-- Regards, http://www.mit.edu/~reagle/ Joseph Reagle E0 D5 B2 05 B6 12 DA 65 BE 4D E3 C1 6A 66 25 4E _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 16:56:55 -0700 From: Mark Williamson Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Choosing interface? To: wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org Message-ID: 849f98ed050106155666fb1597@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Of its own interface, yes, that would be a nightmare. The issue with LanguageXX.php is this: two ways to translate the interface exist (in practice). With one, translations are activated on that Wikipedia as soon as they are submitted (Mediawiki namespace). With the other, a developer has to be asked to activate it, adjustments are more difficult to make, and activation is entirely at the developer's leisure. Many more recent translations have been exclusively namespace because people didn't forsee the problems that might be caused by not using LanguageXX.php. It's fairly simple to export the MediaWiki namespace translations into a LanguageXX.php file, and a bot could probably be made for it, but even then it would probably be a while before anybody activated them. (I can't do that because my programming skills are limited to qbasic, html, and unl) Mark On Thu, 6 Jan 2005 17:55:08 +0000, Rowan Collins wrote: > On Wed, 5 Jan 2005 18:43:29 -0700, Mark Williamson wrote: > > Nope, you can choose an interface language now. > > > > Unfortunately for many Wikipedias, this uses the LanguageXX.php file > > and NOT whatever might be in the mediawiki namespace on that Wikipedia > > - thus you can't view the interface in Kannada, or Navajo, or etc... > > For obvious reasons, it would be a bit of a nightmare if every wiki > could include a seperate customised version of its interface in every > language; and the different wikipedias will customise things in ways > dependent on their *community*, not just the language. > > Presumably (I hope I'm not reopening a can of worms here) the > languages you mention can become available to whoever wants them as > soon as somebody creates an appropriate LanguageXX.php, so it's not so > much a problem of how the interface selection works, as the status of > those translations. > > -- > Rowan Collins BSc > [IMSoP] > ------------------------------ Message: 3 Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 19:03:23 -0500 From: Stirling Newberry Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] A Solution to Larry Sanger's Criticisms - Project Has Been Around For A While To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Message-ID: 8C213924-603F-11D9-93D0-000A95A26E0A@xigenics.net Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed On Jan 6, 2005, at 5:16 PM, NSK wrote: > On Thursday 06 January 2005 21:03, Stirling Newberry wrote: >> Most academics are poves, that is why they became academics in the >> first place. > > Anti-Intellectualism at its best. > Nonsense, anti-academicism yes, but to say that academia is intellectual is to defy its own admission that the set of professors and the set of dullards have a far from null intersection. You are engaging in appeal to authority, which has been a logical fallacy for quite a little while. ------------------------------ Message: 4 Date: Thu, 06 Jan 2005 16:15:59 -0800 From: Sean Barrett Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] A Solution to Larry Sanger's Criticisms - Project Has Been Around For A While To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Message-ID: 41DDD4BF.5080309@epoptic.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed NSK stated for the record: > I once saw a professor visiting a Wikipedia article on maths found from a > Google search, but he abandoned it just after a few seconds. Another > professor has advised us never to cite material not hosted on .edu or .ac.uk > or other educational domains. > > If Wikipedia does not change its attitudes, it will eventually die from brain > drain: New, more expertise-friendly and intellectual wikis will emerge and > WP's knowledgeable users will just immigrate there. For someone so contemptuous of Wikipedia, you sure do like our mailing list a lot. -- Sean Barrett | What was the best thing before sliced bread? sean@epoptic.com | ------------------------------ Message: 5 Date: Thu, 06 Jan 2005 16:19:12 -0800 From: Stan Shebs Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Message-ID: 41DDD580.3070302@apple.