Re: [WikiEN-l] Fw: [Christina Grimmie] Please provide a photo of Ms. Grimmie under a licence suitable for Wikimedia Projects ( e.g: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Grimmie )
Are you sure the person you are emailing understands what free licenses are? I would include a short explanation and a link to a more detailed one. On Apr 3, 2013 11:20 AM, Shlomi Fish shlo...@shlomifish.org wrote: Sent this message now. Comments are welcome, after the fact, as a way to learn from my mistakes. Begin forwarded message: Date: Wed, 3 Apr 2013 13:18:33 +0300 From: Shlomi Fish shlo...@shlomifish.org To: br...@lh7management.com Subject: [Christina Grimmie] Please provide a photo of Ms. Grimmie under a licence suitable for Wikimedia Projects ( e.g: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Grimmie ) Dear sirs or madams, I am an editor of the English wikipedia and other wikimedia projects and currently we have this page about Ms. Christina Grimmie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Grimmie ( Christina is my favourite YouTube artist, and Team Grimmie rocks! ) However, one thing lacking from there is a photograph, and I was unable to find any good photograph of Ms. Grimmie under a suitable licence (e.g: Creative Commons CC-by-sa, CC-by, Public Domain, etc.) on Flickr. I know some localised wikipedias (where Ms. Grimmie also has some presence - see the translations) require photos to be under a liberal licence). If you, or Ms. Grimmie can provide us with a good, representable photo of her, that would be a great gesture and a wonderful way to promote her in Wikimedia projects and other collaborative projects such as http://wikia.com/ , and other people and I would be incredibly grateful for that. I am not a lawyer (IANAL) but I think that you can license a lower resolution version of the photo under a liberal licence, and keep the original photo as All-Rights-Reserved. It can also be a one-off photo dedicated for Wikipedia. Please let me know of what you think. Best regards, Shlomi Fish P.S: I realise the page about Ms. Grimmie could use more work, and is somewhat out-of-date, but I'd like to tackle one issue at a time. -- - Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ Perl Humour - http://perl-begin.org/humour/ Why can’t we ever attempt to solve a problem in this country without having a “War” on it? -- Rich Thomson, talk.politics.misc Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . -- - Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ List of Networking Clients - http://shlom.in/net-clients Chuck Norris doesn’t commit changes, the changes commit for him. — Araujo Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . ___ 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] Larry Sanger's new project
On 13 March 2013 18:15, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: The problem he apparently trying to solve is that sites like Wikipedia and YouTube are kind of noisy. As problem statements go, it lacks a certain specificity... I know what he means though. The snarling nonsense we sometimes encounter on mailing lists or during editing disputes could fairly be characterized as noise. The question is whether this project will be any better. I don't think that is what he means. I think he's talking from the perspective of content users, not content generators. ___ 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] Larry Sanger's new project
I am rarely as enthusiastic about my ideas as I am about this one--it's a corker. I've never known him not be extremely enthusiatic about his ideas... If you need to see the project before agreeing to work, and I like you, it's no problem for me to share access to the site if you sign the NDA/non-compete. Is that standard? Signing a non-compete before finding out what the project is sounds risky - you have no idea what you're agreeing not to compete with... On 14 February 2013 13:51, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: A commercial enterprise a bit like a wiki or a blog that's a way to crowdsource *high-quality* information. http://columbus.craigslist.org/eng/3614099241.html - 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 ___ 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] Yet another PR company busted ... apparently it's all our fault
The difference is one of intent. I dispute the claim that we often defame people - an innocent mistake in an article is not defamation. Even if we're a little careless to allow such mistakes, that still isn't defamation (I think the legal threshold in most jurisdictions is recklessness). On Nov 12, 2012 3:26 PM, Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.com wrote: You misunderstand. As I mentioned: we simply have no moral high ground to criticise their actions. Our controls are shoddy and we defame people all over the place. They massage biographies etc. to cast things in a better light. Who is the good guy? Tom On 12 November 2012 15:21, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 12 November 2012 14:56, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: On 12 November 2012 13:54, Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.com wrote: We won't win a moral argument; they are breaking the social contract of a website. We regularly defame people. http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/report-usmanov-pr-firm-tweaked-wikipedia-entry/471315.html is interesting to read in this context. The moral side of whitewashing a biography ahead of a stock market flotation is fairly elusive. Indeed. I urge Thomas to go grab a copy of the Times today. If only articles this well-written concerning Wikipedia were more likely to be read by the people on the Internet who would be most interested in them ... - 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 ___ 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] Encyclopedia or Gossip Rag
On Oct 7, 2012 2:44 PM, Marc Riddell michaeldavi...@comcast.net wrote: I came across this today in the English Wikipedia: In 2011, it has been reported that [the subject] has been caught cheating on his wife with a 30 year old intern turned reporter. Is this worthy of a credible Encyclopedia or, if it needs reported at all, in a gossip tabloid rag? I'd prefer it if we didn't make that kind of decision ourselves. Has it been reported in mainstream (non-gossip) media? (We have to make a judgement about whether a particular source is respectable or not, but that's better than making judgements on individual facts.) ___ 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] Encyclopedia or Gossip Rag
I disagree. Determining that someone had been hypocritical and therefore their actions are more notable than they would otherwise have been is the kind of judgement call we should be leaving to the secondary sources. On Oct 7, 2012 3:29 PM, Marc Riddell michaeldavi...@comcast.net wrote: I came across this today in the English Wikipedia: In 2011, it has been reported that [the subject] has been caught cheating on his wife with a 30 year old intern turned reporter. Is this worthy of a credible Encyclopedia or, if it needs reported at all, in a gossip tabloid rag? Marc Riddell on 10/7/12 9:55 AM, Fred Bauder at fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: Depends on reliability of the source and notability. If the subject was Barack Obama and the sources were The Washington Post, The New York Times, AND The Wall Street Journal, the mere report would be encyclopedic. If the subject was Joe the Plumber and the source was perezhilton.com/, no. Answering your specific question requires reference to the factual situation, but, no, we are not a gossip rag. It was not my intention to suggest that we were a gossip rag. It was my intention to suggest that we are above that. The reliability of the source should, in this case, be irrelevant. What should be relevant is if the subject of the report has been publicly hypocritical concerning the issue then, yes, is should be reported. But only to stress the hypocrisy, not the infidelity. Marc ___ 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] VIP Treatment
On 11 September 2012 17:29, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: It seems I have not posed this as a question. The question is how could we better handle VIP subjects who give us feedback, attempt to edit either themselves or through an agent, or contact OTRS? For example, could we assign some diplomatic people to handle such situations, I've noticed CBS does that. It's a skill. We have assigned diplomatic people to handle such situations - they're the OTRS volunteers. The problem is how we make sure people get directed to OTRS. ___ 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 Sep 10, 2012 9:20 PM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: In reality, many businesses and individuals have filtering in place to prevent access to pages that include certain keywords. I've sometimes been stymied when following a legitimate link when I'm on a computer that has some form of net nanny software. Funny you should say that, I wasn't able to access Wiktionary at work today because it was suspicious. No idea what that was about... ___ 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 article on Roth novel and Wikipedia article
On 8 September 2012 14:16, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 8 September 2012 13:48, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: That is the sort of thing that happens in a monarchy like England or North Korea, idiots in charge... something that really pissed off George Washington. Fred, that's really an insanely stupid thing to post. Nonsense - everyone knows HM The Queen writes all the articles on the BBC News website! ___ 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] Roth is an elderly man googling
On 8 September 2012 14:53, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: I'm older than he is. Roth is not the the first celebrity to think he could dictate Wikipedia content. Michael Moore also felt he could throw his weight around. And, no, I don't respect that move. Instead of spending decades on line they wrote books and produced documentaries; they are Noobies here regardless of their accomplishments elsewhere; crying babies squalling and throwing their rattles. The content he was trying to dictate was a statement about what his inspirations had been. I think it is reasonable for him to expect us to take his word for that. The only problem was that we needed him to put his word on the matter somewhere we could cite. Once he did that, we changed the article and cited the new source. I've only read the BBC article, so I don't know all the details. I expect there was a failure of communication at some point - either us not telling him what he needed to do in a clear, consise and respectful way, or him not being willing to listen and respect our policies. Without looking into the details, I don't know it was in this case, but there have been previous cases in both categories. ___ 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] Stocking personal details
