I apologize for being so slow with this message that Zoe became alarmed.
As a result of the discussion on [[Wikipedia_talk:Manual of Style (dates
and numbers)]], I have written a datebot that will convert dates of the
form "[[March 2]], [[2003]]" to "[[2 March]] [[2003]]" (and also the
simpler case of "[[March 2]]" to "[[2 March]]"). I have tested it in my
own sandbox and on a few naval ship pages.
Currently it has no automatic article selection mechanism; it only
munges the single article it's pointed at. I intend to run it manually
and slowly on the ship articles and make sure I haven't missed anything
about its operation.
I have no intention of doing anything precipitous.
--
Sean Barrett | How am I supposed to hallucinate
sean(a)epoptic.com | with all these swirling colors
| distracting me? --Lisa Simpson
>So Encyclopedia Britannica sucks in the
>Wikipedia contents, locks them up and
>improves upon them. Does that hurt me in
>any way? Or anybody else for that matter?
>I still have precisely the same amount of
>freedom I had before they decided to to that.
>Wikipedia is still free. If anything, I benefit
>because more people get to read my material
>and I get to read Britannica's improvements.
>
>Axel
At that point the /only/ thing you would be able to do is just read
Britannica's improvements.
Without the protections of the GNU FDL you would not be able to improve on
their improvements. Thus Britannica improves and Wikipedia doesn't - the
positive feedback cycle ends with the imprisonment of a version of the
content.
Thanks to the GNU FDL the content always improves and is always free.
Britannica is more than welcome to incorporate our content but any changes
they make would have to be licensed under the GNU FDL. Thus that gives us the
/freedom/ to improve upon their improvements. Default copyright forbids them
to use the content at all and the public domain only grants freedom in one
direction.
I for one would not contribute to Wikipedia if it were in the public domain.
--mav
WikiKarma:
The usual at [[February 25]]
Wikipedia supports HTML comments. You can enclose text in
<!-- and -->. This means that while the text will still be visible in
wikisource, it will not be visible on the displayed page.
I see in many articles that people add comments like: "To do: .." or
"needs to be expanded" or "who was this?". Some pages also have "Notes to
Wikipedia editors" and the like.
In case of detailed discussions, this should of course be moved to the
Talk page. But if it is useful to have directly in the text but only
useful for editors, we should use HTML comments for these kind of meta-
remarks. A non Wikipedia editor should not be exposed to meta-content like
this.
So when you see such a remark and don't want to delete it, please enclose
it in <!-- and --> to hide it from the rendered page, but not from those
who edit it. You *must* use this exact character sequence, the shorter
<!- foo -> or other variants like <- foo -> will *not* work.
Thanks!
Erik
>Fair enough. We should make it more clear, then.
>
>Please keep in mind that our rules, including this one, are
social
>norms that are sometimes informal, and don't get formalized
until we
>have something that pushes us to get more formal. I mean,
there are
>so many possible things that people might do, for better or
worse,
>that we can't (and shouldn't try) make a formal rule for
everything in
>advance.
The last thing we want is a bureaucratic prodecure. I never
advocate to formalize rules or detail them.
What frustrates me is that even though rules are not formal,
they are applied, sometimes rigidly.
>"Get approval before running a bot" is a good idea.
Approval from
>who? Well, you know, some sysops. One sysop? Probably
more than
>one? From Jimbo? No, not unless ultimately there's trouble
>establishing unanimity and we just need a ruling to get on
with
>things.
My idea is again we should stop impling rules and stick to
wiki style, which is act first then discuss and fix the
problem.
I don't think it would work that those who want to use bots
wait for a day or possiblly a week. Or maybe I just haven't
seen working cases yet.
My current side is simply ban bots by ordinary wikipedians
other than sysops. I believe the wiki way act first then fix
is a basic premise and because bots can be too destructive,
we can't apply the wiki way to it.
>Is this vague?
The problem is not rules are vague but the reasons of people
apply it are.
