Wikipedia-l March 2006

wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

97 participants
60 discussions

New wikipedias created
by Jens Frank 26 Mar '06

26 Mar '06

Hello, the following wikipedias have been created: nds-nl rmy lij bat-smg map-bms ksh pdc vls nrm frp zh-yue tet xal pap See also http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Approved_requests_for_new_langu… Regards, JeLuF -- Echte DSL-Flatrate dauerhaft f�r 0,- Euro*! "Feel free" mit GMX DSL! http://www.gmx.net/de/go/dsl

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Cantonese WP: Report
by Mark Williamson 26 Mar '06

26 Mar '06

Already, even though it has only existed for a day, the Cantonese Wikipedia has been full of activity. Take the main talk page as an example: http://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page Already, there are active discussions on: 1) User interface translation 2) Name of the encyclopaedia (Should it be same asthe Mandarin, which is pronounced in Cantonese as "wai gei", or should it be a more phonetic Cantonese, like "wik gei"?) 3) Promotion of cantonese wp 4) "Standard Characters" (Hoeng Gong Zi) 5) Subdomain (some people think it's unfair to use zh-yue, and that just yue should be used instead or such) 6) Getting an admin and making a logo 7) Should it be "Cantonese Wikipedia" or "Yue Wikipedia" 8) Name of main page 9) Allmessages, namespace translation With such activity in such little time I have no doubt we can expect phenomenal growth from this new Wikipedia. Mark -- "Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin

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New Langage
by samson schneider 25 Mar '06

25 Mar '06

I Would like to see the addition of a non-wiki formatting of an english HyperText Markup Language --------------------------------- New Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. Call regular phones from your PC and save big.

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Re: [Wikipedia-l] [Wikimediauk-l] Radio Wales interview as ogg
by David Gerard 24 Mar '06

24 Mar '06

David Gerard (dgerard(a)gmail.com) [060323 12:16]: > For those who missed it, I've put my segment up: > http://static.rocknerd.org/david/radiowales-q0-mono.ogg > Ogg Vorbis, 2,311,827 bytes. Apparently there's no mailing list for cy:. But I chatted with Telsa on IRC about this a coupla nights ago and she says she'll shop the URL around the Welsh Nationalist-inclined bloggers, which may help recruitment for cy:. Telsa also says the big problem with cy: is that it's really badly written for the most part ... basically, that it needs some native speakers who are good writers to give it a top-to-bottom revision and set the standard. Which is actually quite feasible with 4,000 articles, if the editors can be found. I know no Welsh myself or I'd dive in ... - d.

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MediaWiki converter to Plain Text, XML, DocBook, PDF
by Magnus Manske 24 Mar '06

24 Mar '06

Note: I cross-posted this to several lists, because I think this is of interest to many; please reply on wikitech-l only. A long, long time ago, I started writing a PHP script to convert MediaWiki markup into XML. I believe it is now feature-complete and relatively reliable. Not only can it process a single wiki text, but a list of articles, taking the text from any MediaWiki-based site online. It uses the same method to replace templates. The generated XML can now be converted into other formats. For demonstration [1], I offer "plain text" and DocBook XML. What I cannot demonstrate (due to limitations of my hosting service) is the subsequence conversion to HTML or PDF from the DocBook XML. However, it is quite easy to set up an automatic conversion locally if you have the necessary DocBook files installed. As an example, I have generated a PDF [2] by 1. Entering the titles of the articles I want to have 2. Chosing "DocBook PDF" as output format 3. Clicking "Convert" 4. Waiting for the PDF to open Really, that easy! :-) I am well aware of some shortcomings of the example PDF, however, most of them (no left margin, gigantic tables, misshaped images) are flaws of DocBook, or of the default stylesheets I use. I'm not really familiar with DocBook and hope for help by people that are. While the converter seems to work pretty well, I'm sure there are lots of fun bugs to find. If you do find a page that breaks, please mail me the title so I can find the bug, or even better, fix it yourself! The code is in CVS, "wiki2xml" module, "php" directory (ignore the old C code in the main directory;-) A word about speed: Yes, the process of creating a PDF takes some time. However, most of it is DocBook at work, and of course the loading times for articles and templates. Converting the example from wiki markup to XML to DocBook XML to PDF takes 2 minutes 20 seconds total, but the actual conversion wiki-to-XML is done in just 8 seconds. Apart from bug fixing, my next priority is ODT (OpenOffice) format output. Also, I would like to extend Special:Export in MediaWiki so it can return a list of authors, which can then be added automagically to all converted files. Awaiting your feedback, Magnus [1] http://magnusmanske.de/wiki2xml/w2x.php [2] http://magnusmanske.de/wiki2xml/Biology_topics.pdf (3.7 MB!)

