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Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2021-08-29

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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2021-08-29. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Community view: Making Olympic history on Wikipedia (1,217 bytes · 💬)

Great story, thanks for sharing.--Vulp❯❯❯here! 02:32, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

  • Tremendous, bravo! Aza24 (talk) 05:26, 2 September 2021 (UTC)
  • What a lovely story! And a great example of what makes editing so fun. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 19:26, 2 September 2021 (UTC)
  • Nice to see your perspective in your own words, as well as reading The Guardian piece. Thanks for that penultimate paragraph—it needs to be said more often—and as for the part about you still feeling new, the site is so broad and complex an ecosystem that you will never stop learning things about it. — Bilorv (talk) 21:25, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

Gallery: Our community in 20 graphs (6,711 bytes · 💬)

  • Thanks for pulling these out! It's a good way to highlight some of the findings and a good way to lead people like me to actually read the report! Ganesha811 (talk) 20:11, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
  • Is there a glossary? Eg what is a tenured contributor? (What is a contributor?) Gog the Mild (talk) 21:11, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
    • I'll just repost the link above to the original report m:Community Insights/Community Insights 2021 Report. Once you start in with definitions, you're on the slippery slope to a full 30 page report. I think these graphs give you about 80% of the content without all the pages! Smallbones(smalltalk) 22:53, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
      • In case anyone else was searching for definitions, without wanting to read the entire report, you get most of it from m:Community Insights/Community Insights 2021 Report/Survey Methodology. Survey conducted in 2020; email invitation sent to 26,000 active editors with “email this user” activated; 1800 completed at least half. Newcomer is someone who started editing in 2019 or 2020. Tenured (presumably) means someone from 2018 or earlier. To judge the significance of these results, it would be good to see some “n=” figures on these graphs. 2A02:C7D:A8FE:7600:4435:A3EB:3E41:3C80 (talk) 10:01, 3 September 2021 (UTC)
  • See also "Recent research" in the June issue with more background about the race and ethnicity results, which are the first of their kind. Regards, HaeB (talk) 21:14, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
    • It'd be interesting to see a more in depth analysis, along the lines of the Pipeline paper mentioned elsewhere in the June issue, than just comparing to total population numbers. Anomie⚔ 12:39, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
  • 73% of contributors feel they have the tools they need? 67% say the software is easy to use? 57% say the WMF prioritizes the software that's needed most? Those aren't great numbers, but they're higher than I'd expect. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 23:05, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
    I'm sure we are missing plenty of potential contributors who give up because they don't feel these things. Phil Bridger (talk) 22:03, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
    Absolutely. And among many existing contributors, I think there's sometimes a lack of imagination about how much better things could (and ought) to be. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 22:18, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
  • We should update WP:BIAS to cite some of these more recent figures for its demographic data. signed, Rosguill talk 18:51, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
  • There's no such thing as a "tenured contributor." BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 06:52, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
    • Reminds me of the joke about the "tenured grad student". That is, that it's a misspelling of "ten-year". Anomie⚔ 12:39, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
  • There really isn't anything new to be said now IMO (but then again, even I didn't read the entire thing as I found these graphs a bit boring). We can definitely do better. On a side note, did you guys deliberately use "Among US" in the US editors' race graph? Tube·of·Light 03:02, 1 September 2021 (UTC)
  • It would be interesting to see a similar analysis by income level, social class and education. Perhaps it would inform the outreach efforts. Alaexis¿question? 06:35, 1 September 2021 (UTC)
  • Some of these graphs seem to be based on small data samples - the one listing ethnicities in the UK is based on responses from 67 people (m:Community Insights/Community Insights 2021 Report/Endnotes). 3% of 67 is about 2, so I don't think we can draw much from the fact that there weren't any black people in that sample. Hut 8.5 18:44, 1 September 2021 (UTC)
  • I don't know why we'd expect major changes from 2019 to 2020, and attribute differences to anything more than random fluctuation. Also, am I reading right that en.wiki feel safer than average and have experienced harassment more than average? It wouldn't really surprise me. — Bilorv (talk) 21:36, 1 September 2021 (UTC)
  • I too have a problem with the use of the undefined word "tenured". If the usage is intended to be comparable to the usage in an academic context, then that is an all or nothing proposition. Either the PhD (or equivalent) has tenure or they don't. Another definition is length of service. Editor A has a tenure of two weeks, editor B has a tenure of four months and editor C has a tenure of eight years. What does that tell us? Is there some sort of time/number of edits threshold? Is editor D who has made 2000 edits over two years, blocked three times, brought to ANI eight times and warned there, most of their article edits reverted, and spending endless time bickering and arguing "tenured"? Is editor E who has made 500 edits in six months, focusing on excellent content contributions, never been blocked or even warned, and is now starting to help at the Teahouse "not tenured"? Shoddy presentation. Cullen328 Let's discuss it 02:32, 11 September 2021 (UTC)

