Re: [WikiEN-l] VIP Treatment
On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 12:15 PM, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.netwrote: VIPs expect to deal with another VIP, with authority to get things fixed, with a word, even if the rules have to be bent a bit. That is the way of the world. We, particularly a random community member they are interacting with, often do not have authority to do what has to be done. They do not understand or appreciate discussions with the community about their problem. For what it's worth, this is not just a VIP behavior. Most people assume that Wikipedia has centralized control over content, and they want Someone In Charge to fix things for them. (cf. all the people who e-mail Jimbo asking him to make changes, or the people who volunteer for OTRS because they want to fix errors on pages) It's difficult to correct these assumptions, even after pointing out the big edit tab at the top of nearly every page. -- Jim Redmond [[User:Jredmond]] ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] VIP Treatment
On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 12:56 PM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: If something gets into OTRS and is from a household name, it would be sensible to have it passed to someone with a lot of experience, but I don't know if that is part of the system. Of course, we'd first have to establish that the message legitimately was from said household name, either directly or via an assistant or publicist. Even for legitimate VIPs, though, OTRS volunteers aren't going to change content without good reason (and but it's my article is not a good reason). -- Jim Redmond jredm...@gmail.com ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Call for Volunteers: If you can read a diff, you're exactly who we need.
On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 16:15, Steven Walling swall...@wikimedia.orgwrote: Hi everyone, In the Community Dept. we've been collaborating with some Wikipedians to continue one of the research projects from the summer, namely involving the randomized testing of talk page templates to try and improve them. (If you watch WP:VPT, then you might've seen our announcements.) The great thing about doing randomized testing is that we get a more unbiased assessment of our experiment. The bad thing is that in order to do a proper job of crunching these numbers, we need help from people who can read wiki histories accurately and tell us what's going on. This is where you come in. Obviously no one is better primed to analyze diffs and editing histories than editors, so we're looking for a few (3-4, but the more the merrier) volunteers to lend us their experience this week. I know used the r word (research), which makes it sound not really important, but this is a live experiment on the projects. If we do this correctly, then we can do a better job of educating good faith editors, warning away those who cause damage to the encyclopedia, and keeping experienced Wikipedians from getting their user pages vandalized by angry people. ;-) The system we've got set up for analyzing these diffs is insanely simple if you're used to MediaWiki, so let me know either on the list or my talk page [1] if you might have an hour or two to spare. I'm game, if you still need volunteers. -- Jim Redmond [[User:Jredmond]] ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia article on [[Santorum (neologism)]]
On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 12:47, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.comwrote: We aren't doing anything wrong here. We could, but the actual coverage in the actual article is NPOV and does not show Santorum himself in a negative manner, because we show Santorum's reasoned and mature response for what it was. +1. It's far better for us to report neutrally on the term, describing its origins, its effects on the Senator's career, et al., than to stick our collective fingers in our collective ears and pretend that the term doesn't exist - or worse, to whitewash our content and leave only the happy nicknames for controversial figures. This goes for other disparaging googlebombs or nicknames as well, whether the subject is a politician or not and whether the subject is alive or not; the encyclopedia is less complete if we leave out Slick Willie or miserable failure or (my favorite) Attila the Hen. -- Jim Redmond [[User:Jredmond]] ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] On this day in history...
On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 17:05, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: ...in 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the U.S. into World War II. Not that you'd know that from the On this day section of the main page. I guess there is an iron rule that nothing mentioned in any other part of the main page makes it into the On This Day section (a Today's Featured Picture is an image of lifeboats rescuing sailors from a ship damaged in the attack), but that seems like a strange rule to me. I can see the motivation behind that rule. Would you really want the On this day section, featured article, featured image, and DYK to be given over to the Pearl Harbor attack every December 7th? What about devoting the whole Main Page to the creation of the United Nations every October 24th, or to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand every June 28th, or to the Battle of Talikota every January 26th*, or to the founding of Rome every April 21st? All were extremely notable historical events, after all, and adding those would keep us from being too US- or UK-centric. The rule is arbitrary, and I'd be fine allowing 2 mentions of the same event. But having a fixed limit like that keeps the Main Page from becoming overrun by history-related articles; it spreads the newbie influx around; it lets us catch a wider field of potential editors; and, because our articles are skewed to relatively recent topics in the Anglosphere, it helps reduce our systemic biases by forcing consideration of other topics. *Yes, I had to look that date up. Article needs work, btw; anybody have good sources on south Indian history? -- Jim Redmond [[User:Jredmond]] ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] On this day in history...
