Talk:Wikipedia

It's possible that we'll have a CVS system up and running pretty soon. One way or another we certainly do want to make it as easy as possible for programmers to help develop Wikipedia's code. Please see also UseModWiki for essential information. --LMS

Do you suppose that starting /FAQ pages would be appropriate? Perhaps the function is already covered by /Talk, but I think that an article subsection that is specifically for questions about the content could really help to refine the content of said articles.

The main article uses the term "international wikipedias" to refer to the non-English versions. I wouldn't call them international; in fact they are arguably "national" and the English version is closer to an "international wikipedia" since people from many countries can read English and several non-native speakers contribute to the English version. --AxelBoldt

--- Sounds logical. However, also the 'national' Wikipedia's have 'international' content. The difference is the language and some information typical for that nation. That is also the case for this English Wikipedia. It has far more 'American' topics than , I suppose, other Wikipedia's will ever have. In that sence the English Wikipedia is a 'national' one. Maybe we could just refer to non-English Wikipedia's as 'Wikipedia's in other languages'?

Where do we actually refer to other Wikipedias as (individually) "international Wikipedias"? We should just change that. "International Wikipedia" is just a quick name meaning "Wikipedias in non-English languages." Is there a better name we can use, Axel? If so, we should use it. --LMS

Why not simply write "The original Wikipedia uses English, but now Wikipedias in many other languages have been started." --AxelBoldt

Go ahead, then! --LMS

May I be too bold in suggesting, that in future the word national and international (as yet no Articals)be replaced with community and virtual community. I think politics and its social boundaries may be a bit out of date and on the nose right now. Maybe this statement belongs under Meta-wikipedia --JW Oct 19,2003

Oct 17, 2001 Is it possible to get the Wikipedia on a CDROM? Perhaps someone could sponsor a download site with the whole wikipedia zipped up or something so people could download it and use it on their PCs without having to be connected to the net. CR

It seems a little early for that yet. I know that there's lots of interest in this idea though. It'll just be a little while... --Stephen Gilbert

It would be really grand if someone would move all the various Wikipedia:policy pages, and change all the major links to them :-/ , to the wikipedia:namespace. I'd do this myself but, er, I haven't got the time. But I can see that it needs to be done. Any takers? --Larry_Sanger

Shouldn't Wikipedia be the one wikipedia article that is not in the wikipedia namespace? I think the project itself has risen to a degree of importance to deserve its own article in any online encyclopedia -- especially this one. Just my two cents. --maveric149

I agree. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia article and belongs into the main namespace. AxelBoldt

OK - I will move it back. --maveric149

Done --maveric149

I was wondering whether it wouldn't be a good idea if there was a script that went through articles and found references to dates that weren't linked to the actual dates themselves. Then someone could go through and add the events to the dates in the timeline... Right now all the timeline dates seem very sparse in terms of events.

Just because a date appears in an article doesn't mean that the author necessarily wants it linked to the timeline. It may, for example, be a provisional one pending further clarification of the facts. Eclecticology

Absolutely, agreed. But the process would in any case require human input, details the events the articles describe might need to be added to the year... This was, in fact, the main motivation for finding such links.

It would be nice if you could search for items of 3 letters. Consider that it is almost impossible to search for some topics due to this restriction. Try searching for 'Art' or 'DNA'.

Someone appears to have been uploading pornographic images - it might be an idea for someone so enabled to delete them. Example 1003015.jpg .

(That's a quite old one, according to the log it's been sitting there since january 26.) As a stopgap measure, upload a clean file with the same name.

I think that the Wikipedia should have its own encyclopedia article, but some of the content should be moved to, say Wikipedia:About Wikipedia. --Stephen Gilbert

Mea Culpa on the deletion - the damn subpage talk link got me. --maveric149

The article states that a copyright claim has been added to the 1911encyclopedia materials; by my reading of the "Legal" section this claim is only on the edits and changes. -- User:Khendon

---Who are wikipedia's competitors? Lir 13:11 Oct 27, 2002 (UTC)

The article says "there is a plan to produce a low-cost paper version". Is this so? I was only aware of some discusstion about making a CD. And I thought Wiki is not paper. Could someone please clarify? Arvindn 17:36 Jan 23, 2003 (UTC)