In the media: Vive la différence! (20,672 bytes · 💬)

  • Why not a single Wikipedia article for controversial topics? See futuristic project meta:Abstract Wikipedia with the goal of "people can create and maintain Wikipedia articles in a language-independent way." --Bamyers99 (talk) 20:41, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
    • We covered that proposal in a past issue: In focus, April 2020. It has also been known as Wikilambda. ☆ Bri (talk) 21:06, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
      Wikilambda (know known as Wikifunctions) is not equivalent to abstract Wikipedia, but a subproject of it. It can be understood as a wiki of computer code or algorithms. It’s to be used by abstract Wikipedia as a technical foundation but the aim is not at all the same. TomT0m (talk) 13:56, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
      • Several years ago The Signpost had an interesting article comparing the article "Jerusalem" in a few languages, I think they were English, Hebrew, and two Arabic Wikipedias. Anyone who has read the article would realize that some topics are going to remain irreconcilable. - kosboot (talk) 15:58, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
  • The Global Citizen article was a fun challenge, but it would have been nice if Rodriguez had taken a little more time to compile information on the women at hand. Most of what she wrote could be found with a few Google searches. Some interviews to get some additional biographical or career info would have been helpful. -Indy beetle (talk) 21:44, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
  • Different languages are a problem for the entire society :) We need Universal translator. Hopefully, this problem will be solved this century. Of course, even when we get the tech thanks to our new AI overlords, I wonder how many decades will pass before some local communities agree to fold (with cries of 'English Wikipedia imperialism', 'our rules are better' and simply the organizational inertia and dislike of changes 'this worked for so long, why change anything in the background...). Btw, there already are machine-translated English Wikipedia forks out there, one of the more useful parts of the Wiki-forks ecosystem (gaz.wiki, wikiqube, not sure if anyone researched these phenomena?). One could argue WMF should be already looking into the machine translation service, given such forks exist and have some utility (and for those who don't know, machine translation in many languages, ex. English to Polish and vice versa, already produces very good results). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:06, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
    You can read about Cebuano Wikipedia which is one of the largest language Wikipedias due to machine translations and the contentious discussion whether to delete it or not over at meta:Proposals for closing projects/Closure of Cebuano Wikipedia ~ Shushugah (he/him • talk) 17:13, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
    Linguistic diversity is a boon, not a curse. The pros of having different versions for each language version far outweigh the cons in many ways. — Sagotreespirit (talk) 05:43, 10 September 2021 (UTC)
    @Sagotreespirit What booms? Different viewpoints? We can get them here. Small wikis tend to have more biased viewpoints since they don't attract diverse contributors. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 12:46, 10 September 2021 (UTC)
  • I was hoping the August 4 Haaretz article would have a mention, I assumed the Al Jazeera-Croatia article was inspired by it. It's sadly locked up, so I haven't read it. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:35, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
    • I was hoping for it too, but I have at least 2 problems writing about news stories that neither I, nor my readers can read. Omer Benjakob, along with Stephen Harrison, is in the next batch of inductees into the Hall of Fame of journalists who write about Wikipedia (a very select institution). Maybe we could get the Wikipedia Library to create a Signpost package so that we can get complete coverage from every newspaper rhat writes about Wikipedia without paywall. Maybe Omer is reading this (Hi, O!) and now will just email me the story any time he mentions Wikipedia. BTW - most important thing of coutse - did he mention The Signpost? In short - there's a problem here, but I don't know how to fix it! Smallbones(smalltalk) 19:15, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
      עומר בן יעקב Since we're talking about him, we can always ping the guy. Please remove the "This is a subscriber-only article." ;-) Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:22, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
      @Gråbergs Gråa Sång It appears the Haaretz article is no longer paywalled. I like the idea of adding more newspapers to WikipediaLibrary generally, but no idea where/who to proceed with that. ~ Shushugah (he/him • talk) 11:28, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
      @Shushugah It is paywalled for me. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:33, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
  • @JimmyWales must remember a different internet than I do. The internet has always been a great source of disinformation. That's what makes it such a wonderful marketplace for the good and bad. If it weren't for crap, you couldn't recognize quality. Not Wilkins (talk) 14:29, 31 August 2021 (UTC)NotWilkins
    • @Not Wilkins: Almost everybody chooses to remember the past wearing rose-colored glasses. Jimmy certainly did in that story. Or perhaps he did it simply as a rhetorical device - he can say it, but nobody was really expected to believe it. In either case, it brings up the question of how the disinformation now differs from the disinformation then. I'd say that back then it was more disorganized or chaotic. Now it looks more organized, or at least concentrated into a few groups. Another way to look at it is that now the disinformation is more politicized and commercialized. It always was - just more so now. Smallbones(smalltalk) 16:08, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
  • Some lovely articles here. I enjoyed "Why Basketball 3×3 Star Stefanie Dolson, Others Fact Check Their Wiki Pages", "There are 11,656 athletes at the Olympics. Guy Fraser wanted them all on Wikipedia" and "7 Notable African Women Activists Who Deserve Wikipedia Pages". All have issues (I'm reminded of a Signpost report I can't find summarising research that found that the media, wrongly, presents us as static, uniform-quality and mostly complete) but they report on Wikipedia well enough. The crypto nonsense is less lovely; apparently some bros who want to invent the biggest scam since pyramid schemes say that Wikipedia lacks "an advanced consensus mechanism" (we have many of these) and "a scalable and fast blockchain with smart contracts that implement any operating logic" (well... I suppose this we do lack). I see no reason to trust that they can introduce a system for paying editors that won't be gamed to oblivion and the ungrateful bastards don't get that our "uneven coverage" is the result of millions of hours of hard work that they simply will never get people to donate. — Bilorv (talk) 20:57, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

