<wikipedia(a)epoptic.org> writes:
> Once the search engine updates, we'll see if it fixes the problem there too.
Whilst this may well fix it, I think the search engine needs to watch for
these things in future. The indentation in my mail was added by me, the real
search engine page didn't have much whitespace.
--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock. By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)
For the last month or more I have not had the time to
do anything to do with Wikipedia due to other
commitments. I probably won't for some time yet
either. (I'm going on a holiday to Thailand, then uni
starts and I better get busy with that.) I'm not
"dropping out" though -- I will come back latter when
I have more time on my hands.
Just in case anyone was wondering, and good luck in my
absence,
Simon.
__________________________________________________
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Type "Miles Davis" into the search engine.
View the source and look for "Cologne"
<tr>
<td valign=top width=20 align=right><b>08</b></td>
<td>
<font face="Helvetica,Arial">
<b>
<a href="http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Cologne" title="Cologne">
Cologne
</a>
</b>
</font><br>
<font size=-1>
<table border="0" cellspacing="0" width="600" height="153">
</font>
</td>
</tr>
Now I don't know why, but there is an unclosed empty <table> entity in there,
which is causing the search results to not render at all on Netscape 3 and 4.
--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock. By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)
I have just uploaded a file, 1037c-output.txt
It contains the text from Federal Standard 1037C, after the following
operations have been performed:
* stripping of HTML markup (which has left some nasties like 1012 for
10<sup>12</sup> )
* tracing of sources based on tags in text
* stripping of items that contain stuff from non-Federal Govt. sources
like NATO or CCITT...
* stripping of bracketed abbreviations from titles
* generated an introductory phrase where possible
* added paragraph breaks in generally sensible places
* added a heading like this {{ title }}
* general wikification (term in bold, etc.)
* classified articles by adding tags like
# REDIRECT [[whatever]]
#ONELINER for one-line articles < 120 chars
#NONTRIVIAL for articles > 200 chars
Approx breakdown (this might be a few versions old)
1241 REDIRECTs
411 ONELINERs
799 mid-length items
2783 NONTRIVIALs
It is now in a form where not too much more programming is needed to
shove some or all of it into the Wikipedia.
Would this be useful?
Neil
Jan Hidders wrote:
>Why not [[George Washington (person)]]. I thought that was the whole
>point of having namespaces. That reminds of something else I wanted to
>ask. Why do we now have two namespace concepts? (We have "X:Y" and we
>have "Y (X)".) I would vote for one namespace concept with one
>notation: X (Y).
I think the two are different: the software enforced name spaces are
there to separate the encyclopedia proper from all the cruft
surrounding it. Your parenthesis notation serves mainly to distinguish
several concepts with the same name: [[Cardinal (bird)]], [[Cardinal
(person)]]. I don't think people want to or should be required to
universally slap on "(person)" to every title that describes a person.
Jimbo's "tagging" idea is different still. I agree with Magnus: if
such a tagging is to take place, it would have to happen on the
article level, maybe easiest as a little choice list when you edit and
submit an article (Place, Idea, Person, etc.) That wouldn't complicate
matters for contributors (they could always ignore the choice list and
leave it at the default). I don't immediately see the payoff though.
Axel
> Well, it seems that the battle is over, and I lost. :-)
> I'm still not really convinced because I feel that you
> are seeing threats that are not really there. Was
> consistency ever a real problem when we still had
> subpages? Yes, some articles contained pieces of
> discussion that belonged on the Talk pages, but that
> was usually solved in time.
I want to be clear about one thing. My argument has less to
do with how user and talk pages are differentiated by the
software than it does with the point of having these extra
namespaces -- we want them to seem different to users, so
they know they are in a different part of the site.
This could be done while using the Talk:XYZ format, and
it could also be done using XYZ the (Talk) format, but I
think it is important to make the conceptual distinction
between disambiguation of terms, and the creation of a
penumbra of wikipedia related materials which are not
encyclopedia articles. If we were doing this from the
beginning, I think we'd be far more willing to do it your
way, but fortunately or unfortunately we are already
working with live code that uses Talk:XYZ style
namespaces.
Another issue I just thought about is that we've
discussed at great length when originally thinking
through the idea of namespaces it that we might like to
at some point create a "Stable:XYZ" namespace, which
will contain locked versions of wikipedia articles
which have been in some special way validated by a group
of experts in that field. These articles might very
well include () style disambiguation, at some point
we'd clearly want a stable version of
"Lincoln (Nebraska)." This and this would
would make using () style namespaces for the stable
branch of the wikipedia "codebase" very confusing.
Yours
Mark
Really, if you have to explain why it should be deleted then it probably
shouldn't. All the canidates I've seen for delation have been common
sense.
Ian Monroe
http://mlug.missouri.edu/~eean/
On Mon, 11 Feb 2002, Larry Sanger lsanger(a)nupedia.com XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX wrote:
> Sounds good to me. In "voting" for deletion, of course it's important to
> be able explain why one believes the page should be deleted.
>
> Larry
>
> On Mon, 11 Feb 2002, Magnus Manske wrote:
>
> > I thought about having an easy way of expressing "this page is obsolete and
> > should be deleted". Currently, we have "page titles to be deleted", but it
> > takes time and effort to go there and edit.
