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User talk:Brion VIBBER (archive)

Brion, I just noticed you had italicized some of the words in the Bats article I wrote. Please note that only genus and species names should be italicized in Linnaean taxonomy, and not any other level of taxon.
-Aidan

Ach, very well. Brion VIBBER

Cool! Thanks Brion. What did you have to do to fix it? maveric149

Don't thank me too soon, the bug was my fault too. :) In the function that strips out unwanted HTML tags, there's a buglet that causes the whole process to stop dead if it found too many closing tags -- there was an extra </font> tag in there which set it off. D'oh! Hopefully Jimbo will install the patch soon, but until then just make sure you have at least as many opening tags as closing tags...

Fair enough. So all the text was still there in the edit mode then? If that is the case, then I owe you an apology - I should have looked first before I threw a temper-tantrum. I then would have realized it was a rendering issue, and not an actual deletion. maveric149

Quite all right, I'd be throwing temper-tantrums too if my baby came up that badly broken! --BV

I love the macrons in the rubi. Had no idea how one would do that. -- Olof

Ahh, the wonders of Unicode! If you have (lots of) spare time, take a look through the Unicode character charts (http://www.unicode.org/charts/). Most people with current computers should have fonts that include everything in Basic Latin, Latin-1 supplement, Latin Extended-A, Greek, Cyrillic, and some other bits. Hmm, here's a shortcut (http://www.hclrss.demon.co.uk/demos/wgl4) that lists just the characters in the default Microsoft fonts (http://www.microsoft.com/typography/). --BV 2002/03/12

Are you sure that Soderbergh's Solaris is remake? I heard that this will be new adaptation of the book. That's why i decided to put two Solaris (movie), one for Tarkowsky (with future intention of added wikipedia contains spoilers etc) and second for future Soderbergh. szopen

Well, I consider it a remake in that it's another movie based on the same story. I consider the recent Tim Burton Planet of the Apes movie to be a remake, even though it's not really closely based on the 1968 film, but both are based (loosely) on the book La Planète des singes. Of course, even the first movie was a remake of the book, when you think about it. :) In general I think it's preferable to keep multiple incarnations of the same thing on the same page where appropriate, particularly when there's roughly zero information on at least one of them. If and when there's a reason to separate Soderberghe's version, we can do so. --BV

one more thing - could you possibly look at Stanislaw Lem entry? It seems there is something wrong with software - just look how it begins... szopen

Yeah, as I mentioned at the bottom of wikipedia:Bug reports, I accidentally broke that feature such that inter-wiki links with % signs (used for url-encoding as a hack until we move to UTF-8) are rejected. Until Jimbo installs my patch to fix it again, either ignore it (grrrr) or switch things to ASCII-based redirects. --BV

Incubus? Charm? I think I would have to disagree with you on this one... but it is pretty funny for those who speak Esperanto! It was incredibly hilarious to watch with other Esperanto speakers in Philly. Although I have to admit that the funniest experience I think I had at those things was on the New York subway when a guy asked us what language we were speaking: "Well, we're all really Americans, but we're speaking the international language, Esperanto!" and the guy replied, "What? Is this some kind of joke?!" :-) --Chuck Smith

Well, I've always loved those old Twilight Zone and Outer Limits episodes, and Incubus feels just like one, krom ĝia esperanteco. As well it should, having been made by the same people that did The Outer Limits. For a real hoot though, run William Shatner's commentary track on the DVD sometime. Sadly, the commentary's not in Esperanto. :) --BV

Nice Brion putting in the main page a link to Slovene Wikipedia. As for now I am the only one Slovene wikipedian and I do hope this will change soon, 'cause Wikipedia really means something. I just want you to correct a typo mistake if it is possible. It is not slovenkso but slovensko. Thank you in advance, man. I can give some assistance on Wikipedian's geographical maps in non-English if it is needed. --XJam [2002.29.03] 5 Friday (0)

Oops, gess i cant spel... Fixed it. Help with the maps would be great! Get me a list of the country names and whatever other text belongs there appropriately translated and I'll happily put up a slovene version. --BV

I've finally move the incorrect Slovene pages from http://si.wikipedia.com to http://sl.wikipedia.com . I hope this will make things clearer about Slovene and Sinhalese languages. Brion, please correct once again the protected main page for the right link. --XJam [2002.06.03] 1 Monday (0)

Great, thanks! If you notice any other oddities in the lists, let me know (or just fix 'em). Brion VIBBER

Many thanks for the quick response on user 62.98.various. I really should get off my duff and write for a sysop password... your help is much appreciated. -- April

Hi Brion, God-of-Wiki-Tech :) Maveric said I should copy this note here because you'd be better able to help me with it. I have no idea why but I had a big problem with the Bug Report page:

Maybe you can help me? I'm getting very frustrated by things that don't work today and I don't know if it's because I'm doing it wrong or not... I tried to search for 'May 23' to see if anyone else had done a birthdate fill-in, but I got a Boolean error because 'May' is less than four letters long!' So I thought I'd report it on the bug reports page, only when I loaded the screen and hit 'edit' it loaded the appropriate window - but then it wouldn't let me add any new text to the page! It it locked? Or at maximum length? Maybe somebody who knows what they're doing needs to make a 'Bug Reports Page 2'... or maybe I've just totally screwed up because I'm an ignorant newbie! Also, when I typed 'help' into the search box to see if there was another help page to give me a clue, I got no results... I find it hard to believe that no articles anywhere in the entire Wikipedia use the world 'help' in them! I'm bewildered... KJ

As far as searching, there are some problems with the search function (short words break, and some words just don't come up with any results) and we're working on fixing that. After the next upgrade, it should automatically fall back to a slower, but more thorough, search method if it doesn't get any results.

As for editing long pages... what browser, what operating system, and what version of everything are you using? The longer pages seem to be particularly troublesome for some people; there've been some reports about Internet Explorer 5.5 on Mac OS giving some kind of beeping noise when trying to edit (unfortunately I can't test this, as I don't have a Mac), and there are known problems with Mozilla 0.9.9 (can't submit long pages) and in general (editing is very very slow when the sidebar is enabled, especially for longer pages).

For the Mozilla problems, you can work around it by upgrading to a nightly build that has the submit bug fixed (see http://mozilla.org/, down in the right-bottom corner) and by disabling the sidebar in your Wikipedia preferences for the slow-edit bug. For the Mac IE bug, I don't know. :( For anything else, I also don't know yet! But I'll try to help... Knowing exactly what the problem is should help with that; does your browser refuse to let you type text? Or can you type, but saving your changes doesn't work? Brion VIBBER, Sunday, April 7, 2002

I'm using Netscape and I think the problem MIGHT have been with my computer. I had a similar incident with my diary a few hours later, where keyboard apparantly stopped responding. I restarted netscape and it was fine. During the problem I couldn't type any text into the textbox. Hopefully it won't recur! I just worked with a wiki page that was every bit as long as the bug reports screen and it worked fine. KJ

Hey Brion -- Do you know if there is a way to prevent Google from indexing and displaying wikipedia edit-links in google searches? As it is right now, even these pages (which shouldn't really exist -- right?) are indexed by Google and presented in search results. Not sure if this is a bug, mis-feature or even a feature in somebody's mind, but this may be the main source of many of the "Describe the new page here." pages come from (which has been a major maintenance issue that is eating up the time of several sysops). I’ve been tracking many of the IP's that create these pages and most never return. So I don't think that these people are purposely creating these pages as a kind of vandalism, they are just understandably confused when they click on a link from google (http://www.google.com/search?as_q=&num=10&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=California+State+University&as_oq=&as_eq=&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all&as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=www.wikipedia.com&safe=images) titled Editing California State University (http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/California+State+University&action=edit) and are presented with a text box with the words "Describe the new page here." -- hell, I might even have hit the Save button a couple of times in my pre-wiki days. Any help would be greatly appreciated. --maveric149

Yeah, that's possible... Okay, the issue is that currently the edit links look like this: http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/User_talk:Brion_VIBBER&action=edit. A web search crawler has no way of knowing that that's a dynamic page that it shouldn't be messing with. If we used the full URL, ie http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Brion_VIBBER&action=edit, it might be clearer... maybe. Leastwise, looking in google, I don't see edit pages showing up in my google searches when checking the perl-based wikis, where the URL is like http://eo.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?action=edit&id=Brion_VIBBER/Priparolu. On the other hand, ?-ed URLs for viewing articles do show from both on the perl- and php- wikis (look for things on the meta wiki, it's still running on all-explicit URLs without the /wiki/ alias); perhaps google is playing some kind of guessing game, where "something=edit" in a URL with a query string gets ignored? I don't know... arrrgghh... Brion VIBBER, Friday, May 3, 2002

You could probably help things by putting ".../wiki.phtml..." in wikipedia.com's ROBOTS.TXT file. --LDC

Hey Brion,

I got into a bit of trouble awhile back by accidentally deleting The German Ideology from the database. This page was created as a blank page by a newbie back when the server was moving VERY slowly. I hit delete several times over the period of an hour and kept getting timeouts. Apparently, somebody was actually working on the article at the same time, saved, and then I deleted that version without knowing somebody spent time creating an article out of the blank page. Is there a way to recover deleted material that was deleted within minutes of being created? --maveric149

I don't know if it still works this way, but a couple of weeks ago I found that if you recreated a deleted page (for example, if you were to go to The German Ideology and just type in random junk then save it), the history link would then allow you to access the prior history of the deleted page. I'll test and see if that's still the case... Bryan Derksen, Saturday, May 18, 2002 -- Nope, sorry, doesn't appear to work any more. Bryan Derksen, Saturday, May 18, 2002

There's not an explicit 'undelete' function yet, but the delete function is set up in anticipation of one; the deleted page is still (or at least, should still be) kept in the old versions table, but unlinked so it doesn't show up in the regular page history list. Poking around in the old table, I do see a "Describe the new page here." page for The_German_Ideology dated April 21, but I don't see a more recent version (or one with content). If there was in fact a more recent version saved, it seems to be gone now, sorry. Brion VIBBER, Saturday, May 18, 2002

Thanks for the info -- maybe the article wasn't saved correctly in the first place because of the ridiculously slow performance of the server that day (there was much weirdness going on that day). Perhaps I did only delete the "Describe the new page here." page like I thought... Perhaps some of the performance issues caused something unexpected to happen with eithe the save or delete... Perhaps... Anyway I tried. Thanks again for your help. --maveric149

What do I need to remove an uploaded file that shouldn't be here? Specifically, a user called Mushroomhead[?] whose user page is blank and who has no record of working on any articles, has uploaded a file called "ACDC - For Those About To Rock.mp3"; even if ACDC doesn't object, Wikipedia isn't an MP3 server. Vicki Rosenzweig

If you have been declared a sysop, you can click "delete X" from the list in special:Upload (the list is in filesystem order, so you might need to search for the filename to find it). If not, just create a blank file with the same name on your computer, and upload it over the objectionable material. It can then be completely deleted later. (About this file specifically though, see my comment below.) Brion VIBBER, Tuesday, May 21, 2002

Deleted. For some reason that file hadn't shown up on the Uploads page yet so I typed http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/special:upload&removeFile=ACDC - For Those About To Rock.mp3 which seemed to work. --maveric149

The file also didn't show up when I tried to access it directly -- I don't believe the upload went through in the first place. (The uploads page is really in need of a rewrite; it says "upload succeeded!" and logs it without actually checking to see if it succeeded. Ditto on deletes - try deleting a random file that doesn't exist, and it'll happily tell you it did it.) Brion VIBBER, Tuesday, May 21, 2002

Hey Brion, I just had an interesting idea (well, at least I think it's interesting) about how we could track IPs after they are removed from the block list or on some kind of "warning list". We could place the offender's IP into a "probation list" such as the one I've started at Wikipedia:IP probation watchlist. My question is this: would it be possible to change the way IP numbers on such a "watchlist" would show up in RecentChanges? As it is right now, there really is no practical way to have such a watchlist -- unless you are a phycho like me and compare IPs on my own list with ones on RecentChanges (I don't like blocking IPs, and when I do I try to limit the time period of the block which means I have to periodically check the IPs contribs). A lot of IPs seem to have been kept blocked for longer than really are warrented by the limited damage that was done (well, that's my view anyway). This is especially troubling since so many IPs are dynamic and change after a few weeks (if not the next time the person dials-up to their ISP). Just wondering if this would be possible, I'm not advocating it yet. --maveric149

Sure, I suppose that could be done pretty easily. Particularly if you're only concerned about checking the author of the most recent edit (assuming that any vandalism would have been removed by the next contributor). --Brion VIBBER

Cool! Do you think this is something we should bother the list with? (I'm leaving town for 4 days starting tomorrow so I won't be able to be part of the any policy discussion) --maveric149

Probably should, since this means adding a sysop-level function (or else, letting anybody add to the "ip probation" list...) Brion VIBBER

I'll do this first thing after I get back. Thanks! --maveric149

Thanks for the info about the changed Stats - I looked at the diff linik you gave, but the headache seems to be fading now :) user:Verloren

Thanks for the info on the / page deletion workaround. BTW, do you think it would be possible, or even desirable, to write a script that automatically removes entries from the "Votes for deletion" page when a listed entry is deleted? --maveric149

Sure, sounds reasonable to me. There's a potential to eat up extra text if the page has been manually misformatted just so... But, if the old version is maintained, that can be corrected if/when it happens. --Brion VIBBER

Cool. It's not particularly important -- just would be nice thing to have if you or another developer decided to do it. Thanx again! --maveric149

Hey Brion, you are probably already aware of this, but when a page is administratively moved the history of the moved page gets majorly truncated usually only leaving who created it and the person that last edited it before the move. Is this a feature or a bug? If it is a bug do you know when it will be fixed? Also, if it is a feature I would like to request that the entire history of pages be moved -- which only makes sense to me (esp. on pages that have extensive histories such as the improperly named Tables of Chinese Sovereigns -- I don't want to move this unless I can be sure that the complete history will also move over). Later! --maveric149

Yep, I was talking about the moved history. For example I just made a few edits to the improperly capitalized and pluralized Cigarette Cards article and then administratively moved it to Cigarette card. Here is a screenshot (http://www.wikipedia.com/upload/maveric149-tempfile.png) of the history before the move and here is a link (http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=Cigarette_card&action=history) to the histoy after the move. Minor edits as well as regular ones are lost inbetween the first and last edits. Notice that the creation and edit times have also changed (dates are also affected). For the mass majority of the articles in the database this isn't too important but for some that have alot of edit activity this may become an issue. --maveric149

As I just explained on your talk page and on wikipedia-l, the edits are not lost, only the dates. The items being missing from the history list is an artifact of the sorting used in retrieving items for display. Exact dates of older edits that have been munged by this bug can be manually restored, if and only if they're recorded elsewhere. (Eg, that screenshot; older database snapshots, etc.) --Brion VIBBER

Should I modify what I am telling the other sysops then? If so then go ahead and modify what I stated on Magnus' page and I will copy this onto the talks of the other sysops. --maveric149

Oh, what you're telling them is true enough. It shouldn't be used until the fix is installed! (BTW, I just fixed the dates on Cigarette card (http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Cigarette+card&action=history), though the accuracy is only to the nearest minute.) --Brion

Hmm, should I remove all that obsolete discussion of bugs or just leave it there with a disclaimer that the administrative move function is now happy and bug-free, and you should use it as often as possible? I think the latter. --Brion

Thanks for fixing my typo. :) --mav

Well, if Denmark then geography... but if not Denmark, then what? I knew that couldn't be right... --Brion

Hey Brion,

I just cam across an interesting bug for you and want to know if it is affecting anyone else; I tried editing User talk: Rlee0001[?] and got this error:

Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/Article.php on line 1003

Which is the exact same thing that pops up to anybody trying to edit a page when their IP is blocked (try it yourself, this version allows you to unblock your IP afterwards). Trouble is that it only has occurred for me on that particular talk page (your's too) - and no I didn?t have myself blocked at the time (but I did for most of the week for my work IP though? I'm currently at work). Weirder still is that nobody else seems to be having trouble editing that page. Also, replacing the 'R' of Rlee0001 in the edit URL of User talk:Rlee0001 with an 'r' provided me with an edit window (had to do the same thing here). But then I didn't have any problem editing user:the Anome's talk page or my talk page (both are user names that were created with lowercased starting letters) or any other one I tried. This may have something to do with my work computer so I will try to recreate this when I get home. --mav

Do you have any idea why the deletion log is now called the "article deletion log" and not the "page deletion log"? Why in the world would we ever want to delete an article? I know we don't delete articles but others may not. It is already difficult enough to explain the difference between a wikipedia page and an article. --mav 14:18 Jul 28, 2002 (PDT)

Thanks for fixing the minor league baseball table. -- Zoe

Brion, I was trying to say when Caribbean blacks, whose ancestors were brought from Africa centuries before today, immigrate to America, it makes sense to call them African-Americans. But maybe I'm going overboard on classification and categorization. I think I'll call it a day. --Ed Poor

Hi, I've uploaded the files holography-reconstruct-notext.png and holograph-record-notext.png which are text-removed versions of the images I made for holography. I've also uploaded the original Adobe Illustrator files, in case you can use them directly. DrBob

Thanks! --Brion VIBBER 23:23 Aug 10, 2002 (PDT)

Brion, could you take a look at the deletion log and at user:Andre Engels just to make sure I'm not being paranoid about the choice to delete? --mav

If I may butt in -- I've spent the last 1/4 hour following Andre, and I think he needs reining in. I left him a note at the deletion log, with a stern warning. Ed Poor 13:14 Aug 14, 2002 (PDT)

Yes, I have left him a note to. He saw it, replied and then ignored my request to stop deleting the Bible entries and then proceeded to start deleting stub orphans (a handful I was able to find cached on Google had decent definitions and encyclopedias are filled with decent definitions on minor players). --mav

