Re: [Foundation-l] iBooks vs. wBooks?
Hi Gerard, if you read my original email, I do emphasise Apple's walled garden, and my proposal is specifically *not* to put our contents there. Rather, I would like us to take advantage of the breach in the educational material monopol that Apple will undoubtedly create, by generating our own pure-HTML5 books (which I call wBooks to differentiate from Apples iBooks), which would work on all tablets (and probably phones), not just the iPad. Cheers, Magnus On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 10:42 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, The EULA currently in use prohibits the use of material that is offered anywhere except in the Apple store. They have also broken the mold of the standard. Consequently adopting the Apple model would technically support Apple devices. Both reasons are enough not to use Apple at all in an education setting and for material available under a free license. Thanks, Gerard On 25 January 2012 23:12, Gregory Varnum gregory.var...@gmail.com wrote: I'm confused by what you mean by walled garden. If this were the same as the App Store model where they have a custom iOS app format and their store is the only place to get it - that would make sense to me. That doesn't seem to be the case here.. My understanding was the ebooks created with iBook Author works in any ebooks store that supports HTML5 standards. I've been testing some ebooks we threw together on lots of devices (almost all non-Apple) with no problems. We've even turned some of them into interactive web pages. I haven't heard of this software breaking the current standard so much as further enabling HTML5 within it - but I could be wrong. -greg On Jan 25, 2012, at 4:16 PM, Gerard Meijssen wrote: Hoi, I think we should not support Apple in breaking the standard and in preventing us from using our work anywhere else. We take pride in being freely licensed and there is no excuse for the walled garden approach taken by Apple. There is also no excuse for us endorsing this behaviour. Obviously as what we do is freely licensed or public domain you can do whatever as long as the license requirements are maintained. I am sure that as a consequence you cannot legally publish in Apple's walled garden. I hate to see anything done in this area that is endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Thanks, Gerard On 20 January 2012 10:46, Magnus Manske magnusman...@googlemail.com wrote: (This mail is focused on books, but the topic is of more general interest IMHO, thus foundation-l) Hi all, I just saw the iBooks Author news: http://www.macrumors.com/2012/01/19/a-closer-look-at-ibooks-author-textbooks-and-exclusivity/ Of course, all these pretty books will be only available in the Apple paywalled garden. So I thought: As they use basically HTML5 (plus a few proprietary libraries), could we produce such interactive, tablet/phone-enabled e-books (wBooks as in Wikimedia:-) from free content? I believe the answer is yes, though it might be quite a push technologically (just to be clear, I am speaking of the books here, not of the authoring software). Also: Should we? I believe the answer is yes as well, for two reasons. One, Apples work here might (yet again) set a new standard, which means everything falling short of that standard will be neglected by the target audience, which runs counter to our declared goal of disseminating free knowledge; standing still might well mean falling behind. Another reason is the opportunity that Apple creates for us here: Once such e-books become accepted as general teaching tools in schools, it will be much easier to switch from Apple-only, costly books to run-everywhere, free books; they might just win the technology battle for us. What do you think? Cheers, Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] iBooks vs. wBooks?
(This mail is focused on books, but the topic is of more general interest IMHO, thus foundation-l) Hi all, I just saw the iBooks Author news: http://www.macrumors.com/2012/01/19/a-closer-look-at-ibooks-author-textbooks-and-exclusivity/ Of course, all these pretty books will be only available in the Apple paywalled garden. So I thought: As they use basically HTML5 (plus a few proprietary libraries), could we produce such interactive, tablet/phone-enabled e-books (wBooks as in Wikimedia:-) from free content? I believe the answer is yes, though it might be quite a push technologically (just to be clear, I am speaking of the books here, not of the authoring software). Also: Should we? I believe the answer is yes as well, for two reasons. One, Apples work here might (yet again) set a new standard, which means everything falling short of that standard will be neglected by the target audience, which runs counter to our declared goal of disseminating free knowledge; standing still might well mean falling behind. Another reason is the opportunity that Apple creates for us here: Once such e-books become accepted as general teaching tools in schools, it will be much easier to switch from Apple-only, costly books to run-everywhere, free books; they might just win the technology battle for us. What do you think? Cheers, Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing
On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 9:49 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
On 2 November 2011 21:41, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote:
I knew it looked so obvious someone must've already tried to do it.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ProveIt.jpg and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ProveIt_GT. This is a GUI reference
adding interface that shows up while editing (i.e., after you click
edit this page.) It's a gadget currently available to everyone.
A gadget is certainly handy and I'll be using ProveIt from now on,
but... it doesn't help people who are not logged in or have never
edited before, it's not widely publicised, etc. etc.
This needs polishing into some sort of newbie-usable tool and
deployment as soon as can be managed. (i.e. before the WYSIWYG of our
dreams.)
