Wikipedia-l July 2003

wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

71 participants
114 discussions

Intro for readers of this list (Was: "Edit this section", TOC implemented)
by Daniel Mayer 03 Jul '03

03 Jul '03

brion vibber wrote: >We have allowed such links since nearly >a year ago, but you had to make an anchor >yourself by putting in some HTML tag with >an 'id="anchorname"' attribute. Sounds cool. But why not just make another article? >The discussion is whether to automatically >_create_ anchors from headers, which is >needed for Erik's proposed automatic table >of contents generation for pages with more >than three headers. Heavens no! That would be ugly and non-standard and should not be a default setting (in the same way as the almost as ugly auto header numbering is not the default). -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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Re: Announcing Wikimedia Foundation
by erik_moeller＠gmx.de 03 Jul '03

03 Jul '03

rvalles- > - Unprivilegiation of the English wikipedia: The way it's setup now > (http://www.wikipedia.org = english. others are ?.wikipedia.org) is totally > discriminative , offensive and degrading for the other languages, Hyperbole is not very helpful. It is discriminating, yes, but "offensive and degrading" are terms that I am sure many people working on these other Wikipedias would disagree with. Our English Main Page prominently features links to the active Wikipedias in other languages, as well as a link to the list of all wikis in the very first sentence. If you speak Spanish, it is hard to miss the fact that there's a Spanish edition of Wikipedia. Nevertheless, most of the developers agree that we want to make the switch to a multi language portal eventually. However, I personally would find it silly and offensive to put up an ugly plain static HTML page with just a bunch of links instead of our current Main Page (and frankly, all the drafts I've seen so far were ugly). Existing links to www.wikipedia.org articles would have to keep working anyway. A multi language portal should have the following functionality: - meta search on several wikis - unified login system (trivial to code, but non-trivial to synchronize our existing accounts) - unified interlanguage link table - recent changes over several wikis - auto highlight of language defined in web browser There is still lots of work to do on more serious issues related to our software for us to focus what is an issue that only relatively few people have strong feelings about. However, if you and other people were to volunteer on addressing these issues, the multilanguage portal would come about much faster. Complaining rarely gets things done -- participating does. > - Migration of all wikipedias to the phase3 software. This is non-trivial because of the vastly different data structures. Currently there is only one person actively involved in the necessary process. If you want to speed it up, again, help us locate active developers who can help with the conversion, and we will certainly be as liberal as possible in handing out access to the server. > - More openness in general, public discusion of decisions > before them being made. Virtually all of our decisions have public justification, either on the mailing list or on the wiki. Everyone working on Wikipedia has agreed that Jimbo has the right to veto all decisions; he is the founder of the project and has invested thousands of dollars to make it happen. He deserves our respect and gratitude. The FDL protects us from serious abuse of power, as your own fork demonstrates. > -Distribution of the servers all arround the world, > allowing every one of them to mirror backups for all the others, While I sympathize with the idea, the Wikimedia foundation will allow us to raise the funds necessary to operate all wikis in one place. The aforementioned interlanguage integration will be much more difficult with distributed wikis. > and > avoiding this way any kind of censorship originated by having a single > server unther the US laws. Arguably, US law is the most liberal in terms of freedom of speech. Few other countries have such a strong commitment to what is the First Amendment in the US. Of course, US politicians try to undermine it whenever they can, but it still protects a lot of speech that is prosecuted elsewhere. You will find it very difficult to point to examples where content was "censored" from the English Wikipedia for reasons other than copyright. Distributing servers will not help in addressing censorship concerns, since this will be viewed as merely a technical trick if the servers are legally controlled by the Wikimedia foundation. If they are not, we are no longer talking about an integrated project. > Myself, I'm specially angry about the > english-as-the-main-language-and-others-just-secoundary thing, and about it > being not solved even after years listening to people asking so. Years of listening? Wikipedia has been around since January 2001. What I find very frustrating is that people like yourself complain about certain things not being done when the cause of them not being done is not that people have a bad attitude towards you, but that there are simply not enough resources to complete them yet. By forking your project, you have only worsened the problems, since now there exist different editions of Wikipedia with different versions of the same content, and a lot of duplicate work is done. There are different branches of the software and different groups of users. The justification for the fork was IMHO weak at best. Didn't you ever ask yourself why none of the other wikis have forked? Everyone working on Wikipedia is doing so on their free time. When something is not getting done, the kind of "gimme" attitude that says "Either do what we want, and do it NOW, or we will fork" is very harmful. Above all else, people need to bring patience into a project such as ours. > By the way, if you're interested in a spanish language free encyclopedia There already is one. It's called the Wikipedia. If you have any content you wish to contribute to it, let us know. Regards, Erik

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Re: Please help test new features
by Mirko Thiessen 03 Jul '03

03 Jul '03

Erik Moeller wrote: > > Please help us test these features before we put them on the live server, > > otherwise, things might break unexpectably. > Everything works fine in Opera 7 and IE 6. Great new features. The TOC below the introduction looks fine. IMO it is a better place than top right or in the sidebar. As for the EDIT links belonging to the sections, I would expect to be able to edit an entire section including the sub-headings after clicking on such an edit link. (see http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donau-Ries - after clicking on EDIT next to the HISTORY section the edit screen includes only the heading "History" and not the sub-headings below) I don't know, if it is possible to implement this, but you will probably know. Thanks for the great work, Mirko (Cordyph)