Is there some time limit on how fast I have to get the image uploaded after I put its link in the article, please? I didn't think ten minutes was too long, but you deleted the link in Butt while I was uploading the image to go there. -- isis

Maybe it's just a weird thing I do, but I usually upload an image and then stick it into articles. --Brion

Is there anything wrong with my doing it in the other order? Because I do graphics on a different computer from the one that's on the Internet, I often process six or more images, put them on a floppy and then upload them one after the other, I find it more efficient to put the link to the article in on this computer when I write the JPG file to the floppy on the other one, so I don't have to remember what the names are or which ones I've connected to articles -- they just go where they're supposed to as soon as I upload them here. If that's a problem, I can not do it, but I find it a lot easier than when I tried it the other way. So do you mind if I keep doing it backwards from the way you do? Different strokes for different folks? -- isis

Do you also pay for things with checks and then deposit the money into your bank account? ;) Nothing technically wrong with it, I suppose, so long as you get the money deposited before the check is cashed... However, as a courtesy you might want to note in the "summary" field of the change that you're still in the process of uploading, and that's why you've left a broken link. The rest of us don't know what you're planning to do, only what you've already done. --Brion

No problem. (BTW I worked for E. F. Hutton when they did the infamous check-kiting where they didn't deposit money until after the checks had actually cleared the bank, and I'm still suing them for firing me for whistle-blowing, so that example cut a little close to the quick.)
Anyhow, now that I know you're somebody that knows how things are done here, I have a question I hope you will answer for me, please. There's already an article for President Benjamin Harrison. I want to make an article for his great-grandfather (the father of President William Henry Harrison) who was a signer of the Declaration of Independence (and governor of Virginia several times, etc.) His name was also "Benjamin Harrison" -- he was Benjamin Harrison V, and the president one was VI or VII or something. There's a link for Ben V in United States Declaration of Independence, but it goes to Pres. Ben. So here's my question: What is the policy for how to handle the names of these two Benjamin Harrisons so we can have articles on both of them? -- isis

Hey Brion, I'm kicking around a new idea over at Talk:Orders of magnitude that I think will make us both happy. --mav

Brion, there is something over at Wikipedia talk:Statistics that needs to be seen by a developer. It's about article counts. --mav

I don't appreciate the condescending parental b.s. The way you handled the issue was heavy-handed, and you could at least have embedded a link on the main page. Is this the sort of thing I'll keep having to put up with if I'm involved with this project? --user:jaknouse

Thanks on the info on how to move a page. re: The Walt Disney Company. [User:Christopher Mahan|Chris Mahan] 20020906

You're welcome! --Brion

Hey Brion, I've noticed that the default time on for Wikipedia is now UTC however why is "UCT" showing up in time stamps? Is this a French thing I'm not aware of? --mav

Naw, just the wrong acronym. It's been fixed. --Brion 04:10 Sep 7, 2002 (UTC)

You, sir, have just made me inundate my monitor with soda thanks to the Darth Vader quote. :) -- April

As they say down at the Assassin's Guild, we aim to please... --Brion

The map idea is great. I do have one minor comment on my talk page though. --mav

Brion, I think the map idea is good, have fun uploading all those images. :-) -- Zoe

Hi, Somebody created Santa Anna as a blank. Before erasing it, I followed the back links, and additionaly "corrected" the Santa Anna to Santa Ana. The name of this guy is an anomaly in Spanish, i took me a while to convince myself that the correct spelling is, in fact Santa Anna. Sorry for the extra work.AstroNomer

hey thanks-and how do you unlink one that is mistakenly linked? Lir 23:54 Oct 3, 2002 (UTC)

Unless it's a redirect with no history, a sysop has to delete it; I'll go do that now. --Brion 23:57 Oct 3, 2002 (UTC)

Go:--User:hfastedge

Are we waiting for language.php to be translated before announcing the fact that the Japanese wiki is now on the Phase III software? If that is the case, why don't we just move all the other active wikis to the new software (with permission from the participants of course). That is one sure way to motivate people to translate language.php -- each language.php could be pasted onto a page in each of their respective wikis for community translation. Just a thought -- it may not work. But posting of the language.php text on wiki-editable pages would be a good idea. --mav

I tend to look at it from the other direction: if there isn't already enough interest in a particular wiki to produce someone to do the translation and help with maintenance, why should we waste any of our valuable time on them? --LDC

The Japanese wiki is a personal pet project of mine (but my Japanese is too poor to do it justice) -- and there were only about a half-dozen pages to manually move over. All the active non-English wikis have localized interfaces and hundreds or thousands of pages that need to be converted correctly. --Brion 20:14 Sep 10, 2002 (UTC)

I knew there must be a reason. Thanks! --mav

This does need to be explained to the other language wikis. Otherwise I forsee much unnecessary angst in the non-English wikipedias without both of your explanations. But such a statement needs to come from a developer. Is there any technical reason why language.php can't be community translated (I don't buy Lee's maintenance argument -- "if you build it developers will come", along with a boatload of new contributors)? If the text of that file is on the respective wikis and nobody does anything with it, then they only have themselves to blame for not being upgraded to Phase III. Also, is there a set of translations that must be done before any upgrade can be done at all (namespaces such as "talk", "user" and combinations therefore spring to mind as being absolutely necessary)? A priority list would be great to have. I'm sure having some links in English won't hurt so long as the really important stuff is already translated (in fact, it probably wouldn't even hurt to keep certain URLs in English -- so long as the displayed link is eventually translated). --mav

There's no reason they can't do a community translation... just like the French did in preperation for phase II upgrade. Unfornately, by the time they finished, phase III is online and my suggestion to do intermediate phase II upgrades using the existing translations for Esperanto, German, Spanish, Polish, and French was rejected in favor of "wait and go straight to phase III". --Brion 21:00 Sep 10, 2002 (UTC)

If you think some effort on our part is justified to kick-start growth, then I suggest making a post to intlwiki-l asking someone on each of the foreign wikis to post a note on their front page asking for translators. We can use that to judge interest--those that actually make the change will show some interest; those that actually come up with a translator are even better. Best of all are those that come up with a translator skilled enough to deal with CVS and check in the code himself.

Yes, there is an abolute minimum set of tranlations needed to get basic functionality for the wiki, with all the remaining text in English (and things like American date formats): the namespaces "Special", "Talk", "User", "User talk", "Wikipedia", "Wikipedia talk", "File", and "File talk" (yes, I know that's not even in the English wiki yet--but it will be soon), and the special link prefixes "Image" and "Media". --LDC

Will do. I will summarize what was said here and link to this page from my list post (just so the other list members know that what I say is true). --mav

Brion, I see you moved a lot of talk pages for the WikiProjects which I moved to the Wikipedia-namespace earlier. I'm pretty sure I had the "move talk page if applicable" checkbox checked, however (it's checked by default, I think, and I haven't changed it). Did this go wrong because I was moving across namespaces? If so, this should probably be added to the bug reports (or maybe this is a feature ;-) ). Jeronimo 08:18 Sep 11, 2002 (UTC)

Aaargh, saw your message on my talk just now... Jeronimo

I've answered on your talk page. --Brion

You have mentioned a couple of times about restoring the pre-Feb histories. However, how is this going to work for the many 100s of pages that have been moved since that time? --mav

Make a list of pages that have moved, their old and new titles. (Check for "moved" in comment fields.)
Make the converter aware of this list, and tack the histories onto the new titles.

Not completely foolproof, but it should catch most cases. --Brion 07:11 Sep 12, 2002 (UTC)

In Bob Jonkman's User talk page Brion wrote:

Hi Bob; I noticed you've been making some links to NTSC standard. That article's basically a dupe of the more expansive NTSC, so I've made it a redirect to that existing article. (I left the former contents of NTSC standard in Talk:NTSC so anyone who wants to integrate remaining tidbits can easily do so.) In the case of things like NTSC and JPEG where the acronym of a committee or standards group has become synonymous with the standard, it's generally accepted to use that common name for the article about the standard; articles about the committees themselves would most likely use the expanded names, such as North American Television Standards Committee[?] and Joint Photographic Experts Group. --Brion 04:00 Sep 12, 2002 (UTC)

Thanx Brion! I was aiming for some consistency between the entries for the different standards. Since both PAL and SECAM have concise titles and explanations for the standard, I had hoped to get the link for NTSC to point to a description of the standard (instead of the link NTSC standard), and, as you suggest, use the full name link National Television Standards Committee[?] for information about the committee (which article does not yet exist). It now works pretty much as I had hoped for. --Bob Jonkman 13 September 2002

---

could you add the fr: link to Wikipedia:Neutral point of view please ?
I think we have a little issue here as some french people seem to have a quite different definition from the english wikipedia on what neutral point of view is. Substantially, their point of view is that on every moral, ethical and political issue, the "united nation point of view on human rights" should prime on the neutral point of view. And should be clearly stated as such. You may see what the consequences could be on articles such as excision for instance. Since you wander on other international wikis, do you know whether the issue of what neutral point of view is, has been brought up ? Do they follow the en.wiki point of view ? Can we consider the fr wiki to be part of this global project if it differs so much on what neutrality is ? Any ideas ? user:anthere

I've added links to the french, german, and esperanto NPOV pages. (I'll take a look through the others later.) I just finished reading the french discussion (http://fr.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Wikipedia-La_Neutralité_De_Point_De_Vue/Discuter), and I must say I'm pretty bemused by the suggestion about the convention on human rights -- I simply don't see what it's to be used as the base for. Certainly it can be cited in an article on a subject that is forbidden or required by the convention (as a major facet of international law it's quite important!), what more is being asked for? For the encyclopedia to say "torture is bad"? What does that provide that "torture is outlawed by international convention X, and violations by countries such as Y, which claims to require such methods to combat criminal element Z are condemned by organization W" does not? The latter (which conforms to the conventional NPOV policy) is informative and encyclopedic, while the former is an empty opinion. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding; if I could see some examples of articles written in the suggested style, it might make more sense. --Brion 07:05 Sep 16, 2002 (UTC)

it is more than bemusing, Brion, it is a disastrous idea imho. With the recent issue of "les six" (discussion Ligne du temps (http://fr.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Ligne_Du_Temps/Discuter), it appeared obvious to me we had several problems that I tried to sum up on the int.wiki mailing list (if only people were not stuck by "gros mots"...), among which the notion of "neutral point of view" appeared somehow misunderstood by several (along with cooperation, respect of other people, patience, acceptance of different propositions...). It seemed to me the neutral point of view was badly leaning on the "scientific point of view" side. So I decided we needed to make that clearer, together. And you read what was written.
Only two people chose to comment what I translated and adapted to our situation. You saw that.
If french people decide that the "united nations point of view" comes above the "neutral point of view" as stated in the en.wiki, it is a breach with neutrality as the en.wiki defined it. It means considering our moral views are superior to these of other countries that do not follow human rights.
Consider a wikipedian who decides to write an article on excision that says Excision is a mutilating operation practiced on women in some countries. Excision is to be considered wrong as it is infringing with human rights as defined by the united nations declaration on human rights. However, some people think excision is acceptable for these and these reasons, and many countries go on with that practice... (I agree I force a bit the idea, but basically, that is what is proposed in

--> Parce qu'il existe une échelle dans les valeurs : je préfère mettre le respect des personnes et de leur intégrité physique AVANT les raisons qui expliquent les pratiques de mutilations sexuelles, qui doivent bien sûr être présentées.

or in

Le référentiel adopté par Wikipedia est la déclaration universelle des droits de l'homme de l’Organisation des nations unies : les points de vue contraires à cette dernière sont considérés comme nuisibles.)

Would you consider it neutral ? probably not. I would not. The en.wiki has an answer to this kind of article, it does not fairly represent point of views. That's final. Hence, the article must be reworked. If the french wiki considers human rights above neutral point of view, there is no answer to this kind of article, as the author can state it is acceptable along the policy rules. Adopting this policy would only state some moral views are acceptable while others are plain wrong. And this, I believe, is not neutral. Fortunately, no, no article really has been done that way yet, but it would be an open door. I would like very much other people to state what they think, otherwise, it will be tough to defend what imho is the idea of neutrality. That was why I asked you whether other int.wiki had been working on that issue. I'm a bit troubled right now. user:anthere

Indeed; that seems so completely unlike an encyclopedia that I can't conceive of someone wanting to write one like that! On the Esperanto wiki, we're not always as neutral as we should be (especially on the pages about other constructed languages ;) but we try -- certainly no one is considering that the UN's official point of view is "neutral" (it's not!) or should be implicitly considered correct. It should instead be explicitly stated and assigned to the UN, the Declaration of Human Rights, etc. IMHO, if what is intended by the troublemakers is pushing the (officially) internationally accepted viewpoint, citing the convention or organization that holds the view will carry a lot more weight than a bald assertion from an anonymous author! I'll try to drop a few words to that affect into the discussion when I have a moment. --Brion

Hey Brion - it looks like there is some consensus on having a more conservative definition for what the software considers to be artciles. However I still haven't heard either you or Lee jump into the discussion yet on the list. I think that it is important to change this before we hit 50,000 articles. What do you think? --mav

From the other side of the screen articles and non-article pages look exactly the same -- they take up space, have edit histories, link and are linked to -- so it makes little difference to me. :) As long as there's a consensus and the measure is straightforwardly quantifiable, I have no objection. --Brion 23:31 Sep 20, 2002 (UTC)

Hi Brion,

Just a few words to tell you that I did put the text for the php translation on the french wiki.
How are the other wikis doing ?
On the mailing list, Aoineko said he would take care of that, but he seems to be still on holidays. Buzz declared himself interested to do it, and I hope he will, but he is rarely around these days...My previous call for translators didnot raise any reaction.
As I already stated, the phase II translation was not a community work; I did it alone, didnot even succeed to convince the others to check what I had done (I am no developper in the least). I spent quite a lot of time on it. So I have decided I will do the barest minimum this time, and if nobody does the effort, I will consider, as LDC stated, that they are not interested really.
The neutrality issue is bugging me quite a lot (thank you for your comment over there); it seems the pro-scientific point of view chose to bury the head in the sand and not to discuss it at all. Avoiding discussion when there's an issue to discuss, or getting rude as with the six is not the way I see wikipedia.

user:anthere

Hey Brion, I'm on the list twice (#6 or 5 and #77). Would it be possible to combine those in future? (If this is going to be steadily maintained--and if not, that's cool too.) I'd do it myself but after I got the results, I couldn't figure out an easy way to sort them. Best, --KQ

Woo hoo! Thanks, Brion. Two halves reconciled.... Now if I give you some thought patterns exemplifying cognitive dissonance, can you resolve those too? (I've got plenty of them, I'm sure). ;-) --KQ

What happened? I was trying to move Gay marriage and the article disappeared? --mav

All is well - you fixed it. --mav

I think three people were working on that swap simultaneously. Do we have a "Most Hilarious Bloopers of Wikipedia" page? :-)

We should. :)

"(deleted "Same-sex marriage": Removing to make room for rename of Gay marriage (wouldn\'t need to, but someone changed the redirect to a paste-in of the other page))

-- Right. That would be me. Is it a no-no to do things that way?

It's much preferred to use the "move page" function. This changes the name of a page while keeping its edit history completely intact under the new name, so it's easier to keep track of changes to the article over its entire existence. (See Wikipedia:How to rename a page). This feature is only available to users who are logged in (this was a compromise; originally it was an experimental feature available only to sysops, but it was so useful that there was pressure to make it generally available. However, we don't really want random vandals to be randomly renaming pages, so at the same time there was pressure to limit who can use it.) So, feel free to create a login for yourself (it can be random letters and numbers for all I care :) and you will then find "move page" listed in the sidebar. --Brion 00:17 Sep 27, 2002 (UTC)

Thanks! Noted.

Hey Brion; After getting the idea from your county locator maps, I've started a new thread over at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Elements about a concept for nav bars and locator maps for the chemical elements (there is a prototype example at Lithium). Join in if you are interested. --mav

Brion; I suppose you've noticed all of the county entries that I added (if not, just look at one). Now I am in a position to create the exact same sort of entries for any or all of the cities in the U.S. FYI, that would make 35,000 or so new articles at ~2000 bytes per article. It would take me a good chunk of time to add that much data, so my question is, is there some way that we could automatically generate some of the articles? Clearly there would be some specifics to work out (naming conflicts, whatever), but I can prepare the data/articles in a MySQL database. I don't mind adding the entries myself as it will go really fast since most of the entries currently don't exist, but it would obviously be faster if there were an automated way. Tell me what you think. -- Ram-Man

I am not even going to try to get any kind of web interface going on. I am *not* a very good web developer (my main programming "weakness", as I don't enjoy web work too much). I can provide the data as a MySQL database, a text file dumped from MySQL using a "INTO OUTFILE 'textfile.txt'", a tab delimited text file, or a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. -- Ram-Man

Hello Brion, thank you for your suggestions. I will scale down the maps tomorrow and try to convert them to PNG. As I plan to make more maps for the other german states as well, your advices will at least help me to make the next ones better. BTW, I had the idea of adding the maps after finding your own maps in the California county articles. Greetings, -- Cordyph 09:30 Oct 3, 2002 (UTC)

Another question concerning images. Did you ever encounter the case, that you tried to upload an image, and afterwards it had a size of 0 Byte. The message tells me, that the upload was successful. But it's not there. Any idea? I ask you, because you seem to have uploaded dozens of images. -- Cordyph

Brion, I attempted to make a page with title Luís Inácio Lula da Silva. The non-english characters do not display correctly. Apparently I still don't understand this. Thanks. -- FURTHER COMPLICATING MATTERS: I now have a good page (the link in the previous sentence) and a bad page LuÃs InÃ¡cio Lula da Silva[?]. The latter needs to go (unless there's some chance somebody might actually enter these characters; I did when when trying to make the page).

