Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-05-28/Recent research

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"English still the Lingua Franca of Wikipedia" reminds me of a time when websites that would work well only with M$ Internet Explorer would claim that most of the traffic to them was from IE browsers. I recently handled a workshop where I had to get Hindi speakers to consider contributing content to Wikimedia Commons and we chose the Hindi language option and horror-of-horrors - the interface simply is impossible to understand or incomplete to the extent that it is NOT possible to use. I subsequently checked the situation with several Indian languages and it is very incomplete. Even when one chooses German, the interface is largely translated but the information template for files is still in English. It appeared to me like the Android App - "Upload to Commons" was a much easier target for localization (although user registration would still be a blocker). Internationalization/localization really seems to require a much greater push if there is to be adoption by non-English users. Shyamal (talk) 06:45, 29 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Schyzofrenia.. does it even exist?

The first thing about an article about schizophrenia and genetics is that the two parts exist. There is a lot of literature scientific at that that denies schizophrenia exists. That makes the second part irrelevant. The next and obvious question is, what are we talking about. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 07:14, 29 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya paper

This is a minor gripe of mine but we (probably me) already reviewed this here back in Dec 2014 (this is the very same paper, published not January THIS year as the newsletter states, but February LAST one, compare [1] and [2], we probably reviewed a pre-print back then, but any changes if exist are minor). In my relatively comprehensive (or at least I'd like to think so) lit review on the subject from March THIS year that has yet to be reviewed by the Research Newsletter I have a note saying "Meseguer Artola et al.'s (2015) study incorporates and builds on an earlier work of its contributors, Eduard (2014) and Lladós, Aibar, Lerga, Meseguer, and Minguillón (2013), using the same data set and arriving at more refined conclusions. For that reason, those works are not reviewed or cited separately." I was wondering if the said authors published yet another remix of their research, but no, it seems to be a mistake in our review. I suggest removing that section. We have plenty of unreviewed research (hint: dear readers, we have a backlog - help!), no need to discuss the same paper twice. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 09:08, 29 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Good catch! I have added a mention of the previous review of the preprint. In general, it's not impossible that there may be added value in reviewing the final, published version of a paper that had already been covered as a preprint. But if their content is identical (I haven't checked), that is indeed not necessary. (Still, even though the previous review was much more thorough, this one by Textaural added some important information that had been lacking in the previous one, namely about the methodology - "survey of 800 professors ...".)

"published not January THIS year as the newsletter states, but February LAST one" - I don't know what "the newsletter states" refers to here. [3] gives February 2015 for the "version of Record online" and May 2016 as the journal issue in which it appeared (the latter is cited in the reference here); this kind of discrepancy between formal (or print) and factual (or online) publication date is not too unusual in academic publishing today.

In generally, I at least always try to check if a publication has already been covered before adding it to our todo list for the next issue, by searching the newsletter's archives (this however is affected by a bug in our on-wiki search function that my colleagues from the WMF Discovery team probably won't be able to fix very soon, phab:T129762) and/or our corpus on Zotero (example for this paper - there however we are way behind with tagging those publications that have been covered already). See also the notes on our production process.

To go off on a tangent for a little: The big picture is that while after almost half a decade of its existence, the research newsletter/"recent research" section has built up a very useful corpus of Wikimedia-related research using a pragmatic bibliographic process that keeps the ongoing effort somewhat manageable, this process is still brittle and inefficient in various aspects. I'd love to be able to set aside some time to revamp it with the help of some people who are knowledgeable in this area (some have already offered to help and worked on some parts, but someone would need to take the lead in identifying other needs and tasks and then moving things forward on this, and I at least haven't found the time for that yet). A small step would be to file bugs for the Zotero export issues that hit us basically every month here (also in the case of the paper discussed here [4] [5]). I have left a somewhat longer version of this comment for later reference here.

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 22:25, 29 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sorry for not double-checking the item before reviewing it, I just trusted the todo list. A brief doesn't do much harm in my opinion, other than to the reviewer's time (but I didn't consider my time to be wasted in this case). Nemo 19:06, 10 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Availability of broadband

I have been told if I pay more I too can have broadband at home. I decided not to spend the money. I have no problem contributing at home, but I have often copied the information from other sources at libraries. At one time this was because I couldn't access the information at home, but now the resource that I used the most is unavailable unless I travel about 30 miles. But the truth is I don't have the patience to wait and wait at home. Only those few sites I spend a lot of time on ever approach the speed that they do at libraries. That first time accessing a site (a long way from actual research) can take a very long time.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 20:23, 30 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The difference between information acquisition and learning knowledge

That article would be interesting if it used recent sources. The newest is from 2012, and all but three are from the 2000s. --NaBUru38 (talk) 16:47, 1 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]