On 19 August 2012 10:54, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote: This is quite wrong, and a dangerous fallacy to promote, Thomas. To give an example, a few months back, German Wikipedian Achim Raschka got a phone call from the German police over his addition of a pornographic video to the German article on pornography. The video he added violated German pornography law, which requires an effective age filter for explicit pornographic material. Achim wrote about his experience in the Kurier (the German Signpost): Achim lives in Germany, so is very much subject to German law. He's equally subject to German law if he edits the English Wikipedia, though. There is no connection between a particular language Wikipedia and the law of a country that speaks that language. The OP said that the French Wikipedia was illegal, not that contributing to Wikipedia while in France could be illegal. They are very different things. ___ 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] Stocking personal details
On 19 August 2012 02:32, yutsi darthyut...@gmail.com wrote: Under the French penal code, stocking personal details including race, sexuality, political leanings or religious affiliation is punishable by five-year prison sentences and fines of up to euro300,000 ($411,000). — http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/24/jew-or-not-jew-iphone-app_n_730.html Doesn't this technically make the French Wikipedia illegal? I don't really understand this law's nuances, so I'm wondering if someone with more knowledge could elaborate. The French Wikipedia is written in the French language, but it isn't French. It is hosted by an American charity on servers in America (and a few in the Netherlands, I think). French law doesn't apply. ___ 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] Longevity of edits
www.wikitrust.net I think that's what you're looking for. On 10 June 2012 23:06, Alan Liefting alieft...@ihug.co.nz wrote: On 11/06/2012 2:21 a.m., Alan Liefting wrote: I have a vague recollection of a tool that ranks editors on longevity of their edits. Does anyone know of such a thing? I think it may have given some sort of measurement of time rather than a ranking against other editors. Alan ___ 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] Link removal experiment; Re: How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_
On 31 May 2012 17:03, Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.com wrote: This, I think, is a major issue which make the results useless * The edit summary implies policy knowledge, I'd only check an edit like that on my watchlist on occasion. Not every edit needs checking, so we use our common sense over what likely need checking * I believe that edit summary probably met a number of heuristics used by the anti-vandal tools to filter out good edits. Which means it immediately removes them from the front line of scrutiny. It does demonstrate a problem with our processes, though. There are three ways in which bad edits can get reverted: 1) They get spotted on recent changes (probably using automated or semi-automated tools these days). It isn't practical to check every edit, so you can get your edit skipped over fairly easily by just giving it a good edit summary. If it isn't reverted within a few minutes, it isn't going to get spotted by this first line of defence. 2) They get spotted on someone's watchlist. Watchlists don't move as fast as recent changes, so you get a few hours, maybe even a couple of days, in which to spot something, but again good edit summaries will cause you to ignore an edit to an article you aren't watching too closely. That means only articles that are watched by someone that cares enough about them to check every edit, and where that someone checks their watchlist within a few hours of the edit being made, will get protected by this second line. 3) The third line is someone going to the article for some other reason, spotted the vandalism and fixing it. There is no time limit for this, and it isn't unusual for vandalism to an obscure article to be fixed months after it happened. This line isn't going to detect bad removals, though, since there is nothing there to spot. That means bad removals with good edit summaries to articles that aren't closely watched will often never get reverted. This could be improved by making it more practical to check every edit, perhaps using the flagged revisions feature (at the moment, we probably check suspicious looking edits multiple times, so there is spare resource to check the others if we could just be more efficient about it). ___ 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 17 May 2012 12:54, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, unless I read this wrong you are admitting to 100 random vandalisms of Wikipedia? If so please stop your experiment now and revert any vandalisms not yet spotted. Indeed. Then read WP:POINT. ___ 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 our competitors are doing
Conservapedia aren't a competitor. They aren't in remotely the same business as us. On Apr 19, 2012 11:22 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On Conservapedia, a parodist came up with this template: http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Template%3ANohearsayaction=historysubmitdiff=976114oldid=976104 Mr Schlafly approves: http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=User_talk:CPalmercurid=72836diff=976121oldid=975547 - 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 ___ 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
They say you have to wait 2-5 days for a response after requesting changes as though that is a bad thing. I'm very impressed with that response time. How many commercial encyclopaedias can do better? On Apr 18, 2012 12:48 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: PR people who edited Wikipedia get crucified. Counterattack: reduce trust in Wikipedia. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120417113527.htm Paper: http://www.prsa.org/Intelligence/PRJournal/ The paper's message appears to be Wikipedia's rules need to change. (Also, Jimmy Wsles is a big meanie head.) The paper doesn't address the problem that the media and general public get upset and turn PR editing into a PR problem even when it's within existing rules. (Aside: I've evidently been skimming too many hard science papers - that peer reviewed paper reads like an undergraduate essay.) - 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 ___ 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] More stringent notability requirements for biographical articles
On 27 March 2012 21:39, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com wrote: My thinking is that a constructive and asymptotically approaching perfection (hopefully as rapidly as humanly possible) way of doing a good bit of easing of some of the tensions, would be to start compiling a list of criterions which make someone absolutely 100% a chinch to need a wikipedia article about them, no matter what. What would the benefit of that list be? Surely no-one is contesting any of the BLPs that fit that description. If something is being contested, then that means it isn't 100% obvious that the article should exist. There's no point trying to fix the articles that aren't broken. ___ 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] More stringent notability requirements for biographical articles
I think it is important to remember why we're doing this. Our purpose isn't the judge people's notability. Our purpose is to provide useful information to people. It is clear from the page views they get that BLPs are useful to people. As long as there are sufficient reliable sources to write more than a stub about someone, then I don't see why we shouldn't have an article about them. That is basically what the General Notability Guideline says. I do think we have a problem with writing about things too soon, but it isn't so extreme that we should wait until people are retired or dead to write about them. I did have a policy proposal prepared a few years ago that I never really proposed because I thought it was too unlikely to be successful. It was to set a limit on how recent something can be and still appear on Wikipedia. I can't remember what the limit I was going to propose was, but it was about a month - if something happened less than a month ago, don't write about it on Wikipedia. Write about it on Wikinews and either link to it from an existing Wikipedia article or create a redirect to it if the subject is new or newly notable. Then, after a month once everything has settled down, we can write a decent article (as opposed to one where every paragraph starts As of). I think that kind of policy would be useful for BLPs, particularly 1EVENT cases. It is often much easier to tell after a month whether something is really notable for an encyclopaedia than it is straight away (how many AFDs have we all seen where people are saying This will almost certainly be notable. - much better to wait and see rather than try and predict notability). ___ 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] More stringent notability requirements for biographical articles
On 24 March 2012 17:51, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: You're not going to get that through for general events (natural disasters or revolutions), because they've long been heralded as one of en:wp's great strengths. But they *should* be one of Wikinews' greatest strengths, not Wikipedia's. I know it isn't likely to get adopted, which is why I never bother proposing it, but I still think it would be a good idea. ___ 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] More stringent notability requirements for biographical articles
On 24 March 2012 18:18, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Wikinews suffers sufficient gatekeepers that it doesn't attract a froth of contributors the way Wikipedia does. It could do with some statistical and experimental loving from the Foundation, if anyone feels up to putting a proposal together. But trying to channel volunteers in this manner strikes me as a way to kill motivation rather than channel it. My hope with this proposal was to encourage contributions to Wikinews. I think one of the main reasons Wikinews has never been particularly successful is because it is competing with Wikipedia's current events coverage. ___ 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] More stringent notability requirements for biographical articles
On 24 March 2012 19:42, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 4:23 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: I think it is important to remember why we're doing this. Our purpose isn't the judge people's notability. Our purpose is to provide useful information to people. It is clear from the page views they get that BLPs are useful to people. For low-level BLPs, a large proportion of the views may be Wikipedia editors. Wikipedia editors count as readers too. As long as there are sufficient reliable sources to write more than a stub about someone, then I don't see why we shouldn't have an article about them. That is basically what the General Notability Guideline says. But what if that is all the reliable sources there are? And there are no more and no more likely to be forthcoming? We are effectively bequeathing to future generations a large number of stubby articles that may never have any more sources written about them. Would you like the job of (in 50 years time) sorting through these articles and deciding which ones to try and ascertain year of death, and which ones to expand from obituaries (if any exist), and which ones to delete because they turned out to have sunk back into obscurity and only dedicated research in primary documents (mostly not allowed under WP:OR) will be of any use? I did say there needs to be enough to write *more than* a stub. ___ 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] Who says the print encyclopedia is dead?
