The Wikibooks portal, http://www.wikibooks.org, is a redirect to the
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks_portal which is maintained by the
sysops of the English Wikibooks. However all language editions of Wikibooks
should have opportunity to request updates or redesigns of this portal.
At March 2006, the English Wikibooks sysops redesigned the portal to feature
the top ten language editions, as does http://www.wikisource.org. Recently
an anoymous user noted that the Swedish edition reached 10th place.
However, when I checked the stats [1], Swedish had 11th place and Hebrew at
10th. Thus I would remove Hungarian and add Hebrew.
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikibooks
Instead, because positions 10, 11, and 12 seemed unstable, but there was a
larger gap between 12 and 13, I unilaterally increased the number of
featured editions to 12, thus retaining Hungarian and adding both Hebrew
and Swedish. However I do not have translations for "open-content
textbooks" and "modules" in those languages.
Thus, I need someone to provide the messages in Hebrew and Swedish. I also
want everyone to check translations for languages that they read, and
provide changes if necessary. Please also alert us if an edition is missing
from the list of "All Languages". You can use the talk page at
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Talk:Wikibooks_portal or reply to this
message.
--[[Wikibooks:en:User:Kernigh]], sysop
> opinions like this that seem to encourage this type of content to remain
from Robert Horning
> The problems with such an article is more likely to be in its effect on
> the copycats and other unprofessional idiots.
> Calling on Jimbo to decide on something is a cop-out. It's a sad
> admission that the community isn't strong enough to settle its own
> problems.
from Ray Saintonge
Which is precisely why I suggested having a constitution of some
description.
If you don't want this type of content on wikibooks then you have to give up
neutrality. And you're going to have to be very specific. I am working on
a wiki project that educates how to start businesses.
I would hate for someone later on to declare that "capitalism is theft" and
then go on to use that as a reason to remove my project.
NPOV may be adequately defined. A textbook on how alarm systems work, how
they're installed and how they may be disabled is not advocacy to break into
homes, but it can be used that way.
There are two ways of defining rules: everything is allowed unless
specifically forbidden; everything is forbidden unless specifically allowed.
You may wish to adopt the former.
How about a growing list that starts with the following:
- No book may describe how to perform any of the following actions:
i) torture
ii) murder
iii) all forms of violence from either public or private sources
iv) cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment
v) xenophobia or discrimination based on gender, age, sex,
pregnancy, race, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual
orientation, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language or
birth
You can discuss torture in an entirely neutral way (how to use a battery,
water and jumper leads to cause pain, for instance), but the discussion of
torture (as above) can be banned outright. I would suggest that the list
itself needs to be maintained by someone with an international legal
background (no good having laws specific to any country) to offer guidance
and a small team to act as "constitutional court" to decide on changes to
these rules. And don't defer to the Human Rights Commission, you may find
that Libya is in charge of it again.
The above - by the by - is paraphrased from the South African constitution.
---
Gavin
Take this a little further, though. A "guide" to terrorism (or rape for
that matter) exposes how the "trick" is performed and so allows others to
come up with strategies to combat that act.
The question, of course, is whether or not that ups the game. Every new
computer virus that comes out has to get through an ever more sophisticated
set of virus scanners and so there is an evolutionary process.
But the terrorist attack of September 11 already upped that game. Surely it
is helpful to know how terrorists and other nutcases plan their attacks so
that we, who are not homicidal, can at least have some insight into how the
other side thinks?
Gavin
[ Wikimania translation update Nr.1 / 1st week of April. ]
Hello,
Wikimania, the International Wikimedia conference, is being held in
Boston, MA, USA this August 4-6. This is an update on its translation
and multilingual content.
== General ==
* Translation of the Wikimania website main page CfP has begun on meta.
* The deadlines have changed; so the CfP and short announcement need
to be changed.
* Translation of the CfP is continuing on on meta; some will be
released in this week.
* You are invited to help translate visa info
* Wikimania translations and their status are now listed directly on
the Wikimania website. See
http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania:Translations
Spanish, French, and Chinese translators are especially welcome.
