Wikipedia-l April 2006

wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

46 participants
34 discussions

comment on wikipedia
by Optim 15 Aug '24

15 Aug '24

I was describing to someone how Wikipedia works: "anyone can edit" etc. He answered with this argument: "Wikipedia is the triumph of the average person! of the man in the street!)" (average meaning: not good, not bad, just OK) I asked "why?" His explanation: "Great brilliant works are built by individuals. Groups of people can only create average works. If someone writes something good in the wiki, other average persons will intervene with his/her work and turn it into an average work. If someone writes something bad in the wiki, the others will again turn it into something of average value. with your system (meaning: Wikipedia's system) you can be sure that you will never create something too bad but also never something too good. You can create only average articles." The idea behind his argument was that Wikipedia will be a good resource as long as it attracts good cotnributors. but it will soon become an average site/encyclopaedia because it allows anyone to join the project and edit, and most people are just average persons and not brilliant writers. Do you think it's true? and how can we answer this argument? --Optim __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/

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Re: [Wikipedia-l] multi-headed VANDALS
by Daniel Mayer 18 Jan '23

18 Jan '23

On Sunday 28 July 2002 03:00 am, The Cunctator wrote: > What are the articles this person has been changing? For 66.108.155.126: 20:08 Jul 27, 2002 Computer 20:07 Jul 27, 2002 Exploit 20:07 Jul 27, 2002 AOL 20:05 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker 20:05 Jul 27, 2002 Leet 20:03 Jul 27, 2002 Root 20:02 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker 19:59 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker 19:58 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker 19:54 Jul 27, 2002 Principle of least astonishment 19:54 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker 19:52 Jul 27, 2002 Trance music 19:51 Jul 27, 2002 Trance music For 208.24.115.6: 20:20 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker For 141.157.232.26: 20:19 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker Most of these were complete replacements with discoherent statements. Such as "TAP IS THE ABSOLUTE DEFINITION OF THE NOUN HACKER" for Hacker. For the specifics follow http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Special:Ipblocklist and look at the contribs. --mav

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Language policy agreement in the Norwegian Wikipedia community
by Bjarte Sørensen 01 Apr '12

