Re: [WikiEN-l] [Wikimedia-l] Fwd: access to journals
If you've gone to university, it's well worth looking to see if your university provide alumni access. My university, the University of London, provide alumni access to the library for £220 a year, which includes an eight book borrowing limit, full JSTOR access (which doesn't have the limitation that JPASS has), Oxford DNB access and some other online resources. Some universities also charge the even better price of nothing. I've put up a page in project space on English Wikipedia so we can document which institutions provide access: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:JSTOR/Alumni_access -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ On 24 September 2013 at 12:56:18, David Gerard (dger...@gmail.com) wrote: fyi -- Forwarded message -- From: Kathleen McCook klmcc...@gmail.com Date: 24 September 2013 12:25 Subject: [WikiEN-l] access to journals To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org In an effort to enhance access options for people who aren’t affiliated with universities, colleges, or high schools, not-for-profit digital library JSTOR has launched JPASS, a new program offering individual users access to 1,500 journals from JSTOR’s archive collection. The move follows the March 2012 launch of JSTOR’s Register Readprogram, which allowed independent researchers to register for a free MyJSTOR account, and receive free, online-only access to three full-text articles every 14 days. That service has since attracted almost one million users including independent scholars, writers, business people, adjunct faculty, and others, and JSTOR plans to continue offering the service in its current form. However, in a recent survey, many of Register Read users expressed interest in an individual subscription model that would offer enhanced access, encouraging JSTOR to move ahead with JPASS. http://www.thedigitalshift.com/2013/09/digital-libraries/jstor-launches-jpass-access-accounts-for-individual-researchers/ JSTOR Launches JPASS Access Accounts for Individual Researchers [Library Journal] ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list wikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] bizarre: Women Novelists Wikipedia
If only there were some kind of editable data store project being worked on that could store this kind of metadata in a centralised location… grin -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ On Friday, 26 April 2013 at 13:07, David Gerard wrote: On 26 April 2013 12:15, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com (mailto:carcharot...@googlemail.com) wrote: See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Category_intersection That's an old proposal, but is it becoming more feasible now? As I vaguely recall, the main barrier to treating categories as tags in the past was that MySQL was terrible at it and it would have crippled performance. (I have no idea if MariaDB is better, but I have no reason to think so.) Hence the workaround with sending the functionality off to the toolserver. It's really annoying because cats-as-tags would be perfect for Commons. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Psychological correlates of deletionism/inclusionism?
On Saturday, 13 April 2013 at 05:10, Gwern Branwen wrote: Some recent musings reminded me that I never did find a good answer for an old question of mine: does anything predict whether an editor will lean towards deletionism? I'm waiting for extreme inclusionists or deletionists to produce some high-quality, not-at-all bullshit research that shows that failure to adhere to their preferred philosophy is something that shows a deep psychological tendency to rape kittens. That'll elevate the debate, I'm sure. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How to write about things that were once notable?