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Caroline Ewen wrote: >Hi all, > >Don't get me wrong but why would there be a need for a tool to create a >bibliography ? It's all quite simple: Surname, NAME, Title in italic, Edited >by..., City, Year. > >Or did I misunderstand the whole "technology for bibliographical >records"-thing ? > Ah, an innocent wandering into the brambly briers of bibliography... :-) Think of different styles (some do first name first), different names for the same person (middle initial vs spelled-out), journal articles, book chapters in a multi-author book, translations, multiple editions with different content, annotated works, uppercase/lowercase, and so on. Even though only a minority of our articles have references now, there is a remarkable randomness among them. Wouldn't you rather be able to type in "[[Biblio:Wealth of Nations]]" and have it expand into a correctly-formatted reference to Adam Smith's book, mentioning original publication date, ISBN for a good recent reprint, and URL for an online text at the most reliable website? Even better, some dedicated bibtexers and others have built giant bibliographies online, and we would like to just reuse them instead of typing all in ourselves. Stan ------------------------------ Message: 6 Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 01:35:43 +0100 From: "Caroline Ewen" Subject: RE: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography To: Message-ID: 200501070035.BAA00638@germaine.webtechnologies.lu Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Two things: 1. "different styles": I did realise that this depends a LOT on the country. Of course there's a slight change when you have an article of a newspaper than when you're citing a book. And I do agree that it would be simple just typing "[[Biblio:Wealth of Nations]]". The thing with the different styles is, how to you get them all under one style ? I do study in France actually, and I noticed that some of the german Erasmus-students I met here looked at my bibliography once and where astonished by the way it was written. I told them that that's just the french style of writing it. They do have some minor differences when writing theirs. As for the multiple editions: in France, you tend to state the most recent edition (because revised, mistakes have been corrected etc). Do you want to "impose" one style for all ? :-) 2. "just reuse them instead of typing all in ourselves": I do object to that. I don't know about other Wikipedians but when I write articles, I usually have some of my books on my desk, I don't know all that stuff by heart (would be nice though :-) ) And I NEVER put any books in my own bibliography I haven't used. The reason is simple: by only adding the books I used, because I know what's IN the books. I could easily say "oh the english Wiki has some more books than we do, let's just add them too". Not saying that the books in the english wiki article aren't good, but how can I know ? I haven't read them, maybe never heard of them. You could say that maybe I WILL know them since they're stated there and out of curiosity, if I'm interested in the subject of the article, I will look into them, but I still dislike the fact to simply use what's there :-) Caroline, the innocent :-) -----Message d'origine----- De : wikipedia-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org [mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org] De la part de Stan Shebs Envoyé : vendredi 7 janvier 2005 01:19 À : wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Objet : Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography Caroline Ewen wrote: >Hi all, > >Don't get me wrong but why would there be a need for a tool to create a >bibliography ? It's all quite simple: Surname, NAME, Title in italic, >Edited by..., City, Year. > >Or did I misunderstand the whole "technology for bibliographical >records"-thing ? > Ah, an innocent wandering into the brambly briers of bibliography... :-) Think of different styles (some do first name first), different names for the same person (middle initial vs spelled-out), journal articles, book chapters in a multi-author book, translations, multiple editions with different content, annotated works, uppercase/lowercase, and so on. Even though only a minority of our articles have references now, there is a remarkable randomness among them. Wouldn't you rather be able to type in "[[Biblio:Wealth of Nations]]" and have it expand into a correctly-formatted reference to Adam Smith's book, mentioning original publication date, ISBN for a good recent reprint, and URL for an online text at the most reliable website? Even better, some dedicated bibtexers and others have built giant bibliographies online, and we would like to just reuse them instead of typing all in ourselves. Stan _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l ------------------------------ Message: 7 Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 19:40:55 -0500 From: Stirling Newberry Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] A Solution to Larry Sanger's Criticisms - Project Has Been Around For A While To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed On Jan 6, 2005, at 7:15 PM, Sean Barrett wrote: > NSK stated for the record: > >> I once saw a professor visiting a Wikipedia article on maths found >> from a Google search, but he abandoned it just after a few seconds. Some sections of wikipedia are a horror, and the only way to fix that is to contribute. It was the state of the economics section which finally got me to