User talk:Pstudier

From Libertarian Wiki

Jump to: navigation, search

Greetings; I'm Seth Ilys from Cary, NC and a Wikipedia admin. I'm trying to get local LP folks to begin using wikis to develop content, and I stumbled upon libertarianwiki. Our state newsletter editor asked me to write up a blurb on the recent Badnarik meetup (which I see you noticed), so I decided to do it on libertarianwiki rather than forward it to her directly. I'm going to try to funnel people to using wikis to develop documents, but, as you may have know, persuading libertarians of the merits of a new idea can often be like herding cats. But thanks for having this set up for us to stumble across and use. :) -- Seth Ilys 16:15, 14 Jun 2004 (PDT)

Welcome to Libertarian Wiki and thank you for your contributions and promotion. Libertarian Wiki is getting off to a slow start. I haven't contributed and promoted it as much as I should have. However, progress is cumulative, and someday it will take off. It was mentioned in the Libertarian Party of California's newsletter. See Web Watch on page 6. Paul Studier 18:45, 14 Jun 2004 (PDT)

Contents

[edit] Free State Project

Hi, Paul. Are you a member of the FSP? If not, why not?

I'll probably register at some point. Thanks for putting up the wiki.

170.35.224.64 15:16, 30 Jun 2004 (PDT)

Your welcome. As for the FSP, I am too old and set in my ways to give up the good weather of Orange County, California. I own a house, have old friends here, etc.

I do wish the FSP luck, and gave them some money just before their state selection.

Paul Studier 17:23, 30 Jun 2004 (PDT)


[edit] Bug

Hello Paul.

I have added a couple of pages starting with LPMA Libertarian Party of Massachusetts. and I think that I found a formatting bug.

If a page is very short, and the browser window is not wide enough for all 4 banner add rectangles, then "Edit this page", "Main Page", and the first banner ad, in the second column can overlap the first column, and can sometimes be covered by the LP logo image.

I am using IE v6.0.

I hope that this is easy to fix, because I am trying to get libertarians interested in wiki here in MA and NH, and your wiki seemed great for that purpose, but it does not look very good now when pages are short when they often are when creating new pages.

Thanks.

"David W. Roscoe" <DWRoscoe@earthlink.net>

Bug fixed by making dummy banner ad smaller. Paul Studier 21:36, 10 Jul 2004 (PDT)

Hello Paul.

I noticed that you redirected the (LPMA Waltham Event) page because it was an orphan. It existed because I decided that (LPMA Waltham Calender Of Events) was a better title. I did not know how to rename the old page, so I created the new one. But I did not know how to delete the old one. It really need not exist at all now. It's existence might actually cause confusion. FYI

David W Roscoe

The best way to rename an article is with the "Move this page", which is on the menu on the left side of the page. It copies the history and talk pages to the new page. The old page is redirected to the new page.

Part of the wiki culture is to always keep a history of everything. There is also the goal of never having dead links. For example, if some outside website pointed to the LPMA Waltham Event, they would be redirected to LPMA Waltham Calender Of Events. Therefore articles are rarely deleted. See Wikipedia_policy_on_permanent_deletion_of_articles

Paul Studier 17:14, 15 Jul 2004 (PDT)


Hi Paul,

I know that upgrading can be a pain, so I'm not expecting it to be done immediately. I'm actually not going to upgrade my wikis until version 1.4 is ready.

Are you planning to make the database publicly available/dowloadable? That would make me more comfortable. When a project is hosted by one charitable individual, there's always the risk that the host will some day no longer be able to host the site (or will accidentally delete it!)...and it is nice to know that the work has been backed up by someone else somewhere.

This is a bit of a pain to implement right now, and maybe it will be easier in future versions of MediaWiki... just something to keep in mind.

happy holidays, Adam 07:45, 21 Dec 2004 (PST)

I am familiar with the problems of any organization being critically dependant on any one individual. Especially true with volunteers. After the holidays, I will make a dump of the MySQL database available periodically. To use this dump one would have to be competent in MediaWiki, MySQL, etc. Having someone other than me who could restore this to his own wiki to verify the back up process would help give everyone more confidence. 68.51.79.208 05:59, 24 Dec 2004 (PST) Paul Studier 06:00, 24 Dec 2004 (PST)

You can now find a link to a directory of dumps at Libertarian_Wiki_Administration. The information seems to be present, but I have not actually attempted to test it by restoring a database. Paul Studier 15:59, 16 Jan 2005 (PST)

Has anyone looked at this site in IE? I just checked it out and the fonts on every single page are HUGE! I mean ENORMOUS! It's as if it was designed for the blind or something.