On Wednesday, 6 February 2013 at 08:20, Charles Matthews wrote: Notability is *supposed* to be timeless, not perishable, let's recall. DG raises an interesting writing issue, nevertheless. Remember Pownce? This is the startup over which Andrew Lih went ballistic - with risk of distortion in my hindsight, the point at the time was that Lih thought a press release about a Silicon Valley startup was quite enough for an encyclopedia article, while other disagreed. As things now stand http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pownce tells us it went down one of the startup routes, for a lifespan of around 18 months. That article seems fine, except that The developers have also created should now read The developers also created. Pownce is clearly a footnote by now. One of WP's purposes is to host such footnotes. So the writing issue boils down to reducing froth to footnote coverage. Pownce is an interesting example of why we need to keep these kinds of articles around: every time a new social network comes along, people jump on to it like it's the best thing since sliced bread. Showing them the many failures and closed services may prompt them into reconsidering their actions. Not that Wikipedia ought to moralise or preach, but the lesson of reading articles like Pownce is that Silicon Valley venture capitalists don't value things for longevity. And a lot of people seem to forget that. Those who don't learn from history are bound to repeat it applies to technology and business too. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Fox News says we have a rampant porn problem
On Monday, 10 September 2012 at 19:51, Steve Summit wrote: Wikipedia has turned down a more or less free offer for software that would keep minors and unsuspecting web surfers from stumbling upon graphic images of sex organs, acts and emissions, FoxNews.com (http://FoxNews.com) has learned -- sexually explicit images that remain far and away the most popular items on the company's servers. This morning, I turned down an offer for some viagra that was emailed to me. In fact, I was offered the chance to help secure some money in Nigeria and transfer it to the United States to help a member of the Nigerian Royal Family. And I was offered access to some horny chicks that live near me, apparently. I await the Fox News story about how I failed to take up any of these offers. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Categorisation by gender
On Wednesday, 18 July 2012 at 13:18, Delirium wrote: I'm not sure if that's the best way to do it, but I think that asymmetry in interest and navigational usefulness is why we have some asymmetries in the category structure. As for changing it, I think it'll have to be looked at on an area-by-area basis with involvement of relevant wikiprojects, because some of the category systems are fairly complex and/or brittle, and people have opinions about them. In sports, for example, many people are already categorized into the leagues they play in, and many leagues are single-gender, so that could provide an easy way of adding people indirectly to a category without going through an editing tens of thousands of articles. Alternately (or perhaps, additionally), there are increasingly more ways than the category system for encoding metadata, if the goal is to use it for external sorting rather than navigation. For example, perhaps Template:Infobox_person could have a gender field, which would then be picked up by DBPedia and similar projects that extract infobox data. Funny you should mention DBpedia. DBpedia can only work based on the things in Wikipedia and given that we don't include gender in Wikipedia info boxes or category structures, there won't be anything in DBpedia. But, DBpedia links into Freebase, and Freebase has been running a game through the 'Freebase apps' platform called Genderizer. This allows people to select either from a queue of real or fictional people and set their gender based on the lead from their Wikipedia article. While this isn't a reliable source to integrate the information back into Wikipedia, for the purposes of doing a rough study into the gender ratios of Wikipedia articles about people (and fictional people), Freebase may do what you want. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia as part of a social media strategy for hotels
On 25 June 2012 12:57, Martijn Hoekstra martijnhoeks...@gmail.com wrote: What's wrong with Hi, thanks for your stuff. It didn't belong here, so we put it there for you rather than Hi, you put stuff here that didn't belong here. Bad user. Find an admin that will email your stuff for you through a murky procedure, so you can put it there yourself? So, what you are saying is that to properly handle new page patrolling, users now need to know how to edit OpenStreetMap. Like with Wikipedia, the process of learning how to edit OSM well is a non-trivial one. Also, most Wikipedians didn't start editing Wikipedia to help provide better business listings but to improve articles about interesting, notable topics. And I say that as a Wikipedian who is also an OSMer who spends a non-trivial amount of time adding shops and businesses to OSM. ;-) -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Duolingo and translating Wikipedia
On 20 June 2012 13:20, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: PS. Forgot to say that this claim misses several points about how different language Wikipedias often have very different articles on the same topic (i.e. they are rarely direct translations if independent editing of the articles is being done). Also, I'm not clear if they are saying that this would be an improvement on machine or human translation or not. I think the claim is merely being used as an example of translating of a large amount of text relatively quickly using a form of crowdsourcing, rather than any intention to actually translate the articles, but maybe they do intend to do that? Well, the other thing that is an issue with the Duolingo method is you'll end up with style continuity problems. If you translate sentences on their own, you end up not having a consistent style running through the article. In my blog post that Andrew Gray posted, I think I suggested what we could do with Duolingo if the people running it want to play ball: chuck articles in French, German and Spanish at it that don't have equivalents in English, and then have them stowed away in some kind of holding pen, perhaps an AfC like place where people can dip in, fix them up, add references and move them to mainspace. von Ahn is probably going a bit OTT in his claim, but it's potentially certainly a useful model. Even more useful would be English to other languages, and also once it stops just being the major languages like FR, ES, DE and PT. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] Massive AfC backlog
There is currently an enormous backlog at Articles for Creation, of over 700 articles. If you've got some time spare, it'd be great if you could help work on the AfC backlog. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AFC Many hands make light wiki-work. ;-) -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Current consensus on PR editing?