> >
> > The obvious solution:
> > * For logged-in users (troll prevention!), have a link in the sidebar "Mark
> > this page for deletion" (a shorter title might fit better, but I can't think
> > of any; maybe a shredder logo?;)
> > * This adds the current page to "log:Pages to be deleted" (or
> > "wikipedia:Pages to be deleted")
> > ** Alternatively, we mark the article in the database, so the page is "PTBD"
> > page is generated on-the-fly, ensuring it doesn't list pages that already
> > *have* been deleted
> > * Additionally, these pages are sorted by votes (descending, the "most
> > hated" on top;)
> > * Optionally, list the users that voted for deletion of that page
> >
> > Then, a sysop (=Larry) comes along, checks out the list and cleans up behind
> > us thoughtless page-creators by permanently deleting the pages he deems
> > obsolete.
> >
> > Before I implement any of that, any ideas, comments, flames? ;)
> >
> > Magnus
> >
> > [Wikipedia-l]
> > To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> > http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
Just as the announcements page says, Wikipedia is a lot faster now.
Thanks to everyone who made it possible. A quick-loading Recent Changes
page is a beautiful thing.
Larry
Dear everyone,
After a lot of thinking and negotiating, I've arrived at an important
decision and it's also important that I convey this decision to you.
For reasons I'll let Jimbo explain if he likes--it had *nothing* to do
with my job performance or with any personal animosity--I was placed on
half-time pay in January, and as of February 1, I am no longer a Bomis
employee. There is no ill-will between Jimbo and I, and I wish him and
Bomis all the best. This means that any work I do for the 'pedias, for
the near future anyway, I am doing as an unpaid volunteer, the same as the
rest of you.
This means two things. First, I've got to get a job that will pay the
bills, and second, I'm going to have to reduce my participation in the
project quite a bit (over my pre-January participation).
I want to stress that I am *not* simply quitting altogether. I can't see
abandoning the projects I started--they're too important. I hate to think
of what might become of the projects if I were to quit altogether. But
Wikipedia has become *largely* self-managing, something I'm tickled pink
about, and Nupedia has been moving so slowly anyway that I don't need to
spend a lot of time managing that. (Ironically, I might have more time
for Nupedia, now that I'm not a paid employee. :-) ) Moreover, Bomis
might well start selling ads on Wikipedia sometime within the next few
months, and revenue from those ads might make it possible for me to come
back to my old job. That would be great. I've liked this job very much,
and I'm willing to do some work to help make it pay for itself.
Now that I'm on the job market, if you want to see my resume, let me know
at lsanger(a)nupedia.com. I'm willing to work as a consultant or as an
employee--or, possibly, even as a partner. I have quite a few ideas for
Internet projects that are potentially profitable and/or extremely
productive and interesting. Among the cards I have to play are proposals
to big Internet portals, thinktanks, and magazines, to spearhead these
projects, much as I've spearheaded Nupedia and Wikipedia. If you'd like
to discuss these project ideas confidentially on a serious business level,
please let me know. Of course, I'm interested in less ambitious ways of
making money, too. :-)
One last thing. Please don't use this announcement as an excuse to say,
"Fine, I'm quitting then." As you can see, *I* am *not* quitting, even
though prudence about my employment situation might dictate otherwise. I
have decided to tough it out and join the ranks of volunteers myself. If
anything, I hope this will make you even more inspired than ever to help:
"By golly, if Larry doesn't quit even though he's out of a job, and
volunteers his now-limited free time, I will too!" That's what I hope
you'll think. Just remember: Wikipedia is going full steam ahead. We've
got nearly 25,000 articles in just a year! We're getting ever-increasing
amounts of traffic and we have a very large, fairly competent (in some
cases, brilliant) base of contributors. I will still be around to answer
questions, offer opinions, and occasionally kick ass over bad articles
:-). As for Nupedia, now that I've finally made this decision, I do plan
sometime in the near future to make that final push to rewriting the
policy guidelines with the recent vote in mind. Magnus Manske is champing
at the bit to write the code (Nunupedia, he calls it) that will implement
the new Nupedia system. I do think that once the guidelines and the code
are up and running, Nupedia is going to experience growth of a sort it's
never seen before--one or two orders of magnitude greater. Once we make
it easier and more automatic to submit Wikipedia articles to the new
Nupedia system, I think things are *really* going to take off for Nupedia.
Our forging ahead surely doesn't *require* my full-time paid involvement.
It would make it a lot easier and faster if I were still involved in such
a capacity, but I don't think it's absolutely necessary.
So--stay the course!
Best,
Larry
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Magnus Manske [mailto:Magnus.Manske@epost.de]
> Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2002 10:26 AM
> To: wikipedia-l(a)nupedia.com
> Subject: RE: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Simple XML ideas
>
> I agree that the special namespaces should be distinguished
> more from the encyclopedia pages. Again, this is more a
> layout problem than anything else. How about marking the
> namespace part of the title in red, of italics?
I agree that changing the layout of the special
pages will go a long way to solving this problem.
But I also think we may want to add some text
near the links to other namespaces, explaining
things.
That said, I don't think just changing the color
of the title is enough to make it immediately
visually apparent that you are looking at a different
kind of page. I think we need something visually
bigger -- a slight change in the background color,
or the addition of a subtle background image,
or re-arranging the layout of special pages in a more
obvious way.
Beyond that, I do think the text for the link to a
Talk: namespace should be more descriptive. But, I
also don't believe users need a longwinded description
of the _concept_ of namespaces, to be able to grasp
them, this is because people use namespaces intuitively
all the time. ("Bob" means something different for me
at work than it does at a family picnic.) What they
need is visual cues which will help them to make use
of this intuitive knowledge.
Yours
Mark