Wikipedia-l May 2007

wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

48 participants
35 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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Wikimedia Open Access Chat
by Erik Moeller 04 Jan '08

04 Jan '08

I would like to invite you to join a chat about the relationship between the Wikimedia community and the Open Access movement in scientific publishing. This will explore issues of licensing, content sharing, technology, and hopefully result in mutual commitments to collaborate. In a nutshell: December 17, 2006; irc.freenode.net; 21:00 UTC; #openaccess Please see: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Open_Access_chat for more (including a link to a web interface for accessing the IRC channel). I would appreciate it if you would add yourself to the "I want to attend!" list on the page, so we have an idea how many people are coming. -- Peace & Love, Erik DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.

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Be-x-old
by Monk 02 Oct '07

02 Oct '07

Hi, How can anybody say that Yury Tarasievich and his project is about language, not about politics, after such a letter? No facts, just insults and speculations. > You are an entity, yes, set out to destroy the existing Belarusian > language and culture and replace it with your version -- okay, your > right. But get yourself your own blessed language code for that. This speculation with such aggressive words doesn't help your case, it can only make your case worse. I don't even hope any more that you understand that your outrageous insults are absurd. You just dig a pit for yourself by your own hands. > P.S. > Some years ago I witnessed a creation of one of such sites you call > "proofs". So, there was 1 tech and 1 editor, who re-edited everything > incoming (like 90+% or even 99% in standard Belarusian and Russian) > into his flavour of "classic". It was politics. Thousands pages (and I > mean real thousands, there was sort of 4800 or so) of pages. And... > grant money. I could add -- near to zero interest, excepting the > indexing bots. Another great example of lies. Where could they get any incoming in "norm" if people just don't write in it? Monk.

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Localization of interwiki bot
by Andre Engels 08 Jun '07

08 Jun '07

Recently I got a request to not use Russian but Ukrainian text for the summaries of the interwiki bot at the Ukrainian Wikipedia. This has now been done, but I can imagine there are more languages that would like to have their own language, or perhaps another choice of alternative language than the one I have made. If you want summaries in your own language on your Wikipedia for the bot, please send me a message with these summaries. The following languages already have translations: af,ar,br,ca,cs,da,de,el,en,eo,es,eu,fa,fi,fr,he,hr,ia,is,it,ka,ksh,lt,mzn,nds,nds-nl,nl, nn,no,os,pl,pt,ro,ru,sk,sl,sr,sv,uk Of the other languages, the language used for the summaries is: Arabic is used by ku,so German is used by als,bar,hsb,lb Esperanto is used by io,nov Spanish is used by an,ast,ay,ceb,gl,gn,lad,nah,pag,qu,tl,war Farsi is used by glk French is used by co,frp,ht,ie,kab,ln,lo,nrm,oc,vi,wa Hebrew is used by yi Croatian is used by bs,mk,sh Italian is used by eml,lij,lmo,nap,pms,rm,roa-tara,sc,scn,vec Lithuanian is used by bat-smg Dutch is used by fy,li,pap,vls,zea Norse (bokmal) is used by se Portuguese is used by tet Romanian is used by mo,roa-rup Russian is used by av,be,be-x-old,bxr,cv,got,hy,kk,ky,lbe,ru-sib,tk,tt,udm,xal All languages not mentioned in the above use English. If you want a localization in your language, please send me the replacements for the texts "robot", "Adding", "Removing" and "Modifying". If there is no local replacement needed, but you do think that you would do better with some other language, just state which (if any) language(s) should be preferred to English. -- Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels

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Quality vs Quantity
by Mark Williamson 01 Jun '07

01 Jun '07

Hello all, I think this is a debate/discussion that has been a long time coming. We need to have this. Many may not realize this, but there is a HUGE disparity between the stub ratio (related to average article length) in the different Wikipedias. http://s23.org/wikistats/wikipedias_html.php?sort=ratio_asc For a little visual demonstration of the fact: http://ceb.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random (Random page on Cebuano Wikipedia, with the "stubbiest" stub ratio) -- clicking randompage 10 times, I got 9 different stubs about communes in France and one about a place in the Philippines I think that there has been too much emphasis on article count in the past, causing people to think that it is much more important than it really is and wanting to inflate it by adding hundreds or even thousands of "hollow" articles with little information on semi-obscure topics that probably won't be read at all by anyone ever, and if they are, will not be useful. Now, I know I sound critical with that sentiment, but hey, who am I to say that it could not be useful to have those stubs? But I do think we should discuss it... is it better to have 1000 stubs or 100 long well-written articles? And also here's a little nudge to everyone... why not go to Special:Shortpages or Special:Random on your favourite Wiki and expand some articles? How about it? Mark -- Refije dirije lanmè yo paske nou posede pwòp bato.

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Wikimedia brand survey open
by Erik Moeller 31 May '07

31 May '07

I'd like to invite you to participate in a survey about Wikimedia's brands, their uses, and possible changes to our brand strategy: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_brand_survey Thank you. -- Peace & Love, Erik DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees. "An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open, free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic

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creation of language
by kiyan Rezaie 31 May '07

31 May '07

Dear Wikipedia-I, My language Dari (Afghan), an old version of Persian, is not on the list. Hereby I want to ask you to create this language and then contact me so that I can manage the Dari Wikipedia. Yours sincerely, Kiyan Rezaie _________________________________________________________________ Probeer nieuwe online services via Windows Live Ideas—zo nieuw dat ze nog steeds niet officieel zijn verschenen. http://ideas.live.com

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Wikipedia in Hakka language created
by River Tarnell 29 May '07

29 May '07

hello, a new Wikipedia has been created in the Hakka language. it can be found at <http://hak.wikipedia.org/>. - river.

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Wikipedia-l May 2007