Wikipedia-l September 2006

wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

88 participants
65 discussions

[[WP:100K]] - who here writes well in English and another language?
by David Gerard 21 Sep '06

21 Sep '06

[[:en:WP:100K]] is a page about Danny's wild idea to have 100,000 featured-quality articles on en: in a year or so. Featured articles from other language Wikipedias may be a marvellous source for quality material. If you write well in both English and the other language, you may be able to do very well for en: by going through the other language's featured articles and bringing the en: article up to scratch. (And for the other Wikipedia by doing it the other way.) How do those of you who write well in two languages feel about this idea? - d.

7 12

Re: [Wikipedia-l] [[WP:100K]] - who here writes well in English and another l...
by daniwo59＠aol.com 21 Sep '06

21 Sep '06

I think that this is the precisely the point. At Wikipedia, we aim to be the biggest and the best. Well, we already are the biggest--now let's be the best as well. There are so many ideas out there as to how we can do it. Let's share them. Some of the things that are happening (I realize this refers only to en:wp) 1. "Requested articles" on the Recent changes page has been changed to "Stubs." Lets see some turnaround there. 2. My contest, which I hope will be the first of many more. 3. [[Polar exploration]], an article we did not have, which was written jointly by a group of people on IRC. It's still not up to par, but this is a really good example of collaborative writing. Get together with a few friends, pick an article, and fix it. 4. Good articles, which are being improved. Other, easy steps-- 1. Take a look at articles that did not quite make feature and fix them. 2. Take a look at any of the lists that exist for vital articles, pick one and fix it. 3. Look through the projects and portals and see what needs to be done. 4. Take an EB:1911 article and make it a uniquely Wikipedia article. 5. Look through the categories of articles needing citations and find the citations. 6. Pick a topic you know little about, go to the library and learn about it, then write about what you learned. It can be very rewarding. 7. If you speak another language, translate. (It would be interesting to see what the ratio of FAs per total articles is on other languages as compared to English). For those who are intimidated by all the work this entails, remember--there are a lot of low hanging fruit out there. And it's much easier to do it than to talk about it. And it's much more rewarding than to complain about this or that (person or process). Danny Who would love to see [[Amethyst]] and [[Foreign policy]] vastly improved.

2 1

Re: [Wikipedia-l] Methods of electing an arbitration committée
by Michael Snow 21 Sep '06

21 Sep '06

habj wrote: > 2006/9/19, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>: > >> They didn't. The last election was an open and publicly visible vote, >> and possibly the most acrimonious possible method of running it. > > English Wikipedia has used a more or less modified version of the > BoardVote > software at least once > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration_Committee_Elections_July… > > and as it looks to me actually twice > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration_Committee_Elections_Dece… > > Maybe someone who knows the whereabouts of elections to enwikis arb > com can > tell us the story of how enwiki, as it seems, decided to have secret > ballots > in elections to arb com, used it a couple of times and then abandoned it? > > What are the conclusions after the last round of elections at enwiki, > regarding the method? The use of the Boardvote software was dropped for the last election because a significant concern about the Arbitration Committee was the lack of majority support from voters. That is to say, since voters could vote for as many or as few candidates as they wished, only one candidate received more than 50% of the vote. In order to fill seven open seats, you had to go down to candidates who received only 31% of the vote. The publicly conducted vote more closely resembled requests for adminship and ensured that quite a large number of candidates received majority support, because those who did not explicitly vote on a candidate were not counted in that person's totals. Regarding the acrimony involved, David's characterization is not unreasonable, although I would point out that the previous election was also acrimonious. However, that manifested itself during the campaign via endorsements and "disendorsements", instead of directly during the voting process. I still think the secret ballot has considerable merit to it. However, I also appreciate the importance of the winning candidates enjoying majority support. This can be accomplished without completely overhauling how we conduct elections. Personally, I would support changing the interface to allow for people to vote Yes or No on each individual candidate, and to only count their ballot as to that candidate if they choose one of these. In other words, in the current board election, I'd have the ability to vote for AaronSw, against Alex756, and not vote at all regarding Arno Lagrange (example unrelated to how I actually voted). Candidates would be chosen on the basis of percentages rather than raw vote totals. A minimum vote total might be set to prevent surprise victories by obscure candidates, although I suspect that enough people would vote against unknowns that this isn't really necessary. --Michael Snow

