a month ago, japanese user Tomos came to the list citing japanese problems with mailman. i helped
him out, and we determined that mailman 2.1 (as opposed to 2.0) has lots of good i18n fixes.
shouldnt you get to this ?
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Sadly, it appears that there are some hurtful vandals out there
who are attacking the people trying to counter them. For example,
User:Zoe has just posted that she's abandoning her efforts to counter
vandals; see: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3AZoe
which begins: "I'm tired of fighting, I'm tired of arguing,
I'm tired of being called names."
The last straw seems to have been an edit by No-Fx to Zoe's
user page, in which No-Fx made it appear that Zoe was "into oral sex".
I don't know enough about this situation to know for sure if this
is an example, but I am concerned about the long-term dangers
if this starts a trend.
Attacks on users and sysops - particularly highly dedicated ones -
are much more dangerous to the Wikipedia than
simple attacks on a few pages. If these kinds of attacks cause
people to stop weeding out bad pages or vandals for
fear of retribution, the project is doomed.
Is there any way the software could be modified to make it harder
for vandals to counter-attack the people who are trying to
remove vandalism?
At the least, why not let the User:NAME pages be ONLY editable
by NAME? The "User_talk:" spaces need to be editable in some way,
but I don't see a need for others to "fix" the User: space of someone;
it's not critical that that content be fixed, and there's advantanges
to having some areas that are "precious" to each user.
Here's a more controversial idea: perhaps some
information relating to deletion of pages and banning of users
should be hidden from non-sysops. For example,
since "delete" can only be done by sysops, why not just tell
non-sysops that a deletion occurred, but not WHICH sysop did it?
By the same token, perhaps some discussion areas should be
only readable/writeable by sysops, in particular a discussion
area to discuss banning someone. Perhaps there could be a way
where anyone (non-sysop) could suggest that someone be banned,
without having their name revealed to non-sysops.
Since real deletes and banning can only be done by sysops anyway,
and sysops are trusted, there's no reason this information
MUST be public.
A related idea might be to modify the "talk" system so that it's
more like a bulletin board, with threaded messages and
a clear identification of who made it (click on "reply" to reply
to that item, maybe in a threaded way). That way, any message is
clearly
identified with its REAL author. A side-effect would be that
the attribution would happen automatically (no more
forgetting ~~~~). That way, when people discuss things, they
can't make it appear that someone else made an outrageous/nasty
statement.
The goal here would be to prevent people from attacking each other,
or at least limit its effectiveness.
Thoughts?
Hey guys I think this is important so I'm forwarding
this to this list. Does anybody besides Brion know
how/have enough access to set up a blank wiki at a
"sub"-domain?
This is definitely something we want in the Wikimedia
family so why not let somebody start working on it
now?
-------
Hi, I'd like to ask a developer to open up a spot on
Wikipedia to start developing Wiki textbooks. I have a
physics book that is part written and bits of an
organic textbook that I started on Wikipedia before it
was deleted ("Wikipedia is not the place for
textbooks"). Maveric149 suggested I write to the
developers asking for a blank spot to be opened at
http://textbook.wikipedia.org until a permanant name
for the planned Wiki textbook site could be arranged.
I would be honored and grateful if you could fulfill
my request. Thanks!
Karl Wick (User name:Karlwick)
>When I came accross Wikipedia I thought that its
underlying software and concept would be great for
putting my physics book on the web. If other people
have a similar idea I'd rather be part of the larger
effort. Maybe my organizational or "visionary" ideas
are not of use to you right now but if you can help me
have a place to start getting stuff on the web, I'll
do it, and it wont be bad stuff. (I dont have much IT
background so it would probably take me a real long
time to figure out how to do all of the
technical part anyway). BTW I think that hypertext
textbooks will eventually be even better learning
tools than the traditional ones ... and am eager to
start proving it. ---Karlwick
>If you are eager to get to work then ask a developer
via the mailing list to set-up
http://textbook.wikipedia.org with a blank Wiki. We
can use what you have already to work out
organizational issues and hopefully in time we can
think of a snappy name that will help draw-in
contributors.
The worst thing that would happen is that nobody will
be very interested in the idea and that wiki will be a
lonely place (like our Sep11wiki). --Maveric149
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I've got a pileup of work to get through on other projects, so I'm going
to take a week off from Wikipedia. (If I can -- wikipediholism runs strong
in my veins! ;)
If anyone really really needs to contact me for some technical emergency,
mail or IM me directly, as I won't be watching the wikis or the mailing
lists.
(If I finish up other things sooner than I think maybe I'll have time to
finish that conversion script for the old wikis, but don't bet on it.)
Don't go censoring everything and locking it all down to sysops while I'm
away, now. ;)
I'll return around June 23.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
When all is said and done, I would like a picture like
http://ontology.teknowledge.com:8080/rsigma/sumo-1.36classes.pdf
and when I click on a category, I'm sent to a category page which lists
the immediate superclasses and subclasses (editable), gives an editable
description of the category, gives a link to the recent changes in that
category (including all changes in its subcategories), a link that
allows searching in the articles of that category and its
subcategories, and a link to a complete alphabetical list of all
Wikipedia articles belonging to that category and its subcategories.
(I'm not suggesting that we adopt SUMO http://ontology.teknowledge.com/
because these people live in a world where fungi are plants and where
real numbers, imaginary numbers and complex numbers are disjoint.)
