Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2011-08-08

Comments

The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2011-08-08. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Arbitration report: Manipulation of BLPs case opened; one case comes to a close (5,052 bytes · 💬)

You know, I'm personally sort of sick of the whole "What does it tell us" thing. Herp derp,I had know idea I was supposed to conduct myself civilly, or that talk pages are not for off-topic discussion. That's like saying the OJ Simpson trial set a firm "no murdering people" precedent. If you're going to have this sort of feature at all, at least focus on the exceptional aspects of the case, or the clarifications made in terms of policy. Tell us something we don't know. ☻☻☻Sithman VIII !!☻☻☻ 23:05, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

The segment should provide a snapshot of what the case says (usually, in more simple language), and those who want more detail or want to examine things further can go to the case page itself. Often, the most simplest of issues (to me, or even you) is either a source or a major factor in the multiple disputes that fester on Wikipedia, and despite how obvious some of these things are, they still end up needing to be reinforced in this last step of DR. Alternatively, it's a refusal to fully comply with the principles behind policies which leads to further escalation of the disputes. For example, what most administrators considered obvious (i.e. not to block a fellow party in a case) was apparently considered a grey line by a particular admin (about the time the case was opened), and strangely enough, in direct opposition to the Community, that admin still does may not fully comprehend how problematic it was for him to create the spectacle that he did. A few have suggested that it was a failure to explicitly reinforce the principle (that-seems-obvious-to-many) that became the source of further conflict at the conclusion of the case, so that could be part of the reason why it was explicitly reinforced at the conclusion of the case. But obviously, one can't ignore the fact that if the admin in question was openly and explicitly addressed early on (in line with the urges and requests to do so), a more positive resolution for the project would have emerged overall.

As to what's particularly different about this formulation of civility, this was a rare time where AC placed some importance (or emphasis) on a WMF Resolution - one which at least some users were unaware of. The other part which should be of interest is the fact that AC have spelled out (in a different way) that complying with the letter of a policy, and complying with the principles that gave rise to the policy, are not the same thing, and that sanctions will result for those who do not get their act together (be it due to unwillingness or inability). It was thought that by pointing out what the decision tells us, readers would become (more) aware and/or be reminded of some of the principles which are taken for granted, and that they will reflect on them enough (ideally, to a point where they will not end up in front of ArbCom over the same "issues" one day). How successful we are at doing so is possibly debatable, but it's something. Nevertheless, I do welcome feedback, and although I have received more positive feedback than negative feedback as far as this segment is concerned, if it's no longer of interest, then there shouldn't be a problem scrapping it (particularly when it can be more time-consuming than much of the rest of the report). Ncmvocalist (talk) 14:14, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

I like the "What is the effect" sections, maybe just rename them? -- Jeandré, 2011-08-09t20:52z

"Final decision" like the Arb pages? -- Jeandré, 2011-08-11t12:36z

In light of "and opened a new case this week", how about changing "the Committee passed a motion to accept two separate cases" to something clearer? It's explained in the 2 bullet points, but caused a double take before I read them. -- Jeandré, 2011-08-09t20:52z

I'm not going to be available on a regular basis after Friday (RL overtakes). Still, do you have any suggestions (both on what the segment could be renamed, and a wording that might make sense without causing the confusion)? Ncmvocalist (talk) 14:13, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

"Following a request for arbitration, the committee passed a motion to split manipulation of BLPs from the Cirt and Jayen466 request (both are currently open). No other cases are currently open." -- Jeandré, 2011-08-11t12:36z

In the news: Israeli news focuses on Wikimania; worldwide coverage of contributor decline and gender gap; brief news (6,248 bytes · 💬)

Ref types, old and new

   I share the interest in "When Knowledge Isn’t Written, Does It Still Count?" (WKIW ??). I think this is important for WP, and/but i am toying with the concept of an en.WikiOR, perhaps conceived as an appendix to en.WP; that might be the interim way (today? our second decade?) to "catch this wave" while we hash out policies for e.g. templates that paint paragraphs yellow to indicate they're an exception to WP:OR. Is this where we start discussing the issue as opposed to the article? Should it go immediately onto VP?
--Jerzy•t 19:17, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

There is some discussion at m:Research_talk:Oral_Citations. Calliopejen1 (talk) 00:57, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

The project on oral citations reminds me of a type of reference that could be novel: the text of historical markers, photos of which can be shown simply via a click-through from the citation. Right now if you cited one with a <ref> element, dullards would accuse you of malpractice. But there's actually nothing wrong with it. The text of historical markers tend to be a highly vetted and pretty reliable source (WP:RS). — ¾-10 03:49, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Text of markers and labels is, indeed, verifiable, and has been used in the past. Rich Farmbrough, 12:56, 10 August 2011 (UTC).

