Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-06-05/News and notes

Discuss this story

@Mdennis (WMF): regarding online courses for the training platform for functionaries, are there any public examples (perhaps with identifying details omitted) of safety problems which we most urgently need to address? Can we please have Twine/Twee versions of such online courses for review? (Please see Entweedle for creation of Twee from Twine.) Can we also please have online Twine/Twee courses about how to edit well? I'm sure you could get the community to make some of those if you asked. Please see [1], [2], [3], and [4] for context. EllenCT (talk) 14:55, 6 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

EllenCT (answering for Maggie as she is quite busy), the delivery platform for the training will be chosen after consultation with the functionary groups, but the options are open. This is the first I have seen of Twee/Twine - we'll look at it more closely, and be sure to include it as an option on the table when talking with folks. Thanks for letting us know about it! In terms of expanding this training to other topics, such as general editing, we have to be careful not to "bite off" too much for this project - but, we want to prioritize re-usability and adaptability, and formats we come up with may well be useful for more topics. For examples of safety issues, we will be looking at cases our team has handled internally, cases admins and functionaries have dealt with, as well as more public examples, such as ArbCom cases related to harassment. Much of these problems are handled privately, so I'm not sure of the best public example to point you to ... The research you shared looks great - already reading some of it now! Thank you! Patrick Earley (WMF) (talk) 14:05, 7 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@PEarley (WMF): happy to help. Twine and Twee produce javascript which works offline, too, for free. EllenCT (talk) 14:19, 8 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Good to know! Patrick Earley (WMF) (talk) 15:20, 8 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Is there any way to get a list of all the individual WMF salaries to calculate a Gini coefficient from year to year? Based on a recent discussion at Jimbo's page I would be interested to see whether there is increasing economic inequality overall within the ranks of WMF employees. Wnt (talk) 03:45, 6 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

What's the difference between Product and Technology departments? --167.57.119.144 (talk) 23:19, 8 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Super short version: Product makes the things folks use to donate, edit, read, and find, while Technology supports that work and makes sure things don't blow up. :) There's a list of teams within each on MediaWiki.org. CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 14:46, 9 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

"Wikidata—which now has the third-largest community after those of the English Wikipedia and Commons" - I wonder... how, exactly, is the size of Wikidata's community measured? What's the definition of "community"? After all, many edits on Wikidata are made by people who never actively visit Wikidata, through automated processes. For example, if you move an article in Wikipedia, this may result in a Wikidata edit attributed to your account such as this one - one doesn't need to visit Wikidata or even know of the project... So, if Wikidata's community size would simply be measured by the number of account names showing up as contributors to Wikidata, that would be misleading in my opinion. The actual, active community of Wikidata in the sense of people who participate in project discussions etc. looks rather small to me. Gestumblindi (talk) 03:13, 9 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]