Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-08-04/News and notes

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• I hope that some of the ideas from June's Inspire Campaign against harassment are adopted. I'm currently working on an RfC for my idea to protect userspace by default, which got a fair amount of support (and was also mentioned in Maggie Dennis' presentation). Funcrunch (talk) 00:26, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

• It's interesting that only one target seems to be identifiable in your montage. Did you consider contacting that target? Have you consulted experts in social media and natural language? The statistics cited above are very unimpressive, and fail to give confidence intervals A fairly good research literature exists: do you know it well? Did you ignore then use of blackmail on Wikipedia for a reason, or were you simply unaware of the recent episode? MarkBernstein (talk) 01:58, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

• I found two of the WMF harassment study's findings surprising:
  • "28% of editors say they have experienced criticism of their work"... so the remaining 72% never got any negative criticism? Does that mean they simply ploughed their little patches and never collaborated in any contentious area?
  • "Revenge porn (2%)"... That's a nasty surprise! Deryck C. 23:37, 7 August 2016 (UTC)

• "Congratulations. I don't know whether you are aware of this fact or not, but you have shown your qualified stupidity."
  • To be fair I'd be confused as well if I were an algorithm interpreting this logically/grammatically. The adjective "qualified" has two definitions, the first "competent or knowledgeable to do something" implies sentience which "stupidity" does not possess, this leaves the second definition of qualified "not complete or absolute; limited" which leaves us with an unusual sentence congratulating someone for their limited stupidity. M. A. Bruhn (talk) 04:59, 8 August 2016 (UTC)

    User:M. A. Bruhn—Indeed. I'm intrigued that the system appears to be so successful at this early stage, given the difficulty of programming grammar into computers. If you try it out at that link, I'll be interested to hear what you make of its interpretation of your examples. User:Deryck Chan, I agree, it's dreadful that one in 50 ticked that box; but I wonder what people mean by it, and how "revenge porn" could be sourced to attack an editor. Tony (talk) 09:54, 8 August 2016 (UTC)

  • Ack! Please revise this article; at least some parts are simplistic to the point of being counterproductive. "Criticism of your work" is absolutely essential to maintain the encyclopedia's qulaity. I assume you don't believe Ta-Nehisi Coates was advocating harassment when he wrote: "Good fact-checkers have a preternatural inclination toward pedantry, and sometimes will address you in a prosecutorial tone. That is their job and the adversarial tone is even more important than the actual facts they correct." His remarks  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 05:22, 15 August 2016 (UTC)
    • Perhaps it should say "non-constructive criticism of your work"? Praemonitus (talk) 18:01, 15 August 2016 (UTC)
      • I agree that "criticism of your work" should not generally be interpreted as a negative thing, and high-level studies of Wikipedia interaction often make that mistake. Still, we at the Signpost are not doing the study, merely reporting on the study. So rephrasing things to reflect the way we might wish the study had been done is not really an option. -Pete (talk) 19:22, 15 August 2016 (UTC)

WikiCon North America

I see the announcement in English and Spanish but no Francophone wikilove. Any Signpost people ask why not or if French is supported? Les pauvres gens du Québec. Ô Canada!

--DHeyward (talk) 11:11, 18 August 2016 (UTC)