Contributorship

The article contains the rather dubious assertion that "Mr Wales revealed that he plans to double the number of people actively editing the site's pages within a year", probably a misquote, but also . [sic]—What happened at the end there? howcheng {chat} 23:35, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

Regarding contributor decline a friend of mine recently joined Wikipedia for the first time. Lacking auto patrol his first article (on a secondary school) came under sustained deletionist attack and although the article survived he gave up contributing afterwards saying it was too much hassle. If Jimbo is going to find new editors we need to make this place a little more welcoming first!  Francium12  00:20, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

I don't think it's worth throwing (divisive) terms like "deletionist" around. The simple, clear fact is that people that start out by contributing new articles tend to get their hands burnt. Either we need to relax the existing consensus on speedy deletion, or we need to discourage article creation in mainspace. Probably the latter IMHO. - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 11:44, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

I don't think you can discount wikiphilosophy entirely on this point. It definitely affects how people approach this. Being an incrementalist and eventualist, I'd vote for the former rather than the latter. I think the latter is a step toward killing the incentive for new editors to start contributing to Wikipedia. I even view it as a latent form of newbie-biting in itself. It implicitly says, "Your new article about secondary school XYZ is worthless to us. Go away." Bad idea, IMO, and deletionist and immediatist. Kills the community and the potential of what Wikipedia can eventually become (i.e., evolve into). — ¾-10 03:58, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

That's an odd attitude to have, Jarry1250 -- "people that start out by contributing new articles tend to get their hands burnt". If I had gotten my hands burnt when I started, I doubt I'd still be contributing eight and a-half years later. And from discussions I've had with a number of non-Wikipedians, I've received anecdotal evidence that confirm Francium12's story. Most people who get their hands burnt never go any further with Wikipedia, & many of them form a hostile opinion of it, & the community around it. -- llywrch (talk) 04:51, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

I think you may have misunderstood what I was saying...? I meant that the answer to the question "Where should I start?" should not be article creation, because starting there results in a lot of burnt hands and therefore a lot of potential contributors driven away (I was agreeing on this point). Much better to start on something of lower stakes (editing existing articles) and working up. - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 11:36, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Because of our rules, we basically don't let newbies create lasting articles. We should probably stop pretending that we do, and make them edit a certain number of times first.- Peregrine Fisher (talk) 20:26, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Perhaps seasoned editors could actually sit down and make in-depth, carefully considered, additive contributions to the corpus, working in better collaboration with newbies, in subjective distinction to their addictive policing habits.FeatherPluma (talk) 05:22, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

Correction

The Jewish Chronicle is not an Israeli newspaper, but rather a British one. It is indeed Jewish, pertaining to the British-Jewish community, and it is considered pro-Israel, and yet it is not Israeli. 79.182.96.139 (talk) 04:24, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

Well spotted, I've removed that description. Robofish (talk) 21:19, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

News and notes: Wikimania a success; board letter controversial; and evidence showing bitten newbies don't stay (11,099 bytes · 💬)

>>The Hindi Wiktionary increased from 50,000 entries to over 100,000 entries this week, VibhijainBot creates thousands of entries about cities in India.

This is not a milestone but a huge disaster. Attempting to inflate the word count, vibhi jain has trashed an entire project by himself in a space of few days. Nearly 50000 entries have been created by taking names of indian cities (in english) from the census list, automatically transliterating them into different languages and creating pages with a single line description "X is a city in india". And the transliteration is erroneous in most of the cases as Vibhi jain doesnt know most of these languages. He has just input the latin characters into the google transliteration tool and generated wrongly spelled names in half a dozen languages. Hindi wiktionary has ended up with thousands of entries where even the word is not spelled right!! Imagine that - a dictionary that couldnt get the spelling of the entries right. This shoudln't be announced in the signpost as a milestone. This is an excellent example of how things can be screwed up immature teenagers who view wiki as a MMORPG and chase numbers.

Unless someone with some sense in the Hindi wiktionary community controls this over eager pre-teen, who seems to think wiki projects are his personal playground, Hindi wiktionary is going to end up as a big joke (if it is not one already).

