I hereby decree, in my usual authoritarian and bossy manner, that today shall
forever be known as Magnus Manske day. Wikipedians of the distant future will
marvel at the day when the new software era dawned upon us.
Tonight at dinner, every Wikipedian should say a toast to Magnus and his many
inventions.
--Jimbo
On Wednesday 04 September 2002 10:38 am, Helga wrote:
> Hello, I am a little swamped with all the wiki list reading material and it
> seems my limited email is getting overloaded.
You might want to create an email filter to sort any emails with the string
"Helga" in the subject into a special folder (just use the help menu of
whatever email program you use and look up "filter").
Otherwise you may miss some emails that concern you.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
On Saturday 24 August 2002 12:01 pm, Karen wrote:
> Something I wondered - how do you know who the new users to greet them?
> Do you just look for user names you haven't seen before or is there some
> way to identify them? I'd be happy to do the meet-and-greet but I don't
> know how to do it.
Well - I guess I do it the hard way and scan each edit in all Recent Changes
for a 24 hour period looking for edit link user names (a dead give-a-away)
and for user names I don't remember seeing before. This works for me since I
pretty good reading comprehension and memory.
What would be most useful is a listing of new users that can be accessed from
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Listusers. That way this job would be
much easier.
BTW we really /do not/ have 3498 real users -- a good many of these "users"
logged in only to abuse our upload utility or for other nefarious or
non-contributing reasons (I don't greet any user who hasn't contributed at
all). Is there a way to get rid of many of these no-longer used user accounts
Lee (just the ones that have been inactive for months and whose user pages
are still edit links)?
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
On Monday 19 August 2002 03:41 pm, you wrote:
> Can still be done later. The problem is the lack of time. If you wait to
> long there are to many links to the new location of the english
> wikipedia that can not be broken. If there is no fundamental objection
> to put the English wikipedia at en.wikipedia.org then that must be done.
> What to do whit www.wikipedia.org can wait (a littel.)
>
> giskart
This is just silly -- we are building an encyclopedia here not an
organization. There is nothing at all wrong with having the English wikipedia
at wikipedia.org and have all the pages that are about the English language
project be in the wikipedia namespace (or in the other languages project
namespaces). As each language figures out what to call their wikipedia we can
buy them domain names for that and make sure the xx.wikipedia.com domain
names still work.
Other than being a one-page portal to all the different language wikipedias
(which the Main Page already does -- as do most of the other language main
pages) I don't see any logic in using wikipedia.org for anything other than
the English language wikipedia.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
A relatively new contributor, Ellmist, has been adding articles
about Robert Heinlein's novels. This is a good thing - Heinlein
was an important sci-fi writer, and we should cover his work in
some detail.
However, they have added the publication dates of his books
to the applicable "Year In Review" articles. Is this such a
good idea? Probably not. I doubt that everything Heinlein
wrote was so momentous to warrant such a listing.
This is a more general problem with the year in review listing.
Unlike virtually everything else in the 'Pedia, these articles are
space-limited by their very intention (to provide a concise overview
of what went on in the world in that year). Therefore, if we wish
to retain them in the current form, we're
going to have to exercise editorial judgement as to the things
sufficiently important to list there.
The NPOV isn't a great help here. It says we should resolve disputes
by by characterising the
dispute and letting the differing opinions speak for themselves.
I can't see how that helps. Because we are space-limited, we *can't*
just list every event that somebody (or even a large group of people)
thinks is important, state why those people think it was important,
and let the reader come to their own conclusions.
Lists like this are a special case, and so I would argue that we should
make special rules to handle it. What those special rules should be I'm
not sure. As a "meta-rule" I think we need fairly strict section
guidelines on what can go into each section of the Year in Review
entry.
Let me play Devil's advocate for a minute. The fact that we might need
special rules for Year In Review articles makes me wonder whether
they are, indeed encyclopedia articles or something else entirely.
If not, do they really belong as part of the Wikipedia or are they
a job for another projct with different rules? Probably not, but it's
something to think about.
Opinions?
-----------------------------------------------------------
Robert Merkel rgmerk(a)mira.net
Go You Big Red Fire Engine
-- Unknown Audience Member at Adam Hills standup gig
------------------------------------------------------------
On Friday 21 June 2002 09:02 am, Robert wrote:
> However, the [City, State] convention works fine - it's quite
> sufficient to disambiguate between Australian cities and
> any from elsewhere, AFAICT, and it's not hard to identify that
> the cities are Australian. If somebody really wants to
> change the entries, go ahead.
