[Wikipedia-l] Reactions to the list and its discussions

Send Wikipedia-l mailing list submissions to wikipedia-l(a)nupedia.com To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to wikipedia-l-request(a)nupedia.com You can reach the person managing the list at wikipedia-l-admin(a)nupedia.com When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of Wikipedia-l digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Re: Modest proposals (Uri Yanover) 2. Re: Modest proposals (Tim Chambers) 3. Re: Copyrights (Larry Sanger) 4. Re: Copyrights (Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen) 5. Re: Modest proposals (Uri Yanover) 6. Re: Re: Modest proposals (Jan Hidders) 7. Re: Modest proposals (Jan Hidders) 8. Re: Modest proposals (Uri Yanover) 9. Re: Re: Modest proposals (Jan Hidders) 10. MySQL dump available (Jan Hidders) 11. File upload Copyright notice (Axel Boldt) 12. Re: MySQL dump available (Jimmy Wales) 13. 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(a)yahoo.com> To: <wikipedia-l(a)nupedia.com> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Modest proposals Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2002 22:00:20 +0200 Reply-To: wikipedia-l(a)nupedia.com helps to consider to make sure that our problem. It is not entirely Originally, Uri Yanover inconvenient Earth/Elrond|Elrond]] was than it is [[Rivendell]]" involved in typing long page offered by Uri solves a exactly the problem he wants 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(a)yahoo.com> To: "Wikipedia List" <wikipedia-l(a)nupedia.com> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Modest proposals Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2002 15:28:33 -0700 Reply-To: wikipedia-l(a)nupedia.com I haven't seen a need to write again since making my proposal, but today Uri Yanover <uriyan_subscribe(a)yahoo.com> wrote: it converts article title. My proposal is archived at

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

He also proposed an Alias: namespace

but the features are very similar. The key differences between my proposal and his are: 1. 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

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.