01 Apr '12

Dear all, Most of you would be aware of some of the discussions that have occurred around Wikipedia in the Norwegian languages. Since the last round of discussions on this list, there has been a lot of internal debate, as well as what seems to be a fairly widely accepted agreement following voting. This e-mail intends to, after a brief recap on Norwegian language and wikipedia issues, take those interested through the latest development and will stake out the road ahead. It is also intended to inform the international community about the current agreement on no.wikipedia, so as to prevent misunderstandings in the future. Finally, we will mention an unfortunate reaction to the vote by a small number of users at the Norwegian Bokmål/Riksmål (no:) wikipedia who want to disregard the result of the voting and are planning to create a _third_ Norwegian wikipedia with the sole mission of mixing the contents of the two current Norwegian versions. == A short language history of Norway == Spoken Norwegian ("norsk") (ISO 639-2 alpha-2 code "no") is in a fairly unique situation compared to most other languages of the world in that it has two widely accepted written standards, Bokmål (ISO 639-2 alpha-2 code "nb") and Nynorsk (ISO 639-2 alpha-2 code "nn"). By national legislation they are both regarded as official written forms of Norwegian. In addition, many people still make a distinction between Bokmål and its precursor which still is in use, Riksmål. Briefly speaking, Bokmål and Riksmål are descendants of the Danish written language. Until the 1800s, Danish was the only widely used written language in Norway as a result of four centuries of union with Denmark. With increasing independence came a wish to norwegianise the Danish standard, with Knud Knudsen at the forefront for changing parts of the vocabulary and orthographics. Thus, Riksmål, and later Bokmål, resulted. These forms together are today probably used by about 90% of Norway's population, or somewhere around 3,500,000 people. Parallel to this development, a new written standard was created by Ivar Aasen. He travelled extensively throughout Norway, and based his new language, landsmål, on the grammar and vocabulary of dialect samples from around the country. This was later renamed Nynorsk. Modern Nynorsk differs significantly from modern Bokmål, and may be linguistically looked upon as as different (or as similar if you like) as Swedish is to Danish. For English or Dutch/German speakers, the differences may be likened to those between (Lowland) Scots and English or Low German and Dutch. Today it is estimated that about 500,000-600,000 people have Nynorsk as their first written language. More information about the Norwegian language history can be found in English, German, French, Spanish or Portuguese on the website of the Norwegian Language Council: http://www.sprakrad.no/templates/Page.aspx?id=653 == A short history of Wikipedia in Norwegian == The first Norwegian wikipedia started 26 November 2001 on the subdomain no.wikipedia.org. As most wikipedias, its contributor and article count started really picking up around the end of 2003. At the time, it accepted all written standards of Norwegian, although the amount of Nynorsk was minimal. There were already several debates about the feasibilty and appropriateness of keeping the two languages united on one Wikipedia. On 31 July 2004 a Wikipedia for Nynorsk was created. The creation of nn:, however, split the community at no: wikipedia. Many felt that given that Nynorsk now had its own wikipedia, no: should become a Bokmål/Riksmål Wikipedia only. Others disapproved and claimed that there was no need to change and that it should continue its language policy of accepting all and keep its interwiki link name of "Norsk". Nynorsk Wikipedia soon proved a success, as it within the next few months gathered several people who had felt uncomfortable in the (mainly) Bokmål environment at no:. The name displayed in interwiki links became "Norsk (nynorsk)" (languages are not spelt with upper case in Norwegian). To date it continues to be one of the fastest growing wikipedias, with a steady article increase, now at over 6000 articles and >50 editors with more than 10 edits since arrival. == Votes == The issue of no:'s language policy has come up time and again, and a vote was held in March ([[:no:Wikipedia:Målform]]) as to which policy to adapt. Independent of the method of the tally (whether or not to include new contributors etc.) there was a majority for switching to a Bokmål/Riksmål only language policy (50% for Bokmål/Riksmål, 43.2% for Bokmål/Riksmål/Nynorsk/Høgnorsk, and 6.8% for the official variants Bokmål/Nynorsk only). Following this result, there is now going to be a vote on which interwiki link name will most appropriately reflect the current language policy of no:. The result of this vote will most likely be either "Norsk (bokmål)" or "Norsk (bokmål/riksmål)". Understandably, there has also been a debate as to whether the subdomain should change from "no" to "nb", as this is the correct representation of Bokmål according to ISO 639-2. However, there is some resentment towards such a move and currently a general acceptance in letting the Bokmål wikipedia stay at "no". The alternative some have suggested is a server-side redirect from "no" to "nb", in the same way that "nb" today is a server-side redirect to the equivalent page on "no". == Summary of the problem == Unfortunately, a small group of users (who all write Bokmål/Riksmål) are ignoring the results from the vote, and are claiming they want to re-establish a wikipedia for all written standards of Norwegian. They claim they have been in touch with people centrally in Wikimedia (developers? stewards?) and that they have so far received positive comments. With this email, we would like to state the fact that there have been no official decisions about creating a third Norwegian wikipedia containing both Bokmål and Nynorsk, it is merely an unofficial initiative from a small group of users which started a sign-on list at [[:no:Bruker:Norsk_Wikipedia]]. A spontaneous list with signatures against this activity was immediately created at [[:no:Wikipedia-diskusjon:Fellesnorsk]]. The process of creating a third Norwegian wikipedia has not gone through a voting process in any of the two existing Norwegian wikipedias (no: and nn:) and can not be considered as a decision by the Norwegian Wikipedia community. We believe the creation of a third wikipedia under the Wikimedia foundation would have a serious and unfortunate impact on the existing wikipedias in Norwegian, no: and nn:, and would undermine Wikipedia's reputation in Norway. This being said, we are all for extensive co- operation between the four Scandinavian language wikipedias (including Swedish and Danish), as evident by the recent creation of [[:meta:Skanwiki]], the Scandinavian meta-pages, and the use of featured articles from neighbour wikipedias. == Conclusion == Hopefully, this letter will help people better understand the complicated language situation of the Norwegian Wikipedia community, so as to give a background on which discussion can take place on this list in the future, such as the inevitable debate following a possible request for a re-establishment of the common (and third!) Norwegian Wikipedia. >From the community of no.wikipedia.org and nn.wikipedia.org, Bjarte Sørensen [[:meta:User:BjarteSorensen]] (Administrator/bureaucrat on nn:) Lars Alvik [[:no:User:Profoss]] (Administrator/bureaucrat on no:) Øyvind A. Holm [[:no:User:Sunny256]] (Administrator on no:) Onar Vikingstad [[:no:User:Vikingstad]] (Administrator on no:) Jon Harald Søby [[:no:User:Jhs]] (Administrator on no:) Chris Nyborg [[:no:User:Cnyborg]] (Administrator on no:) Guttorm Flatabø [[:no:User:Dittaeva]] (Administrator on nn:) Gunleiv Hadland [[:meta:User:Gunnernett]] (Administrator on nn:) Jarle Fagerheim [[:nn:User:Jarle]] (Administrator on nn:) Øyvind Jo Heimdal Eik [[:en:User:Pladask]] (Administrator on nn: and no:) Kristian André Gallis [[:nn:User:Kristaga]] Vegard Wærp [[:no:User:Vegardw]] Nina Aldin Thune [[:no:User:Nina]] Thor-Rune Hansen [[:no:User:ThorRune]] Claes Tande [[:no:User:Ctande]] Arnt-Erik Krokaa [[:no:User:AEK]] Rune Sattler [[:no:User:Shauni]]