== Main Page translation ==
* Main Page #1 of the Wikimania website is ready to translate. Drafts
are being worked on in: Chinese (zh), Japanese (ja), Dutch (nl), and
Polish (pl).
* Other languages also need attention from their translators,
especially Spanish.
* Wouldn't you like to have Main Page in your own language? Create
your language version on meta or contact User:Aphaia or User:Sj on
meta.
* This main page will be a visitor's portal to
wikimania2006.wikimedia.org and will provide visitors with an overview
of what Wikimania is.
Workplace: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/Wikimania/Main_Page
== CfP translation ==
* Translation of the CfP is now in its last stage. In addition to four
languages (Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Japanese), Polish is now
waiting for proofreading. Native speakers are invited review those
versions; if you find mistakes, please fix them. If you think it is
okay, please leave your comments on talk.
* A German translation is going on. German speakers are invited to help.
* French & Chinese translators will be a great help for us; you can
start your work from which you prefer - either Main Page or CfP.
Workplace: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2006_Call_for_Participation
== Visas ==
* Some attendees to the conference will need visas from the US
government, and visa information will be helpful for them. We have
information available in English, but it would be more helpful if
it were multilingual.
* Polish translators are working on this; this also needs for a
proofreader. If you speak Polish, please review it if improvement is
necessary. If it looks good, you are then invited to join Main Page
translation ;-)
* Chinese, French, and Arabic translations would be welcome.
Workplace: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/Wikimania/Visas
== Email distribution ==
* This update is sent not only to Wikimedia mailinglists. If you
receive extra copies, please let us know.
* If you know a translation-related mailinglist and are sure this
newsletter wouldn't violate their policies, you are welcome to post it
there. Or you may want to forward it to a friend. We will appreciate
your help greatly.
== Special note: proper names, cultural details ==
* Sometimes proper names are a headache for translators. Especially so
when one is not sure how to transcribe a name. The difficulties can
increase when your source and target languages have different scripts
- between English and Japanese, or between Chinese and Russian ...
** One example - the letter Z is pronounced as [z] in many languages,
but in German it alone is normally [ts]. The letter S is [z] at the
top of a word in German but in many others [s]. Most German speakers
know this, and can be aware of this when they read out foreign proper
names.
* Another cause of headaches is cultural differences; sometimes
phrases, descriptions, or nicknames have special cultural
significance, and are difficult to translate. These often require
extra explanation by a native speaker.
* If you are dealing with a difficult transcription or a cultural
issue, other translators are probably facing the same difficulty.
Please use translators-l or our noticeboard [[m:Meta:Babylon]] on meta
for discussion.
Workplace: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Babylon
========
Wikimania translation update
Editors: Aphaia, Sj
Wikimania 2006 Translators' team
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/Wikimania
I think you will continue to have a problem with contentious content if the
only means of controlling it is the NPOV. Encouragement to genocide can be
presented very dispassionately.
A book documenting how to build a nuclear bomb is a textbook. A book on how
to build a nuclear bomb and then place it on a commuter train is an
instruction book on terrorism.
It may be against the spirit of Wikimedia but the only way to control this
is to have some declared rules about where you stand. Perhaps you should
consider the idea of a general constitution or bill of rights. An
instruction book on "How to launch a hostile leveraged buyout" could be
offensive to people with ambivalent attitudes to capitalism. An instruction
book on "How to send anthrax by mail" will offend others. Clearly, though,
if you wish to be entirely neutral you have to host all this information.
As soon as you start to judge and select what content is allowed and what
isn't, you are choosing sides.
If you choose sides, make it quite clear where the line is and don't let
anyone cross.
And you have to decide.
Where do analysis of Sun Tzu's "Art of War", or Klauswitz "On War", find
itself within the current imbroglio? Both books give a penetrating and
illustrative guide to waging war.
--
Gavin Chait
SJ wrote:
>For a demographic breakdown of visitors to the site in the US, the
>Hitwise data are pretty good. Here are data from early March:
>
>http://hcs.harvard.edu/%7Esjklein/WP-Charts-030206.doc
>
>
With the caveat that their breakdown by age starts at 18, which
obviously omits a sizable chunk of the online population, and we can be
fairly confident that this affects Wikipedia more than some other sites.
