David Gerard wrote:
>Mark Williamson (node.ue(a)gmail.com) [050114 10:34]:
>
>
>>Really, that is absurd...
>>
>>
>Not really. The rationale is that it clogs the block log and adds
>unnecessary confusion.
>
It was also problematic when the IP autoblocker hit other users besides
the self-blocking admin. Since the situation doesn't come up frequently,
people often weren't aware of the implications, though perhaps it's
better understood now after the "Every time we block Michael, we block
Danny too" fiasco. The underlying issue is a matter of courtesy,
especially toward non-admins.
--Michael Snow
Jon Udell writes a nice piece about the sad state of tech support for
high-end products (and how most people end up searching for answers in
scattered chat fora).
http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/01/07/02OPstrategic_1.html
I would enjoy using a wiki dedicated to product information, with a
level of detail and a breadth of coverage unsuitable for either
wikibooks or wikipedia. Right now lots of open-source products
maintain local wikis for users of their tools, but they too could
benefit from the wider audience of a unified public site.
Thoughts? Feel free to comment on meta:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#Wikiproducts
--
+sj+
While it isn't the highest of priorities, it seems we
need to establish a firm policy to go by on celebrity
usernames. While I'd rather they be blocked outright,
we at least need to ban people not only using the name
as their username, but
If [[user:Scott Peterson]] made an edit to [[lawn
fertilizer]], you'd tend to believe it more than with
the average user. Same as if [[user:Hillary Duff]]
made edits to the [[Disney Channel]], or if [[user:Joe
Scarborough]] made edits to [[United States House of
Representatives]], all things that were professionally
related to them in their lives.
I can almost live with [[user:Jerry seinfeld]], as he
admits to not be the comedian. But anyone else is just
trying out identity theft on us.
I propose we ink out a more direct policy stating that
"no user may impersonate another living person other
than themselves, particularly a person that is worth
encyclopedic note, and may or may not have a Wikipedia
article".
If a celeb does want to join, they should be able to
have "their people" phone one of us, possibly the
Foundation itself. Or, they would have to undergo an
extensive trivia process on their lives, which was
what I was going to propose for Miss Duff before she
was scared away.
Nick Moreau
"Zanimum"
___________________________________________________________
ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun! http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
Folks,
I have been trying out the new feature of having the interface in one
language while reading wikipedia in another.
I have found some small bugs.
While the interface is set to French in my preferences, the English
wikipedia reports "Basé sur le travail de $1." at the top of
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=xx
Obviously a parameter missing somewhere.
Also, at the bottom of any page,
Dernière modification de cette page : 9 jan 2005 à 21:45. All text is
available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (see
Copyrights for details).
Perhaps the License description should be in French too.
On a different subject, I see that the images tarball has ballooned
from 2.5 Gig in March 2004 to 15 Gig Jan 2005.
Wow.
I would /love/ an rsync interface to this archive - downloading the
whole thing to get the updates is rapidly becoming unmanageable.
I put snapshots of wikipedia down in South African schools that do not
have realtime access to Internet - and it is proving very popular. My
distribution mechanism has become a hard drive, with Linux, mysql,
mediawiki, and the wikipedia tables and images pre-installed, and
either mailed or carried to the school.
I download the wikipedia frontpage nightly and fix up the links to
point to the local snapshot - give it a fresh, newsy feel. Some links
do not work, of course, but things like the Featured Article work
well, and non-bolded links in the News items and Recent articles.
Any local edits are lost, of course, when I update them (disk swap).
Cheers, Andy!
http://wizzy.org.za/
[[en:User:Wikiwizzy]]
~~~~ :wq!
On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 19:40:51 -0500, Stephen Forrest
<stephen.forrest(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> I suspect that the idea behind James' question was to share MediaWiki
> system messages across Wikipedias in the same language. (This is
> because I happen to know that the Language*.php system is not used on
> the Anglo-Saxon wikipedia.)
Unless I'm much mistaken, this is simply a case of no-one having
created the LanguageAng.php file yet. Surely, once all the messages have
been defined, you can *create* that file, and thus copy all the
changes to new wikis. Or is there some reason that Anglo-Saxon has
been denied its own translation file?
> For example, once we define on ang.wikipedia.org the value "Sibba
> hwierfunga" for the MediaWiki variable MediaWiki:Recentchangeslinked,
> it might be nice to automagically have the same customisation
> available to ang.wikibooks.org or ang.wikinews.org (if the latter
> existed).
That sounds like a question of co-ordination: there should be a master
translation [in ang.wikipedia.org's MediaWiki namespace, perhaps] that
is being regularly imported to all other wikis as it progresses [with
appropriate scripts, bots, or whatever, to assist].
OK, so that's not as nice as having it central, but I hold to my
argument that the MediaWiki namespace is for *customisation* not
*translation*.
> I would argue that the MediaWiki messages are most useful if they are
> language-specific, not project-specific. If English Wikipedia and
> English Wikinews have need of different translations for the same
> MediaWiki variable, then this is evidence that one or both need to
> introduce another, project-specific MediaWiki variable for this
> specific purpose.
No, that's not the way it works. Every message in the MediaWiki
namespace represents a part of the interface, used by the software
when displaying pages *on that particular wiki*. It allows users [with
admin/sysop status] to change the text of these parts of the interface
*to suit that particular wiki*, over-riding the standard-issue generic
translation contained in LanguageXX.php.
