Re: [WikiEN-l] (no subject) This is SPAM
SPAM Compromised email account On 11/10/2011 6:41 p.m., Geoffrey Plourde wrote: http://94.76.215.106/~chevrole/catalog/site.php?html143 ___ 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 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] (no subject) This is SPAM
Likely. Spammed other mailing lists as well. On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 11:25 PM, Alan Liefting alieft...@ihug.co.nzwrote: SPAM Compromised email account On 11/10/2011 6:41 p.m., Geoffrey Plourde wrote: http://94.76.215.106/~chevrole/catalog/site.php?html143 ___ 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 mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ 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] So ...
... written anything good on the encyclopedia lately? - d. ___ 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 ...
David Gerard wrote: ... written anything good on the encyclopedia lately? - d. I assume you're addressing this to those still able to do so. I, for my part, am beavering away on Commons trying to sort out the mess that is [[Category:Rivers of England]]. Category maintenance seems to be somewhat haphazard/optional there, and I guess we can always do wth some additional help. ___ 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 ...
... written anything good on the encyclopedia lately? - d. Well, yes, I discovered the answer to the mystery of why Mao adopted Stalinism and put it into History of the People's Republic of China (19491976) A lot of people have wondered where he got those ideas. Turns out they came from History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik): Short Course which was adopted by the Comintern as official history in 1938. This solution was developed by Hua-yu Li, of Oregon State University and published in his book, Mao and the Economic Stalinization of China, 1948-1953, Rowman Littlefield (February 17, 2006) (hardcover), pp. 266. ISBN 0742540537. The introduction is on the publisher's website at http://chapters.scarecrowpress.com/07/425/0742540545ch1.pdf So yes, progress is made Fred ___ 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 ...
If you're into mythology/cryptozoology, I did some translation from Old Norse and Old Icelandic this summer to put together what is probably the most complete syntheses (in any language) of [[Hafgufa]] and [[Lyngbakr]], two legendary sea monsters. Bob On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 12:17 PM, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.netwrote: ... written anything good on the encyclopedia lately? - d. Well, yes, I discovered the answer to the mystery of why Mao adopted Stalinism and put it into History of the People's Republic of China (1949–1976) A lot of people have wondered where he got those ideas. Turns out they came from History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik): Short Course which was adopted by the Comintern as official history in 1938. This solution was developed by Hua-yu Li, of Oregon State University and published in his book, Mao and the Economic Stalinization of China, 1948-1953, Rowman Littlefield (February 17, 2006) (hardcover), pp. 266. ISBN 0742540537. The introduction is on the publisher's website at http://chapters.scarecrowpress.com/07/425/0742540545ch1.pdf So yes, progress is made Fred ___ 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 mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] Readers clicking through to talk pages
Pondering the utility of talk page edits recently, I've begun to wonder: how many of our readers actually look at the talk page as well? I know some writers writing articles on Wikipedia have mentioned or rhapsodized at length on the interest of the talk pages for articles, but they are rare birds and statistically irrelevant. It might be enough simply to know how much traffic to talk pages there is period. I doubt editors make up much of Wikipedia's traffic, with the shriveling of the editing population, which never kept pace with the growth into a top 10/20 website, so that would give a good upper bound. It would seem to be very small; there's not a single Talk page in the top 1000 on http://stats.grok.se/en/top and comparing a few articles like Anime, Talk:Anime has 273 hits over an entire month (http://stats.grok.se/en/201109/Talk%3AAnime) while the article has 128,657 hits (a factor of 471); or Talk:Barack Obama with 1800 over the month (http://stats.grok.se/en/201109/Talk%3ABarack_Obama) compared to Barack Obama, 504,827 hits (http://stats.grok.se/en/201109/Barack%20Obama) for a factor of 280. The raw stats in http://dammit.lt/wikistats are currently unavailable; I've bugged domas to get it back up but it's still been down for hours, so I went to http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-raw/2011/2011-09/ instead - each file seems to be an hour of the day so I downloaded one day's worth and gunzipped them all which is enough info to get a good idea of the right ratio. We do some quick shell scripting: grep -e '^en Talk:' -e '^en talk:' pagecounts-* | cut -d ' ' -f 3 | paste -sd +|bc ~ 582771 grep -e '^en ' pagecounts-* | grep -v -e '^en Talk:' -e '^en talk:' | cut -d ' ' -f 3 | paste -sd + | bc ~ 202680742 Looks somewhat sane - 58,2771 for all talk page hits versus 2,0268,0742 for all non-talk page hits A factor of 347 is pretty much around where I was expecting based on those 2 pages. And Domas says the statistics exclude API hits but includes logged-in editor hits, so we can safely say that anonymous users made far *fewer* than 58k page views that day and hence the true ratios are worse than 471/280/347. - If we take the absolutely most favorable ratio, Obama's at 280, and then further assume it was looked at by 0 logged-in users (yeah right), then that implies something posted on its talk page will be seen by 0.35% of interested readers (504827/1800*1.0)*100). - If we use the aggregate statistic and say, generously, that registered users make up only 90% of the page views, then something on the talk page will be seen by 0.028% of interested readers ((202680742/582771*0.1)*100). I suggest that the common practice of 'moving reference/link to the Talk page' be named what it really is: a subtle form of deletion. It would be a service to our readers to end this practice entirely: if a link is good enough to be hidden on a talk page (supposedly in the interests of incorporating it in the future*), then it is good enough to put at the end of External Links or a Further Reading section, and our countless thousands of readers will not be deprived of the chance to make use of it. * one of my little projects is compiling edits where I or another have added a valuable source to an article Talk page, complete with the most relevant excerpts from that source, and seeing whether anyone bothered making any use of that source/link in any fashion. I have not finished, but to summarize what I have seen so far: that justification for deletion is a dirty lie. Hardly any sources are ever restored. -- gwern http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism ___ 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] Call for Volunteers: If you can read a diff, you're exactly who we need.