I don't know how to do it, but can you change the settings or stylesheet or whatever so that the text is regular size in IE (i.e. 12 point)? Thanks.

The Modern American 15:55 03 Jan 2005 (EST)

You have me mystified! As of a month ago, it worked for me in IE. I am out of town and have limited access, so I will look into this in a couple days. Paul Studier 09:04, 4 Jan 2005 (PST)
In case you're wondering, I'm using win2000 professional with IE 6.0.2800.1106. The Modern American 13:30 04 Jan 2005 (EST)
I am in the process of upgrading from MediaWiki 1.1.0 to 1.3.9. Chances are that this will fix your problem. Paul Studier 22:04, 16 Jan 2005 (PST)
We are now running MediaWiki 1.3.9. Does this help the problem? Paul Studier 14:20, 18 Jan 2005 (PST)
Wow! I just logged in, and this site looks GREAT! (I also fired it up in IE and it looks okay there too) The Modern American 23:20 19 Jan 2005 (EST)

[edit] dkosopedia (Daily Kos wiki)

I just discovered the dKosopedia http://www.dkosopedia.com/index.php/Main_Page

Are you familiar with this? Do you think it is competition, complementary, or irrelevant to the Libertarian Wiki. I haven't looked at it in detail yet, but it seems significant.

Adam 19:59, 9 Feb 2005 (PST)

Never heard of them before. They are lefties. 1850 registered users, 2701 non-trivial users, a huge BBS, older version of MediaWiki. Much bigger than ours. Although they are lefties, it seems that most the articles are NPOV, and could have gone into Wikipedia. I looked and I didn't find any regional specific stuff like LPMA. Overall, it seems to be mostly redundant to Wikipedia, and doesn't seem to be used as an organizing tool as explained in How You Can Use Libertarian Wiki. Paul Studier 21:29, 9 Feb 2005 (PST)

It seems that their political slant is reflected mainly in "Projects" on the right side of the main page. Most users are members of their BBS at [1]. Both are free, but the BBS has ads that you can turn off if you subscribe. Libertarian Wiki is on my personal vanity site which costs $10/month, so it will be a long time before I feel the need to fundraise. My overall opinion is that they are competition, and most of their stuff should have just been put on Wikipedis. Paul Studier 21:54, 9 Feb 2005 (PST)

As my frustration with GWB has grown I've started hanging out at DailyKos quite a bit. AFAICT their 'pedia is intended to be an activism tool, but there probably is a lot of content that's sufficiently NPOV to go to Wikipedia too. As for whether they compete with you, I suppose the question is how much reference material you want to store here. For example, I think it would be pointless to replicate Wikipedia:Massachusetts_General_Court here, but DKosopedia did -- and had the names of the incumbents added, too! So I transfered them back to Wikipedia and updated them. In sum, they're obviously filling a different niche than you are, and to the extent this wiki is Libertarian-oriented I don't see too much duplication problem. -- EqualOpportunityCynic 09:42, 23 May 2005 (PDT)

[edit] software and web-organizing

Hi Paul, I've got more news;

I've been following some libertarian bloggers who have announced their intention to create a web-based platform for the libertarian community[2].

They are largely focuesed on blogging and activist networking. Their platform may be better suited for some or the organizing tasks that the wiki is being used for. Otherwise, there is some cool software called EGroupWare that seems to do everything -- wiki, calendar, projects, etc. I've been playing with it, and the main problem seems to be that it is designed to be private -- you need a password to even look at most of the material.

Adam 07:08, 20 Feb 2005 (PST)

[edit] spambot needs to be blocked

As you've probably noticed by now, 83.26.108.205 has taken aim at the Weblogs page. I tried reverting a few times, but it's useless if this bot is going to keep at it. -- EqualOpportunityCynic 09:29, 23 May 2005 (PDT)

It doesn't do much good to block an IP address. They will come back with another. One spammer would sign up with a different username every time he spammed. What seems to have helped a lot is adding the attribute rel="nofollow" to all the pages. No external link will be indexed by a search engine. Unfortunately, this deprives legitimate links of the search engine ranking. Paul Studier 16:15, 23 May 2005 (PDT)

I've put up a test of BWABOM (hacked on for wiki markup instead of as a standalone html file) with the current batch of destructive accounts in the Sandbox. -- Strangelv 10:43, 27 August 2007 (PDT)

