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Back in green 18 April 2006

Posted by Zach in meta.
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Hi all, I'm back, sorry for the almost month-long unannounced absence. I've been rather busy with schoolwork, mostly a senior thesis on Aristotle and ecofeminism. Man I can't wait to be done with school (May 13 – actually, no, May 30, since I have to do a wilderness expedition for two weeks after graduation as my final PE requirement).

There have been some understandable concerns about the future/health of the wiki in the past couple weeks due to my absence and non-responsiveness (e.g. to emails); I moved this discussion to the [[community portal]] and responded to it.  

I probably won't be terribly active on the wiki for the next month and a half while I finish school, but I'll try to post a little bit and fight back the spammers. I may post some stuff about ecofeminism, which usually includes concerns for animals, as I continue writing my thesis.

In the wider animal-friendly world, Food Fight! and other kind souls are trying to raise $10,000 for Josh Harper's (one of the SHAC 7) legal fund, and Sea Shepherd captain Paul Watson is resigning as a co-director of the Sierra Club because they are, uh, supporting hunting…

SHAC roundup & last dictatorial act 16 March 2006

Posted by Zach in SHAC, legal, meta, support, visuals.
2 comments

The skin and wiki-politics

So it seems that all of a sudden the new skin is working roughly properly in Internet Explorer. Minor fixes should still be done, but I think we’re mostly OK now.

I’ve gotten both good and bad feedback on it. One wikivegan thinks it looks too unlike a normal wiki (a majority of wikis use the standard Monobook skin, or similarly business-like skins if they’re using a different engine).

I admit it was ‘unwiki’ to just change it as I did, without getting feedback from the users. My reasons were that I really thought the old skin was bad, and that a majority of future users would prefer the new skin to the old one. And I’ve gotten rather more good feedback than bad already, wich confirms this. 

So, although it’s ‘unwiki’, I’m going to leave the current skin on, as my last act as Benevolent Dictator. In a minute though I’m going to start the page [[wikiveg constitution]] which will outline what I (and other sysops) can and can’t do, and from then on will stick to that.  

SHAC roundup

As you may know, the SHAC 7 were convicted on all counts back on March 2nd. The sentencing will happen in June, and meanwhile the defendants are out on house arrest. (Four were released fairly quickly; Kevin was released early this week; Josh was to be released today.) I haven’t been talking about it because of widespread sentiment in the activist community that publicly discussing the case, or engaging in anti-HLS activity, could perhaps hurt their chances of not getting a heavy sentence. The Toronto Star (via Hounded, Cowed, & Badgered) has a good article about it though if you want to read more.

As I think I said, I’m ambivalent about many SHAC tactics but I still think this wasn’t a just outcome. Hopefully though it will be won on appeal. I heard someone say that first amendment cases are often lost on trial but won on appeal.

That means though that they need more support to hire a decent first amendment attorney. Donations can be received on the website, or by sending a check (payable to NJARA) to SHAC 7, c/o NJARA, PO Box 174, Englishtown, NJ 07726.

New skin goes live 7 March 2006

Posted by Zach in meta, technical difficulties, visuals.
3 comments

So I just finished version 1 of the new skin, and put it on the site. Yay!

Funny thing is, it’s working in Firefox, but not Safari or IE (all Mac).

Even stranger, Safari and IE are using the previous skin… but the previous skin only existed on the page MediaWiki:Monobook.css, and that page now has the new skin on it. So I don’t know why that’s happening – it’s like they’re intentionally looking in the history of that page and getting the older version, just to piss me off.

So, very helpful would be to know for whom the skin is working. It should look someting like this.
Some known bugs:

  • Banner ends and dark green begins if browser window is wider than 1024px
  • Funny business on the personal links if you hover the cursor at the bottom of them
  • Color of gardener fellow isn’t exactly the same as the color of the main content area
  • I meant to give the heading styles one last touch-up, since the current color scheme is different from the one I was using when I designed them, but I’ll do that later.

Unfortunately, my computer broke an hour ago (AGAIN). So I can’t really fix these bugs or other ones until who knows when…

Update:

It seems to be working in Safari, and mostly working in IE, except that the sidebar is beginning at the top of the page instead of below the banner. So the top group of sidebar links are on top of the banner. Annoying, but that seems like a smaller problem. I’ll try to fix that and other bugs this weekend.

