it just occured to me that there could be a very nifty way to *help* all
good men... to help categorize wikipedia articles.
please, whoever it may concern, too.
try considering a new feature: a dropdown menu for inserting/deleting
categories into/from articles is definitely what the wikipedia world needs!
i am not suggesting offering *all* categories under the sun but only
universally agree on top-level categories in immutable form
i guess wikipedia could really benefit from categorization work already
done by
* dmoz.org
* openCyc
* universal decimal classification (UDC)
* etc. ...
think.
8)
hi
here is an extract from a short talk i had on irc lately:
>kakau does anyone present remember this posting concerning a
wikipedia visual navigator? my very humble suggestion (about 2 mths
ago) was then bluntly rejected for no clearcut reasons or let's put it
the other way: did anyone of you once come across
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/online/ or touchgraphs wikibrowser
http://www.touchgraph.com/TGWB_101_SS.html ???
>hashar I did I dont think we can use that on wikipedia servers, it
will generate too many queries for the DB servers
kakau and exactly *this* is *not* true. all you'd need to make that
work would be a wiki "action" that only listed either the hyperlinks or
the categories or both of one article at a time... look at
tgwikibrowser. it's fairly straigthforward. while you are in "visual"
mode, the load would be even less than for a full text query result
>hashar that s still one more query made additional queries to build
the tree
>kakau you won't have one person do both at the same time: either
people navigate through "bubbles" or through text. this argument is
nil... 8) some people, just to insist a bit more, do in fact like
http://www.kartoo.com/ which is not so far from my suggestion, either i
just cannot imagine that the outside world is really busy and keen on
visual navigation just for laughs i'd rather think that the idea holds
some "extra value"... for the "customer"
as an aside: i think i posted an idea about a "semantic wikipedia" over
one year ago. the idea, sadly enough, was turned down too. now we see
categorization in full bloom. whom exactly should i address to make my
visual navigation proposal be heard?
8)
Mark Williamson a �crit:
>> Do not claim something is true when you do not cite
evidence
>> Do not claim something is true over just one sample
person experience
>> Do not draw conclusion of censorship when
information is missing to draw
>> such a conclusion.
>Quote: "Adding new languages is certainly a strain on
>developers. It
>certainly will be that this project will grow slowly
>(it would be
>wiser perhaps to work mostly on wiktionary rather than
>wikipedia to
>start with), but I do not think we should on purpose
>limit the
>existence of small projects on the motive there will
>be few editors to
>work on." (Anthere)
>You claim something is true (strain on developers)
>without citing
>evidence, you claim it is true from your own
>experience presumably,
>and you claim it as a fact when in fact the next
>message was a message
>from TimStarling contradicting what you said: "It's
>not that much of a
>strain. I actually added this to the language list as
>soon as I saw
>the post, thinking that since it has an ISO 639-2
>code, it would be
>uncontroversial."
I am not entirely sure you can compare
* the opinion of an anonymous person, as a representative, relevant and accurate sample of possibly one million people (reported by you)
* versus the opinion of one of our top developers, known by our whole community, as a sample of a team of perhaps 20 guys (reported by I)
But I suppose this is debatable indeed....
I noticed Tim comment. I remember I felt that though he was being gentle, it was probably a mistake for him to say this. Your comment just proved me right.
Setting a new wikipedia is one thing, maintenance is another. I think Tim mentionned several times how heavy this can be and I do not think he was making it up. You may choose to focus on one gentle comment he made once and forget all the times he complained, but I do not think this is how the rest of the community understood the situation. If you understood that setting up and maintaining a small wikipedia is no problem and easy at all, I beg that you remember we are all volunteers and reconsider your view on the situation.
>>> Also, such actions to censor minority language
websites are common in Turkish netcafes.
>> Do not generalized without citing facts.
>>Do not make appeal to pity by using the word minority out of context.
>Apparently, you need to look at the Ethnologue because Kurdish,
>Ladino, and all other non-Turkish languages of Turkey
>are minority languages - that is, they are spoken by less than 50%
>of the population. I fail to see how this is out of context, as it is an
>undeniable fact that, in the present boundaries of the nation of
>"Turkey", the majority language is Turkish, and thus
>all other languages are "minority languages" within the
>boundaries of that state.
Are you saying that connection to Wikipedia is impossible to Ladino or other non turkish-speaking people, while Wikipedia is available to turkish-speaking people ?
I do not think so.
We are talking of restriction of access to Wikipedia in internet cafes.
Not of minority languages being censored. Nor of minority languages people having their access to information restricted.
