User talk:Erik Zachte

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[edit] 13 Oct, 2002

Hello there Erik, welcome to the 'pedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you ever need editing help visit Wikipedia:How does one edit a page and experiment at Wikipedia:Sandbox. If you need pointers on how we title pages visit Wikipedia:Naming conventions or how to format them visit our manual of style. If you have any other questions about the project then check out Wikipedia:Help or add a question to the Village pump. Cheers! --maveric149

[edit] mediawiki conference

Hello Erik, I'm currently preparing a developer meeting at the 21C3 in december in Berlin and like to invite you to come there. If you have any questions, please contact me on my german talk page. --Elian 18:37, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Wikinews demo up and running

Hi!

I'm writing to let you know that the Wikimedia Board of Trustees has approved the first stage of the Wikinews project. There's now a fully operational English demo site at demo.wikinews.org. This will be used for experimenting with various review models and basic policies before the site is launched officially in about a week. demo.wikinews.org will become the English version later.

You voted for the Wikinews project, so I'm asking for your participation now. Everything is open, nothing is final. What Wikinews will and can be depends in large part on you. There already is a global Wikinews mailing list for discussing the project. If you are interested at all, please subscribe -- coordination is of key importance. There's also an IRC channel #wikinews on irc.freenode.net. Realtime discussion can help to polish up articles.

If you're looking for something to do, check out the articles in development and articles in review. Or start a new story in the Wikinews workspace, or ignore the proposed review system - it's up to you. I hope you'll join us soon in this exciting experiment.--Eloquence* 01:58, Nov 17, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Unification of the different Wiki fixup projects?

Greetings TB, Neilc, Sietse Snel, and Erik Zachte! I'm posing this message on each of your four talk pages, asking you if you're interested in unifying the different Wiki fixup projects (User:Topbanana/Reports + User:Neilc/External links + User:Sietse_Snel/Fix_common_mistakes + Wiki Syntax Project + Erik's list of HTML problems that he emailed me a subset of).

Currently, we all have different pages at different locations listing different types of problems. What I'm wondering is whether we and the Wikipedia would all be slightly better off if we had one location that contained all of the outstanding problems from all of these different projects. It would be the ultimate clearing-house for problem-finders like us to list problems, and for contributors to go find list of things that need fixing, and fix those problems.

Consider the benefits:

  • One page address for all problems is easier to remember, and we'd set up a super-short shortcut (e.g. "WP:WF") that was very easy to remember.
  • It's easier to avoid duplication by seeing what other people are already doing - for example, I've started searching for redirect problems, only to find the Topbanana was already doing something similar. I didn't mean to do this, but I simply didn't know it had already been done.
  • It evens out the workload - currently one person's problems all get finished, and another person somewhere else has a new batch that's suddenly done and ready for fixing - and it's hard for the contributors to know where to go to find outstanding problems.
  • If we have one page with everything on it, we could list it as a place for newbies to start out doing productive stuff when they're new to the Wikipedia - and by seeing and fixing the types of problems that came up, they'd be that much less likely to make those mistakes themselves.
  • There's a momentum that builds up from having a continuous supply of problems, rather than having a stop-start supply. If problems stop coming, contributors stop checking - they like to see new problems, and feel a part of community project that's getting somewhere and doing something useful.
  • With one central repository, if you go on holidays or disappear for a few weeks or contribute new problems very infrequently, it doesn't matter - someone else will still be doing something useful while you're off doing other stuff.
  • New developers could easily add problems they found to the page, and indeed would be actively encouraged to do so. Rather than a series of independent and competing efforts, it would be one combined effort, with people actively encouraged to expand the scope with new systematic searches for problems (such as Erik, who out-of-blue sent me a list of HTML problems a conversion script of his had found - this is the exactly the type of thing we need to actively encourage, because the whole Wikipedia is that much better off for it).
  • It would make it easy for the contributors to know what's out there - There may be other fixup projects already running that I don't know about, and it would be really good to include them - I haven't omitted anybody deliberately, so if there are omissions, it just proves my point that currently it's hard to know what's out there.
  • As the number of articles in the Wikipedia grows, the need for some systematic central repository of problems grows - and the pace of growth shows no signs at all of slowing.

