Mailing List Archive

Check boxes and other articles counts
> Not that i have objections against this change, but
changes to the
> software/userinterfase of the Wikipedias should be
announced formaly
and
> well in advance.
> Somthing like this;
> Give 3 weeks notice.

>This is way too long. I don't have time to track each
>individual patch over three weeks, especially since
patches >become obsolete quite quickly as other
changes are committed.

Please do consider that it is probably not worth
telling us anything under at least a week notice. Not
enough time to understand, then to translate, then for
people to react, then to translate again. If a patch
is so necessary that it can't wait a week, please
proceed without asking. Otherwise, please consider we
are maybe not in such a hurry that the other
wikipedians don't have time to maybe give their point
of view or just to be informed.

>Besides, intwiki-l is not for feature discussion (see
the list >description). wikitech-l is, and if feature
discussion concerns >wikipedia policies, it should be
copied/moved to wikipedia-l.

I am officially asking that the international
wikipedia list be discarded. It is useless, and
providing the false feeling to international people
that it is "their" list, and that they don't need to
register to the *main* *english* one. This is very
misleading. It would be better not to pretend things,
but to make them clear.

Please also make official wikipedia-l and wikitech-l
are the only lists that are worth considering as far
as general policies are concerned for similar reasons.

However, also realise that just doing so will prevent
international wikipedias to have any real involvement
in general policy matters. Today, in 5 hours, my mail
box received 85 messages. I do not feel fluent in
english enough to read all of them. I'll discard some
of them, hoping no essential issue for us was raised,
for I know nobody else will tell them.

>Notice that the above policy is not used by anyone
else either, >so I don't even see why you bring it
up.

So, if I follow you, not having other people follow
policies is enough reason for you not to follow them
enough ? If so, why are these policies still there ?
Let's discard them to.

>Members of the international Wikipedias that want to
take part >in feature discussions should subscribe to
wikitech-l and/or >wikipedia-l, if we spread this
stuff over three lists, we'll >never get anything
done.

Probably true. But, that is not what is widely
understood among "foreigners" though. Hence, I think I
am gonna remove international-l from our mailing list
page, let's be blunt and realistic. I already
understood quite many years ago that not understanding
english would just get me nowhere.

>What I can agree on is to send strings that need to
be >translated to intwiki-l before committing a
change, and to >wait a few days for translations to
come in, then to commit >the change together with the
translations. But if not all >translations come in
within a reasonable amount of time, they >will have
to be added later, meaning that the user interface
>will have some English in it until the translations
are
>submitted. If you check some of the international
Wikipedias, >you will notice that this is the case
for quite a few of them, >for features with which I
had nothing to do.

We can manage with that; we have no choice anyway if
we want to participate a bit but to understand
english; so a couple of features in english won't be
much trouble (though some will protest-their problem).

However, to tell the truth, I won't be able to
translate your feature for the very good reason that
though I tried to concentrate very hard on it, I have
not being able to understand what that checkbox in the
watch list was all about. I just couldnot figure what
you were talking about.

So, could you spend a tiny little bit of your time
just telling us what is going to appear ? I am sure it
is a good choice, since everybody seems to agree with,
but I am just curious.

Also, I have read your proposition (that if I
understood well you decided to implement today if
nobody complained about it...maybe some answers are in
the 85 messages...) about the counting of articles.
Please could you tell me whether it will apply to
international wikipedias or just to the english one ?
If it does, I am not sure I understood well when the
article will stop being considered a bot or a stub

- when at least 2 edits have been made after the
creation, whoever the authors of the edits are ?
- 2 edits by authors, creators excluded ?
- 2 edits by 2 different authors, creators excluded ?

Though I understand well the interest of this (and
definitly support the change of count to exclude some
small or automatic entries), I would be happy then if
you could provide a system to list articles that are
*above* a certain number of characters (no stub) and
not automatically generated.
I think your system is gonna exclude some specialized
articles I think would deserve accessing to the status
of articles. I would be glad - in my own field of
expertise - to go and humanly edit them enough for
them to be considered real articles.