Go to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MyPage/common.js
and insert
importScript('User:Magnus Manske/insertref.js');
You'll get an Insert reference link in your toolbox. Select some
(best plain, unique) text in the normal page (not the edit page!),
click the link, paste the reference, choose to insert left or right of
the selection, in edit mode click save, done.
This has been sitting there since March 2009. It's probably not what
you want as is, but the concept could be married up with the Proveit
interface, and the save could be done via API, so you never ever see
the edit page.
Cheers,
Magnus
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Re: [Foundation-l] 10th wiki-birthdays?
On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 10:10 PM, Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org wrote: On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 01:39, Kim Bruning k...@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote: And now for something completely different. :-) Who here has already had their 10th wikibirthday, and who will have it soon? Seems like an excuse for a party :-) First recorded edit : July 28, 2001 (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributionsdir=prevtarget=Magnus+Manske) Now get off my lawn ;-) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] H2G2 to be disposed of
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-12265173 Anything worth salvaging? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Happy Birthday Wikipedia, from Jimmy Wales
On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 6:01 PM, Jay Walsh jwa...@wikimedia.org wrote: Birthday wishes from Jimmy on our blog, with embedded video greetings. Implemented as Flash. Oh the irony ;-) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Old Wikipedia backups discovered
Great news indeed! Now I can finally figure out when my first edit was :-) Magnus On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 3:54 PM, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: I was looking through some old files in our SourceForge project. I opened a file called wiki.tar.gz, and inside were three complete backups of the text of Wikipedia, from February, March and August 2001! This is exciting, because there is lots of article history in here which was assumed to be lost forever. I've long been interested in Wikipedia's history, and I've tried in the past to locate such backups. I asked various people who might have had one. I had given up hope. The history of particularly old Wikipedia articles, as seen in the present Wikipedia database, is incomplete, due to Usemod's policy of deleting old revisions of pages after about a month. The script which Brion wrote to import the article histories from UseMod to MediaWiki only fetched those revisions which hadn't been purged yet. I didn't want to believe that those revisions had been lost forever, and I even opened the UseMod source code and stared forlornly at the unlink() call. What I (and Brion before) missed is that UseMod appends a record of every change made to two files, called diff_log and rclog. In these two files is a record of every change made to Wikipedia from January 15 to August 17, 2001. I've put the two log files up on the web, at: http://noc.wikimedia.org/~tstarling/wikipedia-logs-2001-08-17.7z The 7-zip archive is only 8.4MB -- much more manageable than today's backups. rclog contains IP addresses. The Usemod software made IP addresses of logged-in users public, so the people who made these edits had no expectation that their IP address would be kept private. That, coupled with the passage of time, makes me think that no harm to user privacy can come from releasing these files. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Old Wikipedia backups discovered
On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 8:36 PM, Henning Schlottmann h.schlottm...@gmx.net wrote: On 14.12.2010 16:54, Tim Starling wrote: I was looking through some old files in our SourceForge project. I opened a file called wiki.tar.gz, and inside were three complete backups of the text of Wikipedia, from February, March and August 2001! That's wonderful news. Is this for enWP only or were all languages in one database back then? There was only English back in the day... ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Old Wikipedia backups discovered
On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 9:49 PM, Henning Schlottmann h.schlottm...@gmx.net wrote: Hi Magnus, On 14.12.2010 22:35, Magnus Manske wrote: On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 8:36 PM, Henning Schlottmann h.schlottm...@gmx.net wrote: On 14.12.2010 16:54, Tim Starling wrote: I was looking through some old files in our SourceForge project. I opened a file called wiki.tar.gz, and inside were three complete backups of the text of Wikipedia, from February, March and August 2001! That's wonderful news. Is this for enWP only or were all languages in one database back then? There was only English back in the day... Not true. The first other languages were introduced on March 15 and could be part of this archive if the different Wikipedias were in one database under UseMod. My earliest recorded entry in de.wikipedia dates September 2001 (and I have a low two-digit user ID, which was created upon the switch to MediaWiki), so there seem to be some versions missing indeed. Do you know the oldest preserved esit on de.wp? Do you remember how this worked? AFAIR, every language had its own UseMod setup. My import script only took the last version; Brion later wrote one that filled in the previous ones from the stored diffs. Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 8:56 AM, Robert S. Horning robert_horn...@netzero.net wrote: On 11/12/2010 10:05 AM, Magnus Manske wrote: Wikimedia policy is to use only free software, at least on the customer-facing side. That includes the PDF-generation process, which runs on our servers AFAIK. Requiring this from sites we (in essence) link to seems excessive. We link to Google Maps via an intermediate page, similar to PediaPress, and their code is not 100% open source either, last time I looked. Cheers, Magnus The link to Google Maps is certainly not exclusive and includes links to other mapping services including government mapping agencies and the Open Street Map Project, whose database and toolchain is 100% open source. As a mater of fact, I was introduced to Open Street Map through Wikipedia and its link when I was trying to look up the geo coordinates on a couple of articles done with the Geotagging Wikiproject. And if you can find some other publishing entity (printing, DVDs, etc.) that could be used interchangeably for the PediaPress button, and this entity is denied a button next to the PediaPress one, /then/ a moral uproar might be justified. So far, I do not believe any such entity has stepped forward. Web-only services, like Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap, can be sustained cheaply enough to be free of charge for the user, which leads to many alternatives in the online maps category. Producing and shipping physical objects like books is still a business-only market, at least until everyone has a universal 3D printer sitting on his desk. For mass-printed books, there are lots of companies, which is why we have lots of them on out ISBN special page. However, there are relatively few print-on-demand businesses out there, and a total market of a few thousand unique books per year is apparently of little interest to all except one of them. If they want a share, let them have their own button; otherwise, be glad there is at least one of them, for there would likely be no PDF and OpenDocument (and soon OpenZIM) export function without their initiative. Cheers, Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 5:18 PM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: In a message dated 11/13/2010 6:44:18 AM Pacific Standard Time, magnusman...