On 13 June 2012 15:51, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: Came up at the London meetup. Opinion ranges talking to PR people to injecting formic acid into their eyeballs. So I'm going to stay we are still at the lot of shouting stage. Following on from that discussion, one thing I think I suggested was that if we were to come up with a list of good admin practices towards PR folk, it might be easier to derive good practice that way. If instead of saying what do we think of PR people editing Wikipedia? we said under what circumstances should administrators act on the requests of PR people?, I think we might have a way out of the conundrum. So, here's a real life example of how I've dealt with someone representing a PR company. An acquaintance of mine who works for a PR company emailed me asking why the Wikipedia article about their company had been deleted. I explained that it was due to lack of notability, per the GNG, and explained in detail what AfD was. They asked whether it was possible to appeal the decision in the AfD. I explained DRV to them. I said that while I can undelete the article, there wouldn't be community consensus for me to do so. I suggested that if they want the article deleted, they locate five sources that specifically meet the requirements of the GNG. I'm waiting on them to send said sources. If they do and I'm genuinely satisfied that these five sources meet GNG, I'll start a DRV that explains that I know this person in real life but don't have any business or financial connection with them, and list the sources. This sidesteps all the canards about paid editing* and COI editing and so on. I think if we could find all the various common issues that happen with these kinds of editing and work out some rough formulas of how to resolve them, we can solve most of the problems without animus. * There's nothing wrong with paid editing in my view. If Bill Gates were to set up a fund that paid a living wage to a group of Wikipedians to write neutral, high-quality, referenced articles on, say, science, maths and history, I don't see a problem. The problem with paid editing isn't the pay, it's the articles they are editing. Shilling is the problem, not being paid. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_
On Wednesday, 16 May 2012 at 16:49, Gwern Branwen wrote: Indeed. Why *are* the skeptical geeks now on Reddit and not Wikipedia? 26 minutes? I'm trying to imagine how much the angry inclusionists would be soiling my talk page with accusations of BITEyness if I had IAR deleted this page after just 26 minutes. ;-) The question also presumes that Wikipedians are not also Redditors. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Notability of commercial organisations
On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 13:44, WereSpielChequers wrote: 1. The ratio of volunteers whose hobby it is to write about business to hired hands operating covertly is probably not as healthy for Wikipedia on general business issues as it would be re hill forts, classic cars or hurricanes. I concur with this: my primary issue with all the paid editing/CREWE etc. discussions is it means that unpaid volunteers including admins will have to pick up the slack. Legitimising it turns it from a trickle to a flood, and we now need to find more humans to police the crap these PR folk turn out. Think about it by comparison to drug legalisation. The argument goes like this: we legalise pot and the government can tax and regulate the sale of marijuana, and reduce the law enforcement costs for policing it. The cops can spend their time policing actually important crime and the government get a new tax stream. Explicitly permitting paid advocacy editing gets us the opposite bargain: it increases the 'cost' for 'law enforcement', admins have to spend more time policing. And what's our tax payoff? Lots of borderline spammy, business articles. Great. Because, you know, we haven't got hundreds of those in the NewPages backlog and the WP:AFC backlog that nobody can be bothered to deal with... 2. Some businesses have annoyed people, and I suspect that articles on businesses in general get more hostile unbalanced editing than do articles on extinct megafauna, asteroids or mathematical formulae. 3. There are areas where our coverage is, or aims to be, comprehensive, and there are areas where we merely cover the most notable. with crinoids, cathedrals and corsairs this doesn't bring up a fairness issue. But with business it does. If we only create articles for the main players in a market then we are potentially giving them an advantage over smaller or newer rivals, especially if those articles emphasise the positive. I'd say one of the problems with business articles is they are so badly written. It's all dynamic providers of made-to-measure solutions. I'd want to reducify the instantiation of literary constructions that do not meet our best practices. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:B2B -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: The counterattack of the PR companies