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Parsing Extensions in Templates
by John Stowers 30 Apr '06

30 Apr '06

Hello All, I have a wiki, currently running the GeSHi syntax highlighting extension[1]. I wish to use this from within a template page (Template:HF). This template page contains the following wikitext Click [http://john.greenbirdsystems.com/files/{{{1}}} here] to download this file. <bash-file>/var/www/john.greenbirdsystems.com/files/{{{1}}}</bash-file> According to the extension, the file between the <bash-file> tags should be parsed and displayed inline when I call {{HF|test.sh}} from another page. But because the order that extensions and templates are processed all I get is Click here to download this file. Could not load /var/www/john.greenbirdsystems.com/files/{{{1}}} See how the template var is not expanded. The extension gets called first. Can anyone suggest a solution to my conumdrum? When not in template form the plugin works great. Its source code is available at [1]. I have done quite a bit of research trying to get tis to work but couldnt find anywhere that said anything about this situation. Help would be appreciated. Cheers John [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ajqnic:GeSHiHighlight

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Re: [Wikipedia-l] Bot flagging, stewards, & bureaucrats
by Anthere 27 Apr '06

27 Apr '06

Essjay wrote: > Apologies if Rob has already posted this elsewhere, but I wanted to make > sure this was announced as widely as possible: > > Developer Rob Church has enabled the [[Special:Makebot]] feature for > Wikimedia wikis; this feature allows local bureaucrats to flag and > deflag bot accounts on their projects. THANKS ROB !!!

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Bot flagging, stewards, & bureaucrats
by Essjay 26 Apr '06

26 Apr '06

Apologies if Rob has already posted this elsewhere, but I wanted to make sure this was announced as widely as possible: Developer Rob Church has enabled the [[Special:Makebot]] feature for Wikimedia wikis; this feature allows local bureaucrats to flag and deflag bot accounts on their projects. Discussion on this proposal went on for quite a while, with almost unanimous support from both stewards and bureaucrats alike; it was approved by Jimbo (in March, I believe) for implementation. A big thanks to Rob for working up a great extension (I've already used it on en.wiki, and it works beautifully), and to those who supported it's implementation. As a side note, I suppose this means that stewards will be getting out of the bot flagging business on projects with local bureaucrats? (I've started a thread on [[m:Talk:Requests for bot status]] on the subject, if anyone would like to comment.) I may be being a bit bold in doing so, but I encourage those who read the list to make the communities on their respective wikis aware of this new responsibility for bureaucrats. Essjay -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Essjay Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia http://www.wikipedia.org/