break

  • TRIPODI: From above: "Dr. Tropodi, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, reports that biographies of women are more likely to be nominated for deletion than similar male biographies." - not true at all. Tripodi's paper neither tested this proposition, not made any such conclusion. What Tripodi's paper was actually about was well reported in the last issue, with an excellent analysis of the statistical flaws in her conclusions. Johnbod (talk) 14:52, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
    • @HaeB:'s review of the paper in the last issue, was indeed very good and I'll ask him to let me know if I've made a mistake here. Probably the most confusing part of Tripodi's paper was that it wasn't about discriminatory deletions of women's articles, it was about discriminatory nominations for deletion of women's biographies. She tried to show that there was a surplus of non-justified deletion nominations for women. *Not getting deleted* here is considered evidence of bias! HaeB pointed that out very well. But how to determine that there was a surplus of nominations for deletion? Just compare these nominations to similar nominations. She couldn't compare it to something totally dissimilar, e.g. AfD nominations of geography articles. So she picked something similar, men's bios. Perhaps I misstated when I wrote "similar male biographies" instead of "similar AfDs of male biographies". As pointed out very well by HaeB, it turns out the males bios really aren't that similar, e.g. different ages of the bio articles, and different ages of the subjects. Again HaeB addressed that very well. I'm sorry if leaving out 2 short words caused any confusion. BTW, I'm sure there must be a joke in here about Seemingly unrelated regressions vs. Totally unrelated regressions, but I'll let others take that risk.

Smallbones(smalltalk) 16:46, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

      • This is what Tripodi says: "I tested the following hypotheses:
H1. The proportion of biographies about cis-gender women (she/her/hers) nominated for deletion each month will be greater than the proportion of available biographies about cis-gender women (she/her/hers) on Wikipedia during the same time period.
H2. Articles about cis-gender women (she/her/hers) are more likely to be misclassified as non-notable (i.e. “kept”) than articles about cis-gender men (he/him/his).