@googlemail.com writes: And if you can find some other publishing entity (printing, DVDs, etc.) that could be used interchangeably for the PediaPress button, and this entity is denied a button next to the PediaPress one, /then/ a moral uproar might be justified. So far, I do not believe any such entity has stepped forward. Disengeneous (if that's how you spell it). You don't. And insults don't really make your POV more popular. Open the location to citizen modification and I guarentee you there will be another competitor shortly. I'm all for that. But, did anyone actually ask the Foundation to have his button included there (besides spammers et al.)? It's not like an email is hard to write... Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 6:16 PM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: In a message dated 11/13/2010 9:53:41 AM Pacific Standard Time, magnusman...@googlemail.com writes: I'm all for that. But, did anyone actually ask the Foundation to have his button included there (besides spammers et al.)? It's not like an email is hard to write... Why should *this* be a Foundation issue in your mind, when adding a source to Special Books is not. To me it's an identical situation. How is it different to you It's not, in principle, and you just quoted me with I'm all for that (replying to your citizen modification), so you know it's not different to me. I just don't see a reason for drama that it's not available right now. I can see three reasons why it is different /in practice/ right now: 1. Given the limited of number services (one, plus Robert's which I missed in the thread, if it still exists), it probably seemed pointless 2. Any service would have to develop the appropriate interface to MediaWiki first, and also integrate with Wikimedia servers, as far as I can tell; therefore, users adding buttons would be non-functional without Foundation's active help anyway 3. PediaPress might have bought a head start with the extension. This is pure speculation on my part, though. Looking at the implementation of the button, it actually has a partner field. So, more partners are in the technical design. This would lead me to conclude that the thing missing to have more partners for book printing is ... partners. Unless it's a Foundation-PediaPress conspiracy, and the technical implementation is just a clever guise. Cue the Morley's smoker... Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 11:04 PM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: In a message dated 11/13/2010 11:08:33 AM Pacific Standard Time, magnusman...@googlemail.com writes: 1. Given the limited of number services (one, plus Robert's which I missed in the thread, if it still exists), it probably seemed pointless 2. Any service would have to develop the appropriate interface to MediaWiki first, and also integrate with Wikimedia servers, as far as I can tell; therefore, users adding buttons would be non-functional without Foundation's active help anyway 3. PediaPress might have bought a head start with the extension. This is pure speculation on my part, though. 1) Assumption. We do not know how many services there might be. Assuming there is only one, because one one has been allowed is beating a man with his own staff. Note that I wrote seemed, not seems. I trying to list possible reasons why this facility was created the way it was. That is different to what it should develop into now. 2) This is not true. Clicking Make a book out of this page, and hold on I'm going to add some more pages to this book has nothing to do with integration. I can build a list of the pages you choose, right now, with a Php script and without any foundation approval. My button interface might not be pretty of course, but it would work. Again, please read carefully. I am not talking about the book setup, but about the actual preview/order process. You will note that the PediaPress button goes to [[Special:Books]], which then redirects to PediaPress. This, at the moment, requires integration. I does not have to, but currently it does. 3) Under what RFP ? How was it chosen, how was it vetted, why is the process to gain this approval now closed to any rival? Yet again, with the reading. You did see the words pure speculation? I'm getting tired of having to nitpick this discussion. How about something practical? It should be feasible to conjure up some JavaScript to add a new button pointing to another service, though I suspect some internal magic happens before the PediaPress redirect, handing the book structure data over. So, back to the basic question: Which service would be able to take a structured page list and spew out a book? Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 6:37 AM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Liam Wyatt wrote: I suspect that the issue lies not with the fact that you are only a couple of clicks away from the PediaPress bookprinting service from every Wikipedia article, but more the fact that the PediaPress system is the *only *service listed on the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Book As Erik mentioned in the previous email, the relationship with PediaPress is non-exclusive and entirely independent from the Book Creator code. I enjoyed your examples of for-profit companies' products being integrated with Wikimedia. I wonder, if a company like CafePress wanted to sell Wikimedia apparel and would donate a percentage of their revenue to Wikimedia, would they get a sidebar link (or section) as well? The response from Erik seems to be well, having printed copies of our work makes us feel good, which is perfectly fine, but so does a fitted T-shirt with the Wikipedia logo on the front. Would a company like CafePress be allowed to have a link in the sidebar to their Wikimedia-related products? What are the exact criteria for getting to be only a couple of clicks away for millions of visitors? Wikimedia is owned and operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit foundation dedicated to bringing free content to the world. For us, PediaPress brings free (as in freedom) content to the world. CafePress brings T-shirts to the world. You might be able to spot the difference. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia. We work on it online, because that is the most efficient and convenient way to do it. I have an offline copy of it on my iPhone. I have an (outdated) German DVD with a copy. Many people have WikiReaders. I am sure many people without net access would be happy with a single-volume Wikipedia V1.0 desk encyclopaedia. If a company would take the export function and write an open source extension to produce multi-platform DVDs that allow you to browse a snapshot of the selected articles, their link should go right next to the PediaPress one. Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Should we offer to host citizendium?