For instance, MediaWiki:Currentevents and MediaWiki:Currentevents-url
contain the label and location, respectively, of one of the links in
the navigation box; they allow that link to be used for different
purposes on different projects, or to be turned off completely. You
can also add messages to the users of a particular wiki in appropriate
places, such as MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning or MediaWiki:Sitesubtitle;
but you can't just "introduce a new variable". Some of these
customisations may be worth applying to all Wikimedia projects in a
particular language, but many of them wouldn't be appropriate - or
wouldn't be supported by the different communities. Thus, apart from
making initial translations marginally easier to co-ordinate,
centralising MediaWiki: namespaces would be a lot of develepor effort
for a net loss of functionality.
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]
In the long run, philosophically, I think you're right. In the short
run, we should focus on usability and minimizing seek time -- an area
where the site is already weak.
If we're going to force people through a portal, it should be clear
how to use it and should load instantly, not in 15 seconds.
+sj+
On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 19:14:46 +0100, Paweł 'Ausir' Dembowski
<fallout(a)lexx.eu.org> wrote:
> S> I singled out the en: wikipedia because anyone using URL shortcuts, or
> S> posting links to "wikipedia.org" and expecting them to get to the en:
> S> main page, would have -- until last week -- intended to direct readers
> S> to en.
>
> And that's why I think they should *not* be redirected automatically.
> This portal makes people more aware of the existance of other language
> Wikipedias.
>
> --
> Ausir
> Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia
> http://pl.wikipedia.org
>
>
--
+sj+
_ _ :-------.-.--------.--.--------.-.--------.--.--------[...]
Hoi,
I find it funny to be writing about this subject as I do not believe in
any God.
I am heavily involved in Wiktionary and one of the things that is a
constant issue is how to promote the things we think important. Not only
would we like to have a bigger community, we would also like more
sophisticated software to support what we do. Every now and again there
are things that make our life easier. One of these things was the
introduction of Commons as it allowed us to have soundfiles that can be
used in ANY project.
The wikimedia projects have a rule that the only soundfiles allowed are
the .ogg files. This is a handicap as many people do not have software
to play these files. So the only way to have people GET the necessary
software is by making these files more relevant. The next question is
HOW do you make them relevant. Sabine of the Italian wiktioanry had this
brilliant idea of asking people to contribute to a list she had with
Christmass wishes. A month ago we started to ask people to contribute
translations of *"Buon Natale e felice Anno Nuovo!" and record the
pronunciation as well using the .ogg format. It proved to be a struggle
to get translations and an even bigger stuggle to get soundfiles.
We have been really gratefull for the contributions that we got. In so
many ways we were happy with the responses that we had. We had people
explain about their Christmas, we learned that Happy Newyear is only
said in Japan once the new year has started. We learned that the
Armenian christmas is on another day from the Western and the Eastern
traditions. It was really good fun. Still, it was a wiktionary project
and religious contributions that were added were deleted from the pages
being not relevant to a lexicological project.
On Christmas eve, I added wishes to several projects among them the
en:wikipedia as this was the moment were we could expect a big amount of
people to help in our effort. This was not to be. Apparantly not only is
the American society very religious. They are also very "correct" about
it. Some said that because the "C" word was used (christmas) it could
not be on a wikimedia page. "Because it would have the wikimedia
organisation endorse Christmas". I was am and am utterly amazed. My
exhortions that it had little to do with christmas and everything to do
with the promotion of all these wikimedia values was to no avail.. This
was "SO WRONG".. :( So I found myself in a revert war. And was told that
because of Christmas I was not banned).
I am still amazed about this. Another thing that happened in this
timeframe was this "minkukel" (you can look the word up on the
nl:wiktionary) who added a picture of a pig and some foul language on a
template called "Islam" on the nl:wikipedia. Now THIS I knew to be
wrong; so I deleted the references to this template and put it up for
deletion for this is sacrilidge. I am still amazed about our community
that some find it necessary that we cannot, under the pretext of
neutrality, have a project like our Italian wiktionary project because
of the anti-religious ideas that they harbour.
I do not understand it. I do not care for these uptight attitudes. I
hope that next time when people ask for contributions like we did for
our **"Buon Natale e felice Anno Nuovo!" project that people will be
less rigid and more forthcoming. I am aware that some people will be
angry with me for saying all this. But hey, I am still reeling from this
experience.
Thanks,
GerardM
PS If you care to have a look at the Italian project,
http://it.wiktionary.org/wiki/Buon_Natale_e_felice_Anno_Nuovo%21
**
*****
Hi I am searching for an Italian mothertognue who could proofread an
article I translated on meta:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WQ/2/Founder/It
It is part of the newsletter.
I am German and translating from one foreign language into the other is
not too easy ;-) so sorry for some of those horrible errors ...
Besides that: the newsletter is not published very often and so it
should be quite easy to translate and proofread it if we are in many.
Is there a way to create a group of people interested in
translating/proofreading the newsletter into Italian? Please contact me
- if we organise things well no-one of us will have to work much and we
will have great results.
Ciao and thank you!!!
Sabine
*****
s.cretella(a)wordsandmore.it
skype: sabinecretella
I took the current www.wikipedia.org page and added an auto-selection
based on the browser language settings. This example recognizes all the
languages with 10.000+ articles:
http://www.tommasoconforti.com/portal2.php
Try to set your browser to Russian or Esperanto and see what happens :-)
If the language preference is not recognized, no selection appear.
It's basically the same page at www.wikipedia.org, with a few lines of php
inserted. I copied over wikimedia's stylesheets and images since hitting
wikipedia servers was too slow. Japanese and Chinese characters might be
incorrect since I don't have them installed and I have no idea of what I
put on the page :-))
Source on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Portal_code
Alfio