So, do not mix issues please. The issue *right now* is access to Wikipedia, not minorities rights not being respected.
> > >Right, so if I sent a letter to the government of Turkey requesting
> > >the release of H. Ertas, who was jailed just for editing a
> > >Turkish-language Kurdish culture category (not as I said earlier a
> > >category on terrorist groups) on DMOZ, there is some sort of
> > >requirement that, as a Wikipedian, I sign it "Mark Williamson
> > >(Wikipedia user Node_ue)"? There is life outside of Wikipedia, and
> > >there is activism independent of Wikipedia. I do not sign letters with
> > >my username and the fact that I am a Wikipedian unless it's relevant
> > >to the letter itself.
>> Do not change topics. We are talking of Wikipedia access only, not of
>> the DMOZ issue.
>Perhaps you did not read the letter which started this
>thread, written by Erdal Ronahi, in which he mentions the DMOZ issue?
>This is a mailinglist, and I will change topics whenever I want,
>regardless of what you say.
This is a mailing list about Wikipedia. There is a sort of expectation that we discuss about Wikipedia generally.
Not about languages minorities rights. Nor about DMOZ issues. Not about your political activity outside of Wikipedia.
Still, you may change topics if you wish and discuss whatever topic pleases you indeed, but do not expect necessarily that people follow you ;-)
Currently, I was trying to talk with you about Wikipedia access in Turkey. It seems very hard to focus on this specific topic.
>> If you want to be an activist out of Wikipedia, please be so, but do not
>> try to involve us in your advocacy.
>When did I try to involve "you" in "my advocacy"? I never said
>"Antheres of the world, I call upon you to support me in my advocacy!".
Sweetie, if you make a huge noise on media channels, explaining how outrageous it is that Turkey is so irrespectful of human rights, and sign it under your real name, it is just fine by me.
If you try to do make it appear that we, the wikipedia community, supports this as well, you involve us in your advocacy.
Consequently, any such bold move should only be done with support of your peers here.
I am pleased to know you would do this under your real name.
>> >>Give it time.
>> > Is this what you tell H. Ertas, who is going to spend the next ten
>> > months in prison just for editing a culture category on DMOZ? "Give it
>> > time, you will get out of prison eventually"?
>> And above all, avoid sneaky personal attacks.
>You said "give it time" in direct response to what I
>said. If you propose to give it time, this means to me the same as
>if you said "Give it time, you will get out of prison eventually"
>to Mr H Ertas.
All wikipedians have topics for which they care. For you, it is probably minorities and preservation of minority languages.
However, this is NOT Wikipedia goal, even if Wikipedia can help.
When I say "give it time", I talk about Wikipedia, not about your own fights.
"Give it time" means "do not jump on the Turkish government or on internet caffees owner immediately. Check if there is really censorship before. And even if there is, go slowly and allow them for keeping face. Don't call for help all human rights activist organizations. Do not scream hell in media".
"Give it time" does not mean "Just let the jerk shrivel in prison for the rest of his life. Who cares ?"
My "give it time" is related to Wikipedia, not to human rights issues in Turkey.
This is a mailing list about Wikipedia, not human rights in Turkey. Unless specified, my comments are about Wikipedia issues.
>That is not a sneaky personal attack.
>And I have this to say as well: above all, avoid
>assuming a hostile tone in messages unless you feel you will later be
>able to explain your tone, especially when the previous message is not
>hostile in tone.
>Mark
Implying that I just do not care at all for the guy in prison is hostile in tone.
Do not bother answering to this mail
At least, I will not comment any more :-)
---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - Find what you need with new enhanced search. Learn more.
Hi Erdal,
Before anything, I would like to recommand you to very very well check your facts. But I see that you are trying to do this. Have some feedback from all turkish editors. Ask some friends in Turkye to check as well. Perhaps Erik Zachte could help you on checking statistics ? Or another developer might ? (Hashar, can you help on this ?)
The second point is that I would recommand low profile *as much as* possible.
I think making major reports to inform anyone on the planet that Turkish government is doing censorship or that there are multiple individual moves in that direction is a *very bad* idea. Same for starting an email campaign and call for help from Amnesty International. Please, do not do this. Avoid threatening the government as well, as you are NOT sure it is the government who might be responsible of it (you are not even sure there is censorship, doubly less for knowing who is the instigator).
Generally, we are not here to say what is good and what is not good, or how authorities should manage their countries. We try to demonstrate that freedom of information is better in the long run, but we are not an advocacy group supporting human rights.
