WikiEN-l December 2010

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60 participants
45 discussions

Britannica tries for Indian market
by David Gerard 24 Dec '10

24 Dec '10

http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/britannica-to-give-wikipediarun… Bundling access with a broadband subscription. Does Britannica still take user contributions? - d.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia - talkback templates
by WereSpielChequers 23 Dec '10

23 Dec '10

I don't use talkback templates myself, and find them somewhat irritating, but I can live with them if that keeps liquid threads at bay. Watchlists have some limitations, I would like to be able to watchlist a section and have that watch transfer to the archive when the section moves. I'd also like to be able to filter my watchlist by some sort of priority system. But even with over 11,000 articles on my watchlist I find it very simple to use and highly effective. After my experience on Strategy I would be loathe to Liquid threads introduced on EN Wiki. I believe David Gerrard said that Rational Wiki decided to destroy it with fire, does that mean that Liquid threads are reversible, and if so could we remove them from Strategy? WereSpielChequers On 22 December 2010 22:09, Peter Coombe <thewub.wiki(a)googlemail.com> wrote: > On 22 December 2010 12:29, wiki <doc.wikipedia(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: >> >> 5) I see the growing use of {{talkback}} templates. Personally, I hate them. >> However, the assumption that everyone masters watchlists and knows how to >> find discussions - and sees replies people make to them in any one of 27 >> noticeboards, talk pages etc is also counter intuitive. Could we develop >> software that flagged a user when someone replies to their post, wherever >> the reply might be? So if I post anywhere and someone posts indented below, >> I get some form of automatic notification? I don't know how it would work - >> but Facebook's beauty is that wherever I comment, or wherever someone >> comments about me, I get notified - that tends to keep me interested in >> continuing the discussions rather than drifting off. Watchlists were great >> in 2002, but they are part of an increasingly tired looking infrastructure. > > This is one of the main benefits of LiquidThreads. The system is coded > and in use on a few wikis (the strategy wiki & en.wikinews comment > pages spring to mind), but I can't see it ever being introduced on > en.Wikipedia without serious resistance. It's a big change from the > current discussion model, and unlike skins there's no way for > individuals to opt-out. > > Pete / the wub > > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l >

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
by Peter Coombe 22 Dec '10

22 Dec '10

On 22 December 2010 12:29, wiki <doc.wikipedia(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: > > 5) I see the growing use of {{talkback}} templates. Personally, I hate them. > However, the assumption that everyone masters watchlists and knows how to > find discussions - and sees replies people make to them in any one of 27 > noticeboards, talk pages etc is also counter intuitive. Could we develop > software that flagged a user when someone replies to their post, wherever > the reply might be? So if I post anywhere and someone posts indented below, > I get some form of automatic notification? I don't know how it would work - > but Facebook's beauty is that wherever I comment, or wherever someone > comments about me, I get notified - that tends to keep me interested in > continuing the discussions rather than drifting off. Watchlists were great > in 2002, but they are part of an increasingly tired looking infrastructure. This is one of the main benefits of LiquidThreads. The system is coded and in use on a few wikis (the strategy wiki & en.wikinews comment pages spring to mind), but I can't see it ever being introduced on en.Wikipedia without serious resistance. It's a big change from the current discussion model, and unlike skins there's no way for individuals to opt-out. Pete / the wub

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Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia by Reagle (MIT, 2010)
by Tony Sidaway 22 Dec '10

22 Dec '10

Joseph Reagle's book on Wikipedia culture reviewed by Cory Doctorow http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/20/good-faith-collabora.html Could be useful if you still haven't worked out what to get the internet nerd in your life for Christmas.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Old Wikipedia backups discovered
by Tim Starling 22 Dec '10

22 Dec '10

On 22/12/10 12:13, Anthony wrote: > On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 7:51 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: >> In XML 1.1: >> >> "Char ::= #x9 | #xA | #xD | [#x20-#xD7FF] | >> [#xE000-#xFFFD] | [#x10000-#x10FFFF] /* any Unicode character, >> excluding the surrogate blocks, FFFE, and FFFF. */" > > Where are you reading that? At http://www.w3.org/TR/xml11/#charsets I read: Ah yes, that would be the XML 1.0 spec. My fault. [...] > >> Without this change, importDump.php gives a fatal error. > > Have you tried escaping them? Does importDump.php work with XML 1.1, > or only XML 1.0? Is the file defined as XML 1.1 or XML 1.0? If the > file is designated as XML 1.1 (*), the control characters are escaped, > and importDump.php still gives a fatal error, it sounds like a bug in > importDump.php. I provided both versions of the XML if you want to muck around with that. I don't think there's much historical value in the control characters. Speaking of historical value, I found the argument between Lars Aronsson and Larry Sanger, which caused Lars to quit and found susning.nu. It happened on May 21. Lars had just spent several days writing dictionary-like articles, and he wrote [[Short words]] to organise the effort. At 12:48, Larry complained about this on [[LA2]], and at 12:53, he created [[Wikipedia is not a dictionary]], which was clearly an attack on what Lars was doing. At 12:54, Lars announced that he was leaving, as a comment on [[Wikipedia is not a dictionary]]. There were several responses. On July 24, Larry erased all the comments from [[Wikipedia is not a dictionary]], and on July 28, he rewrote the original text, toning down the language. Before I found this backup, the earliest version we had of this policy page was from August 17. -- Tim Starling

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Wiki-research-l] Old Wikipedia backups discovered
by Anthony 22 Dec '10