Okay, let's go through this step by step: 1. What browser are you using? 2. What version, exactly? 3. What operating system are you running it on, exactly? 4. From what page did you follow that link to create the page, exactly? 5. Or, did you instead of following a link manually type the characters into your browser's URL bar (which may cause troubles)? --Brion 01:38 Oct 7, 2002 (UTC)

Brion, I think I entered the page name into the URL bar directly. This seems like a logical thing to do, but evidently not, if it's going to cause problems. Thanks.

Yes, that's the problem. I have a work-around planned, but haven't gotten to it yet. In the meantime, don't do that. ;) Your browser thinks it's smarter than you and is encoding URLs you type as UTF-8; since this wiki uses a different encoding, you get garbage characters instead. Fortunately, UTF-8 is relatively easy to detect, so it should be able to automatically detect and recode the URLs to give you the correct page. But, as I said, I haven't gotten to it yet. Sigh... --Brion 18:10 Oct 7, 2002 (UTC)

-- More of the same :-) -- Brion, User:Xaos is new (I think), and on his/her user page, it says, "I think I'm always making mistake when I type some korean characters in the documents. I'm using the english IE 5.5 under Windows98. What should I do for correct encoding?" Thanks again.

The following are data for 30,966 cities of the United States. It is in raw form. I hope is it what you wanted from me.cities.zip (http://www.rit.edu/~dlr1225/cities.zip) -- Ram-Man

Brion, I have the same problem with the Recent Changes page as with the Search Results page -- it's lapping into the right margin. -- Zoe 21:05 Oct 8, 2002 (UTC)

Whoops, never mind, there's a very long URL in the comments causing the page to spread out. -- Zoe 21:08 Oct 8, 2002 (UTC)

Hey Brion, Iv'e continued our Meta discussion on my Wikipedia user talk page since I can't access Metapedia right now. --mav

Yo, Brion, do you actually live in California? --Wiz!

Yes. Not that difficult to believe; there's over 30 million people here... some are bound to end up on Wikipedia! --Brion

I think you guys have low standards for "talent" and "creativity"

I agree. In my self-appointed role of Editor, I frequently feel desperate to find new talent -- perhaps I expect too much, if I think creative writing and encyclopedic writing can overlap. --Ed Poor

Brion, can you help ? Thirteen Years War has been the victim of a "cut and paste" move to Thirteen Years' War, and as a result the history has been split. I'm happy with the move, in principle, it's just the way that it's been done that's a problem. I would fix it myself but I don't have the ability to permanently delete pages (and I don't particularly want it) so I can't clear things ready to do a proper move. Could you do it, please? Thanks. -- Derek Ross

I'll do it. --mav

Done. --mav

Thanks, mav -- Derek Ross

See: Talk:Burbank, Los Angeles, California

Hi Brion, I haven't been able to connect to fr.wikipedia.org for days (weeks ?), it keeps sending me the following message:

Warning: Host 'localhost.localdomain' is blocked because of many connection errors. Unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts' in /usr/local/apache/htdocs-fr/w/DatabaseFunctions.php on line 17

Connexion impossible à la base de données sur 127.0.0.1

What's happening ? FvdP 21:48 Oct 21, 2002 (UTC)

Problem cured by reading your messages about caches in answer to other people's questions. Thanks. try reload, ctrl+reload, shift+reload, alt+reload, clear the cache, reintstall Windows, whatever? ctrl+reload did the trick, no need to resintall Windows, pfew !. FvdP 22:17 Oct 21, 2002 (UTC)

Engels reworded it in later editions that could explain differences.

Aye, that would do it. If we can exactly match the quote and an online edition to cite that'd be great, but not the highest priority. --Brion 06:29 Oct 23, 2002 (UTC)

regarding Mimos Berhad what is a corporatized organisation ??

I explained my guess on Talk:Mimos Berhad, but as I said that's only a guess. Someone more familiar with corporate structure in Malaysia might be better able to say for sure. --Brion 10:37 Oct 23, 2002 (UTC)

Brion, I didn't want to do the MOVE because I didn't want to have to unlink and relink everything. -- Zoe

You don't have to; it leaves a redirect. --Brion 04:27 Oct 24, 2002 (UTC)

??? Then why do I get yelled at for doing a move without changing all of the links? -- Zoe

??? By whom??? --Brion

Hello, you're knowledgeable about these things: how would i generate a query to determine all pages that have interlanguage links to the French Wikipedia so I can start posting those links over there? I know it can be done; I worked on the one for the Dutch wikipedia for awhile. :-) Thanks very much, --KQ

Also: interlanguage links from other Phase III wikipedias to the French one lead to wikipedia.com, on the old software. --KQ

That's right. It hasn't been converted yet; the fr.wikipedia.org is still in testing (though we should get it moved over soon, it seems to be working okay). --Brion 20:24 Oct 24, 2002 (UTC)

Ah, so I've jumped the gun. What about the SQL query for the interlanguage links? I'd like to set up the page to work on them once the database is switched over (provided someone doesn't beat me to it, which is quite possible given my schedule). --KQ

SELECT cur_namespace,cur_title FROM cur WHERE cur_text LIKE "%[[fr:%" should do it. There's also the maintencne page which will show which pages don't link to the French wiki, but that's less useful from our end at current ratios. ;) --Brion 20:27 Oct 24, 2002 (UTC)

Neat feature, that. Actually that gave me the idea of going to http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Maintenance and selecting which pages don't link to English. I wonder how that's done, though. Automagic, indeed. :-) --KQ

thanks kq. From time to time, I added the fr links for some articles. Is there not a way to update automatically all the links in all the phase III wikis once one is connected ?

comment ça, current ratios !!! euh, I tried SELECT cur_namespace,cur_title FROM cur WHERE cur_text LIKE "%[[en:%" on the fr.wiki, and I feel curious about the results : one of the page that gets out is http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarquin (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarquin), but there is no english link on his page ?
Besides, what does the field "cur_namespace" means ? Tarquin has 2, while the other pages have 0. Tarquin doesn't have a talk page. What does it refer to ? user:anthere

The number scheme is: 0=article 1=talk 2=user 3=user talk 4=wikipedia 5=wikipedia talk 6=image 7=image talk. There're stored as numbers to make it a teeny bit more efficient, and so we can localize the names for each language. If you check But there is one on Utilisateur:Tarquin (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilisateur%3ATarquin), there is a language link. (Though the query can turn up false positives -- things that look like language links, but actually aren't (it would pick up this page, for instance). Eventually we'll get around to keeping them in a link table that can be queried directly, but not yet.) --Brion 21:37 Oct 24, 2002 (UTC)

okay ! I made a few experiments with "not like" (and "limit"); it's working nice.
I am not seing any en.wiki link on Tarquin page, but that's meaningless :-) thanks --user:anthere

thanks Brion! found it! gosh, i feel blind! thanks again!

If/when you have a moment, could you promote my es.wiki user account to Admin status? Thanks. ---mav

Thanks! --mav

Brion - I need some help. Earlier I blocked 194.117.133.196 after somebody who is using that IP went on a vandalism rampage. However, after reviewing all the edits by this IP I saw that most were in fact good edits. Just now I got an email stating "194.117.133.196 (cache-haw.cableinet.co.uk) is the ISP cache I'm behind. I'm finding life a little difficult tonight :-/". So it looks like both a valid user and a vandal are using the same IP at the same time. What should I do? --mav

UPDATE This is effecting more than one user. See Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress. I am tempted to lift the block and hope for the best. --mav

is the fr conversion issue *ok* Brion ?? I spent maybe 3 hours yesterday moving stuff around, deleting, renaming...I hope I didnot do anything wrong :-(

user:anthere

Brion, I left some comments on Wikipedia talk:Links to disambiguating pages. Can't succeed to make it work in french. Did I misunderstood how it is working, or is there a but. I made a collection of page, a disamb, 2 going after the disamb, and one leading to the disamb. Shouldnot this latter appear on the maintenance page ? Thanks in advance

user:anthere

thanks alot Brion. Works great. --ant

hi, Brion. Could you upgrade the interface localization file at zh.wikipedia.org? We had translate some pages into Chinese and we want to have a look.

Thanks. --user:ghyll

Done. --Brion 09:25 Nov 16, 2002 (UTC)

I unblocked 24.201.235.57 -- whom you blocked 30 days ago. I figure 30 days is long enough. --Ed Poor

Brion,

weird thing. Somebody linked fr:agriculture durable to en:sustainable agriculture. This is currently an empty page, but the history show the page was created in 1969 31th of december ??? What is going on ? user:anthere

The page doesn't exist. That's what you get if you're foolish enough to click "history" for a page that doesn't exist. :) It probably should display a message like "Page doesn't exist, there is no history" instead of trying to convert a bunch of zeroes into a meaningful history display, but since it's harmless and cosmetic and rarely comes up (linked to nonexistent pages normally are edit pages, which don't have a history link) nobody's got around to fixing it yet. --Brion 10:15 Nov 16, 2002 (UTC)

ah ? But why did it come to the idea to Tokerboy to link a french page on a non existing english page ? He certainly didnot "invent" the page just to set the link, did he ? That's weird... bah. Thanks anyway foolish

Thanks a lot, Brion.

we had fixed some error on translation, and this time the main page should not be mixed with Chinese and English links any more. so could you please upgrade the interface localization file at zh.wikipedia.org again?

and we found the style sheet must be tuned to Chinese makeup convention. I will give a thorough study on the css file - wikistandard.css.

Thanks in advance. --user:ghyll

Brion, would it be possible to revoke just Lir's ability to move pages. I'm sick and tired of moving pages back because of her stupid moves every few days. --mav

Technically I could hack something like that in, but I don't believe I have the authority to add a new and exciting level of partial banning without the say-so from Jimbo or a general consensus. --Brion 05:31 Nov 18, 2002 (UTC)

I just wanted if it was technically possible. Thanks. --mav

Brion, has there been any complaint on Windows 98 avec Internet Explorer 5 (5.00.2614.3500). AGiss says that pages do not reload when he clicks on the reload button; the only way is to empty the cache, or to do a Ctrl+Alt while reloading. He is afraid he will tend to destroy changes, as he might forget to reload a page each time he wants to edit it. Does anybody complained about that ? http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikip%E9dia:Rapport_d%27erreurs&diff=0&oldid=0 [[user:anthere]

Hey, Brion, at the bottom of every subject and talk page (at least in the article, user and Wikipedia namespaces) contains:

Notice: Couldn't find text for message "subjectpage". in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/GlobalFunctions.php on line 141 Notice: Couldn't find text for message "subjectpage". in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/GlobalFunctions.php on line 141

Right above the lower control bar. This started since I've become a sysop a few hours ago. Everything seems to be working fine, though I haven't tried deleting anything or blocking any IPs yet. Any clues? Tokerboy 00:44 Dec 4, 2002 (UTC)

Nevermind, I suppose it has nothing to do with being a sysop--someone else just mentioned it at the Village Pump. Tokerboy 00:44 Dec 4, 2002 (UTC)

Yeah, I was getting it too (I use Opera), and I just switched to IE for a minute to see what's up. But, I'm just gonna guess it's a server-side problem -- probably having nothing to do with the browser. Anyway, I now I can call it a night since the new sysop is on duty :-) --Ed Poor

I had to do that because he kept deleting my changes. why did he remove a link to a relevant NYTimes editorial?

Why did he remove relevant info about ACSH's funding?

Why did he say 'nominally' independent??? That is libelous!

Why did he simply REVERT to old version, when the old version was misleading?

If he wants to take out POV stuff, fine, but a clarification regarding funding issues????

Removing a NYTimes editorial that agrees with ACSH?

When even the left wing editorial page of the Times agrees with ACSH, he should probably give up his unscientific advocacy and conceed that there is no longer a controversy--in the scientific community- about this issue.

I notice some comments in the deletion log about the delete function not working right -- what's up? I'll try to fix it if there's a problem... --Brion 08:28 Dec 7, 2002 (UTC)

I'm not sure, and I don't have time to play with it because I'm behind schedule to make my deadline on Monday, but I stopped by for a minute and tried to delete a page, and it didn't go away. I thought when I deleted pages that had no links to them before, they ceased to exist, but I may just not have known how to find them again. This one doesn't go away when I delete it.

What exactly happened? Did it tell you that it had deleted the page, or did it do something else after clicking the 'yes, delete it' button? --Brion 09:19 Dec 7, 2002 (UTC)

It said it was deleted, but it wasn't -- the page was still there, but without any text. It may have had to do with there being an article page and a talk page and my trying to delete them one at a time. Or not. -- isis 09:46 Dec 7, 2002 (UTC)

Hmm, "without any text" meaning a completely empty/blank article area, or meaning the "(There is currently no text in this page)" message? (This latter is very misleading -- the message only shows for pages that don't exist; a page with no text will just show blank. This needs to be replaced with something useful.) --Brion 10:05 Dec 7, 2002 (UTC)

I don't remember whether it said anything or not, but it was an edit page, and when I clicked on 'cancel' (without typing anything on it) it turned into an article page that may have said there is no text. -- isis 10:47 Dec 7, 2002 (UTC)

By the way, I'm not sure if this is a problem with the software or my ignorance of how to use it, but when I search I don't find articles whose titles are letters, that is, I can't find A.U.M.P. Church by searching on the letters, but on "a u m p church" it gives me all the ones with "church" in the title. -- isis 09:10 Dec 7, 2002 (UTC)

Searching doesn't currently work on individual letters. --Brion 09:19 Dec 7, 2002 (UTC)

Brion, why does the textbox work for me here in the Normal skin, but it still doesn't work right for me in the Esperanto version? --Chuck SMITH

Did you try turning off 'edit box full width' in your prefs? --Brion 10:49 Dec 9, 2002 (UTC)

I didn't know if it would matter, but I created a User:rambot for all the rambot entries, that way anyone can tell at a glance if it is me or the bot doing the work. I didn't know if this meant there could be some way that we could hack in some kind of special case so that the Recent Changes screen avoids all "rambot" entries. The current bot run is going to take about 7 days to complete, but after that I was planning on rechecking the remaining 10,000 city articles that were missed (to verify the data, as people were noticing problems). I didn't know if there was any new work done on trying to clear the Recent Changes screen of bot entries. -- RM

If the rambot entries weren't on recentchanges, would people have noticed the problems in the data? --Brion 21:22 Dec 9, 2002 (UTC)

Unless they were viewing recent changes from a month ago, yes. None of the errors that people have recently given me were about the current bot run. So it appears as if most people are ignoring those entries. That said, I understand the purpose of the RC. Nevertheless, I just wish there was some way that I could do my work without bothering others. It is also a (minor?) annoyance to have to slow the bot down this much. A filter would be a blessed thing. -- RM

Hi Brion. is it ok to change the logo for the Swedish wikipedia? So far we have one alternative ready, with swedish text and a little bit happier in color:

This is how it looks...

Dan Koehl 11:42 Dec 10, 2002 (UTC)

Done. It should now be linked to the uploaded file 'Wiki.png', so if you upload a new version it should take over automatically (clear your cache if need be!). --Brion 21:46 Dec 10, 2002 (UTC)

Thanks for your help once again! Looks good? / Dan Koehl 00:53 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)

I'm afraid it may alienate people from outside Sweden. Both Finland and Estonia have a Swedish speaking minority. // Liftarn 09:51 Jan 2, 2003 (UTC)

Hey Brion - Wiktionary is a bit much to type for inline links to Wiktionary articles. Is the d: namespace being used for or planned to be used for anything? --mav

Its only tempoary Mav anyway, We need to get it moved to languagecode.wiktionary.org, but the main question is hwo we are going to link it back and forth maybe... enwt: for wiktionary and enwp: for wikipedia.

-fonzy

Thank you so much for the bot feature. I look forward to when you finish up and we have an option to turn it on. -- Ram-Man

Sweet! Thanks Brion! --mav

As I mentioned in email sometimes the full headers produce new articles! Aludra Thanks again for helping. BF 01:38 Dec 16, 2002 (UTC)

Hi Brion, I have a favor to ask. I posted this question to Maverick, and he referred me to you. Somebody has taken my comments to "Karl" on Dan Keshet's talk page and moved them to the Holocaust page, signing my name, creating the impression that I am a holocaust denier. I've made an entry on the Vandalism_in_progress page, and contacted the anonymous user's ISP, Sentex.net in Canada. Is it possible to check the server logs and find out if any registered users have logged in from the IP block (64.7.128.0 - 64.7.159.255) on December 18 between, say, 8:00-10:00 UTC? Or any other information which would help identify this person? If necessary, I can provide Perl support to help grok logfiles. Thanks! --Len

See my response at User talk:Maveric149. --Brion

See my followup on Mav's talk page. --Len.

On a related matter the above mentioned user have been posting my full name and adress on at least two pages in the Swedish wikipedia. Not only is it a violation of my privacy, but also of Swedish (and European) law. Since I'm concerned about my privacy I would prefer that the article would be deleted. // Liftarn 10:10 Jan 7, 2003 (UTC)

And where may I find these pages? --Brion 10:24 Jan 7, 2003 (UTC)

They are on his user page in the Swedish Wikipedia. // Liftarn 12:11 Jan 14, 2003 (UTC)

if you are polite to the trolls they give you gold coins. Vera Cruz

Maybe once in a great while, but usually they just give you more shit. -- isis 17:08 Dec 19, 2002 (UTC)

Help! I can't erase an stupid image called Optimism.jpg in es.wikipedia!--AN 17:00 Dec 19, 2002 (UTC)

Thanks!--AN 19:31 Dec 19, 2002 (UTC)

Hi! Would you mind setting up a test version for the new Portuguese Wikipedia? There are a few lines left to translate, but i would really like the other users (they finally appeared!!!!!) to test it at once. I am a bit insecure with the translation, so this is very important.