On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 8:56 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 12 November 2010 07:56, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: We should offer to host citizendium on our servers at no cost for a period of 1 (one) year offering a level of support equivalent to our smaller projects. After one year the citizendium community/Editorial Council is expected to have sorted themselves out to the point where they can arrange their own hosting. At which point we lock the database and provide them with the dumps I strongly support this. +1 Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 1:24 PM, Joe Corneli holtzerman...@gmail.com wrote: What people seem to have been stepping around in this thread so far is the fact that Pediapress's software chain includes some components that they have NOT released as open source. There seems to be ongoing confusion about this. If there was an open source toolchain for doing what Pediapress currently does, then Wikimedia itself or any third party organization or individual could use it to create manuscripts suitable for printing, and use any printer they liked to achieve that end. I think the crux of the argument should be: is it OK for Wikimedia to have a partnership with a service provider who uses closed source software as an integral part of the service they provide. Pediapress sets a precedent that says yes, that's completely fine. And maybe it is, but it is then just wrong to refer to this as an open source way of working. Wikimedia policy is to use only free software, at least on the customer-facing side. That includes the PDF-generation process, which runs on our servers AFAIK. Requiring this from sites we (in essence) link to seems excessive. We link to Google Maps via an intermediate page, similar to PediaPress, and their code is not 100% open source either, last time I looked. Cheers, Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] data centralization for the benefit of small (and also bigger) projects
On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 6:13 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 23 August 2010 17:43, Marcus Buck m...@marcusbuck.org wrote: Although I'm sure they will establish sub-communities on the new wiki like they did on Commons. E.g. German speakers meet at the Forum (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Forum) instead of the Village pump. That will happen on a datawiki too and probably these subcommunities will focus on their respective regions, e.g. German speakers will focus on maintaining the town data for places in Germany, Austria, Switzerland etc. I do like this idea very much indeed. What will it take in software terms? Something similar to Freebase? Something like Freebase bolted onto MediaWiki? OmegaWiki? I thought transwiki template transclusion is being worked on? Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] English language dominationism is striking again
On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 6:40 AM, Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.rs wrote: On 06/22/2010 08:07 PM, Magnus Manske wrote: I would consider this state as a poor reflection on Commons' accessibility. Especially as Google image search (imho, the likeliest avenue of searching for images) gives 130 000 pictures of horses on Commons if searched in English, zero if searched in Estonian (hobu), and while it gives 160 000 results for a Hungarian search (ló) on the first page only one of it is an image that resembles a horse. Here's a thought: Enter hobu into translate.google.com, leave source language on automatic and target on English, and it will happily translate it into horse. Could we offer a translation link in search? As in, translate my query into English and try again? I'm sure we can come to an arrangement with Google (or someone else). I already made something similar: http://toolserver.org/~nikola/mis.php Nice! Now it needs language auto-detect, and Estonian for the example (unless I didn't see it), and, of course, integration into Commons... ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] English language dominationism is striking again
On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 11:17 AM, Tisza Gergo gti...@gmail.com wrote: Samuel Klein meta...@... writes: I'd like to see such translation tools used to enhance the tags used to identify an image, so that all internet searches can find images by those tags. I think this stuff should be left for Google. A clever search engine should be able to figure out that if you are looking for Pferd images, horse images will also be of interest; and Google is getting clever quickly in this regard. (For example, recently Google web search has been offering to translate the search phrase to English, and translate the results back to you.) OTOH, it would be a nice feature to show translated page and category names when someone looks at the page with the interface language set to non-English. OK, technical solution (hackish as usual, but with potential IMHO): http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Searchsearch=Pferd+SchachwithJS=MediaWiki:SearchTranslation.js Basically, this will (on the search page only!) look at the last query run (the one currently in the edit box), check several language editions of Wikipedia for articles from the individual words (in this case, Pferd and Schach), count how many exist, pick the language with the most hits (in this case, German), and put a link to link to Nikola's tool under the search box. The link pre-fills the source language and query in the tool, which automatically opens the appropriate search page. In essence, clicking on the link gets you to the toolserver and back to the search, this time in English, without you noticing. I am checking all the languages the Nikola's tool offers (so no Estonian), except English (no point, really). Experimenting, I noticed that even if your original query got you some results (e.g. Schaufel=47), the translation in English will give you more (Shovel=484). I tried to restrict the language search for the languages accepted by the browser (so, using 1 or 2 queries instead of 32), but there appears to be no way in JavaScript to get that information. MediaWiki could pass it on, though... Feel free to improve! Cheers, Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] English language dominationism is striking again