Is that a world record for the longest biography ever written? On 18 March 2012 18:37, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2012/03/scientology_sun_18.php *cough* - 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 ___ 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 11:29, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: The one omission there other than the mailing list seems to have been the Village Pumps; the first RFC was hosted on VP/Proposals, but spamming a notice for the second RFC to the others might have been worthwhile. Something to add to the list for next time we have some mass short-notice discussion like this - though, hopefully, that won't be for another ten years! Really, if it's on Central Notice, it doesn't need to be anywhere else. It was a little difficult to miss. ___ 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 13:00, K. Peachey p858sn...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 10:34 PM, Katie Chan k...@ktchan.info wrote: One can't really complain about not being inform about things if they choose to block out one of the major channel of public notice I'm not going to start the whole debate on If CN is a notice service, what it should be used for, etc discussion. But when 99% of the messages are visually distracting and serve no relevance to a large amount of the audience, You can expect these things to be blocked which is why most people have. I find it highly unlikely that most people have blocked them. You don't strengthen your argument by using hyperbole. ___ 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 freedom to know things
It's not just the freedom to know things, it's the freedom to share your knowledge. Both are important. On 1 January 2012 13:49, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: A remarkably succinct summary of what Wikipedia is for recently occurred to me: freedom of knowledge; the freedom to know things. This freedom was, of course, hard-fought and hard-won. And the battle actually continues. Do either of the quoted phrases sound like good summaries of what Wikimedia is actually about? I eagerly await the fine pedants of this list picking them to pieces. - 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 ___ 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 freedom to know things
On 1 January 2012 14:50, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 1 January 2012 14:05, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: It's not just the freedom to know things, it's the freedom to share your knowledge. Both are important. Yes. Though we quite definitely don't provide a platform for any comer. The freedom to share your knowledge is the freedom to say 2+2=4; that freedom is well-known. Freedom to know things is not so well known. We are pretty open when it comes to sharing knowledge. It's sharing opinion that we are less accepting of. The freedom to share knowledge may be well-known, but it doesn't always actually exist. Wikipedia (as well as sites like Twitter and Facebook) play an important role in places where that freedom doesn't exist. ___ 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
Only one of those four confused users is clearly confused by a fundraising banner. With the other three, that's just a guess. It may be a very plausible guess, but I think we need more than guesses before we change the way we fundraise. On Dec 13, 2011 3:53 PM, Ken Arromdee arrom...@rahul.net wrote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BLPN#Peggy_Meggars_.28archeologist.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons/Noticeboard/Archive139#Henry_Hardy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons/Noticeboard/Archive138#Stephen_O.27Doherty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons/Noticeboard/Archive138#Ron_Carlson Four *separate* incidents where users mistook the fundraising banner ad for an illustration that is part of the article. As is usual for lousy user interfaces, a lot of us are probably going to blame this on the user being too stupid to read the page properly, as if there was no such thing as a bad user interface. Often the image in the banner is the most prominent thing on the page, and it's located directly above the article title in a place that in many other contexts would mean it really does go with the article. ___ 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] Lobbyists and Wikipedia (again)
There is an excellent story on the BBC about this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16084861 They've really understood our position on these matters. It looks like David Gerard is responsible for helping them understand, so thank you David! ___ 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] Why Wikipedia Is Important.
On 27 November 2011 13:12, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com wrote: There is no way to create myths without knowledge. There is no way to create fear without intolerance. There is no way to create intolerance without ignorance. Ignorance is the cradle of creation. Knowledge is the grave of creation. It is not ignorance itself that is the cradle of creation, but rather knowledge of our own ignorance. ___ 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] Why Wikipedia Is Important.
On 27 November 2011 01:41, K. Peachey p858sn...@gmail.com wrote: Even with Wikipedia around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death I saw a documentary recently on the BBC that all about how to build the wings of the Boeing A380, and it talked about the wings generating lift because the air going over the top has further to travel... I sometimes wonder if we're just wasting our time... (For the benefit of any readers still labouring under that misconception: please take a few minutes to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift_(force) ) ___ 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] Academic study: Wikipedia cancer information accurate but hard to read
On Sep 16, 2011 6:35 PM, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: It is difficult to balance the needs of the general public, which reads more at a 5th grade level than a 9th grade level, with the need to present comprehensive information that would be of use to an oncologist. If we addressed this problem in a systemic way we would present alternate articles at differing levels of comprehensiveness and readability. Perhaps in the future. If most people that have completed the ninth grade can't read at the ninth grade level, you need to recalibrate your scale... Either that, or give up on this nonsense that readability can be determined by word and sentence length. It has far more to do with how engaging it is and how much prior knowledge it assumes than how long the sentences are. If people want something that doesn't require much language skill, we do have Simple English Wikipedia. I haven't visited it in a while, so I'm not sure how good it is these days. ___ 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 start a viable competitor to Wikipedia? Step 1 allow people to edit
On 9 April 2011 13:00, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 9 April 2011 12:53, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote: Interestingly only Liberapedia and one of the conservative sites, http://www.astorehouseofknowledge.info/Main_Page are actually open for editing. Conservapedia http://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page currently comes up as a 404 and http://conservapedia.wikkii.com/wiki/Main_Page allows you to create an account, but not to edit, not even to edit your own talkpage 404 or 403? Conservapedia user TK (TK-CP on Wikipedia) had a programme of doing huge rangeblocks on entire countries, keeping them from even *viewing* the site. He passed away in December and since then it's been unlocked slightly, but I believe most or all of the UK is still under a rangeblock ... I get this error: Forbidden You don't have permission to access / on this server. Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request. That looks like a 403, although it doesn't contain the number. The mention of 404 is a reference to the error page not being found (so using the server's default error page instead). Blocking whole countries from viewing your website seems very counter-productive to me... ___ 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] Koch brothers articles doctored says Think Progress
On 10 March 2011 13:11, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: What is an airbush? I think we should be told. Our article Airbrush does not include information on the use of airbrush as a metaphor Charles' point was that the article says airbush not airbrush in the headline. ___ 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] Somebody must correct this
On 21 February 2011 00:52, michael west michaw...@gmail.com wrote: No Thomas, there are problems with (a) the East Pakistan/West Pakistan war (Bhhutto was a memeber of government and never appeared on TV - it was the government leader who told of West Pakistan's capitulation) I made no comment as to the accuracy of the article, only your claim that it is un-sourced. There are numerous sources in that article. The sources may be incorrect or the article may be misinterpreting the sources, but the sources are there. ___ 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] Somebody must correct this
On 20 February 2011 19:45, michael west michaw...@gmail.com wrote: How on earth can we have an un-sourced article on the founder of the PPP? The whole article is outlandish. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulfikar_Ali_Bhutto a complete re-write of history, anybody with any knowledge on Pakistan help me correct it? I can see 32 references on that page. In what way is it un-sourced? ___ 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] Rating the English wikipedia
On 14 February 2011 20:04, FencesWindows fences_and_wind...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2011 03:16:12 + From: Ian Woollard ian.wooll...@gmail.com Subject: [WikiEN-l] Rating the English wikipedia This encyclopedia has been rated as C-Class on the project's quality scale. This encyclopedia has been checked against the following criteria for B-Class status: snip 2. Coverage and accuracy: criterion not met (currently 3.5 million of an estimated 4.4 million articles) snip You think there are only 4.4 million possible topics? Based on what criteria? Stevertigo also thought this in the essay Wikipedia:Concept limit, which I tagged as [citation needed]. There are probably tens of millions of potentially notable topics, if not hundreds of millions. However, we're better at deleting new articles than writing them and writing a new article that will survive these days requires more detailed research than in years gone by. I agree. There are far more than 4.4 million possible topics. Consider all the human settlements that we could write articles about. There could well be millions of those (I really don't know how many there are). ___ 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] Rating the English wikipedia
On 14 February 2011 20:48, Gwern Branwen gwe...@gmail.com wrote: Perhaps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus/Wikipedia_interwiki_and_specialized_knowledge_test I think that page is more a test of how good we are at interwiki linking than anything else. The trend it shows is far too fast to be explained by new articles being written, it must be explained by old articles being linked to. ___ 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 status checkers
On 22 January 2011 13:40, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 1:21 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: $ traceroute bits.wikimedia.org I did this, and if I'm understanding it right it took 19 hops. The first one looks like my cable modem, the second one I don't recognise at all(!), the next eight are my ISP, the eleventh is from an IP in the Netherlands, the twelfth is knams.wikimedia.org, the thirteenth is esams.wikimedia.org, and then it timed out five times, and then it completed the trace on hop 19 at the prompted destination of bits.esams.wikimedia.org. This is really useful for visualising how internet traffic works! :-) But my connection is still not working. :-( I may try hassling my ISP, or I may just go shopping. Are you having difficulty accessing any other sites? Wikipedia is working perfectly for me (in the UK), so it's very unlikely to be a problem with Wikipedia. The problem must be at your end. bits.wikimedia.org is where things like the CSS come from. Try en.wikipedia.org - that's the actual domain you need to be able to access. ___ 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] Hello world! (was Hello world?)