On Wednesday, 18 April 2012 at 13:58, David Gerard wrote: Also note that in my experience, it is pretty much impossible to get across even to nice PR people that they have a really bloody obvious COI. I have spent much time trying. I would guess that this is because getting their POV in is, in point of fact, what they get money for. So, recently, I've been advising a PR/social media company (unpaid) about their article, which was deleted for lack of notability. They are perfectly well-aware of their COI and so on: that's why they've contacted me. The stance I've taken with them is basically to ask them to find at least five reliable sources that meet the GNG, I'll have a look at them and if I think they do, I'll open a DRV on the deletion, listing the five sources. In the DRV, I'll make it quite clear that I've communicated with them, what the nature of the relationship is (no commercial relationship, I just happen to know a lady who works at the company personally) and they provided me the sources, but I won't open a DRV unless I agree that the sources meet the GNG. I hope that's a way to do it with some integrity. Being that I'm pretty damn cynical of PR companies, and when I read about how PR companies want to edit Wikipedia ethically, my initial bullshit detector goes off the charts. But in this instance, I think it's certainly possible. User:Fluffernutter gave a talk about paid editing last year at Wikimania, comparing it with needle exchange programmes. Much as my gut feeling is god no, don't give an inch to PR people even if they are claiming to act 'ethically'!, I have a funny feeling we're going to need to do something very soon. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement
On Wednesday, 4 April 2012 at 20:16, Andrew Gray wrote: Catscan has always been quite slow - it's fair enough, I suppose, when you consider it's having to match item-by-item in two very large and dynamically generated lists! I wonder if it's possible to tell it to just return a figure for matching articles, rather than a list, when you expect it to be unusually large? It's still going to have to calculate the intersection of the two sets (the computationally and IO intensive task) in order to then calculate the size of said intersection. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Inclusionists vs deletionists
On Thursday, 22 March 2012 at 19:34, WereSpielChequers wrote: Inclusionism and deletionism are a spectrum not a binary choice, wherever you are on that spectrum there will be editors who are more deletionist or more inclusionist than yourself. The closer you are to one end of the spectrum the more likely it is that you will think that the other end of the spectrum is dominant. Which is a longwinded way of sadly saying no, in fact it's very much the opposite. Deletion debates generally attract deletionists, especially as the inclusionists have to take more time the more potential sources they can check. I think that's probably a bit too broad-brushed too. Certain types of deletion debates tend to have no reference to -isms, because there's an understood and clearly applicable standard. On English Wikipedia, look at WikiProject Football, where they have a pretty clear notability standard (NFOOTY) such that most deletions aren't that contentious. As an admin who closes a fair few AfDs, and as a human being who isn't a big fan of loudmouthed ideological posturing, I have to say that I rather like such topic areas. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Stopping the presses: Britannica to stop printing books
On 14 March 2012 00:22, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: I don't use it in print, haven't for years, and have been expecting something like this for a while, but am still surprisingly saddened by it too; there's something about the shelf of volumes that encapsulates the world's knowledge that sort of symbolizes the whole idea of a library to me. I've been asked to write a short editorial about this development from a Wikipedian's perspective and am curious about (and would love to include) other Wikimedian experiences -- did you use print encyclopedias as a kid? Was a love of print encyclopedias part of your motivation or interest in becoming a Wikipedian? Is there any value in them still? Will you miss it? Anecdotal data point: as a kid, I was a reference book nut, although never had a decent encyclopedia. My parents bought me a copy of the Guinness encyclopedia, a colourful one-volume title. 'Twas amazing, but very stubby. Philosophy got all of four pages, as did Christianity, the death penalty got half a page, and human rights got a whole page. 20th century theatre got a whole two pages, and 20th century cinema got the next two pages. The best bit was the scientific diagrams: really detailed, colourful drawings of car engines and different types of nuclear reactor. Thematic organisation was definitely one of the benefits of the encyclopedia: it started with 'The Universe' and described cosmology and the Big Bang and stars, and then moved on to the Earth and geology and volcanoes, and then trotted onto biology and medicine, detouring into economics, sociology and law, then onto engineering, then to religion and philosophy, then finally the arts: visual, musical and theatrical. I still keep it near my desk, but I have to admit, I usually grab my laptop or smartphone and go to Wikipedia or Wiktionary (even though my local library gives me Britannica access, and my university library gives me OED access - all the logging-in faff isn't worth it). -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] A Wikipedian asked to write for a paper encyclopedia