Wow, that's right. This is really a case of hyperactivity getting on the way of quality. Several of the entries that Vibhijainbot has created are erroneous and most definitely all of them (randomly picked several to check) just contain single sentence as mentioned above and there are about 61,700 of them. And the insane thing is that there exists another bot by the name Mayurbot, which has so far created close to 27,700 similar entries, in parallel to those of Vibhijainbt, containing the similar formatted single line. This link has got the numbers. So, Hindi wiktionary has gone from 12,000 to 100,000 in a matter of few days. That's mind boggling and definitely not an achievement. I guess something is completely wrong here. - DSachan (talk) 01:28, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

The ethos of en.wiki has shifted (and is still shifting) from "quantity" towards "quality"; that should apply to other wikipedias too. Mass creation of single-sentence placename stubs without any fact-checking is definitely at the "quantity" end of the spectrum. bobrayner (talk) 07:23, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I don't think it's a good idea either; but anyhow, it's what Special:Nuke was created for. - Jarry1250 

^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 11:48, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

Also it would be helpful if celebrating article milestones was based on more stringent criteria of what constitutes a useful article. Erik Zachte (talk) 13:29, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

To an extent; but if we invest effort in setting up a new metric, people will try to game that metric instead. Maybe we could start praising articles with more substantial content (let's say 2500 bytes); somebody will think of a way to automatically fill articles with 2500 bytes of cruft which has little real value - in the case of placename stubs, it would probably involve coordinates, nearby cities, which province/country the place is in, and a "see also" list padded with similar placenames. Maybe we would react to that by encouraging an incremental, cooperative process to build better content; then somebody will think of a way to game the new metric by giving each of these articles a 20-edit history involving superficial tweaks (for instance, categorisation) by a different account.

People are awkward. (Yes, including me). bobrayner (talk) 14:12, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

Mass creation of articles has occured on the English wikipedia in the past, and to a certain extent continues on in small batches. It's just part of the process of filling out articles, it also attracts editors(as is likely on the India Wikipedia) although with diminishing returns once main subjects are covers. Regards, SunCreator ^(talk) 11:28, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

I think the YouTube channel is bad, with little coverage, and of low quality. As an outsider who tried to participate through the internet, I was extremely disappointed. 86.196.149.168 (talk) 03:12, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

I didn't think it was that bad (videos of individual events are still forthcoming, however) - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 11:48, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

• About the research. Has anyone tried to assess the quality of new user's contributions? I can't help but think the trend could be explained by an inevitable decrease in good faith new users as the pool of potential good users gets drained over time, and an increase in bad faith spammers and POV pushers as Wikipedia grows more influential. jorgenev 05:21, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

"the length of an articles(sic) the newbies are editing provided him with evidence that editors are editing longer articles", that would be because an average article is longer then. I would say however it's much harder to add content to more mature articles, because good faith additions without a WP:CITE (or even with a cite that does not meet reliable source) are many times reverted. Wikipedia internally operates on multiple systems of quality requirements depending on the article you edit; so it can be quite confusing to a newbie or even an existing editor that moves from one area of Wikipedia to another. Regards, SunCreator ^(talk) 12:05, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

—

Regarding the reversion of newbies, I realize that it is a large, multivariate topic, but I know from experience that there is a tendency of laziness among plenty of experienced Wikipedians to just delete a newbie contribution rather than bother to fix the problems with what is clearly a good-faith contribution motivated by a valid content-creation or -improvement motive. One can counter that the experienced Wikipedians are too overworked to take on the added effort of bothering to fix rather than delete. I know that many people have validly discussed that aspect. But my argument is that it doesn't matter what the complication is—what matters is the end result. If we don't stop this laziness, we are gradually killing the project, by killing its community of volunteers. It will be a gradual death of natural attrition failing to be offset by natural growth. If you see a complication that is standing in the way tactically to a strategic goal, you either suck it up and deal with it, or you allow the strategic goal to be defeated. Look at this from a soldier's perspective. Specifically, a soldier who believes that he is fighting for the "right side", and that the war needs to be won. When a tactical obstacle gets in his strategic way, he doesn't cave in to laziness and say, "Well, I'm too lazy to ford that stream or scale that concrete wall, so I guess I'll just turn around and wander off in another direction." That's the way to lose the war, regardless of whether it's cosmically fair or unfair. If building a properly constructed, comprehensive, dynamic, powerful, positive-influence Wikipedia while swimming against the current of apathy and entropy is the war that we are choosing to fight, then we can't win it unless we overcome our own laziness and fatigue. — ¾-10 14:51, 13 August 2011 (UTC)