Axel
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We could avoid most of the hassle of HTML tables with a relatively simple
template system. The user of a template would just have to enter key/value
pairs and the software would do the rest.
Let's take the country tables as an example. This is a table that
essentially looks the same on every country page, with different contents.
So we could have
[[Template:Country table]]
which would contain the table with a special syntax for variable
dentifiers and conditional expressions:
<table border="0" width="200">
<<Flag && Coat of arms??
<tr><td>
::Flag::
</td><td>
::Coat of arms::
</td>
</tr>
>>
<<Flag && !Coat of arms??
<tr><td colspan=2>
::Flag::
</td>
</tr>
>>
<tr><td>
Official language
</td>
<td>
::Language::
</td>
</tr>
<<President?
<tr><td>
President
</td>
<td>
::President::
</td>
</tr>
>>
...........
</table>
The above contains two important elements:
* variables (enclosed in ::name::)
These contain text that is defined by the template user and inserted into
the template when it is used.
* condition blocks (enclosed in <<..?? .. >>)
These determine under which conditions the respective text from the
template is to be inserted; that is, which variables have to be set or
unset.
Now any country page could use the template defined above like this:
<Template:Country table>
Flag:: [[Image:Flag_germany.jpg]]
Coat of arms:: [[Image:Coat_of_arms_Germany.jpg]]
Language:: German
President:: Johannes Rau
...
</template>
Similarly for taxonomy tables
<Template:Taxonomy table>
Name:: Amaryllis
Kingdom:: Plantae
Division:: Magnoliophyta
Class:: Lilliopsida
...
</template>
For navigation tables:
<Template:British Monarch navigation>
Preceded by:: George VI
Heir apparent:: Charles, Prince of Wales
</template>
This is easy to use and easy to edit, but generates nice looking,
correctly aligned tables. It could also be used for general image
formatting:
<Template:Image right>
Image:: Foo.jpg
Width:: 420
Caption:: My image
</template>
using the following template, for example:
<table border=0 width="::Width::" align="right">
<tr><td>
[[Image:::Image::]]
<br>
''::Caption::''
</td></tr>
</table>
Most of the code required for this feature is simple search/replace stuff,
only the conditional expression parsing is somewhat more complex, but also
offers a lot of power to handle subtle variations in tables. The template
syntax could also provide functionality for iterations, or these could be
implicitly generated by simply repeating a variable during the template
use:
[[Template:List table]]
<table border=0>
<<Item??
<tr><td>::Item::</td></tr>
>>
</table>
->
<Template:List table>
Item::Foo
Item::Bar
Item::Baz
</template>
->
<table border="0">
<tr><td>Foo</td></tr>
<tr><td>Bar</td></tr>
<tr><td>Baz</td></tr>
</table>
That is, the conditional expression Item?? would automatically run an
iteration of the enclosing block if there is more than one item (whereas
without the conditional expression, only one item would be used).
Syntax likes and dislikes aside, I'd be interested in what you think about
such a system.
Regards,
Erik
This is the message I receive (and yes, I cleared my browser cache ;-):
Warning: mysql_pconnect() [function.mysql-pconnect]: Access denied for
user: 'wikiuser(a)localhost.localdomain' (Using password: YES) in
/usr/local/apache/htdocs-de/w/DatabaseFunctions.php on line 28
Konnte keine Verbindung zur Datenbank auf 127.0.0.1 herstellen
Access denied for user: 'wikiuser(a)localhost.localdomain' (Using
password: YES)
If this error persists after reloading and clearing your browser cache,
please notify the Wikipedia developers.
--
Zeno Gantner <zg(a)zenogantner.de>
Hi lister,
fr.wikipedia.org is down since a few minutes.
I receive isystematicaly the following message for all pages:
Warning: mysql_pconnect() [function.mysql-pconnect]: Access denied for user: 'wikiuser(a)localhost.localdomain' (Using password: YES) in /usr/local/apache/htdocs-fr/w/DatabaseFunctions.php on line 28
Connexion impossible à la base de données sur 127.0.0.1
Access denied for user: 'wikiuser(a)localhost.localdomain' (Using password: YES)
If this error persists after reloading and clearing your browser cache, please notify the Wikipedia developers.
--
Luc Van Oostenryck aka [[User:Looxix]] & [[fr:Utilisateur:Looxix]]
During times when Wikipedia otherwise responds promptly, saving a
modification to [[List of mathematical topics]] takes upwards of five
minutes, and during that time other Wikipedia searches often also
block. (Please do *not* try it out, take my word for it.)
The page contains about 4,300 links, used to keep track of changes in
the math area with the "Related Changes" feature.
Axel
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Currently, before creating a new user account we do some limited
validation on the given name:
* Trim beginning and trailing whitespace
* Check if it looks like an IP address (four sequences of 1-3 digits with
dots between them), if so reject it.
* Check if there's a slash character, if so reject it [I just added this
check; it was I think supposed to be added when we set up partial subpage
support for userspace, which conflicts with the slash character in names
if remaining problems with the contribs/email sidebar links are fixed.
Unless there's some huge objection... there don't appear to be any valid
usernames on this pattern. Note also that this check applies only to new
names; existing ones which are legitimate would be grandfathered in.]
*Canonicalize the name (run through the title canonicalizer and take the
version without underscores) and check for an exact existing match. If
there is one, reject it.
We may wish to do a case-_in_sensitive check, and/or a
same-except-for-accents check. Or not. Anyway, I think it could use some
tidying up.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)