I've uploaded it to http://www.yvesjmt.kit.net/LanguagePt.php

Can you add me as an admin at the test.wikipedia? Username 'Yves Marques Teixeira' pass: 'lol'

thank you! My email, in case you need, is junqueira at brturbo.com Yves 23:49 Dec 20, 2002 (UTC)

I'll try to get that set up tonight. --Brion

Ok. I am sorry if I sounded like trying to rush you. That was not my intention. Take your time. Thank you! Yves

I tried the DNS redirect thing and it failed on me. More on my talk page. If you like I can forward you the account info which has the user id and pswd. FYI I only registered with Verio, I didn't sign up for any service. --mav

Brion, could you delete :Image:Jennajameson.jpg for me? For some reason the software says that it is either a bad or empty title but as you can see there is nothing empty in that picture. I don't think fair use applies. --mav

Brion, was sent to you from the Village Well. I am a new Israeli ... (insert whatever you like to call your newbies), and since the heb site is empty I was wondering what could one do to help. Besides the point just wondering about your interest in film. I studied film and hope to end up making them some day in the near future (my first contrib was Un Chien Andalou. Thanks. -- aarrrggghhh

I'm a little behind on setting up new language wikis; I have to tweak some of the conversion scripts to get them back in synch with the current database schema. I'll try to get it set up in the next couple days! --Brion 22:02 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)

Definitely don't rush this on my account. Are there any other people in charge of making something of the Heb wiki once the software is up?

I would offer my help with the code, only I should probably learn to write some before... Thanks anyway, -- aarrrggghhh

Performance has been great in the last few days, is this because of InnoDB? Or are we just getting less traffic? --Eloquence

It's the light holiday traffic. The InnoDB tables are still only running on test.wikipedia.org, as I haven't yet ironed out some cases of search index synchronization problems. --Brion 03:20 Dec 28, 2002 (UTC)

Re :Image:Dimndust.htm; is it your intent to place the book under GFDL license? --Brion 23:21 Dec 29, 2002 (UTC)

Yes. -- isis 23:43 Dec 29, 2002 (UTC)

Hi, Brion, I was looking at the LanguageIt.php versions on Sourceforge and I found that I probably made a mistake in sending you the last file. Sourceforge version 1.3 is in fact reverting all the changes I had made in version 1.2 and it should be quite similar to 1.1, if not the same. If you wish, I could prepare a 1.5 restoring 1.2 and including the "math" => 1 string added in 1.4. Please, forgive my confusion, and
Have a joyful New Year :-))) Gianfranco

Hi Brion! I've tried to search for some common Englsih words in the Swedish Wikipedia, this would be a good way to find English articles that need translation or removal, but all common words seems to be blocked. Is there any chance to change the blocked worlds from English to Swedish? // Sven Eriksson

MySQL's fulltext search index is hardwired with English stopwords. --Brion 15:38 Jan 2, 2003 (UTC)

Hi Brion! Someone had left some good advices for you at zh.wikipedia.org . I support these advices.

zh:%E7%94%A8%E6%88%B7%E5%AF%B9%E8%AF%9D:Brion_VIBBER

--Ghyll 4:14 Jan 3, 2003 (UTC)

Brion you're quicker than me Ericd

How come today I'm getting "error"s in the left margin of my "older versions" screens, please? I think I would have noticed if they had been there before, but they've been there since I got up this noon. It says:

View article
Move this page
Error
Error
Discuss this page
What links here

Please make it stop saying that. -- isis 21:53 Jan 7, 2003 (UTC)

We've changed the sidebar behavior so that there are links to the article, talk page etc. on screens where they were previously missing. For example, when you click on a user page that doesn't exist User:Foobarbar[?], you can now directly visit their talk page, or contributions, without having to put some text there first. The errors probably relate to your sysop status (I suppose these would be "Protect" and "Delete" links), I didn't test properly with sysop status enabled. Will be fixed ASAP. --Eloquence

Fixed, but should be double-checked for correctness. The deleteThisPage() and protectThisPage() link-generation functions were making different checks than the functions that called them, returning an error when not in plain viewing mode; I've changed them to check simply for the existence of the article instead. --Brion 22:21 Jan 7, 2003 (UTC)

Yes, it seems to be okay now. The two "Error"s have turned into "Delete this page" and "Protect this page," and when I put my cursor on them, they show me the name of the article whose "Older versions" page I'm on. Thanks very much. -- isis 22:36 Jan 7, 2003 (UTC)

Brion can you have a look at Sexual lubricant & Talk:Sexual lubricant

Hi Brion, Me again. What can I do to help with the Hebrew wiki. I'm kind of getting the feeling that there aren't many other people interested (so who put up the page??). Will translating the language.php file help? What about all the Right-to-Left troubles.. :-) Please let me know what I can do to help. Aarrrggghhh

Yes, the translation would be a help! I'm not sure just how right-to-left is going to work; we'll see what happens once the interface strings are translated and it's running... --Brion 17:35 Jan 8, 2003 (UTC)

Where do I put the stuff (front page, php file) once it's translated? It's going to be UTF-8 text, if that's OK? Aarrrggghhh 19:13 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)

Perfect! Just attach a copy and e-mail it, either direct to me or to the developers' list (see Wikipedia:Mailing lists). Or, try on meta.wikipedia.org (which is set up for utf-8) and see if it posts properly. --Brion 23:07 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)

Hi Brion. I've got myself an account at Sourceforge: "tarquindarkling" (there's another "tarquin", who'd been inactive for ages last time I checked.... :( Once I've worked out how do have multiple logins with WinCVS[?] I'm ready :-) -- Tarquin 15:51 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)

Looks like I'm in :-) Will I find english text in LanguageFr.php that needs translating, or variables missing from that file I have to add? -- Tarquin 22:43 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC) Never mind, it seems to be the former. -- t

Probably a little of both, double-check. --Brion 23:07 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)

Now why do I suddenly get this feeling of impending doom? ;-) -- Tarquin 23:14 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)

Problem: I tried to commit the file & I got: "cvs [server aborted]: "commit" requires write access to the repository" -- t

Were you working from a directory where you made an anonymous checkout, or did you make a separate checkout from the non-anonymous server? (Remember you need to run it through SSH. I don't know how to do this with WinCVS; when on windows I just use cygwin and pretend I'm running a funny unix.) --Brion 00:44 Jan 10, 2003 (UTC)

I'm working in the non-anonymous directory -- but I used the same server, just substituting my userID for "anonymous": tarquindarkling@cvs.wikipedia.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/wikipedia . I've found an SSH option, but I get the same reply from the server. Do I need an "RSA identity", whatever that is? There's an option for that that "wakes up" once I have SSH selected. -- Tarquin 10:04 Jan 10, 2003 (UTC)

______

This offensive handle debate got me thinking about F*** and I just clicked into Vagina. The shock of seeing c*** big and blue simply stund me. How could I be so foolish ? Two16

I think the consensus of the community is that it's time for you to change cumguzzler's username. Please check that user's talk page and see if you agree. -- isis 09:31 Jan 16, 2003 (UTC)

mav and I reccomend C. Guzzler. Vera Cruz

If the user in question has agreed to change their username (a simple matter of logging out, creating a new account, and moving the user page if desired), I will be happy to swap the database records to list the new name for their old edits. Otherwise, you'll need a "warrant" from Jimbo (I don't have the authority to ban or radically alter user accounts without permission except in cases of outright vandalism, which this is not), and you can expect more whining and bitching and creation of "clever" alternate "obscene" usernames to get around the "ban" will likely follow. --Brion 10:19 Jan 16, 2003 (UTC)

I've cc'd you the email I sent to Jimbo. --Robert Merkel

Brion,

is there a reason we are using a different set of code files for each Wikipedia? It's fairly simple to use the same one for each, I have hacked this for the OpenFacts (http://openfacts.berlios.de) project: just use different wiki.phtmls which include different Setup.phps which include different LocalSettings.phps. All other PHP files are then shared among the different languages. Wouldn't this make updating a lot easier? (On a different note, I have also hacked OpenFacts to use a common user table for the two languages, this took me only a couple of hours, but merging the existing user DBs would be tricky for WP.)--Eloquence 20:34 Jan 17, 2003 (UTC)

I'm not so sure that would be an advantage; as it is, I can synchronize all the common source files with a single call to a simple update script, so it's no trouble to have separate directories -- modifying the wiki.phtml and Setup.php for each language would cause more work for me whenever those files happened to change. If we reenable PHP caching with a more recent and less crashy version of APC, I'm not sure how it would be affected by running the same files with different include dependencies.

I'd like to combine the user tables, but we need charset conversion (or a common charset, preferably), a one-time remapping of user id numbers, and a one-time check for duplicate names that aren't the same people. Further, I haven't heard any concrete ideas on how broadly user options and sysop rights should extend; the same for all languages, or partitioned into sections? --Brion 01:45 Jan 18, 2003 (UTC)

If you have a script that's fine; when working on de I noticed it seems to be a relatively dated version of the code, though (I miss my backlinks ;). As for perms, yeah, we'll probably need a more complex mechanism here. Either we try to push it all into one column, or we'll create a separate perms table. Opts could be global for the time being, IMHO -- if at all, you would probably only want single opts to be different in different local versions. --Eloquence 04:00 Jan 18, 2003 (UTC)

I've just updated everything to current version. I notice there's some weirdness in the default skin sidebar; "New page" was showing up on special pages (Recentchanges etc); I've suppressed that message but still get two line breaks. That code could use some cleanup... --Brion 04:18 Jan 18, 2003 (UTC)

Argh, my mistake, I wanted to show the backlinks in preview mode, too, and checked for $action=="submit", which seems to be the action for special pages. I removed the check in CVS, which will make the backlinks disappear again in preview, though. --Eloquence 06:28 Jan 18, 2003 (UTC)

How much work is it to update the scripts? The display bug is quite annoying. I'll try to fix things up properly over the weekened (don't have a local install here yet), but it would be nice to have the temp fix up before that. (I know you're using a different skin, so you don't notice.) Alternatively, I can ask Jimbo for server access. --Eloquence 00:47 Jan 19, 2003 (UTC)

Poof, updated. --Brion 00:53 Jan 19, 2003 (UTC)

As always, thanks for the quick service. I could get used to Cologne Blue .. if only it had a go button ;-) --Eloquence 01:03 Jan 19, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for your diagram in Telecine. It was the key to helping me understand the process. I added column names to the picture and reduced it to 256 colors (filesize from 20K to 8K, no noticeable decrease in quality). --Nate 05:56 Jan 19, 2003 (UTC)

Hi Brion,

I've been having trouble editing a couple pages here. I can click in the edit boxes, I can select in the edit boxes, I can delete in the edit boxes, but cannot type or paste in the edit boxes. The only two pages (that I know of, of course) on which this happens are Talk:Evolution and User talk:Maveric149. As far as I know, there is no other unprotected page that I cannot edit.

Several people, and in particular Koyaanis Qatsi, have tried to help, but to no avail.

Other info:

I don't have an ISP. I have ethernet locally going out a T1 eventually at a college.
I have my own IP. It's dedicated to the sole computer in my office.
My IP is almost certainly not banned. Otherwise, I couldn't have written this message--unless there is such a thing as a page-specific ban. However, I've never written to Maveric's page, so unlikely I'd be banned there.
I've never seen a ban message. Only the symptoms I described above.
Maveric149 said that large pages might be giving me trouble. Perhaps. Both the bothersome pages are fairly large.
I'm using Netscape 4.75. (I know. It's old, but I like it.)

Do you think there's a bug of some kind doing this?

Yours,

Arthur

Okay, this is no longer useful, i guess. I just saw the message you just sent. I think i'll still send it for archival purposes. I hope that's helpful rather than rude (i'm new here. don't the culture yet).

No more need to respond. I'll assume it's my browser and a size limitation.

Thank you!

Arthur

I should modify my earlier comment to Arthur to say that you seldom bite. ;-) Anyway, thanks for all your help on wikipedia. I do appreciate it, even if I don't always remember to say so. Koyaanis Qatsi

Hey Yo! (okay, that's a little joke)

thanks for support on other pages. I still like those who disagree with us and are unkind for no reason (do you understand this? I don't want to say names because I don't want to offend anyone).

best wishes,

Arthur

It’s time to update the list on the most active Wikipedians, complied over a month ago.

172

Do you have an idea why your change of Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a dictionary of last December shows up in my watchlist (of the last 7 days)?

BTW, nice article on Model United Nations.

Sebastian 19:47 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)

The watchlist actually shows _all_ entries back to X number, ignoring the date. (The header bit needs to be fixed to explain that!) Since you only have a few items in your watchlist, even fairly old ones will show up. Thanks re the MUN article, I'm glad someone read it. :) It's still pretty light though, calling out for additional editing... --Brion 19:54 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)

Brion!

Dropped the nearly fully translated version (I skipped some really difficult parts scriptwise) of LanguageHe.php in you mailbox. It's v0.1 or less but it's a start! It's on my talk page over at meta. Should I put it on the Locales for Wiki software (http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locales_for_the_Wikipedia_Software) page as well? -- Aarrrggghhh

I just got an error message. I saw an empty link to Guns n Roses at 1962 in music and clicked on it to make a redirect. Since I was unsure what the correct title was, I did a search for "guns roses" and, then clicked back to make the redirect. The error message came after I pressed save -- (it did take and the redirect works) and this is what came up:

A database query syntax error has occurred. This could be because of an illegal search query (see Searching Wikipedia), or it may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was: SELECT cur_id,cur_namespace,cur_title

   FROM cur,links
   WHERE cur_id=l_to AND l_from='Guns_N'Roses'

from within function "LinkCache::preFill". MySQL returned error "1064: You have an error in your SQL syntax near 'Roses at line 3".

Tokerboy

Oops! Fixed. --Brion 22:05 Jan 25, 2003 (UTC)

Copied in 2003-03-31:

Is the system going to start counting accesses again soon, please? -- isis 07:16 Jan 26, 2003 (UTC)

It seems that LDC "lcrocker" has been inactive for months. I made a patch on sourceforge, and given this, I doubt he will get to it...

 https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=411192&aid=652507&group_id=34373
 https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=411192&aid=643351&group_id=34373

And then i just made this one which was assigned to you ;-)

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=674724&group_id=34373&atid=411192 (i'll patch if u let me). user_talk:hfastedge Hfastedge 07:54 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC) I notice there is a new way of signifying activity per each user's talk page. could you also address the issue in this last feature request i filed. Namely, that the ~~~syntax links to the user page. You put in your word expressing your conservatism on the matter; eg against my suggestion that ~~~ actually link to the user_talk page instead. I immediately gave a reply saying that an even less major change is to have the notifier (no longer the '*' but now the 'You have new messages', to also be activated whenever the user page is edited). This needs to be done,so as to make communications better.

Also, would you apply my other patches above. user_talk:hfastedge

User:Mac doesn't seem to be paying attention. He moved back to wikipedia (canonization) the article Wikipedia:Canonization, for the second time in a few hours.

Hi Brion, is there a way to link a small image to a big one ? Ericd

The cleanest way is to include an explicit text link to the big image, with [[media: instead of [[image:, and call it 'click fo rbigger image' or 'magnify' or 'expand' or what have you. You could also put the big image into the description page of the small image (so clicking the small image itself shows the big image), but present consensus is against it. (One admitted problem is that if the big image is really big, it still doesn't fit well into the wiki page.) --Brion 00:26 Jan 27, 2003 (UTC)

Salut Brion! I had some days "off" and used the time to learn more about what I am actully doing. Put up some 4 wikis and learned more. Fun, thanks!

Reg Swedish Wikipedia:

When I search on Google for some words Google points to "old" sv.wikipedia.com articles, which are impossible to edit, and doesnt lead to the the new site. Is this OK? (only temporarily or a permanent problem?
Is there a possibilty to have lets say the 4-5 largets wikiedias Recent changes as language links on the recent changes page?

"Its the one who loose his way in the forest that find the new trails" Dan Koehl 10:48 Jan 27, 2003 (UTC)

Glad to hear you're doing well, Dan!

Oops, the DNS records need to be updated to point the .com address to the new server; that must have fallen through the cracks. I'll go bug Jason about it. And yes, interlanguage links on the recentchanges are a good idea -- right now I there's something funny about interpretation of lang links on special pages that would keep it from working in the normal way, but we can slip in some links into the intro text (like on meta). --Brion 19:23 Jan 27, 2003 (UTC)

I noticed the Danes has removed their lan links on RecentChanges. By the way, why did the dot com articles turn up upon request with googles, it seems like UseMod were playing better with Google, may that be? (and now when I checked, I see theres no meta keyword or description in th head:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html><head><title>Stockholm bloodbath - Wikipedia</title> <meta name="robots" content="index,follow"> <link rel="shortcut icon" class=encyclopedia href="/favicon.ico">

How come? I think even that "simple" chiq-chaq[?] has automatically $title implemented in the meta keywords. Has something happened which i dont know? Isnt description and keywords used anymore to attract search engines? Enlighten me, poor soul since I now had ants in my head... A wikipedia must be supposed to seriously brabe search engines like Google, or? The .org files comes several pages after the .com, Tryit if you can find living pages on the old server?

- Sorry, problem again, please forget my Q! here comes the sun, what did you do with your page it looks much better, thanks for checking those files in kosmos :) Dan Koehl 03:19 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)

Well, the new server is only partially indexed on Google because about a month or so ago I goofed up with the robots.txt file and accidentally forbid bots from indexing articles; in early January we got re-spidered and previously indexed articles got dropped from Google. (*cough* *cough*) It's been corrected, and we've been at least partially reindexed since. The rest should continue to fill in over time... As far as meta keywords -- I know we used to do include the title and I think links as meta keywords on the phase 2 software; this may have gotten accidentally (or intentionally by LDC) left out of phase 3. We should see about getting that back! --Brion 03:28 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)

Do you get the new messages link properly? --Eloquence 21:57 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)

Yes, lovely!

Brion, would you delete User:Anthere/ToImprove[?] please ?

