Hoi,
As we have not stopped discussing all kinds of everything because of
Jimbo's presentation on the radio. I would like to change the subject
and direct you to http://asp.noterik.com/asset-view/23 where you find a
video stream with three presentations. The latest is Jimbo's. All three
speeches are in English :)
Jimbo mentioned enough good things to make it worth your while. I really
liked that EllyWa's law is now known to Jimbo. I think most wikipedians
have seen this variations on Murphy's law in action. :)
Thanks,
GerardM
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After just working my way through 150 untagged images on en.wikipedia
(an that is only a small fraction!) I thought about ways to improve the
tagging process.
Many of the images had no image description at all. But making
descriptions mandatory would only lead to things like "asdfghjk" as a
description. Having a mandatory dropdown box with licenses would make
things even worse, as newbies/vandals/people-who-don't-care might choose
one at random, making it much harder to find copyright violations. (They
can already do that by putting a false tag in the description, but that
requires knowledge of the tagging system and something bordering on
criminal energy).
So I thought, why not, upon upload of a new image, *automatically* add
"{{unverified}}" to any image dewscription that does *not* contain the
sequence "{{"? This is dead easy technically, and will bring untagged
images to our attention without wasting time and effort of people who
could do something more constructive.
Image descriptions that contain "{{" but *not* a copyright tag can still
be found through the current scanning process.
The "{{unverified}}" could be stored in [[Mediawiki:AutoImageTag]] or
something, so each wikipedia can use the one appropriate for the
language/tagging system.
Magnus
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--- Sean Barrett <sean(a)epoptic.org> wrote:
>
> We think highly of you, too. However, we refrain from posting
> mindlessly bigoted rants on mailing lists devoted to the process of
> building a free encyclopedia.
Yeah, ok, maybe over the top.
But, so you know, I am both a French and US citizen, living in Los
Angeles now, but lived in Fort Worth, TX for 8 years. Yeeehaw!
Actually, I would like to address the point along the same line of
thought that names of large multinational corporations are shunned on
en-wikipedia, to the advantage of the brand name that said
corporations used to successfully market their product to the
american consumer. How do you explain to somebody that Toyota !=
Toyota Motor Corporation when their level of expertise is limited to
US High School education level?
In any case, I get your point.
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan(a)yahoo.com
chris.mahan(a)gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
Just read it on the french pump
The Encyclopedia Libre has been heavily attacked by a spam bot 2 days
ago. It spammed about 500 pages with a change of ip for each edit. It
took them 1 full day to restore it all.
As a consequence, log-in is now mandatory for contribution on EL.
Ant
Hi all,
You may or may not have read my earlier message warning people that
it's not OK to put Simplified text as the zh translation for press
releases, system messages, etc. outside of the 3 Wikimedia wikis that
support it (zh-books, zh-pedia, zh-wikt).
As I found out it seems this is all the work of one culprit,
"vipuser", who similarly seeks constantly to replace the Traditional
Chinese sister-projects template on the Traditional Chinese version of
Commons mainpage with a Simplified one.
However, his work is already very extensive, and it will be a lot of
work to do by hand.
So I wondered , is there a way we can move (and delete redirect) en
masse all of the /zh translations to /zh-cn or /zh-hans?
Again, it's important that we remember that conversion only works
inside of those 3 wikis, everywhere else there still needs to be two
versions .
Also, congrats on the Cantonese Commons, Meta, etc-mainpage.
Mark
--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE
Just to keep up with information.... I saw an announcement today in two websites, so thought it worth to say a bit about it
.... Perhaps to divert our gentle editors from daily life in France or in the USA ... (grin)
News from a very minor wikipedia (I think this deserves to be reported in next Quarto Sj, I'll write up a bit....)
The association Geekcorps recently (it started possibly 2 months ago) made a lot of efforts to try to stimulate a minor wikipedia in an african language.
Along with work in translation of the interface, addition of major rules and principles of Wikipedia, Geekcorps also decided to motivate editors speaking bambara in Mali to participate to the bambara wikipedia (http://bm.wikipedia.org) in a *financial* way.
The conditions : to live in Mali and to be able to write in bambara.
The prize is : 200 CFA to earn per article written with at least 200 words (max 5000 CFA per person) plus a bonus prize for specific actions.
Specific actions are
1) translation of document or interface
2) start a wikibooks on Bamanankan
3) start Bamanankan Wikiquotes
4) start Bamanankan Wiktionary
5) start another wikipedia in other languages spoken in Mali
(Note that there are no requirement of quality to get the prize per article, but the length)
Geekcorps also remind to Mali editors that Mali people might be interested in the following languages
* french (fr)
* english (en)
* fulfude (ff)
* wolof (wo)
----------------
The bambara version is still not very active, but Guaka is working on it from time to time. But what I find interesting is the organisation proposal... this way might be one of the good ones to really get such versions off the ground. Ie, a wikipedia being babysitted by a local organisation.
I think there is much interest in following such initiatives. What do you think ?
