Mailing List Archive

wiki pedista wrote:
>
> I was thinking about a printed wikipedia.
> Enciclopedias usually are printed in alphabetical
> order. As there is no absolute order in wikipedia, we
> have named the articles with the best possible
> article, but not the one that would be correctly files
> if ordered. For example, the biographies are listed
> with the proper name first, while
> in a printed work we would look for it by last name...
> detailed articles about history, economy, etc. of
> countries would be all printed together, and far away
> from the country itself, and so on.
>
> Would it be possible to add a tag for each article
> that says where should it be placed in an
> alphabetically ordered list? For example, in Bill
> Clinton the tag would
> be something like <alpha>Clinton, Bill</alpha> or
> something like that.
>
> What do you think?
>
> AstroNomer
>
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Hi AstroNomer,

That is possible but not necessary (in my opnion).
Better rename all pages, and let a script repair
all backward links, than introducing an extra tag
to the wiki-language. If agreement can be reached
on how an article SHOULD be named, rename it.
In other words: articles already have a "name"
that can be lexically ordered, please don't
introduce anything new which is not strictly
necessary. Sorry :-)

Kind regards,
Pieter

Pieter Suurmond wrote:

>wiki pedista wrote:
>
>
>>Would it be possible to add a tag for each article
>>that says where should it be placed in an
>>alphabetically ordered list? For example, in Bill
>>Clinton the tag would
>>be something like <alpha>Clinton, Bill</alpha> or
>>something like that.
>>
>>What do you think?
>>
>>
>>
>That is possible but not necessary (in my opnion).
>Better rename all pages, and let a script repair
>all backward links, than introducing an extra tag
>to the wiki-language. If agreement can be reached
>on how an article SHOULD be named, rename it.
>In other words: articles already have a "name"
>that can be lexically ordered, please don't
>introduce anything new which is not strictly
>necessary. Sorry :-)
>
>
Um, no, we should definitely NOT move [[Bill Clinton]] to [[Clinton, Bill]]

We are dealing with two very different things. The "wiki name" must be
what people find easy to link to, and what looks good to Google. thus:
"Bill Clinton".

"Clinton, Bill" is a "paper name".
We will at one point want to produce paper output, so I think it's a
good idea to start coding these in now.

Another idea I had along these lines was to create some synonyms for
#REDIRECT:

#ALTERNATIVE <-- future paper edition will want this entry as a "see foo".





>
>

> We will at one point want to produce paper output, so I think it's a
> good idea to start coding these in now.

No, please make a different project for this. I already hate the
interlanguage links, we don't need more of this meta stuff in the
article source text.

I don't want to know how many people hit on "Edit", see the
interlanguage links ([[ru:%D0%9C%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%82]] ...)
and think that it's too complicated to edit articles.

What about the idea to keep these in a separate database (and not in the
article)? I think this was discussed before, but nobody seems to be
motivated enough to code it.


Kurt

On Fri, Jan 24, 2003 at 02:35:32AM +0100, Kurt Jansson wrote:
> I don't want to know how many people hit on "Edit", see the
> interlanguage links ([[ru:%D0%9C%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%82]] ...)
> and think that it's too complicated to edit articles.

That's because there's no Unicode on English Wikipedia.
No such problem on Polish.

wiki pedista wrote:
> I was thinking about a printed wikipedia.

I would bet $5 that this will never happen.

Plus you would have to print it in pencil, so the reader can erase and
rewrite. :-)


--
Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
tel +46-70-7891609
http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/

> > I don't want to know how many people hit on "Edit", see the
> > interlanguage links ([[ru:%D0%9C%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%82]]
...)
> > and think that it's too complicated to edit articles.
>
> That's because there's no Unicode on English Wikipedia.
> No such problem on Polish.

I got this from the Polish MainPage:

[[af:HomePage]][[en:Main Page]][[ar:HomePage]][[eu:HomePage]][[cs:Main
Page]][[zh:Main
Page]][[da:Forside]][[eo:%C4%88efpa%C4%9Do]][[et:HomePage]][[fi:HomePage
]][[fr:Accueil]][[fy:HomePage]][[es:Portada]][[nl:Hoofdpagina]][[ja:Main
Page]][[ca:HomePage]][[ko:&#45824;&#47928;]][[la:HomePage]][[ms:Main
Page]][[de:Hauptseite]][[no:HomePage]][[pt:HomePage]][[ru:Main
Page]][[sh:HomePage]][[sl:HomePage]][[sv:HomePage]][[simple:HomePage]][[
it:HomePage]]