22 Dec '10

On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 7:51 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: > In XML 1.1: > > "Char ::= #x9 | #xA | #xD | [#x20-#xD7FF] | > [#xE000-#xFFFD] | [#x10000-#x10FFFF] /* any Unicode character, > excluding the surrogate blocks, FFFE, and FFFF. */" Where are you reading that? At http://www.w3.org/TR/xml11/#charsets I read: [2] Char ::= [#x1-#xD7FF] | [#xE000-#xFFFD] | [#x10000-#x10FFFF] /* any Unicode character, excluding the surrogate blocks, FFFE, and FFFF. */ [2a] RestrictedChar ::= [#x1-#x8] | [#xB-#xC] | [#xE-#x1F] | [#x7F-#x84] | [#x86-#x9F] > Without this change, importDump.php gives a fatal error. Have you tried escaping them? Does importDump.php work with XML 1.1, or only XML 1.0? Is the file defined as XML 1.1 or XML 1.0? If the file is designated as XML 1.1 (*), the control characters are escaped, and importDump.php still gives a fatal error, it sounds like a bug in importDump.php. "Finally, there is considerable demand to define a standard representation of arbitrary Unicode characters in XML documents. Therefore, XML 1.1 allows the use of character references to the control characters #x1 through #x1F, most of which are forbidden in XML 1.0. For reasons of robustness, however, these characters still cannot be used directly in documents. In order to improve the robustness of character encoding detection, the additional control characters #x7F through #x9F, which were freely allowed in XML 1.0 documents, now must also appear only as character references. (Whitespace characters are of course exempt.) The minor sacrifice of backward compatibility is considered not significant. Due to potential problems with APIs, #x0 is still forbidden both directly and as a character reference." (*) Ah, there's one problem. It isn't. http://www.mediawiki.org/xml/export-0.3.xsd starts with xml version="1.0".

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Old Wikipedia backups discovered
by Tim Starling 22 Dec '10

22 Dec '10

I was looking through some old files in our SourceForge project. I opened a file called wiki.tar.gz, and inside were three complete backups of the text of Wikipedia, from February, March and August 2001! This is exciting, because there is lots of article history in here which was assumed to be lost forever. I've long been interested in Wikipedia's history, and I've tried in the past to locate such backups. I asked various people who might have had one. I had given up hope. The history of particularly old Wikipedia articles, as seen in the present Wikipedia database, is incomplete, due to Usemod's policy of deleting old revisions of pages after about a month. The script which Brion wrote to import the article histories from UseMod to MediaWiki only fetched those revisions which hadn't been purged yet. I didn't want to believe that those revisions had been lost forever, and I even opened the UseMod source code and stared forlornly at the unlink() call. What I (and Brion before) missed is that UseMod appends a record of every change made to two files, called diff_log and rclog. In these two files is a record of every change made to Wikipedia from January 15 to August 17, 2001. I've put the two log files up on the web, at: http://noc.wikimedia.org/~tstarling/wikipedia-logs-2001-08-17.7z The 7-zip archive is only 8.4MB -- much more manageable than today's backups. rclog contains IP addresses. The Usemod software made IP addresses of logged-in users public, so the people who made these edits had no expectation that their IP address would be kept private. That, coupled with the passage of time, makes me think that no harm to user privacy can come from releasing these files. -- Tim Starling

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Foundation-l] Old Wikipedia backups
by Daniel R. Tobias 21 Dec '10

21 Dec '10

I note that among those earliest articles were separate articles on every single character in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, including "Bum Number 1" and "Passenger Number 1" through "Passenger Number 4". -- == Dan == Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/ Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/ Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/

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Wikipedia Ambassador Program looking for new ambassadors
by Sage Ross 20 Dec '10

20 Dec '10

The Wikipedia Ambassador Program is expanding for the coming term, and we're having 5 regional Campus Ambassador training events in the US: *San Francisco, 7-8 January *Washignton, DC, 8-9 January *New York City, 11-12 January *Baton Rouge, 13-14 January *Indianapolis, 15-16 January (Alex Stinson, User:Sadads, will also be working to get the program started in the UK over the next few months, while he's studying at Oxford.) With a few exceptions (we need some more Campus Ambassadors in the Boston/Cambridge area and in Houston) it looks like we'll have enough local ambassadors to support the 25-30 courses we'll be working with between January and May. But if you're near one of the training events and would be free for the scheduled days of training, and you want to help spread the Wikipedia Ambassador Program to new campuses and disciplines or to try to start a Wikipedia club on your campus, please apply to be a Campus Ambassador: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Steering_Committee/Campu… (I can provide a .doc version of the application by email, upon request.) I also want to invite people to join the ambassador program as Online Ambassadors. We may be working with upwards of 500 students who needs experienced Wikipedians to serve as mentors. If you're comfortable giving reviews of articles in development, and want to be a friendly face/username for newcomers, please apply: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Online_Ambassadors Being an Online Ambassador is also a good way to get some experience with the ambassador program if you're interested in doing in-person outreach as a Campus Ambassador or similar role down the line; by the end of the Public Policy Initiative grant, expansion of the ambassador programs to new campuses and beyond will be driven by the ambassadors, and WMF will mostly or completely step back. Cheers, Sage Ross Online Facilitator, Public Policy Initiative Wikimedia Foundation

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Strange article title rendering
by Carcharoth 20 Dec '10

20 Dec '10

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code When I go to the above page, the bit at the top (the title) reads as follows: MediaWiki talk:Morse code I've just checked and it is still there. Anyone have any idea what is going on? Carcharoth PS. I loved this bit here in the article (sadly not cited yet): "When the French Navy ceased using Morse code in 1997, the final message transmitted was "Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence.""

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WikiEN-l December 2010