On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 3:17 PM, Tisza Gergo gti...@gmail.com wrote: Magnus Manske magnusman...@... writes: Basically, this will (on the search page only!) look at the last query run (the one currently in the edit box), check several language editions of Wikipedia for articles from the individual words (in this case, Pferd and Schach), count how many exist, pick the language with the most hits (in this case, German), and put a link to link to Nikola's tool under the search box. The link pre-fills the source language and query in the tool, which automatically opens the appropriate search page. Again, I would suggest using Google (or an alternative with open data, if one exists) instead of trying to reinvent the wheel: http://translate.google.com/#auto|en|Pferd%20Schach http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/documentation/#Detect It might support less languages then we have wikipedias for, but I'm pretty sure it would give better results for the major ones. Well, that's what I suggested a few mails ago in this very thread. However, people didn't seem to want it. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] English language dominationism is striking again
On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 6:52 PM, Bence Damokos bdamo...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 7:42 PM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: In practice pulling up the wikipedia article on horse in your language will cover most cases. There is a fairly good argument to be made that wikipedia is common's best search engine. I would consider this state as a poor reflection on Commons' accessibility. Especially as Google image search (imho, the likeliest avenue of searching for images) gives 130 000 pictures of horses on Commons if searched in English, zero if searched in Estonian (hobu), and while it gives 160 000 results for a Hungarian search (ló) on the first page only one of it is an image that resembles a horse. Here's a thought: Enter hobu into translate.google.com, leave source language on automatic and target on English, and it will happily translate it into horse. Could we offer a translation link in search? As in, translate my query into English and try again? I'm sure we can come to an arrangement with Google (or someone else). Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Usability: page weight
On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 2:19 PM, Ryan Lomonaco wiki.ral...@gmail.com wrote: Forwarded. -- Forwarded message -- From: Yann Forget yan...@gmail.com Date: Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 6:57 AM Subject: Usability: page weight To: foundation-l-ow...@lists.wikimedia.org Hello, While we are talking about usability issues, I would like to mention an issue which was not mentioned up to now : page weight. I am now surfing most of time with a 3G key with a bandwidth of 16 KB/s maximum, and often less. My experience of Wikimedia sites compared with the other websites I am using regularly, GMail and Facebook, shows that these load much faster than Wikimedia pages, even if the page is mostly empty. It seems that these sites use some fancy caching for that. Page weight is a major hurdle for working on any Wikimedia sites affecting users who do not enjoy a broadband connection. And I believe that small wikis with non-European languages are more affected than others (a study would be interesting here). For improving outreach of Wikimedia outside of the Western world, improving the page weight should be a priority. What can be done? I notice that, when comparing logged-in to logged-out page loading times, the former is almost twice the latter. This appears to be true whether I refresh the browser cache or not (tested on Main Page). A light, JavaScript-free skin for low-bandwidth use might be an intermediate measure. Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] drive-by site updates
On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 15:11, Svip svi...@gmail.com wrote: On 16 May 2010 14:06, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: But the introduction of the new search box that practically can't search, was not part of the beta and it was a complete surprise. Am i badly mistaken? After my own attempts, I cannot find any issues with the search box. Could you describe your problems more accurately? Or better yet, file a bug report about it on https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/ In Vector, search for begin. You'll get to the page Begin. There's no way to actually search Wikipedia for the word begin using this search box. sigh Type begin in the box, hit the cursor-up key to select the last rows in the suggest box, hit enter. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] drive-by site updates
On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 4:15 PM, Svip svi...@gmail.com wrote: On 16 May 2010 17:14, Svip svi...@gmail.com wrote: On 16 May 2010 17:12, Magnus Manske magnusman...@googlemail.com wrote: On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 15:11, Svip svi...@gmail.com wrote: On 16 May 2010 14:06, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: But the introduction of the new search box that practically can't search, was not part of the beta and it was a complete surprise. Am i badly mistaken? After my own attempts, I cannot find any issues with the search box. Could you describe your problems more accurately? Or better yet, file a bug report about it on https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/ In Vector, search for begin. You'll get to the page Begin. There's no way to actually search Wikipedia for the word begin using this search box. sigh Type begin in the box, hit the cursor-up key to select the last rows in the suggest box, hit enter. sigh That is /real/ user friendly. I bet Joe Public can figure that one out. Also, I apologise for sending this mail out too quick, but your suggestion didn't work. Unless you consider the 'AJAX-suggestions' to be 'search' (which it isn't, btw). Huh. Worked yesterday. Clearly they're changing stuff, just not the right stuff... Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Funny news from Poland
