Wikipedia-l July 2008

wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

33 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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Wikimania Podcast and Edit this Wiki
by Andrew Lih 29 Jul '08

29 Jul '08

Two quick notes: - Edit this Wiki: A reminder that the community is invited to help write the last chapter of The Wikipedia Story, details below - Final podcasts from Wikimania 2008 are now posted to WikipediaWeekly.org, descriptions below -Andrew (User:Fuzheado) ----- "The Wikipedia Story" wiki invites Wikimedia community members to help write the "next chapter" for Wikipedia. The result will appear in the hardback book "The Wikipedia Story: How a bunch of nobodies created the world's greatest encyclopedia" a nonfiction work which will be released in January 2009 by Hyperion in the US. Many already know I have been writing this book for over a year, after being a community member for over five years, attending three Wikimanias and conducting countless interviews with Wikipedians around the world. I'm inviting the community to collaboratively write the last chapter as a demonstration of what the Wikipedians can do. Details can be found here: Link: http://wikipediastory.com/wiki/Main_Page Recent changes: http://is.gd/16B2 ----- Wikipedia Weekly podcasts available: Episode 58: Wikimania 2008, Jimbo and Reflections http://wikipediaweekly.org/2008/07/28/episode-58-wikimania-2008-jimbo-refle… A two part episode: 1. Interview with Jimmy Wales, from the Windsor Palace hotel 2. Final Day-after - Reflections from a van, from Alexandria to Cairo - Memorable moments - Wiki-research-L mailing list revival - Next year in Argentina - Wikipedia Academy, for newbies Commentators: * Phoebe Ayers * James Forrester * Austin Hair * Andrew Lih * Liam Wyatt ----- Podcast episodes coming soon: - Sue Gardner, WMF - Egyptian organizers of Wikimania 2008 - Patricio Lorente on Wikimania 2009 - Diplopedia - Kaltura - Javanese Wikipedia

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Re: [Wikipedia-l] Proposed fork of Wikipedia
by Thomas Larsen 19 Jul '08

19 Jul '08

Hi all, I'm very pleased - and somewhat shocked - at the raw percentile amount of support that I've received for Wikipendium. I think this indicates that the community as a whole is sick and tired of Wikipedia's problems and frustrated that they continue unfixed after years. I'd like to clarify on a few points. Firstly, when I stated that Wikipendium would be a fork of Wikipedia, I intended it to be more of a social fork than a content fork - i.e., I'm not intending to use any Wikipedia content in Wikipendium. Perhaps the purpose of Wikipendium, you might say, is to provide a valid social alternative to Wikipedia with higher social and content standards. _Some_ ways in which Wikipendium will differ from Wikipedia include: - simplicity and clarity of rules - there will be only three policies, a "fundamental policy" (basically a constitution), a "content policy" (essential content standards such as neutrality and verifiability), and a "community policy" (essential community standards such as respect and pleasantness); - a simple governance structure - there will be a Council (basically a less bureaucratic equivalent of the WMF Board of Trustees) which will serve as "project leader", "constables" who will serve as maintainers of social standards, and, of course, the general community; - people in positions of authority will, except in rare cases, be required to use their real names as their account names, thereby increasing accountability of authority and helping avoid abuse. About me ... well, I'm very flattered that some of my essays and edit counts were brought up. Let me explain ... - The PWTELW essay lists just _some_ of the problems I see with the English-language Wikipedia. Feel free to read it. - The CWQ essay was badly written; ignore it. - The RARC essay was a replacement of CWQ, and was written in a better way. Feel free to read it. - About my edit counts - I edit Wikipedia infrequently nowadays (no home Internet connection at the moment) and I have spent most of my time on Wikipedia since late last year trying to fix the fundamental problems. So forgive me, but I've had no time to contribute _content_; I've been trying to make my contribution, and that of others, worthwhile. Best and friendly regards, Thomas -- Thomas H. Larsen thomashlarsen.wmf(a)gmail.com http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Thomas_H._Larsen

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Geo-tagged pages in wikipedia
by John Gill 19 Jul '08

19 Jul '08

I'm sure someone will have suggested this before (in fact i'm betting it is already implemented in some form) but here goes anyway. Wikipedia has a lot of great pages about places and many of those pages are tagged with the co-ordinates of the pages. With mobile devices with web and GPS becoming more and more common it would be wonderful if wikipedia had the ability to return pages 'close' to a given location. John

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Geohack moves to stable toolserver
by Magnus Manske 18 Jul '08

18 Jul '08

I'm moving my "Geohack" script from the "normal" to the stable toolserver. That will have many benefits: * Less clogging of the normal toolserver, as this is one of the most queried scripts there * Runs (almost) alone on the new machine * More stability/reliability * Multiple maintainers * New layout! (well, some minor tweaks at least) The new URL is: http://stable.toolserver.org/geohack Example: http://stable.toolserver.org/geohack/geohack.php?pagename=Berlin&params=52_… Please see to it that the appropriate templates are changed, at least on the major wikis. The transcluded pages need to be fixed as well (language links etc.) Both versions will run in parallel for a while, then the normal toolserver and the old stable server (stable.ts.wikimedia.org) will be turned into redirects. Welcome your new stable overlords! Magnus

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Proposed fork of Wikipedia
by Thomas Larsen 10 Jul '08

10 Jul '08

Hi folks, I am formally proposing that Wikipedia be forked and that a new compendium of human knowledge, Wikipendium, be created as an independent alternative with a more pleasant, respectful, productive, constructive community with simple, clear rules and an unbureaucratic and responsible governance structure. I believe, along with many others, that Wikipedia community members are frequently unjustifiably hostile towards viewpoints other than their own and towards the users who hold these viewpoints. In addition, I feel that Wikipedia has become too bureaucratic, ineffective, and indecisive and has placed the values of quantity and openness, while important, over those of quality and reliability respectively. I believe that Wikipedia's continued rejection of, and discrimination _against_, experts is outrageous and must be amended, but in a far less elitist and arrogant way than Citizendium has attempted. The official proposal may be found as a blog at http://wikipendium.blogspot.com/ . All people who are interested are invited to participate in discussion there. Best and friendly regards, Thomas -- Thomas H. Larsen thomashlarsen.wmf(a)gmail.com http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Thomas_H._Larsen

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Top 10 Wikipedias
by Filip Maljkovic 08 Jul '08

08 Jul '08

Forwarding on behalf of Waldir. Cheers, Filip

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Wikipedia HTML & Syntax specification
by O. Olson 08 Jul '08

08 Jul '08

Hi, I have two questions related to each other. I would like to know if there is a simple way to get the Static HTML from the Wikipedia Articles i.e. extraction as HTML files. In this regard I managed to put the Text Table into a MySQL database. It can give me the Wiki Text – which I could then parse. However I found the Wikipedia Syntax more complicated than what I had used when contributing to Wikipedia myself. Is there some place where the complete syntax is specified? At least if I have the specification I can think about working on a parser. Thanks a lot. O.O. __________________________________________________ Correo Yahoo! Espacio para todos tus mensajes, antivirus y antispam ¡gratis! Regístrate ya - http://correo.espanol.yahoo.com/

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Wikipedia-l July 2008