>On a related tack, I've been toying with the idea of writing my NEXT book
>as an open source project from start to finish. We would begin by posting a
>chapter outline and letting anyone edit, contribute and annotate while we
>write. Do you think this would work? Would it be possible to publish the
>book commercially and get it into bookstores if the writing process took
>place within a GNU framework? Would the GNU license be necessary to attract
>collaborators?
Wow! That'd be really keen. With you and whoever else as editors and/or
primary authors, you'd obviously have veto power over what changes get
included, what changes get reversed, etc. If you managed to draw enough
people to the project, I can't even begin to imagine the possible quality of
the end result. When I'm reading books, I seem to find /all/ the typos,
misspellings, and punctuation errors. I guess most books don't get very
meticulous proofreadings (I have to read and digest every single word fairly
slowly when I read, so my reading of a book does equal an insanely
meticulous proofreading). Plus, I imagine such a project would likely
attract fairly intelligent individuals. Having a number of acute minds
contribute to the text would likely bring to the project more depth and
scope, with people suggesting nuances, perspectives, and angles that the
authors probably wouldn't have thought of otherwise.
I'd certainly be interested in meaningfully contributing. And if you
managed to advertise the project in the right channels, imagine the people
that might drop by to throw in their two cents: Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn,
Ralph Nader, Jello Biafra, Greg Palast, Naomi Klein, Michael Parenti, RMS,
countless anti-globalization kiddies (I use 'kiddie' in a good sense here,
as I'm one of 'em), old peaceniks, numerous academics from around the world,
etc. I don't see how you could go wrong.
So long as a history of all changes is kept, and so long as the
authors/editors review all changes, I don't see how anything bad could come
of the venture. (The part about authors/editors reviewing all changes
shouldn't be too bad, as such a project certainly wouldn't have the volume
of contributions as Wikipedia.)
And I don't think a GNU license would specifically be necessary. I,
personally, would like to see a GNU license, 'cause I'm a big fan of RMS,
and I've been a GNU kiddie since I was 15 or so. But there are plenty of
good GPL-ish (or at least BSD-ish) licenses out there that people respect:
Open Content License, Open Publishing License, Artistic License, or roll
your own, etc.
Peace out,
Derek
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>Music typesetting could be provided by GNU LilyPond,
><http://lilypond.org/>. [...]
>
>LilyPond is a plaintext syntax, very TeX-like. It ought to be
>pretty trivial to create a texvc-like module for Wikipedia that
>renders LilyPond notation into PNGs. The LilyPond syntax could
>be put within <music> ... </music> tags, or something similar.
I forgot a few things:
1) LilyPond can also render its input into MIDI files, which might
be a cool feature for Wikipedia.
2) LilyPond is already being used by the Mutopia Project,
<http://www.mutopiaproject.org/>. Mutopia is to music what
Project Gutenburg <http://gutenberg.net/> is to literature.
Okay, I'm done now,
Derek
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>Tomasz, could you please also implement a <tex>...</tex> which goes
>straight to TeX, so that matrices, commutative diagrams, chess
>diagrams, chemical structure formulas, music notes and flow charts can
>be typeset conveniently? Or would you prefer that I do it?
Regardless of the "should we allow full LaTeX" debate, I tend to think that
some means of typesetting music could greatly benefit Wikipedia. Music
theory is certainly a huge topic, and one that Wikipedia ought to be able to
document and cover properly.
One part of music theory is math, and for the math we now have Tomasz's
texvc module. But most of music theory requires being able to typeset
notes, chords, music, etc.
Music typesetting could be provided by GNU LilyPond, <http://lilypond.org/>.
(It's part of the GNU project, folks, so Wikipedia should support GNU
LilyPond, if for no other reason than to promote wider use and adoption of
Free and Open standards and software.)
LilyPond is a plaintext syntax, very TeX-like. It ought to be pretty
trivial to create a texvc-like module for Wikipedia that renders LilyPond
notation into PNGs. The LilyPond syntax could be put within <music> ...
</music> tags, or something similar.
Anyways, it's certainly something to look into!
Peace out,
Derek
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>now that's a surprise -- a guy whose work I like to reference on Wikipedia
>and elsewhere shows up on, of all places, the Wikipedia tech mailing list.
>Welcome, Sheldon, and thanks for your excellent work with John Stauber on
>exposing the corporate PR machinery.
Tehehe, me too, actually! I was pretty impressed for wikitech-l when
Sheldon appeared. You's a pseudo-celebrity amongst radicals, Sheldon.
>I recommend creating Talk namespaces for every namespace -- if pages are
>not large enough to discuss them separately, it makes no sense to separate
>them in the first place.
I just thought I'd bring up something about talk pages that I've always
thought was kinda stupid. Now, I don't know how this works for the internal
code, and why you guys decided to implement talk namespaces the way you did.
