Already, even though it has only existed for a day, the Cantonese
Wikipedia has been full of activity.
Take the main talk page as an example:
http://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page
Already, there are active discussions on:
1) User interface translation
2) Name of the encyclopaedia (Should it be same asthe Mandarin, which
is pronounced in Cantonese as "wai gei", or should it be a more
phonetic Cantonese, like "wik gei"?)
3) Promotion of cantonese wp
4) "Standard Characters" (Hoeng Gong Zi)
5) Subdomain (some people think it's unfair to use zh-yue, and that
just yue should be used instead or such)
6) Getting an admin and making a logo
7) Should it be "Cantonese Wikipedia" or "Yue Wikipedia"
8) Name of main page
9) Allmessages, namespace translation
With such activity in such little time I have no doubt we can expect
phenomenal growth from this new Wikipedia.
Mark
--
"Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin
I Would like to see the addition of a non-wiki formatting of an english HyperText Markup Language
---------------------------------
New Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. Call regular phones from your PC and save big.
David Gerard (dgerard(a)gmail.com) [060323 12:16]:
> For those who missed it, I've put my segment up:
> http://static.rocknerd.org/david/radiowales-q0-mono.ogg
> Ogg Vorbis, 2,311,827 bytes.
Apparently there's no mailing list for cy:. But I chatted with Telsa on IRC
about this a coupla nights ago and she says she'll shop the URL around the
Welsh Nationalist-inclined bloggers, which may help recruitment for cy:.
Telsa also says the big problem with cy: is that it's really badly written
for the most part ... basically, that it needs some native speakers who are
good writers to give it a top-to-bottom revision and set the standard.
Which is actually quite feasible with 4,000 articles, if the editors can be
found. I know no Welsh myself or I'd dive in ...
- d.
Note: I cross-posted this to several lists, because I think this is of
interest to many; please reply on wikitech-l only.
A long, long time ago, I started writing a PHP script to convert
MediaWiki markup into XML. I believe it is now feature-complete and
relatively reliable. Not only can it process a single wiki text, but a
list of articles, taking the text from any MediaWiki-based site online.
It uses the same method to replace templates.
The generated XML can now be converted into other formats. For
demonstration [1], I offer "plain text" and DocBook XML.
What I cannot demonstrate (due to limitations of my hosting service) is
the subsequence conversion to HTML or PDF from the DocBook XML. However,
it is quite easy to set up an automatic conversion locally if you have
the necessary DocBook files installed.
As an example, I have generated a PDF [2] by
1. Entering the titles of the articles I want to have
2. Chosing "DocBook PDF" as output format
3. Clicking "Convert"
4. Waiting for the PDF to open
Really, that easy! :-)
I am well aware of some shortcomings of the example PDF, however, most
of them (no left margin, gigantic tables, misshaped images) are flaws of
DocBook, or of the default stylesheets I use. I'm not really familiar
with DocBook and hope for help by people that are.
While the converter seems to work pretty well, I'm sure there are lots
of fun bugs to find. If you do find a page that breaks, please mail me
the title so I can find the bug, or even better, fix it yourself! The
code is in CVS, "wiki2xml" module, "php" directory (ignore the old C
code in the main directory;-)
A word about speed: Yes, the process of creating a PDF takes some time.
However, most of it is DocBook at work, and of course the loading times
for articles and templates. Converting the example from wiki markup to
XML to DocBook XML to PDF takes 2 minutes 20 seconds total, but the
actual conversion wiki-to-XML is done in just 8 seconds.
Apart from bug fixing, my next priority is ODT (OpenOffice) format
output. Also, I would like to extend Special:Export in MediaWiki so it
can return a list of authors, which can then be added automagically to
all converted files.
Awaiting your feedback,
Magnus
[1] http://magnusmanske.de/wiki2xml/w2x.php
[2] http://magnusmanske.de/wiki2xml/Biology_topics.pdf (3.7 MB!)
The "create account" currently currently does not display any (lack of)
rights people are entitled to when they create an account. Shouldn't
this screen at least need to display that accounts will not be deleted
and may be even have a box that needs to checked, stating that people
accept Wikipedia's privacy policy?
Cheers,
Ruud
Below is a letter that Britannica sent out today to some of its
customers, in response to the December Nature article comparing the
accuracy of articles in Wikipedia and Britannica. A more detailed
review of the Nature study, including responses to each alleged error
and omission, is linked from the front page of www.eb.com.
==================================================
>> Because you're a valued Britannica customer, I'm writing to you today about
a subject that has received widespread news coverage - it is a subject
that's being taken very seriously by all of us at Encyclopædia Britannica
and one on which we have worked extensively with our editors, contributors,
and advisors for many weeks.
In one of its recent issues, the science journal Nature published an article
that claimed to compare the accuracy of the online Encyclopædia Britannica
with Wikipedia, the Internet database that allows anyone, regardless of
knowledge or qualifications, to write and edit articles on any subject.
Wikipedia had recently received attention for its alleged inaccuracies, but
Nature's article claimed that Britannica's science coverage was only
slightly more accurate than Wikipedia's.
Arriving amid the revelations of vandalism and errors in Wikipedia, such a
finding was, not surprisingly, big news. Perhaps you even saw the story
yourself. It's been reported around the world.
