
having a bad day today... don't try to do anything with Wikipedia right now!)


body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> actionforum at comcast.net wrote:
>
>> -------------- Original message --------------
>>
>>> There are some minor issues, but I can't see anything overly serious,
>>> particularly considering that 172 has had two massive articles
>>> (relating to these topics, too) featured in this period, which
>>> suggests to me that he is making an effort to reform.
>>
>> Desysopping does not mean he can't continue to edit articles, although
>> it may lessen his powers to enforce his severe authorial
>> territorialism through vendettas.
>>
> What might be an interesting approach when accusations are made would be
> to have the promoter of a failed accusation serve the same fate that he
> sought to have applied on the accused.  Thus if he seeks to have someone
> de-sysopped and fails he would be de-sysopped; if seeks to have the
> person banned for a month and fails he would be banned for a month. etc.
>
> It might put an end to all the whining. ;-)
>
> Ec

Not to put too fine a point on this, but this would intimidate real
victims. That's why they don't apply this in real life. I think the best
example of this is the RFC that was (and still is, for some reason)
filed on myself. Personally, I think it was silly, but nonetheless I
support the creation of it if enough people endorsed it. They did.
However about 15 other people OPPOSED the creation of the RFC. Does this
mean that the creator of the RFC should be penalised? No.

Incidently, I do know that filing an RFC on a user is not meant to be a
"punishment" against that user, rather a request for people to, well,
*comment* on that user, but this is as close an example I can come to.

The only exception I can see is when you get a user like CheeseDreams,
who filed so many RFCs and ArbCom requests that it became a farce and
eventually harassment. In this case, however, the ArbCom pretty much
made her a vexation litigant.

TBSDY


body:
>From: Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com>
>
>Some people are incorrigible.  Yes, many can be reached, but not all.

This is an important point that is often overlooked by idealists.  There
*are* people who are long time disruptive influences and who *cannot* be
reached by any sort of reasoning, Wikilove, mediation, etc.

Jay.


from_name: Tony Sidaway

body:
Arno M said:
>
> If some had been arranged for this fellow earlier, this anti-wikipedia
> site MAY have been avoided.

I don't think you understand the situation.  Sollog is a nutcase with a
track record of acting like this.  He's a loony and nothing on that site
reflects badly on Wikipedia.


subject: FW: [WikiEN-l] Moving to wiktionary and deleting

body:
Sean Barrett said:
>
> What I failed to communicate is that I don't think deletion policies
> apply.  The articles in question are already listed for moving; I think
>  that moving them doesn't involve the deletion process, speedy or
> otherwise.

The problem is that as far as I'm aware there is no single consensual
process for deciding to move to wiktionary.  The items in that category
are just those that someone or other has edited to add the mtw template.
So we can't just delete the item there and then, unless the move to
wiktionary was decided as a result of discussion on WP:RM, WP:VFD or
WP:CSD.


body:
>From: Theresa Knott <theresaknott at gmail.com>
> > It wouldn't artificially discourage people from making legitimate
>complaints
> > for fear that they too would be penalised or at a minimum tempbanned
>from
> > editing an article until the hearing is complete.
>
>Is there any evidence that this has actually happened in the past?

Public evidence?  No, of course not.

>Certainly requests for arbitration appear to come thick and fast. I am
>not aware of a legit complaint not having been made out of fear.

You're on ArbCom, so you wouldn't be; you only hear the cases made by people
who are brave/foolish enough to approach ArbCom.

Jay.


from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [Wikitech-l] ORDER BY and partial field indexes

body:
Richard Holton wrote:

>A question for you MySQL gurus out there:
>
>Currently, the categorylinks table uses the index
>
>cl_sortkey(cl_to,cl_sortkey(128)),
>
>Note that the cl_sortkey field in the table is varchar(255).
>
>In the categoryPage query, there is an ORDER BY clause on cl_sortkey.
>However, this query ends up using a filesort. I've found that if the
>index is changed to use the full width of the cl_sortkey field, then
>the ORDER BY does not need the filesort.
>
>Does anyone know how to eliminate the need for a filesort without
>having to expand the index to the full width of cl_sortkey? Or should
>we just bite the bullet and use the full width?
>
>I've tried ORDER BY LEFT(cl_sortkey,128), but that doesn't help
>(probably no big surprise).
>
>-Rich Holton
>
>
Rich,

I don't know the situation in detail, but this looks like there's an
index on the sortkey, which will be used by default if you sort on the
entire thing. Sort on a substring, or any other transformation of the
sortkey, and the database will not be able to use its pre-existing
index. Why would you want to sort on a subkey, anyway, if sorting on the
full key is more efficient?

(Incidentally, I'm having fun with databases at work, too. I generate
complex SQL queries programmatically from logic expressions, only to
find that the DB will tend to generate implicit outer joins rather than
doing even the simplest evaluation of constant-expressions. So I end up
having to do everything myself, leading the DB slowly through series of
SELECTs linked up by bits of trivial sorting-and-optimization code.  DBs
are dumber than rocks.)

-- Neil