On 20 January 2012 14:10, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: This is the interesting (if now quite old) debate about traditional encyclopedias. Yes, Britannica or any other old-style commercial encyclopedia is keen to tell you about expert authors. Less keen, for example, to tell you when the article was written, as opposed to who wrote it; the expert not having a crystal ball rather affects the value of an article (say in science or technology). This was the starting point of Harvey Einbinder's The Myth of the Britannica (1964), which even Wikipedians might find rather unfair to EB (though the detail is fascinating - seems Einstein got the same $80 as anyone else for an article which allowed them to promote the work using his name ... wonder how hard he worked to write it). One should note that the market works to favour encyclopedias with a business model that allows later editions in which revision is kept to essentials. That's how it is: initiating a new high-quality print encyclopedia requires money up front, and the investment is paid off by having later editions that require substantially less writing bought in, rather than done in-house. I don't know this for a fact, but I doubt encyclopedia writers get a contract in which they are guaranteed the right to revise their work for each edition - implausible given the way publishers' minds works. Anyway we know that (for English speakers at least) market forces, given the barriers to entry, did not really drive quality right up. Einbinder pretty much gets that correct, as I recall. Not related to Britannica, but I came across a stunning omission from a printed encyclopedia a while back while editing Wikipedia... http://blog.tommorris.org/post/11947599442/encyclopedia-of-the-harlem-renaissance-vs-wikipedia -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] BBC articles related to Wikipedia blackout
I hate to toot my own horn, but Wikinews has had some articles... Wikipedia, Reddit in 'blackout' against SOPA, PROTECT IP laws https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikipedia,_Reddit_in_%27blackout%27_against_SOPA,_PROTECT_IP_laws?dpl_id=342230 Wikinews interviews Sue Gardner on Wikipedia blackout https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews_interviews_Sue_Gardner_on_Wikipedia_blackout -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] English Wikipedia blackout
On 17 January 2012 17:09, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Citizendium will *clean up* tomorrow. No, Simple English Wikipedia will. It's like Citizendium, but with three times as many articles and with a much better homeopathy article. ;-) -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Image rotation request
On 9 January 2012 17:55, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: Is anyone able to deal with this image? (Or ask someone else or repost this someone suitable?) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Southampton-Cenotaph.jpg The Wikipedia copy needs rotating (or deleting). The Commons image is here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Southampton-Cenotaph.jpg That is the right way round. This article is on DYK on the Main Page at the moment, so it would be nice if the image people see when they click through to the article is the right way round. Not sure if everyone is seeing it the wrong way round, or if it is just me. I presume the default is to show the Wikipedia file if there is a file of the same name both here and on on Commons. I've deleted the local version on enwiki, so it should be using the version on Commons now. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] A reader's experience with The Closed, Unfriendly World Of Wikipedia
On Dec 11, 2011 10:03 PM, Daniel R. Tobias d...@tobias.name wrote: While the design and user interface of Wikipedia certainly has things that could stand improvement, I generally like the fact that it's not run by a billion dollar budget commercial outfit brimming with meddlesome marketing and management types and artsy graphical designers, aimed at producing a site design that looks cool when demoed in PowerPoint presentations, shoves lots of annoying, intrusive ads at the user and is explicitly designed and structured to maximize this even at the expense of actual content, and works well (if at all) only in the particular browsers and platforms targeted by the developer. Those sites are hard to navigate, hard to read, slow to load, prone to crashing your browser, go out of their way to interfere with normal browser operations like caching and back/forward buttons by having crazy contraptions of scripts to reinvent those wheels in an inferior way, and are generally a headache to use in comparison with Wikipedia. This. A hundred times, this. Compare Quora and Wikipedia: I have reached the unenviable situation of having the rich-text editor lag while typing on my laptop (with 2Gb RAM and a 2.2GHz dual core CPU). It is 2011: beyond flashiness, I have no idea why a webapp performs worse than the first version of Word I used back on my 386. But at least the user experience doesn't scare people by introducing the minimal costs of actually having to use one's brain, right? ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Ad banners are a bad user interface