Please also look at the site of MaliWiki : http://mali.geekcorps.org/mediawiki/index.php/Accueil (based on mediawiki)
----------------
Note that there are a couple of slightly embarassing little issues related to these attempts by local organisations.
For example, when an organisation (ANAFA) made some work on the wolof version about 3 months ago, someone asked me a sysop account, which I gave (usual process for small projects).
I however noticed soon after that the main page was a bit cluttered with quite a bit of advertisement for their organisation. (see for example http://wo.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&oldid=1482)
I tried to discuss to them about that, and since we did not really reached an agreement, I had to remove the sysop status.
Since then, the wo is inactive.
Ant
---------------------------------
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new Resources site!
!!!URGENT!!!
Dear stewards,
Can one of you please upgrade Cicero and me to sysops on the Limburgic
wikipedia? We have an extremely violent vandal at the moment, blanking all
pages, and our only current sysop is deconnected from the internet. We MUST
block him now. He's razing our whole project. We are
http://li.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gebroeker:Cicero and
http://li.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gebroeker:HaafLimbo , respectively.
Thank very, very much in advance,
Wouter.
_________________________________________________________________
Nooit ongewenste berichten ontvangen: gebruik MSN Messenger
http://messenger.msn.nl/
Hi all,
I have received a response from VIPUser which I reproduce in full here:
"about sc and tc
please stop clean the translation! the reason:
请问你了解维基百科处理简体中文和繁体中文的原则吗?如果你不清楚建议你到维基百科去了解一下，内容的书写可以暂时使用繁简两种字体，到时候使用程序自动转换就可以。这样可以大大增加中文的有效内容，减少重复的内容和劳动，谢谢!
if you can't understand the content, you can do the clean job after
you learn some chinese! thank you very much for your attention to the
chinese version wikimedia commons!"
What the Chinese part says is that basically asking if I understand
Wikipedia's policy towards Simplfied and Traditional Chinese, if I
want to know more I can check Chinese Wikipedia, that for temporary
purposes it's OK to use both but in the long term conversion... not
duplicate content... improve effectiveness... reduce workload... etc.
As a user of primarily Traditional Chinese, I can tell you that,
although it is manageable, the conversion software is certainly '''not
perfect'''' and that for official press releases, sites like commons,
and the like, it's best to have two separate versions.
One simple example is that the Simplified Mainpage on Commons uses
Roman numerals for dates and times; the Traditional uses Chinese
numerals. In other cases, there are special conversions which need to
take place concerning legal terms, computer terms, and all sorts of
other things which are not currently covered by the conversion
software.
If you go through zh.wikipedia, you'll quickly find that much text
is either converted incorrectly or sometimes left entirely
unconverted.
I don't complain about it because it's still readable although it's
somewhat poor quality.
But in these cases, it's more important that people be able to read
content written in a correct manner.
Also keep in mihd that the situation is still basically a majority of
Simplified users who, from their point of view, are accommodating for
a minority to whom they can't relate - while most Simplified users
know Traditional pretty well and don't mind much reading content in it
occasionally, Simplified characters are very difficult and grating on
the eyes and mind of most people for whom Traditional is their first
script: Traditional is occasionally used on the Mainland because it is
used in historical documents, calligraphy (theoretically -
calligraphic forms are often more similar to the Simplified form),
sometimes as titles of books, and to make something seem a little
fancy. However, in Taiwan you will never see Simplified with few
exceptions. In Hong Kong, it used to be similar to Taiwan. Simplified
is becoming more common in Hong Kong and Macao, but still the
situation is not the same as the reverse on the mainland because its
use is still very rare in HK and Macao. In Singapore, although
Simplified is used officially, people actually use both (the same is
true in Malaysia).
So while a Simplified user might not mind a page written in Simplified
but with some words or phrases in Traditional, the reverse is very
annoying and visually displeasing to a Traditional user.
Mark
--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE
I'm here to post a warning of a vandal that spans multiple projects.
Here's a synopsis of how it went down from my POV:
[[b:User:Ivyboy]] and possible sockpuppet [[User:Dittoboy]] have been
causing disruptive behavior while trying to impersonate
[[User:Bulbaboy]] on at least en.w and en.b and possibly others. I
was alerted to this when I saw the user trying to wikify a copyvio
page (ripped from GameFAQs), then trying to delete subsequent vfd and
copyvio notices and discussion from [[b:WB:VFD]] and the pages in
question.
As I was the person who took notice, I had to let another admin do
the work. [[User:User142]] and [[User:Frazydee]] (also an admin)
have also been involved in this situation (as well as, of course,
[[User:Bulbaboy]]). Ivyboy and Dittoboy have since resorted to
vandalism in various parts of en.w and en.b, ostensibly in an attempt
to prevent users at their university, [[Bar Ilan University]] in
Israel, from accessing the Wikimedia projects (it's also to note that
User142 also attends the university).
Action should be taken quickly. Since I'm a newbie-ish admin at
en.b, I'm also looking for advice on how to deal with this sort of
situation should it pop up in the future.