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Survey of New Media in this week's Economist (fwd)
by SJ 24 Apr '06

24 Apr '06

Speaking of research into collaborative media : here's the lead article about a recent Economist survey. Wikipedia gets a kind tip. Has anyone read the full report? The entire survey is available as a PDF for $5... <http://www.economist.com/members/survey_paybarrier.cfm?story_id=6794156> (thanks to aslam for the tip) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- AMONG THE AUDIENCE Apr 20th 2006 The era of mass media is giving way to one of personal and participatory media, says Andreas Kluth. That will profoundly change both the media industry and society as a whole THE next big thing in 1448 was a technology called "movable type", invented for commercial use by Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith from Mainz (although the Chinese had thought of it first). The clever idea was to cast individual letters (type) and then compose (move) these to make up printable pages. This promised to disrupt the mainstream media of the day--the work of monks who were manually transcribing texts or carving entire pages into wood blocks for printing. By 1455 Mr Gutenberg, having lined up venture capital from a rich compatriot, Johannes Fust, was churning out bibles and soon also papal indulgences (slips of paper that rich people bought to reduce their time in purgatory). The start-up had momentum, but its costs ran out of control and Mr Gutenberg defaulted. Mr Fust foreclosed, and a little bubble popped. Even so, within decades movable type spread across Europe, turbo-charging an information age called the Renaissance. Martin Luther, irked by those indulgences, used printing presses to produce bibles and other texts in German. Others followed suit, and vernaculars rose as Latin declined, preparing Europe for nation-states. Religious and aristocratic elites first tried to stop, then control, then co-opt the new medium. In the centuries that followed, social and legal systems adjusted (with copyright laws, for instance) and books, newspapers and magazines began to circulate widely. The age of mass media had arrived. Two more technological breakthroughs--radio and television--brought it to its zenith, which it probably reached around 1958, when most adult Americans simultaneously turned on their television sets to watch "I Love Lucy". SECOND INCARNATION In 2001, five-and-a-half centuries after Mr Gutenberg's first bible, "Movable Type" was invented again. Ben and Mena Trott, high-school sweethearts who became husband and wife, had been laid off during the dotcom bust and found themselves in San Francisco with ample spare time. Ms Trott started blogging--ie, posting to her online journal, Dollarshort--about "stupid little anecdotes from my childhood". For reasons that elude her, Dollarshort became very popular, and the Trotts decided to build a better "blogging tool", which they called Movable Type. "Likening it to the printing press seemed like a natural thing because it was clearly revolutionary; it was not meant to be arrogant or grandiose," says Ms Trott to the approving nod of Mr Trott, who is extremely shy and rarely talks. Movable Type is now the software of choice for celebrity bloggers. These two incarnations of movable type make convenient (and very approximate) historical book-ends. They bracket the era of mass media that is familiar to everybody today. The second Movable Type, however, also marks the beginning of a very gradual transition to a new era, which might be called the age of personal or participatory media. This culture is already familiar to teenagers and twenty-somethings, especially in rich countries. Most older people, if they are aware of the transition at all, find it puzzling. Calling it the "internet era" is not helpful. By way of infrastructure, full-scale participatory media presume not so much the availability of the (decades-old) internet as of widespread, "always-on", broadband access to it. So far, this exists only in South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan, whereas America and other large media markets are several years behind. Indeed, even today's broadband infrastructure was built for the previous era, not the coming one. Almost everywhere, download speeds (from the internet to the user) are many times faster than upload speeds (from user to network). This is because the corporate giants that built these pipes assumed that the internet would simply be another distribution pipe for themselves or their partners in the media industry. Even today, they can barely conceive of a scenario in which users might put as much into the network as they take out. THE AGE OF PARTICIPATION Exactly this, however, is starting to happen. Last November, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 57% of American teenagers create content for the internet--from text to pictures, music and video. In this new-media culture, says Paul Saffo, a director at the Institute for the Future in California, people no longer passively "consume" media (and thus advertising, its main revenue source) but actively participate in them, which usually means creating content, in whatever form and on whatever scale. This does not have to mean that "people write their own newspaper", says Jeremy Zawodny, a prominent blogger and software engineer at Yahoo![1], an internet portal. "It could be as simple as rating the restaurants they went to or the movie they saw," or as sophisticated as shooting a home video. This has profound implications for traditional business models in the media industry, which are based on aggregating large passive audiences and holding them captive during advertising interruptions. In the new-media era, audiences will occasionally be large, but often small, and usually tiny. Instead of a few large capital-rich media giants competing with one another for these audiences, it