New look, pages, & blogs 28 February 2006

Posted by Zach in blogs, legal, meta, support, visuals.
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New skin

I’ve been neglecting to write about the wiki proper lately due to the SHAC 7 trial goings-on, but there has been stuff going on. Most excitingly (for me at least), I’ve been for most of the past 24 hours working on a new skin (i.e. layout) for the site. I’ll probably be done in another couple days. I’ve thought for a while that we really needed one – so many people just won’t come back if a site looks ugly – but been too scared of CSS.

Turns out though CSS isn’t that bad. I just jumped in and started messing with it.

What I’m working on will be a good bit simpler-looking than the standard “Monobook” skin we currently have, what with all its lines and boxes everywhere. I think across the top is going to be a banner made up of veggie or animal liberation related silhouettes, not entirely unlike (though not entirely like either) what you see on this site. I spent the last couple hours trying to get a nice silhouette of a rodent of some kind being freed (below), though frustratingly I’ve lost the original link so I don’t know what kind of animal it is or where. I’m not super happy with the graphic, and may not use it in the final skin, but it gives you a general sort of gander of where this is going.

New pages

Perhaps the most important page recently made is Eric McDavid. Eric was arrested back in January, along with a two others, for allegedly planning to destroy some cell phone towers, one or more power plants, and a facility of the U.S. Forest Service Institute of Forest Genetics. They were arrested mostly because they, along with many other radical groups over the years, had been infiltrated by a young undercover agent who went by the name of “Anna”.

When I went down for the SHAC 7 trial last week, I met a girl doing prison support for him and the two other activists. I had heard about some recently-arrested activist who was on the third week of a hunger strike because he was being denied vegan meals; it turns out this was Eric McDavid, and that very recently, after about a month, they started feeding him suitable meals.

Still, letters would be appreciated, and if you’re near Sacramento you could visit him. (Also on the vegan prisoner front, Peter Young has been allowed to receive books again. His wikiveg page hasn’t been updated yet though, so see SupportPeter.com for more info on that.)

Other articles include: a Philadelphia page; one on Mary Lou Sapone, an undercover agent who did something tres bizarre in the 80s; Teany, a cafe opened by vegan musician Moby; Huntingdon Life Sciences (did I already mention that before?); elephants, which apparently are more and more frequently being born tuskless due to a certain gene being promoted by hunting (“unnatural selection”).

Finally, there’s an article on soya toxicity (aka soy toxicity). Apparently some sources say that soy in high enough amounts (amounts many vegans get) becomes bad for you. Other sources say this is just dairy-industry propaganda. I’m not sure which is true, but I did notice a long article about this in an issue of Herbivore I have, so I’ll try to read it and add some info from it in the next week or so.

New blogs

There’s what looks like a really good, down-to-business blog on U.S. animal law called Hounded, Cowed, & Badgered. Also, Herbivore just launched a staff blog.

Watch your back, you other 1.2 million websites… 9 February 2006

Posted by Zach in blogs, meta, technical difficulties.
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Apparently, the wiki isn’t working today. I’m getting the following message:

Sorry! The wiki is experiencing some technical difficulties, and cannot contact the database server.
Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock’ (111)

Our host’s site (cache) also seems to be down, though it doesn’t give me an error message. I visited most of the other wikis he hosts (via the Google cache of the page wikidev.net/Wikis, where they are listed), and it was the same story for about half of them. I just emailed him about it, and I’ll let you know what he says.

I also asked him to clarify how much access to a WordPress blog installation we would have if we had him install one, e.g. whether we would have to email him every time we need an extension installed (as we currently have to do with MediaWiki), or want to alter the skin. If he answers “plenty”, I’m going to get him to go ahead with it and install it at wikiveg.org/blog, in accordance with the discussion on the community portal.

Update: we’re back!

More updates: Gabriel said: “There was a disk failure on one of the servers (the only one without RAID). I moved all wikis off that machine to another server.” Also, he said we’ll have shell (and if we want, as root) access to a WordPress installation, so I told him to go ahead with it.

