User talk:Walter

Request for admin rights...

Hi, I'm Alejandro Sánchez, Asmarin user of this wiki.

I'm system administrator of EL project, http://enciclopedia.us.es, fork of es.wikipedia.

I'm translating most important articles into spanish and sometimes i need to delete bot vandalism and so....

Can you make me admin privileges to clean and maintain the wiki?

I enter every day and can do this "job".

I'm waiting for your reply. ;-D

--Asmarin 11:51, 21 April 2006 (EDT)

Alejandro -- you're coming to Wikimania in August, I hope... Sj

Ditto

I'm not around every day, but would be glad to help with page deletion and bot blocking. Sj 04:04, 2 May 2006 (EDT)

Anti-spam measures

You should definitely turn on captchas for anonymous edits; a reason to upgrade to Mediawiki 1.6.x

You might further consider throttling the edit-rate for newbies and anonymous users... there is some hackable functionality for this built into MediaWiki. Sj

Navigation

Can you please add the table of contents to the navigation table/block that appears on the left of every page? This seems to be the most frustrating thing thats missing from some wikkis. For me anyway. :) jkinz

Excellent idea. I've started. Any suggestions as to what I should include? Walter 17:56, 31 May 2006 (EDT)

Content links

See Template:Content-list; also linked to from the Content ideas page.

Kudos

Kudos for your diplomatic handling of the "safety concerns" of the design of the rabbbit ears. Of all the dangerous things that are faced on a regular basis to the children for which the laptop is designed, I think falling on the rabbit ears of a olpc laptop is a risk they can live with. --HSTutorials 16:29, 25 July 2006 (EDT)

 Sj 16:05, 27 June 2006 (EDT)

Walter, Kudos on Build 303. It's very nice. -Jeff 17:44, 13 March 2007 (EDT)

Wikipedia need an image :)

Hi! I'm writing an article about Wikipedia for Polish Press. I wrote something about collaboration olpc with Wikimedia Foudation. That article with all images is on public domain licence. So, I need an image of that laptop :) with tag {{PD}}, ({{PD-self}} - will be the best ;) I found on commonswiki some images, but only with cc. That article will be promotion of pl wiki and olpc too, I think. You will find me here on pl wiki: http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedysta:Przykuta

and this article is here: http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pi%C4%85te_urodziny_polskoj%C4%99zycznej_Wikipedii

Information about olpc ends it.

Thanks for all what you can do, and sorry for language mistakes ;)

With regards Przykuta 05:14, 14 September 2006 (EDT)

I can take some photos and put them in the public domain over the next few days, but I am curious as to why CC-A is not adequate for your needs. --Walter 23:06, 14 September 2006 (EDT)

thx :) I'm afraid, that people who will copy the article and images, they will not look for a licence. Przykuta 05:14, 18 September 2006 (EDT)

nasa color tool

Hey, check it out! http://colorusage.arc.nasa.gov/ColorTool.php. --Jacobolus 02:39, 1 November 2006 (EST)

Avoiding Spam

Darn it! I hate spam. I've noticed the last wave (I usually check the recent changes page) and was wondering how to make it harder for the buggers... something should be done (or attempted at least).

Is there an easy way to report it? I mean, many don't have the (sensitive) rollback ability, but I would like maybe a simple way to report it so that an administrator could act on it without having to hunt it down. Editing the page to remove the spam instead of doing a rollback is an extra edition that just pollutes the page's history and doesn't contribute anything (except removing the offending spam).

On a more 'aggressive' stance, is it my impression or spammers are more active during weekends? If so (which I haven't really bothered to check) maybe the wiki could be configured so that only people logged in could change pages during weekends? Or do some validation so that no more than a given percentage of the page could be replaced?

An arms race is the last thing we should embark on, but...--Xavi 13:50, 10 December 2006 (EST)

Maybe we should just force everyone to login to edit pages--not my first choice, but it will slow them down somewhat. I'd be nice if MediaWiki had a rollback for all changes a spammer made in one step: something I might write if I ever have some spare time. --Walter 15:19, 10 December 2006 (EST)

I'm constantly logged in, so I couldn't care less, but others may/will think differently. Tagging an user/IP as a spammer and semi-automatically reverting all changes would be a good administrator tool. I have no idea how that could be accomplished in WikiMedia (I'll start reading). Still, it would be nice to have a 'report as spam' or similar so that the community could easily flag things for the administrators... BTW, 'spare time' sounds like an oxymoron for you guys... :P --Xavi 15:46, 10 December 2006 (EST)

How about something as simple as a page which we watch that anyone can post a spam alert to? It could be include a link to the spammer's contribution page, which is the easiest place to do rollbacks from. Maybe SJ has some additional ideas. --Walter 15:54, 10 December 2006 (EST)

Other approaches

How about we call it quits and start funding schools? Just a thought. --Nelson Mandella 01:55, 25 December 2006 (EST)

I am all for "funding schools", but history and experience has shown that that approach is slow and only reaches a limited number of children. We believe that the laptop program will reach more children faster and these children will not be limited by the resources the schools will be able to offer them. But by all means, you work on helping children you way and we will continue to work on our approach. Let's hope we a re both successful. --Walter 07:09, 25 December 2006 (EST)

Correction to your edit

Your editing was not grammatical I think:

In January 2005 the MIT Media Lab launched a new research initiative to develop a $100 laptop—a technology that could revolutionize how we educate the world's children. To achieve this goal, a new, non-profit association, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), was been created, which is independent of MIT.

should be

In January 2005 the MIT Media Lab launched a new research initiative to develop a $100 laptop—a technology that could revolutionize how we educate the world's children. To achieve this goal, a new, non-profit association, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), was created, which is independent of MIT. --Tonyv 12:30, 29 December 2006 (EST)

Hardware folks

Walter, who is on hardware, specifically power supply/battery/generation? Tom Haws 13:18, 5 January 2007 (EST)

replied on your talk page. Sj talk

Hebrew translation

There is a Hebrew translation for the laptop.org previous site. Zvi Devir 08:58, 13 March 2007 (EDT)

I (think I've) fixed the quotes error. Zvi Devir 11:29, 18 March 2007 (EDT)

Bakersdz and Hunter

Users Bakersdz and Hunter are acting really odd. I'm not even 100% sure they aren't bots using the wiki (rather than IRC) for some odd purpose. Nothing they write makes any sense. Perhaps they are the same person. You might want to investigate this a bit. AlbertCahalan 12:58, 15 March 2007 (EDT)

Site copy

Hi, we should add a set of content sections to match the other sections in User:Felice/website_copy.1... and update them in depth along with the rest of the site. Sj talk 19:02, 18 March 2007 (EDT)

New colors

Sounds and looks nice. I'll bolden the original & diff links on the right of the Template:Translated Page, as they fade a bit.

I like the idea that {{OLPC}} maps to the 'laptop icon color', and that the translations maps to the 'participate icon color' (nice touch for the community translators :) Something could be thought out for the remaining icon colors... new 'vision' template? And 'content' with the XO child color? ;) --Xavi 10:39, 21 March 2007 (EDT)