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
>
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> WikiEN-l mailing list
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> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
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
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
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".
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
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/
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
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.""