Unfortunately, unless a lot of good coding happens in reasonably short
order, Special:Validate probably won't be enabled on en: for 1.5 (to be
released next weekend). Brion has serious concerns with the present code.
This is quite annoying, but oh well. Interested PHP coders needed!
Or it stays in limbo!
We appear to have worked out a front end for the initial test, though -
[[m:En validation topics]] has been more or less stable for the last two
weeks. The [[m:Wikimedia research team]] IRC meeting last night was
productive also; I'll be putting some stuff from it on the article
validation pages on Meta and discussing further with Magnus (who wrote the
feature).
([[m:De Validierungsthemen]] has been stable a lot longer, but is also a
lot shorter and simpler. I'm somewhat surprised the de: quality initiative
hasn't jumped on it with great glee ...)
I know several other Wikipedias are waiting to see how the test goes on en:
(and presumably de:). I also think this feature will be vastly popular in
non-Wikimedia installations of MediaWiki. If we can write it so it doesn't
kill the system ;-)
- d.
----- Forwarded message from Brion Vibber <brion(a)pobox.com> -----
From: Brion Vibber <brion(a)pobox.com>
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Special:Validation status
Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 02:43:20 -0700
Just a note; the 'validation' feature will most likely not be turned on
on en.wikipedia.org when we upgrade, since it's not currently in a
usable state.
Problems include, but are not limited to:
* In various places it tries to load metadata for *every* revision of
the page. This would be fatal on the actual Wikipedia, where there are
pages with tens of thousands of revisions. There are likely other severe
performance and scalability issues with it.
* The 'management' interface for defining survey options is not locked
off properly, and is very hard to use if you do get to it.
* Lack of HTML-safety on the UI interface: as a quick hack I added
htmlspecialchars() guards, but things really should be changed to use
wikitext where appropriate; several of the UI messages are currently
displaying raw HTML tags.
If anybody would like to work on it further that would be spiffy;
otherwise it will remain in limbo indefinitely.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
----- End forwarded message -----
Hello guys.
I would like to reiterate our request to have a
Wikipedia in the Cebuano language. We have the minimum
number of supporters, and we have also promoted the
idea in some fora where Cebuanos frequent.
Our raster name would be using the same image as the
English Wikipedia. The logo would have the text
"Wikipedia Ang Gawasnong Ensayklopediya".
I have started translating the main page of the
English Wikipedia and some of the required pages.
Unfortunately I don't have a permanent online
connection and I live in a country where one hour of
online connection is 5% of the minimum daily wage. So
I could visit the Internet at most thrice a week. :(
Respectfully yours,
Vincent "Bentong" S. Isles
http://bentong.topcities.com/
P.S. Yes, I do speak the language. I even write using
it (for a small fee in one of our Cebuano magazines).
Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
On Wed, 15 Jun 2005, Kim Tucker wrote: (mailing list copied)
> Hi Andy,
> How is everything?
Lets start with the big questions :-)
Working currently on an easily installable "wizzy server" that does email in an occasionally-connected location.
Mostly via dialup these days, but I hope via USB memory stick.
> Are you by any chance going to WCCE? (we have exhibition space and a demo slot).
Looking at the dates, no :-(
> We are preparing a box of CDs to distribute and considered including extracts of Wikipedia.
> Do you have a subset which would fit on one or at most 2 CDs which could be distributed
> without risk of bad content inside? - and ideally relevant content which would be of use
> even to people in Africa?
I carry wikipedia around on an external hard drive, for installation at schools.
Capacity quickly wizzed through a DVD last year ..
I have been deleting my 2004 copies (which would fit your criteria) - maybe I shouldn't.
However, old dumps are fine (just as good as today's dumps, I didn't read the old one yet).
I think the 'bad content' (and 2 CD) criteria could be easily satisfied with a text-only recent dump.
Text-only carries everything, but lacks pizazz (and porn).
But that is what I recommend. Any others should be sent to Kim directly.
Cheers, Andy!
Hi, Mark,
I'm glad to inform the group that we have satisfied the minimum number of people required to start the Kapampangan Wikipedia. I am therefore resubmitting my request for a Wikipedia in the Kapampangan language. Thank you.
Edwin
P.S. Thank you, too, to our cabalens (fellow countrymen) for their support.
Message: 7
Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 18:10:45 -0700
From: Mark Williamson
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Request for Kapampangan Wikipedia
To: wikipedia-l(a)wikimedia.org
Message-ID: <849f98ed05061118102855347e(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Hi Edwin,,
Just wondering but do you speak Kapampangan yourself?
And would you be willing to write much of the content on the
Kapampangan Wikipedia yourself?
Is there anybody else col-laborating with you?
Mark
---------------------------------
Correo Yahoo!
Comprueba qué es nuevo, aquí
http://correo.yahoo.es
I think that all Wikipedia pages should contain somewhere (say, at the
bottom) a link to a page where people could complain about the content
of the articles. (I'm talking here of complaints about breach of
privacy, copyright violation, libel etc.)
