Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2011-01-10

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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2011-01-10. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Arbitration report: World War II case comes to a close; ban appeal, motions, and more (344 bytes · 💬)

I initially read the title as "World War II comes to a close" and thought "hey wow, would be about time :D". silly me.

=^^= (talk) 22:22, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

Features and admins: Featured topic of the year (1,433 bytes · 💬)

I definitely like the FT of the year writeup. Nice job to Wizardman and whoever dreamt that up! Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 08:23, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

It is a good write-up, but I'd like to highlight the phrase "could care less". As a grammatical construction, it's counter-intuitive. David Mitchell finds it as annoying as I do – watch the video for a crippling analysis of the phrase. Seegoon (talk) 13:32, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

• It was good to hear about recent work on high-quality sports articles, considering Wikipedia has over 1.5 million articles about sports. When remembering that the old Britannica would never have included: Babe Ruth, Wayne Gretzky, David Beckham or Secretariat, I guess Wikipedia's sports collection is "cosmic justice" come due. Of course, all those sports articles are not the reason we have so few other articles on: string grammar, Out of My Later Years (Einstein), or "Lawn fertilizer": there needs to be a better way to get people to focus on major topics. -Wikid77 21:45, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

In the news: Anniversary coverage begins; Wikipedia as new layer of information authority; inclusionist project (2,284 bytes · 💬)

As a technical note, I am highly skeptical about the claimed "tenfold increase". That's the sort of factoid which often gets echoed without any checking or context. Wikipedia articles are often re-used by spam websites, so it's entirely possible to have the entire traffic increase be from the activity of web crawlers and site scrapers. At the very least, there should be some burden on the claimant to investigate this, as it currently reads like a marketing pitch. -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 05:04, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

Marketing what? I'm reading it as they noticed an increase in traffic to their site coming from wikipedia.org referrers, and sure enough, it was correlated with an on-wiki effort to improve coverage of that subject area. What does that have to do with advertising and web crawlers? Powers ^T 22:27, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

The next sentence in the article makes it clear he thinks "traffic" == "researchers". That's not necessarily true. It's entirely possible that "traffic" == "'bots". -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 08:40, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Ah, okay, I see what you mean now. It's of course possible the claimant did investigate and found out that most of the traffic was non-bot-related. Powers ^T 12:14, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Yes, but that wasn't stated or implied. And it's a common error for people unfamiliar with web analytics to confuse 'bot and spam traffic with real readers. -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 22:21, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

The Buisnessweek article was an interesting mix of common wikipedia cliches and interesting commentary. I thought the final sentence "How well Wikipedia ages may depend on how much the newbies are allowed to grow up" ,was spot on. Ajbpearce (talk) 00:12, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

News and notes: Anniversary preparations, new Community fellow, brief news (3,637 bytes · 💬)

Participation of women on Wikipedia; a random thought

This isn't responding to anything in particular, but I've been commenting on some FACs recently, and it struck me that the usual figure of 15% participation by women in Wikipedia is a somewhat misleading measure. At FAC, many of the active reviewers and article creators/expanders/copy editors are women. I am guessing that if someone made a study of featured content and GAs, one would find a much, much higher proportion of female participation. Don't know why I'm posting this here, but it just occurred to me (a male). -- Ssilvers (talk) 03:46, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

Attracting and retaining participants

I read with interest that User:SvHannibal, the fourth recipient of a Community fellowship, will be working on the Account Creation Improvement Project. A timely announcement, since I had just listened to the podcast version of:

http://www.economist.com/node/17902943?story_id=17902943&CFID=159433305&CFTOKEN=60207840

As that article notes:

For all Wikipedia’s achievements, however, it inspires three worries: that it contains too many inaccuracies; that it is not financially sustainable; and that it has lost touch with its founding ideal of being open to all

Read the article if you want more about the first two...its the third item that is relevant to the fellowship of SvHannibal (talk · contribs). To quote:

It is the third worry—that Wikipedia has become ossified and bureaucratic, discouraging new users from contributing—that is the greatest cause for concern. In recent years its most active contributors have become obsessed with obscure questions of doctrine and have developed their own curious jargon to describe the editing process. The number of regular contributors to Wikipedia’s English edition peaked in March 2007 and has since declined by a third; the number of new contributors per month has fallen by half. Growth in the number of articles and edits has also levelled off.

I've been contributing to Wikipedia for over seven years, mostly without logging in. The barriers to doing so have steadily grown. I understand the motivation and suspect that the reduction in vandalism is significant enough that discouraging IP editors is probably viewed by most as the price we pay. But it would be nice if the Attracting and retaining participants strategy would include a vigilant effort to continue to support the legitimate contributions of editors like me. In the past few days I've been the target of multople false positives from both User:ClueBot NG and the WP:Edit filter. For example:

• http://report.cluebot.cluenet.org/?page=View&id=189868

I'm hoping that the latest false positives are a statistical anomaly...most month's the anti-vandalism bots and subsystems aren't quite so concerned with my contributions. 67.101.5.135 (talk) 13:09, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

It's probably because of the exclamation mark in 'Yahoo!' Mostly bots do revert blatant vandalism... I don't think they're mainly the reason there are less contributors. :-) -- Mentifisto 22:48, 14 January 2011 (UTC)