Wikipedia-l May 2008

wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

12 participants
15 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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Useability
by Florence Devouard 04 Jun '08

04 Jun '08

Hello, The menu on the left hand side lists, in this order Navigation Main Page Contents Featured content Current events Random article interaction About Wikipedia Community portal Recent changes Contact Wikipedia Donate to Wikipedia Help search search box ---------- Problem: on small screens, the search box is not visible and readers must scroll each time they get to a new page to find it. Whether we are happy with this, or would prefer that people navigate three featured content or indexes or random article, does not change the fact that most poeple actually use search system on internet. What about changing the search box place ? Perhaps under the logo. Or below the Navigation block. Or fully at the top of the page ? Ant

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Testing
by Marc Riddell 31 May '08

31 May '08

Folks, Please bear with me while I run a test of my e-mail service. Comcast has been having problems for the past 24 hours & for some reason I haven't received any posts from any of the various WP-related Mailing Lists for that period of time. Marc

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The marriage of Fredrika Bremer
by Lars Aronsson 28 May '08

28 May '08

On Tuesday May 20, 2008, page 4 of Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's leading newspaper, carried a signed editorial article by Henrik Berggren, detailing how he found an error in the Swedish language Wikipedia and corrected it, http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=577&a=771422 This [[:sv:Henrik Berggren (journalist)]] has a Wikipedia entry since 2005. He holds a PhD degree in history. The error is rather serious, a whole paragraph of text claims that [[Fredrika Bremer]] (Swedish writer, feminist pioneer, 1801-1865) found the love of her life in 1820 and married later that decade. In reality, she never married. The error was planted on May 4, 2007 by the username Elinwolf and corrected by Henrik berggren more than a year later. Apparently, the error never spread to other languages. The editorial article, however, doesn't ridicule Wikipedia as an unreliable source of information. It concludes that this is what might happen unless we are vigilant, and that Wikipedia's quality depends on all of us, especially when it comes to more obscure topics than the most renowned authors. This follows after the newspaper reprinted AFP's story on May 11 about professor Jon Beasley-Murray at the University of British Columbia, with the puzzle globe and the headline "gains respect" on the front webpage (www.dn.se) for several days, and after a similar story from a Swedish college was featured on May 19, http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=147&a=771168 In summary, Swedish press reporting about Wikipedia is currently very positive and also quite realistic. Wikipedia is described as something that school children actually use as a reference and something we all can and should contribute to, but not as a pile of junk and neither as a promised land. There has also been one mention of how the Russian Wikipedia gained the 10th position. -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

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Meet-up about less resourced languages, wikis and other nice things
by Sabine Cretella 26 May '08

26 May '08

Good morning! Next week we will have a first international wiki and less resourced languages meet-up in Cherasco, Piedmont, Italy. The languages for this meet-up are English as mayor communication platform eventually French and Wolof (for the Senegalese community) and Piedmontese. There will be some short inserts of other less resourced languages in terms of videos and/or recordings as well. Yesterday there was a meeting in Piedmontese language only. Recordings will be available online soon. Unfortunately the network connections did not allow for live transmission. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherasco (is the place where we will be next Saturday). The event is backed by the local authorities and the Region of Piedmont as well as by the association GoPiedmont. Programming of the event started quite late so all what was possible was done, and it was not possible to consider many additional possibilities for this year (also in terms of funding ... there's always that 24 hours/day thingie ... :-) Therefore we had no additional funding to the technical facilities. This time scolarships were not possible - we hope to be able to get things like these in future, but we cannot promise :-) Link to the programme: http://gopiedmont.i-iter.org/contn%C3% B9/programme-international-day-31st-may-english-language Some of the videos are already online: http://gopiedmont.i-iter.org/contn%C3%B9/eng-1-piedmont-festival-web-tv For now we have a loop of approx. 90 mins. Transcripts will be uploaded step by step here: http://gopiedmont.i-iter.org/contn%C3% B9/transcripts-videos-conference-31st-may-2008 (also in this case licenses need to be still established) Some changes are still possible, but we have more contents than shown here, so: no probs for that part. As to the videos: most of them are already here, few are missing, I have also additional contents. If you are part of a less resourced or minority language group and would like to talk about your language and projects in your language, you are welcome to submit your video to show people - we cannot grant it to be online for the day of the conference, but we can insert it in the cycle as soon as possible. Please also consider using a free license for your video. We will see which ones of ours can be released under free license (we could not care about that part by now, but this is not essential for the conference itself and can be handled after it). All videos shown during the conference are going to be dubbed in Piedmontese language. At this stage I would like to publicly thank all, Wikimedians and non, who helped us to organise the event and get things on their way. Approx. 4 month is not really much time. Yes, we are already thinking about the next event for 2009 (also 2010 is being considered) and whoever is interested is welcome to join us. Really next year should have been the first year to do this ... but well: we got the challenge to do it now and so we did. Please feel free to distribute this information as you wish. It was not possible to go around all village pumps on our wikis which deal with a less resourced language (I tried to do at least some). Should you have any questions, please ask - they will be answered on the website of GoPiedmont so that questions and answers are available to a broader public. We cannot make sure we answer immediately being only in two to do this. Please send a copy of your question to info(a)voxhumanitatis.org from where it reaches our private mail boxes and not the lists which we cannot really follow these days. Thank you and have a wonderful week! Sabine Cretella

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legal status of government works?
by david.monniaux＠free.fr 20 May '08