On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 15:52, Ken Arromdee arrom...@rahul.net wrote: Four *separate* incidents where users mistook the fundraising banner ad for an illustration that is part of the article. We've had a few at OTRS too... -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Lobbyists and Wikipedia (again)
On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 10:57, Sam Blacketer sam.blacke...@gmail.com wrote: What might be better is to stress that any lobbyist seeking to use 'dark arts' to correct inaccurate or unfair Wikipedia articles, or to add properly sourced positive information, is best advised to use OTRS and to provide sources. It seems to me that current policy and guideline pages are much heavier on telling people what not to do and threatening dire consequences, than they are on helping people to help us. This sounds like a splendid idea. Perhaps we could supplement it by informing criminals that they can avoid a life of crime by getting an education and a job, or maybe we could tell politicians to tell the truth. Or maybe News of the World journalists could be informed of the many story-gathering opportunities that don't involve hacking into people's voicemail systems. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Invitation to Participate in Wikipedia Survey
On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 15:43, Bo Xu box...@yahoo.com.cn wrote: We, Prof. Bo Xu at Fudan University in China and Prof. Dahui Li at University of Minnesota Duluth, are interested in why and how people contribute to Wikipedia. You could make an important contribution to this research by completing a questionnaire at http://labovitz.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_3h4hthRyOWKxZVa. The survey is completely voluntary. All the data will be kept confidential. Your assistance in answering this questionnaire is highly appreciated. In Part C: 13. When decisions are made about ranking and credit, the managers treat us with kindness and consideration. 14. When decisions are made about ranking and credit, the managers treat us with respect and dignity. There are no managers, just the community. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] So ...
On Wednesday, October 12, 2011, Thomas Morton wrote: All of the portraits on http://parliament.uk are copyright to http://dods.co.uk/ It has always been in the back of my mind to approach them and ask about relicensing with a free license (long shot, but maybe...). I can't remember who I had this discussion with but someone Wikimedia UK-related, I'm sure. Basically, one thing we could do once we have charity status is actually approach the Houses of Parliament and for some volunteers affiliated with WMUK to become official photographers, and to include that in the list of things MPs either have to or are encouraged to do when they return after the next election. This is the sort of thing we can do as a chapter even if doing it as an individual is a pain in the ass. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Facepalm?
On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 11:04, Scott MacDonald doc.wikipe...@ntlworld.com wrote: Unfortunately, I think this is what happens when kewl teenagers who like memes started (apparently) by star-trek, meet adults who value actual communication in the language of Shakespeare. Oh, please. I'd call you a flap-mouthed miscreant, but instead I shall risk accusations of incivility and just facepalm quietly to myself. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Front Page on BLPs
On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 13:58, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote: Hmm nice that he's not entirely relying on the Siegenthaler incident and has quoted something beyond 2007. But his reliance on a 2009 Daily Mail story about 20,000 editors vetting changes via flagged revisions http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1208941/Free-edit-Wikipedia-appoints-volunteer-editors-vet-changes-articles-living-people.html Yes, during the pending changes trial, Reviewer status was basically being given out along with Rollback. The idea that there was some kind of political motivation behind it is insane. Yes, more experienced users with things like Rollback or Reviewer rights tend to run the site, but that might be because those people are selected for their ability to competently manage the site and those who are incompetent, don't. That may be wishful thinking. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Article Feedback - Ramp up to 10% of Articles
On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 18:22, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote: To be honest I'm not particularly worried if people canvass their mates to give straight 5s to an obscure article that only a few hundred people will ever notice. I would anticipate that will happen whenever someone files an AFD on an article that is of interest to a particular fansite, and if anything it will be less disruptive to have a bunch of fans boost the articles ratings than it will be to deal with those same fans at the AFD. The positive ratings that really matter to editors on this site are things like FA and GA and I don't see this system replacing that. I think the important think about the article feedback tool is that hopefully it will allow WikiProjects to prioritise article improvements. Let's say you are involved with WikiProject