Hi all,
Just wondering whether anyone has considered the way MediaWiki
renders when the browser is particularly wide. Many blogs fix a
maximum column width, because it gets increasingly harder to read as
the line length increases.
Perhaps MediaWiki could do something like this, and use the extra
space that would be left to solve its infobox crisis. In fact, many
layout issues would be completely solved by having a column purely
dedicated to text, with no possible interference from images, tables,
contents etc. If the browser is narrow, then it could condense to
something like its current format.
Any thoughts? Someone want to do a mock-up?
Steve
"Magnus Manske" wrote
> > Sounds like there is an interesting exercise for a statistician here: by sampling from the larger Wikipedias, estimate the total number of article topics in them, taken collectively.
> Easy:
> all articles on en.wikipedia
> + all articles on other wikipedias that do *not* have an interlanguage
> link to en.wikipedia (substract doublettes that are connected in an
> "interwiki web" not including en.wikipedia; count these as 1)
>
> There, all done :-)
You have a touching faith that interwiki is 100% efficient.
I think you've found a plausible upper bound, though.
Charles
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" Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this
right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to
seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and
regardless of frontiers." - Article 19, Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, Adopted and proclaimed by General Assembly resolution 217 A
(III) of 10 December 1948
(was Re: The price of providing privacy and free speech)
> Please take discussions of this
> sort to a mailing list where it is
> on-topic.
Hmm ... regarding "...discussions of this sort...", which I see as
"Wikipedia policy towards anonymous contributions and contributors" or
the use of http://tor.eff.org/ versus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_open_proxies, do you have a
suggestion of a better place?
Personally I think we - Wikipedia - should stand up for Tor operators
who get abused. We - Wikipedia - should at least understand the
difference between our own policy against anonymous contributions or
contributors on Wikipedia (a prohibition with which I disagree), versus
totally unrelated features and benefits of Internet anonymity (though I
think these issues are totally related to Wikipedia). Just because we
may block anonymous contributions and contributors shouldn't mean we
think anonymity itself is always bad or that we are neutral to it.
In fact, we - Wikipedia - have many layers of protection to allow people
to remain anonymous to everyone but ourselves (our admins, webmasters,
sysops know who you are!), so we should be very, very sympathetic to
such stories as
http://committeetoprotectbloggers.org/2007/09/17/german-tor-administrato
r-arrested/
--
> Apologies - I've now seen the
> thread about AB being put on
> moderation. In future, I'll
> queue posts for batch replying
> after having checked out
> newer threads. Thank you to
> the moderators.
I don't mind your goof. I think we all contribute posts that we might
later want to rescind or edit afterwards. I also don't mind what I
believe is your misunderstanding of what I believe is the very on-topic
nature of the previous posts. However, I like your solicitation and
consideration of others here, and I wish we all were as forgiving of
each other's on- or off-point, accurate- or inaccurate-posts, as you as
ask to be towards you.
Eugene van der Pijll wrote
>We could perhaps copy the information from other languages;
> France for example seems to be complete in frwiki.
Sounds like there is an interesting exercise for a statistician here: by sampling from the larger Wikipedias, estimate the total number of article topics in them, taken collectively.
Charles
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Contents#Contents_pages.2C_and_…
Essentially: Do pages like [[Lists of basic topics]] belong in
mainspace, or projectspace?
Having failed to get much feedback via a Village Pump post or an
RfC/policy, I bring the request here. See (and reply at) the thread
for the full version.
And Please, please watchlist (and look over) the very slow changing,
but incredibly prominent links in [[Template:Contents pages (header
bar)]] (except List of portals, which updates a lot). We need more
participants there, we hardly have any.
Quiddity
"David Gerard" wrote
> We'll see if the S-curve in article creation (as noted by Andrew Lih)
> really does top off at about 2.5-3 million. Or if there's some
> systemic deletionism going overboard that can be corrected.
>
> I'd expect our article totals to go through the roof as the internet
> rolls out into India, for example. Nearly a billion people who have
> English as the language of learning. How many topics are there in
> India?
It's the good point about this. WP's total traffic is apparently zooming ahead. Anyone who checks Alexa will see that the share of Web traffic went up 20% in July and August. That's when the college students of the Northern hemisphere are not at college, dammit! What is going on? Well, perhaps the non-English content is pulling in readers on search engines in a significant way. We may find out.
But the point is that so many readers (omigod, we could _overtake MySpace_ ?!) must tend towards the creation of more articles. I do suspect speedies have cut back article creation - Andrew probably has a point there (and A7 must still die, as so often misapplied). But an elbow in a curve can be misinterpreted, also.
Charles
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Brave German Tor exit node operator
arrested.
His blog entry:
http://itnomad.wordpress.com/2007/09/16/tor-madness-reloaded/
'I was arrested. They scared my wife.
They consfiscated all my equippment.
They stopped the investigation. I'm
sitting on a pile of bills from my
lawyer no one except me has to pay.
I'll sue for compensation, but I don't
think that this will lead anywhere. I'm
now accused of something else. Horray!
Bloody hell. I still love my country,
but it's bitching around.'
It's also on Cnet:
http://www.cnet.com/surveillance-state/8301-13739_1-9779225-46.html?tag=head