Will do...

Looks like Eloquence beat me to it!

And User:Anthere/Discussion language non sexiste which doesnot exist anyway ?

Comme tu veux. --Brion 22:28 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)

Et User talk:Anthere/utilisateur[?]...

voire User:Anthere/Emberiza hortulana L.[?]

Seulement voire, ou voire et supprimer? ;)

sorry, voir and voire are different words. Voir is a verb and means "to see", voire is adverb and means "and also"

I think its you(if i remember correctly)that i contact about the map of Europe used in Eu member map, is it possible for you to adapt it to show the EFTA member and former member countries? -fonzy

I'll take a look at it.

Ok i filled in the colours myself, but did nto do the text as its betteer if you do that. I saved it as a bmp file and zipped it up hwo shall i apss it on to you? -fonzy

Afterthought, could you undelete User:Anthere/Discussion language non sexiste? Sorry.

Fait.

Brion, please update to CVS; there was a small bug which caused 'newpagetext' to be shown on every edit (missing parentheses). --Eloquence 00:12 Jan 29, 2003 (UTC)

Done.

Thanks, I'm not so good with tables. ... Also, I notice that Recent Changes has been improved again, as well as the "new page" editing process. Nice work! :-) Koyaanis Qatsi

Why do you put language links at the bottom of articles? In 99% of the cases, I have seen them at the top. olivier 08:23 Feb 3, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for your answer. olivier 08:37 Feb 3, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks Brion (for your help at the Village Pump)- I understand now. By the way, I don't know who it was who defined 'voir' and 'voire' further up, but 'voire' means 'or even' or 'nay'Olivia Curtis

(And I think whoever it was may have been missing your wordplay on the two words)

You do me too much credit, I really didn't know what it meant. :) --Brion

Hi Brion, sorry for bothering, but I just wanted to ask about it.wiki and if there is something in which I could help. --Gianfranco

RE:EFTA (EU MAP)

Ok i filled in the colours myself, but did nto do the text as its betteer if you do that. I saved it as a bmp file and zipped it up hwo shall i apss it on to you? -fonzy

Yes, please do! --Brion

Hello. I have promised to get rid of my sysop status on the French Wikipedia when I will be ambassador. When you will have some time, could you remove my sysop status on the French Wikipedia for ever. It will make me less stressed and feel more at ease. (I will just keep sysop status on the Spanish wiki). Have a nice afternoon. Youssefsan 22:31 Feb 4, 2003 (UTC)

note that nobody was asking you to drop it Youssefsan. I regret that you do. I would have felt less alone than I do.

Could i get sysop for Wiktionary?, it needs a few mre sysops. -fonzy

Will do. --Brion

Wow! Less than 12 hours from my bug report to your bug fix! (Hide minor edits & user contribs.) That's fast work. Thanks Brion. Tannin

Glad to be of service! Brion

Esperanto question
Brion, I added the following to Lingua Franca earlier today, based on something I read some time ago in the Wall Street Journal about the popularity of Esperanto among translators:

Esperanto is said to have gained currency as a lingua franca among translators however.

I thought maybe you could confirm, or add to it. It isn't mentioned in the Esperanto article, but as I recall, the idea was that because lots of translators spoke Esperanto, they could eliminate chains of translation from language to language using Esperanto as an intermediate form, so the Korean could talk to the Finn without going through Japanese and French first. Ortolan88

I would be surprised to hear that. While there are certainly individual translators and interpreters who think highly of and themselves speak Esperanto (eg Claude Piron), having "gained currency as a lingua franca among translators" implies a level of use significantly out of proportion with anything I've heard of. Of course the point of Esperanto is that the Korean and the Finn could talk to each other directly, without the need for interpreters. :) But a three-language chain is better than more than three, and Esperanto does sometimes get proposed as an intermediate language for both human and machine translation, in part due to its flexible yet robust grammar and relative ease of learning. --Brion 06:43 Feb 5, 2003 (UTC)

That was the burden of the WSJ article, that they were using Esperanto as an intermediate form. To me, that is a classic lingua franca. Finn speaking Esperanto to Korean speaking Esperanto means that Finns and Koreans have a better communications path than otherwise. Ortolan88

I have also some requests;

Multi-language search (/tools/wikisearch.php) It has only one link out, the hyperlink of the word "Wikipedia" that goes to www.wikipedia.com Can yo u change that to http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_provisional_portal_of_Wikipedia ?
Now when you enter a non-existing url like http://blabla.wikipedia.org you come out a the English Wikipedia. Can you change that to http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/T he_provisional_portal_o f_Wikipedia ?
Can you make my sysop at the MetaWikipedia?
Are there other people who I can annoy instead of you for things like this?

Giskart 21:44 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)

Can you send my the logs of Wikipedia NL or a account to the server so I can get them?

The pages on MetaWikipedia have the sub-titel "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." I think it is better to remove that. Live it blank. Something like "Anti-American Wikipedians From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." can be bad PR. Giskart 23:56 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)

Could you check out Talk:Amish. The link to the Japanese article doesn't seem to be working, and no one can fix it. Tokerboy

Hello...could you look at http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine-friendly_wiki_interface? I put together a PHP script that is probably < 25 lines to accomplish this, and I think it would be great if you could add something like this to wikipedia proper. Saves you the bandwidth of people like me routinely downloading the tarballs. :-) matt 17:47 Feb 7, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for givig my sysop in wiktionary. - Fonzy

Hi Brion, a question. I was in the middle of a major re-write on a page on the Late Late Show when my browser crashed. Is there anyway of tracking down that re-write? It had not been saved; I was in the middle of previewing it. It was quite different to the saved page. I would hate to have to re-do the whole damn thing again if at all possible. Is it possible to salvage something previewed but not saved when the crash occured. JTD 04:55 Feb 8, 2003 (UTC)

Brion, might I ask of you a favor? Wipe my User and talk pages? Thanks.-Stevert

---

Brion than you for doing some clean up at the pump. It is at 35, still too long to fit in my edit window. I can't effectively clean it myself: could you take an other sweep or move old threads. Two16

Brion, something went very wrong with Mary, Princess Royal. The text was typed in and laid out correctly. It showed up accurately in the preview but when I went back up to look at the version before saving, it was garbled, with some grey boxes cropping up in the middle of the text, the final paragraph mixed up and the first paragraph gone completely. I saved it, hoping the preview version would be the one that was saved, but instead only a bit of one line ended up saved. I left a note on the summary saying 'Help Brion' but that too didn't show up. (Other summaries I have made elsewhere don't show up.) Is there a bug somewhere? I have left the page on touched for you to take a look. (Hopefully no-one else will touch it. ) JTD 21:00 Feb 9, 2003 (UTC)

While trying to do a move back I have really f***d up Gulf War. Look at What links to Gulf War (/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Whatlinkshere&target=Gulf_War) notice the redirect called "Gulf War". The history should have been restored after I restored it from the restore a page page. But it didn't. Please help. --mav

BAD NEWS! There is no problem what so ever at the Swedish Wikipedia. Calm and stabile, growing and prospering. I really dont know what to complain about, please forgive me. The only thing I could think about is a request: On the recent changes to have links to recentchanges in en: de: da: no: po: and fi: (and if possible by any means susning.nu with the absolute adress http://www.susning.nu/Senaste_nytt, many editors write on both places)

Hope I dont make you too much disapointed with those news, I might come up with something in the future, when I need some free time again... BTW where is a list for prebanned wikipedians? :) Dan Koehl 01:57 Feb 12, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for dealing with the vandal on Meta. It looks are lacking people with sysop powers on meta - could you grant me sysop status there? (I am already a sysop on the english Wikipedia). Thanks, Enchanter 23:53 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)

Brion, Though I suspect the user calling herself Caroline F. was just trolling by posting a purportedly suicidal Commit Suiside[?] from 66.210.117.46, is it reasonable to contact the ISP and have them check? I did a reverse lookup but that's the extent of my technical expertise. -- Someone else 05:35 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)

I was happy to early. There is a Liftan race on the swedish Wikipedia again Dan Koehl 16:32 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)

Brion,

Me again. Any time for progress on Heb wiki?

Had a chance to try the script?? -- Aarrrggghhh

Is it possible to move my watchlist from User:Tokerboy to User:TUF-KAT? And can you grant me sysop rights and change my contribs credits and solve world hunger and invent a perpetual motion machine and have a nice heart-to-heart with Dubya about whom he's really angry at and end Britney Spears' career and maybe invent a better mousetrap? Tuf-Kat

Thanks oodles. Tuf-Kat

The Swedish wikipedia is suffering from several editing wars with neonazis. 194.152.96.72 changes pages several times a day and acuses people for threatning him/her/it. Same pages where edited earlier by 213.67.0.127. I don't know if there is any use to block 194.152.96.72, they might only change ip, but it's worth a try. http://sv.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=194.152.96.72 // Sven Eriksson (http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anv%E4ndare:Sven_Eriksson)

Again? Sigh.... --Brion 22:53 Feb 19, 2003 (UTC)

Could you upgrade the Lithuanian Wikipedia, as i got a couple of Lithuanians to start it abit. Some Lithuainas i talked to said they would only help if it got upgraded.. so please cna you upgrade it, soon, very soon. TW I treyd to email you that EFTA map but it kep syaing it could nto send to you. :-s -fonzy

Sorry, still haven't looked at it yet... --Brion 20:51 Mar 30, 2003 (UTC)

As soon as I have a chance I will. As far as the pic, just upload it on meta and I'll grab it from there. --Brion 22:53 Feb 19, 2003 (UTC)

Sorry to come here again. When you blocked 194.152.96.72, the person changed to 213.140.29.37, http://sv.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=213.140.29.37 . // Sven Eriksson (http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anv%E4ndare:Sven_Eriksson)

And he has now changed to 66.101.192.86, http://sv.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=66.101.192.86 Btw, I checked where 66.101.192.86 came from and it belongs to http://webwarper.net/ that is "new free Web service, allowing to speed up your access to Internet and to reduce your traffic.". From a Wikipedia viewpoint it does the job of an anonymity server so I think this IP should be permanently blocked. // Liftarn

Brion, if you're online, please turn on IM. There's a data loss bug I just noticed which I'd like to talk about. --Eloquence 21:32 Feb 20, 2003 (UTC)

About the discussion on the Swedish Wikipedia: Användare:Brion VIBBER (http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anv%E4ndare:Brion_VIBBER). Could you make me a sysop on Swedish Wikipedia? Den fjättrade ankan 20:25 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

A meeting is going on, regarding the files and the 2 warriors. The IP: 66.101.192.86 is labled on [varnade användare (http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Varnade_användare)] "(Wikipedia:Warned users)", but I am trying to negotiate a solution which possibly could remove the reason to the war. Dan Koehl 20:29 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

Everytime I look at recent changes or a talk page it says i have new messages. Susan Mason

Force a reload, it should clear. --Brion 00:22 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

DoesntSusan Mason

Well, did you read your messages? --Brion 04:01 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

Dont have any new ones. It keeps telling me I do, but I don't. Susan Mason 14:50 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

It seems to me that the history of /wiki/Japanese_proverbs is incorrect. Try editing and see the history. -- Taku 01:02 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

Hi Brion - I think it was you who protected Richard Wagner while you investigated a bug or something. Is it OK to unprotect it yet, and if not, any idea how long it will be before it is? --Camembert

Hi, Brion. Thanks for your reply regarding book links for Japanese wiki. I will ask others and come up with some links before long. Tomos 04:01 Feb 23, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for cleaning up Recent changes on Swe Wikipedia!

Hey thanks... I can't believe List of Canadians is the fourth-most controversial subject in the Wikipedia. Thanks DW... Tuf-Kat

My partner rebuilt our network from scratch - everything works now. Thanks again for the info. :) --mav

If you have a few spare minutes, would you mind popping over to Ebonics? I wrote some stuff on the grammatical characteristics and made up examples, but you seem to know a lot more about technical linguistics stuff, and I'm not sure that some of my examples correctly illustrate the habitual aspects (I get the gist of the conditional future and present perfect progressive with remote inception, but...). And, if you have a few more spare minutes, I don't know SAMPA well enough to incorporate pronunciation info (see the talk page for a good site). Thanks a bunch. Tuf-Kat

Esperanto Etymology

I notice that you write Esperanto quite fluently. I've been slowly trying to learn the language as well, since I discovered it four years ago and has been ever since fascinated by its universality and hopefulness. But sadly to sad, my Esperanto is still at a very very basic level, mainly because my studying has been sporadic at best due to the lack of motivation. (I've yet to meet an Esperanto speaker/writer in my real life.) I wonder if you know any Esperanto etymology dictionary (or a dictionary that contains etymology) on-line or in print? I don't know enough of all the European languages to get where the word comes from. I mean, "jes" obviously comes from "yes", but some words are unclear to me, for example, "edzo", "suko", "pregxejo", and "kortbirdviando", etc. For me, understanding etymology has always been an important and fun part of language acquisition. Dankon. --Menchi 15:21 Feb 28, 2003 (UTC)

Mapmaking

I really admire the maps you made. They're beautiful, like those by Scipius. I've always loved map gazing since I was a kid. I'd stare at them on and on like it's a treasure map. I asked Scipius how s/he made the maps and s/he said that s/he first trace the outline of a real map, and then digitalize it (colouring, labelling). How about you? How do you make your most lovely maps? I'm thinking of making some myself as well. --Menchi 15:49 Feb 28, 2003 (UTC)

Esperanto Accents

Thank you for the info on Esperanto etymology and mapmaking. I'm wondering if there's an easy way to enter those Esperanto hat accent marks. --Menchi 02:03 Mar 1, 2003 (UTC)

Yup - dat dun et. You are a fast one grasshopper! :) --mav

Hi Brion, if you have a moment, could you look at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (use English)? I've moved the bit on accents in titles from the article to talk, from what you said at the Pump it's out of date? Many thanks -- sannse 11:47 Mar 2, 2003 (UTC)

Hello, Brion. How's the server coping at the moment? I was wondering if I might be allowed to query the database in order to update Wikipedia:Most active Wikipedians. I haven't got to try out any of my new sysop functions yet, and I think that might be a fun place to start, before trying anything more serious. However, I gather that it might slow the system down a bit. What do you think? -- Oliver P. 04:23 Mar 10, 2003 (UTC)

Hello again! I just made my first attempt... According to Wikipedia talk:Most active Wikipedians, I'm supposed to use this query:-

SELECT count(*),cur_user_text FROM cur GROUP BY cur_user_text

But when I try, it sticks a "LIMIT 99" on the end, and I only get 99 lines back! Erm, what should I be doing? Damn, I expect if I pester you for help every couple of minutes you'll start to wish you'd just done it yourself, but at least this way I'll know for next time... :) -- Oliver P. 05:52 Mar 10, 2003 (UTC)

Saluton, Brion. I got it to work! Thanks for the help. By the way, if you gave me a fish, I'd just put it back into the water - I am a vegetarian, you know! :) See Wikipedia:Most active Wikipedians, and let me know if I've done anything horribly wrong that I just haven't noticed yet... Gxis! -- Oliver P. 07:39 Mar 10, 2003 (UTC)

The access to the Swedish Wikipedia is very, very, very slow. And it is just becoming worse. Many are complaining about this. Couldn't you consider moving it to a new server? Den fjättrade ankan 22:52 Mar 10, 2003 (UTC)

I don't have a new server. If you'd like to donate one, I'm sure Jimbo would be happy to set it up, and I'd be happy to configure things to split database and web operations between two machines. (The site does seem unusually slow today, I'm not sure why -- load is actually down compared to the recent past. In any case, there are still plenty of performance fixes to do...) --Brion 00:07 Mar 11, 2003 (UTC)

How much will a new server cost? Susan Mason

Hi, I'd like to use wikipedia software on my computer as a personal knowledge base. I don't understand how to get the software. In sourceforge the files section has only a wiki.tar.gz dating from 2001. Documentation seems to indicate that we should download directly from the CVS sources but, since I never did that, wouldn't we need a sourceforge account to be able to download?

Will it be a lot of work to get wikipedia to work? I would like to use it, to benefit from the support that the software gets.

Thanks, Ochipepe[?] 21:23 Mar 12, 2003 (UTC)

About Fremantle -- yes you're quite right, it was stuck in cache. Sorry about that. That's the first time I've seen that happen, it seems strange that it would happen just as I move a page. Is it possible one of the pages from the move script did something to confuse poor IE6? Say, by leaving the cache-suppression headers off momentarily? -- Tim Starling 23:12 Mar 15, 2003 (UTC)

Hello. I just tried out the deletion and undeletion mechanisms for the first time. I found a bug, or at least a discrepancy between what happened and what I was told would happen... When I restored a page, it said that a record of the event would appear on Wikipedia:Deletion log:

Restore deleted page

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The article Ben_Hajioff has been successfully restored. See Wikipedia:Deletion_log for a record of recent deletions and restorations.

Nothing about the restoration appeared in the deletion log, or anywhere else that I can see. The deletion log just shows me deleting the same page over and over again! -- Oliver P. 18:15 Mar 16, 2003 (UTC)

Response at your talk page. --Brion 21:23 Mar 16, 2003 (UTC)

I was on Recent Changes and clicked on "Diff" to see what anonymous user had done to One-hit wonders in the United States, and I got this error message:

The database did not find the text of a page that it should have found, named "One-hit wonders in the United States (Diff: 0, 0)". This is not a database error, but likely a bug in the software. Please report this to an administrator, making note of the URL.

The URL is: [1] (/w/wiki.phtml?title=One-hit_wonders_in_the_United_States&diff=0&oldid=0)

Response at your talk page. --Brion 21:23 Mar 16, 2003 (UTC)

sorry to "harras" you again Brion, linking to the Lithuanian wikipedia doesn't seem to work:? doing this: [[lt:HomePage]]

O and i uploaded the EFTA map in a zip form to meta.wikipedia.org: [[2] (http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:EFTA.zip)]

- fonzy.