Philosophy: it'd be really useful to get a list of all the philosophy articles with article feedback statistics mixed in. If we have an article that is getting very variable ratings, going up and down all over the place, that's a useful measure for having passionate readers. If there's an article with organically occurring high ratings from the readers, that is something the WikiProject should collectively consider pushing towards Good Article or Featured Article. The problem is we get the 'Bieber problem': people voting on the basis of their views of the article's subject rather than the article, so people who love Justin Bieber upvote it and people who loathe him downvote it, even though we are asking whether they think the article is good. The negative side is worse here: people downvoting the article as a kind of 'delete' vote - they think that saying the article is poor quality because we are giving too much coverage to a subject we shouldn't be giving coverage to. There is a good side though: we can use the different categories quite usefully. If we have an article that is highly rated in three of the four criteria but not so well rated in another, that's potentially something we could flag up to WikiProjects as an area for improvement. The article feedback tool is just that... a tool we can use to feed back into the project. It shouldn't ever be an end in itself. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia article on [[Santorum (neologism)]]
On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 23:57, Ken Arromdee arrom...@rahul.net wrote: If there weren't any anti-scientology campaigners spreading the word about Xenu, we'd still have a reason to have an article about Xenu. If there was no anti-Santorum campaign, we'd have no reason for the article--its entire existence depends directly on that campaign. Yes, but there *is* such a campaign. If there weren't a tea party movement, we wouldn't have an article on the tea party movement. But there is. So we do. If there weren't a neologism named after Mr. Santorum, there wouldn't be an article on it. But there is. So we do. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ Please don't print this e-mail out unless you want a hard copy of it. If you do, go ahead. I won't stop you. Nor will I waste your ink/toner with 300+ lines of completely pointless and legally unenforceable cargo cult blather about corporate confidentiality. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia article on [[Santorum (neologism)]]
On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 21:56, Ken Arromdee arrom...@rahul.net wrote: The reason: Wikipedia is on the Internet. If Wikipedia has an article about something whose promoter specifically intends to spread it on the Internet, it is impossible to separate reporting from participation. It's a loophole in the definition of neutrality that doing things which help one side of a dispute doesn't break neutrality, simply because our intentions are neutral--even though our effects are not. (Warning: POV ahead.) Using that logic, we should probably shut down every page on WP about politics, religion, alternative medicine and anything even vaguely controversial. There are factions within those movements or groups who stand to benefit from people knowing less rather than more about them. The Church of Scientology would probably object on the same lines as you have that the mere existence of the article Xenu can never be neutral because they would rather there not be an article at all. Our effect is to make Scientology seem more ridiculous to outsiders. Similarly, there are probably Pentecostalist movements who would rather people not read the sections of the article on Glossolalia about how linguists and neuroscientists have studied people speaking in tongues and found that they aren't actually speaking a language with any actual semantic structure but rather a meaningless but phonologically structured human utterance, believed by the speaker to be a real language but bearing no systematic resemblance to any natural language, living or dead. By including this material, we are in effect biased against movements who would rather people knew less about the scientific underpinnings (or rather lack thereof) of an impressive-looking religious practice. A great many people when asked their views on homeopathy think it is basically a form of herbal medicine. There are undoubtedly homeopaths who financially benefit from this confusion and are quite happy that people associate their extremely dubious pseudoscience with herbal medicine, which is basically a ragtag bag of stuff that does and does not work (the stuff that does work often becomes known simply as 'medicine'). In general, there are a lot of fields where people use and benefit from other people's ignorance. Neutrality isn't an excuse for ensuring inconvenient material doesn't turn up on Google search results because it might be biased. A reductio ad absurdum: imagine there is a voter who intends to vote purely based on some very arbitrary property of a political candidate like, say, the colour of their suit. Most informed people would say that this is a poor use of one's vote and one is not living up to one's moral duties to make an informed and meaningful decision about policy with one's vote. In order to enforce this kind of outcomes-based neutrality, should we remove all photographs of candidates on Wikipedia in the run up to elections in order to encourage people to vote based on policy rather than appearance. And what if there is a candidate who is specifically trying to benefit from being aesthetically pleasing? Should we make his picture bigger to ensure the race is fair? Determining neutrality on the basis of outcome could have such perverse consequences for article policy that it really seems like a tough row to hoe. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ Please don't print this e-mail out unless you want a hard copy of it. If you do, go ahead. I won't stop you. Nor will I waste your ink/toner with 300+ lines of completely pointless and legally unenforceable cargo cult blather about corporate confidentiality. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 11:09, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote: Other options would be for a site that ended the inclusionism/deletionism conflict by abandoning notability and concentrating on verifiability or aiming for comprehensiveness. That seems to work for IMDB but possibly you need to restrict this to specialist pedias - aiming for coverage of all films and their cast is one thing, but on a general pedia you need to set a threshold somewhere unless you are prepared to have articles for pet guinea pigs. One of the things Citizendium gets right in policy terms is to recast notability in the terms of 'maintainability'. An article on Citizendium is only deleted if (a) it's obvious junk (though not explicitly listed, that's basically CSD-type criteria - vandalism, propaganda pieces etc.) or (b) it's not maintainable by the current community of editors. It seems a pretty good candidate to be a bounding threshold for inclusionism. And it's something that is sort of required for BLPs. A rough test might be something like this: if you've got a BLP article and that person were to die or their status changes radically, would the article be updated? If Tony Blair or George H.W. Bush were to keep over dead tomorrow, the WP article would be updated, and the CZ one would be too, even with only a very small community of editors. But what happens if the man who runs the grocery in a small village in England dies? Who updates his article? That is what a maintainability policy gets you. The benefit of such a maintainability policy is that a lot of articles don't need much maintenance like BLPs do. It's not like Isaac Newton is going to rise up from the grave and become an Oscar-winning actor and make his encyclopedia articles invalid. And it seems a reasonable presupposition to think that once an encyclopedia like Wikipedia has an article on the Cabbage Patch Dolls or Plato's Republic or the evolution of horses or whatever, the amount of updating isn't going to be too drastic. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ Please don't print this e-mail out unless you want a hard copy of it. If you do, go ahead. I won't stop you. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] List of includipedias
On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 09:44, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Every now and then something gets nominated for deletion and fans of it go feral and say I'm going to start an inclusionist fork! No notability policy! Do we have a list of these anywhere? The ones off the top of my head: Citizendium, Deletionpedia, Knowino, Wikinfo, Includipedia. It would be useful if the page on WP for Mirrors and forks was split into separate listings for straight mirrors and forks, and having a brief description of what exactly the premise of the fork (if any) is. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ Please don't print this e-mail out unless you want a hard copy of it. If you do, go ahead. I won't stop you. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] A Mormon Persective from the Deseret News
On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 02:59, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: 10 controversial Wikipedia topics: http://www.deseretnews.com/top/97/10-controversial-Wikipedia-topics.html This is really goofy. Having lots of footnotes doesn't make something controversial. It makes it well-sourced. Sometimes the reason an article is well-sourced is because it is controversial and the way to resolve controversy it to have a lot of footnotes, and sometimes it means there is one of those wonderful people who just enjoy adding lots of footnotes. Take today's FA, [[Star Trek: The Motion Picture]] has 174 footnotes. According to the criteria given by this article, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a more controversial article than Abortion or Global Warming. The stupid thing is, if you actually wanted to know how controversial an article is, there are plenty of ways to measure it: amount of vandalism, number of times it has been protected or semi-protected, how long the talk page is, how many reverts there have been, how many times admins have had to get involved to sort out 3RR violations, whether it's been the subject of mediation or ArbCom. It's all there if you click on the talk page... -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ Please don't print this e-mail out unless you want a hard copy of it. If you do, go ahead. I won't stop you. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