2010/5/13 Tomasz Ganicz polime...@gmail.com: Journalist from Poland just started commenting if we really need a president who's main source of knowledge about national security comes form Wikipedia :-). Better than Fox news, I'd wager :-) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
H... The vast majority of that material is entirely uncontroversial, but the projects do contain material that may be inappropriate or offensive to some audiences, such as children or people with religious or cultural sensitivities. Time to delete http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_is_dead I guess... ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Mind-boggling (was: Wikipedia e-mail)
On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 7:14 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Magnus Manske wrote: Subject: Wikipedia e-mail To: Magnus Manske Dear active administrator, [nonsense] Why are you forwarding this? To alert people of this. I see others have done the same, so it's redundant by now. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Mind-boggling (was: Wikipedia e-mail)
-- Forwarded message -- From: Genuinelyawikiquizzling Date: Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 6:46 PM Subject: Wikipedia e-mail To: Magnus Manske Dear active administrator, As an advanced user here at wikipedia, I am sure you are familiar with the corruption and bureaucracy that exists at every level, with the site effectively being run by a clique of editors who are only looking out for their own interests. Heck, maybe you are one of them! Hopefully though you are not, and would be willing to help us restore fairness and integrity to the project... We are currently expanding our portfolio of administrator accounts and perhaps you could consider sharing yours with us - to do so will take you only two minutes: change the password (if desired) and then reply to this email with your login details. We'll do the rest! Thank you for your time and consideration, and naturally do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions. Kind Regards, The Wikipedia Freedom Fighters -- This e-mail was sent by user Genuinelyawikiquizzling on the English Wikipedia to user Magnus Manske. It has been automatically delivered and the Wikimedia Foundation cannot be held responsible for its contents. The sender has not been given the recipient's email address, or any information about his/her e-mail account; and the recipient has no obligation to reply to this e-mail or take any other action that might disclose his/her identity. For further information on privacy, security, and replying, as well as abuse and removal from emailing, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Email. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] I'm here to request a new Wikimedia project
On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 4:02 PM, Tyler programmer...@comcast.net wrote: Dear folks at Wikimedia, Thank you for existing! You are responsible for the encyclopedia I use every time I need an encyclopedia! So, you publish an encyclopedia (Wikipedia), a dictionary (Wiktionary), an archive of news articles (Wikinews), online classes (Wikiversity), online textbooks (Wikibooks), online non-educational books (Wikisource), lists of quotes by people or shows or whatever (Wikiquote), an encyclopedia of living things (Wiki Species), a meta-wiki that no one knows the reason for (Meta), a place where all files on the wikis are placed (The Commons), and a site I don't know why the deuce it exists (The Wikimedia incubator). I was just wondering, how would you like to start an almanac, guys? That would be neat, a wiki almanac. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinac was submitted 2005 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] At school
On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 4:32 PM, William Pietri will...@scissor.com wrote: On 02/16/2010 02:12 AM, Ziko van Dijk wrote: In general: Never before people knew so little about something they use so often, as a German journalist said about Wikipedia. In a strange way, that pleases me; as Danny Hillis says, What people mean by the word technology is the stuff that doesn't work yet. That people use Wikipedia regularly without caring about the the inner workings is a sign that we've done something right. Of course, it might be too right; maybe we'd like people to pay better attention to the quality of what they're reading. Interestingly, the people who make luggage X-ray machines have a similar problem: problems are rare enough that the operators get bored and stop looking. Their solution is something called Threat Image Projection: they randomly add pictures of bad things to images of real bags. When the operator notices something dangerous, they press the threat button. If they don't notice a projected threat, it's counted against them. That keeps the operators alert enough that they'll hopefully notice real threats. I'd love to find some way to usefully apply this approach to Wikipedia, but haven't come up with anything yet. Perhaps someone here will. De-admin for failure to pick up simulated vandalism? /me hides ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Announcement] Danese Cooper joins Wikimedia as CTO
On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 8:16 PM, Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hi folks, I'm delighted to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation's new Chief Technical Officer is Danese Cooper, an experienced technology manager and open-source evangelist. Danese will start with Wikimedia on February 4, 2010. That means she hasn't looked at the parser code yet! :-) Welcome, Danese! Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia and Environment
On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 1:22 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/12/13 Teofilo teofilow...@gmail.com: But the best is to use no energy at all : see the OLPC project in Afghanistan (A computer with pedals, like the sewing machines of our great-great-great-grand-mothers) (1) (1) http://www.olpcnews.com/countries/afghanistan/updates_from_olpc_afghanistan_1.html That's the answer! Distributed serving by each volunteer's pedal power! And you automatically become an admin after 5MW! Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikipedia christmas calendar?