I am thinking of developing Persian Wikipedia, yet the url is fa.wikipedia.com, although it should be .org, are you capable of redirecting the link? Please reply on my discussion page Regards Alireza Hashemi

He will do it when hes made an automate program to converted all phase II wikipedias to phase III, speaking of which are you almost their Brion? -fonzy

I see that you moved from LA to Orange County. You have my sympathies. ^_^ -- Toby 20:55 Mar 19, 2003 (UTC)

Re: PHPA. Cool, keep me updated, I'm interested in finding out. Maybe it is the placebo effect, but a number of pages seem considerably faster to load. -- Marumari 21:49 Mar 20, 2003 (UTC)

Hello Brion. Could you please help us install the updated LanguageZh.php (http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:LanguageZh.php) at Chinese Wikipedia (http://zh.wikipedia.org)? Thanks a lot. --Lorenzarius 09:22 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC)

Re tibetmap.png: see:

which is probably where I got it from. Give me an argument defended your rash action of deleting it Hfastedge 20:17 Mar 27, 2003 (UTC)

As per the This bug (http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=674724&group_id=34373&atid=411195) Could you please address it. The most conservative solution would be for changes on the user: page to activate the "you have new messages" feature as well. Remember, my original plan was for ~~~ and ~~~~ to refer to the talk page, but u argued against this. If u argue still, how about a ~~ or a ~~~~~ that points to the talk page.

user_talk:hfastedge

You're the one with the gall. I started this bug report months ago. In the above dicussion on this very talk page, I say that I'll write the patch if you give it your ok. Im terribly insulted by your whole behaviour over the past two issues we've had to deal with. Please avoid my wrath, and respectfully respond to the above, which I bent over backwards to try to account for all possible scenarios. You make me cry, truly.

You know that wasn't what I meant. Do we really want to have articles with meaningless names wihtout context floating around? :( -- Zoe

I don't appreciate being called an asshole by some anonymous luser. If you think I'm abusing my sysop powers, take it to the mailing list. Are you checking up on me, or just harrassing me? -- Zoe

And if 172 continues to abuse me, I will block him again. -- Zoe

I never anticipated that deleting those names in their first iteration, which were basically initials or just last names, would cause such a hassle. That's why I used "wikify", it wasn't an attempt to hide anything. When 172 put them back, I told him that all he had to do was give us full names and a little context, but he decided to be abusive. -- Zoe

What is Zoe talking about? I'm not the anonymous who has been bothering her. I don't even know what the above conversation is about. I haven't worked on any articles for a couple of months other than the Mugabe and Saddam articles earlier today.

172

Could you peep Mark Jonathan Harris and make any needed additions? Thanks, Koyaanis Qatsi

Brion, Mav is opposed to setting a clear box size for images & embedding images in text. I think this fundamentally wrong, making images take up entire columns when the don't need to (giving an image excessively strong visual emphasis), is causing problems with my browser and makes pages seem amateurish. I have done graphic layout for advertorials for years and embedding pictures is text is always seen as a fundamental requirement. Your view? STÓD/ÉÍRE 20:12 Mar 30, 2003 (UTC)

Could you be a little clearer? This is completely without context. --Brion 20:22 Mar 30, 2003 (UTC)

Bloody hell, Brian!!! How come different browsers show pages so completely differently on wiki??? I'm on Netscape 7.0.2. right now and on my screen now this is typing in courier font (NEVER saw that on explorer!). The Mugabe picture is in a different location in Netscape and Mozilla to where it is on explorer. (I don't know how to 'capture' that image and show it to you. I'll try something here.

On netscape/mozilla the image is aligned to the right in the second paragraph and has a clear thin line outline around it.

On explorer, the page looks

opening paragraph.

Image (without a box) dead centre of page with white space all around.

second paragraph.

That page you sent to me replicates that. On explorer, the image is dead centre on its own. On netscape it is right-aligned.

I've looked at other pages. On explorer, if you set the command at .1px the text box itself is invisible, leaving the picture and caption unboxed (which looks very clean and neat). On netscape, no matter how small you set the command, you still see the textbox (which can look clumsy. I looked at the page on the Papal Tiara and on explorer everything looks neat and well aligned, on netscape ugly great boxes appear around the picture. Yuch!

I've just tested out the Papal Tiara page by taking out the width command from around two pictures. On netscape the picture remains in location (right aligned) with a box closely fitting it (though the border set at .1px still shows the line.) On explorer, .1px hides the border, but without the width page, the picture jumps to the centre of the page and screws up the text alignment below it (the next paragraph runs four letters longer to the right than everything else on the page, but perfectly aligned on the left. If you will pardon me for a moment (f@*k. S€*t. Damn. Coclklffu!) In other words, I am pissed off. What do you do? Put in width to keep images aligned on Explorer, or leave it out to keep netscape happy? And whichever you do will screw up the other!!! And all the time I evidently wasted getting images in various articles perfect on explorer, onto to find them screwed up in netscape, and vice-versa. Is this exclusively a problem with browsers or is there some way the geniuses in wikipedia can solve it? A VERY frustated STÓD/ÉÍRE 03:22 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

Harass me here.

(You can also harass me live at times: Jabber brion@jabber.org, AIM BrionV)

My hero! *swoon*. :-) Yep. Your changes to the Bobby Mugabe pages have worked a treat. Explorer and Netscape are seeing the same thing (for once). Salutations and congratulations. You really should be getting paid for this. (We all should. Heck, I'm paying by the minute for being on wiki, as there is no alternative due to a scam by the Irish service provider, which thankfully they have been ordered to change by June!) Anyway, congrats on a job well done. Now to change all those other images out I put on out there! If only I hadn't been so damn enthusiastic about adding images!!! :-) STÓD/ÉÍRE 05:20 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for your help clearing up my Renée Zellweger typo. I really need to pay more attention to what I type sometimes... -- Pual A 02:35 Apr 1, 2003 (UTC)

I thought you may have had classes with him, was why I asked. I guess not. ^_^ cheers, Koyaanis Qatsi

Held my peace long enough...

Wassup with the Hebrew wiki Brion?? Passover holidays are coming up and if we ain't ready by then - I'll be spending it doing other stuff :-).

Lemme know. Aarrrggghhh

Yeah I know, but there were so many annoying features - slow moving pages, blurred screen images with lines repeating and repeating and repeating

repeating and repeating and repeating

repeating and repeating and repeating . . . as a page formed, typing slowing to a crawl (as a reasonably quick typist I'd have typed one and a half lines and find it had only got the first two words a n d t h e n b e c a m e a c r a w l!) I was just mentioning the courier in a tongue in cheek example of Irish sarcasm as the easiest way to explain how much I HATED NETSCAPE. I've just taken on safari (and camino!) and OHMYGOD what an improvement. I have had half an hour of wiki pleasure after four hours of Netscape 'AAAAH - fuck this . . . ' So far Safari has been quick, (very quick, quicker than anything I have used!), neat looking, quick typing. And none of explorer's tendency to suddenly decide after about an hour that you had to hit 'return' twice to get it to work, muttering "I said 'return' you f****** thing". About the only minor problem is that the font size is the smallest I have used. But I can certainly recommend safari as bloody brilliant.

On another point: do currency symbols cause problems, or is it just the ? sign (euro sign). Everytime I did a show preview it would become a ? on both explorer and safari. (Yup - done it here too. The first question mark was typed in as euro sign). STÓD/ÉÍRE 00:51 Apr 2, 2003 (UTC)

Referring to audio file question on village pump. Not even the midi version of any song is allowed? or as long as the artist's voice is not heard.kt2

Copyrights on music are fairly complicated. (I am not a copyright lawyer, just a film student. Consult a real lawyer for legal advice.) Suffice to say that not only is the recording copyrighted, and the lyrics are copyrighted, but also the sequence of notes is copyrighted. If you hum a copyrighted song in public, technically you're probably liable for paying royalties. :) Certainly a MIDI representation of the tune of an entire copyrighted song would not be acceptable for Wikipedia (unless that copyrighted song is also licensed under the GFDL, which is not very likely...) Brief extracts as samples may be acceptable under fair use, however fair use is a tricky thing and I don't personally recommend it.

Complete MIDI files (or recordings as OGG or similarly compressed audio) of songs that are in the public domain are A-OK. National anthems... Some countries may copyright them, I don't know. I would imagine most are safe, though particular recordings may be under copyright -- this is true also of classic music! -- so it's safest to sequence or record them yourself unless you know the recording or file is in the clear. --Brion 08:38 Apr 3, 2003 (UTC)

Thanx for letting me know but I am just disappointed that I can't upload my favorite songs here. Some are either downloaded from file sharing softwares like KaZaa, especially Leslie Cheung's that I wish to offer as condolences. :-)kt2

Hey Brion - I'm sorry for being such a jackass on the mailing list. --mav

Do you want to update the most active Wikipedians site[?]

172 4/4/03

Hi Brion, I just post some suggestion about traditional/simplified Chinese problem on your talk at zh.wikipedia. Take a look when you have time :)

pektiong

Brion, there is a weird problem on the Pope Pius XII page. At the bottom of the page is a link to Pius's predecessor and successor. The link to the former, Pius XI, has gone haywire. Everytime I type in [[Pope Pius XI]] it comes out as [[Pope Pius XI] on a preview . WHen I removed the square brackets, the next box, with [[List of Popes]] suddenly became [[List of Popes] . I did a cut and paste from Pope John XXIII using the same textbox. When I installed it on the page and changed the predecessor/successor names, the same thing happened. Two ]]s became one ]. When the predecessor's square brackets were removed, one disappeared from the centre List of Popes box. (Earlier, the 'signature' image on the page went weird as well, throwing text after it to the left. I did a cut and paste of the commands and installed them with the image and it worked perfectly. As far as I could see, the new commands were identical to the ones originally there. What is going on? STÓD/ÉÍRE

It's fixed. It was an unbalanced bracket in an external link that preceded the table. -- Someone else 21:06 Apr 10, 2003 (UTC)

Mystery solved. STÓD/ÉÍRE 21:24 Apr 10, 2003 (UTC)

Hi Brion - I've just made a bit of a mistake: I tried to upload a .png with a # in the name. I know #s aren't allowed, I just cocked it up. It said it was renaming it to something else (it truncated everything after the #), and I OKed the rename before I noticed what I was doing. The thing is showing in the upload log (23:37 Apr 13, 2003), but clicking on the link for the image (:Image:E with) brings a "(There is currently no text in this page)". I'm going to re-upload the image with a proper name, but I just thought I'd mention it in case it was of interest to you for some reason (I don't know why it would be, but I felt I should tell somebody about it, anyway - it seems odd that it's in the upload log but isn't there). --Camembert

Hi Brion, I'm sure you know the saga of Susan Mason/Dietary Fiber (who inadvertently admitted to being one and the same, and on the evidence is Adam/Bridget/Lir/Vera Cruz of not so fond memory!). An anonymous user visited one of the 'war zones' the History of the Soviet Union page and something about their tone immediately rang a bell as being rather similar to the Adam family contributions. I presume that you can check IPs. It might be worth seeing if this user is using the same IP address as the Adamses. Their IP was 131.247.157.115. The last thing we want to do is presume that that user is the dreaded twice-banned Adam under yet another new identity, ready to screw up new articles ('Susan Mason' calling King James VI of Scotland english was an all-time classic; it is a wonder wiki didn't get firebombed by irate Scots over such a 'slur'!). But given the Adam/Bridget/Lir/Vera Cruz/Susan Mason/Dietary Fiber behaviour on a wide range of articles in the last few months, if this is Adam trying yet another entry point onto wiki, it is worth knowing straight away, rather than people having to chase around fixing muck ups in the dark. Between SM/DF and Michael crapping all over articles recently and provoking edit wars, wikipedia is begining to feel like Iraq. Should we let Donald Rumsfeld loose on one or other? *grin* STÓD/ÉÍRE 01:39 Apr 14, 2003 (UTC)

Not the same. Lir posts from AOL, and that was posted from a University. -º¡º

Brion, did you ever see my reply on my talk page abotu what the colours showed on the EFTA map? - fonzy user talk:fonzy

Yes. I haven't got around to finishing it, and I'm at work and don't have the stuff with me right now. (Really, couldn't you have put up a temporary version of the map yourself months ago?) --Brion 20:27 Apr 15, 2003 (UTC)

you know, that thought never came across my mind. :-s -fonzy

Five syllables here

Seven here, why? Oh, nature.

Your TruckNumberFixed (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TruckNumberFixed)

Koyaanis Qatsi 15:23 Apr 19, 2003 (UTC)

Brion, I am having some strange technological problems on wiki in the last 24 hours. Last night I went to enter an older version of Nicholas II of Russia to do a revert (someone kept rewriting the page without following the naming conventions). But when I entered the previous version (which was under my own name) it didn't enter the proper article but threw up Alexander II of Russia. It took me a moment to work out what was going on. My first thought was "Jesus, this version is different". It was only after a close reading of it that I copped on I was in the wrong page. There is a link within the Nicholas II page to Alexander II, so my guess is it jumped into the page and then into an internal link. I did notice that wiki did seem to be running very slow suddenly. I don't have the exact time but I guess it somewhere in the region of 5am Saturday morning. (BTW I am using safari on an eMac!) Also, on Pope John Paul II the image of the euro coin seems to be causing all sorts of problems. It is using a different font for the caption. When I went to rearrange photos because one was interfering with text by pushing a headline out of space, everything went wrong from the euro image on. All the text began to run in a column from the image down the page, and began to over-write the subsequent image. I cut the image out altogether and reinstalled it and everything ran fine (except for the font which I cannot change. I thought it might be related to the euro sign commands in the caption, but even when I removed them the font remained the same.) No commands on that image had been removed or touched before the whole thing went wonky, and the image and commands put back were identical to the ones cut. But the problem . . . just came and then after the cut and paste . . . went.

Tonight I hit my watchlist command on the left side bar to be thrown into the Romanov page in an edit stage. I had just finished that page and saved it before hitting watchlist so I hadn't a clue why that happened. Are there some other similar experiences out there, or am I some 'X Files' type wiki? :) Oh, I've just remembered something else. On netscape (split! Got I hate netscape) the <small></small> commands don't seem to have a blind bit of difference. As a result, images that fit when a subcaption is small on other browsers are thrown out of place when looked at on netscape, because the text is all shown the one size. On I Explorer, text put in using those commands seems to become smaller and uglier than shown on safari. Hence my preference for safari. ÉÍREman 23:34 Apr 19, 2003 (UTC)

PS - one final final point (it has just happened again so I better mention it) it may not be something wiki can do anything about on safari, if for whatever reason a save didn't work (eg, the modem just cut out while you were doing it, an edit conflict, etc) hitting a save a second time does not work. You have to hit the back a page button on the browser, then when the earlier version of the page is shown, hit the forward a page button. Only then, when you are back in the edit page you were originally working on, can you hit save page and actually have the page saved. Strange, huh. Has anyone ever manufactured a browser that doesn't have its own quirky faults? ÉÍREman 23:34 Apr 19, 2003 (UTC)

Greetings. Weirdness at wikipedia:village pump. Koyaanis Qatsi

Using boolean keywords in a search dumps a database error. I know they're disabled, but is that the expected behavior? I posted this at the village pump (with the error message and a link) on the 16th, but it looks like it was lost in the shuffle. -- Notheruser 19:42 Apr 20, 2003 (UTC)

Hello. Hopefully, you wouldn't mind my quoting your two e-mails to Wikitech-L at the article Grub? --Geoffrey 20:45 Apr 26, 2003 (UTC)

How do I make myself clear, so that you will quit misrepresenting what I'm trying to say? As I have said, over and over and over and over and over again, I have no problem with people making changes to what I write. My problem in this particular case is that Egil went in behind me and moved, without explanation, photos that I had had spent hours uploading and installing, and changing the captions. And his only explanation is "because it looks better." He and I got off on a bad foot from the very beginning when he started creating empty articles than attacked me without any introduction when I suggested that they be deleted (and I did not delete them, I merely listed them in the votes for deletion page), and I have a feeling that there is more to this than simple desires to be bold in editing, I think it's personal with him. I haven't even bothered looking at any of his posts since his initial foray into Wikipedia, and have had no communication with him, so as far as I am concerned, we had no further problem, until Saturday night, when he went into virtually every page I had put a photo into, and made changes. If he had bothered to let me know why he thought they needed to be changed, then I might have been mollified. But he couldn't even let me know what it is about them that he didn't like, nor did he point to any page which tells us that what he's doing is some sort of standard. No, it's just his personal feel for what is "looking better". One wonders if he would have done the same thing if it had been anyone else who had contributed those changes. But again, as I keep saying to deaf ears, yours as well as others, I don't care if people change what I write. Just, please, let me know why you're doing it, so I can maybe not do it "wrong" the next time? -- Zoe

You seem to be purposely twisting what I'm saying. I see you have no interest in discussing this fairly, so there's no point in my discussing it with you any more. This isn't the first time we've had problems with each other, but it is the last time, because I see no need for further discussion between us. -- Zoe

Yo, tough times...;-)
Just a little clean-up, and warm hi Brion. User:anthere

Hi, Brion.

I'm a sysop in the Japanese Wikipedia (well, as you might remember), and I know some, including myself, are interested in knowing distribution of article sizes. I found this particular seemingly useful database query from Wikipedia:Database_queries.

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM cur WHERE LENGTH(cur_text)>1500 AND cur_namespace=0

But I have no idea how burdensome this query is to the server.

If no problem is expected, I may try the following format, with perhaps several different sets of values in places of "1500" and "2500".

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM cur WHERE LENGTH(cur_text)>1500 AND LENGTH(cur_text)<2500 AND cur_namespace=0

Any advice is appreciated. But I'm not in a hurry. Please take your time. And you can either answer here, or on my talkpage or Japanese counterpart - either one is fine.