20 May '08

Hi, I'm invited to a hearing by a governmental commission who works on possible alterations to the laws and regulations governing the copyright on public works in France. They want to know my opinions (and those of Wikimedia France) on the issue. I know about the copyright-free status of the works of the US federal government. I'm interested in the copyright status of the works of other governments worlwide, especially in the European Union. Please answer by private e-mail. Regards DM

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Swedish Week on Russian Wikipedia
by Lars Aronsson 18 May '08

18 May '08

/* Sorry for resending: Stupid me, I thought the Cyrillic URL was * the problem, but apparently it was the line starting with * "From" that Pipermail couldn't handle. */ Surprisingly long, Swedish has held the 10th place among the largest languages of Wikipedia. Swedish is spoken by only 9 million people and the following two places are held by Russian and Chinese. Some say the high rank is held in part because of many very short articles: stubs and even "substubs". This is true, but the high ranking of some languages (including Polish and Dutch) in this first decade of Wikipedia is rather to be explained by the late coming of the major languages. Arabic is still trailing at 31. Swedish has been falling from 6th to its current 10th place. All of April, the Swedish Wikipedia has been active with merging "substubs" into larger units. As a result, the over all size of the Swedish Wikipedia has been flat around 282,000 articles, while the Russian Wikipedia has continued to grow at a healthy pace. The difference in size is now only 5000 articles. Any day or week soon, Russian will capture the 10th place. This will be a great event, but what about the timing? The Russian wikipedians already missed the 200th anniversary of the conquest of Sveaborg (May 3, 1808). I don't think they will time today's final in the ice hockey world championships. But I also think they will be too early for the 299th anniversary of the battle of Poltava (July 8, 1709). So we will have to find some other way to mark the Russian victory for a place around the puzzle globe (http://www.wikipedia.org/). As part of WikiProject Sweden (Википедия:Проект:Швеция), they started yesterday a subpage "Swedish Week" (Шведская неделя). The idea is to fill these last days of Swedish dominance with writing new articles about Sweden. Yesterday, Saturday May 17, was Norway's independence day but this didn't stop the Russians from creating an article about the National holiday of Sweden, as well as 50 other new articles pertaining to Sweden. _From a Swedish perspective, this isn't too bad. To quote ABBA: "I feel like I win, when I lose" (Waterloo, 1974). http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Википедия:Проект:Швеция/Шведская_неделя The surrender of Sveaborg ([[Suomenlinna]]) fortress at Helsinki in 1808 and the [[battle of Poltava]] in the Ukraine in 1709 are the two most famous Swedish military losses to Russia. A Russian expression for helplessness is "like a Swede at Poltava", but this is not at all how I feel today. Still, I had hoped that this year's ice hockey championships, played in Quebec ([[2008 Men's World Ice Hockey Championships]]), would provide retaliation, but yesterday Sweden lost out at 4th place without medals and Russia is playing the final today against Canada in just a few hours. It is surprising how well hockey-playing nations (Russia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Canada, USA, Germany, Poland, Czech Replublic) are doing in Wikipedia. Maybe this is what the Arabs should try. -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

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Swedish Week on Russian Wikipedia
by Lars Aronsson 18 May '08

18 May '08

Surprisingly long, Swedish has held the 10th place among the largest languages of Wikipedia. Swedish is spoken by only 9 million people and the following two places are held by Russian and Chinese. Some say the high rank is held in part because of many very short articles: stubs and even "substubs". This is true, but the high ranking of some languages (including Polish and Dutch) in this first decade of Wikipedia is rather to be explained by the late coming of the major languages. Arabic is still trailing at 31. Swedish has been falling from 6th to its current 10th place. All of April, the Swedish Wikipedia has been active with merging "substubs" into larger units. As a result, the over all size of the Swedish Wikipedia has been flat around 282,000 articles, while the Russian Wikipedia has continued to grow at a healthy pace. The difference in size is now only 5000 articles. Any day or week soon, Russian will capture the 10th place. This will be a great event, but what about the timing? The Russian wikipedians already missed the 200th anniversary of the conquest of Sveaborg (May 3, 1808). I don't think they will time today's final in the ice hockey world championships. But I also think they will be too early for the 299th anniversary of the battle of Poltava (July 8, 1709). So we will have to find some other way to mark the Russian victory for a place around the puzzle globe (http://www.wikipedia.org/). As part of WikiProject Sweden (Википедия:Проект:Швеция), they started yesterday a subpage "Swedish Week" (Шведская неделя). The idea is to fill these last days of Swedish dominance with writing new articles about Sweden. Yesterday, Saturday May 17, was Norway's independence day but this didn't stop the Russians from creating an article about the National holiday of Sweden, as well as 50 other new articles pertaining to Sweden. >From a Swedish perspective, this isn't too bad. To quote ABBA: "I feel like I win, when I lose" (Waterloo, 1974). http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Википедия:Проект:Швеция/Шведская_неделя The surrender of Sveaborg ([[Suomenlinna]]) fortress at Helsinki in 1808 and the [[battle of Poltava]] in the Ukraine in 1709 are the two most famous Swedish military losses to Russia. A Russian expression for helplessness is "like a Swede at Poltava", but this is not at all how I feel today. Still, I had hoped that this year's ice hockey championships, played in Quebec ([[2008 Men's World Ice Hockey Championships]]), would provide retaliation, but yesterday Sweden lost out at 4th place without medals and Russia is playing the final today against Canada in just a few hours. It is surprising how well hockey-playing nations (Russia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Canada, USA, Germany, Poland, Czech Replublic) are doing in Wikipedia. Maybe this is what the Arabs should try. -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

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Wikipedia-l May 2008