Hi everyone, In the Community Dept. we've been collaborating with some Wikipedians to continue one of the research projects from the summer, namely involving the randomized testing of talk page templates to try and improve them. (If you watch WP:VPT, then you might've seen our announcements.) The great thing about doing randomized testing is that we get a more unbiased assessment of our experiment. The bad thing is that in order to do a proper job of crunching these numbers, we need help from people who can read wiki histories accurately and tell us what's going on. This is where you come in. Obviously no one is better primed to analyze diffs and editing histories than editors, so we're looking for a few (3-4, but the more the merrier) volunteers to lend us their experience this week. I know used the r word (research), which makes it sound not really important, but this is a live experiment on the projects. If we do this correctly, then we can do a better job of educating good faith editors, warning away those who cause damage to the encyclopedia, and keeping experienced Wikipedians from getting their user pages vandalized by angry people. ;-) The system we've got set up for analyzing these diffs is insanely simple if you're used to MediaWiki, so let me know either on the list or my talk page [1] if you might have an hour or two to spare. Thanks, -- Steven Walling 1). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Steven_(WMF) ___ 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 Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 6:41 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: ... written anything good on the encyclopedia lately? - d. Mostly cogent notices on talk pages, hoping that years from now somebody with more in-subject expertice will address those concerns. Eventualism isn't fun but it gets there eventually. -- -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]] ___ 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] Call for Volunteers: If you can read a diff, you're exactly who we need.
On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 16:15, Steven Walling swall...@wikimedia.orgwrote: Hi everyone, In the Community Dept. we've been collaborating with some Wikipedians to continue one of the research projects from the summer, namely involving the randomized testing of talk page templates to try and improve them. (If you watch WP:VPT, then you might've seen our announcements.) The great thing about doing randomized testing is that we get a more unbiased assessment of our experiment. The bad thing is that in order to do a proper job of crunching these numbers, we need help from people who can read wiki histories accurately and tell us what's going on. This is where you come in. Obviously no one is better primed to analyze diffs and editing histories than editors, so we're looking for a few (3-4, but the more the merrier) volunteers to lend us their experience this week. I know used the r word (research), which makes it sound not really important, but this is a live experiment on the projects. If we do this correctly, then we can do a better job of educating good faith editors, warning away those who cause damage to the encyclopedia, and keeping experienced Wikipedians from getting their user pages vandalized by angry people. ;-) The system we've got set up for analyzing these diffs is insanely simple if you're used to MediaWiki, so let me know either on the list or my talk page [1] if you might have an hour or two to spare. I'm game, if you still need volunteers. -- Jim Redmond [[User:Jredmond]] ___ 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] Readers clicking through to talk pages
On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 9:05 PM, Gwern Branwen gwe...@gmail.com wrote: Pondering the utility of talk page edits recently, I've begun to wonder: how many of our readers actually look at the talk page as well? I know some writers writing articles on Wikipedia have mentioned or rhapsodized at length on the interest of the talk pages for articles, but they are rare birds and statistically irrelevant. snip long analysis I suggest that the common practice of 'moving reference/link to the Talk page' be named what it really is: a subtle form of deletion. Well, only if there is no discussion. I think moving to the talk page is far better than outright removal. It does at least give editors a chance to review what has been included and what has been excluded. And talk pages *should* be for editors and not really for readers. I frequently use the talk pages to help draft articles and as a place to put material that I'm not quite sure is ready for inclusion yet. Putting everything straight into an article can make it harder to organise things later. It would be a service to our readers to end this practice entirely: if a link is good enough to be hidden on a talk page (supposedly in the interests of incorporating it in the future*), then it is good enough to put at the end of External Links or a Further Reading section, and our countless thousands of readers will not be deprived of the chance to make use of it. I agree absolutely that external links and further reading should be used far more than they are. I think the problem is that people are paranoid about link farms and link spam and look at number of links rather than quality or organisation. It does help to organise very large external link sections into subsections, both to help readers (in finding what may be of interest) and the editors (in trimming where needed and organsing what is there). * one of my little projects is compiling edits where I or another have added a valuable source to an article Talk page, complete with the most relevant excerpts from that source, and seeing whether anyone bothered making any use of that source/link in any fashion. I have not finished, but to summarize what I have seen so far: that justification for deletion is a dirty lie. Hardly any sources are ever restored. If there is no discussion, you would be fully justified in adding the source yourself. If there is discussion, then, well, you need to discuss. Have a look at my recent talk page edits for one way in which I use article talk pages. The other aspect to all this is that many editors make editorial decisions silently, in their head, or briefly mentioned in edit summaries, and it can be hard for later editors to understand why something was cut or trimmed down. If a longer explanation is posted to the talk page, that can help, though for the largest articles, having mini-essays on the talk page explaining how each individual section of the article was put together would be a massive undertaking. What I do think would be helpful is a subpage for each article (or article talk page), listing the rejected material (sometimes the material is better placed in a different article). That would save a lot of repetition and aid organisation not only of the included material, but the excluded material. Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
