Tim Starling <ts4294967296(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
> I've set up Wiktionaries for all 146 languages that have a Wikipedia.
Great work, I appreciate that! :-)
I hope, it is appropriate to answer in this list, even though it
concerns mainly interwiktionary issues:
Tim Starling <ts4294967296(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
> I've set up a few basic kinds of interwiki links, which may be expanded or
> modified in the future. The "w:" prefix should link to the Wikipedia in the
> same language. Language prefixes link to other language Wiktionaries. To
> link to a different language Wikipedia, use [[Wikipedia:xx:Page]].
>
> The "Wiktionary:" prefix still links to the English Wiktionary, but a
> new "wikt:" prefix has been introduced which links laterally to the
> MediaWiki allowing "diagonal" linking, with the help of redirects. A
> link reading [[wikt:fi:kukkala]] on the German Wikipedia will link to
> http://de.wiktionary.org/fi:Kukkala, which will redirect to
> http://fi.wiktionary.org/Kukkala .
When adopting the Wikipedia (WP) structures however there should be
considered some significant differences in the needs for
interlanguage-links in the case of the Wiktionary (WD)! From each WD
entry have to be distinguished three different kinds of interlanguage
destinations:
1. The from the WP well known interlanguage links, displayed at the page
edge, does NOT link to translations, rather it links to the same
Homonyms in other WDs!
( de:Bank --> en:Bank, --> fr:Bank )
2. The "normal" link to translations has it's destination within the
same WD.
( de:Bank --> de:bank, de:bench; --> de:banque, de:banquette )
3. The actual (meaning-wise) interlanguage link would be one that leads
to the translation in the respective "native" WD:
( de:Bank --> en:bank, en:bench; --> fr:banque, fr:banquette )
Due to ambiguity this link can not be handled in the same way as in WP.
It can be constructed manually of course:
Translations:
*Englisch: bench ([[:en:bench|English]]) [1], bank
([[:en:bank|English]]) [2, 3, 4, 5]
*Finnisch: something ([[:en:something|Suomi]]) [1,3], other
([[:en:other|Suomi]]) [2,4,5]
But that won't work in practice, to enter each time the native writing
of the respective Wiktionary language name, I suppose.
So it might be worth considering an interwiki-code for meaning-wise
interlanguage links. Whether this link in the text should display as the
the native language name, or some other meaningful symbol,
respectively, is a further consideration to be done then. E.g. it might
be appropriate to introduce an "native-WD" symbol to indicate
meaning-wise interlanguage links in the text.
== Different topic, probably more important: ==
Is there anything we can do for supporting a soon and smooth change of
the character encoding from iso-8859-1 to utf-8, as long as the German
Wiktionary is tiny? (I'm also willing to support the to utf-8
transformation of the Wikipedia, off course. But there the constraints
differ slightly, due to it's magnitude, and some days more or less to
wait are off less influence on the effort.) Back to Wiktionary: I've
saved a Lang.php to
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/LanguageWiktionaryDE.php
in order to allow checking and improvement, so that it hopefully will
become suitable for usage, but probably it's not required any more as
de.Wiktionary is operational already.
Greetings --SteffenB
Thought this would be of interest to people not on WikiEN-l as well.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [WikiEN-l] More evidence of Wikipedia's success
Date: Wed, 5 May 2004 10:16:29 -0500
From: Sheldon Rampton <sheldon.rampton at verizon.net>
>May 05, 2004
>
>Research Shows Media Increasingly Cite Wikipedia as Credible Source
>
>A fascinating paper presented by Andrew Lih, an Assistant Professor
>at Hong Kong University, at the University of Texas at Austin's
>recent International Symposium on Online Journalism analyzes how
>Wikipedia's articles are increasingly cited in the media and as a
>credible source. Wikipedia is a popular Internet-based, user
>contributed encyclopedia that is collaboratively edited.
