2008/11/15 Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net>et>: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (Clay Shirky): http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html Note that Wikipedia is given as an example of a group that had evaded this. Oh well. In open source software, forking usually remedies the problem, with possible remerging. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development) . - d.

2008/11/16 Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net>et>: That's what I mean: it didn't evade this. I've seen the dynamics described in that paper myself over and over on the net in the past twenty years. - d.

2008/11/16 Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net>et>: I believe I've answered before in threads on this list on this topic before. - d.

On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 5:32 PM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com>wrote;wrote: Archives are indeed searchable (Google is your friend!) There is actually a search function I believe which is in the list archives, but I always use Google to search things from mailing lists. -- Alex (User:Majorly)

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 12:49 AM, Charlotte Webb <charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com > On 11/16/08, Al Tally <majorly.wiki(a)googlemail.com> > Archives are indeed searchable (Google is your friend!) There is actually > a > > search function I believe which is in the list archives, but I always use > > Google to search things from mailing lists. > > O rly? > > http://lists.wikimedia.org/robots.txt > > Maybe you mean you use the Google button to search through your old > Gmail, which is harder when the desired messages are not in your > possession. > > Sadly the easiest way is to download the "Gzip'd Text" and then send > it to yourself so you can actually "Google" it: > > http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/ > > —C.W. > Well I've searched for it in the past, and it worked. There are mirror lists (I think Nabble?) that come up on Google. -- Alex (User:Majorly)

2008/11/17 Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net>et>: No, it's fatigue at you asking the same question repeatedly despite having been answered at length. I don't find it useful to encourage you by going through it again. - d.

Marc Riddell wrote: You must forgive David. The many years he has now spent in the UK have undercut his natural Aussie frankness. He is saying you've become a bore on the topic: start at date formats and end up at "stability, structure and strong leadership". It will do as well as anything to bring up the same refrain. Charles

Marc Riddell wrote: No, just commenting from an oblique angle. We are short on benevolent dictators, and the one we had probably would be happy never to see another email in his life. Doesn't make all of us motherless children. Charles

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 3:20 PM, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote: I believe that he means many of us do not feel the same lack of leadership and/or crisis that you apparently do, and would indeed prefer if you stopped trying to "discuss" the topic of leadership by badgering individual people about it. It is impolite and unhelpful, and a waste of time for the vast majority of readers who read this list for information and only post themselves occasionally or not at all. -- phoebe

On 11/26/08, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote: Somebody once said leadership is like nuclear power. It can be used for good or evil, and you don't want to get any on you. Speaking for myself I've been able to identify two types of leaders on Wikipedia: those who say "swallow your pride", and those who say "wash it down with kool-aid". But don't let me feed you, Marc. Feed yourself. Leadership is for sheeps and other livestock. —C.W.

2008/11/15 Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net>et>: There are probably more. They will be sorted in time wikipedia tends towards standardisation Become? Quite the reverse in fact. Sure there are poor articles out there. Always have been always will be but fewer are critical articles and individual articles are tending towards improvement. An example UK canal articles have across the board improved from the tiny stubs I was putting together 4 years ago. And I sense that some people have forgotten what things used to be like. We need objective assessments of weaknesses not emotionally driven non specific accusations of hubris. -- geni

On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 11:52 PM, Marc Riddell &lt;michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net&gt; wrote: <snip> <snip> I suspect you mean /style/ issues (i.e. "born" versus "*" vesus "b." and so on), but I might be wrong. Can you list those five ways you are talking about? There is a similar profusion of different methods of dealing with biographical metadata. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographical_metadata That is more concerning to me than inconsistent style. If you have the same information entered four or five times in the same article, you will end up with articles where the different entries are inconsistent, with different birth/death years in the lead, the main text, the infobox, the Persondata and the birth/death year categories. You would think that sort of thing gets checked, but it is surprisingly common for the birth/death date in an infobox to be mistyped or just plain wrong, compared to what is in the article. What should happen is that the basic biographical data, with sources, should be entered *once* and then reused in the various locations where it is needed. But I haven't yet seen anyone able to come up with a way of doing this that still allows new editors to avoid using a horrendously complicated template or coding system (Template:Lifetime is a step towards such a system - for geography, the co-ord templates do similar things). I think the most workable solution would be to have the biographical information in the lead and main body of the text entered freehand, but to have the infobox, categories and Persondata all calling the biographical metadata from a dedicated place designed for that purpose. Anyone have any ideas how to set up a system like that cleanly and get it working on Wikipedia? The relatively poor spread of Persondata suggests that it is harder than it looks to get something like this going. Carcharoth

Carcharoth wrote: There've been lots and lots of proposals to add explicit support for metadata within mediawiki. It's too bad none of them have gained any traction in the mainstream. The approach I'd love to see would involve a table of name/value pairs associated with each page. There would be a separate interface on the edit page to display and edit these values. Values could be referred to anywhere on a page (including in infoboxes) using template-like syntax, probably {{{name}}} (i.e. just like template parameters). Everything that, currently, is typically specified in infobox arguments would be moved to the page's name/value list. Infoboxes would be rewritten to use the enclosing page's named values instead of its own explicit parameters, and the infobox invocation would become drastically simpler. The editing interface for a page's name/value pairs could be made nicely user-friendly, removing a standard complaint about current infobox usage. No functionality would be lost, much functionality would be gained, and everything would become much cleaner and easier. (IMO.) Someone could (and would) implement SQL-like queries on page data, letting you search Wikipedia for all pianists born in odd-numbered years and with names beginning with "P". (Disclaimer: this certainly isn't my idea; see e.g. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Field-value_pairs .)