Mailing List Archive

Censorship at meta
I am very upset

very

Yesterday, I wanted to put something on the "what to
do with wikipedia.org" page on meta

Then I realised I could not edit this page because

1. It was made with plenty of special characters and
my editing would break all of them

2. The page was too long anyway, so my editing would
remove the end the page

So, with the best of my energy, I opened this brand
new Opera 6, that sure indeed handle the utf stuff (so
at least I didnot mess with this)

Then, I noticed two things

1. Opera 6 handles very unwell some return to lines
(it seems to transform curiously texts edited in other
editors, and misunderstand returns)

2. For about 1 save among 2, It just crashed, so I had
to do all over again

Consequently, since I want to edit this page without
breaking it, since I know other people also have this
length issue with their browser, and since I think
some of the stuff is less important than others, and
can easily be moved to something like a sub page

I decided to break that page in more pieces. It was to
late to put everything back into good shape. So I did
only part of it, still it took me more than half an
hour, and it was painful to do (restart the browser 8
times)

I took time to explain why I was doing it, in the
comments, and on brion talk page

This morning, I discover that what I tried to do was
considered a sort of vandalism. Everything reverted,
and more people add things on top of it.

As a conclusion
1. I can't do any revert back, or it will lose the new
stuff
2. I lost my time yesterday
3. I can't edit that page again, without breaking
things up, or making some stuff disappear. In other
words, either I am a vandal (if I edit) or I am
censored (If I don't)
4. What I did was utterly misconsidered, and abused by
Mav, who didnot even "try" to understand why I was
doing it.

So, I am very upset





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Re: Censorship at meta [ In reply to ]
Anthere,

I agree that we need to figure out how we can make large pages work
better. There have been plenty of problem reports regarding that.

What do you think about the external editor support I proposed in a recent
message to wikitech? That would allow you to edit a page directly using
gvim, emacs or any editor you like.

Furthermore, perhaps we need to set some limit by policy for what the
maximum length of a page should be. This should be as high as possible, so
perhaps you can help us with finding out at which length browsers start
having problems.

Regards,

Erik
Re: Censorship at meta [ In reply to ]
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller@gmx.de> wrote:
> Anthere,

Erik, thanks for acknowledging the technological part
of my message

> I agree that we need to figure out how we can make
> large pages work
> better. There have been plenty of problem reports
> regarding that.
>
> What do you think about the external editor support
> I proposed in a recent
> message to wikitech? That would allow you to edit a
> page directly using
> gvim, emacs or any editor you like.

You didnot understand me apparently. I can very well
edit in the wiki window. But Opera 6 makes some weird
transformations of texts *edited in external editors*
by *other people*. So, the pb is not entirely me, it's
others too.
That's probably an encoding issue. As if somehow <br>
were transformed in <p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>

Plus, Opera 6 crashes for most save, hence it is not
possible to use it anyway

> Furthermore, perhaps we need to set some limit by
> policy for what the
> maximum length of a page should be. This should be
> as high as possible, so
> perhaps you can help us with finding out at which
> length browsers start
> having problems.

I can save you anytime again the "what to do with
wikipedia.org". You'll see where that cut the page
very well, and should be able to automatically count
the number of characters.

But probably, some sysop will revert my changes before
you have time to look at the differences easily.

Last week I was a fascist, this week I am a vandal,
next week ???

Regards

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Re: Censorship at meta [ In reply to ]
On Sunday 19 January 2003 04:00 am, wikitech-l-request@wikipedia.org wrote:
> As a conclusion
> 1. I can't do any revert back, or it will lose the new
> stuff
> 2. I lost my time yesterday
> 3. I can't edit that page again, without breaking
> things up, or making some stuff disappear. In other
> words, either I am a vandal (if I edit) or I am
> censored (If I don't)
> 4. What I did was utterly misconsidered, and abused by
> Mav, who didnot even "try" to understand why I was
> doing it.
>
> So, I am very upset

I am sorry that I made you upset, but I looked at the diffs - all that was
done was breaking off a couple of proposals onto separate pages. Was there
other editing that you did? If there was I didn't see it.

The revert was needed due to the fact that your browser (I know it wasn't you
on purpose) inserted HUGE amounts of whitespace inbetween each and every
line. See the revert diff here
http://meta.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.org&diff=4618&oldid=4617
notice all the extra spacing that was deleted and also the two proposals that
were pasted back-in.

I would have done what I normally do in these cases and perform version
management but the proposals you moved were still very relevant to the
current discussion. It will take only a few minutes to delete these proposals
and provide links to the new pages you created.

So even though I still don't think it is such a good idea, I've already done
this. Now look at this diff
http://meta.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.org&diff=0&oldid=4617
the only difference between your last version and the newest one is all the
white space placed into your version.

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
RE: Censorship at meta [ In reply to ]
>Last week I was a fascist, this week I am a vandal,
>next week ???
>
>Regards

Nobody is calling you a vandal - the only issue here is that your choice of
browser/platform and the Wikipedia software for some reason try to kill each
other.