>
>"Wikipedia as Participatory Journalism: Reliable Sources?" (PDF) is
>the equivalent of The Pelican Brief for the public relations
>industry. It's a must read for any PR pro trying - as I am - to
>understand the impact that participatory/citizen journalism will
>have on our profession. It provides clear metrics that show how
>Wikipedia has quickly emerged as a media influencer. During a 14
>month period (Jan. 03 - Mar. 04), according to the research, 113
>Wikipedia articles were referred to by various news outlets.
http://steverubel.typepad.com/micropersuasion/2004/05/research_reveal.htmlhttp://journalism.utexas.edu/onlinejournalism/wikipedia.pdf
--Sheldon Rampton
It's a bit off-topic here, but I wanted to reach a larger audience, so
here goes:
Seeing that the Chinese Wiktionary is empty, I decided to start some
work on it, but I found out that even the name needs attending to, as
there are three different names that people have referred to as the
Chinese term for Wiktionary. In traditional Chinese, they are: 維基字典,
維基詞典, and 維基辭典.
Now, the first one is used in the English Wiktionary entry on
Wiktionary as its Chinese translation. The second is used in the
Chinese Wikipedia to refer to Wiktionary, and the third was what I put
down when I wrote down the Chinese main page (as well as some
appendices/indices that should be similar to the Wiktionary Appendix
namespace).
字典, 詞典, and 辭典 all mean the same thing, but (at least in the dialect of
Chinese I use - a hybrid of Cantonese and Putonghua) 字典 is a dictionary
of single characters, 詞典 is a dictionary of single characters and
multiple character phrases (ciyu), and 辭典 I use as a "blanket term"
(despite the fact that according to ''Xinhua Cidian'', 辭 is synonymous
with 詞) for dictionaries, and thus I favor the use of 維基辭典 for
Wiktionary. I don't know what the MediaWiki software uses (I think
it's 維基詞典 based on probabilities).
I'm sure that there are people who disagree with me on this, but what
should be done?
PS. After this debacle, a lot of the text in the Chinese Wiktionary
still refer to it as Wikipedia, and I can't do those changes. Perhaps
someone can help me out.
Message: 6
Date: Tue, 4 May 2004 07:41:09 -0700
From: evan(a)wikitravel.org
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Information
To: wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org
Message-ID: <20040504144109.GA10352(a)pigdog.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Anthere said:
> * When a soft improvement is done to fit legal
> requirements, please, could it be discussed on
> foundation-l to check if that complies with the legal
> requirements ?
>I'm wondering if you're still obliquely talking about the contributors
>list.
>I'd love to hear that you read and understood my response to your
>questions.
I have understood your explanations Evan.
Well, I hope I did :-)
I understood I think that your features were currently on wikimedia 1.3 (not yet released, and time of release not known). I understood there were meant to provide a mean to comply with gfdl (or Wikitravel license) requirements, which requires this contributors list; This is good.
I understood adding a real name field is meant to provide possibility to some editors, to have credit (for their edition on articles), while keeping a little bit more of privacy as participants (pseudo displayed).
I understood you developed these thinking a lot of Wikitravel, and that these are disabled for Wikipedia right now.
Here are my feelings on these two features themselves :
I personally do not think adding a "real name" field is a very good idea for Wikipedia; I do feel that if people want public recognition, then, they should register under their real name. If they prefer to sign comments under a pseudonyme, then, they can have a nickname; This already exist. This said, I understand your opinion, which is to say that people might want public recognition, but not want to work on wikipedia under their real name. It just seems a bit unefficient to me, that we have
* one field for real name
* one field for pseudo name (which may be real or not real)
* one field for nick name (which may be real or not real)
But if people want that, and feel it is great to have this real name field on Wikipedia, then there is no reason why your work should stay only on Wikitravel and not be benefiting on Wikipedia. I do not want to undermine your efforts here, it is great that people improve the mediawiki ;-)
But the fact is, we currently do not know if people would like it or not...
Perhaps, one thing that I heard may be problematic, is simply that "real name" is basically any name you put here. There is no control whatsoever of what our identity is. That means that adding this real name thing is also a door to a sort of sneaky vandalism. I am not sure I understood this well, so please tell me if I am wrong here. See, if a bad user add your real name to his preference pages, he will do bad edits, which will appear under your name; If these are not easily trackable, this user could spoil a lot of articles, but making bad edits, which will then appear to be your edits (edits under your real name). We could then get credit for really bad moves. While if tomorrow, a user appears under your real name, you might see it quite quickly, and perhaps you could do something about it.