If you "attack" the government, and it is responsible of the current situation, you do not let room for it to politely claim it was all a mistake, apology and restore full access. You do not let room to keep face, you contribute to escalating a conflict.
If you "attack" the government and it is not responsible of the current situation, you will upset it toward us, and this will not have good consequences in the long run.
Whatever the government, we do not want to be expressely seen as an advocacy group saying what they do is bad, we should rather stay low profile, and remind that we have a strong neutrality policy and are not taking sides.
If you really feel you have to make it known what is going on, I think you should advertise it just as you would in a wikipedia article. Just report facts (decrease of access as shown in recent statistics; report from xxx wikipedians that they cant access the site anymore. Cite your sources if you can (people is tough, but stats do not fear anything). Stick to facts, and do not draw any public conclusion. Do not make a long rant on how horrendous it is that censorship exist, that human rights are not respected. Just let the reader make its own opinion on why access is impaired and where it could come from. You might indeed mention in the article that it might be a temporary technical problem.
In short, let a back door so that the situation can resolve without getting in a war necessarily and upsetting people.
Anthere
Wikimedia Foundation
---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - now with 250MB free storage. Learn more.
I have looked, and have not found any explicit
statement that bandwidth "theft" is "discouraged". It
seems like common sense to me, but what do I know?
A few weeks ago, Brian blocked a site that was
mirroring wikipedia by passing on each request to
Wikipedia live, and presenting the results (wrapped,
of course, with advertisements). That site was also
blatantly violating GFDL, so the block seemed obvious.
There is also a site that has been doing the same
thing, though with the appearance of GFDL compliance.
( See
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Non-compliant_site_coordination/
)
So, my question is, do we need such a statement
forbidding/discouraging/allowing/encouraging
band-width stealing? Perhaps more important, is it
safe to assume that such sites should be blocked? Do
we need some process to make sure it happens when
appropriate?
Finally, is this the right place to bring this up?
-Rich Holton (en.wikipedia:user:rholton)
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - now with 250MB free storage. Learn more.
http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250
Hi,
I'm curious about two things: one, the proper forum to discuss mass
minor edits (a user or a few users who make a lot of small, related
changes to lots of unrelated articles), where using the talk pages for
the individual articles would be impractical (owing to the sheer
number).
If that was too vague, here's what prompted it: A user named Alice9
has gone through what looks like every article for every company
mentioned in the "100 Best Companies for Working Mothers" list
published by "Working Mothers Magazine" and added a reference to that
accolade in the article.
Now, I don't think that Alice9 isn't spamming Wikipedia (there's no
link to the magazine). Nor do I think this is any sort of vandalism --
Alice9 has far more contributions to Wikipedia than I do. I do,
however, question the necessity of adding this accolade to 100
articles (some of which, like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University, are long enough as it
is). A list of every accolade bestowed by every women's magazine would
make the Ford article unreadably long, let alone the Ben and Jerry's
article. It would be unfair to exclude the others, but impossible to
include them all.
Normally, I'd post my concerns on the talk pages, but with hundreds of
articles affected, that's impractical.
So, two questions: one, what's the best forum for matters like this?
Obviously, the talk pages would be inefficient, since the same
arguments affect hundreds of articles. Second, assuming this is the
best forum, what do people think of the issue at hand?
--Joe
Hello Mark W.,
On Sun, 12 Dec 2004 02:50:24 -0700, you wrote:
>I think the key here is, when using Windows, what version of Uniscribe you
>are using, not the browser (also, it may depend on what font you are using
>- some fonts have opentype tables for diacritic positioning, others don't).
I already pointed out that the problems are *specific* to Mozilla and
Mozilla Firefox. Also, the fonts creating problems in Firefox do not create
those problems in other, non-Mozilla, programs.
As far as Uniscribe goes, I use version 1.471.4030.0 -- a version which
should be quite able to handle this, as indeed it proves to do in all the
other programs I run --, and I have put a local copy in the "Mozilla
Firefox" program folder without that making any difference.
I have basically no problems in Opera, IE, OpenOffice 1.1.3, Windows
Notepad and Windows WordPad except for the occasional minor kerning
problems in PDF creation -- a problem that is widely known as a separate
issue..
The font I use the most is Ezra SIL SR -- a font that basically has all the
OpenType tables you may desire...
