(With my apologies for cross-posting to different mailing lists. I wrote
a separate message to wikien-l, so some of you will have already read
about this, but I thought it would be good to mention this to some of
the non-English Wikipedians who don't subscribe there.)
As the English Wikipedia has gotten so big that even the most active and
experienced users can't really follow all of the major events there,
I've started a newspaper to try and collect that information for people.
You can find it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost
Obviously, anyone is welcome to read it, but it's intended to be mostly
for and about the English Wikipedia. Collectively (and in some cases,
individually), all the other languages could undoubtedly have a similar
newspaper, but I don't speak all those languages, and I'm only one
person. Anyway, I think this is the sort of thing that we develop
according to need, so whenever any individual project thinks it needs
this, feel free to use and adapt this idea.
--Michael Snow
Just the languages, please.
Less text, more interface.
The more text you try to include, the longer it will take visitors to
find a page that really introduces them to WP; and the longer it will
take to add new languages; and the harder it will be to generalize to
other Wikimedia projects.
http://www.europarl.eu.int/ is a fine start. Add another two-column
list in smaller font for the next 70 languages, and perhaps a big >>
arrow at the bottom leading to a full list of all langs or a dropdown
menu for the smallest 100 langs.
--
+sj+
Anthere wrote:
> I do not think there were be links broken now.
It is very strange that no-one seems to have picked up on this.
There are clearly many many more links to http://www.wikipedia.org
(expecting to link to an English language encyclopedia) than ever
before. The decision has been taken to break these links.
Whether the cost of breaking those links is worth the gain of getting a
international portal is debatable.
More interesting to me is how this episode shows how what really matters
is in getting something changed is what a tiny number of people think,
not what the unwashed masses (who a: can't programme a computer and b:
aren't on the board) think.
Pete/pcb21
Hello Mark W.,
At 23:46 09/01/2005 +0000, you wrote:
>Name me a monolingual country, and I will show you a flying pig.
OK: The Faeroe Islands. :-D Now, amidst those flying pigs fluttering
around, I will certainly have to admit that the Faeroese situation is
highly unusual in that respect.... :] But coming to think about it --
there are of course plenty of Danish- and English-speakers there too; along
with Norwegian- and Tagalog-speakers etc.
(Message fading out to sound of pigs dropping to the ground...)
-Olve
___________________
Olve Utne
http://utne.nvg.org
Scríobh Jens Ropers:
>Quite true, however for most (if not all) languages, there is a flag
>that is commonly understood to symbolize the language as well
>(depending on context). No other symbols exist that so clearly and
>graphically identify the respective languages. And I thing it having
>the instant visual indentification that you can get with images is
>worthwhile. That said, someone has removed the flags now (without
>explanatory comment) and I'm taking my time about reverting, because I
>believe community consensus will decide this one.
I agree that the flags look pretty, but there are just too many languages
and countries where they don't sync. What flag do you put to Afrikaans,
Tibetan, Breton, or Navajo? Either you end up repeating flags, or some
entries don't have one at all, which looks very ugly.
Nice idea, and it looks visually agreeable, but it's just not practical.
Regards,
- Craig Franklin
-------------------
Craig Franklin
PO Box 764
Ashgrove, Q, 4060
Australia
http://www.halo-17.net - Australia's Favourite Source of Indie Music, Art,
and Culture.
Walter Vermeir a écrit:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I want to know why the address
http://www.wikipedia.org redirects
>> automatically to http://en.wikipedia.org... Is
Wikipedia an english
>> project with translations, or is it a real
international project?
>
>
> I asked myself that same question many years ago. I
think I posted the
> first question about this on some wikipedia list at
the end of 2001.
> Always a lot of objections. It would break links,
English is the lingo
> franca of the internet. At the time of the change
from wikipedia.com to
> wikipedia.org used to a opportunity to do it but it
has not be done.
>
> Wikipedia is a international project. But only the
English may use the
> front entrance.
I was among those who objected more than 2 years ago.
I believe most of the objections raised at that time
do not make any more sense. A lot was written on the
mailing list, and some discussion may be found here :
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.org.
I do not think there were be links broken now. We
switch the adress more than 2 years ago, the
encyclopedia is so much bigger now, and we had truely
become international (which was not true 3 years ago
at all).
It is high time we finally get a portal page.
There were other solutions mentionned 2 years and a
half ago, but I think portal is the solution chosen
for all our projects, so best to stick with it
probably.
However, it might be nice to try to do something good
looking and not necessarily wiki (we do not need the
left menu for example).
I suggest that some people try to come up with some
good designs and that we get done with this. For
example, this might be a conceptual proposition
(http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.org-mav%27s_Pr…)
but it could need a graphist to polish it.
I hope someone come up with a good idea :-)
Could someone set up a contest page, where we could
add considerations to respect and where wikipedians
could link their proposal ?
Anthere
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Meet the all-new My Yahoo! - Try it today!
http://my.yahoo.com
Hello Andy R.,
You wrote:
>I have read the discussion here on the con's, and have not seen any of
the pro's.
>
>I like it. We should get past the supposed political incorrectness and
see it as /easy/, /visual/, and /obvious/.