If we use such a feature, in the clear objective to give credit to people, then we must
1) have a way to change this attribute (ie, to edit the attribution page)
2) easy way to track this (ie, the credit given to a real name should for example be visible in recent changes)
I am not sure you understand what I mean. Just tell me if not.
The second point is about the list of contributors appearing in the article page. It is not obvious wikipedians would agree with this, as someone mentionned, they never asked for this. Still, we need (perhaps) a way to have a list of contributors (expecially for printed versions). For this reason, your feature is very likely useful. I know not if the current proposition is best, but it is probably better than nothing. Hence, I think it important to be discussed. Again, I do not want to undermine your efforts here, I do believe this is an important legal point, and it is really nice that someone works on it. It is just that I regret this is not adverstised more widely.
>I agree that it's a good idea for there to be more communication
>between the
>Wikimedia community and the volunteer developers. I think there are a
>lot of
>areas that could be improved -- streamlining the way bug reports and
>feature
>requests work is one of them.
I agree with all what you are saying Evan. Though I understand very little of technical things, I have to follow loosely wikitech, or sometimes hang around mediawiki just to know what is going on; I deeply regret this. Because as I can't understand details, I would prefer just one lign formula of what is going on. Something I could quickly understand. Just sometimes to know that good people are taking care of something, and one line to say what is going on, is enough for happiness. One line, and a link to the relevant place is usually enough. If the person is interested, he can follow the link for more.
---------
Example (I try to be practical here). When a down time is planned for technical reasons, what we saw recently is appearing usually at the last minute "servers will be down in a few minutes"
* setting up a feature that allow this little red message appearing on wikipedia to be in the current language and not english per default (If necessary, we can set a collection of preformated messages, so that the little messages on top may be automatically translated very quickly)
* instead of writing "will be down in a few minutes", writing something a bit more specific
** starting down time expected between 19h and 20h UTC (I guess everyone knows it may be fluttery, but it is more precise than "in a few minutes")
** expected down time for technical update : 5 hours (we also know that it may last longer if things go bad, but saying expectation is around 30 mn compared to expectation is around 5 hours IS information and IS important. If expected time is 5 hours, people do not hang around bugging developers to know more, they just go to the restaurant instead)
** indicate the reason why the servers are down (simply, just say, installing new "this")
** put this message several hours before hand, 12 hours for example.
There is no need to go in length and to be very specific, just warning people before, and giving them a bit of info will show you care, will keep them reassured, and will avoid that they come messing the mediawiki channel :-))))
-----------------------
Recently, I looked at the bug report on fr:, and I saw an awful mess, that was going up to october 2002, where we were switched to phase III. There was no way to know what was still valid, and what was not (it has been cleaned now). Similarly, I have little idea what is on mediawiki1.3. Most of the time, it does not matter; we just know you all do the best, and likely it is the best. And best that everyone takes care of what he can understand, and not of what he can not understand.
Still....yup...more communication would be real nice.
Is there somewhere a page listing what is currently planned on mediawiki1.3 so that I can add the link to goings-on on meta ?
> Having a community leader like yourself
>take
>the initiative to make this work well would be a great help to
>everyone.
hum, perhaps. But I know so little of technical things, that I really cannot help here. It is also up to you guys to use the channels that we try to outline. Most of the time, when you report an information, it has no feedback whatsoever, but once in a while, it has. So, it is worth doing it. But people should try to make effort to report information they have. Please.
>I'd also like to say that I feel comfortable right now adding features
>or
>fixing bugs in MediaWiki that may or may not be useful for Wikimedia
>projects. There's an awful lot of code in MediaWiki that's not enabled
>for
>Wikipedia.
>I've tried to make a point of:
>1) Noting these changes on tech lists and marking them as non-Wikimedia
>ones.
>2) Making them disabled by default.
>If you think there's a problem with having features in MediaWiki that
>are
>disabled for Wikimedia projects, that's a development direction issue
>that
>should probably be discussed. I'd be somewhat unhappy doing a private
>fork
>of MediaWiki, since I'd like to give back any improvements to the code
>as a
>thank you to the Wikimedia community. But of course I'd be happy to
>make the
>effort if that was what the community wanted.