On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 18:55, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: Perhaps there are folks who are scraping just the On this day section, or people who look there for interesting tidbits on the date. Or expect to look there to find articles on the day's events in history. True. OTD's contents won't change substantially from year to year, so perhaps the wise and attractive admins who manage the Main Page could let OTD do its own thing. The OTD box could also potentially be restructured a bit to draw more attention to the main article for whichever day. (There are quite a few articles and images related to Pearl Harbor, where any mention of them would include a reference to Pearl Harbor... Does that mean featuring any of them on Dec 7 excludes the event itself from OTD?). Who says we can only feature Pearl Harbor-related articles or images on December 7? The daily FA and FP should reflect our best works, whether or not they're related to some significant anniversary. If that means that the article on the USS Arizona is featured on the Main Page in February, then that's fine by me. -- Jim Redmond [[User:Jredmond]] ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] [Wikitech-l] Fwd: Wired: Wikipedia to Color Code Untrustworthy Text
On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 12:33, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: A simple version of that is already implemented. Go to http://wikitrust.soe.ucsc.edu/index.php/Main_Page and click the check text tab to see it, hover over a piece of text, and click it. The hover shows the username, and by clicking it, you'll get a diff. (This may not be the latest code.) According to their Wikimania presentation (hopefully available soon on Commons), they've also prepared a Firefox add-on, WikiTrust, which adds a new trust info tab to the top of mainspace articles. The trust info database is still being populated, though, so the trust info itself may be a little skewed; at the presentation they estimated that the English Wikipedia trust info database would be finished in about a month. (Their existing algorithm is language-independent, so presumably the add-on will work for non-English wikis as well.) The Firefox add-on is still classified as experimental, but adventurous persons can still get it at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11087. -- Jim Redmond jredm...@gmail.com ___ 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] Request to Wikipedians for BBC Documentary
On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 11:54, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: And that extends to even having an article at all - for many subjects, having a Wikipedia article can be a curse. Not that that has ever stopped anybody from creating an autobiography -- Jim Redmond [[User:Jredmond]] ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] A new solution for the BLP dilemma
On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 19:16, Durova nadezhda.dur...@gmail.com wrote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Rand_FishkinIf the vandalism occurred the day after he checked the page it'd be six days more before he spotted it, and longer while OTRS processed his request. ...but under your proposal OTRS would be the ones handling the noindex request. As several others have mentioned, noindexing won't prevent vandalism, won't prevent mirrors from showing the hidden content, and won't prevent direct visits to the hidden content. Additionally, as I mentioned in a comment on your blog, most BLP-related complaints on OTRS are more concerned with the vandalism itself or with the wiki-nature in general - Google doesn't really enter the picture unless their cache is outdated. I'm always eager to hear new ideas on keeping BLPs neutral, but I'm afraid this one won't cut it. Sorry. -- Jim Redmond [[User:Jredmond]] ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Green Ink Day
On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 11:43, purple.clou...@gmail.com wrote: Could you please explain? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_ink -- Jim Redmond [[User:Jredmond]] ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Sourcemonkeys
On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 16:30, David Goodman dgoodma...@gmail.com wrote: But most people at Wikipedia have not even bothered to find out what their public or school library may already be paying for. Almost all of them buy at least some packages. This is true. I've found some excellent sources through academic libraries and their database subscriptions. -- Jim Redmond jredm...@gmail.com ___ 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 on Obama Wikipedia article controversy
On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 14:46, William King williamcarlk...@gmail.comwrote: Fox News has a story on the controversy regarding Barack Obama's Wikipedia entry: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,507244,00.html Your thoughts? I love how they resort to the Wayback Machine for archived versions of the page. -- Jim Redmond [[User:Jredmond]] ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