How much this matters may depend on what lines of research you're
interested in pursuing.
--Michael Snow
I'm trying to get the sense of the Wikimedia community here on a
potentially explosive topic.
I started a thread on the Staff Lounge at Wikibooks over what to do with
content that openly advocates breaking laws. The goal I had was to help
come up with some wording that we could add to existing policies that
would prohibit this sort of content from being added to Wikibooks.
It has since devolved into general adult-level content including
pornography and if it should or should not be permitted and what sorts
of policies should be set for handling this sort of content. Generally
pornography is not a problem at all on Wikibooks, because it almost
always involves a copyright violation or has other policy issues that
come into play well before it becomes an issue over pornography. The
one exception was ordered to be deleted by Jimbo himself, and comes back
to the above issue because it involved a display of what could arguably
be child pornography. That doesn't mean it won't be a problem in the
future, but at the moment nobody seems to be trying to push the envelope
here.
Where Wikibooks is having some real problems is with things like the
Manual of Crime, How to Rape, AIM Password Cracking, or a currently
contentious book on the use of illegal drugs called Drugs: Fact and
Fiction. There was one book that even advocated genocide, but that was
defeated by a VfD. The point I was trying to bring up is that these
books should not have to go before the Wikibooks community if there is a
clear policy that is strongly against this sort of practice. As Jimbo
pointed out in an earlier discussion, many of these books should simply
be removed through a speedy deletion process with perhaps a concurring
opinion by another user (i.e. administrator) before it goes.
My question to the Wikimedia community at large is to see how you have
dealt with content of this nature, or if this is something that is
restricted mainly to Wikibooks? I've tried to use NPOV arguments to
help temper some of the content, but many times it is simply better to
remove the content entirely as the entire book is advocacy of this sort
of activity, or to leave it in place with an obvious bias. Sometimes
the book is added by an anonymous contributor over a few days and then
is a dead project, but in a few cases there are some very active
contributors who are very passionate that the content and fight tooth
and nail to keep the content in its current form and on Wikibooks, with
even a community of contributors that are involved as well. With enough
other problems on Wikibooks, administrators have a tendancy to simply
leave content like this alone under this situation and perhaps add it to
their watch list as something to take care of in the future.
One proposal was to simply "wall off" the mature content in such a way
that no links would go into or out of the mature content area, and
become in effect a project within a project. I don't know how to
effectively do this, but in theory it might be possible. Policing that
content for vandalism is going to be a nightmare, and I can see other
problems as well including administrators openly encouraging vandalism
on this sub-set of pages. The more I think about it, the more I dislike
the idea, but it at least is a partial solution to the issue.
--
Robert Scott Horning
I am preparing a Masters thesis on wikipedia and am
questioning whether
> wikipedia users are representative of the regular
population. I would
> like to know what demographic uses wikipedia? Have
you collected any
> statistics on the representative makeup of those who
work on your site
> including gender, age, geographic location, income,
education, ownership
> of home, marital status? If so, would you feel
comfortable sharing it
> with me for the purposes of my research.
>
> I would appreciate if you can help.
>
> Kent Emerson.
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
Hoi,
I have read the thread as it was published so far and I am amazed that
nobody mentioned one simple reason why people do not edit or add content
to the Arab, the Farsi, the Hebrew and Assamese projects .. It is too
bloody hard. When you say "everybody can edit", it is as if it is the
same effort is involved. I read somewhere where an African president
said; "we do not have scripts yet for all of our indigenous languages.
When the yi.wikipedia celebrated its 1000th article Gangleri was thanked
for his hard work to make this technically possible. When I created some
Farsi training material on Wikibooks, I needed two browsers to complete
certain tasks; both Internet Explorer and Firefox were not up to the task.
Gangleri does a great job, he is imho one of the most valuable
Wikimedians because he tries to make it possible to have information in
all languages. To take things to the next level, we need more
developers; people of all the language families and make sure with them
that MediaWiki is up to the task. So far we have been self
congratulatory about how well we do. We profess that we want to do
better in Africa Asia and South America. We can if we make it a priority.
