User talk:Tim Starling

Thanks Tim! --Daniel Mayer 09:44, 13 Jan 2004 (UTC)

That was quick. Thanks. If I get a message saying User xxxx cannot be made an admin, should I assume that someone has already done them? It's happening for Roadrunner and Seglea. Bmills 15:35, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Reply on User talk:Bmills -- Tim Starling 15:45, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Thanks. I've sysoped Seglea. Bmills 15:50, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Looks like roadrunner accepted at the bottom of this. Bmills 15:53, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Oh, right, looks like he did that a couple of days ago. I missed it when I checked just then. -- Tim Starling 15:56, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Range Blocks: suffix/prefix

I looked at your article Range blocks and there seems to be some confusion over the use of the word "prefix": ITYM "suffix" in several places but I'm not confident enough of the terminology to fix it myself (recalling the fairly-well-known-to-everybody-except-me example of client/server inversion in X Windows). --Phil 13:20, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

OK, more understandable now, thanks. However in reference to your example at the end of the preamble: surely blocking 142.177.0.0/16 will block the exact range 142.177.0.0&mdash142.177.255.255? 142.178.0.0 shouldn't be affected, surely? --Phil 13:27, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Bureaucrat.

The Bureaucrat situation seems confused, but I guess you're still involved in that. I would very much like to be able to appoint sysops in Wikisource and Wiktionary. I've been quite involved in both since the day they started, and have come to see where there are needs in both. There do not appear to be any bureaucrats in either project at this time. Eclecticology 01:40, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Yes, I'm involved in it in that I'm against the whole concept and I don't want to encourage it. There's no sense in placing power into the hands of an unaccountable few. That's barely better than the previous situation. -- Tim Starling 15:16, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

If there's another practical way to create sysops on these projects I'm certainly flexible about it. Two of Angela's old nominees has agreed to thus act, and that's fine with me. Beyond that, because of the multilingual nature of Wikisource I would hope to encourage a few others to take on the role to deal with articles in their own language. The need at Wiktionary appears less immediate, but in either case a "bureaucrat" should be a person who is prepared to monitor the appropriate pages to see if any sysoping needs to be done. That's not happening on the smaller projects. The powers involved are really limited, and I'm sure that if anyone were abusing these powers you would soon hear about it. Eclecticology 09:39, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Alright, you're a bureaucrat on those two wikis. But this is temporary! -- Tim Starling 13:40, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Many thanks. -Ec

Sorry to keep bugging you on this. It seems to be working OK on Wikipedia (where the need to create sysops is not immediate). At Wikisource I keep getting, "The action you have requested can only be performed by sysops with "bureaucrat" status." Is this a software problem. Eclecticology 23:44, 3 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Oops, I made you a bureaucrat on Wikibooks instead of Wikisource. Fixed now, I hope. -- Tim Starling 00:05, 4 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Great it works, and I just created my first sysop (Shizhao). We all make these errors, and when I said above that it was working well in Wikipedia, I meant Wiktionary. blush

I now have two questions. 1) I have been looking at the possibility of an "Index:" namespace at Wiktionary where the list of pages in the Wikisource namespace has grown to 1278. The majority of these are for various interlanguage indexes which could possibly be separated. Are there any technical difficulties connected with or possibly resulting from such a decision? There would be no point to seeking editorial consensus if the idca won't work. [Ec]

In principle something like this could be done. It's technically easier to use pseudo-namespaces, but if the editors of Wiktionary decide it's better to have a separate namespace, then you can have a separate namespace. [TS]

Thanks I'll see if there is any consensus on this, and get back to you if there is. -Ec

2) Can you write in any language other than English. Since you are yourself a Wikisource sysop i am trying to develop a list of sysops' language abilities so that queries can be made to non-English speaking newbies when the occasion arises. Eclecticology 09:24, 5 Mar 2004 (UTC)

No I can't, but you shouldn't consider me a Wikisource sysop anyway. I'm a developer, I have sysop powers on every wiki where I feel like giving myself sysop powers. But I don't compete with real sysops on the various wikis. I just use it for changing MediaWiki messages and the occasional emergency vandalism response. -- Tim Starling 06:31, 8 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I saw your comments on the mailing list, and agree with most of what you said there about the relative roles of sysops and developers. Endless wrangling over rules and behaviour can be a drain on anybody's time. The skill that I've really been looking for is other language ability - the facts appear to leave you immune from that scheme. :-) There is one area where I think that occasional monitoring by developers could be helpful. That is on the "Bug reports" pages. Although non-developers should try to help here too there will always be a few questions that are beyond the understanding of non-techies, but may be dealt with simply by developers. Where the question leads to significant complications a mere short explanation of that fact would be very reassuring. Eclecticology 01:17, 11 Mar 2004 (UTC)

