Comments

The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2011-03-28. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Arbitration report: New case opens; Monty Hall problem case closes – what does the decision tell us? (4,127 bytes · 💬)

Monty Hall problem: Arbitration

The article summarizes the decision well.

However, the article missed the main news story: the early drafted decision would have made it impossible to write (most) articles on mathematics, because editors would have been barred from providing simple examples that were not directly from reliable sources. The good news is that the arbitration committee listened to the mathematicians' concerns and drafted a decision that both is consistent with the WP rules and allows us to write articles for a general audience.

Another concern: I have long expressed displeasure with the statement about Gill. Gill referenced his own papers when referring to only others' results (and never his own). One ArbCom member opposed the statement about Gill; another formally abstained.

Thanks, Kiefer.Wolfowitz (Discussion) 19:00, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

For my own part and on behalf of the committee, I'd like to confirm that Dr Gill did not do anything underhand in respect to using his own material, nor was there anything "wrong" with the material itself - these were not self published blogs, but material accepted by recognised journals. The reminder issued by the committee is just that, a reminder that there is an etiquette in sourcing to one's own work, and the poor environment on the article talkpage had definitely not been conducive to etiquette. --Elen of the Roads (talk) 11:09, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

That is another accurate and fair statement by a habitually graceful truth-teller. Elen was the principal author of the adopted statement, I should add. Kiefer.Wolfowitz (Discussion) 17:36, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

It was an interesting case, although I didn't follow the actual cut and thrust, I did review the proposed rulings. The interest came from the fact that ArbCom is generally leery of getting tangled in content issues (quite rightly) they initially allowed themselves to move further into that sphere than normal, despite, or perhaps because of, the esoteric nature of the subject. This is a pattern seen widely, for example the well known philosopher Dr C.E.M. Joad, a member of an early radio panel show The Brains Trust was famous for invariably starting his answer "It all depends on what you mean by ...". On the occasion that the question was "What is the law of averages." Joad replied "The law of averages says that if you spin a coin one hundred times it will come down heads fifty times and tail fifty times." For some reason lured outside his normal cautious approach, by a subject he was less familiar with than many of the questions he did answer so well, he committed what we would today call an epic fail. Rich Farmbrough, 10:58, 30 March 2011 (UTC).

Suppose there are three editors and one of them is going to be topic banned. I tell you who one of the editors who is not topic banned is.... Um, nevermind. ;-P Jason Quinn (talk) 14:43, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Features and admins: Featured list milestone (2,516 bytes · 💬)

Not to be rude, but you really need to check this on a high-res monitor before publishing: on high screen resolutions, it takes a lot less space for the text, so you can end up with far too many images if you're not careful.

I've removed one image, but, really, I should have removed two, for layout reasons. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 01:33, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

It's not so much this text as your edit summary that was a little brash. I have reinstated the picture, but captioned it as related to featured sounds, since you are right, for wide window widths the pic will not be adjacent to the FS section. If you use a full window width on a 27-inch monitor, most WP pages will display with text/image distortions. We cannot cater for every window width (and resolution) at the same time; thus, a compromise is reached. Perhaps you might experiment with smaller widths. Mine is less than half the width of the monitor, which also minimises the occurrence of one- and two-line paragraphs. Tony (talk) 02:40, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

I possibly should have specified wide-screem monitors in the edit summary, but it really did look appalling on wide-screen - there was about 2/3rds of a screen worth of whitespace left of the pictures. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 16:42, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

This might be related, but occasionally images here overlap. It's rare, but here are the two most recent examples, dated. One is from this week, the other from several months ago. Sven Manguard Wha? 05:12, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

I've just realized the internet has ruined me. The Lion Tower just looks like a face to me, while I am expecting a funny capshun on the cat. Great pictures though! Reso lute 02:44, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

In the news: Sue Gardner interviewed; Imperial College student society launched; Indian languages; brief news (3,396 bytes · 💬)

About Wikipedia being the first draft of history, I discussed this with a classmate of mine at Riverside HS's Class of 1990 20th reunion in South Carolina and told her that I was an editor. Jennifer "Jac" Chebatoris, a former entertainment writer for Newsweek and a classmate of mine, was impressed. Chris (talk) 01:26, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