What do you think? Are you interested? I'm completely open to your suggestions - and to get us started, can I just throw some ideas out there:

  • It would be good to have a WikiProject location (and it does NOT have to be "Wiki Syntax" - it could be "The SuperList of things that need fixing", or "Wiki Fixup", or any other name you like).
  • All problem-finders would be listed in a special credits section (and for the record I'm more happy to be the last name on the list :-) ) - so that everyone still gets recognition and credit.
  • It would be good to have the current list of locations redirect to the new central location, wherever it is, so that any pre-existing links still work.
  • Some basic criteria for the scope of the new project would be good (something like: Covers the whole English Wikipedia; Has lists of problems; The list of problems should be generated by some type of automated process - e.g. software or database query - which ensures that it's systematic and repeatable; The problems listed should be simple to fix, so that the barrier to entry for contributors is low; And it would be good if when contributors fixed problems if we could ask them to put a link in their edit description that pointed back to the central location).

Maybe I'm crazy. Maybe it's a bad idea. I'd really like to think it could work. Maybe it's a good idea. You tell me.

P.s. To save lots of different messages on different pages, can we please have one location where everybody can speak their mind? How about Topbanana's talk page ?

All the best, -- Nickj 07:12, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Might I suggest, being the nosey sod that I am, the project talk page for maximal coverage? --Phil | Talk 09:30, Dec 1, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Article Licensing

Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 2000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:

Option 1
I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:
{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

OR

Option 2
I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions to any [[U.S. state]], county, or city article as described below:
{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" with "{{MultiLicensePD}}". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. -- Ram-Man (comment| talk)

[edit] Invitiation to join the Wikimedia Research Team

Hello Erik!

I'd like to invite you to join the Wikimedia Research Team which I'm building on Meta with support from the Foundation Board of Trustees. Our goal is to work together to systematically analyze the needs of the projects, conduct research and collect empirical data, interview users, build relationships with outside developers, examine project proposals, and make recommendations to the Board for targeted software development. Given your fantastic work on Wikistats, I think you would be an excellent candidate for joining the Team. That doesn't necessarily mean any further time commitment on your part, but it would be nice to see you at meetings, and share ideas on the present and future of the project with you. If you're interested, just add yourself to the list of Current Members, and I will inform you about all future developments.--Eloquence* 16:14, May 26, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] New scripts for TomeRaider

Hello, Erik. Since MediaWiki 1.5, there will be no longer SQL dumps anymore. So please release newer scripts for the XML dumps. I know, it takes time, but we can start with TR2 atleast. So, at this stage, the script that converts XML dumps to TomeRaider 2 format will be enough. 14th september dumps are available, which are most recent, at download.wikimeda.org/wikipedia/en/ for English language.


[edit] Historical atlas

Hoi Erik,

Worldhistorymaps heeft een mooie atlas gemaakt. Ik hoop dat de WikiProject historical atlas van betere kwaliteit kan worden, anders dan voegen we niks toe. In ieder geval is de atlas die ik zou willen maken gratis. Ik kom ook uit Leiden, grappig.--Daanschr 07:53, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Your long overdue barnstar

The Original Barnstar
For producing the best wikipedia for offline use. Jens Nielsen 14:53, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Erik, you've produced outstanding work! Thanks to you, I (and everyone else) can now have the million article English wikipedia with many images AND the text of the Dutch wikipedia on my handheld computer. Save for a few flaws, it is absolutely awesome, and I wish it will become more widely used - it is certainly better than the wikipedia on CD, or whatever else is outthere. Keep up the good work, and hope to get the 2008 wikipedia in tomeraider format too!

Jens Nielsen 14:53, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm blushing :) Erik Zachte 15:15, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] GUS update

Do you know anything about GUS update? I have trouble even finding the people who did the update, sigh...-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  03:45, 22 June 2007 (UTC)

Piotr, sorry, I don't know. Frankly I don't have the time nor the energy to work on GUS myself anymore. Cheers, Erik Zachte 01:22, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Jan Steen

This has absolutely nothing to do with Wikipedia, so forgive me for importuning you on these pages, but since you posted the first Jan Steen article I thought you might be able to help me. I am looking for a catalogue raisonné of Steen, or at least a book illustrating his paintings, preferably complete. There is no reference to such a publication in the Wikipedia article, and Googling the artist is a nightmare! If you know of such a publication, I should be very grateful to know the title and publisher. I am really after good quality illustrations rather than learned academic articles on Steen. With many thanks Nick Michael 08:41, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Special Barnstar

The Special Barnstar
Thank you for Wikipedia Statistics WonYongTalk 07:36, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Image:WilliamOfOrange.jpg listed for deletion

An image or media file that you uploaded or altered, Image:WilliamOfOrange.jpg, has been listed at Wikipedia:Images and media for deletion. Please see the discussion to see why this is (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry), if you are interested in it not being deleted. Thank you. BlueAzure (talk) 04:47, 20 May 2008 (UTC)