Hello,
Today, I reviewed my (complete) watchlist. I found some strange,
non-existing pages on it:
ClockWorkNigger
George Wanker Bush
Pinux
Template:AAERGilbDFgoui
I can't recall ever having encountered such pages. How could such items
have been added to my watchlist?
--
Greetings from Troels Arvin, Copenhagen, Denmark
Hi all,
Andre Engels has recently locked the sh.wikipedia database at the
recommendation of Tim Starling, on the grounds that it is "supposed to
be dead".
However, if I recall correctly, there is a story behind the continued
existance (until now) of the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia in the shadow of
the Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian Wikipedias, perhaps something along
the line of there still being people who push for the usage of the
unified form again?
While I realise that much of the content at sh.wikipedia does not
belong there, simple locking of a database is no way to deal with
inappropriate content, rather it should be discussed with the relevant
people who can help fix it in the proper way.
And while Serbo-Croatian may no longer be the official language of a
state, it still exists parallel to Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, and
Montenegrin (this may or may not be an actual language, the whole
question of these 5 different varieties which are, depending on who
you speak to, different languages or different dialects). Bosnian,
Serbian, and Croatian are pushed by Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian
nationalists as well as their respective governments, Montenegrin is
pushed in Montenegro (Crna Gora) by nationalists but a measure to make
Montenegrin rather than Serbian the official language of Montenegro
failed. However, something like 30% of the population writes on the
census that rather than Serbian they speak Montenegrin. Serbo-Croatian
is very controversial, but it is still pushed by some.
Mark
Hi all,
We have some language names (ie, for interwiki) that aren't right.
Among them are:
bo (tibetan): bod skad (should be བོད་ཡིག)
bn (bengali): should be বাংলা
or (oriya): Oriya (should be ଓଡ଼ିଆ)
xh (xhosa): Xhosa (should be isiXhosa)
zu (zulu): Zulu (should be isiZulu)
dv (divehi): should be ހިބަސް
lo (lao): should be ລາວ
si (sinhala): should be සිංහල
ht (haitian creole): should be Krèyol
dz (dzongkha): should be ཇོང་ཁ
Best,
Mark
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> The following is my response to a question raised in the Beer Parlour
> of the en:wiktionary about how far we go in accepting protologisms or
> newly coined words. I have copied it here because it involves issues
> that can be of concern to the broader community.
>
> Wiktionary is frequently Googled, and because of its FDL availability
> it is frequently copied into other websites. The result is that
> allowing some protologism here has a multiplier effect. By allowing a
> protologism we become advocates for it; we are no longer neutral, but
> begin to collectively push a POV.
>
> Wikipedia has a "no original research" policy. We need some parallel
> to that. The support for a word is far more accessible that the
> details of some complicated new theory in physics. With a physics
> theory the average reader is soon lost in opaque details, and can
> quickly give up in confusion. A word is different in that it's often
> easy to devise a coherent definition. The average reader can
> understand it, and begin to apply it in his own life. We are in a
> better position to get away with a lot of public bullshit.
>
> Strangely enough, I believe that Wiktionary has a far greater
> potential than Wikipedia to being influential in the general public. I
> say this notwithstanding the fact that it is much smaller, and
> receives far less critical scrutiny than Wikipedia. A person who has
> found "prydxl" in Wiktionary or any of its copycats could very well
> begin to use it despite its bogus origins.
>
> Protologisms are only part of the problem. The debate about "leet"
> words come into it; so does the verifiability of any entry. Mix these
> with an increasing level of influence, and we have a major ethical
> dilemma relating to the function and purpose of any dictionary.
>
> A dictionary chronicles the language in both its past and its present.
> Its past needs to be subject to calls for evidence; if a word is
> challenged the burden of proof for verifying its legitimacy needs to
> fall upon the contributor. Otherwise, the rest of us are left with the
> futile task of proving a negative. Evidence for new words is even more
> important. It is not enough to say that the word was used in some
> unspecified episode of a TV series. What amuses the members of today's
> peanut gallery may be completely forgotten by this time next year when
> the forces of marketing will have diverted our attention to some new
> ephemeral fantasy. Web evidence does no better. It is not good to
> accept any word as valid irregardless (sic!) of where you found it.
I don't know where the problem is greater, but this certainly occurs
plenty on Wikipedia as well. Protologisms, or as I would call them
"attempted neologisms", are a regular feature on Votes for Deletion and
go swiftly to their fate. The no-original-research policy would be the
ideal starting point for Wiktionary to use, I would think.
I'm quite surprised at you, Ray, you're almost starting to sound like a
deletionist. (Please, nobody start a flamewar over this - I'm only teasing.)
--Michael Snow
hi all I am new and have some questions. I want to use some of the
tools provided im wikimedia but am a little lost when looking at the
source code.