[edit] Talk:Links

Just FYI, I asked a question of you (but also hopefully to invite opinions of others) at Talk:Links. You probably would find it anyway, but I just wanted to bring it to your attention. (And sorry if I'm going overboard with my enthusiasm in general -- I'm just so excited at all the potential that this wiki represents, so at times I may make dubious impulsive decisions. Thanks for being patient with me.) - EqualOpportunityCynic 07:43, 8 Jun 2005 (PDT)

[edit] URL cleanup

Hey Paul,

I finally got my wikis to use a clean URL (drop the "index.php?title=" stuff). I remember that you encountered this problem after updating to MediaWiki 1.4, so I thought I'd tell you how I solved it in case you'd like to give it a shot. I think this is needed for search engines to index your site.

The solution that I found [3] is pretty simple, but it took me a long time to find it and understand it... so you are warned. It tells you how to fix the URLs even if you don't have root access on your machine. The basic idea is that you go into the LocalSettings.php file and change the $wgArticlePath variable (and comment out the previous definition). The standard value is: 

$wgArticlePath = "/wiki/$1";

and the directory's .htaccess file needs the following code: 

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^wiki/?(.*)$ /w/index.php?title=$1 [L,QSA]

You may need to create the .htaccess file.

Two things tripped me up:

  1. My scripts were in the "wiki" directory, but the article path (a virtual directory) cannot have real files in it, so I had to rename my script directory. Also, it doesn't work if the virtural directory is a shortened form of the real directory name (for example, you can't use "w" for the article path and "wiki" for the script directory) because if you use the shortened form as a rewrite condition, you will also pick up the longer form (which is the output) and get into a loop.
  2. I had everything set up properly but didn't know it because MediaWiki was caching the old links. To fix this, I needed to type the following URL: 
mysite.com/wiki/Main_Page?action=purge

If you want to try this out, keep the following references in mind:

  1. Wikipedia:Eliminating index.php from the url
  2. Apache web-server:URL rewriting guide
  3. Apache: Module mod_rewrite

The last reference is particularly useful because it describes the syntax of the "RewriteRule" command.

Good luck Adam 05:22, 31 Jul 2005 (PDT)

Thank you. I will try to work up the courage to attack this in the next few days, along with an upgrade from 1.4rc1 to 1.4.7. There is also some info about this on dreamhost.com's wiki, which is our host. Paul Studier 20:50, 31 Jul 2005 (PDT)
Boy is this confusing. With my experimental version, I got the urls to the form http://libertarianwiki.org/Main_Page. The purge command that works varies from time to time, so the following should be tried: 
mysite.com/wiki/Main_Page?action=purge
mysite.com/index.php?action=purge
mysite.com/wiki/index.php?action=purge
I use: 
$wgArticlePath      = "/$1";
and for .htaccess: 
# close the php security hole...
php_flag register_globals off

# first, enable the processing - Unless your ISP has it enabled
# already.  That might cause weird errors.
RewriteEngine on

# Rewrite wiki?xxx as wiki/index.php?xxx and stop
RewriteRule ^wiki$ wiki/index.php [L]

# Don't rewrite requests for files in MediaWiki subdirectories,
# MediaWiki PHP files, HTTP error documents, favicon.ico, or robots.txt
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/wiki/(stylesheets|images|skins)/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/wiki/(redirect|texvc|index).php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/error/(40(1|3|4)|500).html
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/favicon.ico
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/robots.txt

# Rewrite any article as wiki/index.php/article and stop
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ wiki/index.php?title=$1 [L,QSA]

[edit] Public Domain Link

Thanks for using the public domain for this wiki's content. Very forward thinking and pragmatic of you!

You might want to link the words "Public Domain" in the footer sentence "All content is available as Public Domain." as follows: 

<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/">Public Domain</a>

Doing so means LibertarianWiki will be included in Google (see usage rights) and Yahoo! (also available from Yahoo! Advanced Search) public domain/creative commons searches.