- I'm not seeing anything about "biographies of women are more likely to be nominated for deletion than similar male biographies". As I suspect Tripodi knows, there is other recent research more relevant to the the male/female ratios, which I won't attempt to summarize here. Johnbod (talk) 16:53, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

H1 is clearly a typo in the original. It literally says H1: A > A. Not a promising hypothesis. The 2nd "cis-gender women (she/her/hers)" should be changed to "cis-gender men (he/him/his)" or H2:A>B. This just says that "biographies of women are more likely to be nominated for deletion than ,,, male biographies". ("similar" not included here)

"H2. Articles about cis-gender women (she/her/hers) are more likely to be misclassified as non-notable (i.e. “kept”) than articles about cis-gender men (he/him/his)" can clearly be restated as:

H2. Articles about cis-gender men (he/him/his) are less likely to be misclassified as non-notable (i.e. “kept”) than articles about cis-gender women (she/her/hers)", i.e. similarly nominated men's bios are less likely to be kept than women's nominations. She's trying to compare similar things, AfD nominations of men to AfD nominations of women.

Hope that helps. Smallbones(smalltalk) 17:52, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

  • Actually H1 could be correct as written. It is comparing the proportions of women's bios at AfD to their prevalence in all bios. In other words, if 15% of all biographies are about women, then an equitable proportion would be 15% of the biographies nominated for deletion are about women. ☆ Bri (talk) 18:23, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
    • Possible with an emphasis on "available" but seeing as she's talking about proportions i,e #W/(#W + #M) it comes down to the same thing - comparing the number of women's articles nominated to number of men's articles nominated. Smallbones(smalltalk) 18:53, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
  • Your first change is also completely wrong. The whole point of her research was that she was comparing, in proportion terms, nominated female biographies against "available" (ie all existing) female biographies, not against male ones. A rather dubious excercise, as pointed out last issue, but that is what she did! From her final section:

"My dataset revealed that the proportion of women nominated for deletion each month (out of all biographies nominated for deletion) was greater than the proportion of available biographies about women on English-language Wikipedia more generally." Johnbod (talk) 02:40, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

Somebody is missing something here

@Johnbod: It could be me - but as I understand what you're saying is that Tripodi did not compare AfDs for men and women. Is that what you are saying? It is quite obvious that she did. Quoting from her paper:

  • "this article demonstrates that biographies about women who meet Wikipedia’s criteria for inclusion are more frequently considered non-notable and nominated for deletion compared to men’s biographies." (abstract)
  • "Specifically, my data indicate that biographies about women who meet Wikipedia’s criteria for inclusion are more likely to be considered non-notable than men’s." (intro)
  • "I analyzed nominations by month for the entire year of 2017, 2018, and 2019 and the first two months of 2020 (totaling 22,174 biographical entries around a she or he gender binary)." (i.e. dataset examined includes bios classified as male or female. (Data and methods)
  • "If no gender bias exists, the percentage of miscategorized biographies should not vary by gender." (Data and methods)
  • Figure 1. is a direct comparisons of men and women bios. "Men" and "Women" are labeled. (Findings)
  • "My data indicate that women’s biographies are more frequently miscategorized as non-notable than men’s (see Figure 2)." (Findings)

So men's and women's nomination are directly compared. What am I missing about your complaint? If she didn't mean these statement, according to your view, what do you think she meant? If I can figure out what you mean and consider it to be correct, then I will issue a correction. Until then. I have to ask that you not try to correct Signpost articles. That is a matter for staff of The Signpost and ultimately the editor-in-chief, me. Signpost articles are signed by the contributors, changing them is equivalent to changing somebody's comment on a talk page. Smallbones(smalltalk) 14:24, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

And I have to ask that you don't attempt to just rewrite what you think a (presumably peer-reviewed) paper ought to have said, when it clearly doesn't, as you did above (previous section). The analysis in your last issue was spot on; it's pity you didn't leave it at that. Many people including me have corrected various things in Signpost articles in the past, & I don't accept we can't. It's a bit rich saying that when you had just claimed the Tripodi paper must have meant something different to what it actually says! Johnbod (talk) 03:48, 2 September 2021 (UTC)
"Dr. Tripodi, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, reports that biographies of women are more likely to be nominated for deletion than similar male biographies," appears to be correct, as illustrated by the bullet points above. The analysis in Recent research presented in our last issue is indeed very impressive and readers and anybody who has any questions about the paper should consult it. I believe the statement above is entirely consistent with what the original paper says, as well as what HaeB's analysis says. No correction is needed.
As far as readers - or anybody else who is not on the staff of The Signpost - making post-publication "corrections" to the content of an article, that is inconsistent with the project's rules and 16 years of The Signpost's practice. We are an independent newspaper that presents the news truthfully to the best of our ability as well as our contributor's opinions. We do not necessarily represent - or claim to represent - the views of the WMF, its affiliates, ArbCom, admins, or even non-staffers who are part of our very diverse community. I believe that our readers would not want it otherwise. That means that The Signpost has the final say on our content. Please do not ever change our published content in opposition to the views of our staff. Of course the overall rules of enWiki apply here. The applicable rules are those that apply to WikiProjects and talk page content, e.g. do not change the content of another user's signed content. You may make a request at WP:MfD or even ArbCom if you disagree. Smallbones(smalltalk) 13:31, 2 September 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia's "language problem"