On 17 January 2011 04:03, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: Then, in 2010, he posts to Talk:Jimmy Wales that I was born on the 7th of August, according to my mother. My legal paperwork all says 8th of August, due to an error on my birth certificate. (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?User_talk:Jimbo_Walesdiff=prevoldid=399961785) The point being that trusting Jimmy Wales when it comes to seemingly trivial matters is not a good idea, because Jimmy Wales lies about seemingly trivial matters. And putting unsubstantiated statements made by Jimmy Wales into a Wikipedia article, without properly attributing them to him, is also a mistake, for the same reason. Jimmy taking his birthdate as that which his mother tells him rather than that which is on his birth certificate doesn't sound like a lie to me. A lie is saying something that you know to be untrue, this is simply a disagreement regarding what is true. ___ 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] Hello world! (was Hello world?)
On 17 January 2011 00:50, wiki doc.wikipe...@ntlworld.com wrote: I don't think it helps to characterise any simple questioning of the leader as a deranged vendetta. Correction: Jimmy is our founder, he is not our leader. We don't have a leader. ___ 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] Hello world! (was Hello world?)
On 17 January 2011 16:55, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: That's what he said September 18, 2004. So no, this wasn't an honest mistake (which still would be reason not to trust what he says). And it wasn't even just Wales being misleading, as he so often does. This was an intentional lie. If he was intentionally lying, he must have had a motive. What motive could he possibly have for lying about his age by a day? Do you think he was just doing it to be annoying? Jimmy has plenty of faults (we all do), but being annoying for the sake of it isn't one of them in my experience. ___ 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] Hello world! (was Hello world?)
On 14 January 2011 12:01, Tony Sidaway tonysida...@gmail.com wrote: 'So Jimmy's claim that the first edit was Hello world! isn't to be taken literally?' I don't see why not. It's far from unusual for a tech-savvy user to type that phrase into a document as a first test. I would be surprised if anyone expressed a good reason to doubt it. Indeed. Jimmy says he did it. It's a very plausible claim. There is no evidence against it. Therefore, I suggest we assume Jimmy is being accurate. ___ 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] Hello world! (was Hello world?)
On 14 January 2011 12:25, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: One possibility, though, is that he typed it at some point, but there was an earlier edit he forgot. Memory can be a selective thing. What you would look for, if going further into this, is the first time he recalled this and where and to whom. Ultimately, though, it is not a critical piece of information. Just a nice bit of trivia, and a nice story. Sure, Jimmy is certainly capable of making mistakes, but unless there is evidence to suggest that he did it seems sensible to me to assume that he is correct. As you say, it's not a critical piece of information so we don't need to try and verify the story. ___ 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] [Foundation-l] Old Wikipedia backups
On 20 December 2010 01:38, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: On 18/12/10 00:14, Daniel R. Tobias wrote: I note that among those earliest articles were separate articles on every single character in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, including Bum Number 1 and Passenger Number 1 through Passenger Number 4. Tim Shell created about 200 articles on Atlas Shrugged. They were left as they were until 2003, when Catherine Munro took on the huge task of cleaning them up and merging them. Why does the word Pokemon spring unbidden to my mind? ;) It seems history does repeat itself. ___ 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] CZ fork: Tendrl
On 11 December 2010 17:36, Tony Sidaway tonysida...@gmail.com wrote: I know everybody is tired of hearing me bang on about this, but the whole Featured article edifice has always seemed dubious to me. It seems to concentrate our limited resources on a tiny number of articles, and the emphasis has always been more on dotting eyes and crossing tees than improving overall quality of coverage. As far as I know, only a small minority of Wikipedians work on getting articles featured. There are plenty that like to create lots of articles that are just of reasonable quality. There are plenty that like to go around making small improvements to lots of existing articles. A big part of Wikipedia's success is our diverse community. There are lots of jobs that need doing (including dotting i's and crossing t's) and everyone can choose for themselves which job they want to do and (rather amazingly) we end up with almost every job getting done (there are a few backlogs that build up, but relative to the size of the project they are pretty small). ___ 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] Citizendium charter ratified
On 24 September 2010 12:41, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: They need a USP (Sanger's involvement is not going to be at all relevant to that now). Well, they need a few things. But it prompts me to wonder what our USP is. You have heard of us doesn't count. Our USP is that, whatever it is you want to know about, there is a very good chance that we'll have a good enough article on it (and we're free - if you are happy to pay for content, then we're not particularly unique, Encarta is good enough on a lot of topics, although not as many as us). What a lot of people don't realise is that our readers generally don't want excellent articles, they are happy with good-enough (which probably means B-class in most cases, maybe even C-class). What they really like about Wikipedia is our breadth of content. Citizendium is trying to have a small number of very good articles (and it's not even doing that well), which isn't actually what readers want. (This is all anecdotal, but I'm confident it is correct, to the extent that any massive generalisation can be.) I should clarify that, despite referring to it in the present tense above, I consider Citizendium to have already failed. It was worth a try, but it didn't work. ___ 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] FBI vs. Wikipedia
Did that never make it as far as this mailing list? We all had great fun with it on foundation-l a few days ago. On 7 August 2010 23:42, Alan Sim cambridgebayweat...@yahoo.com wrote: At the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10851394 and the NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/us/03fbi.html?_r=2 The original FBI letter http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/us/20100803-wiki-LetterFromLarson.pdf Mike Godwin replies http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/us/20100803-wiki-LetterFromLarson.pdf Alan ___ 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] FBI vs. Wikipedia
On 8 August 2010 01:29, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: I might be reading the wrong thread, but I've read through the FBI Seal and Wikimedia thread on foundation-l, starting here: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-August/060329.html There are some 11 posts to that thread, none of which seem to actually say anything substantive. I would have thought that a serious debate would have been better than having fun over this clash with an authority figure organisation. The FBI may have been wrong this time, but that doesn't mean they won't try again with another argument, and it doesn't mean that some of the concerns raised shouldn't be considered in this or other contexts. You were expecting something substantive from foundation-l? If the FBI try something else, we'll deal with it then. We can't do anything about it without knowing what they'll try, and it doesn't seem wise to speculate about what they could try on the public list - we might give them ideas! I considered the concerns raised and rejected them. If you think there is actually something worth discussing, please speak up. ___ 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] Destructionism
On 7 August 2010 01:45, William Beutler williambeut...@gmail.com wrote: Certainly, it still describes a real phenomenon: articles that attain Featured or Good status, and then have those statuses (statii?) revoked as they degrade. It happens, all right. Does it happen very often? Most revocations are due to us raising the standards we require rather than due to articles deteriorating. If an article has deteriorated to the point where it isn't worthy of FA any more then wouldn't it be better just revert to the last FA worthy version? If the FA criteria are such that there are edits that we don't want to revert but that make an article no longer worthy of FA, then we need to change the FA criteria (since they don't fit with our actual views on what makes an article better or worse). ___ 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] History what?
On 2 August 2010 03:26, stevertigo stv...@gmail.com wrote: Anyone know what the name of that magickal clone project was - the one which represented edit authorship/version by color-highlighting article text? WikiTrust? ___ 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] Prizes and the British Museum and Wikipedia
On 27 July 2010 10:02, Michael Peel em...@mikepeel.net wrote: I decided to ignore the whole prizes aspect of the BM residency. That's a snarky piece, really, and there is no need for me to add to the snarkiness. But the idea of a wiki is collaboration, and any prizes that ignore that an article is developed by a team (how exactly do you divide up a £100 book prize among those who get an article to FA?) are basically misconceived. Um ... £100 / (number of people involved)? or using a weighted distribution? Seems fairly easy to me, and definitely a lot easier than dividing up a specific prize (e.g. a book worth £100). Who counts as involved? What do you weight the distribution by? Number of edits is useless, number of words isn't much better. ___ 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] Kicking off the 2010-2011 fundraiser
On 27 July 2010 11:56, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: A friend of mine woke up in the middle of the night with a belly-ache. He googled it (in Hebrew) and the first result was the Hebrew Wikipedia article about appendicitis. The symptoms matched, so he went to the hospital and it indeed was appendicitis. Wikipedia may have saved his life and this story may make a good testimonial video - but are we sure that we would want to do it in the light of [[Wikipedia:Medical disclaimer]]? I'm not at all sure we should. We shouldn't be encouraging people to diagnose themselves using Wikipedia. What if your friend had found the article on indigestion and found that his symptoms seemed to match (the symptoms can be pretty similar) so just went back to bed? ___ 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] ZOMG Wikipedia is TERRORIST!!1!1!!!!