Thanks,

Tomos 08:41 May 6, 2003 (UTC)

Brion: thanks for your help on this. Tomos 06:27 May 7, 2003 (UTC)

I'd be interested in becoming an admin. I've already demonstrated strong support on the mailing list. 172

I don't get involved with sysop-making on the English wiki. I do it on the recommendation of the local bigwigs on the other languages purely as a technical matter, as there's not yet an automated system and most of the languages don't have a developer with DB write access among their contributors. --Brion 21:31 May 9, 2003 (UTC)

Copyright Release

I noticed that some of your work is released into the public domain while you retain the copyright of others. I see that none of the maps are copyrighted, I assumed that it's because they're largely based on an existing work, but some of your photos are copyrighted and others not. How do you decide? --Menchi 03:25 May 10, 2003 (UTC)

I generally prefer a copyleft license for original works, but I've PD'd a few of the pics on a whim. There's no real pattern to it so far. :) --Brion 07:23 May 10, 2003 (UTC)

Brion, please ban User:JohnQ[?] - he tried to replace with an image of some fat guy's penis (not that I have anything against penises but I don't think such an image is what we want for a logo). --mav 10:18 May 10, 2003 (UTC)

While you're at it, Aezrarer, Rebecca1 and Esthet have been incorporating pictures of said penis into articles. Probably the same guy. Danny

And User:Uster -- sannse 10:28 May 10, 2003 (UTC)

Could you please update Wikipedia:Most active Wikipedians? Thanks, MB 14:26 May 14, 2003 (UTC)

Work up a sweat and wipe it off and dance some more, stomp! stomp! stomp! stomp! Koyaanis Qatsi 15:34 14 May 2003 (UTC)

Je fond d'allégresse :-)))) Thanks. You did not sleep long. You should not strain yourself too much. Ant

De rien. :) Every time I get a full night's sleep after messing with the server I find it has crashed and people have spent the last few hours cursing my name... ;) --Brion

eh. Not today ! TheRed appears to behave nicely...nice girl.

Vi scias Esperanto? Ankau mi! LittleDan

Mi scias Esperanton, jes. ;) Efektive mi origine atingis cxi tiun projekton per trovi la esperanto-fakon. --Brion

Please take a peak at User talk:Dewlaylomo/ban. I think an administrator should take some action. MB 02:34 May 15, 2003 (UTC)

Hello Brion.

With the translation, our deletion log is now called Wikipédia:Trace des effacements[?] (that is a perfectly stupid name imho, I should have followed the translation file :-(((). The new deletions are going in that new file, while the old ones are still in the Wikipedia:deletion log. Can we move everything out of the old page ? Should we keep it, or may we delete it ? Is it sure there will be no problem in terms of maintenance ?

hum...I really hope there will be an answer for my question on the mail list about how people get admin. I have absolutely nothing against Alvaro, but when I see a weird process, I always feel a *weight* on me (how can someone be sysop with less than 50 edits, most being international links or talk pages ?) Is it again a little "arrangement" ? Anthere

A message for you on Meta (http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Brion_VIBBER)

A message on subpages for you on zh:用户对话:Brion VIBBER. --Menchi 16:47 22 May 2003 (UTC)

Response there. --Brion 02:15 25 May 2003 (UTC)

Also, is the Chinese Wikipedia on the new statistics algorithm? It seems strange to have that many edits in Recent Changes and there to only be 182 articles there. --Chuck SMITH

I think Chinese wiki is still on broken comma system. I'll fix it when I get a chance. --Brion 02:15 25 May 2003 (UTC)

Howdy Brion, I noticed on Village Pump that you can merge my pre-User edits in with my current login. I only edited about a dozen articles, but I'd like them to be part of my history. I was the only person using 12.235.65.71 (/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=12.235.65.71). If you could merge them, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks! --Dante Alighieri 21:23 23 May 2003 (UTC)

Sure, I'll run that in a bit. --Brion 02:15 25 May 2003 (UTC)

I sure you get fed up with stupid questions/requests, but here is another one. On the "My contributions" Special page, is there any way of showing a running total of edits made and/or new pages created? I have no programming knowledge whatsoever, so if this is either obvious or impossible, just put it down to my ignorance. thanks jimfbleak 10:27 24 May 2003 (UTC)

Hypothetically this could be done, yes. Which reminds me also of the proposed m:User details special page. --Brion 02:15 25 May 2003 (UTC)

Message for you on User talk:Tim Starling -- Tim Starling 04:56 25 May 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for the article count fix. Any chance to get my beloved SpecialAncientpages and deletion fix online soon? --Eloquence 06:07 25 May 2003 (UTC)

Any way to avoid that "oops, two people rolled the article back negating each other effect"? -- Someone else 06:35 25 May 2003 (UTC)

Yeah, yeah, I'll go code that up. You take over here. :) --Brion 06:36 25 May 2003 (UTC)

Hello. I'm trying to update Wikipedia:Most active Wikipedians again, but this time I turned on the "-w" warning message thingy, and I got the following output:

Possible unintended interpolation of @bebbington in string at modified_script line 15.
Illegal hexadecimal digit '-' ignored at modified_script line 50.
Illegal hexadecimal digit '-' ignored at modified_script line 50.
Illegal hexadecimal digit '-' ignored at modified_script line 61.
Illegal hexadecimal digit '-' ignored at modified_script line 61.
Name "main::bebbington" used only once: possible typo at modified_script line 15.
Use of uninitialized value in hash element at modified_script line 51, <CUR> line 1.
Use of uninitialized value in hash element at modified_script line 52, <CUR> line 1.
Use of uninitialized value in hash element at modified_script line 52, <CUR> line 1.
<table border="1">
Use of uninitialized value in hash element at modified_script line 62, <OLD> line 1.
Use of uninitialized value in hash element at modified_script line 63, <OLD> line 1.
Use of uninitialized value in addition (+) at modified_script line 63, <OLD> line 1.
<tr><td align="right">1<td>Ram-Man<td align="right">45052

Ands then everything's okay after that. Does this mean everything's gone wrong, or what? -- Oliver P. 16:24 25 May 2003 (UTC)

And another thing... When I add the correspondence "BigFatBuddha" => "º¡º", the number of that user's contributions goes down from 1729 to 1633. Now that shouldn't happen, should it...? Is it anything to do with the strange characters? -- Oliver P. 18:41 25 May 2003 (UTC)

Okay, well, it still does strange things, but I'm going to give up for today, and hope that I will wake tomorrow magically imbued with an understanding of Perl. ;) -- Oliver P. 19:39 25 May 2003 (UTC)

Hi Brion,

It looks like you've got work piled up to the ceiling, but just hoping to get an answer for once. Is there a chance that the Hebrew wiki will be updated anytime soon, or should i just wait very quietly in the corner? :-)

Thanks, -- Aarrrggghhh 09:15 26 May 2003 (UTC)

Regarding the edits: Yes, they are by me. I have been psychologically quite shaken up today, but I still think I'm the same person. But one minus some parts of his bicycle, some glasswork in his kitchen, the glass in his front door and the usual amount of self-confidence, and with a referral for a psychotherapist. Andre Engels 18:16 26 May 2003 (UTC)

I obtain copyright free maps and fair use maps from universities etc. on the Internet as well as scan them in at the local public library who has every historical map that ever existed copyright free and who are not required to provide each library user with a copyright certification certificate. That is one of the reasons why, under the DMCA et al (See Alex 756’s good work) Wikipedia is not obligated to check each photo posted and has no legal liability whatsoever except to remove it when notified by a claiming party. So, my question is why is this particular one being singled out by you? First, I had a sysop revert my very detailed and factual work without reason, now suddenly this inquiry. Coincidence? I too am very concerned about Wikipedia being harmed. I have a list of about 120 photos on Wikipedia that I have doubts about. So, seeing as you are saying I should post each of these on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion, I shall do so ASAP.

I have over 300 maps on my computer. The two I posted on Weikipedia are available in about 50 different formats. Some come from:

 http://historymedren.about.com/library/atlas/natmapwestemp843.htm?once=true&

There are hundreds of maps put on the Web by About.com and others and in About.com’s case each map is labeled as follows or similar: "This map is from the Atlas to Freeman's Historical Geography, edited by J.B. Bury, Longmans Green and Co. Third Edition 1903. It is in the public domain and you may download it or print it for any use. Click it to return to the smaller version."

I frequently download these copyright free items, resize them, convert them and label them if necessary. I’m telling you this to save time in the future, but if you wish, I will provide proof each time I post, subject to being advised by the owner, Mr. Wales, that I am an exception to the fixed legal policy and required to do so.

As to the two specific images you refer to, I would like to know why Ms. JHK, a Wikipedia sysop, contravened your policy and deleted one of them from the Clovis I article? Is there two standards here. One for Ms. JHK and another for us “obtuse”, “misrepresenters”, and “liars” as she called a contributor to this page?

Image:ClovisDomain.jpg and :Image:843-870 Europe.jpg?

For these two images go to:

http://globegate.utm.edu/french/globegate_mirror/medhist

TennesseeBob Peckham Director, The Globe-Gate Project University of Tennessee-Martin

At his website he has these two specific maps you refer to that you will see come from Paul Halsall, Ph.D. history. (You might suggest Ms. Hemp go to this website and learn FACTS about Merovingian History from an expert) - It is part of the Fordham University website to aid researchers. The University of Tennessee links to Fordham University, the Government of France service departments and other education places who in fact put these historical documents on the web and WANT places like Wikipedia to have these maps (assuming that the intellect level is high enough to ensure the written input has narrative based on fact, not personal opinions). Now, Mr. Vibber, I trust this meets with your satisfaction. Would you please inform Ms. JHK that she should not vandalize pages by deleting peoples maps/photos etc. before following Wikipedia procedure. Perhaps I’m wrong, but don’t they ban people from Wikipedia for deliberate deletions of photos without proper authorization? Maybe you could advise me on this, please. While you are at it, suggest also to Ms. JHK (and someone called sysop Tannin who reverted my FACTS from the good Professor) not to delete my text additions when I support them with facts that contradict her unfounded opinions. I welcome improvement to my miniscule efforts to contribute, but not vandalism by someone with a personal agenda who asserts baseless opinions on the Internet claims of personal accreditations.

Thank you, I am appreciative of your concern and great diligence in seeing that Wikipedia operates properly and fairly. I hope this meets with your satisfaction, should you have need of any further information, please do not hesitate to ask. Have a lovely day. May the Prophet bless you. Triton

Just a small PS re fair use. I wasn't aware you were a lawyer. As I said, Wikipedia has no obligation to verify photos/maps posted. Anyone may in fact claim "fair use" when items are found on the Web without copyright claim. There is no legal requirement of any kind for a person to go searching for copyright. That is why the DMCA was created, it was new and huge as well as multi-country. If someone inadvertently has copied an unidentified copyright photo, they have no liability except to remove it when provided with PROPER notice. That is the law. Triton

Response on your talk page. --Brion 00:00 27 May 2003 (UTC)

Thank you. I am not the lawyer for Wikipedia.org. nor are you. The copyright issue is well documented, if Mr. Wales plans to change the legal requirements for posting photos I will be glad to follow them but I certainly will not act contrary to the policy that applies to all contributors. I believe it is referred to as equality under the law. I take personal exception to your insinuations because if you read the issue being debated here with myself and Ms. JHK, you would clearly see that it is about me working hard and posting facts while she deletes them with her unfounded theories thatr are definitely not even close to a Wikipedia:Neutral point of view. Please read her text on List of French monarchs and tell me this is NPOV and encyclopedic. Then, please tell me why you allow her deletions without justification of my documented facts on Clovis I AND why she could refer to users as "Obtuse", "misrepresenters" and "liars" and you, Mr. Vibber say not one word. Now, I am asking one more time that you put an end to her abusive conduct. Is that a reasonable request? My behaviour has been most tolerant given the situation. And yes, I most certainly could be a lawyer or a clerk at Sears. Now, please take a moment and read those articles and check out Ms. JHK's conduct before you insinuate anything with me. Thank you. Triton

Triton, you haven't been exactly nice to Julie from the start, calling her edits "unfounded whims" and telling her to learn more about a subject that she teaches. I think it is understandable that she got aggravated. If you both calm down, it might be possible to work out an agreeable solution. Just try to understand her point of view, and then try to find a solution that would be acceptable to both of you. --Eloquence 00:26 27 May 2003 (UTC)~

I must beg to differ. User Ms. JHK belitted another user at Clovis I a few weeks ago. That condescending attitude, calling that erstwhile contributor a liar was not tolerable to me. I happen to know a tiny bit about the Merovingians, so I objected to her deletions that were made solely because she says so. No facts, no substantation. Only because she says she is this or that. Yet, I can't find one single publication by "Dr. JHK", even if she could prove she is who she says she is. Encyclopedias are supposed to be books of facts, not books of opinions or theories. Read my article today on Clovis I that she deleted. She then accused me of copyright violation of the text (no proof) then belittled my very precise, accurate and 100% factual work. Why? Then she accused my maps of being copyright violation. WRONG! But, I proved it, I didn't just say it. And, what does she teach. This is the Internet. Identity theft, claims of education, occupation, mean nothing. What does though, is the content of ones work and I challenge Ms. JHK to find one fault in mine -- with proof. Now, look at her work and attitude. With all due respect, what I see is unlike any teacher I ever had, and quite often I swear I think I'm Einstein, Joe that is.Triton

I recommend both Triton and JHK take a break and come back a while later for an objective biew of the work. kt2

Mr. Vibber. Would you please explain why this destructive abuse at Wikipedia is still being tolerated? :

cur) (last) . . 23:28 26 May 2003 . . JHK (is the map copyrighted ? a question never answered)

Thank you. Triton

Well, largely because no one has any sympathy for you on account of your own behavior and rhetoric. I recommend you try taking the high ground: be nice. --Brion 01:28 27 May 2003 (UTC)

I don't want sympathy. That's rather a hilarious thought on this site with all the outbursts like poor old Andre today. I already pointed out Ms. JHK's conduct. Did you tell her to be nice? Please show me where I was less than tolerable of a difficult situation I most certainly did not cause. AND, why do you allow sysop JHK to delete this picture AFTER YOU posted its validity? Put an end to the crap and you won't hear rrom me other than quality input which you are totally cognizant of. I just don't get it. Did you even look at how she belittled someone on the Clovis I talk page. She drove away other sincere users who were actually trying to make a contribution. Perhaps if you dealt with an even hand, examined facts, all would respect you. Triton

Thank you for referencing Talk:Clovis I. I find Julie's messages there to be entirely appropriate and well-reasoned. Nothing she did involved use of any sysop powers, much less abuse. She mentions particular sources and authors, and offers to double-check those sources. You, on the other hand, come in flames a-blazing, refuse to cite sources, don't respond to requests for more details on sources, make constant accusations of abuse of sysop powers that are completely unsubstantiated, and have some weird fixation on "a detailed procedure required for deleting photos" (no photos were deleted, but indeed the procedure for deleting them involves first putting notes on talk pages and removing the image reference from articles, exactly what Julie did). --Brion 02:05 27 May 2003 (UTC)

Please cite my misconduct and define it. According to you the following from Talk:Clovis I is perfectly acceptable conduct by someone deleting another persons work without reason or proving supporting evidence:

"The statement about all prominent scholars considering the Merovingians to be French is at best a sad demonstration of obtuseness by a well-meaning amateur, at worst, a deliberate misinterpretation and/or outright lie."

Where every decent person comes from Mr. Vibber, it is reprehensible conduct. No one making an honest effort to Wikipedia wants to be put down like this. It smacks of intolerance. And again, please dear sir, read before you speak. The contributor left this site months ago because he was degraded and belittled for trying. And what, you want me to come along, accept Ms. JHK's false articles and congratulate her for belittling the contributor? Sometoimes, we need to tell people the truth. Also, Mr. Vibber, look at the bottom of this page at what the honorable FearÉIREANN has said. It is a diatribe by someone bordering on paranoia. You made no reprimand here, nor did you respond to his spreading this lie despite you being the key party to the truth:

Same refusal to say where the images come from

So, I assume insinuations, unproven allegations, and derogatory remarks are acceptable to you too. If not, please speak out. Mr, Vibber try and deal straight up and above board. Treat all users equally. And yes, I read a great deal of the sysop wars over Fred's stuff and others. Where is the manners you claim you want in that kind of diatribe? Thank you. Triton

By the way, Paul Halsall states on the Internet Sourcebook home page that he reserves copyright on electronic versions he has posted -- does that mean that, if he scanned and resized the picture at Clovis I, he now can claim a new copyright on that version? Fortunately, he also states that permission to use is granted if no financial gain is to be made -- so I guess we're in the clear if Bomis isn't making money -- but what happens if it does become a commercial venture? Just asking ... JHK

Ms. JHK. Why do you think Mr. Vibber is the legal counsel for Wikipedia.org? Triton

http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/ makes the same kind of vague copyright claims on their (poorly) scanned (unproofread) copy of the public domain 1911 EB texts which are extensively used here; it's not clear that that kind of claim applies in any meaningful fashion where no creative additions have been made on the work. However I'd be happy to rescan anything I can get ahold of a local physical copy of anyway (we could use a cleaner, higher-resolution scan). In any case, I'll e-mail him and ask for clarification on whether this applies to the images (as opposed to the text, which is presumably proofread and laid out creatively in HTML). --Brion 05:57 27 May 2003 (UTC)

I don't know if you are aware of it, but there is a widespread belief that Triton is our old pal from hell, DW! Same pre-occupations. Same approach. Same abuse. Using the same images. Same refusal to say where the images come from. Same topics. Only a different name. Why can't he have a personality transplant to go along with each of his names? Heh heh. Slán. FearÉIREANN 05:40 27 May 2003 (UTC)

A message on malfunction for you on zh:用户对话:Brion VIBBER. --Menchi 03:43 28 May 2003 (UTC)

Response re: copyright stuff at Wikipedia:Copyright issues.