1 0

Change language name...
by ro.wiki 20 Sep '06

20 Sep '06

Can please somebody change the name of the Aromanian language ( http://roa-rup.wikipedia.org ) as it appears in Wikipedia's interlanguage links from "Armâneashti" to the correct spelling form "Armãneshce" ? Also I wanna ask, how can this Wikipedia be transferred to rup.wikipedia.org , the correct Wikipedia adress as per ISO 639-2 Alpha 3?( http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/englangn.html ) When it was created there was no ISO code for this language, but one was created. It is anyway a small Wikipedia so there should be no problem in movin articles. Thanks --------------------------------- Yahoo! Mail: gratis 1GB per i messaggi, antispam, antivirus, POP3

5 8

Re: [Wikipedia-l] [WikiEN-l] Would you like one of your videos posted on Wikipedia?
by David Gerard 20 Sep '06

20 Sep '06

On 19/09/06, Stephen Streater <sbstreater(a)mac.com> wrote: > On 19 Sep 2006, at 21:52, [[User:Unforgettableid]] wrote: > > On 9/19/06, Stephen Streater <sbstreater(a)mac.com> wrote: > >> external linking > >> of media on Wikipedia is being phased out, so I > >> couldn't link to an external website hosting it either. > > Why is it being phased out? > The idea is that content should be included within Wikipedia. > Apart from anything else, CD ROMs of WIkipedia would then > be self-contained, but also content could not be altered or > withdrawn by third parties. First I've heard of it. You mean, in the 'external links' section? That's ridiculous. Where can I find this? [cc: wikipedia-l] - d.

1 0

Methods of electing an arbitration committée
by habj 19 Sep '06

19 Sep '06

I recently noticed at Meta - and was a bit surprised - that the BoardVote extension has been used in elections to the Arbitration Committee att English Wikipedia. Since several other Wikipedias also have arbitration committées, but there is no note of these elections can be found on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Election_officials_2006 where the elections to the English Arc Coms are listed along with the elections to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, I suppose the other arbitration committees have been elected openly on the wiki, the way administrators are normally chosen. Why did English Wikipedia choses to have secret ballots in the election to their arb com? Why have the other wikipedias chosen not to? On the more general scale: Why should votes for adminship be open, and votes to the Board of Trustees secret ballot? Where on the scale between these two types of elections do we find elections for an arbitration committee? /habj

3 3

Re: [Wikipedia-l] Central bibliography
by Jonathan Leybovich 18 Sep '06

18 Sep '06

> You're probably right that nobody has probably asked them for the database > dump before. They may not be in a position to conveniently or reasonably > give it to someone who asks. But it can't hurt to ask. Has anyone found > contacts in the LOC organization and followed up on it? > > Either Wikipedia or the Internet Archive would be good host locations for > the data; possibly both. Sorry for not chiming in earlier as I am in some ways the instigator of this altercation ;) In any case I too would tend to think that information from the Library of Congress's Voyager server is not copyrighted (almost all of the records ARE authored by the LoC, not imported) and since in any case the goal is not to store the exact MARC records, but to extend their content through collaborative editing/annotation, I don't see how copyright laws could apply, even if in the future we supported MARC export. With that said, other libraries like the British Library do enforce copyright on their records even though they maintain an open catalog server. I have started to document these issues here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikicat_OPAC_Targets Despite being generally optimistic about the Library of Congress, I have noticed that they do not divulge all their data and in fact charge for complete database dumps in certain cases. This applies to even very basic things like authority records: http://authorities.loc.gov/help/auth-faq.htm#2 In any case this is all speculation and we should simply ask them. I know of someone to contact however I have refrained from doing so as I do not have any particular organizational standing within the Wikimedia Foundation and in any case have not gotten much of a response to the project after its initial announcement over a month ago. I could ask as only myself, but it would be nice if someone from the Foundation could do so so that our request would be taken more seriously and other data possibly opened up to us. Also, in regard to some earlier points about citation, I have already gotten the Cite.php/<ref> extension working with the Wikicat data import function I've been coding- notice that the user needs only provide a key in the <ref> body: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikicat_Cite_screenshoot.png This is ready to go live now, except that without a place to store the bibliographic data we would be banging on the Voyager server with every save/preview- not a very neighborly way to introduce ourselves :/ Transclusion into the wiki-text could be an option, though... __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