I hope I didnot misunderstand entirely what you were
planning to do. When I don't understand things, I
usually wait for further discussion to enlighten me,
but here, I didnot see much discussion. So...I am not
sure I understood well.

Thank you in advance for your answers


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Re: Check boxes and other articles counts [ In reply to ]
Hi Anthere,

> Please do consider that it is probably not worth
> telling us anything under at least a week notice. Not
> enough time to understand, then to translate

Um, how much work is it to translate two text strings? That it may be
hard to understand in some cases is true, we probably need a demo wiki
to better demonstrate functionality (there's one at piclab.com/wiki, but
I don't have access to its code).

> I am officially asking that the international
> wikipedia list be discarded.

I'm not the right person to talk to here, but I tend to agree. The
wikipedia-l list *is* crowded, though, so perhaps we need a different
kind of separation.

> However, also realise that just doing so will prevent
> international wikipedias to have any real involvement
> in general policy matters. Today, in 5 hours, my mail
> box received 85 messages. I do not feel fluent in
> english enough to read all of them.

Your English is more than good enough to be no excuse ;-). Traffic can
get a bit demanding, I agree.

> >Notice that the above policy is not used by anyone
> else either, >so I don't even see why you bring it
> up.

> So, if I follow you, not having other people follow
> policies is enough reason for you not to follow them
> enough ? If so, why are these policies still there ?

They are not. Giskart is, to my knowledge, the first person to bring
this up.

> However, to tell the truth, I won't be able to
> translate your feature for the very good reason that
> though I tried to concentrate very hard on it, I have
> not being able to understand what that checkbox in the
> watch list was all about. I just couldnot figure what
> you were talking about.

OK, here's how it will look. You edit an article:



'''Biology''' is the study of [[life]] and its processes. The term_
biology was coined in the late [[1700s]] by the French naturalist__
Pierre-Antoine de Monet, Jean-Baptiste de [[Lamarck]]. ____________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________


Summary: __________ [ ] This is a minor edit [ ] Watch this article

[Save page] [Show preview]



Note that the above will probably look awful if your e-mail client
displays mail in a proportional font (that is, variable width letters).

The "Watch this article" box, when checked, means that the article will
be added to your watchlist (an existing feature, but previously only
accessible using the "Watch this article" link).

Furthermore, if the user preference "Watch new and modified articles" is
activated, this checkbox will be active by default whenever you edit an
article. You can still deactivate it, though.

Any clearer?

> Also, I have read your proposition (that if I
> understood well you decided to implement today if
> nobody complained about it...maybe some answers are in
> the 85 messages...) about the counting of articles.

That's a misunderstanding, I'll change the navigation bar of the English
Wikipedia only as agreed upon on wikipedia-l. The article count is on my
to do list, but if anyone else wants to implement this, be my guest. If
implemented, it will likely be done in such a way that it will still be
possible to use the previous count.

Regards,

Erik

--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de
Re: Check boxes and other articles counts [ In reply to ]
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Um, how much work is it to translate two text strings? That it may be
>hard to understand in some cases is true, we probably need a demo wiki
>to better demonstrate functionality (there's one at piclab.com/wiki, but
>I don't have access to its code).
>
>
I do, but the source is old, and the database is probably not consistent
with the "live" one. It also contains quite a few dirty hacks of mine
that never made it to the CVS.

I asked for a demo/test wikipedia at least twice, but noone ever listens
to me... ;-)

There should be a little script to remove the source and database at the
test wiki, and replace it with the CVS version and some articles from
the en database (say, all articles starting with "A"). It should be run
every time some changes at the test wiki are commited to the CVS. That
way, we could develop at home, and have all users test it in a
"sandbox", before upgrading the real thing.

