From: "Wouter Steenbeek" <musiqolog(a)hotmail.com> Reply-To: wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org To: wikipedia-l(a)wikipedia.org Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Aggressive vandalism Date: Thu, 19 May 2005 23:18:52 +0200 !!!URGENT!!! Dear stewards, Can one of you please upgrade Cicero and me to sysops on the Limburgic wikipedia? We have an extremely violent vandal at the moment, blanking all pages, and our only current sysop is deconnected from the internet. We MUST block him now. He's razing our whole project. We are http://li.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gebroeker:Cicero and http://li.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gebroeker:HaafLimbo , respectively. Thank very, very much in advance, Wouter.

On 5/20/05, Sulev Iva &lt;juvasul(a)ut.ee&gt; wrote: Something's gone very wrong when playing chess on the wiki (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chess_championship>) is acceptable but creating a demo Wikipedia in a new language is not. If this does not survive VfD, and you want a temporary small wiki, you're welcome at <http://scratchpad.wikicities.com/>. For a longer term Wikicity, you need consensus within Wikipedia that this language can *not* exist within Wikimedia. Angela.

Something's gone very wrong when playing chess on the wiki (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chess_championship>) is acceptable but creating a demo Wikipedia in a new language is not. If this does not survive VfD, and you want a temporary small wiki, you're welcome at <http://scratchpad.wikicities.com/>. For a longer term Wikicity, you need consensus within Wikipedia that this language can *not* exist within Wikimedia.

Actually, I *feel* there is a deletion spree going on on meta, which I find most inappropriate. It seems slowly, the goal of meta, what is acceptable over there is changing and I am not sure at all I like these changes. Recently for example, someone listed one of my articles, which had been there for more than 2 years, listed under humour and essay. I had to move it as a subpage of mine to avoid it being deleted. The reason given to delete it was "rant and non encyclopedic" Since WHEN do we have to write only encyclopedic and reasonably boring stuff on meta ? It is not really surprising me that a birth project got deleted or threatened of deletion as well. Meanwhile, there is a lot of crap still there, and people are delighted listing themselves under "wikipedians who went to tagadaschtroumpf college and wear 56 size pink shoes with a yellow hat". What escape me is "what harm does humour and essays on meta when the essays are not insulting anyone ?" What escape me is "why are some people trying to make meta a really clean and boring place" while it is supposed to be first of all a place for all of us to work together and possibly relax a bit from the stress of the projects ? What escape me is "why trying to keep the place absolutely clean when it is only a personal site ?" I would like to recall something I read on meatball a long time ago. A wiki is a public place, and as all public places, editors are required to follow strict rules. Such as in wikipedia, writing only stuff that is encyclopedic and neutral. This causes stress. It is very important to reserve personal place to editors so that they can let themselves go beyond the rules of the public places. Such as being biaised or putting some political rant. Meta is such a place, where we can also share some funny and constructive moments; this also builds the community. And when editors feel confortable, they also join the fun and put new important proposal. It does mean that meta should host full projects of course, but it is WITHIN meta role to host projects which some poeple are trying to set up. Such projects should not "survive" deletion. They should NOT be on votes for deletion. Ihmo. Or... let's create another meta to really brainstorm on. Ant

When people create Wikipedia content in Meta, it is easy to indentify that it is in the wrong place. It is ever so nice that using a VfD system, proper notice is given that it should not be there. This gives the proper notice that something should be done about it. One of these things is: discuss it. :)

Alphax wrote: Hoi, Thank you for your definition. The only problem with it is, it that it is wrong. Meta is about WikiMedia and its projects. It is about Wikimedians and the communities they belong to. If you care for what we are, in Meta you find that it is about all knowledge in all languages and providing it Freely to all people of this world and how we want to do this.

When people create Wikipedia content in Meta, it is easy to indentify that it is in the wrong place. It is ever so nice that using a VfD system, proper notice is given that it should not be there. This gives the proper notice that something should be done about it. One of these things is: discuss it. :)

Well, Angela and Anthere both seem to endorse it. The idea actually started with, I believe, the Cantonese debate where Felix Wan decided to go start a Cantonese Test-wikipedia to show people that it really /can/ be done. I encouraged him, not thinking much about it being against the rules of meta. After that, I personally suggested the same thing to Amikeco, the founder of the Ossetic Wikipedia, although he had already created an off-site demo. I suggested the same thing for Scots a while back, in fact I started it myself and let actual Scotsmen populate it with content. Seelterfraisk was started by HaafLimbo iirc (his username at the Limburgish Wikipedia where I seem it most often because I still have it in my list of Wikipedias I monitor, he's called Wouter Steenbeek on the list I think), at my suggestion. I personally started Skandinavisk as a test case to see how a bit of clever language planning might positively effect the Scandinavian Wikipedia community. As anybody who knows any Scandinavian language will see, it is not quite Danish or Bokmål, but not quite Swedish either and not Nynorsk. (definitely not Icelandic or Faroese). It is an attempt at an artificially-engineered Scandinavian "happy medium" and I have so far only used it in the context of test-wp. Fiu-vro was created entirely without my knowledge, and I believe that (and its use of the main article space rather than /test-wp/fiu-vro/ARTICLENAME) is what alerted Aphralagia to the existance of the essperimentu. Salutatziones Mark On 20/05/05, Brion Vibber &lt;brion(a)pobox.com&gt; wrote:

see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-wp/

Timwi a écrit: There are two principles in meta, which do not exist on MeatBall. First it allows anyone to post (and not people under their real name as in MeatBall) and second it allows to do so in any languages (while MeatBall is english first of all, french possibly second). I'll add that Sunir was a bit tired to see so many wikipedians at some points, as the experience we were reporting was not the experience of the hightest majority of wiki, but the one of a rather unique case. He feared this would come to principles being reported being applicable to large wikis predominently. Remember this : http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?action=browse&id=WikiLifeCycle&… There are some professionals (business) who now hesitate to set up a wiki for their firm, as they think "it will be a very small community, only a big community can really work on a wiki as wikipedia shows. We are not numerous enough". Just thoughts. I regret we do not hear much more of Sunir any more :-) anth

Something's gone very wrong when playing chess on the wiki (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chess_championship>) is acceptable but creating a demo Wikipedia in a new language is not.