You want to delete Death By Stereo, huh? Go head and I quit Wikipedia now. - Michael 01:28 9 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Protection request

Hi Tim - I saw you made a change here just recently, so perhaps you're still here... There's a bit of a change/revert war going on at Sealand, could you protect it? -- Kwekubo 00:36, 13 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Dates

Some time back I was in a row over ISO date formats. I don't want to get back into that argument at this point. At the time I did not give much thought to BC dates, and considered that as just a matter of format change. I was just making links from Wikisource for Aristotle when I realized that his death year of 322 BC became -0321. I haven't looked back at the ISO standards for this, but this would seem to be a glitch arising from a failure to consider that the year zero never existed. Thanks for looking into this. Eclecticology 18:19, 17 Mar 2004 (UTC)

That's the ISO standard. I had to deliberately subtract one. From en:ISO 8601:

BC dates are offset by one in order to obtain zero-based dates, so -0487-09-11 is September 11 in the year 488 BC rather than 487 BC, as might be supposed. 0000-09-11 is September 11 in the year 1 BC.

It's to make it easier for computers to handle. You can work out what 10 years later than 5 BC is without too much trouble. -- Tim Starling 07:03, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)

OK. I see your point, so I don't have much of an argument. For the most part it seems that only historians and astronomers have any use for BC dates, but that different solutions to this would suit the two groups. Historians don't have any problem with the missing year zero. Anyway, I'll let it drop until and unless I can find a good argument. Eclecticology 08:45, 19 Mar 2004 (UTC)

A Troll's Defence

Hello Tim,

I can explain why I'm a troll in the eyes of Aioneko, Anthere and Shailaiud and some of their followers (because of the leader charisma :-) )

1 I give articles in a conflictual matter : religion
2 When Anthere, Aioneko or Shai jump in an editing conflict, they don't focus on the job to do (What matters about this article ?) but they focus on the user. They understand an editing confict as Stuart Little /vs Smith instead of which points of view are deflagrating ? Are they able to give a unique consensual point of view or must we expose this dualism of point of view with their references and source ?

In Western and Southern Europe because of the proeminency of RC Church, the religious knowledge did not receive a wide range of diffusion excepted in German-speaking countries. The matter is that, each time is given the Tradition point of view (which seems to me mainly respectable) Stuart Little is able to give the scholar point of view on the 3 monotheisms. That's not a miracle : Stuart Little is quite collective name. I receive the help of friends who are scholars in various edu. organisations such as : ULB in Brussels, CNRS in South of France, UQAM in Canada, Jesuit theologat in Brussels, Tijania sufi, ITP in Paris, etc… So we can give an extent bibliographic material about our assertions, the most part covering the both sides of the Ocean.

Few of these assertions rise directly in the dominican exegesis which were quoted as anti-catholicism by an user whose trend is the Fundamentalist Catholic (Fraternite Saint Pie X). As RC Chuch mainstream in Europe is quite similar as Conservative Christians in USA, agnostic or atheist people are agnostic from or atheist from and not atheist in a general way ; so, the only neutral in religious matters, peculiarly in Christian subjects must be the conservative RC point of view as during the modernist crisis which occured in the last part of the 19 century. The only remaining result in Europeof the Vatican II Synod is the Mass in vernacular languages.

Also, each time I dare distinguih w:fr:Islam with w:fr:Islamisme or terrorism, my articles are understood as to cense Islam and each time I give a Dominican exegesis idea, it is evaluated as to damn RC Church. Conservative Christian are not decided to allow the expression of such points of vew to equilibrate their own and, because of their lack of knowledge of the matter the 1st idea which arises among the few sysops is to make an enquiry about Stuart Little and no enquiry at all about the status of art in the concerned matters.

The only arguments among my opponents are ad personam (among the supposed morality of the user). I'm used to answer such class of argument with Arthur Schopenhauer's s rhetoric stratagemas, which was unknown within them till the moment I gave his quotations. That was unbearable for may opponents. So I'm a Troll, indeed as I read the books they ignore.