Mike Linksvayer 13:38, 26 December 2005 (PST)


[edit] classical liberalism

I'm currently blocked for "personal attacks" basically I called left leaning editors...LEFTISTS...(god forbid!!! The admins use any excuse to block me) and the classical liberalism page was reverted once again to a state almost void of citations with Friedman and Hayek. If you could head over to wikipedia and revert Slizor (he's one of the leftsts trying to destroy the classical liberalism article), and keep an eye on the page every once and awhile too. Thanks (KDRGibby 15:37, 1 March 2006 (PST))

[edit] regarding "Here" for deletion

hey Paul, thanks for the help!

yes, by all means, delete the page "Here". in trying to figure out how all this "wiki" stuff works, i've been creating pages, then recreating some new pages and not knowing how to delete old pages! 8-) obviously, i have no idea what i'm doing.

in fact, tonight a friend of mine checked out what i did today and told me that i needed to reconfigure the links so that they have "LRC" in each link, being that the wiki system is not hierarchical having page "nestled" links tied to their "parent" pages. he said this would make it easier for people to know each page in this case IS referenced to a "parent" page. please let me know if there is a better way, if you have the chance to check out what i've done in the Libertarian Reform Caucus section.

regardless, this is what i did, which rendered the old versions of those pages moot and need to be deleted... i think 5 total:

Platform ideas

Bylaws ideas

Statement of Principles

I.1 Freedom and Responsibility

II.1 Taxation

also, i didn't know how to send this message to your "talk" page, so i originally added it to mine, but then figured out that the "discussion" page is where you go to do that. i'm new to wiki, but i'm thinking this will better facilitate our need for LRC discussions regarding the LP Platform & Bylaws for now, until we update the system on our LRC website.

thanks again for the help!

8-)

bbc


There is a lot to learn and the wiki language is a bit kludgy. You can go to Wikipedia:How_to_edit_a_page for help. You can always tell which pages link to a page by clicking on What links here, or by mentioning the parent page in the introduction. If you change your mind what to call a page, you can click on Move and the old page becomes a redirect, that is, any old links to the old name will go to the new name. Deletion is comparatively rare, and only an administrator can do it. Currently I am the only administrator, and we discuss proposed deletions at Libertarian Wiki:VFD. Hope this helps. Paul Studier 20:27, 25 July 2006 (PDT)
Two more tips: Sign your comments by adding ~~~~ at the end. When you are sure which pages to delete, add {{delete}} to the top of the page. Paul Studier 20:37, 25 July 2006 (PDT)


bbc: cool, and thanks again. right now i'm searching the help files to find out how to use strikethrough text. i hope i find it! 8-) anway, what about those other pages i mentioned? i just went to them and did as you said. i'm not savvy when it comes to remembering "programming stuff" 8-). i presume you get notified because i used that "{{delete}}" command and you will delete them. i'll have to look further into what the 4 tilde thing is all about for ending comment posts. we should be able to keep it simple for our needs. thanks again!

(do you just leave these posts for a while and then later on do house cleaning on your discussion page?) 8-) bbc ~~~~


bbc: well, after many minutes of navigating through unhelpful help pages, it finally dawned upon me to simply look where i saw strikethrough text (smack dab in the front of your personal page), and see what was done! so much for help pages! 8-) bbc ~~~~

The general wiki culture is to leave the messages forever. Once in a great while, one copies old stuff to an archive and leaves a link to it on the talk page. About the pages you want to delete, you might just make them redirects. Put "#REDIRECT followed by a link to the new article as the first line of the old article. See LfM for an example. It redirects to Liberty for Massachusetts but under the title of the article it says (Redirected from LfM). Click on LfM to see the redirect. To sign your comments, type the 4 tildas without the nowiki and /nowiki tags. Paul Studier 19:09, 26 July 2006 (PDT)

[edit] CAPTCHA-based MediaWiki

Paul, you'll probably see my comments on that other talk page anyway, but if not I'd encourage you to read them. I think we can probably get a solution that will make this user happy and not scare off the little one-off edits, and still thwart the spam.

I can help with the MW upgrade if you feel like that would be helpful. Regards, EqualOpportunityCynic 21:38, 14 October 2006 (PDT)