I would still appreciate it if you could put en: on current CVS status. --Eloquence 14:53 29 May 2003 (UTC)

Brion, could you please ban User:Michael/Crass? The Anome 00:38 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

...and you might want to take a look at User:Michael/Trapeze, too. The Anome 19:17 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Just wanted to thank you for all your help with User:Kils/User:Viking[?]. It was certainly an unpleasant situation. MB 07:30 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Hi Brion!

It still always amazes me that with all the load you still get around to helping me out.

Which makes me feel all the more bad about this little request - When trying to go to he.wikipedia.org, I get - (quote)

Wikipedia has moved!

/ is now handled by our new server at 130.94.122.199. If you're seeing this page thinking you're coming to www.wikipedia.org, your DNS is out of date!

(endquote)

huh?!, and thanks!!!! -- Aarrrggghhh 09:14 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Could you teach me how to update the most active wikipedians page? MB 14:43 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

hello dear Brion. A french user is reporting a little mess in user old and new identity. Could you check your french page for support please ? ant

Could a developer check to see if User:Eddie is loging in using User:Michael's ip range (i.e. 152.163.25x.xxx)? He has been reverting articles of User:Michael's back to user Michael's content in a sneaky way. I just want to make sure it is or isn't User:Michael. If it is him, please ban the account. Thanks. MB 17:40 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)

User:Fuck is Michael, please ban and delete the account, or whatever is nessesary. MB 15:31 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Michael is back as User:Weezer/NOFX, attempts to reason with him to E-mail Jimbo have come to nothing, usual mind-games, alas, please ban the account. The Anome 15:11 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)

user:My Green Dice is also Michael-- Green Dice, with spaces, not MyRedDice, without. Anyway, he's leaving vulgar edit summaries and moving Hephaestos' page to different places; could you block him please? Thanks. Koyaanis Qatsi 01:53 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Add User:Punk to the queue, please. -- John Owens 23:31 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)

And User:Twister. -- John Owens 00:19 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

deletion comment bug fixed in cvs. --Eloquence 01:47 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Dammit, I just installed my own fix live. :) --Brion 01:52 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

OK, but note that I fixed some other stuff, too (the history warning showed up after the deletion; there was a variable typo that would cause some code that should never be executed to never be executed :-). --Eloquence 01:56 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

How much money is required to significantly improve the lag? Pizza Puzzle

That's a question that can't be meaningfully answered until we've more thoroughly profiled the system to be sure about where the current bottlenecks are. That's not going to happen until someone's got the free time and inclination to go about it. --Brion 18:37 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I think that Pizza was hinting at actually being willing to pay you to do the profiling, since I told him you would accept donations. --Eloquence 04:41 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I don't have the time, as I'm presently overcommitted with existing work. --Brion 06:40 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Hi, Brion. Sorry, Tuf-Kat has derived me to you because of a message I post on the Village pump, for my loggin isn't working right or I AM NOT WORKING RIGHT (I have been an anonymous user and contributor since some time ago, but I've created the account yesterday night), the fact is that I can get logged in "my" page, but I'm not logged in when using then Wikipedia; the username and Log out words do not appear at the corner of the screen, and a little contribution I have made to see if it could be registered was saved but not registered on my historial. I have received a message about 22 hs before to notify I wasn't logged, but I don't know what to do. I tried to re-create the account, but it is already created (by me); anyhow, at any time I try to log in again it is accepted by the program. I was warned that I interfere with other users if that happens, so I'd like to solve this problem for I'd like to stay here. If you have any solution, an explanation or what to do, or need more data about me, please leave me a message on my page; anyway, I'm going to visit your talk page later or tomorrow. I'll be grateful. Thanks The Warlock June 12, 2003, 7:10 (GMT). The last quotation: I've noted that after logging in "successfully" (with username and Log out on screen) I get automatically logged out "not logged in".-- The Warlock June 12, 2003, 10:23 (GMT)

Warlock: please try the test described on Wikipedia:Village pump. -- Tim Starling 11:09 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Sent your tape today, should be there on Monday. Much blargfulness surrounding the DVD, so that may not happen. Best, Koyaanis Qatsi 20:49 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Awesome, thanks! With luck someday my film get finished up too... :) --Brion

Can you install SearchEngine.php from CVS? Just a minor change that should address the Go button behavior mentioned on Wikipedia:Village pump. --Eloquence 00:12 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Done. I thought we had fixed that some time ago, but I guess we just talked about it. oops! :) --Brion

Thanks, Brion, that was it: my browser is setted to reject cookies. I'm just going to fix it now. I didn't know that was a requisit. Sorry, and thanks again. Please extend my thanks to Tuf-Kat, my browser cannot edit his page. Very grateful.-- The Warlock June 13, 2003, 6:10 (GMT) O, please excuse my misspelling "setted" by set; I was so shocked of being logged in that almost forget how to write. A teacher that cannot forgive himself: The Warlock 9:00 (GMT)

Another Go button improvement in CVS (see Wikipedia talk:Go button), please update SearchEngine.php again.

Oh, and the search index on ru: is broken. --Eloquence 08:15 15 Jun 2003 (UTC)

While we're talking ru: anyway, a couple of weeks ago (around the time of the server change? might not be just a coincidence), the should-be-Unicode on ru: started not quite working right for me. I still see most of the characters correctly, but some of them come up as garbage of the "?,?"?>?." kind. I can't be entirely sure I didn't screw things up somehow on my own browser, though. If it would help, I can show you over on my Russian sandbox (http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JohnOwens/Sandbox) exactly what I see instead of the correct characters. For what it's worth, the relevant meta tag from the source is <meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">. I'm using the Russian version of Mozilla to do that, with a separate user account with LANG=ru_RU set and all that. -- John Owens 06:05 16 Jun 2003 (UTC)

My Mozilla 1.3.1 seems to grok ru.wiki okay; I suspect browser trouble on your end. Do you only have trouble when editing, or does it show garbage on existing pages as well? --Brion 17:42 16 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I had meant to mention that, but I guess it slipped past me. It's the same on existing pages too. Still not all the characters, just a few. My main concern is my vanilla Russian version of Mozilla-1.3, but pretty much the same issue comes up on my regular English Galeon-1.2.10/Mozilla-1.3 installation, except instead of seeing question marks I get the square boxes with the hex code "FFFD" in them, generally followed by a punctuation character. So I'm about as ready to suspect font issues as browser trouble. But both were working fine for a while after I installed some more fonts, and figured out what to use for the encoding setting. -- John Owens 09:36 17 Jun 2003 (UTC)

More followup: I just noticed that the characters that aren't showing right most places, do show up right when I enter them into an edit window. However, if they're in the edit window because they were already on the page I'm editing, they still come up borked. So at least I know my browser's doing something right, even if not everything. -- John Owens 21:08 18 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Another note: on IE at a friend's house now, I can see the correct characters, and if you look at my Russian sandbox (http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JohnOwens/Sandbox), what I see here (after having edited the page in Mozilla, where the characters looked funny) is the first keyboard layout diagram showing up correctly, but the second showing what I got instead for the error characters. It shows all the characters correctly in the older versions.

Any idea whether this would be a Mozilla issue or a XFree86 fonts issue? I'm not real clear just where the one ends, and the other begins. -- John Owens 23:34 22 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Is there a limit on file sizes for uploads? I had some mp3s I downloaded from the Edison library but the 'pedia keeps giving me an error message. I've only tried three; the one that was under 2MB worked; the two that were over didn't. Koyaanis Qatsi 13:19 16 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Yes, there's presently a 2MB hard maximum. --Brion 17:42 16 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Where is that set? It doesn't seem to be in SpecialUpload.php. --Eloquence 19:39 16 Jun 2003 (UTC)

It's a PHP setting; it can be changed in the system-wide php.ini. --Brion 19:42 16 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Aha! Could we maybe increase it to 4 MB? There are a few public domain MP3s out there that might be useful. --Eloquence 19:47 16 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Ok, thanks. I don't suppose we could mention the filesize limit on the upload log, maybe with the to excerpt affected files in some way? Koyaanis Qatsi

Hi Brion, I would like to explain a bit why I object to the words "our" and "we" on the meta-pages: The person who reads this is proabably contributing to the project to some degree, so he/she is a part of this project. Using such words creates the illusion that there is some separate, established elite ("we") that governs the project, which I'm afraid may exist in part (Wikipedia:Administrators), but that's not the point. The point is to encourage casual, knowledgable contributors to participate and avoid the false perception of wikipedia being distant, idiosyncratic aim of some closed group of followers. (A criticism I have already heard, by the way). -- Rotem Dan 20:03 16 Jun 2003 (UTC)

The "we" and "our" are inclusive, not some distant mysterious "the" entity which has no relation to the users. --Brion 20:08 16 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I disagree, it may be seen otherwise (If the person is skeptical enough), I suggest you to look at the changes I did today in Wikipedia:About and Wikipedia:Welcome, newcomers.

I saw those changes too, and disagree with them for the same reason. Rather than depersonalizing them ("Wikipedia, the faceless entity, exists in a nether realm where human being cannot touch it"), better to try rewording them make it inclusive, no? ("our -- that includes you!" "anyone can edit this page right now, including you")

and also Wikipedia:Our Replies to Our Critics is one of the most problematic pages in this sense ("our" in the title, and a defensive and advocative (biased) tone all through the article). I have not touched that yet. Even if that's not the most natural thing to do in the project's interest, I am trying to remove the m:Systematic bias and advocacy that is spread in the Meta-pages, and Wikipedia article, by the way, is very biased and advocative IMO -- Rotem Dan 20:15 16 Jun 2003 (UTC)

It's difficult to argue that the help and FAQ pages should not advocate Wikipedia -- that is after all their purpose: to enable and encourage participation in the project. The encyclopedia article at Wikipedia is another matter, of course, and should be neutral. --Brion 21:39 16 Jun 2003 (UTC)

One standard is not applicable to all of Wikipedia. Picture this:

Article namespace	"They"-space: They say that .. (NPOV)
Wikipedia namespace	"We"-space: Thoughts by the Wikipedia community
Meta-Wikipedia User namespace	"I"-space: Thoughts by individuals about Wikipedia

--Eloquence 22:08 16 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Have a nice WikiHoliday! --mav 01:07 17 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Yeah man, have a nice break. Good luck on your film. :-) Koyaanis Qatsi 03:01 17 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Are we still running the slow query log? I strongly suspect that out of control sysop queries are responsible for the occasional slowdowns we have. What else could there be? Most of the special pages are disabled, the search load should be distributed equally over time. Last time we ran the log, we saw queries that took many minutes. IMHO they should be disabled except for developers. Important queries could be run by them. --Eloquence 17:56 24 Jun 2003 (UTC)

In theory we're running the slow query log, but it's not storing anything in it. No idea why. --Brion 18:07 24 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I sent some feedback to Apple about the Safari bug causing Non-western characters turn into quesionmarks. Let's hope thay can fix it quickly. Thanks for reproducing the bug in 1.0, because they wouldn't have investigated a beta bug having just released "the real thing". --Juxo 08:54 26 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Hi Brion! If it's not too much trouble, could you see about increasing the difference in heading sizes in the standard stylesheet? It's pretty hard to tell some of them apart. I've left a note on Wikipedia:Village pump about it. Thanks! -- Wapcaplet 21:43 27 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Ah, I wondered if might be a historical reason for the current heading sizes. I agree that letting the lowest-level headings get smaller than the normal text is dumb, and shouldn't really be an option (though, are there browsers that actually do this with default sizes? I haven't personally encountered it).

I think using other stylistic alterations may be the best solution. Normally, I would suggest different colors, but I don't think that's the best course in this case. Underlining may work, but I've always found underlined text to be confusing, since it's almost automatic to assume that underlines mean links.

Variation in weight may alone be enough. Since level 1 is already more or less fixed (and since we should really only see one of those per article, namely the title), that leaves 5 levels. Perhaps 3 distinct sizes, distinguished by weight, something like:

h2 { font-size: 130%; font-weight: bold; }

h3 { font-size: 130%; font-weight: normal; }

h4 { font-size: 115%; font-weight: bold; }

h5 { font-size: 115%; font-weight: normal; }

h6 { font-size: 100%; font-weight: bold; }

The distinction between h2/h3 is probably the most important, since articles rarely go any deeper than that. Italicization may also be helpful in making the different levels distinct, but there it becomes less obvious which levels are higher than others (is italic "higher" or "lower" than bold?) If we could rely on browsers to implement all of CSS2, we could have even more freedom, and do things like font stretching, small-caps, etc., but that's probably not going to be the case anytime soon. Let me know if you think the above suggestion would work. -- Wapcaplet 01:14 28 Jun 2003 (UTC)

P.S. - This shouldn't be taken as holy scripture or anything, but the CSS2 spec (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/fonts#font-size-props) suggests that 1.2 is a good scaling factor between adjacent font "levels" (they're referring to the context of small/medium/large, but I think it applies here too). So it should probably go something more like 100%, 120%, 144%... -- Wapcaplet 01:21 28 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Sorry, but this isn't the first time I have had a problem with Anthere on the Gaia articles. I and others have tried to work with her before, but she refused to discuss anything; she again is just using reversions. No talk or discussion, mind you. Just reverts. And worst of all, Anthere has no regard for how thousands of other English speakers and scientists use these terms.

English speakers just do not use the terminolgy she uses. I have read books on this subject, articles on the subject, and followed Google links to a huge number of websites. The result is always the same: She doesn't know she is talking about. This isn't about science, mind you. It isn't about NPOV. Its only about Anthere's perculiar terminology. This isn't the French Wikipedia, its the English one. If she doesn't like, she can go elsewhere. But her reversions, and refusal to even admit that English speakers *might* be misled by her private terminology only proves that she is not a team player. RK 02:02 29 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Careful, man. Anthere and I are hatching a plot to ban you too. :-P Koyaanis Qatsi 06:32 29 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Doesn't sound so bad -- I'd have a lot more free time. ;) --Brion 07:15 29 Jun 2003 (UTC)

18:40 21 Nov 2002, Brion VIBBER blocked -1, troll (contribs) (unblock) (Our old pal the goatse.cx lover.)

Were you planning on ever unblocking this account? Martin

Any reason to? The reason we recommend unblocking IP addresses after a while is that they are not tied to people; many IPs are dynamic (either on a short cycle like PPP connections, or a long cycle like most DSL users, who may end up with a new IP every couple of months) or may be shared by multiple people more directly (proxies, public workstations). A login account is different, because only one person uses it (or, hypothetically, a group of people sharing a password might use one account together). Blocking an account doesn't prevent other people who never used that account and never will from editing, while blocking an IP may and sometimes does block other people who happen to use the same net provider. In that case, unblocking an IP after a while reduces the chance that we're blocking innocent people, while at the same time there is a much reduced chance that the problem person would come back with that IP in any case: the utility of an IP ban decreases sharply over time. A login account, though, can only be used by that problem person. Unblocking an account that was only used once during a vandalism spree by someone inserting the goatse.cx image and other sophomoric sexual humor into a serious encyclopedia is unlikely to benefit anyone. Nor is leaving the ban in place likely to harm anyone. --Brion 19:12 29 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I would rather ask, any reason not to? Martin 21:52 29 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Same question: any reason not to leave the status quo? --Brion 23:29 29 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Wikipedia:TourBusStop offers a "multilingual wiki tour", but this only links to the Esperanto Wikipedia mainpage, not to a tour bus stop. Shouldn't EoWikiPedia:Vikipedia:TourBusStop exist? I ask because our English tour bus page is currently featured in PC Magazine. --Eloquence 20:50 30 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Something funny has happened with one of my edits. Is it ok to tell you here or should I have done a bug report? I made an edit and clicked save but it was taking ages to save so I pressed stop on my browser because I decided to write more about it. Then I realised it had saved (as it was in recent changes). However, Koyaanis Qatsi noticed that the edit logs [3] (/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion&diff=0&oldid=1097487) and [4] (/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion&diff=0&oldid=1097488) lead to the same edit--the one he made. Mine seems to have vanished, though the system says mine came in earlier at 21:12. Could it have been half-saved when I pressed stop? Angela 21:41 30 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Brion,

I think the version of the code running on test.wikipedia.org is not the latest CVS version. I cannot reproduce the escaping bug on one of the test pages with my version.

We really should start using CVS branching. --Eloquence 21:20 2 Jul 2003 (UTC)

You're quite right; when I put that version up I couldn't get to the CVS server, so installed my slightly outdated copy.

We should probably set up a cleaner test/upgrade cycle, too... --Brion 21:40 2 Jul 2003 (UTC)

We just need to make sure we can upgrade all wikis easily from CVS, then we have to set up branches for stable/unstable development, auto-update test from unstable once per day and manually update the non-English wikis to stable regularly. --Eloquence 01:55 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

*cough* Could you replace Article.php on test.wiki with CVS? That contains an important bugfix that caused top sections to overwrite the article when saved in preview mode. --Eloquence 02:16 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

LinksUpdate performance

Making LinksUpdate faster should not be too hard. Right now it's really, really dumb and evil. I think this is a case where a data comparison should be done on arrays, the old link status and the new one, and then two loops should be run to 1) insert new links 2) delete removed links. To do the comparison, maybe we could keep a backup copy of the Links Cache object before we overwrite it. Otherwise we would just have to read in the state of the Links table; SELECTing is fast, INSERTing is not.

Even locally saving a page with many links takes very long because of our current braindead process. Someone on one of our wikis is probably saving such a long page every few minutes, at which point the entire wiki would always slow down slightly.

Would you be willing to take on this task? --Eloquence 03:02 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Ha! Clever screenshot of Safari. People will be wondering, "how'd he do that?". --Nate Silva 09:19 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I couldn't resist. :) --Brion

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