Also, the users I'm working with in a good relationship level among wikipedia are used to spare their words in the discussion as they focus on the job to do; on the contrary sysops and their followers are loud speakers in the 'wikipedia prise de décisions. Maybe it should be useful to ask their opinion about my currents jobs to other users such as :

Roby (when he comes back from the hospital whithin a week)
Caton
Phido
Traeb
Alibaba
Greudin

Sincerely, Stuart Little

The matter is that, each time is given the Tradition point of view (which seems to me mainly respectable) Stuart Little is able to give the scholar point of view on the 3 monotheisms. That's not a miracle : Stuart Little is quite collective name. I receive the help of friends who are scholars in various edu. organisations such as : ULB in Brussels, CNRS in South of France, UQAM in Canada, Jesuit theologat in Brussels, Tijania sufi, ITP in Paris, etc… So we can give an extent bibliographic material about our assertions, the most part covering the both sides of the Ocean.

I am glad Stuart, of what you wrote above. I thank you for your honesty. This is the first time you recognise publicly that you are indeed Mulot. This is something old contributors were convinced of, because of your focus, of your style and of your general behavior. This was something supported by the IP check done by Tim 2 months ago. I appreciate that you finally accept to recognise that Mulot and Stuart Little are only one.

I appreciate as well that you do not use both identities to self support yourself any more. As long as you do not try to self-support yourself during edit wars, I see no problem with your sock puppets as I already mentionned several times.

However, Mulot, you are generally disrupting the community, making us lose a lot of time, and causing pain to some contributors. However, we still do think you are valuable for your editing participation to religious articles, and me personally, for your irreverant but enlighted comments on community governance. Nevertheless, these past few days, you went too far; lying, in particular, is not acceptable.

Consequently, I would like that you refrain yourself from editing any meta pages on fr for this full week, and focus on the articles themselves. It would be appreciated as well that you stay polite and avoid personal attacks on the editors with whom you share articles.

I am sure we will find common ground to share the space all of us :-)

anthere

I don't recognize I'm Mulot and we never supported each other. As indicated on my discussion page, I recognize know Mulot. Which is different.

I think that your call to lynch and your lack of discretion with the netiquette disrupt the community more efficently that my few discussions.

With your inventions about my person, which are irrelevant with the purpose of the community, you went to far. I agree with the opinion of R : you're guilty of abuses.

Stuart Little 13:57, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)

To choose the policy

I saw this on an arbitrator discussion page :

In particular, I would very much like to enable each wiki to choose its own power structure. At the moment I can't implement the power structure that the French people want for fr, because the English people don't want it on en. That clearly has to change. -- Tim Starling 04:10, 24 Mar 2004 (UTC)

On the French wiki, w:fr:Roby and I, we intend to push up such a discussion. I suspect (and Roby too, on basis on a private e-mail correspondance) that the various calls to Lynch upon me has close relationship with such a discussion. Unfortunately, the Roby's project is in French. Stuart Little 13:51, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Wiktionary namespace on nl.wiktionary.org

Latest comment: 20 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hi Tim,

The Wiktionary namespace on nl.wiktionary.org doesn't work. Could you have a look at it? Also, how can I change the messages of the interface if they are not suitable for a dictionary? Polyglot 18:13, 5 May 2004 (UTC)Reply

Are you talking about this bug by any chance? [1]

And for interface messages, have you tried http://nl.wiktionary.org/wiki/MediaWiki:All_messages ? Hope it helps. Tomos 23:29, 5 May 2004 (UTC)Reply

Aromanian Uichipedia (ars.wiki)

Latest comment: 20 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hi Tim! It's Ronline from ro.wiki requesting for a Wikipedia in the Aromanian language (called "Uichipedia" at http://ars.wikipedia.org). Would it be OK if you could set up the new Wikipedia in this language, because we got support from an Aromanian periodical appearing in all the Balkans ("Bana Armâneascâ", in about 10.000 copies). Also, one of the managers (Dumitru Piceava) is willing to collaborate and Danutz already has tens of articles in Aromanian stored on his computer. Please create it as soon as you can.

Useful links for you (the interface file, the logo and the main page have been set up by us at ro.wiki):

Adress: http://ars.wikipedia.org/
Interface: m:LanguageArs.php
Logo: [2]
Preview of the main page: here you can see how it should look, and here is the source-text adapted to the ars.wiki interface (changed form the romanian interface, where it is hosted).
Link to my user account on ars.wikipedia.org, as soon as it is on-line: ars:Ufilisitor:Ronline
Contact for romanian and aromanian Wikipedias: wikipediaromana@yahoo.it (this goes to Danutz, another major contributor on ro:)

Thanks a lot and I hope you reply as soon as possible, Ronline 08:40, 26 May 2004 (UTC)Reply

Ok - sorry. I thought I was being helpful. Secretlondon 03:58, 23 Jun 2004 (UTC)

New schemas?