Those reports were wrong, however, because Nature's research was invalid. As
our editors and scholarly advisers have discovered by reviewing the research
in depth, almost everything about the Nature's investigation was wrong and
misleading. Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannica were not
inaccuracies at all, and a number of the articles Nature examined were not
even in the Encyclopædia Britannica. The study was so poorly carried out and
its findings so error-laden that it was completely without merit.
Since educators and librarians have been among Britannica's closest
colleagues for many years, I would like to address you personally with an
explanation of our findings and tell you the truth about the Nature study.
Almost everything Nature did showed carelessness and indifference to basic
research standards. Their numerous errors and spurious procedures included
the following:
* Rearranging, reediting, and excerpting Britannica articles. Several
of the "articles" Nature sent its outside reviewers were only sections of,
or excerpts from Britannica entries. Some were cut and pasted together from
more than one Britannica article. As a result, Britannica's coverage of
certain subjects was represented in the study by texts that our editors
never created, approved or even saw.
* Mistakenly identifying inaccuracies. The journal claimed to have
found dozens of inaccuracies in Britannica that didn't exist.
* Reviewing the wrong texts. They reviewed a number of texts that were
not even in the encyclopedia.
* Failing to check facts. Nature falsely attributed inaccuracies to
Britannica based on statements from its reviewers that were themselves
inaccurate and which Nature's editors failed to verify.
* Misrepresenting its findings. Even according to Nature's own
figures, (which grossly exaggerated the number of inaccuracies in
Britannica) Wikipedia had a third more inaccuracies than Britannica. Yet the
headline of the journal's report concealed this fact and implied something
very different.
Britannica also made repeated attempts to obtain from Nature the original
data on which the study's conclusions were based. We invited Nature's
editors and management to meet with us to discuss our analysis, but they
declined.
The Nature study was thoroughly wrong and represented an unfair affront to
Britannica's reputation.
Britannica practices the kind of sound scholarship and rigorous editorial
work that few organizations even attempt. This is vital in the age of the
Internet, when there is so much inappropriate material available. Today,
having sources like Britannica is more important than ever, with content
that is reliable, tailored to the age of the user, correlated to curriculum,
and safe for everyone.
Whatever may have prompted Nature to do such careless and sloppy research,
it's now time for them to uphold their commitment to good science and
retract the study immediately. We have urged them strongly to do so.
We have prepared a detailed report that describes Britannica's thorough
(7,000 words) analysis of the Nature study. I invite you to download it from
our Web site at www.eb.com.
==================================================
Gerard, you forgot an important thing of this affair:
NO MOLDOVANS requested or wanted this Wikipedia.
We have *no* Transnistrian Moldovan contributors who want to write a
wikipedia in Cyrillic alphabet.
Its only supporters are Node_ue (the kid in Arizona who barely speaks the
language) and a few Russians who support it for ideological/political
reasons and who can't contribute anyway, as they don't know the
language.
There are no newspapers, no journals, no magazines, no books currently
published in Romanian Cyrillic in Transnistria. The children use
decades old schoolbooks from the time of the Soviet Union.
Virtually everyone there would like to switch the education system to
the Latin alphabet, but dissent is not something easy to do in a
totalitarian regime: there are some Romanian/Moldovan Transnistrians
in prison since 1991 for political dissent.
So, I'd say to close it now, not because of political reasons, but for
the simple fact there are not enough people to contribute to it.
Hi everyone,
some weeks ago I came across a proposal to allow for the inclusion of macros
from commons. This would mean e.g. that it would no longer be neccessary to
replicate babel templates between the wikipedias.
The other benefit that was proposed was the simplification of interwiki links.
One would simply define a template:interwiki_english_article_name with the
complete list of interwiki links. Then all those other languages would just
have to add {{interwiki_english_article_name}} at the bottom.
For the transformation one would need a special robot, but after that we would
no longer need the interwiki robots and all the interwiki links would always
be up-to-date.
Are there any plans to make this possible?
Kind regards,
Heiko Evermann
> Message: 3
> Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 22:06:36 +1000
> From: "Craig Franklin" <craig(a)halo-17.net>
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] exicornt switch
> To: <wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID: <001501c64c16$bff788e0$015a5a0a@equinox>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Scr?obh Mark Williamson :
> >The current situation seems to be that all AOL users are blocked
> >pending cooperation from AOL in trying to stop vandalism. This seems
> >like a good approach to me.
>
> Frankly, I have to agree. I can't see any problem with this.
Is the user violating any AOL AUP term? I highly doubt it so I wouldn't expect AOL to stop this.
Maybe the user just needs to be left alone and ignored and a campaign initiated to educate the
public on what the real term of the railroad switch is. :)
.s
Hoi,
On the en:Wiktionary there is a bozo who thinks it funny to create
articles with titles like "exicornt switch". This is a non existing
word. The guy insists to create this article and uses any means to get
his way. I have been told that this guy is a user on the en.wikipedia as
well. As the frustration of this guy is getting to a level where AOL is
being blocked, I would like to know if we can cooperate and do something
about this vandal.
It is a daily annoyance. :(
Thanks,
GerardM