There is also a relative lack of trolling and vandalizing so far. I've also
been reviewing edits by anonymous contributors and have been blown away at
their average quality - every other one seems to be a moderate to major
improvement on the article.
Sweet!
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
WikiKarma:
Firefighting duty on Recent Changes
I've said this before and I will say it one more time: Do we want to keep the
piss-poor definition for automatic article detection?
I propose (again) that the current definition be used for "entries" and a more
stringent definition be used for "probable articles" (everything, of course,
is still a page).
We can simply take the count for entries and exclude anything that is less
than 500 bytes and has a link on it to [[Wikipedia:Disambiguation]] (or is
listed on one of links of disambiguating pages pages). That would give us
about 80,000 probable articles in the English Wikipedia (yes that still
includes about 30,000 rambot articles but so what? They are far more useful
as /articles/ than are many other entries we call articles).
The current prediction is that we should hit the 100,000 mark the middle of
next week. Press release or no press release, that number on the Main Page
will get some attention (thus the need for a press release to explain
things).
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
On Monday 20 January 2003 04:00 am, Brion wrote:
> As much as it's tempting to tell people to not come back until they
> upgrade their computer, they're not always willing or able to do so. Not
> allowing them to edit is perhaps not _quite_ as morally repellant as
> kicking a grandmother in a wheelchair down the stairs, but I still
> wouldn't recommend it.
Would you also advocate that that same wheelchair-bound grandmother be able to
drive even though she is blind and senile? Nobody is advocating kicking her
down the stairs - that was a bad (flame bait) analogy. So let's end the flame
there, shall we?
So let me get you straight: we are supposed to follow people around with
hideously broken browsers, revert pages that their browsers destroy and then
spend a lot of time re-creating what they were trying to do? Have fun doing
that Brion - I guess I'll ignore meta too if this is expected.
I'm all for supporting as many browsers and platforms as possible, but when
someone's choice of browser and platform, in spite of our best efforts to be
inclusive, /still/ destroys pages and causes /a lot/ of work for others, then
that isn't fair to the community (who are all volunteers) and slows down the
progress of the project.
Now annoying things like the 32k limit can and should be dealt with by making
sure articles and talk pages don't get too big (a good idea anyway). But what
happened to the article in question was that whitespace was added to each and
every line making it impossible to fix without a revert or spending dozens of
minutes deleting each whitespace (if there is a fast way to do this, them
please tell me about it - that would make this an annoying but /workable/
browser problem).
--mav
This requires a lot of Wikikarma:
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Scandium&diff=0&oldid=602495
>It is a policy issue when I try to do something, I
>explain *why* I do it on Brion page, and in the
>comment box,
Why am I supposed to be reading Brion's talk page to figure out what you were
doing on a completely different page? That is silly.
>.....
>What I did (but left unfinished for it took me quite
>some time just to do that, and even adding something
>on the talk page would have taken about 10 mn to avoid
>getting things messed) was utterly discarded and
>labelled destruction by you, and is now unrecoverable.
? I did a backwards merge - it took me 7 minutes. However, when I first saw
your changes along with destruction your browser caused, I didn't have 5
minutes or the urge to fix the mess your browser caused AND recreate your
edits. Why should I be responsible for that anyway?
>I consider having many different propositions done on
>the same page is useless, they could be on separate
>pages. That whole page is a total mess, and it is very
>hard to see the different arguments. All the arguments
>are not even there. Nobody is doing the job. I tried
>to start it. And it was dismissed as inopportune.
>Without consideration.
>
>When edits are reverted without consideration, that's
>a policy issue.
I considered your changes - and I disagreed with them. Especially the part
where your browser /destroyed/ the page. Hence this is a technical issue.
--mav
WikiKarma
I updated all the year pages and most of the other pages liked from
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_17
(For why GIFs are bad, see http://burnallgifs.org/ )
At present, when someone uploads a GIF image file to Wikipedia, they're
told it's "not a recommended format". This isn't likely to stop anyone
once they've got that far, so they'll probably just hit "Save anyway".
Plus, we've got a zillion GIF files already uploaded from the olden
days.
Would it be desireable to do automated conversion to PNG? Or at the
least, offering a conversion along with that upload warning.
Pros:
* By eliminating the use of a patent-encumbered file format on our site,
we support the open/free-content ideals this project is built on.
* Wikipedia and Bomis avoid the potential of a Unisys lawsuit for
'contributory infringement' of their LZW compression patent for
providing download of files that might be compressed with unlicensed
software.
Cons:
* Animated GIFs can't be converted cleanly (or is that a pro? ;) (Note
that there is MNG, but it's not widely supported)
* Some browsers don't support transparency in PNGs correctly. These are
older versions, but still in use.
* Conversion may hide/destroy embedded comments which note the origin of
a mistakenly uploaded copyrighted non-GFDL image, making it harder to
track down things we need to eliminate
Comments to http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_All_GIFs please.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
On Sunday 19 January 2003 04:00 am, wikipedia-l-request(a)wikipedia.org wrote:
> Ah, sorry, I probably should have sent this both to
> the main and the tech. There are both a tech and a
> policy issues here...
How is it a policy issue when it was your browser that inserted the huge
amount of whitespace in the page in question? My response is where it should
be - on Wikitech.
--mav
WikiKarma:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ira_Flatow
and updating each year page and many other pages from January 18
Ah, sorry, I probably should have sent this both to
the main and the tech. There are both a tech and a
policy issues here...
---------
Note: forwarded message attached.
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I may be committing blasphemy here, but how much is Wikipedia 'married' to the
GNU/FDL? The reason I'm asking is that I recently wanted to download a picture
of the signing of the Treaty of Rome from the EU website. Only after I did so,
I found that the pictures can be copied only for non-commercial purposes. And
while Wikipedia itself would fall under that heading, the GNU/FDL does not
forbid commercial use. And it's not the first time I've had that problem with
texts or pictures either. The GNU/FDL allows a lot, which is good on itself,
but also means that we cannot use any material under stricter copyleft
restrictions.
Is there a way around this problem? Is there a way to put such material in
Wikipedia without getting in these license difficulties? If not, could it
perhaps be made possible to set it up so? For example, by not having the
pages themselves fall under the GNU/FDL, but some modified version where
certain explicitly specified material is left out (the default being that
there is no such material)?
Andre Engels
Hello,
I restored the test pages for the wikipedia main page (they got deleted
when I moved my stuff to a new server)
It can be found now at http://djini.de/wikipedia-portal/
The PHP-version is not running correctly (the language guessing
functionality did not work when I tested), but I have no time to debug at
the moment.
If you send clear suggestions (like: take these colors, change the text
here into the following), I will put up new pages with your modifications.
greetings,
elian