Maybe there's a technical reason of some sort. But anyways...
Why isn't the talk namespace just namespace-aware? Then you'd only have one
talk namespace instead of having to create a talk namespace for every normal
namespace, and then a talk page could be automagically inherent in every
article, without having to explicitly create a talk namespace first. For
example, instead of
[[user_talk:jizzbug]]
if talk were namespace-aware, it would be much more straight forward to
allow
[[talk:user:jizzbug]]
or instead of
[[Wikipedia_talk:Copyrights]]
it'd be
[[talk:Wikipedia:Copyrights]]
I would think that this would actually make the program logic much simpler.
Am I wrong? Then what gives?
Peace out,
Derek
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Hi all...I'd like a bit of advice. I've now got a test version of my
"Disinfopedia" running at the following URL:
http://www.prwatch.org/wiki/phpwiki/newcodebase/wiki.phtml
If you want to play around with it, feel free to enter any text you'd
like. (This version is purely for experimentation; once I've got
everything figured out and modified the way I want, I'll erase the
dummy version entirely and do a second install at a different URL.)
My test version is currently identical to Wikipedia, except that I've
changed all instances of the word "Wikipedia" to "Disinfopedia" and
created my own logo. Also, I've added a line of code to the
bottomLinks function in "Skin.php", so that the bottom links now
include a section saying:
INFORMATION RELATED TO [page title]:
People | Organizations | Activities | Funders | Issues ... etc.
Right now the hyperlinks associated with this section are
non-functioning dummy links, but I want to add code so they will take
people to related pages on each of these topics. I'd like it to
function similarly to the "Discuss this page" link. For example, if I
had an article about an organization called "APCO," the "People" link
could take people to the following URL:
http://www.prwatch.org/wiki/phpwiki/newcodebase/wiki.phtml?title=People:APCO
If, however, the page doesn't yet exist, the hyperlink would be:
http://www.prwatch.org/wiki/phpwiki/newcodebase/wiki.phtml?title=People:APC…
So here are my questions:
(1) Should I have separate namespaces for "people," "organizations,"
"activity," etc.? If so, I'd have to add code to the
$wgNamespaceNamesEn array in "Language.php". I think I'd also have to
revise "Namespace.php" and create some new functions in "Skin.php".
Where else would I have to modify code? (I'd like to make as few
modifications as possible so that as future revisions are made to the
Wikipedia code, I can incorporate them with a minimum of pain.
(2) Should I also have separate "talk" namespaces for each of the new
category namespaces I'm creating (e.g., "people_talk,"
"organizations_talk")?
(3) If I don't create separate namespaces, is there some other
recommended way of getting the functionality I want?
--
--------------------------------
| Sheldon Rampton
| Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
| Author of books including:
| Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
| Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
| Mad Cow USA
| Trust Us, We're Experts
--------------------------------
X-Original-Date: Sat, 21 Dec 2002 20:08:38 +0100
Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.nederlands:115
>Oh, and for translators.
Oh, en voor vertalers.
>The following messages should be translated:
De volgende berichten zouden vertaald
moeten worden.
>(preference page):
Voorkeurspagina/bladzijde
>"Rendering math"
Weergave/Afbeeldingswiskunde?
> "Aways render PNG"
(aannemende: Aways=Always)
Beeld altijd PNG af.
>"Try HTML first, fallback to PNG if too complex"
Probeer eerst in HTML af te beelden en indien te moeilijk doe het dan in
PNG.
>"Leave it as TeX (for text browsers)"
Houd het in TeX (voor tekst-blader-programma's).
>What looks like:
Wat er uit ziet als:
>=== Rendering math ===
>(*) Aways render PNG
>( ) Try HTML first, fallback to PNG if too complex
>( ) Leave it as TeX (for text browsers)
>
>(errors)
(fouten)
> "Failed to parse"
Kon niet ontleden
>"unknown error"
Onbekende fout
>"unknown function "
onbekende funktie
>"lexing error"
kon niet lex-en
> "syntax error"
schrijfwijzefout
>I couldn't agree more - I've always felt that wiki markup should
>resemble well organised (and maybe slightly quirky) .txt "nomarkup"
>formatting.
Exactly. That was the line of thought I used while organizing my ideas. In
emails, I'll often employ forward slashes to /emphasize/ a word or /two/.
Or if I really need to create good emphasis, I'll !yell! or *accent* the
word. In the plaintext world, the three tend to be more equal than <b> and
<i>, though. My original thought was, "Why can't wikies just use these
normal conventions?" After a bit more investigation, I convinced myself
that while it's a good idea to base the syntax on these conventions, it'd be
too confusing for the software if you didn't provide something more. You'd
definately need something about the syntax that says, "Look at me, I'm a
wiki markup."