-- mav
Re: RE: Censorship at meta [ In reply to ]
--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >Last week I was a fascist, this week I am a vandal,
> >next week ???
> >
> >Regards
>
> Nobody is calling you a vandal - the only issue here
> is that your choice of
> browser/platform and the Wikipedia software for some
> reason try to kill each
> other.
>
> -- mav

None of my plateform/browsers (5) know meta.wiki
language well. Some don't handle long conversations.
Some are troubled by complicated conversations, so
they add blanks in the conversation to give themselves
more time to understand. Others just plain don't
understand some of the words used.

None of my plateform/browsers (5) know meta.wiki
language well.
When they speak, they make many mistakes. They don't
make themselves be understood very well. Good browsers
get tired with them.

None of my plateform/browsers (5) know meta.wiki
language well.
So, maybe that's better they give up trying to speak.


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Re: Re: Censorship at meta [ In reply to ]
On dim, 2003-01-19 at 04:32, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> The revert was needed due to the fact that your browser (I know it wasn't you
> on purpose) inserted HUGE amounts of whitespace inbetween each and every
> line.

That is *not* grounds for reverting the changes made, particularly
without explanation. It wouldn't have been that hard to remove the
whitespace and note the problem in the talk page, would it?

> See the revert diff here
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.org&diff=4618&oldid=4617
> notice all the extra spacing that was deleted and also the two proposals that
> were pasted back-in.

They were broken out to separate pages; I agree with that. The single
page was waaayyy too cluttered, and it was confusing to see what was
what.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Re: Censorship at meta [ In reply to ]
Anthere wrote:
> Last week I was a fascist, this week I am a vandal,
> next week ???

Next week, a hero. Such is the way of the world.

Seriously, this sounds to me like some kind of unfortunate
misunderstanding. I don't think anyone could seriously consider you
to be a vandal.

--Jimbo
Re: Censorship at meta [ In reply to ]
On Monday 20 January 2003 04:00 am, Brion Vibber wrote:
> That is *not* grounds for reverting the changes made, particularly
> without explanation. It wouldn't have been that hard to remove the
> whitespace and note the problem in the talk page, would it?

There were hundreds of lines of whitespace, removing it without resorting to a
revert would have taken at least a half an hour and probably longer.

But yes, I should have explained in as nice a way as possible, just why I did
the revert on the talk page. For that I am sorry.

--mav
Re: Re: Censorship at meta [ In reply to ]
On lun, 2003-01-20 at 16:04, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> On Monday 20 January 2003 04:00 am, Brion Vibber wrote:
> > That is *not* grounds for reverting the changes made, particularly
> > without explanation. It wouldn't have been that hard to remove the
> > whitespace and note the problem in the talk page, would it?
>
> There were hundreds of lines of whitespace, removing it without resorting to a
> revert would have taken at least a half an hour and probably longer.

You clearly need to get a better text editor! That should be a single
search-and-replace operation; change double line breaks to single line
breaks.

In NEdit (http://nedit.org/), that'll be:
paste (middle click)
replace (ctrl+r)
click 'Regular Expression'
enter '\n\n' for 'String to find'
enter '\n' for 'Replace With'
hit 'Replace all in Window'.
select all, then paste it back into web browser.

> But yes, I should have explained in as nice a way as possible, just why I did
> the revert on the talk page. For that I am sorry.

Sorry you got caught, eh? ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Re: Re: Censorship at meta [ In reply to ]
On Die, 2003-01-21 at 01:35, Brion Vibber wrote:

> You clearly need to get a better text editor!

That would be a good recommendation, but alas, Mozilla currently has a
limit of 4000 bytes for copy & pasting under Linux (or 1024, according
to some), making it very cumbersome to edit large articles externally.
Konqueror also has copy&paste limits (I suspect that the X clipboard
code is terribly broken). Some people have resorted to text editors like
w3m specifically for editing wikis (these usually support calling
external editors), but for most of us, that's not an option. Under
Windows, none of this is a problem, though.

See also my external editor support suggestion:
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-January/002154.html

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de
Re: Re: Censorship at meta [ In reply to ]
On Tue, Jan 21, 2003 at 09:46:28AM +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
> That would be a good recommendation, but alas, Mozilla currently has a
> limit of 4000 bytes for copy & pasting under Linux (or 1024, according
> to some), making it very cumbersome to edit large articles externally.
> Konqueror also has copy&paste limits (I suspect that the X clipboard
> code is terribly broken).

This claim surprised me as I have been successfully copy&pasting
in both Mozilla and Konqueror for ages.

To check it, I just tried some 52kB article, and I can copy&paste it
from Konq to Moz and from Moz to Konq without any problems.

$ konqueror --version
Qt: 3.1.1
KDE: 3.1.90 (CVS >= 20030109)
Konqueror: 3.1.0
$ mozilla --version
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021226 Debian/1.2.1-9, build 2002122616
Re: Re: Censorship at meta [ In reply to ]
On Die, 2003-01-21 at 11:17, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

> This claim surprised me as I have been successfully copy&pasting
> in both Mozilla and Konqueror for ages.

