Plz do not slander or harass me. It is not appropriate.
---------------------------------
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Do these red links have a name? I used to call them "question mark
links", but now they are "red links" instead. Saying "links to pages
that don't yet exist" (LTPTDYE, the exact phrase actually gets 8 hits
on Google) is just as tedious as "the artist formerly known as Prince"
(TAFKAP). What about "empty links", "blank links", "open links",
"future links" or "suggested links"? Is there a word that people
frequently use?
BTW, could this wiki idea spread to science, so that a paper would
cite other papers that might come into existence? :-)
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
tel +46-70-7891609
http://aronsson.se/http://elektrosmog.nu/http://susning.nu/
Just a note -- since Lee hasn't been around lately, I've taken over
admin of our bugs and feature requests tracker on sourceforge
(http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=34373&atid=411192 ). I now get
automatic e-mail notification of any reports, so things should be a
little more responsive there.
I know the site's cluttered and kind of hard to use; but I'd like to get
the existing bugs fixed and cleared out before spending time setting up
a new bug tracking system. (Bugzilla was once suggested; in theory we
could modify it to integrate the user accounts with the wiki.)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Hi all --
First, I'm not actually back -- just jumping in. I've been popping in
every couple of weeks to lurk, but even if I were inclined to rejoin the
fray on a permanent basis, I've got four courses this quarter, one
totally new, and I'm somewhat swamped.
Second, I've been watching this whole Lir thing develop, and finally
feel I should throw in my $.04.
Regarding banning Lir or not. If Lir can't be bothered to speak with
Jimbo, stop behaving childishly (name-calling, whinging, and making
guerilla edits that result in non-NPOV articles), and work in a
cooperative, collegial, manner, then a ban is in order. The community
has certain standards, and from what I've seen, Lir is as guilty as
Helga ever was of flouting them. By the way, Helga is back, adding in
stuff about the genocide of the Heimatvertriebene, but somewhat more
neutrally.
Regarding Americanization being genocide. First, Lir's belief in this
(more to that later) is his choice. The argument has, however,
unfortunately gone off on a tangent and not addressed the real point --
Lir's belief is very POV. Articles he renames or redirects in
furtherance of that belief are therefore infected with that non-neutral
POV. Second, Lir, what is your point? I mean this in a historical
sense. Although I personally agree that the McDonaldsization of the
world is a tragedy, and that the ubiquity of American culture may (and
probably is) damaging to other cultures, the process is not itself
unnatural or new. As an historian, I can't honestly name one culture
that had not been dramatically changed once it came in contact with
another, especially in cases of technology. Moreover, without the
fusion of different cultures (for example, barbarian and Roman), many of
the things that make up distinctive European cultures would not exist --
in fact, there's a good chance we'd all be Muslims now.
As to correct language and the evils of americanization -- bullshit,
pure and simple. The idea that using English-language norms in and
English-language encyclopedia is in anyway related to forcing
English-speaking culture on other cultures is simply ridiculous. While
it is deplorable that most English speakers are not bilingual, that fact
does not make it in any way sensible to change place-names, etc., to
their "original" form. By the way, I'm not even sure what that means --
is it Strassburg, Strasbourg, or, as it was called before there was a
clear definition between French and German, Straziburgensis? London, or
Londinium? Should Paris have a note in the title that says "pronounced
Paree, you morons"?
Some while back, those of us most interested and most learned in these
things worked together to come up with a nomenclature policy. We agreed
that it made the most sense to use the most common English-language
version of a name (different forms of English notwithstanding) for the
title BUT, because we all felt it very important to let people know that
other cultures and language-speakers had different names for the same
thing, so we listed alternate names in the article itself. This means
that English-speakers, arguably the largest audience, could search for
articles in the way most natural to them, but the articles would still
appear in searches by speakers of other languages searching in those
languages. I can't see that Lir's political beliefs are valid reasons
to change this policy.
That's all I can think of for now. Hope lir talks to Jimmy and gets a
clue. Otherwise, it seems to me that normally productive members of the
community should be allowed to get on with the project and stop having
to deal with this type of nonsense.
Cheers, all!
Regards,
Julie Hofmann Kemp
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>How to integrate it with Wikipedia script ?
Perhaps you could add an optional setting to have the formula presented in
mathML instead of as an image, for those of us who use browsers that support
it? It'd be off by default, of course, since PNG is much more widely supported
than mathML is.
Also, I'm not suggesting that the formula be _edited_ in mathML; from what
I've seen it's rather cumbersome to write by hand. :)
I want to add support for TeX mode to Wikipedia script.
I wrote a program which takes TeX code on stdin,
validates and standarizes it (so that "x+y" and "x + y" don't have to be
generated twice), and even has some extensions ("%" -> "\%"),
checks if given image already exists, and if i doesn't, passes it to latex,
dvips and convert to get nice antialiased png file.
How to integrate it with Wikipedia script ?
Wikipedia script when rendering should find all <math>.*</math> in markup,
call this program (which is very fast if images are already rendered)
and get info provided by it to render a page. I'm not even sure what should
that program return.
There are 3 possibilities:
* illegal markup - <tt>Illegal markup: ^$%^*^%$%(^$%(^$^$%^$</tt>
* markup validated ok, latex runs corectly - <img href="/path/345456986858674.png">
* markup validated ok, latex failed - ???
The last case shouldn't happen too often, but if we always wait for latex
to finish, that will unnecesarily increase latency.
I'm also thinking that some similar solution should be added for
chemical reactions.
Any opinions ?
I have no objection if you call the US "Les Etats Unis" -- and even if I did, it's YOUR language, so go ahead and call us whatever you want. Even if I think that "stat sunnies" sound a bit strange ;-)
Ed Poor
Julie,
I'm pretty confident that we're going to leave the geographical naming convention alone.
The radicals complaining about anglicization are most likely trying to score political points; I don't think they care about the "real" names at all. As Ortolan suggested satirically, if we always used native names for places in English, these places would quickly become "lost" to the English-speaking world. (We might write articles on the various movements that want the West to forget about the rest of the world and leave them alone.)
I think we can consider the naming issue settled. It's extremely unlikely at this point that any major change will be made in the foreseeable future.
So the article on Italy will be called [[Italy]] and will start something like:
Italy (or ''Italia'') is a peninsular country in the Mediterranean...
Japan is lucky, because it gets 3 names:
Japan (#* or Nippon) is an East Asian... (sorry, my e-mail program can't show you the beautiful Kanji characters depicting the sun rising behind the trees, ah the poetry we miss!)
Ed Poor
I found Project Sourceberg at ps.wikipedia.com. Is there any plan to move it
to wikipedia.org? If so, it can't be ps.wikipedia.org, as that is reserved
for the Pushto Wikipedia.
phma