Hi Tim,

I would like to help with the (eventual, planned) db schema upgrades, and the resulting query and documentation rewrites. Where is the latest discussion of these things going on? Who should I be talking to? Thank you, +sj+ 17:39, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

special letter in an username

Hi Tim,

and again I need your help. I was asking you allready two times in #wikipedia about the special character in usernames, and again we such a problem. This time, I don't know the excetly letter, because the user is not signing his messages with ~~~~. His useraccount ist 'grashüpfer' - maybe with the special letter on the end, maybe as first letter.

Could you please ask the mySQL user table about every username beginning with 'grash' (or something like this?)

Again, thank you very much for your help. -- MichaelDiederich 09:46, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Aehm, could you please check, if the second "Grashüpfer" on this list is allready blocked or can't login? Thanks again! -- MichaelDiederich 20:12, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedians/Wikimedians

Agree with your points on this. I've moved the pages and started a home page of sort for Wikimedians. Not a good idea to grab their pages and use them for pages about contributors to the projects. The groups are distinct and have different interests (for example, -pedians are licensors, -medians are licensees). Jamesday 17:44, 11 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Can you or someone else fix the category problem on two skins?

Hi Tim, If I've got it right, the consensus was that categories would go at the bottom, not the top of pages, and this was indeed implemented on the default skin. But it's not yet implemented on Cologne Blue or Classic. Since I am a user of Classic, and feel rather pained when I see all those categories appearing up top, do you think you could move them, or delegate another sysop to do it? I would be very grateful. Yours truly, User:Opus33 (English Wikipedia).

Problems with the templates

hi tim, anthere did refer me to you: i will create 3 new dictionaries in wiki instead in my private home page (where one of this is now). i did begin this job in wiktionary in the language interlingue (it is not my favorite language; i will only help in this job). i did copy important parts of the german dictionary and translate this page and part of the other pages into interlingue. but the first word ("dictionary" in interlingue) will not work. i did not understand the very long explications about "templates" in the "wikipedia" and the other one in the "wiktionary". before i begin the same work with the both other languages (langue musicale universelle, solresol, and lingua sistemfrater, frater) i will understand what is the matter because i will not to have to remake a lot of wrong dictionary pages of course! --Oui 19:06, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Lir

User:Lir wants to know why her user page, account, talk page, histories, and contributions list have all been deleted. She put a lot of time and effort into improving the Wikipedia, and finds it offensive that this has occurred. 209.181.211.69

Your contributions list [3] and user page history [4] are still intact on en. There's no record of you having edited under that name on meta. Are there contributions on meta which have gone missing? -- Tim Starling 05:21, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Thank you Tim... Anthere 06:21, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)

AOL

Hi Tim,

i have a problem again. We have a user (w:de:Benutzer:Mutter Erde) trolling and we had allready block him indifinte, but he is using AOL so we "autoblock" some ips of the aol proxy and some more AOL-users could not edit the wikipedia also.

Do you have a idea or a solution for this problem?

TIA! -- MichaelDiederich 15:47, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

No, there's nothing you can do, besides not blocking him. Blocking the username but not the IP wouldn't do us much good, he could just edit anonymously. We had this problem for over a year with Michael, and AOL never did anything despite lots of complaints.

Really the only solution is to block everyone from AOL by default, and then only let people who have confirmed their identity edit. We don't currently have such a feature in MediaWiki. -- Tim Starling 12:09, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Direct marketing preference feature suggestion

Hi Tim,

I was wondering how difficult it would be to add a preference to allow users to either positively opt-in, or negatively opt-out, of direct marketing (specifically, campaign messages, although this could conceivably be used for commercial advertising in Wiki's that wanted the option).

If this feature were available, the Edit page could have checkbox controls that would allow message senders to indicate whether a message was a campaign message. When clicking the Save button, if the user had indicated that they did not want such messages, the Save would be rejected, and the user would never see the message.

Message senders who sent campaign messages could be summarily blocked (or banned for repeated violations) if they did not use the checkbox control to indicate the nature of the message.

I think this feature would go a long ways towards giving Wiki users control over their user pages, and also to promote a sane and open environment for campaigning on Wikis.

My motivation for suggesting this feature is that the December 2004 Arbitration Committee Election campaign just started, and there is no easy way to know whether one is exceeding the spam threshold when posting endorsements or opposition to candidates on user pages.

A simple analysis would suggest that there must be some type of previous affiliation for messages not to be considered spam, but it quickly gets into shades of gray when contributors who have worked on a Wiki together in one capacity or another (no matter how remote) start posting such messages to each other. There is a spectrum from "thanks for your opinion" to "bemused" to "I have no clue who you are - why are you sending me this spam", and without this control feature, a user has no way of indicating in advance where they fall on this spectrum.