Anyone actually interested in making a paper version is welcome to do so, and if nothing else I'd be curious to see if it worked! Most likely this would involve some culling to 'known good' articles and search/replace to use abbreviations etc. (For the curious; someone at Enciclopedia Libre has done an experimental printable conversion: http://linuxopensource.com.mx/enciclopedia/ . Only 1200 pages -- you may want to print it at work when the boss isn't around. ;) --Brion 17:45 Jan 23, 2003 (UTC)

Does anyone object to separate history section and make an independent article called History of Wikipedia? -- Taku 22:36 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)

Yes, I object, the history is important to keep here for those who really know nothing about encyclopediae. It's also very important to show that we take the history of compiled knowledge seriously, know it has crossed many cultures, and do not have a naive view of what's required to do it right. Of all things on this page, that history makes historians take us seriously, as it will probably include at least one thing they don't know, get them clicking, and viola' - another contributor! For journalists, they need to see it all on one page.

I'm tempted to slap a neutrality dispute disclaimer on the top of this page, just on principle. Can we really claim to be impartial when describing ourselves? Martin 19:16 28 Jun 2003 (UTC)

No - in principle I think a neutrality dispute disclaimer should only be used as a last resort where there is a serious argument going on, and there are no big disputes about this page. Normally the answer to a slightly biased article is just to change it. We can't be 100% impartial, but that will be reasonably obvious to readers already - I wouldn't think a disclaimer adds anything. Enchanter

Fair enough. Martin 19:47 28 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Why exactly has the decision been made to create yet another wiki for wikipedia? I'd be pretty interested in that topic hence there are sooo many wiki implementations out there some of which are pretty powerful (twiki comes in mind). Maybe someone involved in that decision would care to write something under 'software' ?

See Wikipedia3 for an explanation of several other features that this Wiki has that distinguish it from other Wikis. I am attempting to install it now in my company and I picked it above any of the other Wiki engines mainly based on these additional features, especially the Namespaces. Nanobug 16:55 16 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick response. I'm actually in the process of choosing a decent wiki for an internal documentation project of mine; however - hence the main focus of phase3 is Wikipedia I think I'll better choose TWiki. It has lots of features + cooperate intranet success stories ...

Potential problematic edits

I feel that MyRedDice has made some unneccessary and harmful deletions from this article. I don't have time to go through it today. But at least he has removed the fact that Larry was here at the beginning and left it in an incomplete sentence. Could someone else check these changes? Rmhermen 21:45, 1 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I will try this now a bit. Tomos 00:12, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Oh, you want "For around thirteen months" to be "For the first thirteen months", I guess? You're right: that would be more informative. I'd do it myself, but I think Tomos is doing something :) Martin 00:22, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I saved two past versions - one immediately before MyRedDice/Martin made a series of edit, and the final version among his. I checked diff. between the two. You can see it here. http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia&diff=0&oldid=1228227

In general, I guess the edits were quite agreeable. From Rmhermen's comment, I expected quite controversial, mal-intended edits, but my impression after checking them is quite different. Mainly, I see the text less self-boostering and hyperbolic. The result is a more encyclopedic entry - which is appropriate considering that this is in the article namespace, not in Wikipedia:

Regarding Larry Sanger, I think I have read he exerted some control after a while (not initially). I forgot where I've read it, though. I think I have also read that Larry was the editor-in-chief, which contradicts both the pre-Martin and after-Martin versions. If I come across some pages that make those claims, I will bring them.

If some old-timers think they know that Larry did have some final say about certain things, and did use his authority (may not be a good term..), and think that that understanding was widely-held, I guess it is okay to write that in a neutral way (not asserting, but explaining that such a view exists.)