  • The "one Wikipedia" proposal is naive and vague, and can be dangerous if actually put into action. Forcing all Wikipedia language versions to present one monopolized version of the truth, which will inevitably be Anglophone-centered, would be a disaster that would completely infuriate the non-English Wikipedia communities, who tend to see the English Wikipedia as one of the most problematic language editions with its incomprehensible bureaucracy and often belligerent users. They would perceive this as intrusive digital colonialism and an outright invasion (see also Wikipedia:Ignore Meta). Also, imagine the level of cross-wiki vandalism and edit wars that would exponentially increase as a result.
While written with good intentions, the "language problem" article is clearly written by someone who does not know the details of why it is necessary to have separate projects with separate policies and content. Notability, copyright (especially regarding local fair-use laws), real-life inherent cultural differences, and many other aspects of wiki projects all need to be different, and none of these topics are addressed by the article.
Having original content in different language versions has benefits far outweighing the downsides. At most, we can use WikiLambda or something similar to import basic statistical facts into Wikipedia articles in different language versions, but this should not be extended to complex prose prone to POV problems. — Sagotreespirit (talk) 05:43, 10 September 2021 (UTC)

News and notes: Enough time left to vote! IP ban (13,372 bytes · 💬)

The nomination period for the Movement Charter Drafting Committee has been extended until the 14th. MER-C 19:52, 29 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks - changed it now. Smallbones(smalltalk) 19:57, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
  • It's really difficult to try and analyse RfA by numbers. For example: Look at the most active admins this year, then look at the most active four years ago, in 2017. Most of these very active admins were elected a long time ago, and many of the same names appear in both lists. The admin corps (which, contrary to the bot metric, I'd imagine numbers less than 200 that actively make significant or large-volume admin actions) seems a rather steady figure. In fact, monthly admin actions have more or less been the same since 2009 (~100,000 monthly), which really casts doubt upon the graphs that show a supposed decline in active admin corps.
    But arguably actions by volume is a poor measure regardless. Some actions create a lot of log entries with little benefit, and others do the converse. Also, I think the the 15-25 admins annually churned out by post-2012 RfA is just statistically insignificant, given that much the currently active admin corps were elected prior. Finally, we have to consider the usage of bots and abuse filters. Disallow filters reduce the need for blocks. User:ST47ProxyBot, which has recently started blocking more types of proxies, has made almost one million blocks in under a month of operation. These blocks will probably decrease the number of blocks made by human admins.
    All this is to say, these methods to try and assess whether the current levels of RfA output is a problem have some methodological issues. As does analysis on the basis of File:Wp.en.admin-active-recent.svg, if that graph is being used to imply that enwiki is slowly becoming like Commons' Deletion Discussions with six month backlogs. I think we do have a problem at RfA, but the problem isn't that we're slowly moving towards losing our admin corps. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 20:42, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
    • Are you saying we aren't slowly losing our admin corps? It's pretty clear to me that is exactly what is happening. If that curve doesn’t bend back up, what happens to enwp is as inevitable as death and taxes – it just isn’t a healthy, self sustaining org. Bots will just postpone the crash. Automated tools still need people, and people’s judgment is foundational for good stewardship and regulation of the project. ☆ Bri (talk) 21:14, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
      • I just watched 2 people give up on the pipe-line to becoming contributing editors in an area they care about, because some deletionist felt their hobby of "delete don't fix" was legitimate. You've got a troll problem where it takes only 1 person with a desire to destroy other's work a day to destroy a hundred people's days of work. Fix that, the deletionist problem and you'll be fine; otherwise you'll cast people out before they even come close to entering the pipeline. 76.115.28.15 (talk) 07:54, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
        • It doesn't even take malice. At AFC, no-one who created an account just to submit a draft is hanging around for more than a week to reply to feedback unless they've got a COI. By having a queue length longer than a week, we put off many of the people who could become good editors. We wiped the backlog, great, but now it's up to several weeks again: we need people on a day-to-day basis wiping the "6 days old" category, backlog drive or no backlog drive. To be honest, it would only take a couple more regulars than AFC already has. It would also help if we could find a way to communicate just how hard it is to create an article as your first contribution, to reduce the amount of time wasted and make sure people's first edits give them a sense of reward. — Bilorv (talk) 09:41, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
    • If we aren't replacing old admins with new ones then, even if every old admin stays just as active (or even picks up more slack to account for people who do leave), the bus factor increases. We've seen at least two cases of this so far in 2021: someone is no longer able to contribute and it causes huge disruption as other editors have to quickly adjust to learning complex skills in time-sensitive processes that really affect our reputation. — Bilorv (talk) 09:41, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