I wonder if that "Wikipedia Beautifier" also hides maintenance tags.. -- œ ^™ 01:42, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

I just checked and it shows them. – ukexpat (talk) 02:30, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

It would be very useful if the New York Times created an exception for incoming links from Wikimedia Foundation projects, like they exception they have for social media websites. It would be even better if they offered free accounts to regular Wikipedia editors, similar to the recent Credo donation. Anyone have good contacts at the Times?--Chaser (talk) 04:53, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

My understanding is that incoming links from WMF projects are exempt from the paywall like the social media sites are. If someone finds that isn't the case, and that NYT links from the projects are being stopped at the paywall, please let me know! Christine, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 17:43, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

In the brief note about Wikicountability, "hosted on MediaWiki" is an unfortunate turn of phrase. It is not hosted on foundation servers, it just uses the software. ~ Ningauble (talk) 18:10, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
It's a perfectly reasonable phrase: it isn't hosted by Wikimedia. It is hosted on MediaWiki. This is used widely for web applications: we talk about hosting a site on Wordpress or Django or Apache or all sorts of other server software without implying that the creators of the software are hosting the site. —Tom Morris (talk) 18:22, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
If someone says a site is "hosted on WordPress" that would be ambiguous, since it could really be hosted on WordPress.com. Reach Out to the Truth 18:32, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
I understand that it is accepted technical parlance, but I feel that "hosted on" is an unfortunate choice for a general audience. (Bear in mind that the difference between Wikimedia and MediaWiki is not widely recognized.) Hosting is a highly overloaded concept, and the widest vernacular sense entails involvement by a hosting party. It's not wrong, but "...uses Wikimedia software" would be clearer for a nontechnical audience. ~ Ningauble (talk) 18:43, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

News and notes: Berlin conference highlights relation between chapters and Foundation; annual report; brief news (13,604 bytes · 💬)

"At the time of writing, most chapters appear to have not yet submitted an English-language activity report since the beginning of the year" - note that the table says "This table is a work in progress" above it, so isn't complete. E.g. I know that WMUK posted a report back in January, and we'll be putting out another report soon. Mike Peel (talk) 05:16, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

I linked to the table for the convenience of the reader, but the "most" had been verified by a quick look through the Wikimediaannounce-l archives. The list of "exceptions" wasn't meant to be complete (there was also one report by the Estonian chapter on January 4, and one by the Czech chapter - mentioning as inspiration a posting by Erik Möller on Internal-l titled "Chapters Reporting--Sustainability"), but it seems safe to say that more than 20 of the (until last week) 30 chapters have not yet submitted an English-language activity report since the beginning of the year, and even the majority of the "exceptions" don't produce monthly reports regularly.

It would be quite unfair to single out Wikimedia UK, which as far as I am aware is generally doing a great job in getting information out (and by the way thanks for your tip about the April 2 deadline for submissions for the WikiConference UK 2011, unfortunately no one got to write this news item up for this issue). Nevertheless, since you bring the example up, it should also be noted that this January 9 announcement contained "catch-up" in its title, and that the issue of the "monthly Wikimedia UK newsletter" announced there has so far been the last one to appear. As the editor of the Signpost, I'm of course fully aware of, and sympathetic to, the struggles of keeping up a regular publication schedule over a longer period of time. And I'm in fact grateful that we have readers who will nag and complain when we have fallen behind our schedule, they help keep us on track.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 06:29, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

There is a simple way to get chapters to comply with reporting requirements: an annual allotment of (say) $10,000 from the Wikimedia Foundation to each chapter, conditional on meeting those reporting requirements. That would remove any problems with this being an "unfunded mandate" from above. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:41, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