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RE: Please help test new features
by Erik Zachte 03 Jul '03

03 Jul '03

How about editing conflicts? Do they work for the new section edit feature? I opened two windows for the same article and clicked edit for the same section in both windows. I changed the text in window 1 and saved it. Then I changed the text in window 2 and saved it. I did not receive an response 'Editing conflict'. Is this because I did this from the same IP address, or is it a 'feature' of the new release? Erik Zachte

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RE: [Wikipedia-l] Please help test new features
by Mark Christensen 03 Jul '03

03 Jul '03

>> Making wikipedia easier to use for everybody isn't a terrible >> violation of basic wiki-nature, it's just being nice to users. And, >> that -- in my opinion -- is a just a good idea. > If "Anybody can use any skin they want!" were true, > I would agree with you 100%. > But only logged-in editors can use any skin they want. > Forcing editors to log in to use useful features is > a violation of Wiki-nature. I'm willing to hedge on > "terrible". > I'd first try to develop an interface that avoids > confusion without requiring cookies, etc. That would > be the optimal solution. First, "wiki-nature" is a vague and somewhat undefined entity. While I would certianly agree that it is valuable and could be violated, I would also argue that there is a reasonable requirement that you explain what it is in "wiki-nature" that would be violated by this proposal. Not only that, while I agree that the "wiki-nature is valuable, I don't agree that it is an ultimate value, so I would also think it reasonable that you explain why precisely it is that convenience for users of the wikipedia is ''less valuable'' than the particular aspect of wiki nature in question.

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Please help test new features
by Erik Zachte 03 Jul '03

03 Jul '03

Now that headers become even more important: H3 and H4 are almost indistinguisable (at least on Explorer 6 default settings). This is quite confusing. A reason why many writers prefer '''bold''' text for headers lower than H3. Also the font size for the headers is quite large. Small paragraphs with huge headers is quite ugly. This has been discussed before: Can we have a smaller H4 in the stylesheets? Erik Zachte

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Re: [Wikitech-l] "Edit this section", TOC implemented
by The Cunctator 03 Jul '03

03 Jul '03

On 6/30/03 5:05 PM, "Erik Moeller" <erik_moeller(a)gmx.de> wrote: > Kurt- > > maybe that's a silly question, but why don't we define a policy on > interpage-anchor-linking? There may be a few instances in which it is > useful (FAQ? link to "External links" section, which is always titled the > same anyway?) without any drawbacks. > This whole discussion REALLY should be taking place on the wikipedia-l list. Unilateral, unilateral.

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Re: Wikipedia-l digest, Vol 1 #1216 - 14 msgs
by sgilbert＠nbnet.nb.ca 03 Jul '03

03 Jul '03

On 2 Jul 2003, at 20:43, The Cunctator wrote: > > My reasoning for this was that Wikipedia has two uses: > > - a work of reference > > - a collaborative editing system used by us. > > > > We need to find the right balance between making editing easy and making > > reading Wikipedia unobtrusive. Some work on this is being done in the > > Skin department, for example, where we will probably end up with a Skin > > preferred by editors, and one that is more friendly to non-editing > > users. > > This would be a terrible violation of the basic Wiki-nature of Wikipedia. A "reader" skin wouldn't make it hard for people to edit; it would just keep things as simple and uncluttered as possible, with navigation tools and an "Edit this page" link. The complicated stuff would be tucked out of sight. If you want to argue wiki-nature, I'd say this simple skin would be more "wiki" than our current cluttered, full-featured and somewhat confusing interfaces. - Stephen G. ------- Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia http://www.wikipedia.org

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Re: [Wikipedia-l] Intro for readers of this list (Was: "Edit this
by sgilbert＠nbnet.nb.ca 03 Jul '03

03 Jul '03

wikipedia-l-request(a)wikipedia.org wrote: Daniel Mayer wrote: > brion vibber wrote: > >We have allowed such links since nearly > >a year ago, but you had to make an anchor > >yourself by putting in some HTML tag with > >an 'id="anchorname"' attribute. > > Sounds cool. But why not just make another article? Yet another reason: it would allow for a master index for the FAQ pages, allowing people to quickly scan all the questions and jump to the one of interest. - Stephen G. ------- Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia http://www.wikipedia.org

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Please help test new features
by Daniel Mayer 03 Jul '03

03 Jul '03

Stan wrote: >The TOC should be just above the >first section heading. Otherwise >the lead paragraph, the one that >tells you what the article is >actually about, can be pushed >down so far it's completely off >the initial screen, which is bad. I agree completely. Take a look at how ugly and unusable this is: http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be . >As a reader, I'm only interested >in the TOC when I've read the lead >and decided that this article is >the one I'm looking for; at that >point my eyes will be at the end >of the lead, and a TOC at that >point helps me decide between >reading the whole article or just >jumping to a section of special >interest. Yep. >It would be cool if sidebar vs >main flow was a preference. It would be really cool if the TOC were placed entirely in the sidebar or at the very least after the intro section (either way we would have to encourage short headings or the result will be over-widened pages on low res screens). -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav) __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! http://sbc.yahoo.com

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Wikipedia-l July 2003