On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 6:53 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: 2009/11/2 Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.rs: Дана Monday 02 November 2009 18:31:50 Andrew Gray написа: First image is probably your best bet - the odds are reasonably high it'll be a picture, or something else representative, in the conventional top-right slot. Certainly better odds than random selection! First image could easily be an icon. Mmm, true. First image directly invoked in the wikitext, or something, I guess. So, no images from infoboxes, then. (Except those few that actually require [[File:..]]). Cheers, Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikipedia christmas calendar?
On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 2:19 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: Are you talking about face detection or facial recognition? The former is implemented in some cell phones. It's not that complex. The latter is more cutting edge, though surely the NSA has a good implementation of it (as do many casinos). Selecting pictures of people as opposed to bowling statistics would be the former, right? OK, so shouldn't we run this against all of Commons, then? If we could offer show me only pictures of people as a checkbox in search, that would surely be appreciated (and useful for the calendar thingy as well;-) Cheers, Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikipedia christmas calendar?
On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 4:54 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/11/2 Magnus Manske magnusman...@googlemail.com: On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 5:09 PM, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote: Olli wrote: Date: 2009/10/31 Subject: Wikipedia christmas calendar? What about a wikipedia christmas calendar? It can maybe preview some articles or something similar. Then it can be multilingual. Not necessarily just Christmas, but a published calendar for the whole year. Wikipedia's date articles are already full of weitd and wonderful things that happened on this day in history. Or, have a new calender generated automatically on each page reload: http://toolserver.org/~magnus/wikilendar.php?month=11year=2009 (takes a few seconds to parse all these pages and check for suitable images) I think a human selected calendar would be better for actually publishing, but that's certainly a fun script. Can you add an option to choose a category so we can have a calendar of Britons, or French, or mathematicians, or military people, etc.? I could limit the articles used to a ceratin category, but IMHO that would restrict the search too much, that is, either no or a few possible candidates per day. One bug: I got a graph of Imran Khan's bowling statistics rather than his portrait... And if you give me code to identify a person's image, I'll be happy to implement it, as would the NSA. As it stands, I chose a random article from e.g. [[November 2]], then chose a random picture from that. Cheers, Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [ol-discuss] Open Library, Wikisource, and cleaning and translating OCR of Classics
On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 7:32 AM, John Vandenbergjay...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 3:00 PM, Samuel Kleinmeta...@gmail.com wrote: ... Let's take a practical example. A classics professor I know (Greg Crane, copied here) has scans of primary source materials, some with approximate or hand-polished OCR, waiting to be uploaded and converted into a useful online resource for editors, translators, and classicists around the world. Where should he and his students post that material? I am a bit confused. Are these texts currently hosted at the Perseus Digital Library? If so, they are already a useful online resource. ;-) If they would like to see these primary sources pushed into the Wikimedia community, they would need to upload the images (or DjVu) onto Commons, and the text onto Wikisource where the distributed proofreading software resides. I see CC-NC... http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a2003.02.0004 Too bad. Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Upcoming tech hiring: CTO position split
On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 6:17 PM, Geoffrey Plourdegeo.p...@yahoo.com wrote: High Priest of Mediawiki? I propose robes as his official outfit, similar to this: http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Stallman/index.shtml Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A heads up
On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 10:13 PM, Gerard Meijssengerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, OK, there are *many* pictures of a marc'h on Commons... Now pretend that you cannot find what this is in English. Try to find it on Commons. Noone disputes that this is a problem. And if we had an unlimited number of volunteers fluent in all languages adding descriptions to images, it would easily be fixed. But if that were the case, we wouldn't have this discussion in the first place. Image descriptions are, first and foremost, limited by the languages a user (who is willing to write these descriptions) speaks. Of all these languages, the user will (if he has time and ability to write one or two descriptions) chose maybe his native one, and the one that will be useful for most people - English. (And yes, more people speak Chinese, but few Commons editors do). Once again, ugly reality triumphs over wishful thinking. At least until we can get some 10K Indonesian-speaking editors. Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A heads up
Hi, I think the questions to ask are: * How many Indonesians speak Dutch, compared to those that speak English? * When you try to translate to Indonesian (a laudable goal), will you have more chances to find translators with Dutch and English, rather than with just Dutch? The (obvious) answers aside, if this is going to be a bulk upload, maybe it should be planned: * Gather all images, descriptions, and metadata on a (private) machine * Find a distinct set of often used key terms / tags * Translate those into English (and Indonesian, if you have a translator ready) * Assign (English) categories to tags * Build image descriptions for upload with both Dutch and English terms I got another, loosely idea: Could we use the language templates in the descriptions to build a missing matrix of translations, for translators? I speak English and German; I would like to see images that only have a German description, and translate it to English. A special site (toolserver?) could show me the image and the German description, I enter the English one in a text box, and go to a page with everything prepared for me, just click save and be done. Cheers, Magnus On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 