8 11

Wikimedia Board Elections
by Jimmy Wales 17 Sep '06

17 Sep '06

It is very very important that everyone vote. I personally strongly strongly support the candidacies of Oscar and Mindspillage. Oscar is an amazing Dutch Wikipedian with strong support from that community but who does not have broad exposure in the English Wikipedia... I hope we can change that by introducing him to people. Mindspillage is Mindspillage. We all know and love her. Give her some votes. There are other candidates, some good, but at least some of them are entirely unacceptable because they have proven themselves repeatedly unable to work well with the community. Please, everyone, vote... and vote for people who you can know and trust and care about as human beings. I invite an open discussion here of the candidates. This is your community, speak openly of who you trust and why. --Jimbo

9 10

note to readers interested in Wikipedia/Wikimedia in the UK
by David Gerard 16 Sep '06

16 Sep '06

We have a UK-based mailing list, wikimediauk-l, for Wikimedia-related topics concerning the UK. It was set up as a discussion list for the prospective Wikimedia UK organisation. I often post UK-related article discussion, media stuff, etc. to it. There appear to be a lot of UK-based readers of these lists who aren't on it and probably should be. List page: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_UK - d.

4 3

Fwd: Wikimania 2007 - Bidding cities shortlist
by Delphine Ménard 16 Sep '06

16 Sep '06

I am very sorry, it seems this email never made it to the lists yesterday. Gmail or mailman ate all my emails sent to lists yesterday. I *did* send it yesterday. Delphine ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Delphine Ménard <notafishz(a)gmail.com> Date: Sep 15, 2006 10:50 AM Subject: Wikimania 2007 - Bidding cities shortlist To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)wikimedia.org>, wikipedia-l(a)wikimedia.org, Wikimedia Translators <translators-l(a)wikimedia.org> Dear Wikimedians, first an foremost, the jury would like to thank all the people who have worked on putting together those bids. We all know it is a hard task and that it takes both time and ressources that volunteers already give for Wikimedia altogether. We have chosen 4 cities for the shortlist: Alexandria, London, Taipei, Torino The bids of Orlando, Hong-Kong and Istanbul were unfortunately not precise enough in what opportunities there are especially for conference venues. Singapore's bid almost made it to the shortlist but the lack of opportunities for common accommodation made it fall through. The jury will be asking questions on the talk pages of the chosen bids, please do make sure that you answer them. And do not hesitate to ask us questions too. We also encourage the cities that have not made it to the shortlist, and even those who have, to start thinking about opportunities for the coming years and especially 2008. We expect to be chosing the city for 2008 within a couple of months, so for those who are already at it, work your contacts and opportunities, for those who have not started thinking, it's time to come up with fresh ideas! Again, thanks to all of you who have worked hard on these bids, and as we say in French, "que le meilleur gagne ! " (May the best win!). We will have a public meeting with the bidding teams, the jury and and whoever wants to join on IRC in the #wikimania channel on freenode on Saturday 23rd September at 15.00 UTC. Stay tuned for more and happy further bidding! Cheers, Delphine PS. Merci to the translators in advance for forwarding this to the appropriate lists. -- ~notafish -- ~notafish

1 0

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

Wikipedia-l September 2006