What do you think? Please let me know if there is a better place to post this feature request.

(I regret that I don't have experience on Linux/Unix or I would volunteer to implement this myself. I work on Windows video apps in C++ in my day job, at Adobe Systems, in San Jose, California.)

I have a user account on Wikipedia under David Vasquez, please feel free to reply on my user talk page in that space.

--DV 10:48, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

At this moment, I don't see this as a critical issue. The best that I know, all comments on user pages with respect to various wiki campaigns are extremely targeted and are not sent as random messages to typical wikipedia users.

I don't see this as a major concern at the moment.

However, in a future world its not unreasonable to imagine bots sending messages to users. If this case comes to that, then we will need to fix this. However, at the moment, I don't have any issues with the status quo. El Benevolete.

Special pages

Please Tim, is possible to refresh cached versions of the special pages without downloading the database? Willy 17:01, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

WikiMonkeyBoy

Hello, I keep reading on Wikipedia that developers are a bit short handed, worked off their feet, etc. I've been a software developer for 25 years and I have recent experience of PHP. I worked for Boltblue.com for two years as a PHP and database developer (Oracle and MySQL). I worked on the guardian.co.uk website previously, and I've been mucking around with Perl and Java for years). If any help is needed I'd be happy to lend a hand as a WikiMonkeyBoy. I just don't know where to start, but I'd love to help. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 23:18, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Congratulations

Dear Tim, yours is the only name that occur to me as developer so, please accept my thanks and congratulations for you and the other developers for the new software. Its lovely and already allowed us in wiki.pt to resolve a few problems in categorization. Again, thanks for your efforts. Happy new year! Muriel (212.113.164.100 11:22, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC))

wanted to renew my request to become developer with CVS access

Hi Tim,

I guess, we will meet in Berlin.

Now, as my Enotif and Eauthent "patches" (no longer patches...) were merged into the CVS HEAD by Brion one week ago, I want to ask you (as already done on the Developers page) to apply, to become member of the developer team with CVS access.

I would prefer, that you mail me via one of my user pages. Thanks in advance. On Sourceforge, I am also known as Nyxos - as far as I know, the login username is necessary, too. I have once read something about this requirement and therefore I registered there.

Tom Gries ( aka Nyxos aka Wikinaut ) --Tom Gries [mail] 17:00, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Some thoughts about article validation

Hello Tim. On 21C3 in Berlin I talked a lot about a reviewed Wikipedia and I was given some information that there are several proposals out there and even a patch by Magnus Manske. So I went to Metawiki and edited some of the ideas and so I stumbled into Article validation (which would need some more structure) and your thoughts in Authority metric. In the meantime I had already enhanced and clarified Reviewed article version (and added my main concern that there are no branches as in CVS) and now I'm a bit unsure how to merge it with Article validation, since I first wanted to see the Test-Wiki with Magnus' patch in action (which is down) before I go on editing and clarifying the proposals. In the meantime I also have written down an idea which is somewhat related to your remark about the "Brownian moelcular movement" of wikipedia articles in Authority metric: Edit rules It is about an "algorithm" based article commit check system in MediaWiki similar to the current edit conflict to reduce unwanted edits (vandalism, flames on discussion pages, edit wars, stubs). I think this idea can much more easier be integrated in MediaWiki and will be accepted faster by the community than a review system (cause it is more wiki like) and will hopefully help to improve quality of content and of course it doesn't need a change to the database structure. I have talked a lot about this idea with other (mostly german) Wikipedians in Berlin and they found the idea rather good and the actual feedback on the page is also pleasant to me. I know you get lots of request of people wishing this and that, so my question is: Is this idea worth (out of the perspective of a developer) to investigate deeper? I would be glad to see your comment there in the article if you like/dislike it. Greetings, Arnomane 17:55, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Jimbo's page

Hey Tim,

When someone leaves Jimbo a message on his userpage, do you copy it somewhere else, or expect him to check the history of the page? I was tempted to copy it to his en:user talk so that it would still be somewhere. —Ben Brockert < 03:04, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Www.wikipedia.org portal (Catherine Munro's proposal)

Catherine has come up with a proposal for a greatly improved entry page to Wikipedia that has attracted a great deal of interest and support. What would it take to replace your original version with this one? Is the current level of support sufficient, or should we organise some kind of vote? GeorgeStepanek 22:12, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Just cheers

And my [useless, nontransferrable, extremely distant] support. +sj+ 10:26, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

With a generous kiss from me (if you thought of shaving). Anthere 11:42, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)