I think most people would find a mediawiki fork very unfortunate. Those working on improvements are precious; it is perhaps not good to divide efforts. Anyway, that is up to the team to say what would be best. I have myself no idea how much of the code is for Wikipedia, and how much for other projects. What I mean is that if you announce it on wikitech, then it is probable that it is also meant potentially for Wikipedia; And if it is potentially for Wikipedia, we must find a way for people to know about it, and say "yes, right, we need that" or "no, not at all" or "why not if we change this...".
What I mostly mean to say Evan, is that you did nothing wrong, quite the opposite. You did good things for Wikitravel, and potentially interesting things for Wikipedia. That is all. I do not entirely agree with them, no big deal. What I am bugged with, is that feeling that there are higher barriers to information flow than before. That is logical, we are more numerous, bigger, people may focus more and more on a limited number of fields, and have less and less chance to catch up by chance a discussion on a specific issue.
What is bad is that that may lead to a feeling of frustration, when decisions are taken, or features implemented, that someone has never ever heard about. That is not a transparent process. Would have they known, these people might have said nothing at all (silence might mean they do not care, or silence mean they just agree), but they would have chosen not to say anything.
Now, is there a page reporting what is going on on mediawiki 1.3 for example ?
* minor fixes
* major fixes
* and *mostly* features
----
personal warning red line
Personal downtime starting today
Duration expectation : a few days
Reason : my computer is basically RIP. I am paralyzed at the idea of trying to save all its content, reinstalling system, defragmenting, reinstalling software, fixing updates, prefs, extensions, putting back net connection specifs and co :-(
Anthere
---------------------------------
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The Walloon Wikipedia has been moved from outside hosting to our main
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Links should be updated.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Hello Everyone,
We have launched the Election Campaign for the Board of Trustees of the
Wikimedia Foundation. This is an important step forward in our emergence as a
Foundation, and your participation is crucial.
The election is for two seats on the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia
Foundation:
1) Contributing Active Member Representative;
2) Volunteer User Representative.
I quote Jimbo in saying that:
"The role of the board is *not* generally to get involved in the day-to-day
operation of the website. The board is a legal entity entrusted with ultimate
decision making for the Foundation. Website governance is a different matter
altogether. I don't anticipate that
the board will be a difficult or demanding position."
In the future, only Members who have paid dues to the Wikimedia Foundation
will be eligible to run for the Contributing Active Member Representative. All
Users will be eligible to run for the Volunteer User Representative. However,
since the dues infrastructure is not yet in place, we have decided that all
Users who have been with the project for at least three months will be eligible
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A FAQ regarding the roles of the Board of Trustees, electoral procedures, and
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Elections are scheduled to be held from midnight (GMT), Saturday, 30 May 2004
to midnight (GMT), Saturday, 5 June 2004. All candidates must have been
registered by then. midnight (GMT), 29 May 2004. The 24-hour interval will allow us
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This is not a popularity contest. Please avoid adding comments to the List of
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We encourage the candidates to create pages where voters can ask them
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It is important that participants in all languages and on all projects
participate in this election. If you speak a language other than English, please
translate the election notice that appears on the top of the English-language
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Apart from the translations, we ask that the Notices not be edited or changed
in any way except by or with the express permission of either [[User:Danny]]
or [[User:Imran]]. While this is exceptional for Wikipedia, it will ensure
that this election is conducted fairly. Please address all your questions and
concerns to the Talk Page of the Election FAQ, which is linked from the Notice.
Note that all election materials except for the notices and possibly the
candidates' information pages will be located on Meta. This is done so as not to
favor one language over another. In the future, we hope to have greater
flexibility with regard to other languages, but as for now, initial election
information will be posted in English.
More information is forthcoming, both on the Mailing Lists and on the
Respective Pages. This is the first time that such an election is being held, so
please bear with us.
May the best WikiCandidates win.
Imran and Danny
Co-Chairs, Wikimedia Election Committee
Hello Everyone,
We have launched the Election Campaign for the Board of Trustees of the
Wikimedia Foundation. This is an important step forward in our emergence as a
Foundation, and your participation is crucial.
The election is for two seats on the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia
Foundation:
1) Contributing Active Member Representative;
2) Volunteer User Representative.