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Creating an account and legal stuff
by Rudy Koot 23 Mar '06

23 Mar '06

The "create account" currently currently does not display any (lack of) rights people are entitled to when they create an account. Shouldn't this screen at least need to display that accounts will not be deleted and may be even have a box that needs to checked, stating that people accept Wikipedia's privacy policy? Cheers, Ruud

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"Fatally Flawed" -- Internal Britannica Review Tackles Nature Methods
by SJ 23 Mar '06

23 Mar '06

Below is a letter that Britannica sent out today to some of its customers, in response to the December Nature article comparing the accuracy of articles in Wikipedia and Britannica. A more detailed review of the Nature study, including responses to each alleged error and omission, is linked from the front page of www.eb.com. ================================================== >> Because you're a valued Britannica customer, I'm writing to you today about a subject that has received widespread news coverage - it is a subject that's being taken very seriously by all of us at Encyclopædia Britannica and one on which we have worked extensively with our editors, contributors, and advisors for many weeks. In one of its recent issues, the science journal Nature published an article that claimed to compare the accuracy of the online Encyclopædia Britannica with Wikipedia, the Internet database that allows anyone, regardless of knowledge or qualifications, to write and edit articles on any subject. Wikipedia had recently received attention for its alleged inaccuracies, but Nature's article claimed that Britannica's science coverage was only slightly more accurate than Wikipedia's. Arriving amid the revelations of vandalism and errors in Wikipedia, such a finding was, not surprisingly, big news. Perhaps you even saw the story yourself. It's been reported around the world. Those reports were wrong, however, because Nature's research was invalid. As our editors and scholarly advisers have discovered by reviewing the research in depth, almost everything about the Nature's investigation was wrong and misleading. Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannica were not inaccuracies at all, and a number of the articles Nature examined were not even in the Encyclopædia Britannica. The study was so poorly carried out and its findings so error-laden that it was completely without merit. Since educators and librarians have been among Britannica's closest colleagues for many years, I would like to address you personally with an explanation of our findings and tell you the truth about the Nature study. Almost everything Nature did showed carelessness and indifference to basic research standards. Their numerous errors and spurious procedures included the following: * Rearranging, reediting, and excerpting Britannica articles. Several of the "articles" Nature sent its outside reviewers were only sections of, or excerpts from Britannica entries. Some were cut and pasted together from more than one Britannica article. As a result, Britannica's coverage of certain subjects was represented in the study by texts that our editors never created, approved or even saw. * Mistakenly identifying inaccuracies. The journal claimed to have found dozens of inaccuracies in Britannica that didn't exist. * Reviewing the wrong texts. They reviewed a number of texts that were not even in the encyclopedia. * Failing to check facts. Nature falsely attributed inaccuracies to Britannica based on statements from its reviewers that were themselves inaccurate and which Nature's editors failed to verify. * Misrepresenting its findings. Even according to Nature's own figures, (which grossly exaggerated the number of inaccuracies in Britannica) Wikipedia had a third more inaccuracies than Britannica. Yet the headline of the journal's report concealed this fact and implied something very different. Britannica also made repeated attempts to obtain from Nature the original data on which the study's conclusions were based. We invited Nature's editors and management to meet with us to discuss our analysis, but they declined. The Nature study was thoroughly wrong and represented an unfair affront to Britannica's reputation. Britannica practices the kind of sound scholarship and rigorous editorial work that few organizations even attempt. This is vital in the age of the Internet, when there is so much inappropriate material available. Today, having sources like Britannica is more important than ever, with content that is reliable, tailored to the age of the user, correlated to curriculum, and safe for everyone. Whatever may have prompted Nature to do such careless and sloppy research, it's now time for them to uphold their commitment to good science and retract the study immediately. We have urged them strongly to do so. We have prepared a detailed report that describes Britannica's thorough (7,000 words) analysis of the Nature study. I invite you to download it from our Web site at www.eb.com. ==================================================

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To Gerard re: Moldovan wiki
by Bogdan Giusca 21 Mar '06

21 Mar '06

Gerard, you forgot an important thing of this affair: NO MOLDOVANS requested or wanted this Wikipedia. We have *no* Transnistrian Moldovan contributors who want to write a wikipedia in Cyrillic alphabet. Its only supporters are Node_ue (the kid in Arizona who barely speaks the language) and a few Russians who support it for ideological/political reasons and who can't contribute anyway, as they don't know the language. There are no newspapers, no journals, no magazines, no books currently published in Romanian Cyrillic in Transnistria. The children use decades old schoolbooks from the time of the Soviet Union. Virtually everyone there would like to switch the education system to the Latin alphabet, but dissent is not something easy to do in a totalitarian regime: there are some Romanian/Moldovan Transnistrians in prison since 1991 for political dissent. So, I'd say to close it now, not because of political reasons, but for the simple fact there are not enough people to contribute to it.

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Interwiki links
by Heiko Evermann 21 Mar '06

21 Mar '06

Hi everyone, some weeks ago I came across a proposal to allow for the inclusion of macros from commons. This would mean e.g. that it would no longer be neccessary to replicate babel templates between the wikipedias. The other benefit that was proposed was the simplification of interwiki links. One would simply define a template:interwiki_english_article_name with the complete list of interwiki links. Then all those other languages would just have to add {{interwiki_english_article_name}} at the bottom. For the transformation one would need a special robot, but after that we would no longer need the interwiki robots and all the interwiki links would always be up-to-date. Are there any plans to make this possible? Kind regards, Heiko Evermann

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Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia-l Digest, Vol 32, Issue 36
by Stacey Doljack Borsody 20 Mar '06

20 Mar '06

> Message: 3 > Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 22:06:36 +1000 > From: "Craig Franklin" <craig(a)halo-17.net> > Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] exicornt switch > To: <wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org> > Message-ID: <001501c64c16$bff788e0$015a5a0a@equinox> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" > > Scr?obh Mark Williamson : > >The current situation seems to be that all AOL users are blocked > >pending cooperation from AOL in trying to stop vandalism. This seems > >like a good approach to me. > > Frankly, I have to agree. I can't see any problem with this. Is the user violating any AOL AUP term? I highly doubt it so I wouldn't expect AOL to stop this. Maybe the user just needs to be left alone and ignored and a campaign initiated to educate the public on what the real term of the railroad switch is. :) .s

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Wikipedia-l March 2006