For example, say we wanted to use /slashes/ for italics. How would the
following line be rendered:
"In UNIX-style operating systems, services' configuration files are located
in /etc/. The X Window System's configuration files, for example, are in
/etc/X11/."
How exactly is the software gonna know when
/[word-boundary]...[word-boundary]/ is to be italicized text, or a
UNIX-style path, or anything else where forward slashes are normally
employed and aren't meant to italicize? It'd be possible to work up some
logic so the software /could/ distinguish between paths and something that's
to be italicized... But what if you wanted to employ italics like this:
"/anti/dis/establishment/arianistically"
You might mean for it to render:
"<i>anti</i>dis<i>establishment</i>arianistically"
But how does the software know if it's a path or not? Plus, it looks really
confusing to the human eye. At a quick glance, one might easily assume that
'dis' was supposed to be italicized as well. Even the double forward slash
(//) syntax I orginally proposed is confusing in this way:
"//anti//dis//establishment//arianistically"
Much better is:
"[/anti/]dis[/establishment/]arianistically"
> > I started work on this because I'm doing a lot of development on a
>second
> > generation community-developed/organized open publishing content
>management
> > system for Independent Media Centers.
> > [...]
>
>I'll be VERY interested to see this...
Yeah, me too! *grin* It's still in the early stages. Some of the other
second generation projects are much further along, but they're also much
less ambitious. I'm hopefully gettin' a 5 PM to 5 AM night job where I'll
have a lot of free time to develop. If that's the case, a usable
pre-release should be out sooner than later. Right now I'm working a lot of
the conceptual stuff, the framework, the integration of components, etc.
You have to create a consistent theory before you can create a consistent
product. <g>
>As part of my plans for this, I've been designing my own "nomarkup"
>wiki-style markup for it's use. Currently I've only really got the basic
>wiki markup stuff done, and nothing for more advanced handling of CMS
>and multimedia handling.
I knew I wasn't the only one thinkin' about this stuff. *smile*
>Nevertheless, I think we share similar goals.
Absolutely. That's why I think we should all put our heads to together to
create a consistent standard for us all. Something so we won't have to
learn 23 dialects of wiki syntax just to contribute to our favorite
websites.
>So, I invite you to look over my markup ramblings on my own wiki:
>http://www.nut.house.cx/cgi-bin/nemwiki.pl?NEWS/TextFormatting
I'm sure your ideas are invaluable. And I'm sure I'll be incorporating your
best ideas into Wikitax.
Peace outside,
Derek
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Thanks to Jonathan Walther and Lars Aronsson for their responses.
Jonathan wrote:
>You could do what you want by creating two new namespaces; one for
>organizations or front groups or campaigns, another for individuals.
>You would have to write your own custom code to make sure that articles
>in a particular namespace were properly put in the database, or
>retrieved from the database, etc.
This sounds like a possible solution that might accomplish 70% or
more of what I have in mind. Is there a limit on the number of
namespaces that I can create? Also, how dicey would it be to
customize data entry and retrieval for each different namespace?
Lars wrote:
>That was an interesting background about PR Watch and APCO. If APCO
>were to join the Wikipedia project, this could get exciting. If
>misinformation is their specialty and they are good at it, they might
>get away with writing stuff that noone here knows how to question...
In fact, there are a number of PR firms that specialize in monitoring
Internet discussions and trying to influence content, sometimes even
using false identities to post messages to newsgroups and chat rooms.
See, for example, the articles in our 2nd Quarter 2002 issue of "PR
Watch":
http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2002Q1/index.html
I don't know if any PR firms are currently targeting Wikipedia, but
as the project grows in influence, it seems reasonable to expect that
this might happen. Here, as elsewhere, your best protection against
disinformation is the fact that you have numerous individuals
watching out to correct errors.
Once I launch my own project (which I've tentatively termed a
"Disinfopedia"), it will be interesting to see how it fares against
similar attempts at manipulation.
By the way, yesterday I tried installing the Wikipedia scripts at a
temporary location on my own web site so that I could start to
experiment with them, and I'm pleased to say that it went remarkably
smoothly. For comparison's sake, installing a "plug and play"
wireless networking card in my fiance's computer recently took me
several days, a $40 charge for technical support, and multiple phone
calls to both her ISP and the card manufacturer. My biggest challenge
during the installation of Wikipedia was figuring out CVS (which I've
never used previously). All totaled I probably spent a couple of
hours installing the scripts, creating the database, and tweaking my
local settings. I could have installed Wikipedia 20 times over in the
time it took me just to get that damn wi-fi card working!
--
--------------------------------
| Sheldon Rampton
| Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
| Author of books including:
| Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
| Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
| Mad Cow USA
| Trust Us, We're Experts
--------------------------------