The way the results of the newbie retention study are presented here suffers from the classic "Correlation is not causation" fallacy. Sure, editors who have their first contributions rejected will be very likely also those who stay away soon after. But that doesn't mean the first fact is the cause of the second. More likely than not, both facts are largely caused independently by another, much more explanatory factor: the crappiness of the newbie's contribution. That also goes for the observation that people who are very active and prolific during their very first sessions but have these contributions rejected are even more likely to stay away. Sure. We all know the typical profile of the kind of contributor who this description fits: people who write their autobiographies. Of course, if you come here with the sole aim of writing about yourself, or some other non-notable topic you have a COI in, the likelihood both of having your contributions deleted and of finding no further motivation for other contributions afterwards will be high. Your lack of motivation for further contribs is not caused by the rejection; you most likely never had any such motivation to begin with. – Similar things are likely true for people whose first contributions consist of political POV rants, or of series of copyvio images. The dangerous thing about the way this study is presented here is that it implicitly suggests a course of action: wikipedians, don't reject newbies' contributions! That may be a very mistaken conclusion. The only factor that ought to guide us in deciding what to do with newbies' contributions is their quality. If a lot of it is objectively crappy, as unfortunately it is, there's not much we can do about it. Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:53, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

Good counterpoint. I suppose there's an 80-20 thing between your comment and mine, where yours accurately deals with the 80. My exhortations, applying really only to the 20, aren't much good without that. Operational definitions for use in differentiating the subclasses (80 from 20) would be valuable as experienced Wikipedians go about their watchlisting. Some simple heuristics for saying "this anon has close to zero promise of becoming a long-term contributor asset; whereas that anon has a good chance". Then putting the effort into helping only the latter. The fact that our resources for offering help (that is, our own volunteer hours) have scarcity makes this approach worthwhile. In an ideal world, we could just heap endless AGF on everyone, and hold everyone's hand and mother them to no end. But we live in the real world, and we need to allocate the scarce resources appropriately. — ¾-10 15:52, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

Technology report: Wikimania technology roundup; brief news (477 bytes · 💬)

• I am looking forward for the technology to be get implemented. — Saifulwebid ^{(Talk • Contrib. • Main acc.)} 01:15, 23 August 2011 (UTC)

Wikimania: Seventh annual Wikimedia conference concluded in Haifa, Israel (3,710 bytes · 💬)

• Very descriptive article! I noticed Jimmy Wales said something about improving Wikinews, etc. Why isn't this on Wikinews too? xD  Diego  talk  00:05, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

   Done See Wikinews Water Cooler. —Tom Morris (talk) 06:56, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

• I'm afraid the Chapters Committee did not meet at all (or plan to) - there was a Chapters Meeting though: for both chapters and interested foundation people (there were none of the latter category this year as far as I recall) or others. effeietsanders 05:20, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

   Fixed —Tom Morris (talk) 06:38, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

• I see no bot reversion in the talkpage version history. What's Jimmy referring to exactly? --Cybercobra (talk) 06:39, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

  Jimmy was saying he edited WP:RM directly. —Tom Morris (talk) 06:57, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

  And while Wikimania is technically over,Harej and I discussed a user-freindliness upgrade to his bot, at 1:30 this morning on the Technion campus, here in Haifa. What a productive event it has been. Rich Farmbrough, 08:05, 9 August 2011 (UTC).
  

• For audio coverage of the conference, the Wikipedia Weekly podcast recorded three episodes, including an interview with Jimmy Wales and one covering GLAM exclusively. It can be found here: Wikipedia Weekly. -- Fuzheado | Talk 18:32, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

Congratulations on the comeback of "Wikipedia Weekly" and thanks for pointing out that the link was missing - it was however present in the shorter Wikimania summary in "News and notes".

On participant blogged a "Best of Wikimania 2011" collection of quotes and tweets from the conference, also worth reading.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 09:47, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

• Domus, an Italian art/architecture magazine, covered Wikimania in their "Design" section, which is quite interesting to me. It seems that Wikipedia's presence "in real life" is becoming more and more prominent. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 20:47, 11 August 2011 (UTC)
• Just two comments - the early commers party was on Wednesday, but the conference itself started on Thursday; more then 726 people attended the conference (726 badges were given, but some entered without badges). Deror (talk) 09:28, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

WikiProject report: Shooting the breeze with WikiProject Firearms (513 bytes · 💬)

An article on gun myths from movies. I wouldn't be surprised if we had an article on the subject. It's been covered in a variety of RSs, I believe. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 20:45, 10 August 2011 (UTC)