It's not the entities or whatever they're called, it's the sheer amount
of "code" that many people won't understand the first time they hit
"Edit". And it's getting more and more. I guess we'll see some new
Wikipedias this year :-)


Kurt

Kurt Jansson wrote:

>>We will at one point want to produce paper output, so I think it's a
>>good idea to start coding these in now.
>>
>>
>
>No, please make a different project for this. I already hate the
>interlanguage links, we don't need more of this meta stuff in the
>article source text.
>
>I don't want to know how many people hit on "Edit", see the
>interlanguage links ([[ru:%D0%9C%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%82]] ...)
>and think that it's too complicated to edit articles.
>
>What about the idea to keep these in a separate database (and not in the
>article)? I think this was discussed before, but nobody seems to be
>motivated enough to code it.
>
>
>
A separate field for meta-information could be good. AT the very least,
we could agree to put them at the *foot * of the text.

What happened to the suggestion to somehow centralise language links? At
the moment, if one article is interlinked between 3 languages, adding a
4th is a pain in the .....

>
>

Lars Aronsson wrote:
> wiki pedista wrote:
> > I was thinking about a printed wikipedia.
>
> I would bet $5 that this will never happen.

You're on. :-)

I think wikipedista's suggestion has some merit, and most of the
discussion about it has centered on technical questions (i.e. separate
database table versus in-the-article versus...)

On the other hand, I think that when someone gets ready to make a
print version, the amount of labor required to list all the articles
and go through reversing the titles for some is pretty small,
especially as compared to the total labor required to 'filter/edit'
the entries to eliminate useless stubs and so on.

So I conclude, tenatively, that this aspect of what we are doing
doesn't pose much of a barrier to a paper encyclopedia, and that the
added complexity is *probably* not worth it *right at the moment*.

Now, if there arises a community desire and effort for us (the
wikipedia community) to produce a paper version (rather than leaving
it up to some future 'RedHat'-style redistributor), then we'll want
to add a simple means for lots of people to jump in and lend a hand
with whatever is needed.

On Fri, Jan 24, 2003 at 04:52:33AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Lars Aronsson wrote:
> > wiki pedista wrote:
> > > I was thinking about a printed wikipedia.
> >
> > I would bet $5 that this will never happen.
>
> You're on. :-)
>
> I think wikipedista's suggestion has some merit, and most of the
> discussion about it has centered on technical questions (i.e. separate
> database table versus in-the-article versus...)
>
> On the other hand, I think that when someone gets ready to make a
> print version, the amount of labor required to list all the articles
> and go through reversing the titles for some is pretty small,
> especially as compared to the total labor required to 'filter/edit'
> the entries to eliminate useless stubs and so on.
>
> So I conclude, tenatively, that this aspect of what we are doing
> doesn't pose much of a barrier to a paper encyclopedia, and that the
> added complexity is *probably* not worth it *right at the moment*.
>
> Now, if there arises a community desire and effort for us (the
> wikipedia community) to produce a paper version (rather than leaving
> it up to some future 'RedHat'-style redistributor), then we'll want
> to add a simple means for lots of people to jump in and lend a hand
> with whatever is needed.

My opinion is that it's very unlikely someone will ever produce
paper version of full Wikipedia, but it's likely that someone
will put major part of Wikipedia (for example, everything related
to chemistry or discrete math) to paper quite soon (this year that is).

tarquin wrote:
> Um, no, we should definitely NOT move [[Bill Clinton]] to [[Clinton, Bill]]
>
> We are dealing with two very different things. The "wiki name" must be
> what people find easy to link to, and what looks good to Google. thus:
> "Bill Clinton".
>
> "Clinton, Bill" is a "paper name".
> We will at one point want to produce paper output, so I think it's a
> good idea to start coding these in now.
>
> Another idea I had along these lines was to create some synonyms for
> #REDIRECT:
>
> #ALTERNATIVE <-- future paper edition will want this entry as a "see foo".


Ah, all right.
I thought you had a relational database for FINDING things.
Besides that, you already invented the "#REDIRECT:"-thing for
this purpose. But now you're even inventing a third new thing?!

Why is Wiki so successful?
Because the whole concept is so neat and simple. I really love it!
Please let's keep it that way. I personally like to think more about
reducing things (like banning html-input) than about extending things.

Let's first straighten out the Wiki-syntax, before complicating things
even further.

Sorry if I'm bothering you guys.
I am not against a paper-version, please don't get me wrong. I'm
just warning you software-developers: make things simple instead
of complicated.

Best wishes to you all!!!,
Pieter Suurmond