8:04 PM, Gerard Meijssengerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, How does it help to find material in Commons when you do not know English ?? Practically it is nice that we spend money on improving the upload facility of MediaWiki. In the end it makes no difference when you cannot find the images. Functionally Commons is useless as a consequence to all the people who do not speak English. When you reply PLEASE remember what the Wikimedia Foundation is there for.. Thanks, GerardM 2009/7/15 Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 2:34 PM, Gerard Meijssengerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, Why should the term base be translated ? Is it not more important to be gained by getting all this material in the public domain ?? I do however agree with you. All the material that is about Indonesia should be translated to Indonesian. For them it is very much the opening up of material that is part of their cultural history. Translating it into English does not make it easier for Indonesians to find this material. Thanks, GerardM 2009/7/15 John at Darkstar vac...@jeb.no At least the term base should be translated. John Gerard Meijssen wrote: Hoi, I have been in discussion with the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam about making their material available on Commons. The Tropenmuseum has an important collection on the colonial past of the Netherlands and contains a rich collection on Suriname and Indonesia. The initial talks are about 100.000 images. The annotations of this material is all in Dutch. It will come with unique identifiers back to the physical object in the Tropenmuseum and it will come with the termbase for the images; this termbase is as I understand it the equivalent of our categories. Some of the material has a partial translation in English and, this can be provided to us as well. The key issue I want to raise is that there are hundreds of museums in the Netherlands, Belgium and Suriname all using Dutch there are more museums in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Lichtenstein who speak German While we aim to improve our front end to allow for easy uploads, we do not provide language support. Language support will help people find pictures in their language and will help the matching of categories into other languages. Thanks, GerardM ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l There is certainly a value to having things in English. It aids translation into more languages. It's a lot harder to find people who speak Dutch and Spanish, French and Russian or Greek and Japanese. You're more likely to find people who speak English in addition to their native tongue, which allows them to translate it. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list
Re: [Foundation-l] One Wikipedia Per Person (regarding the distribution of and the ability to read Wikipedia)
On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 7:50 AM, Fajro fai...@gmail.com wrote: And why partner with Google? There are Free alternatives in development: http://www.apertium.org/ http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Main_Page I tried this with a first paragraph from en.wikipedia, translating to Spanish and back. Worked surprisingly well, even though it renamed New Jersey to New Sweater... Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Murdoch newspaper websites to go paywall -opportunity for citizen journalism!
On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 11:07 PM, Steven Walling steven.wall...@gmail.com wrote: At this point in time, the project should act just like any other news organization, and never assume that readers are going to flock to them. How about getting Amazon to offer free Wikinews subscriptions on their Kindle Newspaper channel? They'd have something they can offer for free (they are already using wikipedia in their search function), and it might get more people interested in the Kindle newspaper function, thus portentially increasing (paid) subscriptions for other newspapers as well. Cheers, Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Usability Study Results (Sneak Preview)
On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 2:08 AM, Parul Vora pv...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hi all! The Wikipedia Usability Initiative conducted a user research study with SF based Bolt Peters in late March to uncover barriers new editors face. We are in the process of completing a full report on our methodology, process and analysis, but wanted to share with you some of the major themes and findings in the meantime From what I read, the main problem is that new, eager, serious contributers surrender between our markup and an overwhelming flood of descriptions. I know a new GUI is being worked on. For the moment I hacked the following JavaScript suggestion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Magnus_Manske/newbiehelp.js This adds a how? link into the edit tab, and launches a floating panel with some extremely general content: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Edit_how.png Never mind the wording, the color scheme, or important points I missed :-) If that were added for all anons by default, it might save the willing and able some grief. Just a thought. Cheers, Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Why is the software out of reach of the community?
On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 9:57 AM, Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.yu wrote: David Gerard wrote: The other useful thing that can be done with templates is to standardise the field names in them as much as possible per wiki. The reason? To enhance machine readability of data in them. People are SERIOUSLY INTERESTED in this. Another useful thing: after an article is parsed, write all the templates it uses and their parameters in the database. Even if at first it isn't possible to read this data on Wikipedia, Toolserver could do wonders with it :) People (including yours truly) have been asking for this for years... Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening
On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 7:23 AM, Gerard Meijssen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hoi, When people from other projects tell me that this is one of the reasons why they do not bother with Commons, I have to disbelieve them? Try to find paard and you will not be served in the same way as with horse the search result is inferior. Dutch is not the worst option, try ίππος and you find nothing. This is Greek and it also means horse. They might not be able to find ίππος. However, they might be able to use this big list of word pairs called a dictionary to translate ίππος into English horse and search for that. Not very comfortable, but hardly impossible as you claim. Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