  • Until about 18 months ago, I kept an extremely close eye on all things RfA for well over a decade. Nowadays I’m not concerned whether or not en.Wiki will end up with too few ‘’truly active’’ admins to accomplish all tasks for which the tools and responsibilities are needed. I will however repeat this comment of mine from exactly two years ago: There is 'badgering' (to harass or annoy persistently – Merriam Webster), and genuine expression of concern that a vote might not conform to our Wikisocial norms. Practicing questionably high criteria or posing trick or irrelevant questions are issues that could be perhaps better addressed on the voter's own talk page where the editor is made to look and feel a fool slightly less publicly. Purely disingenuous, disruptive, or false voting probably ought to be responded to directly on the RfA.
In any case, the number of mini threaded discussions being moved to the RfA's talk page is becoming very much more frequent. This is not due to more consistent clerking, but is a result of the steady degradation of the environment of the process, the doubling of participation since the December 2015 reforms, and the classical propensity at Internet forums for everyone to add their two pence.
Anyone who does not read this and follow all its links before running for adminship only has themself to blame if their RfA turned out to be a bad trip whether it passed or not.
The data is only held for 5 years but at nearly 20,000 views in that period alone would appear to demonstrate that most candidates have been reading it. Interestingly, a logarithmic graph would probably reveal that the page views are concomittant with a growing lack of interest in becoming an admin. Hardly surprising in today's climate. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:49, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
  • Is the english wikipedia going to have a ip edit ban? Prairie Astronomer Contributions 21:55, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
    • Any IP ban talk that I know of is related to Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-11-01/Op-Ed the IP masking that WMF says will happen. This changes the balance between enforcement/anti-vandalism and freedom to edit anytime by anybody. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-06-27/News and notes shows one line of thought - that if IPs are masked, it's time to ban IP editing, Smallbones(smalltalk) 22:39, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
      • All the WMF had to do was to disable IP editing as opposed to creating some sort of mess... Firestar464 (talk) 04:16, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
        • I'd have thought the day they disable IP editing can't be long delayed. With a falling number of admins to cope with IP vandalism, and the doubtful/impossible tangle of IP masking, we've basically got to accept that people create an account if they want to edit. It's free, anyone can do it, so "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit" remains true. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:57, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
  • For what it is worth, my experience as one of those eight RfA candidates was absolutely awful and I advise anyone thinking about running to not run. The sky is not falling. Do WP:CCI instead. –♠Vami_IV†♠ 22:27, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
    • Yeah, I read that one. Certain people decided to turn it into a matter of American politics. Firestar464 (talk) 04:16, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
  • Seems Wikimedia need to be reminded that it does not create any policy or guidelines for Wikipedia. It was created to augment and support Wikipedia, not the other way around. Within Wikipedia things such as a Movement Charter, a proposed Code of Conduct, or the Code of Conduct Officers (real things they seem to think can be overlayed on Wikipedians) are at best essays and at worse a misguided confusion of roles. Randy Kryn (talk) 12:50, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
    • Do you perhaps mean "The Wikimedia Foundation"? "Wikimedia" and "Wikimedia Foundation" are not synonyms. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:20, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
      • Whichever Wikimedia thinks they can overlay a movement charter, code of conduct, and Code of Conduct Officers on Wikipedians, and also seemed to forget Wikipedia (and why they were created) when producing this graphic. Randy Kryn (talk) 21:14, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
        • That would be the Wikimedia Foundation. ("Wikimedia", as generally used, refers to Wikipedia plus sister projects, usually plus the supporting organizations.) --Yair rand (talk) 22:23, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
          • Thanks. Knew that though, was being rhetorical. Randy Kryn (talk) 11:53, 1 September 2021 (UTC)
          I would call "Wikipedia plus sister projects" the "Wikimedia projects". While Wikimedia could still potentially refer to the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia movement, I still think it was pretty clear what was meant in this case. ~~~~
          User:1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk)           14:52, 11 September 2021 (UTC)
  • As a frequent contributor to the Portuguese Wikipedia, here is my opinion. The English Wikipedia has very advanced abuse filters that are able to stop or discourage most types of childish vandalism, whereas the Portuguese Wikipedia has very weak abuse filters. The Portuguese Wikipedia also has far fewer recent changes patrollers than the English Wikipedia, so the community was in greater need of such measures. So far, the community is doing quite well with the IP ban, and there has been a steady total of about 9,500 active users for several months in a row. However, the Portuguese Wikipedia IP ban may not be advisable for most other Wikipedias. Each version has drastically different demographics, policies, abuse filters, and so forth. — Sagotreespirit (talk) 04:51, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
  • Wow, everyone who helped at the AfC backlog definitely deserves a praise! Looking at the graph, the end of the cleanup appears to have been timed perfectly as well. ~~~~
    User:1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk)     15:36, 11 September 2021 (UTC)
    • I'd like to see how many of those AfCs were actually published as articles. It's possible that the AfC backlog was eliminated by simply rejecting them all. Without any stats, how can we know? Nosferattus (talk) 00:43, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
  • I support banning IP addresses. They have attacked me way too many times, and I have regrettably used IP addresses for evasion a few times. Yleventa2 (talk) 14:00, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