On 23 July 2010 13:53, Daniel R. Tobias d...@tobias.name wrote: Still, making any attempt to be secretive about where the office was (which even included deleting pictures from Commons that showed what the building looked like) was a really silly thing for an organization based around free exchange of information to do, and was rightly ridiculed by critics such as the WR crowd. The Foundation, like any other employer, has a duty (both legal and moral) to protect its staff. The nature of the Foundation's work means there is a significant risk of it coming under various forms of attack, including people turning up at the office and behaving in a threatening manner. Keeping the location of the office quiet was the best way the Foundation had to mitigate that risk. The new office comes with security, so the risk is significantly reduced, hence the address being published. ___ 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] ZOMG Wikipedia is TERRORIST!!1!1!!!!
On 24 July 2010 01:04, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 24 July 2010 00:57, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: On 23 July 2010 13:53, Daniel R. Tobias d...@tobias.name wrote: rightly ridiculed by critics such as the WR crowd. See, that's a sentence fragment that is intrinsically flawed. The WR crowd in question was not critics, the correct term is stalkers and trolls, several of whom are the actual people the foundation was concerned about showing up there. You get no points for clear thinking on this topic. Actually, I think the correct term has a few more asterisks in it... ___ 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] ZOMG Wikipedia is TERRORIST!!1!1!!!!
On 22 July 2010 10:59, K. Peachey p858sn...@yahoo.com.au wrote: So what is the back story to all of this? and can someone do a tldr version of the first link? You have the read the original to truly appreciate it. ___ 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] ZOMG Wikipedia is TERRORIST!!1!1!!!!
On 22 July 2010 16:43, Cary Bass c...@wikimedia.org wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 07/21/2010 12:07 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote: Indeed. The address of the old office was kept quiet for security reasons, but the address of the new office has always been publicly available. To give him the benefit of the tiniest bit of doubt, he might have written it while the WMF was in the old office and just taken a long time to submit it to the court and not thought to check it was still true. There has been a phone number available for years, though. Might I also offer that kept quiet does not negate offered up to anyone who phoned up and asked for it. In reality, it was simply not publicized; but it was generally fairly easy to get. Indeed, that's why I said quiet rather than private or secret. ___ 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] ZOMG Wikipedia is TERRORIST!!1!1!!!!
On 22 July 2010 23:19, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote: Is idiocy a defence to perjury? Yes, regrettably it is. ___ 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] ZOMG Wikipedia is TERRORIST!!1!1!!!!
On 21 July 2010 14:35, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/wikipediadown/message/2 That's great fun! If I had more faith in humanity, I'd assume it was somebody's idea of a joke... (a joke which wastes the court's time, at that). ___ 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] ZOMG Wikipedia is TERRORIST!!1!1!!!!
On 21 July 2010 20:01, Bod Notbod bodnot...@gmail.com wrote: The petition states that the Foundation cannot be traced to a physical address. That can't be right, can it? And then he signs at the bottom which warns that - if he knowingly states a falsehood - he commits perjury; so if he *is* aware that the Foundation has an address he has perjured himself. Googling Wikimedia Foundation gives you as top hit the site you would expect and as soon as you click contact us you are given the Foundation's address. Indeed. The address of the old office was kept quiet for security reasons, but the address of the new office has always been publicly available. To give him the benefit of the tiniest bit of doubt, he might have written it while the WMF was in the old office and just taken a long time to submit it to the court and not thought to check it was still true. There has been a phone number available for years, though. ___ 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] Parallel Articles on topics
On 27 June 2010 17:43, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: I think there's a valid issue here, but there's a balance to be struck between: * X as it occurs in one specific context * X from the perspective of one viewpoint So it would be legitimate to have an article on [[Economic philosophies of the Something Party]] and one on [[Economic philosophies of the Other Party]]; it would not be legitimate to have an article on [[Economics (Somethingian)]] as a counter to [[Economics (Otherian)]]. Where you draw the line, though, is quite tricky... So should the various articles linked to from here be deleted? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schools_of_economic_thought ___ 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] Parallel Articles on topics
On 27 June 2010 17:56, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: To take a prominent example, it's reasonable to have [[Jesus in Christianity]] and [[Jesus in Islam]], but they need to both be treated as subsets of the article on [[Jesus]], in the same way that [[Historicity of Jesus]] or [[Cultural depictions of Jesus]] are, and *not* as seperate forms of the main article. The trick is in getting that balance right. Well said. Forks should exist to deal with articles that would be too long otherwise and for no other reason. You should be able to combine all the forks together (replacing the summary in the main article with the full article) and end up with a (very long) coherent article. ___ 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] Pending Changes launched on English Wikipedia
For those who want to get a sense of how the system is performing in terms of throughput (e.g., average time-to-approval), please visit the Pending Changes Stats page [7]. The stats page doesn't show the percentiles, like the one of labs does. Is that just because there haven't been enough edits needing approval for there to be meaningful percentiles, or has it been removed for some reason? I think those percentiles are one of the most interesting statistics for determining how well we are doing at keeping up. Also, the average, median and lag are all showing as 0.0s. That can't be right, surely? Is that a bug? Or is it including the automatically approved edits? If so, that should probably be changed to just consider manual edits, otherwise we'll get pretty meaningless numbers (as long as more than half of edits are automatically approved, the median will be 0.0s). ___ 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] Pending Changes launched on English Wikipedia
On 16 June 2010 18:59, Rob Lanphier ro...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 10:48 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: For those who want to get a sense of how the system is performing in terms of throughput (e.g., average time-to-approval), please visit the Pending Changes Stats page [7]. the average, median and lag are all showing as 0.0s. That can't be right, surely? Is that a bug? Yeah, something there doesn't look right. We'll look into it further. Thanks! ___ 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] Pending Changes: first press
On 15 June 2010 11:51, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: On 15 June 2010 09:54, Michael Peel em...@mikepeel.net wrote: From a media contact point of view: one of the first things the media want are examples where it will be used, which is somewhat of a difficult question to answer when a) the community hasn't made its mind up, and b) even if it has, the community can change its mind at any time. ;-) Someone proposed the daily FAs, which I think are an excellent idea from an exposure perspective, but I don't know whether that got the nod or not. We don't currently protect FAs, do we? I thought we kept them unprotected and dealt with the inevitable vandalism, as a matter of principle (we're the encyclopaedia anyone can edit, so our most prominent article should be editable). I think the consensus is that pending changes should only be used (at least during the trial) on articles that would otherwise be protected. ___ 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] Pending Changes: first press
On 15 June 2010 19:15, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: I'm actually becoming increasingly concerned that the notion that the [[George W. Bush]] article would be unlocked has to be coming from somewhere within the organization, since it's being repeated in every single article in the press. This is not a good sign. I believe I was the person that suggested the Bush article as an example when the BBC asked for one. I don't know where the articles that were published before the BBC article got the example from. I'm sorry if I was mistaken, but my understand is that this feature is intended precisely for articles like the Bush one. The objective of this trial isn't to give us good press, it's to persuade the community that this is a useful and viable tool. I couldn't disagree more. The objective of this trial is to see if the feature is effective. This is a trial, not a marketing campaign. We shouldn't be skewing the parameters of the trial to get the result we want. ___ 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] Community ready for Pending Changes (nee Flagged Protection)?