See
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56219
(and various duplicates thereof)

> To check it, I just tried some 52kB article, and I can copy&paste it
> from Konq to Moz and from Moz to Konq without any problems.

The behavior is very unpredictable and depends on a number of
circumstances (one of which seems to be line length). It happens more
with some applications (gvim->Mozilla/Konq, for example) than with
others. It sometimes happens with PRIMARY, and sometimes with CLIPBOARD,
sometimes with both. I really have no time to document all the instances
where I get a nice result like "ˆS" instead of the text I supposedly
pasted, and where I get nothing at all. Suffice it to say that the
clipboard under Linux is horribly broken in general, and anyone who says
otherwise hasn't used it much.

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de
Re: Re: Censorship at meta [ In reply to ]
On Tue, Jan 21, 2003 at 11:41:45AM +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
> On Die, 2003-01-21 at 11:17, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> > To check it, I just tried some 52kB article, and I can copy&paste it
> > from Konq to Moz and from Moz to Konq without any problems.
>
> The behavior is very unpredictable and depends on a number of
> circumstances (one of which seems to be line length). It happens more
> with some applications (gvim->Mozilla/Konq, for example) than with
> others. It sometimes happens with PRIMARY, and sometimes with CLIPBOARD,
> sometimes with both. I really have no time to document all the instances
> where I get a nice result like "ˆS" instead of the text I supposedly
> pasted, and where I get nothing at all. Suffice it to say that the
> clipboard under Linux is horribly broken in general, and anyone who says
> otherwise hasn't used it much.

I use it a lot, and even program it sometimes, and IT IS NOT BROKEN AT ALL.
Re: Re: Censorship at meta [ In reply to ]
On Die, 2003-01-21 at 14:23, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

> I use it a lot, and even program it sometimes, and IT IS NOT BROKEN AT ALL.

Read the Mozilla bug. It works better (but still not good enough, some
clipboard content gets broken) with emacs than with other editors,
apparently because emacs uses different clipboard code. There are
similar, reproducible problems with Konqueror and standard aplications
(where Mozilla doesn't paste at all, Konqueror pastes two random
characters). And there's annoying stuff like Konqueror forgetting
clipboard contents upon closing etc.

I've tested this with various systems and distributions and can say with
authority: The X clipboard is a royal pain in the ass. But you're free
to live in denial ..

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de
Re: Re: Censorship at meta [ In reply to ]
On mar, 2003-01-21 at 00:46, Erik Moeller wrote:
> On Die, 2003-01-21 at 01:35, Brion Vibber wrote:
> > You clearly need to get a better text editor!
>
> That would be a good recommendation, but alas, Mozilla currently has a
> limit of 4000 bytes for copy & pasting under Linux (or 1024, according
> to some), making it very cumbersome to edit large articles externally.

I sometimes have trouble pasting _in_ to Mozilla (workaround: save the
file and open it in Mozilla, then copy & paste between Moz windows), but
never copying out.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Re: Censorship at meta [ In reply to ]
On Tuesday 21 January 2003 02:57 am, Brion Vibber wrote:
> You clearly need to get a better text editor! That should be a single
> search-and-replace operation; change double line breaks to single line
> breaks.

Just as I thought - it /is/ a technical problem with a technical solution.
Thank you giving me the needed information to relatively easily fix these
types of broken pages. Brion the the rescue again! :-)

Sorry you got caught, eh? ;)

Ha ha - no. I felt perfectly justified in what I did since, in my view, it was
the best thing for the page. I wasn't trying to cover anything up (if that
even is possible in a wiki). The only thing I regret is that I did this in
what can only be described as a cold and possibly heartless mannor: I should
have explained what I did and why in order to prevent Anthere from thinking
that I thought the page was vandalized. For that I am sorry.

--mav (If I post any more often to this list, I'm going to have to work on
Wikikarma for Wikitech-l too. Unfortunately I'm coding illiterate - so I
better just reduce the number of posts I make to this list ;-)
Re: Re: Censorship at meta [ In reply to ]
--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday 21 January 2003 02:57 am, Brion Vibber
> Sorry you got caught, eh? ;)
>
> Ha ha - no. I felt perfectly justified in what I did
> since, in my view, it was
> the best thing for the page. I wasn't trying to
> cover anything up (if that
> even is possible in a wiki). The only thing I regret
> is that I did this in
> what can only be described as a cold and possibly
> heartless mannor: I should
> have explained what I did and why in order to
> prevent Anthere from thinking
> that I thought the page was vandalized. For that I
> am sorry.

Well, thank you for cleaning up my mess Mav. My
apologies for the extra work

> --mav (If I post any more often to this list, I'm
> going to have to work on
> Wikikarma for Wikitech-l too. Unfortunately I'm
> coding illiterate - so I
> better just reduce the number of posts I make to
> this list ;-)

No Wikikarma today, but I'll drop a word about the bug
on the Mac.Opera mailing list for the sake of my soul.
That will be about the biggest technical contribution
I could make ;-)

(along with reporting bugs)

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