>A day or a week sounds good to me. We love bots, but it's
good for
>people to talk it over first,
Yeah, I would love to discuss and expected much before
running bots. But the long time brings more thoughts from
varaetiy of people? It seems to me in most of cases that
once a post in Village Pump became old say some hours, it
hardly gets more attention.
Fortunettly or unfortunatelly there is the tendency that
people act first then discuss. It is really difficult to get
many supports or complains before actually making
significant changes.
Yeah, maybe bots should be an exception because the result
might be unfixable. But some bots are really harmful and I
believe mime too.
>Now, I would strongly support changing this to say 'You
must get
>permission from', rather than 'Ideally one should check
with'. But it's
>a bit harsh to jump on people for taking the page literally.
But it is the truth then we should not hide it. It is better
to warn people before they actually make mistakes. I will
apply this to bots page in English wikipedia.
>We're saying the same thing.
Not quite. You believe reading the manual is the
responsibility of each participant and I don't agree.
>Why didn't I tell you? Because Wikipedia is not my job.
It's not my life. I
>don't check in every 15 minutes, every hour, on every
discussion, to monitor
>what goes on.
So you are saying if you delete some text from the article
and some complain about it, then you will say you don't want
to debate because you don't have time?
>I wouldn't mind being omniscient and omnipotent, but I'm
not. You shouldn't
>be upset with me for not knowing everything.
I am being upset not because you are not omnisicent but
because you didn't talk. Wikipedia is a community and the
basis of community is communication.
>But I do appreciate that you think I should be able to know
everything.
I only wish the community functions.
My experimental map code on the test site was removed. Does anyone have
a copy? It wasn't much code, what I need most is an example URL of a
map, which was originally submitted by Lars, AFAIR.
More important is the question: Should we support map links? My format was
[[map:xx.xx:yy.yy:s|Title]]
with xx.xx and yy.yy being the coordinates, and s an optional scale
factor. The link was "rewritten" to a free map service (as a link to an
external page, not to a map image!).
Magnus
Brion Vibber wrote:
>....
>Wouldn't it be more sensible if [[kingdom (biology)]]
>_automatically_ displayed as "kingdom", and in the
>much rarer cases we had to add a pipe to force the
>long form?
>...
Yes that would be much more sensible and unless there
is an objection I say go ahead and implement it (with
the proper announcements to Wikipedia News on meta of
course).
>What about handling of namespaces and interwiki
>links? Currently they're displayed be default,
>and the pipe trick strips them just like
>parentheticals.
I rarely ever want to actually display any namespace
(including interwiki ones) other than the various talk
namespaces. IMO all non-talk namespaces (wikipedia,
user, special and interwiki) should not displayed by
default.
Question:
What about all the piped links that are already in
Wikipedia? Will all instances of [[kingdom (biology) |
kingdom]] that are in articles right now be converted
to [[kingdom (biology)]] but displayed as
<u>kingdom</u>? Or would [[kingdom (biology)]]
automatically be converted to [[kingdom (biology) |
kingdom]] in the wiki code upon save? Or would we keep
all cases of [[kingdom (biology) | kingdom]] and
still support that syntax but also support [[kingdom
(biology)]] being displayed as just <u>kingdom</u>
without converting the wiki code to [[kingdom
(biology) | kingdom]] at save?
What would also be nice is the extend the pipe trick
for comma titles. IMO to follow the logic of your
proposed change [[Auburn, California]] would
automatically become [[Auburn, California | Auburn]]
but that may brake many links that already intend to
display the whole link name. So just to make linking
easier for at least those in the know perhaps
[[Auburn, California | ]] could be displayed as just
<u>Auburn</u> but in the wiki code it could still be
[[Auburn, California | ]] so that newbies can figure
out the trick. Yeah I know this would be inconsistent
with the proposed change in how the pipe trick works
with parentheticals but it is still tedious to type
[[Auburn, California | Auburn]] all the time.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
WikiKarma
I added many events to [[February 10]] and updated all
the year and many of the other pages linked from that
page.)
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