LSS/wikipedia-l-archives/2006 10 29-11 11

English (en)

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This issue covers (roughly) 2006 October 29-Nov 11

Threads

• [1]Frederick Noronha gave a pointer to a news article announcing that China had eased their restrictions on use of Wikipedia from China
• [2]Liz Matthews asked some questions on starting her own wiki, and was pointed to some other lists that better handle that kind of question
• [3]Further ideas on the $100 Million (USD) challenge were given and discussed.
• [4]Aleksandr Sigachov, noting that there was a page on meta describing the Arbitration Committees, asked if it was based on Foundation-Wide policy, and raised an issue of parts of the policy that seemed to be specifically tailored to the English Arbitration Committee. It was suggested that the copy on Meta was made for the benefit of curious people from other projects, and could use some rewriting to make it more generic and helpful in understanding all the other ArbComs on non-English projects.
• [5]Steve asked if the $100 Million USD was something that was going to happen. Jimbo said that there was no news at this time, but a number of good ideas were collected. Further worries of advertisement on Wikipedia were voiced.
• [6]Daniel Mayer announced that the Funding Committee was looking for ideas for fundraising
• [7]Rty Yui, reporting that the Belarusian Wikipedia debate (to create another Belarusian Wikipedia using modern Orthography) had been going on for a long time and asked if anything was to come of it. (Note: The Belarusian language has had a number of historical spelling/grammar reforms over the last hundred years, with many of these reforms being intensely political and exclusive to various political factions. The administration on the Belarusian Wiki has decided on a particular grammar/word set, spurring people who prefer another version of the language to create a separate Wikipedia).
• [8]Faxri Karimli asked if there is a Wikipedia project for Gagauz, a language spoken by about 200,000 people in Moldova. GerardM noted that there was a proposal to create the language, but not enough people have shown up yet to support the project.
• [9]Ian Tresman alleged that an Arbiter on the English Wikipedia appeared to be permitting and engaging in incivil treatment of him. Brief discussion on that as well as application of WP:DICK ensued.
• [10]Erik Möller passed along information on use of the African-language wikis, noting that some of them needed some guidance as to how wikis work.
• [11]Oldak Quill noted that Google's experimental search engine mentions Wikipedia by name, asking for feedback on providing Wikipedia articles as search engine results.
• [12]theProject expressed concern that semi-protection is being used more widely than it once was. Discussion on how semi-protection works and ways for it to improve were discussed.