will be small firms and individuals competing or, more often, collaborating. Some will be making money from the content they create; others will not and will not mind, because they have other motives. "People creating stuff to build their own reputations" are at one end of this spectrum, says Philip Evans at Boston Consulting Group, and one-man superbrands such as Steven Spielberg at the other. As with the media revolution of 1448, the wider implications for society will become visible gradually over a period of decades. With participatory media, the boundaries between audiences and creators become blurred and often invisible. In the words of David Sifry, the founder of Technorati, a search engine for blogs, one-to-many "lectures" (ie, from media companies to their audiences) are transformed into "conversations" among "the people formerly known as the audience". This changes the tone of public discussions. The mainstream media, says David Weinberger, a blogger, author and fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Centre, "don't get how subversive it is to take institutions and turn them into conversations". That is because institutions are closed, assume a hierarchy and have trouble admitting fallibility, he says, whereas conversations are open-ended, assume equality and eagerly concede fallibility. Today's media revolution, like others before it, is announcing itself with a new and strange vocabulary. In the early 20th century, Charles Prestwich Scott, the editor, publisher and owner of the MANCHESTER GUARDIAN (and thus part of his era's mainstream media), was aghast at the word "television", which to him was "half Greek, half Latin: no good can come of it." Mr Scott's equivalents today confront even stranger neologisms. Merriam-Webster, a publisher of dictionaries, had "blog" as its word of the year in 2004, and the New Oxford American Dictionary picked "podcast" in 2005. "Wikis", "vlogs", "metaverses" and "folksonomies" (all to be explained later in this survey) may be next. WORD COUNT "These words! The inability of the English language to express these new things is distressing," says Barry Diller, 64, who fits the description "media mogul". Over the decades, Mr Diller has run two big Hollywood film studios and launched America's fourth broadcast-television network, FOX Broadcasting. More recently, he has made a valiant effort to get his mind around the internet, with mixed results, and is now the boss of IAC/InterActiveCorp, a conglomerate with about 60 online brands. Mr Diller concedes that "all of the distribution methods get thrown up in the air, and how they land is, well, still up in the air." Yet Mr Diller is confident that participation can never be a proper basis for the media industry. "Self-publishing by someone of average talent is not very interesting," he says. "Talent is the new limited resource." "What an ignoramus!" says Jerry Michalski, with some exasperation. He advises companies on the uses of new media tools. "Look around and there's tons of great stuff from rank amateurs," he says. "Diller is assuming that there's a finite amount of talent and that he can corner it. He's completely wrong." Not everything in the "blogosphere" is poetry, not every audio "podcast" is a symphony, not every video "vlog" would do well at Sundance, and not every entry on Wikipedia[2], the free and collaborative online encyclopedia, is 100% correct, concedes Mr Michalski. But exactly the same could be said about newspapers, radio, television and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. What is new is that young people today, and most people in future, will be happy to decide for themselves what is credible or worthwhile and what is not. They will have plenty of help. Sometimes they will rely on human editors of their choosing; at other times they will rely on collective intelligence in the form of new filtering and collaboration technologies that are now being developed. "The old media model was: there is one source of truth. The new media model is: there are multiple sources of truth, and we will sort it out," says Joe Kraus, the founder of JotSpot, which makes software for wikis. The obvious benefit of this media revolution will be what Mr Saffo of the Institute for the Future calls a "Cambrian explosion" of creativity: a flowering of expressive diversity on the scale of the eponymous proliferation of biological species 530m years ago. "We are entering an age of cultural richness and abundant choice that we've never seen before in history. Peer production is the most powerful industrial force of our time," says Chris Anderson, editor of WIRED magazine and author of a forthcoming book called "The Long Tail", about which more later. (Mr Anderson used to work for THE ECONOMIST.) At the same time, adds Mr Saffo, "revolutions tend to suck for ordinary people." Indeed, many people in the traditional media are pessimistic about the rise of a participatory culture, either because they believe it threatens the business model that they have grown used to, or because they feel it threatens public discourse, civility and even democracy. This survey will examine the main kinds of new media and their likely long-term effects both on media companies and on society at large. In so doing, it will be careful to heed a warning from Harvard's Mr Weinberger: "The mainstream media are in a good position to get things wrong." The observer, after all, is part of the observation--a product of institutional media values even if he tries to apply the new rules of conversation. This points to the very heart of the coming era of participatory media. It must be understood, says Mr Weinberger, "not as a publishing phenomenon but a social phenomenon". This is illustrated perfectly by blogging, the subject of the next article[3]. ----- [1] http://www.yahoo.com/ [2] http://wikipedia.org/ [3] http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_ID=6794172

