WikiEN-l August 2003

wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org

77 participants
183 discussions

Azuresong@charter.net
by Azure Montaig 03 Aug '03

03 Aug '03

5 4

Re: Search function
by martin＠myreddice.freeserve.co.uk 03 Aug '03

03 Aug '03

> It's definitely '''not''' easy to find articles without Wikipedia's search > facility I just typed in "[[continental breakfast]]", not knowing that such > an article does not exist (yet) and was referred to [[Departments of the > Continental Army]] Try using google. It's fast; it doesn't cause Wikipedia to slow down; it gives vastly better content summaries; and it's much better at evaluating the relative importance of pages. For example, if I do a google search for "continental breakfast", I get two hits, in under a second: [[breakfast]], and [[Full English breakfast]]. Parfait! How easy is that? (don't tell me, you're on some browser where the google taskbar doesn't play, or something - in which case, sorry...) -Martin "MyRedDice" Harper

1 0

Re: morphophonics for wikipedia
by Geoffrey Thomas 03 Aug '03

03 Aug '03

Tarquin saith: >Everyone tries to invent their own phonetic system when they're in their >teens. I did. >But reinventing the wheel is generally a bad idea. >if every dictionary & encyclopedia has its own system, then it is not >transferable, and the reader has to relearn for each book they open. >Let's stick to something that is universal: IPA / SAMPA. I've seen IPA/SAMPA used in Wikipedia articles and didn't like it. The former uses too many non-ASCII characters to make it easy enough to use and the latter uses weird ASCII signs that make the word @n"rid@bl [unreadable] and l33t-like for those who don't know the system. The system used in practically every school dictionary I've seen (except for Merriam-Webster's) is simple: prime mark after accented syllable (doubled for two accents in one word), flipped e for schwa, breve (curve) for short vowels, macron (line) for long vowels, diaresis or circumflex for vowels of far and fur, line across th for voiced and no line for unvoiced. This last one is the only thing not representable in Unicode; everything else is sĭm'pəl ēnəf' for us to use. (If those words came out garbled, either your mail client or mine doesn't support Unicode. That was 73 12D 6D 27 70 259 6C 20 113 6E 259 66 27 hex.) Even better is the limited letters-only system used in textbooks that aren't dictionaries: complex words are repeated in identical-sounding imitations (I-mi-TAY-shuns). If this latter system is formalized (FAR-muh-liyzd) it may be simpler than SAMPA for those who don't have the time to learn it. Geoffrey Thomas / jěf'rē t�'məs / JEF-ree TAH-muhs geoffreyerffoeg(a)yahoo.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com

12 18

Proliferation of temps
by james duffy 02 Aug '03

02 Aug '03

The battle on [[New Imperialism]] is reaching absurd levels. First we had Pizza Puzzle /insisting/ that his rival version to the main article should be advertised on it. Whatever about advertising a new draft being prepared that was scheduled to replace the main article, to have the official article and PP's personal alternative rewrite seemed absurd. Encyclopædias do not normally put in two rival versions of an article. I protected the page to stop the constant attempts of PP to insert it until people had a chance to discuss whether this was a good idea. (PP refused to wait until it was discussed and insisted that he be allowed to have his way). We had a vote and a narrow majority agreed to put in the link /for one week/. The page has since been redesigned and reduced in size, negating one of PP's main complaints about the live page. But now it turns out that we have not just one but TWO temps being placed on the main page. This temp madness is becoming a joke. It is barely encyclopædic to put two rival drafts on the one page. But now THREE??? We have the main one and two temps. This is plain silly. We have agreed to PP's temp1 being there for one week but now introducing Temp 2 is madness. I have removed the Temp 2 link and will be placing a link to it, alongside Temp 1, on then talk page, where Temp 1 was only supposed to be linked to in the first place. JT _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

4 5

Search function
by K Forstner 02 Aug '03

02 Aug '03

It's definitely '''not''' easy to find articles without Wikipedia's search facility. I just typed in "[[continental breakfast]]", not knowing that such an article does not exist (yet) and was referred to [[Departments of the Continental Army]] (!). This is going to drive away both casual users and regular contributors. If you type in "[[continental breakfast]]" you should at least get one of the "breakfast" articles rather than a "continental" one. KF

2 1

Multiple accounts...
by a.crossman＠blueyonder.co.uk 02 Aug '03

02 Aug '03

JT writes: > We /really/ need to lay down the rules here and tell him in no > uncertain terms that running multiple identities on wiki is as > unacceptable now as it was months ago when we faced his previous > games with names. Ugh. I suppose I now have to come out of the closet and say that I myself have a separate account that I occasionally use when I'm involved in too many arguments with my main account, and want to be able to ignore them all for a while... I have never used it for any dubious activities like vote rigging or anything. In fact, that account has never once been used for discussion of any page, and with I think 1 exception, has never been used for editing a page that I edited with my main account. If there's a real objection to this then I'll stop (and make public that account name, if you like). How this all relates to Pizza Puzzle - it's not so much having an alias that's dubious (I think), but rather using it for dodgy purposes like escaping a ban, vote rigging, creating false concensus in a debate, etc... this sort of behaviour is, I agree, a problem. Evercat -- Allan Crossman a.crossman(a)blueyonder.co.uk http://dogma.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

1 0

Special characters (was: morphophonics for wikipedia)
by Geoffrey Thomas 02 Aug '03

02 Aug '03

A few messages back (on WikiEN-l) I sent some accented characters that are found in Unicode/UTF-n but not in Latin-1 using Yahoo! Mail. These apparently appeared on Timwi's client as HTML entities, but on my client they displayed properly. Is this just a bug with Y!Mail? Most other special characters cannot be easily displayed in my browser. I get the digested form, and some messages use different character sets than others - and Mozilla autoguesses the character set as a third, in most cases. In one digest with links to the Hindi Wikipedia and a UTF-8 apostrophe, the default character set was Chinese Simplified. Is there something the software can do about this? We can't assume everyone'll send in UTF-8 (which would have been nice), and for those like me who receive digests, it's impossible to get the browser to display two character sets on the same page. Could the digesting software automatically convert all e-mails to the same character set, preferably UTF-8? --[[User:Geoffrey|]] Thomas __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com

2 1

Re: [WikiEN-l] Proliferation of temps
by james duffy 01 Aug '03

01 Aug '03

>From: Fred Bauder (I'm pretty sure 172 has got to be up to SOMETHING). > Yes, writing an academic standard article. JT _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

1 0

Re: Again
by koyaanis qatsi 01 Aug '03

01 Aug '03

KF wrote: > Whenever I try to access Wikipedia, this is what > I get. No one has reacted to the same message > which I posted for the first time 24 hours ago, > which I find rather strange. A number of minor > disputes still seem to be going on, and people > do react to them. But how do you work if you > can't read, let alone edit Wikipedia articles? > Or is it just me who can't get in? I'm having the same problem, periodically, but I didn't respond earlier because there's nothing I can do about it. I understand your frustration, but I think that most of the developers aren't around right now, and do all they can when they are. Within a few years we'll probably need as many machines as slashdot has--which will cost quite a lot--but until then, all we can do is wait for the code to be optimized, which takes time. Until then, given that everyone is a volunteer--including the coders--I'd recommend patience. :-) kq __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com

2 1

removal
by Azure Montaig 01 Aug '03

01 Aug '03

Please remove me from the Wikien forum or tell me how I might do that! Azure Montaig (Azuresong)

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WikiEN-l August 2003