On 14 June 2010 01:42, William Pietri will...@scissor.com wrote: On 06/13/2010 03:59 PM, David Goodman wrote: There has never been agreement for more than the 2,000. It will be necessary to ask the community at that point whether to expand , continue, or end the trial. Ok. Since the 2000 limit initially came from the Foundation side of things rather than from the community, I was being especially careful not to presume. But from the mailing list and on-wiki goings on, it looks like the community prefers a software-enforced numeric limit regardless of technical capacity, so we'll plan to leave the limit in place until we hear otherwise. I think the trial was limited by time, rather than number of articles. It's a 2 month trial, if memory serves. After that we need another poll if we're going to keep it going. ___ 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] declining numbers of EN wiki admins - The theory that making it easier to get rid of admins is a solution to the decline in their active numbers
On 30 May 2010 11:43, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Indeed. The first - and, I would have thought, jawdroppingly obvious - result would be that no-one at all would go near such work in any circumstances. Exactly. The big problem with community desysoppings is that any admin doing their job properly will have enemies. The longer you do the job, the more enemies you will have. Whenever you block someone, you annoy the blockee. Whenever you delete an article, you annoy the creator. Whenever you protect an article, you annoy the person whose version you didn't protect on. If you let those people be in charge of the desysopping process, we won't have any good admins left doing even slightly controversial work (which, as I've explained, is pretty much all admin work). ___ 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] Renaming Flagged Protections to Pending Changes
On 28 May 2010 23:25, Rob Lanphier ro...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hi everyone, After much debate, we've settled on a name for the English Wikipedia implementation of FlaggedRevs: Pending Changes. I find this decision very odd. Revision Review had much more support (and very well-reasoned support) than any other option in the discussion you started on this subject. You said in that discussion that you thought it was heading into jargon land but didn't explain that when I asked you to. I can't imagine what makes you think the word review is more jargon than pending - they're both perfectly standard English words. I don't know why you bothered starting the discussion if you never intended to pay much attention to it. ___ 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] flagged revisions - autoreviewer even of minor edits
On 22 May 2010 22:20, James Alexander jameso...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 5:14 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: I'm not sure where this has come from, but there is no problem. An edit by an autoreviewer will only be automatically flagged if the previous version was already flagged. If it's not, then they have to actively check a box (next to the minor edit and watch check boxes) saying they want to flag all the pending edits, and their own (which people should only check if they have reviewed all the pending edits). Ok if that's the case it makes me a bit less worried on that front though I am still confused. You say autoreviewer but a lot of others are using autoconfirmed which is obviously very different and much broader. Is this for those with a separate autoreview flag or are all autoconfirmed users getting this ability? Autoreview is a user right held by members of the autoconfirmed user group. Therefore, all autoconfirmeds will be autoreviewers, but you could have autoreviewers that aren't autoconfirmed (although I don't expect that to happen since autoconfirmed is just an easy bar to get over). ___ 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] flagged revisions - autoreviewer even of minor edits
On 22 May 2010 22:32, Emily Monroe bluecalioc...@me.com wrote: Are you guys talking about the right to not have your page patrolled by New Page Patrol? Because, even though I probably have it all wrong, I don't think I've seen the word autoreviewer tossed about in any other context. I was under the impression that autoreviewer status was something where you can either nominate yourself or another person, after said nominee has written an unusual high amount of policy- complying articles in a row, therefore clogging up New Page Patrol--it doesn't come to you automatically. No, we're talking about having your edits automatically flagged as checked under the flaggedrevs extension. This page seems to confirm I am using the terminology correctly: http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:ListGroupRights ___ 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] flagged revisions - autoreviewer even of minor edits
On 23 May 2010 03:05, David Goodman dgoodma...@gmail.com wrote: There was no general consensus for what people though they were voting for, nor is there any sure way to predict what they will now say, since a great many of the practical details have only been clarified in the last few days upon seeing the implementation. Now that we actually have a proposal, it needs to be approved Since this is only intended to be a trial, I would be tempted not to bother trying to get general approval for every aspect of it. It is probably not worth the effort. If people don't like some aspects of the implementation, they can say so when we discuss the results of the trial. ___ 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] Renaming Flagged Protections
On 22 May 2010 02:18, FT2 ft2.w...@gmail.com wrote: *+ **...The average delay is expected to be around N minutes, and we'll be watching this carefully.* Do we actually have an expectation? We have aspirations, certainly (I think N=5 is bit on the high side for the median, which is probably the best average to work with), but does anyone really have anything more that wild guesses about how good we will actually be at reviewing edits? ___ 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] Flagged protection and patrolled revisions
On 3 May 2010 20:08, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 3 May 2010 19:56, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: Alternatively, simply giving the users a link to a page describing the complete edit life-cycle, This page is [[protected]]., would be fine as well... those who care could go get a complete understanding, the vast majority who don't care about the minutia of the editing process can comfortably ignore it and not worry that their edit is LESS likely to be used then it use to be. Saying who the edit is visible to (Your edit is visible to you and any logged-in users) rather than who it isn't visible to (Your edit has been placed in a collective in tray for someone to get around to sometime maybe never) would probably be nicer too. Once we've had it running for a while, we can give people an idea of how long it will take (hopefully the median will be no more than a few minutes). ___ 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] Expert feedback on Featured Articles
On 27 April 2010 20:50, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Nihiltres wrote: snip I strongly believe that showing very prominently the level of review a given article—or even a given *revision* thereof—has received, and the perceived level of quality involved, is a good thing. The Wikipedia 1.0 assessment system (Stub, Start, C, B, A, GA, FA…) seems to serve as a decent start for that sort of thing. If we are honest with ourselves, we would admit that we really need levels 1 to 10 for articles. It seems already to be hard to get an A, fairly much impossible to get GA for an average topic, and as we know only 1 in 1000 is FA (in round terms). And expert review = FA+ is another quite defensible level. I think cutting to the chase, setting substub = 1 and reviewed FA = 10 might be a great timesaver, and help a process in which less mystique attached to the whole business. Rebooting with FA = 9 sounds quite fun. I realised a few months ago that it had been ages since I'd actually done anything significant in the main namespace, so I decided to have a go at writing an article. With a little help from someone that turned up and started improving the article (in true wiki-fashion), I got it to GA fairly easily. It was at best an average topic - it was my local (about 700 year old) church. FAC is very difficult to get through, but GA is entirely doable. I think adding more levels would make the distinctions more arbitrary, which seems like a bad thing to me. I think we should remove a level, in fact. The current system at the top with A, GA and FA is very confusing. I think GA and A should be merged somehow (perhaps just get rid of A). ___ 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] Expert feedback on Featured Articles
On 27 April 2010 21:33, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Well, the research I remember says the transition from B to A makes the most difference to the reader. So I would make that central to any system: from 5 to 6, say. I have seen perfectly decent articles labelled Start - I mean articles with say five paras of solid, verifiable factual information. I doubt standards are even across the wiki, but if those are Start there have to be a couple of rungs on the ladder below that.; or Start = 3. I see that mathematics uses B+ anyway, so that the lower side has five grades already. There does seem to be some problem with A right now, but abolishing it in such a fashion to reduce incentives to push articles up would really be a bad idea (whatever your anecdotal example says). But what is the difference between A and GA? Really, it's minimal (I think A-class requires the content to be essentially complete, GA just requires it to cover all the main points, which isn't much different). You talk about the transition from B to A - is most of that difference to readers between B and GA or between GA and A (I know the ordering isn't perfect, but any A-class article should be able to pass GA with only minimal changes)? I suspect it is between B and GA, so getting rid of A wouldn't have any significant impact. One alternative is to scrap the entire system and replace it with a points system. We have a few categories like completeness, style, images, references, etc. and an article gets a certain number of points in each category depending on how good it is. Once an article has the maximum points in each category, it is ready for FAC, which basically is just to confirm the assessment was accurate (the categories should be set up with the FA criteria in mind). This would mean people working on the article know what areas need more work, it gives an incentive to even fairly small improvements and it removes the arbitrary distinctions between different classes of article. ___ 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] Expert feedback on Featured Articles
On 27 April 2010 23:14, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Thomas Dalton wrote: On 27 April 2010 21:33, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Well, the research I remember says the transition from B to A makes the most difference to the reader. So I would make that central to any system: from 5 to 6, say. I have seen perfectly decent articles labelled Start - I mean articles with say five paras of solid, verifiable factual information. I doubt standards are even across the wiki, but if those are Start there have to be a couple of rungs on the ladder below that.; or Start = 3. I see that mathematics uses B+ anyway, so that the lower side has five grades already. There does seem to be some problem with A right now, but abolishing it in such a fashion to reduce incentives to push articles up would really be a bad idea (whatever your anecdotal example says). But what is the difference between A and GA? Really, it's minimal (I think A-class requires the content to be essentially complete, GA just requires it to cover all the main points, which isn't much different). You talk about the transition from B to A - is most of that difference to readers between B and GA or between GA and A (I know the ordering isn't perfect, but any A-class article should be able to pass GA with only minimal changes)? I suspect it is between B and GA, so getting rid of A wouldn't have any significant impact. [[Talk:Go (game)/GA2]] is the only GA review I have ever looked at: it has many comments (measurements in both metric and imperial, for example) that ar far from your summary. Sorry, that bit in brackets wasn't meant to be a summary of the criteria for each class, it was a description of the difference between the classes. Each has lots of other criteria, but they are essentially the same for both. ___ 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] Citizendium dead?