Good news

A few weeks ago I checked out what alexa.com had to say about us, and it said our traffic rank was somewhere in the 3 million range, which I think meant that about 3 million other websites were getting more traffic.

I just checked again today, and now we’re in the 1.2 million range! *yay*

Spam blacklisting & bots 30 January 2006

Posted by Zach in meta, spam.
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Gabriel emailed me back and said the SpamBlacklist extension works “quite well”, and that he can activate it on our wiki if we like. I’m assuming we like. I think he’s going to have it use the Wikimedia blacklist, which is a tiny bummer (wanting to be independent of Wikimedia and all), but it’s not a huge deal I don’t think, and I’d rather not hassle him about it. I’ll post here when he says it’s up and running.

I had also asked him about whether it’s helpful to tell indexing bots (e.g. search engines) not to index history pages or the Recent changes page. I got this idea from chongqed.org. The reason for doing this is that even if you eliminate wikispam from all current pages, it still is there in the pages histories and in the Recent changes log, and so if robots are indexing those, there’s still an incentive to spam even if it gets removed quickly. Gabriel
made some changes to our robots.txt file which should remove that incentive.

The only thing now is to make sure spammers know this – perhaps we could put a little notice on the front page if we start getting spammers again. (They seem to have dropped off the past couple days.)

Communication among wikivegans 30 January 2006

Posted by Zach in meta.
3 comments

I’ve been thinking about the various lines of communication among the people working on or using the wiki (aka wikivegans), and here’s how it seems to me:

  • Discussion of policy, etc., should probably mostly happen in the community portal, or on a mailing list.
  • Right now it seems like the community portal is adequate, but sooner or later we’ll probably want to have a mailing list, like most wikis I know of do.
  • This blog should probably keep mainly to reporting news about the wiki, rather than being a forum for discussion, so discussions don’t happen in multiple places and get confused, and I should post in a way that reflects that.

Does that sound good?

Issues on the future of the wiki 22 January 2006

Posted by Zach in blogs, meta, spam.
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Existence: I just saw some questions on the future security of the wiki that TheChin! asked back in November on the Community portal page. Basically he was wondering if the wiki was going to keep existing and if the founder was still interested.

It most definitely is, and I most definitely am – which was a big part of the point of starting this blog.

So that answers the gist of his questions I think, but I wrote a more detailed response (financial, hosting, why I was gone), which you can read there.

Blog: This blog should be moved onto wikiveg.org soon, but where should it go? I lean towards having it on the front page. Discussion here. (Note: We’re definitely customizing the skin; I would customize this one but wordpress.com doesn’t give you that option.)

Spam: It might be too soon to tell, but it seems like the spam is dropping off a bit(?), perhaps as the spammers realize the wiki is active again…

License: Currently we are using a dual GFDL and Creative Commons “by-sa” license. My thinking was this:

  • Advantage: This allows us or other people to export content to both CC-by-sa and GFDL wikis.
  • Disadvantage: This doesn’t allow us to import any content unless it is already license as *both* CC-by-sa and GFDL.
  • Advantage: However, we have the flexibility to “switch” from the dual license to a single GFDL or CC-by-sa license, if we ever feel like the above disadvantage outweighs the above advantage.

I realize the last point seems counterintuitive, because it seems like that would be changing the license, which you can’t do according to the “share alike” (“sa”) clauses in the CC-by-sa and the GFDL. But as long we continued to make the old content available under both licenses (which we could do by just saying on the license page that “Content before [date of switch] is released under both the GFDL and the CC-by-sa”), we wouldn’t be relicensing any content; we’d just be releasing, from that point on, any new content under the one license as opposed to both.

A contributor just added a link to the licensing discussion on Embodiment Wiki (which I just added to our WikiNode), which contains the interesting idea of having different licenses for different kinds of content. That’s something we could probably do if people wanted to; for example, having an “Essay:” namespace where each page would have whatever license the author wanted. I think the basic structure of the license though (most content as dual GFDL and CC-by-sa) should stay the way it is for now. More of my feedback if you want to read it is on the Community portal.

Point of view: There’s an ongoing discussion on the Community portal about what POV the wiki should have. (E.g. Wikipedia’s policy is NPOV, neutral point of view.) The most obvious choice seems to be “vegan point of view” (VPOV). But the question is, does that mean we exclude anyone who someone thinks is not vegan enough, e.g. vegetarians, or people who think used leather is vegan?