News from Wiki Education: Changing the face of Wikipedia (918 bytes · 💬)

  • Globally, women made up 15% of contributors, but in Northern America, where Wiki Education’s programs operate, that number is 22%. Not to discourage Wiki Ed, but I feel like North America having a larger share of not-males than the world might also have to do with the fact that in North America women probably face less social, educational, and economic challenges that would otherwise prevent them from becoming editors. -Indy beetle (talk) 22:09, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
  • It would be interesting to see a similar analysis by income level, social class and education. Perhaps it would inform the outreach efforts. Alaexis¿question? 10:21, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

Recent research: IP editors, inclusiveness and empathy, cyclones, and world heritage (6,952 bytes · 💬)

  • Just wanted to say - thanks, TB, for keeping this column running for years and years. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 04:12, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
  • Have read only the excerpt quoted here, but Jemielniak et al (2021)'s findings that Wikiproject Tropical Cyclones delivers the highest quality content of all Wikiprojects on English Wikipedia surprise me. I expected MilHist. Learn something everyday. Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 18:26, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
    • Paper is paywalled so can't say for sure, but it says it's using the square root of the total articles? A quick check shows MILHIST has 1,334 FAs out of 200,359 articles total. Tropical cyclones has 165 FAs but out of mere ~3200 articles. That seems like it should still favor MILHIST, but I guess Tropical Cyclones huge number of GAs helped it win out - which seems a bit off to me, I'm curious if the writers included A-class MILHIST articles that were also GAs, and also, there's only so many GANs that can really be processed, so that would hit larger projects more than smaller projects. (Regardless, both of those projects are doing good work.) SnowFire (talk) 23:30, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
      We ran into a similar problem in our 2015 paper about the misalignment between quality and viewership of articles (covered in the April 29, 2015 Signpost's research section: Popularity does not breed quality (and vice versa)). In that case, we were trying to understand topics of FAs with relatively low viewership, and used relative risk to measure it. The approach has a couple of parameters that can be tuned: the minimum number of articles in a project, which removes small projects that often focus on a very specific topic; and the minimum number of articles in the dataset, which controls how general the listed topics are (smaller values lead to more specific topics, IIRC).
      Both MILHIST and Tropical Cyclones were in our paper (Table 9, page 7). The difference in relative risk was large: MILHIST ranked #7 with an RR of 5.3, whereas Tropical Cyclones ranked #2 with an RR of 99.3. I'm unsure what the number of articles in the projects were at that point in time, we don't mention it and instead focus on how MILHIST also has some articles with high viewership but relatively low quality. One was NATO, now a GA which made me happy to see! The other was Vietnam War, which is still a C-class article (and it makes sense that it still is, we had good discussions on the talk page of the Signpost back in 2015 about some of the challenges of writing those types of articles). Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 08:01, 1 September 2021 (UTC)
    • Disturbingly, Wikipedia:WikiProject Tropical cyclones is the subject of a very large copyright investigation opened in May 2021. "For the most part, this project remains rife with direct copy and pastes, unattributed PD copying, unattributed copying within Wikipedia, possible but unconfirmed translation vio, possible but unconfirmed cross-wiki translation vio, and possible but unconfirmed paywall vio, mostly to newspapers.com we believe." NebY (talk) 20:51, 1 September 2021 (UTC)