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Re: [Wikipedia-l] [Wikitech-l] Google Summer of Code 2006
by SJ 24 Apr '06

24 Apr '06

Ahh, just beat me to it :-) They're not taking applications yet, and the #summer-discuss IRC channel is inexplicably hosted on SlashNET, but that's extremely cool. Congrats to Brion and everyone working on this... last year, Google sponsored an average of 10 students per project/org on their list. Huzzah!, SJ * likewise Creative Commons, One Laptop Per Child (which is doing cool things with wikis and wants to fit Wikimedia content on its laptops), and Xiph.org, which is moving closer to providing a truly robust free audio and video toolchain. A reason to smile... :-) On 4/23/06, Mathias Schindler <mathias.schindler(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > > after wandering through the archive of those lists, it seems that > nobody has yet mentioned that Wikimedia was accepted as a mentoring > organisation for the Google Summer of Code 2006. > > http://code.google.com/soc/wikim/about.html > > Students may apply for this in the first 8 days of May. > > Please have a look at > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2006 for suggestions > regarding possible projects. > > It would be a great opportunity for us, yadda yadda etc. please apply. > > Mathias > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l(a)wikimedia.org > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > -- ++SJ

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Wikipedia's Success Factors
by Hagen 23 Apr '06

23 Apr '06

Wikipedia: Success factors Wikipedia's success mainly depend on its users - the Wikipedians. In theory, everybody can be a Wikipedian. This thread is supposed to find out if the theory holds true in practice. The idea is that the Wiki-community of Wikipedians is a special group of people, who have special characteristcs. To account for these special characteristics, I have provided the following Factor Model: User factors: - Openness - Neutrality - Flat hierarchy- Computer Skills - Motivation - Knowledge factors: - Tacit & Explicit knowledge - Fast changing rate - Peer review Technology factors: - Easy usability - Fast access - Infinite reach, multilingual - Flexible structure - Safe All these factors play together to accomplish the goal of succesful knowledge creation and knowledge sharing. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Success_factors Comments, feedback and own ideas are very welcome! -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Wikipedia%27s-Success-Factors-t1494063.html#a4049267 Sent from the Wikipedia General forum at Nabble.com.

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Subject: Re: Indefinite block and desysopping by, User:Danny
by Alvaro 23 Apr '06

23 Apr '06

Merci, Anthere, to have put an end to this psychodrama. I expect everyone will get lessons for the future from all of that ;D Alvaro

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Wikipedia-l April 2006