WMF Annual Report: that makes 41 occurrences of "Wikipedia". There are 3 of "Wikimedia Commons" ; "Wikibooks", Wiktionary", "Wikisource" & al can be found on the last page. Ah well. Jean-Fred (talk) 08:14, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
Thanks for the nice write up of the Wikimedia Conference! All sessions' documentation is now linked from the schedule page, and during the week pictures will also start appearing on Commons, including the nice drawings made by the visual documenter of the meeting. (A nice fact that I like about this meeting is that for the first time, we had chapters from all six continents, and no volcano, allowing every chapter to participate.) --Dami (talk) 12:34, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

Right. So, I intended initially to not insist, but I do not really see how we can seriously discuss this on Twitter. So, here is my opinion:

In my view, this is a biaised report of the past 3 days. I am not saying that this report is reporting false things (though I object on some points, see below), however, I regret that it chose to report on only one aspect of a three days long work and in the same time, cast a light which is seriously unfavorable to chapters which participates to the negative light already shed by two people.

Essentially, this report allocates 2/3 of the space on statements made by 2 people from one organization, whilst this meeting was attended by 30 organizations. It only provides opinions of these two people, essentially to criticize and questions the other organizations present at the meeting. Some of the accusations are poorly supported, with no actual data or references being provided (such as Moller outlining that chapters are increasingly questionned by communities. Where does that come from ? What is this "increasing" all about ? Any such statements on wikipedia would be either supported by facts and studies or the statement would be carefully balanced with other opinions. In this case, the statement is carefully balanced with the same opinion).

Also, it only outlines the problems related to chapters inability to handle everything perfectly and on time. This is seriously forgetting that chapters are still essentially volunteer based. Even less than a year ago, WMF was MONTHS late in providing its reports, even though it had over 50 staff members. So the criticism is easy to make but not very fair.

What about the "warning of the so-far hypothetical case that "a chapter [could] set for itself goals that were fundamentally out of alignment with the goals of the Wikimedia movement". This is a very hypothetical case to say the least, given that no chapter is declared a chapter without the chapcom having reviewed the bylaws and without the board of WMF approved them. It is so hypothetical that whilst I understand that Sue may be worried about such a situation where chapters do not respect their own bylaws, I fail to understand how such an hypothetical situation should be given more light than any of the very cool and exciting conversations we had together such as in the "accountability workshop". Also, reading that the situation where a chapter would decide to put its energy towards housing homeless people would create a "quite serious risk to the mouvement" is a bit funny to me. I fear that the case that WMF would decide to put its energy toward housing homeless people would actually create a MUCH larger risk to the mouvement. How more or less likely is that to happen ? Also, why "not providing a report in English" automatically means "not being transparent" ?

This report also interpretates quite liberally some statements made during the meeting. For example, it says The French chapter recalled difficulties with the different audiences in French and English, but found a good solution to inform the latter one: "The one place that is most read is the Signpost. So we connect with the Signpost, if we want to spread things. Since I actually said that, I know for a fact that we started publishing in the SignPost not so much to improve our relationship with the English speaking community, but actually to have somewhere an English based report of our activity that would be easily available to everyone and could be linked from other places... in particular to the WMF staff, since we discovered the WMF staff had either no idea what the French chapter was doing, or attributed the work done by the Chapter... to WMF staff or other unrelated people (uh !). As far as I know, we have not had any particular trouble with the English speaking community. I certainly said no such thing. Still, the SignPost report hints at some difficulties due to an interpretation of what I said. In short, it creates an official report on a difficulty that was not ever reported in the first place. The casual reader will now be aware of some problems between the French Chapter and the English and French community.... but without the ability to cite the problems ...
Since this is outlined in a report largely about Chapters legitimacy and accountability, this comes handy. In a few months time, when one will be looking for references where chapters have problems with the communities, one will be able to cite this report....

It looks like the entire report was crafted around this controversy related to the problems met with chapters. I am not saying there are no problems with chapters, there are problems. Obviously there are problems. I am not necessarily happy about all of it myself. But how come there is no or little mention of all the great things done by chapters in the last year ? About all the planned partnerships between chapters for the future ? And of some of the difficulties chapters met with the WMF, due to the WMF still being young, sometimes disorganized or poorly responding to chapters concerns ? Some of this was also heavily discussed in the 3 days in Berlin. Where did it go ? Why is not mentionned ? Why does this report give the feeling that there are two sides, the WMF very successful, legitimate and accountable on one hand and on the other side, the chapters, to be questionned and looked at with suspicion ? Why does it feel that only one side is represented here ? We also tried hard at the meeting to avoid seeing sides amongst ourselves. This is not helping.