For me improving these issues /is/ a priority. http://WiktionaryZ.org
requires good support for all languages. I am happy that we initiated
the "Multilingual Mediawiki" project as it will further improve the
multilingual capabilities of MediaWiki. It will still not do all the
things that are necessary to make MediaWiki as easy to edit as it is for
us. For that I need people that speak Hindi Assamese Twi Farsi Arab
Hebrew and help us define what /their /problem with our software is and
when we are lucky help us fix these issues.
Thanks,
GerardM
Mark Williamson wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> While it's sort of obvious, given the digital divide, that the number
> of articles in Wikipedias is not proportional to the number of
> speakers, for example Hindi has a much smaller number of articles
> compared to speakers than most active Wikipedias; German has more.
>
> However, something that people may not notice as much is the
> incongruency between popularity of a particular language version and
> the number of articles in that version.
>
> The most visited Wikipedias, in order, are:
>
> 1 English (65%)
> 2 German (10%)
> 3 Japanese (6%)
> 4 Spanish (3%)
> 5 French (2%)
> 6 Polish (2%)
> 7 Chinese (2%)
> 8 Arabic (2%)
> 9 Italian (1%)
> 10 Hebrew (1%)
> 11 Turkish (1%)
> 12 Dutch (1%)
> 13 Portuguese (1%)
> (all others combined total 1% of visits)
>
> On the other hand, the list of Wikipedias ranked by number of articles is:
> 1 English (1048.7K)
> 2 German (376.9K)
> 3 French (261.1K)
> 4 Polish (223.8K)
> 5 Japanese (196.3K)
> 6 Dutch (156.9K)
> ...
> 8 Italian (146.8K)
> 9 Portuguese (123.8K)
> 10 Spanish (105.0K)
> ...
> 12 Chinese (61.48K)
> ...
> 17 Hebrew (34.35K)
> ...
> 29 Turkish (19.94K)
> ...
> 37 Arabic (12.03K)
>
> What this says to me is that these Wikipedias are not attracting new
> pages proportional to views when compared with other Wikipedias. This
> may be because people don't want to write new pages, but it seems to
> me more likely that people simply don't know they can.
>
> How can this be fixed? Perhaps a site notice inviting people to write
> quality pages or register, or a drive to recruit new Wikipedians from
> the academic community.
>
> Mark
On 4/2/06, Gordon Joly <gordon.joly(a)pobox.com> wrote:
>
>
> Can I just add my name to the list who have complained in the past
> that Meta is not useful for some aspects of our work? I was concerned
> that information about the inception of "Wikimedia UK" was hard to
> find, duplicated etc. This meant that many volunteers who might have
> taken part got lost on the way or may never have known about the
> existence of the team (who worked very hard and drank some good "real
> ale" on Sunday afternoons:-)
That was good ale :-)
>
> The main difference between, say, IRC (and email) and a wiki is that
> a the former are linear (by timestamp) and the latter (a set of Wiki
> pages) is not.
>
> A recent example of "Wikimeia UK" existing on a island was that
> (previously discussed) total lack of any involvement from Welsh
> speakers, who may or may not live in Wales. If "Wikimedia UK" wants
> to be inclusive, and democratic, it has to open the doors a little
> wider, and not live in "Meta Space", but In Real Life.
>
> Hence, I would submit to you that Mediawiki 1.5.x and 1.6.x may not
> be the "magic bullet". A wiki is poor tool for many jobs.
But I don't understand what you're getting at here. As you remember,
information on Wikimedia UK was quite spread out - so I made a
navigational template (horrible at first - then a bit nicer).
The fact that people might not be using the Wikimedia UK pages (if
that's true) is a symptom of the fact that *we* haven't provided for
that. That's you, me, and the others who have been working on this
over the last few months. If you want to get participation of and
ideas from Welsh speakers, you use a variety of methods (email, wiki,
IRC, real-life meetings) and a variety of these mailing lists, wikis,
chatrooms and community gatherings to bring together some ideas. The
fact that it's not what we want it to be right now is nothing to do
with Meta *itself*.
Cormac
>
> --
> Gordo (aka LoopZilla)
> gordon.joly(a)pobox.com
> http://pobox.com/~gordo/
> http://www.loopzilla.org/
> _______________________________________________
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>