Magnus
Re: Check boxes and other articles counts [ In reply to ]
On Die, 2002-11-12 at 11:56, Magnus Manske wrote:

> There should be a little script to remove the source and database at the
> test wiki, and replace it with the CVS version and some articles from
> the en database (say, all articles starting with "A"). It should be run
> every time some changes at the test wiki are commited to the CVS. That
> way, we could develop at home, and have all users test it in a
> "sandbox", before upgrading the real thing.

Sounds reasonable, can you set this up?

I don't think we need to remove/update the database that's there -- we
just need some test data, not current data

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de
Re:Check boxes and other articles counts [ In reply to ]
Message: 8
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Check boxes and other
articles counts
From: Erik Moeller <e.moeller@fokus.gmd.de>
To: wikitech-l@wikipedia.org
Date: 12 Nov 2002 11:06:05 +0100
Reply-To: wikitech-l@wikipedia.org
Hi Anthere,
>> Please do consider that it is probably not worth
>> telling us anything under at least a week notice.
Not
>> enough time to understand, then to translate
>Um, how much work is it to translate two text
strings?

I think there was a misunderstanding there. The time
delay was to discuss something new, not for the
translation. A translation can be done very quickly of
course. It can be changed later on if people don't
like it - by the people who don't like it ;-) (which
is why some part of the fr.wiki are still in english,
some don't like it, but they don't do the job
themselves...)


>That it may be
>hard to understand in some cases is true, we probably
need a >demo wiki

Yes, this would be nice.

>> I am officially asking that the international
>> wikipedia list be discarded.
>I'm not the right person to talk to here, but I tend
to agree.

There is no *right* person. Everybody should be part
of the right person. But the majority don't care, so
it won't be done.

>> However, also realise that just doing so will
prevent
>> international wikipedias to have any real
involvement
>> in general policy matters. Today, in 5 hours, my
mail
>> box received 85 messages. I do not feel fluent in
>> english enough to read all of them.
>Your English is more than good enough to be no excuse
;-). >Traffic can get a bit demanding, I agree.

Nope. Some people are easier to understand than
others. And 85 messages is more than demanding :-)
I got totally lost in Larry's very long and
circonvoluted messages and multiple answers. For sure,
now I have little idea left of who propose what.
And I didnot understand tmc at all;-)

>> However, to tell the truth, I won't be able to
>> translate your feature for the very good reason
that
>> though I tried to concentrate very hard on it, I
have
>> not being able to understand what that checkbox in
the
>> watch list was all about. I just couldnot figure
what
>> you were talking about.
>OK, here's how it will look. You edit an article:
>[Save page] [Show preview]
>Any clearer?

Absolutely. Great idea ! I like it.

>That's a misunderstanding, I'll change the navigation
bar of >the English Wikipedia only as agreed upon on
wikipedia-l. The >article count is on my to do list,
but if anyone else wants to >implement this, be my
guest. If implemented, it will likely be >done in such
a way that it will still be possible to use the
>previous count.

It sometimes is very hard to distinguish what is gonna
be only on the en. and what is gonna be everywhere.

I thank you very much for your answers Erik.


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Re: Check boxes and other articles counts [ In reply to ]
Anthere wrote in part:

>I am officially asking that the international
>wikipedia list be discarded. It is useless, and
>providing the false feeling to international people
>that it is "their" list, and that they don't need to
>register to the *main* *english* one. This is very
>misleading. It would be better not to pretend things,
>but to make them clear.

>However, also realise that just doing so will prevent
>international wikipedias to have any real involvement
>in general policy matters. Today, in 5 hours, my mail
>box received 85 messages. I do not feel fluent in
>english enough to read all of them. I'll discard some
>of them, hoping no essential issue for us was raised,
>for I know nobody else will tell them.

The problem is that we don't have <enwiki-l>.
Whether or not we keep <intlwiki-l>, we need <enwiki-l>.

Mav wrote a post recently about redesigning the lists,
a specific proposal that built on your earlier suggestion.
I could have sworn that he posted it on <intlwiki-l>,
so I hope that you saw it while you were still reading that.


-- Toby