He also removed quite a few links to those "Wikipedia:" pages. I think that's in order to make the article less a "guide to Wikipedia for potential users," but just a "explanation of what it is." That's again an improvement. But I think those Wikipedia: pages can be used as a source material, just like historical documents for historians. But that's for another edit, rather than reverting to the previous version.
--Tomos 01:18, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I was here for the last few months of Larry's reign. He was not the editor-in-chief of Wikipedia, he was the editor-in-chief of Nupedia and Bomis paid him a full time salary. However, since Wikipedia's founding in January 2001 until he was laid off in February of 2002 (stock market bubble bust) he spent an increasing amount of time just on Wikipedia. His role here was semi-officially "first among equals" but in reality he was the guy people ran to arbitrate disputes, set policy, delete pages and ban vandals - all the power that is now shared by 100 Admins and to a lessor extent any other user (as far as mediating disputes goes - nobody except Jimbo can do binding arbitration of disputes now). In a very real sense he was like a small town Sheriff - at least that was the impression I got. --mav

Maveric's description is pretty accurate. At first, Larry just wanted to be a plain ol' Wikipedian like everyone else, but as Wikipedia grew and Nupedia stalled, he took on the role of making decisions when agreement couldn't be reached; some of his decisions cause controversy in certain circles. One of the earlier articles written about Wikipedia refered to him as the "chief cat-hereder", which is the best description I've seen. :) -- Stephen Gilbert

Thanks for the information. I incorporated some of info. into the article, hoping it would be an improvement. Needless to say, further edits are welcome. Tomos 07:16, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for the positive review! :) I still think there's a bit of tweaking to be done on Policies and Downloading the database, but I may defer that for later :) Martin 13:39, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

It's more than a bit cheesy that major figures in the history of encyclopediae and compiled knowledge have no bios here yet, not even stubs. Someone care to fix that?

Like who? Also, why don't you do it? :) Adam Bishop 17:33, 10 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Like most of the Muslims, who actually invented the form. You can see who doesn't have a bio, by rolling the mouse over the links - where you see a link to ...THENAME&action=edit that means there is nothing there yet. I am not an expert biographer, but, if Muhammad is promoted to Brilliant prose, I will consider taking a stab at these folks with something other than a scimitar.

Why is it dependent on Muhammad being considered Brilliant Prose? (Just curious) Adam Bishop 05:52, 13 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Stallman

Wikipedia is supported by free software exponent Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation

Do we have a reference for this?

I've heard Stallman mentioned Wikipedia in some public occasion and gave some positive comments. Perhaps that's what "support" means. Though I don't have a reference in English. I am not sure about FSF's support. Tomos 00:10, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Found it: [1] - "Just as we were starting a project, GNUpedia, to develop a free encyclopedia, the Nupedia encyclopedia project adopted the GNU Free Documentation License and thus became a free commercial project. So we decided to merge GNUpedia project into Nupedia. Now, the Wikipedia encyclopedia project has adopted the philosophy of Nupedia and taken it even further. We encourage you to visit and contribute to the site". Also, here's a quote of RMS [2] "exciting news". Well, it'll have to do. Martin

Hardware

I'm now updating this article in Japanese Wikipedia. I hope someone could help on this. As I understand, there are three machines now for the Wikipedia.

the database server, serving all languages and sister projects
the web server for English wikipedia
the web server for all others

I know the web server for en. was introduced in mid-May, 2003. But before that, had there always been two machines? Or the wikipedia started with just one machine and added another at some point? When was it?

Tomos 23:47, 24 Aug 2003 (UTC)

A brief history of Wikipedia serving:

Phase I: January 2001 - January 2002

One of bomis' servers hosted all Wikipedia wikis running on UseModWiki software

Phase II: January 2002-July 2002

One of bomis' servers hosted all Wikipedia wikis; English and meta running on the php/mysql-based new software, all other languages on UseModWiki. Runs both the database and the web server on one machine.

Phase III: July 2002-May 2003

Wikipedia gets own server, running English Wikipedia and after a bit meta, with rewritten PHP software. Runs both the database and the web server on one machine.
One of bomis' servers continues to host some of the other languages on UseModWiki, but most of the active ones are gradually moved over to the other server during this period.

Phase III still: May 2003-present

Wikipedia's server is given the code name "pliny". It serves the database for all phase 3 wikis and the web for all but English.
New server, code name "larousse", serves the web pages for the English Wikipedia only. Plans to move all languages' web serving to this machine are put on hold until load is brought down with more efficient software or larousse is upgraded to be faster.
One of bomis' servers continues to host some of the other languages on UseModWiki, but a few more of the active ones have been gradually moved over to pliny.

-- Brion 00:44, 25 Aug 2003 (UTC)