I don't know if CAPTCHA is that much better than just making up a username. In any case Asdf appears to be the same person as FreedomIsSlavery so signing up as a user does not appear to be that hard. With some wikis, like http://ganfyd.org, one has to apply for membership for editing privileges. I am inclined to leave things as they are. Paul Studier 17:47, 19 October 2006 (PDT)
I was initially skeptical about captchas as I'd read that there were workarounds, but they've been fairly effective with the space wikis. A recent attacker has been creating identical accounts and articles on the three wikis that don't or didn't (Mike may have added them within the past 12 hours) have them, but not on the two that did. If it thwarts a percentage of attackers, it's probably worth it. Right now we only have it appearing to create accounts, not for anonymous edits (yes, we allow anonymous edits -- I prefer to not have junk accounts left behind after cleaning up messes -- this attacker simply assumes that account creation is required when setting up the scripts to attack wikis with (presumably so that the same script can attack all targeted wikis)).
BTW, I have a python script to help ban bulkly created accounts that may help you. The same attacker you're dealing with right now is also attacking LPedia. See here for a version that may need a small amount of tinkering to use (change the URL and maybe some other things -- one field is different between 1.3 and 1.10, but you're still running 1.9 I believe and may have the same field name as 1.3). If you want I could make the necessary modification and add it here (you would need to manually run it to create a local html file). -- Strangelv 00:22, 22 August 2007 (PDT)
Thanks for the suggestion. I don't think that the user names for our spammer are generated automatically because he reuses them. At this level of spamming, I am inclined to just revert and block. Don't know why he spams, all our links are labeled rel="nofollow" so it does him no good. Paul Studier 09:50, 22 August 2007 (PDT)
I'm pretty confident there's quite a bit of automation. The subsequent attacks from the same account always attack the exact same page, for example. Also, it seems that when there isn't any customers in the pipeline it simply deletes chunks of text (or at least this has been the behavior on LPedia -- in fact the first attacks there were deletions, not links). At first I didn't bother blocking any of the accounts because it seemed to be a new account for every single attack. Only after I saw that they eventually were re-used to attack the same page did I write BWABOM to conveniently block them in bulk (yes, I wrote it for this specific attacker that you're dealing with right now). I'd propose captchas for LPedia, but at the moment it's still running a legacy version of MediaWiki (after we finally upgrade I'll make the suggestion).
Almost all recent MediaWiki wikis have nofollow these days, but that doesn't seem to have sunk in to the attackers, or they're hoping that with enough volume it'll be faster than checking to see which ones have nofollow and which ones don't. Another posibility is that they still get paid and ergo don't care, simultaneously being a pain for people maintaining wikis and ripping off their patrons... -- Strangelv 06:21, 23 August 2007 (PDT)
Rrokuryook happens to be an account added by the exact same attacker I mentioned here earlier that can attack three of the space wikis, but not the two where captchas are set up. The excerpt from the WP OED article is the same text put up on the space wikis (I'd paste a link, but you'd need admin access to view the deleted page). That I don't see a Rrokuryook account on any of them this morning implies that Mike has catchas set up on them now as he said he was going to. -- Strangelv 06:37, 23 August 2007 (PDT) -- who remembers clearly his stating his opposition to captchas to Mike not unrecently...
I stand corrected -- Scientifiction.org has a now banned Rrokuryook account and two more deleted articles... so Mike didn't get it installed for all three yet. -- Strangelv 06:48, 23 August 2007 (PDT)

[edit] Centiare Olive Branch

I'll re copy my message as your probably BMOC through what I've seen on the recent changes page.

Do you think we could collaborate a bit between y'all and centiare.com. I live in Ron Paul's congressional district and am a huge fan of him (and limited government, guns, etc.) I like to work together and share the wiki code on my Ron Paul page and maybe others in the future. Feel free to email me through my own centiare page here or just google garrett minks as it comes up number 1! Garrett 11:31, 27 May 2007 (PDT)

[edit] Organizational Possibilities

There are two things I've done with most other wikis I'm involved with that have been quite useful that may be worth considering for here.

A list of lists of needed articles can provide a way to work out needed articles in a systematic way. For example, a List of Lists page could include a List of Philosophers link, which someone could then click on to create a link for Frédéric Bastiat. Someone looking for things to contribute can then see the red link for Bastiat and know that it's something they could immediately start from scratch. On Lunarpedia, some bootstrap list articles have become content articles in their own right (this example having been later relocated to the general space wiki).

The second one I can't claim credit for. Mike Delaney reorganized Lunarpedia into a reasonably tight (room to make it tighter) tree of categories to facilitate browsing. Ultimately, every category and page falls at some point under Category:Main with the exception of the spam blacklist page barring an idea of how to categorize it without breaking it. He couldn't find anything in Lunarpedia and considers Wikipedia to be the world's biggest mess. A page or category may be in more than one place in the tree, but shouldn't fall underneath itself (for example, Ayn Rand could fall under multiple categories which themselves may be found in multiple categories). Someone wanting to browse could start at the top of the tree and eventually find anything they're looking for that exists, whether it's a maintenance page, an image, or any existing article on a philosopher.

--Strangelv 22:18, 11 August 2007 (PDT)

Retrieved from "http://libertarianwiki.org/User_talk:Pstudier"
Personal tools