For that reason, I suggested “tolerant vegan point of view”, i.e. VPOV but not being too iron-handed on dissenting opinions. Tim suggested multiple point of view, i.e. not specifically VPOV. Now a new contributor has said that they think it should definitely have VPOV, but allow if not encourage dissent as to what counts as VPOV.

To me this seems pretty close to my suggestion of tolerant VPOV. It seems like so far then, there’s a faint consensus to have the POV be VPOV but not overzealously so. I think we can just leave it at that until some issue comes up, and we can discuss and clarify it more then.

Sweeping out the cobwebs 4 January 2006

Posted by Zach in meta, spam, visuals.
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I haven’t done any serious editing of pages yet – the first item of business has been to clear up all the wikispam that has accumulated on the wiki while I’ve been away. Wikispam is a form a spamming that consists of putting lots of links on a wiki page to try to increase their ranking with search engines. I’ve seen wikis where this happens very blatantly; where a spammer just deletes a page and replaces it with links. This isn’t super effective since it’s really obvious to the next person who comes along that something needs to be fixed. On wikiveg though, the spammers cleverly put all the links under an HTML tag that made them *not* show up on the page unless you viewed the wikicode for the page. (Here is an example; the spam is at the bottom.)

I first noticed that this was happening a month ago I think, and I was expecting to have to spend a good hour tracking it all down and removing it. Thankfully though, another user, TheChin! had come by and eliminated pretty much all of it. He (or she?) was around as recently as December 29. I hope he or she comes back.

The next thing I’d like to do, though it’ll have to wait until I learn more CSS, is get rid of the (IMHO) godawful CSS skin/visuals I’ve got up there. I just threw together a few customizations of the standard MediaWiki skin back in May, probably between sleep-deprived essay-writing sessions. Originally I thought it would be a good thing to have a skin structurally very similar to the standard skin, for the sake of continuity with many of the well-known wikis (esp. Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects), so that the learning curve would be minimal for people coming to the site. But I don’t think that’s a big issue anymore. I recently came across another MediaWiki installation using a highly customized skin, and while I’m not crazy about the skin itself, it still made me realize that the skin for wikiveg can look like whatever the hell we want. So, I’m going to try to learn some CSS in the next few months and come up with something really bold and nice-looking.

What this is about 4 January 2006

Posted by Zach in blogs, meta.
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Around last May I started a wiki called wikiveg, for anything and everything having to do with veganism, animals, animal rights activism, and related concerns. The project stalled as I got too busy with school, and was preoccupied with other things over the summer. I’m hoping to get it going again this year.

I was partly inspired by the way Food Fight’s site has a blog on the front page… blogs are just much more interesting than a static page. Wikipedia manages to have an interesting front page by having lots of things that are constantly being updated (featured articles, news, “did you know?” bits), but you can’t really do that until you have a community of people working on the wiki. Hence this blog. I’ll largely be writing about what’s going on on the wiki and what’s gong on in the worlds of veganism and animals, which will be connected most of the time.

The guy I’m hosting with, Gabriel Wicke, said he could get a blog set up to load on the front page for me, but that probably won’t be for another couple weeks.

I’ve felt pretty sad about not working on wikiveg for the past several months. It got to the point where I knew it wasn’t growing and that I had a ton of work I had to do, which made me avoid it more, which worsed the problem. I especially felt bad about letting other contributors down, especially Tim from the German-language VeganWiki, and a man named David who wrote a completely kick-ass amazing article on kosher slaughter. I hope I can win them and contributors like them back in the coming year. I think I’m mostly through the problems that caused me to be a spotty, unreliable, AbsentLeader for the past half year; mostly I’ve just had way too much on my hands either in terms of academic work, or the emotional turmoil that comes with being a college student whose worldview gets drastically changed or reinvented every three months. (Seriously, it’s exhausting.) But I’m mostly at the end of the academic pressures, and I think finally I’m finished with having energy- and time-consuming worldview changes.

Right now I’m in Florida till Saturday and then Honduras until the 16th. I’ll probably do a little work on the wiki and another blog post or two before Honduras.