Opps! Sorry, I seemed to have given the wrong impression: I wasn't advocating
moving Australian city articles to the [[city, state]] format, but was just
asking if Australians reused city names as often as Americans and only
<i>if</i> they did, then the [[city, state]] format would need to be used --
which you indicate isn't the case.
So then, why don't we just take the path of least resistance and use whatever
format is the dominant one? Oh drat, I just checked and found out that that
path is to not disambiguate at all.....
If city names in Australia are unique within that country (or any country for
that matter) why not simply have [[Perth]] or [[Sydney]] live at [[Perth,
Australia]] or [[Sydney, Australia]] giving these notable examples redirect
priority over their one word names (only since they are the most famous
cities by those names -- in the same way as [[Los Angles]] redirects to [[Los
Angeles, California]])? Side note: It would be nice for the existance of
redirects to be made more obvious -- at least in "pages that link here".
Again, either way, we should name city articles consistently within
countries. However, [[Sydney, New South Wales]] sounds like an unnecessary
amount of information to my American ears and I would wager that most
netcitizens wouldn't know which Australian state Sydney is in (and therefore
wouldn't be likely to either link to or search for it by that name -- What
netcitizens search for on Google and how Google ranks pages is also important
to consider). So the format of [[city, country]] would appear to be the best
choice for Australia after all.
But then what I think is worthless if the Aussies disagree. Please take the
above as a somewhat well-reasoned suggestion. :-)
maveric149
It just occurred to me that another option might be to let the user specify which links show in the side bar. I don't know how practicable that is, but I for one wouldn't mind if I could "turn off" the links to short and long pages, among others. (though I know others would).
kq
You Wrote:
>The primary problem mentioned about the new layout was that the
>quickbar is too tall on some smaller screens. One possible solution to
>that is that I added two more sidebar options to user preferences: now
>there is not only "none", "left", and "right", but also "fixed left"
>and "fixed right"; in these latter two, the sidebar is scrollable with
>the page.
>
>We may also want to experiment with the fonts a bit, and decide which
>of the now five options is the best default.
>
>Also, it is my intention that "none" should be a useful option, in
>that there shouldn't be enything on the quickbar that isn't also
>accessible elsewhere (for example, the special pages list which isn't
>done yet).00
I am becoming increasingly concerned over seeing seeing greater and greater
numbers of non-article disambiguation pages. The concept of having
disambiguation pages was started for perfectly valid reasons -- for roughly
well-known cities that have the same name, monarchs with the same names, or
for other things where precedence over which term should be at a
non-disambiguated title cannot be determined (such as Mercury).
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia but it is also a wiki - so we must name articles
to (hopefully naturally) differentiate terms that would otherwise have the
same name AND encourage spontaneous linking. Full disambiguation should ONLY
be used as a last resort (such as with Mercury - planet Mercury doesn't cut
it in the same way as [[biological virus]] because "planet" is not part of
the planet's name - but makes for a useful redirect). If we don't encourage
spontaneous linking wherever possible, the project will eventually be lost
because contributors will increasingly find it tedious to use pipes all the
time when linking to articles. Alleviating unnecessary tedium is why I killed
the subpages in the Star Wars and Star Trek articles - contributions to those
articles have since significantly increased now that pipes don't have to be
used to link every term.
All I am saying, is that full disambiguation which turns a page named
[[example]] into a non-article list with a disambiguation notice and links to
[[example (discipline 1)]], [[example (discipline 2)]], [[example (discipline
3)]] should only be used as a last resort when valid non-parenthetical
alternatives are not used at all and there is a <reasonable> ambiguity issue.
--maveric149
I agree with the point that the Year in Review articles are "space
limited" in a sense, but I don't see what's wrong with Toby's
solution: let the articles grow until they get too big, then unload
the less important stuff to something like [[Books published in
1962]], of course linked to from [[1962]]. The most important books
could still stay on [[1962]].
We could now try to come up with some hard and fast rule as to
when a list in a year's article is too long and deserves its own page,
but we could also just leave that up to judgement calls, like anything
else really.
Robert mentions another problem: some fans will add entries to years'
pages, thus skewing their "importance". That's true, but it is a
problem throughout Wikipedia. Many topics are covered from a certain
angle, probably because that's the angle the original author liked
and/or understood best. The hope is that other authors will show up
over time and add other angles. We should expect the same to happen on
the years' pages.
Axel
I looked for Nupedia and found that it's in Anthomyiidae. I looked on
Nearctica for Anthomyiidae and found that it lists Nupedia only in
parentheses after Pegoplata. Is the name valid?
phma