Right. Talk about private clubs. I understand that the list serves mostly to facilitate improvements on the site, and therefore runs to programming conversations. HOWEVER, even though I have worked on a development team where I had to deal with SQL developers on a regular basis, I can't follow you guys at all.
This is all in the way of showing that the geekspeak is a bit exclusionary. Probably not in and of itself a problem -- except that you guys are talking about changes (and in the case of the new site, implementing changes) that affect all of us other users -- AND YOU AREN'T COMMUNICATING THEM. The FAQ's haven't really been updated, lots of people seem unaware that the /subpage no longer exists.... and even those of us who would be happy to help document changes and spread the word can't, because we don't speak programmer well enough to be sure.
For pity's sake -- can we please clean up the documentation for rev2 before going to rev2a? I'll help -- but not unless somebody helps me first!
Thanks for letting me rant -- [[JHK]] --- wikipedia-l-request@nupedia.com wrote:
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Today's Topics:
- Re: Modest proposals (Uri Yanover)
- Re: Modest proposals (Tim Chambers)
- Re: Copyrights (Larry Sanger)
- Re: Copyrights (Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen)
- Re: Modest proposals (Uri Yanover)
- Re: Re: Modest proposals (Jan Hidders)
- Re: Modest proposals (Jan Hidders)
- Re: Modest proposals (Uri Yanover)
- Re: Re: Modest proposals (Jan Hidders)
- MySQL dump available (Jan Hidders)
- File upload Copyright notice (Axel Boldt)
- Re: MySQL dump available (Jimmy Wales)
- Summary of pseudo-subpage discussion (Magnus
Manske) 14. RE: MySQL dump available (Magnus Manske) 15. Re: Summary of pseudo-subpage discussion (Michel Clasquin)
--__--__--
Message: 1 From: "Uri Yanover" uriyan_subscribe@yahoo.com To: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Modest proposals Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2002 22:00:20 +0200 Reply-To: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com
(4) When we think about policy options, it often
helps to consider
carefully what problem we're trying to solve, and
to make sure that our
solution is the most elegant solution to that
problem. It is not entirely
clear to me what the problem is, in this case.
Originally, Uri Yanover
said:
The problem is in the following: it is extremely
inconvenient
(as a policy) to write "[[Middle
Earth/Elrond|Elrond]] was
the lord of [[Middle Earth/Rivendell|Rivendell]]"
than it is
to write "[[Elrond]] was the lord of
[[Rivendell]]"
This suggests that the problem is *just* one
involved in typing long page
titles in order to create a link, but the solution
offered by Uri solves a
lot more than that, so I'm not sure this is
exactly the problem he wants
to solve.
I used to think so when I'd written that post, but I no longer do. Having considered the subject for long enough, I reached the concept of aliases (more details in the mailing list). The general usefullness of aliases is for disambiguating (that is, making [[root]] point at [[root (mathematics)]] on pages concerning with algebra and at [[root (botanics)]] at pages concerning with plants).
However, the other useful thing that could be done with aliases is facilitating the editing of pages like [[Middle Earth]], so that ineed [[Elrond]] on an a page that uses aliases becomes [[Elrond (Middle Earth)]]. But this use is secondary, and confined only to pages that describe a specific universe. The fact that the vast majority of the other articles does not use subpaging indicates that probably there won't be too much abuse of aliasing in this way.
What I don't like about Tim's idea is the fact that it converts the link automatically basing on parsing of the article title. But not only that would be inconvenient (making it more difficult to edit the article afterwards and sometimes creating links that the author doesn't want), it would also be out of policy, as it would essentially be a substitute for subpages.
Sincerely yours, Uri Yanover
--__--__--
Message: 2 From: "Tim Chambers" tbchambers@yahoo.com To: "Wikipedia List" wikipedia-l@nupedia.com Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Modest proposals Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2002 15:28:33 -0700 Reply-To: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com
I haven't seen a need to write again since making my proposal, but today Uri Yanover uriyan_subscribe@yahoo.com wrote:
What I don't like about Tim's idea is the fact that
it converts
the link automatically basing on parsing of the
article title.
My proposal is archived at
http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-January/001230.html
There it can be seen that in addition to the simple solution that does convert links based on the article title, I did include Uri's idea. To summarize:
#base [[Fantasy Fiction]]
[[/elves]]
could be translated into this:
See also: [[Fantasy Fiction]].
[[elves (Fantasy Fiction)|elves]]
The system could remove the #base line completely instead of translating it, but I think it's useful to reflect by default that there's a relationship between the content of a given page and some other related page. After all, if the author doesn't like that behavior, he or she can simply type the links manually instead of using #base. Or the author can edit twice: the first is a major edit, and the second is a minor edit to remove the See also: line.
Uri's original #base idea is archived at
http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-January/001220.html.
He also proposed an Alias: namespace
(http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-January/001218.html),
but the features are very similar.
The key differences between my proposal and his are:
- I propose a solution that converts text during
save, while Uri proposed adding to the wikipedia's source syntax. 2. I propose the disambiguating syntax -- [[title (context)]] -- while Uri proposed subpage syntax -- [[context/title]].
However, Uri also said yesterday in
http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-February/001288.html
that he "didn't mean to use aliaes mainly to categorize, but rather to _disambiguate_ (e.g. [[root (botanics)]] vs. [[root (mathematics)]])." So I assume he's flexible on #2.
I take it that there's consensus on the part that deals with link conversion.
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