I am not as worried about the degree of "political correctness" as the
actual practicalities involved. My problem with it is that while it
certainly would be "visual", it would not be "easy" -- let alone
"obvious"...! Please feel free to convince me through showing what flags
would be easy and obvious for Anglo-Saxon, Arabic, Ladino, Sanskrit and
Yiddish -- to name a few...
Only some of the languages have ONE flag "attached" to them and not all
that many flags have only one language "attached" to them. Examples in
addition to the ones mentioned above, include:
Alemannish, English (UK, Eire, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc.),
Dutch (mainly Netherlands and Belgium), Esperanto, French (France, Quebec,
Belgium, etc.), German (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, etc.), Latin,
Portuguese, Sanskrit... Even flags of ethnicities rather than political
entities, such as the Roma and Sámi flags, often represent groups of
languages rather than a single language each.
I do support the notion of having some kind of graphic representation for
spiffing up the www.wikipedia.org portal -- I'm just concerned that flags
will run us into unnecessary difficulties.
-Olve
___________________
Olve Utne
http://utne.nvg.org
I am anonymizing this complaint, but I wanted to point it out to
people and to point out that complaints of this type are increasingly
common. As we get more and more popular, vandalism of popular
articles, though corrected very very quickly, is also seen by more and
more people.
My technical proposal to deal with this (and I did not invent this
idea, I don't know who did, but it has been floating around) is a new
form of page semi-protection for extremely popular/important articles.
Basically, pages in this case will have a published form and a working
form. The working form automatically becomes the published form
whenever one of two conditions is satisfied:
1. X minutes has passed with no new edits
2. A sysop forces publication immediately
'X' can be left variable, but for most cases I think 10 minutes would
suffice. We might experiment with longer pauses for articles in cases
other than "popular + vandalism", for example as a new approach to
dealing with traditional edit wars in at least some cases.
For the user interface, when an article is in such a state, it looks
totally normal at the usual url. But instead of 'edit this page' you
see 'live version'. Click on that, and you're at the live version,
warts and all, and you can operate normally from there.
I think this solution is softer than our current solution, which is
just to protect the article. George W. Bush was protected for 8 days
during the height of the election season because pranksters kept
putting goatse.cx images, etc., on the article.
This option would give us 10 minutes to deal with vandalism, and would
give us the opportunity to keep working on the article as well.
--Jimbo
p.s. In case someone thinks the 'sysop forces publication
immediately' is somehow unfair, note that it is necessary to prevent a
denial of service attack once a bit of vandalism *does* slip through,
which is inevitable. That is, if someone managed to get vandalism on
an important page, they could prevent others from removing it by
simply repeatedly touching the page within the 10 minute window.
The 'sysop force' means that responsible people can get a sensible
version back live. We can make clear that sysops are only supposed to
do this in the case of vandalism, not just because they don't like the
way the article is written.
----- Forwarded message from heather hudak <heatherhudak(a)yahoo.com> -----
From: heather hudak <heatherhudak(a)yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 06:52:46 -0800 (PST)
To: jwales(a)wikia.com
Subject: Note: Obscene language on Tsunami Article
Hi Jimmy,
I often visit Wikipedia for info. I find it reasonably
credible and it has a large amount of information.
This morning, I was looking for a quick bite about
Tsunamis. I was greeted by the used of the word
"f*ckers" etc., numerous times throughout the text all
the way to end of the article. It seems someone is
playing a bit of a nasty gag on your site. It also
takes away from the credibility Wikipedia has
achieved. The following is the link at which I found
this information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake
This is disturbing to find at any site, about any
topic, but expecially a topic that encompasses so much
devastation.
While I am a young, reasonable business woman, I am
not necessarily offended by this, I just think it is
highly inappropriate and will likely deter me from
trusting Wikipedia information in the future. I use
the site very frequently (daily), and I can't imagine
that will continue. Prior to this, I was unaware that
Wikipedia received submissions from outside sources.
This situation encouraged me to learn more and trust
less. I hope you will look into ways to prevent this
sort of obscene language from penetrating the
information on your web site.
Sincerely,
Heather Hudak
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - Find what you need with new enhanced search.
http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250
----- End forwarded message -----
--
"La nèfle est un fruit." - first words of 50,000th article on fr.wikipedia.org
I have (again) hacked together a minimal demo of a multilanguage portal.
This is not for its good looks but for the function it provides.
To be amazed by it, dial
http://magnusmanske.de/wikipedia/portal.php
The page is generated from two local files containing the text and the
article numbers, respectively. Calling the script with
http://magnusmanske.de/wikipedia/portal.php?update
will update the local files from online files, which are hardcoded into
the script. The article number file, which would normally be generated
automatically once a day, is at
http://magnusmanske.de/wikipedia/num.txt
and the text, to be editable for all, is at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/PortalText
Based on these files, and on your browser settings, it will highlight
what *might* be your favourite language(s). If you set multiple
languages in your browser, it will highlight them all. If your browser
sets different weights for these languages, they will appear in
different shades of grey.
Yes, there is no other layout whatsoever. Don't complain. Web designers
to the rescue!
Magnus
P.S.: Script is in CVS HEAD; "portal.php" in maintenance
Hi,
Is there any way to get a list of articles which have no corresponding
article across languages?
For instance, there is no English version of:
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arapiraca
To pick an exemplo aleatório.
I'd like to get a big list of those and look for articles that might
be interesting to translate.
Regards,
Patrick Hall