Sure enough, the SignPost makes great articles and is keen on regularly reporting regularly about Chapter activities. And I love you guys. I really do. But why is it so that when I read the report about a meeting I spent 3 days attending, I feel like we, somehow, were not at the same meeting ???? Anthere (talk)

As the title clearly said ("Berlin conference highlights relation between chapters and Foundation"), the report was not just about the Chapters meeting in itself, but also about the whole context of that yearly meeting, which includes longstanding, important problems that haven't been much reported in the Signpost so far. Granted, this article is not a comprehensive summary of all the topics that participants were working on in Berlin, but it is not intended as such - instead, in this kind of reporting we try to highlight some of the most salient aspects, those that are likely to be most interesting or important for our readers. Also, some of the sessions were about topics that we already reported about a lot in other contexts (e.g. GLAMs or the Editor Trends Study). Having said that, there may have been other aspects that might have been worth reporting too, in fact I had several others on my plate when writing (e.g. Toolserver, Education, "Volunteer management"), but only a limited amount of time.
As far as I know, we have not had any particular trouble with the English speaking community. I certainly said no such thing. - This Signpost story didn't say that either; I don't understand this complaint. From the notes, on which this story was based: "Q (France): We tried to establish one report for all target groups. It didn't work, since the community is French and the other audience is English speaking." This Signpost story paraphrased this as "The French chapter recalled difficulties with the different audiences in French and English". It seems entirely reasonable to conclude from "tried... it didn't work" that there had been difficulties. And from the previous sentences, it was clear that these were communication difficulties, not difficulties of other kinds - also from the use of the word "audiences" (roughly: readers), which you inexplicably changed into "communities" above. If, on the other hand, the notes should have been inaccurate, I kindly request that you take your criticism to the notetakers instead.
But how come there is no or little mention of all the great things done by chapters in the last year ? About all the planned partnerships between chapters for the future ? - Umm, maybe because we already reported on so many of them in great detail earlier (e.g. [1])? Or will again in the next issue? Strangely, no one was complaining about leaving out movement roles problems when doing so.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 17:49, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm not going to write as much as Anthere did, I promise, but I agree with the thrust of her argument. There was a lot of cool stuff discussed at the meeting. Lots of big ideas, lots of very ambitious ideas. You wouldn't know it from this article though, which concentrates very much on a single topic that was only discussed at a couple of sessions. Yes, it's an important topic, but if this were an article here I'd be screaming WP:UNDUE! Lankiveil ^{(speak to me)} 12:50, 3 April 2011 (UTC).

I don't always agree with what Erik says (I'm more frequently in agreement with Sue); but his comments make sense to me. And the accountability issue matters. Charles Matthews (talk) 18:29, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Technology report: UploadWizard release; code review – should MediaWiki move to Git?; brief news (693 bytes · 💬)

"Bug #542, from September 2004, was finally closed. The successful resolution means that for some simple links, the title attribute (commonly displayed as a tooltip by browsers) will no longer be set, in order to comply with current accessibility guidelines." - Note, that was actually closed several months ago back in november (Its been live on Wikipedia since 1.17 went live). However it doesn't appear to be the most popular change (bugzilla:28182). Bawolff (talk) 03:13, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

WikiProject report: Linking with WikiProject Wikify (830 bytes · 💬)

Sometimes I find that it is best to neither copy edit nor wikify an article as a subtle way to tell the user, "You really don't want to trust anything in this article." These are the articles that have so many problems -- no sources, dubious assertions, as well as bad grammar, punctuation & wikifying -- that I don't know where to start, yet I can't justify tossing them into the maws of WP:AfD. (Yes, I should make the time to rewrite the entire article & make it a proper article, but I only have so much time to donate to Wikipedia & I always find something must needs to be left undone.) -- llywrch (talk) 17:56, 29 March 2011 (UTC)