contribute. Particularly the lack of a good explanation of the IS-LM model. >> Another professor has advised us never to cite material not hosted on >> .edu or .ac.uk or other educational domains. I think the New York Times has engaged in some poor reporting, but to catagorically deny citing them seems, extreme. >> If Wikipedia does not change its attitudes, it will eventually die >> from brain drain: New, more expertise-friendly and intellectual wikis >> will emerge and WP's knowledgeable users will just immigrate there. >> First you accuse me of anti-intellectualism for saying that academics are poves, and then you prove my point. Thank you I could not have done a better job. But to get back to seriousness: Wikipedia does need to get more friendly to a higher level of information integrity, and it does need to get to a higher level of citation, and it does need to recruit many more people from academia to contribute articles - more specifically, it needs more people who write in their area of profession to contribute. One need not be a professor to write a good explanation of a star scheme, but actually having implemented one a few times will generally be a huge help in writing about them. ------------------------------ Message: 8 Date: Thu, 06 Jan 2005 19:28:22 -0800 From: Bryan Derksen Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] A Solution to Larry Sanger's Criticisms - Project Has Been Around For A While To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Message-ID: 5.1.0.14.2.20050106192616.00ac5888@shawmail Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 12:16 AM 1/7/2005 +0200, NSK wrote: >I once saw a professor visiting a Wikipedia article on maths found from a >Google search, but he abandoned it just after a few seconds. Another >professor has advised us never to cite material not hosted on .edu or .ac.uk >or other educational domains. > >If Wikipedia does not change its attitudes, it will eventually die from brain >drain: New, more expertise-friendly and intellectual wikis will emerge and >WP's knowledgeable users will just immigrate there. Alternately, you seem to be suggesting that Wikipedia needs to do is get an .edu or .ac.uk domain name. ------------------------------ Message: 9 Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 22:10:19 -0800 (PST) From: Anthere Subject: [Wikipedia-l] A portal page for www.wikipedia.org (was Re: Why www.wikipedia.org => en.wikipedia.org ?) To: wikitech-l@wikimedia.org Cc: wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org Message-ID: 20050107061019.56004.qmail@web41802.mail.yahoo.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Walter Vermeir a écrit: >> Hello, >> >> I want to know why the address http://www.wikipedia.org redirects >> automatically to http://en.wikipedia.org... Is Wikipedia an english >> project with translations, or is it a real international project? > > > I asked myself that same question many years ago. I think I posted the > first question about this on some wikipedia list at the end of 2001. > Always a lot of objections. It would break links, English is the lingo > franca of the internet. At the time of the change from wikipedia.com to > wikipedia.org used to a opportunity to do it but it has not be done. > > Wikipedia is a international project. But only the English may use the > front entrance. I was among those who objected more than 2 years ago. I believe most of the objections raised at that time do not make any more sense. A lot was written on the mailing list, and some discussion may be found here : http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.org. I do not think there were be links broken now. We switch the adress more than 2 years ago, the encyclopedia is so much bigger now, and we had truely become international (which was not true 3 years ago at all). It is high time we finally get a portal page. There were other solutions mentionned 2 years and a half ago, but I think portal is the solution chosen for all our projects, so best to stick with it probably. However, it might be nice to try to do something good looking and not necessarily wiki (we do not need the left menu for example). I suggest that some people try to come up with some good designs and that we get done with this. For example, this might be a conceptual proposition (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.org-mav%27s_Pro...) but it could need a graphist to polish it. I hope someone come up with a good idea :-) Could someone set up a contest page, where we could add considerations to respect and where wikipedians could link their proposal ? Anthere __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Meet the all-new My Yahoo! - Try it today! http://my.yahoo.com ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l End of Wikipedia-l Digest, Vol 18, Issue 18 ******************************************* --------------------------------- Nuovo Yahoo! Messenger E' molto più divertente: Audibles, Avatar, Webcam, Giochi, Rubrica… Scaricalo ora!