      • Not to sidetrack, but isn't "unattributed PD copying" legit? It's good practice to attribute, of course, but if it's public domain, it's fair game to copy wholesale. SnowFire (talk) 22:45, 1 September 2021 (UTC)
        • Unattributed PD copying still is something that us copyright editors open CCIs for and actively look to correct. Unattributed copying is the most important thing to correct; the act of copying so long as it is usable on Wikipedia is not bad itself. I expect a lot of disruption with all of the socking and vandalism and whatnot, let alone this CCI. Sennecaster (Chat) 14:11, 4 September 2021 (UTC)
      Yes, I'm always concerned when researchers use Wikipedia's FA label to judge the quality of the content here. The whole Clean Wermacht controversy with the military history articles a while back showed how problematic accepting FA status as an indicator of actual quality can be. AugusteBlanqui (talk) 19:14, 2 September 2021 (UTC)
      • An article is an artistic creation, much as a book or movie is, but GAFA does not operate entirely like book reviews and movie awards. It works more by checklist, and the article is judged by how well it meets each of the requirements. So, some subjects like warships and hurricanes are born a dozen or three per year. They have very precise notability requirements and usually very precise official sources, and well-established traditions of article structure and checklists of what goes in the article and what does not. Checking off the boxes for the checklists of GAFA is easier for those whose own checklists are clear, than for articles about a war or a musical genre or a technical development, where the boundaries and criteria for aspects to be included are seldom so clear. This of course does not make GAFA unimportant, but like any tool its powers and limitations have to be understood.Jim.henderson (talk) 15:02, 4 September 2021 (UTC)
        Courtesy link: Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-04-26/Op-ed § World War II Myth-making and Wikipedia Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 18:14, 7 September 2021 (UTC)

Traffic report: Olympics, movies, and Afghanistan (0 bytes · 💬)

Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-08-29/Traffic report

Wikimedians of the year: Seven Wikimedians of the year (0 bytes · 💬)

Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-08-29/Wikimedians of the year

WikiProject report: WikiProject Days of the Year Interview (2,083 bytes · 💬)

  • This is a cool WikiProject, so thank you to the project members and to the interviewer! Seeing the readership stats for each day is fascinating - it makes sense that each page would spike once a year, but it had just never occurred to me before. It makes me wonder what uses Wikipedia has for readers that are less obvious to us as editors. Ganesha811 (talk) 20:17, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
  • This sounds like a very interesting Wikiproject that I did not know even existed! I've already added a cited birth and death entry to 2 articles from a bio article I created. Ciridae (talk) 11:28, 3 September 2021 (UTC)
  • Great to see people working here. I don't know how to exactly describe the topic area but these kind of "list of miscellaneous things" articles like days of the year, articles on numbers up to 100, articles on "2002 in Canada" and so on have such low-quality standards that develop from, I guess, lots of people thinking it's fine just to add one entry without a citation because none of the entries have citations. I'm glad to see a dedicated effort to improving one specific area as much as you can with the people you have. March 13, to pick one example you've marked as "up to citation standard", is exactly what it should look like. — Bilorv (talk) 19:41, 3 September 2021 (UTC)
  • Not to denigrate this project or it's accomplishments -- practically every Wikipedia article could benefit from better sourcing -- but I always assumed that certain articles didn't need sourcing. The ones I am thinking of would be list articles like the various days of the week, or the calendar years, since these all reference articles where this information should be present. -- llywrch (talk) 18:38, 14 September 2021 (UTC)


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