Wikipedia-l September 2009

wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

25 participants
15 discussions

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

2 1

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]]

9 14

Anchors in table of contents on Wikipedia pages
by Robert Chin 14 Oct '09

14 Oct '09

Is it a mistake that the Wikipedia pages now no longer contain normal <a name=""> tags for anchors, instead only providing the name via id? I'm wondering since this breaks the table of contents on my (really old) web browser... Robert

10 16

Wikimedia Staff office hours
by Cary Bass 30 Sep '09

30 Sep '09

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi all, this is a reminder that office hours will be tomorrow, Thursday, October 1, at 1600 UTC (9:00 AM PDT) and feature Rand Montoya. The IRC channel that will be hosting Rand's conversation will be #wikimedia-office on the Freenode network. If you do not have an IRC client, you can always access Freenode by going to http://webchat.freenode.net/, typing in the nickname of your choice and choosing wikimedia-office as the channel. You may be prompted to click through a security warning. Go ahead. The channel is also available through the Wikizine site at http://chat.wikizine.org/ and picking one of the two gateways, while choosing "wikimedia-office" from the dropdown on the next page. - -- Cary Bass Volunteer Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkrD5c4ACgkQyQg4JSymDYmRLwCeKH6Bhte/7kG9vG2nQ7y5wvch 040An0N862KwxNE/XPpx90euxEwEvLPf =H5+K -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

1 0

Wikipedia education
by Lars Aronsson 30 Sep '09

30 Sep '09

This weekend I learned about the phrase "Wikipedia education". Apparently it is used in Swedish ("Wikipedia-undervisning") to describe the kind of teacher-less lessons where school kids are left to "research" a topic on their own. Typically they google and find facts in Wikipedia, which they copy to their papers. The phrase does not say anything about Wikipedia in itself, but describes an irresponsible attitude from some teachers. The sad effect is that Wikipedia's name is associated with something bad. How could we turn this around, so Wikipedia is associated with serious knowledge and good education? -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

8 9

Wikimedia Staff office hours
by Cary Bass 28 Sep '09

28 Sep '09

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hello all! This Thursday, October 1, 2009 between 9:00 AM and 10:00 AM PDT (UTC 16:00 and 17:00) Rand Montoya, Wikimedia's Head of Community Giving will be joining us for office hours. Rand will be online to answer your questions and talk about the role of fundraising for the Wikimedia Foundation and the upcoming Fundriaser. The IRC channel that will be hosting Rand's conversation will be #wikimedia-office on the Freenode network. If you do not have an IRC client, you can always access Freenode by going to http://webchat.freenode.net/, typing in the nickname of your choice and choosing wikimedia-office as the channel. You may be prompted to click through a security warning. It's fine. - -- Cary Bass Volunteer Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate PS: I'll be sending a follow up email to start a thread to discuss the times of the office hours. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkrBLZ0ACgkQyQg4JSymDYmBRwCfTEu4qbPCvAmWg09/cs4ESwOy vnQAniw77gSugbNW/GmwCoQ4fJitiWAv =p3Sc -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

1 0

LocalisationUpdate is live
by Gerard Meijssen 26 Sep '09

26 Sep '09

Hoi, It used to be that when you added to the localisations at translatewiki.net, it could take months before these localisations became part of any of the WMF projects. This is no longer the case. From now on, your localisations will become available in a much more timely manner. Typically localisations will become available within a day, the worst case scenario is that it will take three days. This has some major implications. It was found that people in languages where the localisations of the software of the Usability Initiative did not stick with the "beta test". This presented a problem; is this because of the lack of localisation or is it because of cultural differences with regard to usability. We can now ask people to help us iwith the localisation and learn quickly where the problem is. We know that information for several scripts is missing in the advanced toolbox. Telugu was added recently but Devangari, Kanada, Tamil and Sinhala is still missing. We can now really concentrate our standard localisation in one place. This is very much wanted because it will improve our performance and it will ensure better maintenance of our MediaWiki system messages. It is for all these reasons that we ask you to got to translatewiki.net for your localisations. It would be appreciated when all the messages are compared with what has been done locally. When local messages are the same as in translatewiki.net, they will eventually be removed by the Wikimedida developers. When they are not the same, there will be local messages that have missing parameters, these messages are best removed locally. Other messages indicate things that are specific to a project these messages are the ones that have to remain locally. With the LocalisationUpdate being live on all our wikis, we hope and expect that the quality of the localisations will improve. This will make it easier for people to understand what is asked from them by our software and this will grow our number of readers and editors. We need you to help us realise our wish to bring information to everyone. Localisation is an important part of making this possible. Thanks, GerardM

1 0

REMINDER: Wikimedia Staff office hours
by Cary Bass 25 Sep '09

25 Sep '09

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Just a reminder about today's office hours with Sue Gardner. Just as a note, we're planning alternating the Friday 22:30 UTC office hours with Thursday 16:00 UTC, which is much easier on our European participants. Cary - -------- As a result of the success of the Strategy planning office hours and the recent "meet the board" presentation on the #wikimedia channel on IRC, we've decided to do regular office hours featuring a Wikimedia Foundation staff member. And to kick things off, this Friday, September 25, 2009, between 15:30 and 16:30 PDT (UTC 22:30 to 23:30), Sue Gardner, the Wikimedia Foundation's Executive Director, will be online to answer your questions and talk about her role in the Foundation and plans for the future. The IRC channel that will be hosting Sue's conversation, and all future WMF staff office hours, will be #wikimedia-office on the Freenode network. If you do not have an IRC client, you can always access Freenode by going to http://webchat.freenode.net/, typing in the nickname of your choice and choosing wikimedia-office as the channel. You may be prompted to click through a security warning. It's fine. - -- Cary Bass Volunteer Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkq9EScACgkQyQg4JSymDYl75QCgxdDwN1dKalUu0bSlMJ0uYDFH UcoAoKSrOvaHggLxEXVu/lo4ZHtHLUYW =a0Y6 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

1 0

mail list
by 208212635＠zju.edu.cn 23 Sep '09

23 Sep '09

1 0

Is the FCC becoming the Free Culture Collaborative?
by Samuel Klein 21 Sep '09

21 Sep '09

Genachowski is a gem. Thanks for the heads-up, Mike! ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Mike Godwin <mgodwin(a)wikimedia.org> Subject: FCC Chair Julius Genachowski praises Wikipedia in speech today "And let us not forget that the open Internet enables much more than commerce. It is also an unprecedented platform for speech, democratic engagement, and a culture that prizes creative new ways of approaching old problems. In 2000, Jimmy Wales started a project to create a free online encyclopedia. He originally commissioned experts to write the entries, but the project only succeeded after moving to volunteers to write them collaboratively. The result is Wikipedia, one of the top 10 most visited websites in the world and one of the most comprehensive aggregations of human knowledge in our history. The potential of collaboration and social media continues to grow. It is changing and accelerating innovation. And we’ve seen new media tools like Twitter and YouTube used by democratic movements around the globe." See attached PDF for the full speech. --Mike

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 2009