I really like the diff tool. I would like to use it on some text
files I have. Could you suggest a way to run your diff tool and some
plain test files, not sure what functions to call first
I would like to do this from a unix/linux command line. I would also
like to keep the highlichting and font colors of the wikipedia but
would like to have a basic format (no navigation, no wallpaper ect)
Any help you could provide would be great!
Hi,
Some of the mathematical representation on [[Knuth's up-arrow notation]]
is broken. There is too much whitespace. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/math/a62fcfaa06f5fa6052ab4b8bf292f7fd.png
I don't know what causes this, but it doesn't look nice.
kind regards,
Gerrit.
--
Weather in Lulea / Kallax, Sweden 23/11 10:50:
-19.0°C wind 2.2 m/s NW (34 m above NAP)
--
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist.
-Dwight David Eisenhower, January 17, 1961
[resent, wrong address for wikipedia-l]
[FUP: wikipedia-l, CC: pywikipediabot-users]
Hello,
I have recently been thinking again how wonderful my bayesian
spamfilter, implemented by Spambayes[1], is working to filter my e-mail.
For an explanation of Bayesian spamfiltering, see the Spambayes homepage.
I was thinking whether it would be possible to do something like that
for Newpages. It could reduce human work and might prove a very
interesting experiment as well.
The bot I am thinking of would follow Newpages live. It fetches each
page, and checks it against it database. If it's classified as ham, then
continue. If it's classified as unsure, ask the user whether it is
{{delete}}-material: if yes, train as spam and prepend {{delete}} to the
article. If no, train as ham. It could add a comment to the article or a
message to the talk page: <!-- classified by ... as ... with score ... -->
If it's classified as spam, show the user (part of) the content to
confirm that it's really true (if not, treat as unsure-ham).
If it already contains '{{delete}}', train as spam and continue.
When no user is using the program, create a stack of articles to work
through when a user starts with the program again.
This would be implemented using an enhanced Pywikipediabot and the
library coming with Spambayes. I foresee some problems. For example,
each user would have its own 'hammy.db'. As we are all working on the
same thing, we would want to have a central hammy.db, probably one per
language. This would be at a central server (need not to be Wikipedia: I
volunteer with my server for this task). Initially, it would be a
command-line tool, although a web interface might prove very useful as
well.
Additional to the contents of the page, clues can also be given by the
user contributing, whether the user is logged-in or anonymous, the range
of the IP, name of the page, and, why not, the time of day, although the
latter might have less value than the former ones.
Perhaps it could also be done for RecentChanges. It would then be fed
the diffs. This would require a lot more work, because there is a major
difference between removing a line and adding a line (in fact, when one
would be a spam-hint, the inverse would be a ham-hint with clue 1-other).
This is much more difficult and I do not have the knowledge to write
such a thing. It does not seem impossible, though.
What do you think?
kind regards,
Gerrit Holl.
[1] http://www.spambayes.org/
--
Weather in Lulea / Kallax, Sweden 22/11 09:50:
-19.0°C wind 0.9 m/s NW (34 m above NAP)
--
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist.
-Dwight David Eisenhower, January 17, 1961
Hello,
I am writing an article about the usefulness of Wikipedia outside of
it's purpose as a reference and knowledge resource.
It would be very helpful to know more about the most interesting uses
people have seen of 3rd parties using Wikipedia content. What projects
are innovating with either the Wikipedia dumps or by accessing the
content directly? Primarily I'm looking for projects who sort of extend
the usefulness and the philosophy of--and perhaps contribute back
to--Wikipedia since I've already see many of those that simply try to
capitalize on it (with the ad content, which still is interesting, if
less than scrupulous).
Is there an official collection of 3rd party activity? Does Wikimedia
track/advertise 3rd parties that use the software--this is a secondary
interest for me.
Thanks in advance for your thoughts,
--
Aaron E. Klemm <lists(a)axiomos.com>
Axiom Open Solutions
Hello dear Wikipedians,
I listed a proposal for a Wikipedia in Baseldytsch (a swiss-german dialect
in Switzerland with its own dictionary and orthography, about one million
speakers; see also http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/
Request_for_new_language). I'm currently translating the interface (http:/
/meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Locales_for_the_Wikipedia_Software), but is there
anyone who can put the Baseldytsch Wikipedia online under the domain http:
//bsd.wikipedia.org/ ??? If yes, please do so! Or send me an e-mail how to
do so. Thank you very much,
CdaMVvWgS
--
Geschenkt: 3 Monate GMX ProMail + 3 Top-Spielfilme auf DVD
++ Jetzt kostenlos testen http://www.gmx.net/de/go/mail ++
On Saturday 27 November, that is in one week, a Wikipedia/Wikimedia
symposium will be held in Rotterdam. There will be a large number of
Dutch Wikipedians as well as Jimbo, Angela and Anthere. Might there be
interest from others, see
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Symposium/Najaar_2004 -
unfortunately all in Dutch, but most Dutch Wikipedians know about it
and will be willing to answer your questions in English or anothr
language.
Andre Engels