On 23 April 2010 19:13, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: You see, what he taught sophomores in his Intro to Philosophy class trumps all other content. Note the complete absence of any reference. You shouldn't hold the lack of a reference against him. I started editing a few months after those events and references were few and far between. We only started insisting on references once we realised people were, against all expectation, actually using the articles we were writing! You shouldn't judge people's historical actions by modern standards. ___ 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] Citizendium dead?
On 19 April 2010 09:07, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Thomas Dalton wrote: On 18 April 2010 22:25, The Cunctator cuncta...@gmail.com wrote: Actually, we do know, because Citizendium is just a retread of Nupedia, which wasn't going anywhere. Nupedia was supposed to be experts writing articles. Citizendium is (in theory) anyone writing articles and experts resolving disputes and approving articles. That is a very different model. Different, not very different. Anyway wikis of a certain size and achievement (done some useful writing but not going to set the world on fire) tend, I guess, to have features in common because of the type and scale of the communities involved. It seems that social structure = the rut we're in is about right for these communities, including Citizendium. I don't think the English Wikipedia is immune from the rut, but we are the ones with the very different model. I think what Phil Sandifer was saying is not correct, but that is because I would argue that utility of a piece of hypertext shouldn't be measured as if the hyperlinks don't matter (we saw this when the big rush on [[Michael Jackson]] caused all that traffic to [[vitiligo]]): surf's up. And I would also argue that the policy and community superstructure is useful (though not all of it, and not all uniformly useful, of course). You are aware that Nupedia wasn't a wiki, 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] Citizendium dead?
On 19 April 2010 17:52, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 18 April 2010 23:02, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: Of course, change all this and they still likely would have never supplanted Wikipedia. Some sort of Wikiversity-like mission statement would have probably been more achievable. Heh. Wonder if they would have gone for a bunch of trolls starting a how to troll course. If you are going to have trolls, you might as well have competent ones! ___ 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] Citizendium dead?
On 18 April 2010 19:54, Philip Sandifer snowspin...@gmail.com wrote: On Apr 17, 2010, at 8:26 AM, David Gerard wrote: Wikipedia, and its community and bureaucracy, sucks in oh so many ways. But it does in fact work and produce something people find useful. I'm not entirely sure of this. It is accurate to say that Wikipedia is found useful by people - but I'm not sure the current community and bureaucratic structures have anything to do with why. I suspect the useful parts are unevenly distributed towards articles older than five years. Interesting hypothesis. It is testable, too - we just need a bot to sample a few thousand articles and compare their hits over the last month, say, with their creation dates. I suspect you are wrong, though, since you haven't accounted for current affairs articles and pop culture articles which are very popular, but not for long. ___ 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] Citizendium dead?
On 18 April 2010 20:22, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 3:05 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: On 18 April 2010 19:54, Philip Sandifer snowspin...@gmail.com wrote: On Apr 17, 2010, at 8:26 AM, David Gerard wrote: Wikipedia, and its community and bureaucracy, sucks in oh so many ways. But it does in fact work and produce something people find useful. I'm not entirely sure of this. It is accurate to say that Wikipedia is found useful by people - but I'm not sure the current community and bureaucratic structures have anything to do with why. I suspect the useful parts are unevenly distributed towards articles older than five years. Interesting hypothesis. It is testable, too - we just need a bot to sample a few thousand articles and compare their hits over the last month, say, with their creation dates. I suspect you are wrong, though, since you haven't accounted for current affairs articles and pop culture articles which are very popular, but not for long. I think that is the wrong metric. Lots of people look at the sex articles, but that isn't an indication that our sex articles are considered more useful than, say, our articles on rockets or gemstones. Sex just happens to have near-universal appeal— Joe might be interested in rocks, John might be interested in rockets, but they both have some interest in sex. As a result, sex a very popular subject everwhere on the internet. The same kind of comparison can be made for celebrity subjects. That a WP article gets a lot of traffic isn't always an indication that the content is useful. Most of the people hitting the article could be instantly hitting back because the article wasn't what they wanted. There are probably a hundred ways that we could try to measure something here, but I doubt we would agree on any one of them as measuring the right thing. It's not a perfect metric, but it is probably the best one we can actually measure. A metric we can't measure is completely useless. When choosing a metric you always have to compromise between ease of measurement and strength of correlation to the quantity you are interested in. ___ 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] Citizendium dead?
On 18 April 2010 22:25, The Cunctator cuncta...@gmail.com wrote: Actually, we do know, because Citizendium is just a retread of Nupedia, which wasn't going anywhere. Nupedia was supposed to be experts writing articles. Citizendium is (in theory) anyone writing articles and experts resolving disputes and approving articles. That is a very different model. ___ 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] Citizendium dead?
On 17 April 2010 03:15, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: In March 2010, about 90 people made even a single edit to Citizendium: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Statistics#Number_of_authors Compare Conservapedia, which has 76 at the time I write this. The difference is, the latter is pretty much a personal website run by a gibbering fundie lunatic which gets pretty much all its traffic from sceptics making fun of it; the former was a serious project. This is terribly sad. What went wrong? Citizendium was not sufficiently better than Wikipedia (one can argue over whether or not it was better at all, but whatever difference there was it was small) and was obviously much smaller, so it didn't attract readers or editors: Wikipedia was good enough and people rarely switch from something that is good enough. In order for a project like Wikipedia or Citizendium to be successful you need exponential growth (initially) caused by readers becoming editors and writing articles that attract new readers. Citizendium has shown almost perfect linear growth since its creation because that cycle never happened. Its editors are, from what I can tell, mostly disgruntled Wikipedians and it doesn't have any readers. We shouldn't conclude from this that the idea behind Wikipedia is better than the idea behind Citizendium. The main factor is that Wikipedia came first. Whether Citizendium would have succeeded if it had come first, we'll never know. The only way a new project will ever rival Wikipedia (assuming Wikipedia survives, anyway, and it is so big now that it is hard to imagine it completely failing, although it could change considerable) is if it is very much better than Wikipedia in some respect (it can be worse in others). Such a project could then start to attract readers who would kick off exponential growth. It is readers that are important to attract - once you have those, they will become the editors you need. You will note that I talk about Citizendium in the past tense. That is because I concluded it was a failed project a year or so ago. I suspect Larry Sanger has made the same conclusion, although he (understandably) won't say so outright, since his involvement has been steadily reducing and he has been working on new projects. One very interesting Citizendium statistic is the median article length in words. It has been reducing by about 6 words a month for years. I think that means most of the new articles being created are stubs, or not much more than stubs, and nobody is working on expanding existing articles. I feign no hypotheses for why this might be. I don't have comparable statistics for Wikipedia, so for all I know we are doing the same thing (although that seems unlikely now that article creation has reduced). ___ 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] Citizendium dead?