Currently, people have nowhere clear to go to. We get messages on the
Village Pump or equivalent, by private email to participants (often
unrelated to the articles), by emails to the Foundation board, by email
to public mailing lists.
This, to me, is deeply unsatisfactory:
* By providing no obvious way for people to complain about articles, we
give the impression of some unreliable, irresponsible group.
* While people look for a way to contact us, they become frustrated. As
a result, their complaint may become unnecessarily accusatory and angry.
* We also incite people to make legal threats to get some attention.
* When people write to public lists, they attract undue attention to
issues that should be better dealt with in the calm - some inflammatory
email with legal threats will result in some angry answers, and all can
escalate.
* If people have a really legitimate problem, they have little recourse.
You will say, hey, they can simply edit the wiki. This simply does not
work. Many people don't understand the editing process and simply can't
do it. Furthermore, some well-meaning contributors may see their awkward
efforts as "vandalism" and revert them. This gives people the impression
that their edits are refused or that some "censorship" is implemented.
This is not imaginary. I'll spare you the details, but within one week
the French association mailing-list received legal threats from two
sources, both alleging bad treatment from Wikipedia. In both cases, the
legal claims are dubious; but they can be an annoyance and would be
better dealt with in a friendly agreement than if lawyers get involved.
Somebody remarked to me that we could, as many professional sites have,
have a complaint page. The user would first have to answer some
multiple-choice questions, meant for weeding out "non urgent" complaints
(i.e. things such as "the birth date of XXX is incorrect"); or, these
complaints could be sent to the talk page. Finally, if the reason seems
to fit a legitimate "sensitive" category, they would have a form open
for typing their message or would obtain some link to a complaint email
address.
I think that as we become one of the foremost Internet sites, we will
have more of the sort. We should have means so that simple problems
don't escalate into full blown confrontations. Remember that even if we
win, that's still a lot of frustration and lost time.
Now that the info-en email address is on the "contact us" pages, the
amount of mail is increasing, and we need more help.
We are looking for a long-standing contributor with a good knowledge of
the English Wikipedia and its policies and procedures. You should also
have a working knowledge of other projects. You need to have infinite
patience to reply to the same newbie questions time after time, and a
friendly and helpful style of writing. Most important is the ability
not to laugh at people who write to tell us we have a massive security
hole - an edit link on each page!!!11!.
Being active on IRC is an advantage - it makes a real difference to be
able to talk over the tricky ones sometimes.
Pay is at the usual Wikipedia rate of lots of good feeling and all the
cookies you can eat.
Hopefully there will be a big rush of applicants for this wonderful job,
and I will ask those volunteering to answer a few mails to see if you
have the style we are looking for. Jimbo will have the final say though.
Please mail me directly rather than replying to the list if you are
interested.
Thanks,
sannse
p.s. I lied about the cookies
Hi,
Thought this might be of interest to those of you who are
Firefox/Greasemonkey users. With the help of Stefan Magdalinski, who wrote
the original WikiProxy for the BBC News site (www.wikiproxy.org
<http://www.wikiproxy.org/> ), I wrote a Greasemonkey script that adds links
to Wikipedia to every page that you visit. It uses a simple algorithm to
guess which terms on the page might be in Wikipedia and confirms these using
a web service. The effect is quite cool. it's as if every page on the web
linked carefully to all the relevant Wikipedia articles.
You can download the script here if you want to try it out:
http://wikiproxy.whitelabel.org/greasemonkey.html. There is some more
discussion on my blog: http://www.allpeers.com/blog/?p=165 and
http://www.allpeers.com/blog/?p=167.
Note that you need the latest version of Greasemonkey
(http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/) for this to work.
Enjoy!
Matt
Mark Williamson wrote:
>A remerge has been suggested, but Enciclopedia Libre (Free
>Encyclopaedia) has been resistant and they are, after all, at an
>advantage because they have more articles than do we.
>
>
Where are you getting this information? From what I know, the Spanish
Wikipedia passed Enciclopedia Libre in terms of article count a long
time ago. The counts currently stated on their main pages are 50,508
(es.wikipedia.org) versus 28,165 (enciclopedia.us.es).
I do agree that being friendly and supportive is much more likely to
bring them back in, on their own timetable, than trying to push the
issue too much.
--Michael Snow
Hi,
Wikimania's call for papers has concluded, and the Program Committee has
finished reviewing the submissions. Almost 90 proposals for
presentations, workshops, papers, and posters were submitted and almost
60 were accepted as part of the official program. We are currently
notifying all authors - this may take a while because the organising
team is rather small and we are not using a special software for
conference planning (for instance Pentabarf) but a wiki.
We are currently soliciting volunteers to help edit the official
conference proceedings, hosted by Wikibooks[1]. In true Wiki form, the
proceedings will be open to editing by anyone, but we're looking for a
few reliable people to oversee the process. We also need a few
volunteers to liaise with the authors of accepted papers and assist with
program coordination. If either of these tasks interests you, please
add yourself at wikibooks and contact cfp(a)wikimedia.org or find us in
#wikimania on Freenode.
Greetings,
Jakob
[1] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikimania05