I quote Jimbo in saying that:
"The role of the board is *not* generally to get involved in the day-to-day
operation of the website. The board is a legal entity entrusted with ultimate
decision making for the Foundation. Website governance is a different matter
altogether. I don't anticipate that
the board will be a difficult or demanding position."
In the future, only Members who have paid dues to the Wikimedia Foundation
will be eligible to run for the Contributing Active Member Representative. All
Users will be eligible to run for the Volunteer User Representative. However,
since the dues infrastructure is not yet in place, we have decided that all
Users who have been with the project for at least three months will be eligible
to vote and run for both seats on the Board. Candidates must be prepared to
identify themselves by name and geographic location in order to participate in
the election. Verification of their identities will be required to either of the
Co-Chairs of the Wikimedia Election Committee. Complete confidentiality is
ensured by us.
A FAQ regarding the roles of the Board of Trustees, electoral procedures, and
other information is forthcoming.
Elections are scheduled to be held from midnight (GMT), Saturday, 30 May 2004
to midnight (GMT), Saturday, 5 June 2004. All candidates must have been
registered by then. midnight (GMT), 29 May 2004. The 24-hour interval will allow us
the necessary time to verify the candidates' identities and make a final
determination whether they are eligible to run.
This is not a popularity contest. Please avoid adding comments to the List of
Candidates Page, such as "Great Contributor!" "Good choice!" "Troll" etc. All
such comments will be removed immediately.
We encourage the candidates to create pages where voters can ask them
questions.
It is important that participants in all languages and on all projects
participate in this election. If you speak a language other than English, please
translate the election notice that appears on the top of the English-language
"Recent Changes" page and post it in a prominent location on the respective
project. There is a link for you to follow in the notice to inform us that you have
done so. This way, we will make sure that projects in all languages have been
informed.
Apart from the translations, we ask that the Notices not be edited or changed
in any way except by or with the express permission of either [[User:Danny]]
or [[User:Imran]]. While this is exceptional for Wikipedia, it will ensure
that this election is conducted fairly. Please address all your questions and
concerns to the Talk Page of the Election FAQ, which is linked from the Notice.
Note that all election materials except for the notices and possibly the
candidates' information pages will be located on Meta. This is done so as not to
favor one language over another. In the future, we hope to have greater
flexibility with regard to other languages, but as for now, initial election
information will be posted in English.
More information is forthcoming, both on the Mailing Lists and on the
Respective Pages. This is the first time that such an election is being held, so
please bear with us.
May the best WikiCandidates win.
Imran and Danny
Co-Chairs, Wikimedia Election Committee
Congratulations to all Wikipedians on winning the Prix Ars Electronica for
Digital Communities in 2004!
http://www.aec.at/en/prix/
Thanks again for setting such an excellent example for Open Content and
community on the Web.
~ESP
Anthere said:
> * When a soft improvement is done to fit legal
> requirements, please, could it be discussed on
> foundation-l to check if that complies with the legal
> requirements ?
I'm wondering if you're still obliquely talking about the contributors list.
I'd love to hear that you read and understood my response to your questions.
I agree that it's a good idea for there to be more communication between the
Wikimedia community and the volunteer developers. I think there are a lot of
areas that could be improved -- streamlining the way bug reports and feature
requests work is one of them. Having a community leader like yourself take
the initiative to make this work well would be a great help to everyone.
I'd also like to say that I feel comfortable right now adding features or
fixing bugs in MediaWiki that may or may not be useful for Wikimedia
projects. There's an awful lot of code in MediaWiki that's not enabled for
Wikipedia.
I've tried to make a point of:
1) Noting these changes on tech lists and marking them as non-Wikimedia ones.
2) Making them disabled by default.
If you think there's a problem with having features in MediaWiki that are
disabled for Wikimedia projects, that's a development direction issue that
should probably be discussed. I'd be somewhat unhappy doing a private fork
of MediaWiki, since I'd like to give back any improvements to the code as a
thank you to the Wikimedia community. But of course I'd be happy to make the
effort if that was what the community wanted.
~ESP
We'll be doing further maintenance on the database server tomorrow,
circa 19:00 UTC (noon PDT, 3pm EDT, 9pm CEST). Hopefully won't be
offline too long; we're shuffling data to a larger hard drive so the
thing doesn't explode when we use up the last couple of gigabytes. :)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)