On 17 April 2010 14:42, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 17 April 2010 13:52, Eugene van der Pijll eug...@vanderpijll.nl wrote: David Gerard schreef: Clay Shirky was right: CZ collapsed under the weight of its own bureaucracy: http://many.corante.com/archives/2006/09/18/larry_sanger_citizendium_and_the_problem_of_expertise.php Clay Shirky was wrong. He focussed on one part of the CZ hierarchy: the experts, and the amount of overhead that trying to recognize expertise would cause. But there was no overhead, because experts never came to CZ. He was right, I think, in noting that the bureaucracy was the problem. The expert procedure was symptomatic of the dysfunctional attitude. I disagree, I don't think bureaucracy was the problem. Citizendium never got beyond a very small size and bureaucracy is only a problem on a large scale - even if there is lots of bureaucracy in a small group it is easy to navigate. It never took off because there was never a reason for it to do so: Wikipedia was good enough. ___ 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] Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the yardstick for Wikipedia entries
On 29 March 2010 21:51, Kwan Ting Chan k...@ktchan.info wrote: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2010/03/29/9986468.aspx As has been pointed out in the comments, word length isn't a measure of importance. For our better articles, it's mainly a measure of how much there is to say on a subject. For articles that are still under development, it's mostly a measure of how much time people have spent on that article. Ginsburg's article is currently rated as C-class, so it falls under the latter measurement system. ___ 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] declining numbers of EN wiki admins
On 25 March 2010 20:51, The Cunctator cuncta...@gmail.com wrote: By all measures, en.wiki has been in decline for years as an active project. It's just the typical death by bureaucracy that most projects like this undergo. I think death is overstating it. Many things show rapid growth followed by a small decline before stabilising. That's what I think is happening with enwiki (the rate of decline in many metrics has massively reduced compared to just after their peaks). You are, however, right to state that what we're seeing with admin numbers is replicated by most other statistics. It would probably be best to look at the ratio of active admins to active Wikipedians. Since both groups have shrunk since around 2006/2007, the ratio may have stayed roughly steady. ___ 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] declining numbers of EN wiki admins
On 25 March 2010 21:55, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 5:48 PM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: On 25 March 2010 21:03, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: A couple more questions to which I don't know the answer: 1) What is the total administrative workload now compared to previous periods? The peak was probably back when we sorted out the fair use issues. I'd say that beyond that it's pretty typical. Typical to what period of time? Presumably the anti-vandal bots, huggle and the abuse filter cut down on the need for administrators working in that area, as an example. Reverting vandalism has never been an admin job, it's blocking the vandals that needs and admin and the anti-vandal bots don't help with that. There are tools that add the block templates to user talk pages automatically, which helps, but that's about it. ___ 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] Unreverted vandalism
On 11 February 2010 15:48, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: The latest example is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Military_sciencediff=339309229oldid=337736730 [I'm not at the right computer at the moment, so hopefully someone will fix that] Fixed. So is it as big a problem as it seems? What percentage of vandalism doesn't get caught for days or weeks? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Aetheling/Vandalism_survival That's a pretty good study, albeit with a very small sample size (100 articles). ___ 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] Unreverted vandalism
On 11 February 2010 17:17, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 5:05 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: b) Use reversions. Sample a thousand uses of rollback from the recent changes list, find time between that edit and the one it was reverting. That one sounds easier. If only people wouldn't use rollback inappropriately... Looking for rollback edits is a good way to find vandalism that was reverted quickly, but as Andrew says it won't find old vandalism on articles with subsequent edits, which is essential if the intention it to find out how much vandalism takes a long time to be reverted. ___ 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] Free data (UK government)
2010/1/22 Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com: I *think* Mike Peel reads this list. I was about to do something else, so maybe someone else could point this out to them? They probably know already, but it wouldn't hurt to ask (I'm just not going to do it right now). Yes, we know already, but thanks for thinking of us! ___ 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] Administrator coup / mass deletions
2010/1/21 Apoc 2400 apoc2...@gmail.com: Is there anyone here who can do something about this before it becomes an even bigger wheel-war? Try ArbCom. Keeping admins in check is their job. ___ 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 Curious Incident of the Fans in the Night
2010/1/18 quiddity pandiculat...@gmail.com: On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 12:50 PM, Ken Arromdee arrom...@rahul.net wrote: ... elsewhere. Our rules generally don't say we can't use information unless it has *two* sources; and in this case it's obvious that the reason the information is hard to find is that Neil Gaiman is trying to keep it quiet, not that it isn't true. Unless there's a [[Template:Notable_Wikipedian]] tag missing from the article's talkpage, I suspect you probably mean Neil Gaiman's /fans are/ trying to keep it quiet. Not neilhimself...! The information is difficult to find in reliable sources - most of those are not edited by fans. ___ 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] Why we need a good WYSIWYG editor
2010/1/4 Shlomi Fish shlo...@iglu.org.il: I personally detest all WYSIWYG web-based editors. They are slow and clunky and produce broken markup, and just get in the way. I'm also not fond of WYSIWYG word processors and prefer using XHTML or DocBook/XML or other non- WYSIWYG markup languages. If you are going to enable such a feature, please make it optional. I agree - it is vital that WYSIWYG be optional. There is no way we'll get the complete wikitext feature set into a WYSIWYG editor so not having a view code option (preferably with an option in preferences to default to viewing code) would be a step backwards, which is the wrong direction. ___ 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] Why we need a good WYSIWYG editor
2010/1/4 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: 2010/1/4 Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com: So lets not confuse the usability goals or making editing SIMPLE, NON-INTIMIDATING, and DISCOVERABLE all of which are very much wiki concepts, with the values of WYSIWYG which encourages increased but hidden complexity. And never mind the actual numbers from Wikia, which look very like having a WYSIWYG system for presentational markup was *the* key to having people actually complete a planned edit rather than click 'edit', go what on earth at the computer guacamole and go away? You need to look at more than just one number. Of course WYSIWYG will increase the number of people completing edits, has anyone suggested otherwise? The problems described in this thread aren't problems that would show up in that number. ___ 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] Why we need a good WYSIWYG editor
2010/1/4 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: 2010/1/4 Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com: I think that, fundamentally, WYSIWYG isn't the right model for Wikipedia or even wikis in general. What fits our model is what you get is what you mean. We really shouldn't want most editors worrying too much about how the page looks because its important for readers that the look and feel be very consistent across the site and not change constantly reflecting the standards of tens of thousand of distinct authors. You may think that a semantic markup system is just the ticket, but people who casually write stuff almost universally pick presentational markup and do the semantic bit in their heads, where it belongs. Whatever number of decades it is of computer scientists and other enthusiasts for semantic markup haven't changed this, which leads me to suspect they won't. It all comes down to what you expect to be done with the content. If it is just for viewing on the internet in a standard web browser, then you want people to just concentrate on presentation and ignore semantics. If you expect the content to be used more widely then the other way around is more useful since, if you have the semantic information, you can work out what the presentation should be like for any medium or you can even process the information contained in the content automatically and output something else entirely. Doing that with just presentational information involves a lot of guesswork and complicated parsing. ___ 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] Can sweet reason still work on en:wp? Occasionally.
2009/10/22 Surreptitiousness surreptitious.wikiped...@googlemail.com: stevertigo wrote: So the question is, how do we aggregate and sort arguments such that we can apply a meta process for quickly discerning good, valid, arguments, from those that aren't? Other than IAR that is? Didn't we used to reformat discussions? Maybe we need to re-integrate that into our tool-box. You mean refactoring? Refactoring an ongoing discussion is usually very controversial and not worth the drama. Refactoring a closed discussion might make a more useful archive, particularly I'm not sure archives get read enough to be worth the effort. ___ 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] Can sweet reason still work on en:wp? Occasionally.
2009/10/20 Ryan Delaney ryan.dela...@gmail.com: I like this. Ideally IAR should never be invoked, as its not a rule; IAR should be assumed. That said, I agree with the call and want to give props for the detailed explanation, which should help smooth things over. I disagree. Following rules should be the default. We should only ignore them if we have a good reason to do so. Otherwise, there is no point having rules at all. ___ 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] Can sweet reason still work on en:wp? Occasionally.
2009/10/20 Ryan Delaney ryan.dela...@gmail.com: This is a bizarre, but ancient, misunderstanding of IAR. All IAR means is that priority number one is doing what is right, rather than pedantic allegiance to a dictatorial interpretation of rules. Since IAR is not itself a justification for anything, there is never any useful information added by saying I am invoking IAR. The only defense is I did this because X where X is the reason that what you did was a good idea, so you might as well skip to the end. Rather than saying I am invoking IAR and I did this because X, just say I did this because X. It's not a misunderstanding, it is an understanding of how things actually work in the real world. X will need to include an explanation of why the usual rules don't apply (that may be obvious from just explanation why what you did was a good idea), so it makes sense to acknowledge from the beginning that you aren't following the usual rules. ___ 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] I wonder if the FTC decision on blogs covers Wikipedia edits
2009/10/8 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: If you are in the US and you blog and are paid or receive oher commercial benefits for it, the FTC requires you to reveal the relationship: http://blogs.consumerreports.org/money/2009/10/new-ftc-federal-trade-commission-guidelines-disclose-product-review-blogola-payola-favorable-blog-comments-more-transparency.html?EXTKEY=KEYCODE=OTC-ConsumeristRSS Now, would this cover Wikipedia edits? Make sure you read this sentence: The guides, last updated in 1980, are administrative interpretations of the law aimed at helping advertisers comply with the Federal Trade Commission Act, and they’re not binding law themselves. If you want to try and interpret the guides, make sure you do so with that fact in mind. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