The following page from my own web site can serve as a test page:
http://utne.nvg.org/j/toledot/zebedhabbat.html
The CSS stylesheet used for this page has Hebrew font set in prioritised
order for paragraphs of the type p.he:
line-height: 18pt;
text-align:justify;
font-family: "Ezra SIL SR", "Ezra SIL", "SBL Hebrew", Cardo,
"Times New Roman", Times, serif;
font-size: 14pt;
font-weight: normal;
direction: rtl;
If you have all the fonts installed, you might note that the main header of
the page, in SBL Hebrew, displays its Hebrew correctly, -- whilst the
paragraphs further down on the page, in Ezra SIL SR, do not.
The font Ezra SIL SR has no problems with rendering in Opera, IE,
OpenOffice 1.1.3, Windows Notepad and Windows WordPad -- and there is no
sensible reason that I know of for it not being able to do the same glyph
substitution in Mozilla / M. Firefox...
In case you think that my manually coded CSS and HTML may be especially
faulty, you can also check the following page from Mechon-Mamre:
http://www.mechon-mamre.org/c/ct/c0101.htm
The CSS style sheet for that page contains the following specifications:
font-family:"Ezra SIL SR","Ezra SIL",code2000,Cardo,"Guttman
Vilna-Normal",Galaxie,"Arial Unicode
MS";color:#000000;background-color:#FFFFFF;margin:1.5em;
>seemed like people were like "Oh, did you try this? Didn't work? Oh well."
>which can hardly be a good thing for FireFox.
Exactly... :] For the time being, Firefox seems to be just a bit too flaky
to be of sufficent use even for people who know pretty well what they are
doing -- and we cannot expect that people who don't know CSS- and
HTML-coding ++ to be happy with a product that even reasonably code-savvy
people have trouble with...
-Olve
___________________
Olve Utne
http://utne.nvg.org
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Hoi,
> For whatever reason there is this silly sign that should indicate that a
> link is external.
>
> It is a silly thing for two reasons:
> *It does not show itself in an IE browser
> *When it is used in a language that is left to right like Arabic or
> Hebrew, it insists on being on the right side of the word in effect
> blocking out the first character.
>
> Could we PLEASE get rid of this silly thing. And if someone insists on
> keeping it, could it be fixed so that it behaves properly ...
>
> Thanks,
> GerardM
Hello,
Better than getting ride of it, we can fix the bug to align the icon on
left side using rtl.css ;o)
As for the IE issue, really people should use a modern browser wich can
handle css 2.0 .
cheers,
--
Ashar Voultoiz - WP++++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hashar
Servers in trouble ? noc (at) wikimedia (dot) org
"This signature is a virus. Copy me in yours to spread it."
Hello Gerard M.,
On Sun, 12 Dec 2004 08:52:03 +0100, you wrote:
>Just saying that Firefox is better is plain stupid when the argument
>IS that it does underperform. [...] So I am fully aware why there is a
>such a strong case for IE and against Firefox when used with Farsi and
>propably Urdu, Arabic and Hebrew.
I agree, and I can confirm your suspicions regarding Hebrew. I have tested
recent versions of Firefox and Mozilla with Hebrew, and neither of them can
handle complex Hebrew text with combined diacritics and cantillation marks.
I believe it is a case of varying degrees of support for glyph-substituting
in complex combinations. Opera is best on this, with IE as a good #2. A
problem with Opera in Windows seems to be that it corrupts pictures when
downloading them from Wikipedia. Therefore, I personally use Opera for most
things, and IE when needing to download Wikipedia images.
(Another problem with Opera is that it is in some ways less up to it when
it comes to CSS than IE is. In that respect, Mozilla and Firefox does a bit
better than Opera, but they are both actually outperformed by IE when it
comes to scrollbar properties, block-align by css in table cells, etc.)
That does not by any means mean that I am particularly fond of IE...! It is
just that it is one of the two Windows browsers I know of that can actually
handle Hebrew properly. Not because I am stupid or uninformed, but because
I need something that Firefox and Mozilla (and sometimes also Opera) do not
in fact provide.
-Olve
___________________
Olve Utne
http://utne.nvg.org
Hi there,
I get reports from Turkey that Internet Cafes have begun to block
several Kurdish sites including the Kurdish Wikipedia, which I am admin
on. While it is known that political sites hosted in Europe are being
censored in the whole of Turkey, the selective blocking of sites like
Wikipedia using special software seems to be something new.
After the sentencing of a dmoz editor to 10 months in prison two weeks
ago this looks like another escalation.
Before all, I want to be sure that there is a significant fall in the
access rate from Turkey. Unfortunately the Webalizer statistics do not
work at the moment. Can anybody with a better insight verify if there is
a notable fall in accesses from Turkey to the Kurdish Wikipedia?
Thanks,
Erdal