Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2011-04-18

Comments

The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2011-04-18. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Features and admins: The best of the week (867 bytes · 💬)

The link to the nomination process of the article CSI effect is incorrect. It was linked to Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/CSI effect/archive1 instead of Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/CSI effect/archive2 203.45.186.197 (talk) 06:24, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Fixed, thanks! Regards, HaeB (talk) 12:14, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Once again there are more Featured Sounds than Featured Pictures this Signpost. Quite impressive. Can anyone tell me the cause of this recent development? MasterOfHisOwnDomain (talk) 19:56, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

In the news: Wikipedia accurate on US politics, plagiarized in court, and compared to Glass Bead Game; brief news (2,802 bytes · 💬)

The "How to delete your account" article is almost a year old, from June 2010. MKFI (talk) 06:45, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

True. Still, the link recently made the rounds on Twitter, and hadn't been reported previously in the Signpost. But altogether I agree that we should generally focus on recent news. Regards, HaeB (talk) 08:16, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

USA gubernatorial election results.

Brown didn't fix the mistakes (or they've have been reverted). I fixed the biggest one at [1], but it's not a very good source (no 1st names, rounded %s, doesn't seem to include spoilt votes preventing calculating %s).

The other big mistakes are:

"Wikipedia’s next largest errors were for the New Hampshire 1998 (-2.2), New York 2006 (+1.2), and New Hampshire 2006 (-1.2) gubernatorial races."

Anyone up for fixing them, or finding a better source for the one I fixed? -- Jeandré, 2011-04-19t13:29z, -- Jeandré, 2011-04-19t13:36z, -- Jeandré, 2011-04-20t11:13z, -- Jeandré, 2011-04-20t11:15z

Glass Bead Game

You might want to fix "which earned Herman Hesse the Nobel Prize". The prize is not awarded to a book but to an author, although the book was mentioned in the citation. (the first section deals with Wikipedia's accuracy so let's make sure the Signpost is!) Pichpich (talk) 22:21, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

You are of course correct that the prize was awarded to the author, not the book; but in my understanding the wording doesn't imply the latter. Instead, it was intended to mean that the book was a main reason for the Nobel committee to choose Hesse. There might be some debate whether it was the only one, but for example the paper by Roberts and Peters discussed here says on its first page: "The Glass Bead Game, first published in 1943, was the crowning achievement of Hesse’s long writing career and earned him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946." Regards, HaeB (talk) 08:16, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

Company sues IP editors for defamation

This is a big story. Why did I find it first tucked in here? Jason Quinn (talk) 20:48, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

News and notes: Commons milestone; newbie contributions assessed; German community to decide on €200,000 budget; brief news (4,982 bytes · 💬)

Commons reaches ten million files

It's worth noting that the two-fold increase in the past eighteen months is due in part to a great increase in Moving files to the Commons during that time. – Athaenara ✉ 12:42, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

This problem is going to come to a head eventually. Commons is very lacking in administrative resources, yet a few people keep dumping more and more files there. Gigs (talk) 13:17, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "this problem" and "a few people"? – Athaenara ✉ 22:22, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

Newbe edits

It looks to me as though the "changes" between 2004 and 2011 are not significant.

Aside from that though, I'm left wondering what the assessment criteria were. A "vandal" edit is fairly obvious, but what makes a single edit "excellent" instead of "average"?
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 14:50, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Hey Ohms law. Let me describe the criteria for you more:

• An excellent edit was marked as one that added a paragraph or more of text that included a reference, or as I said in the post, an edit which would be indistinguishable from that of a very experienced editor. Remember these are people's first registered edit only though, which is why we handed out only one five in each sample.
• Acceptable edits did not add a significant amount of content that was verified, but the edit did not obviously violate policy or guideline and would not likely be reverted.
• A low quality edit is one that was clearly made in good faith, but which was very poor in quality and would likely be reverted -- like someone adding a broken link to an image. And vandalism is pretty obvious, like you said.

As far as changes between the two years... the big change is that while there wasn't a large decrease in the percent of decent edits made by newbies, the actual amount of newbies showing up and making edits in 2011 is enormously bigger. 60 in one of the days we looked at then and 1,800 on Monday last week, to give you an idea of the difference. But in any case, the most striking conclusion to me is not a change between the years. It's that in both of the two years we sampled, the majority of first edits made newbies are good. Cheers, Steven Walling at work 16:20, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the info, Steve. :)

Let me state first, my complements. I don't at all want to be all negative about this, since overall I think that this is definitely a good idea.

"Quality" is rather inherently subjective, so any metric where you're attempting to assess quality is going to be imperfect. The problem that I see though is "did (or didn't) not add a significant amount of content". I mean, I don't see someone who corrects a bunch of spelling or grammatical errors making any less valuable contributions then someone who adds paragraph(s) of text to an article. And then there's the issue of contributing "significant" amounts of content over several (usually consecutive) edits...

I don't think that the entire study is flawed or anything, but I don't personally see the utility in considering anything other then "vandal"/"non-vandal" edits.

As to the amount of editors in the samples, I agree with you wholeheartedly that the raw increase in editors is one of the most significant findings. If I had written the piece about this I probably would have lead with that information, actually.

Thanks again for your reply.
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 19:20, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

You're completely correct that any measure of quality is inherently subjective. In thinking about the methodology and its flaws (and there are flaws) it's important to keep in mind that this was a working experiment to get a general understanding for the Wiki Guides project. We just needed to get an idea of how many first edits by new accounts are any good at all. Any other questions, such as the value of WikiGnoming versus the value of an entire new article, were sort of outside of our scope for that sampling. Steven Walling at work 23:28, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Technology report: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News (489 bytes · 💬)

The "slides" link in the final paragraph is incorrect. The correct page is http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/File:Wikimedia_-_Combined.pdf -- John of Reading (talk) 15:16, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

• Now fixed. --Avenue (talk) 15:42, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

WikiProject report: An audience with the WikiProject Council (2,557 bytes · 💬)

TLDR

I think this article needs subheadings and perhaps shorter paragraphs. It is currently a long list of very long paragraphs. --Mortense (talk) 17:06, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

I agree, it is not that it is too long but the paragraphs are short. I am planning on making an article so I will learn from this one. --SomeDudeWithAUserName (talk with me!) 23:51, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for the feedback. If the interview is short, we normally leave it in a Q&A format. But if the responses are long, I try to put it into prose. I will consider using sub-headings in the future, but this article, at 1,600+ words, is really not that long. It is certainly not feature-length (which could be double the length). I will see if a sub-heading or two will help in future articles. – SMasters (talk) 05:57, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

An "audience"?

Isn't is a bit much to call it an audience? I tried to look for evidence that "audience" was being used humorously but if it's there it went over my head. I'm not sure the WikiProject Council qualifies as a "state or religious dignitary" or should be "associated with monarchs and popes". 72.244.200.86 (talk) 03:41, 20 April 2011 (UTC) :-)

It was tongue-in-cheek. – SMasters (talk) 05:57, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

Good report

Well I for one thought this to be a well written and interesting to read report. I liked how the interviews were worked in as a continually flowing narrative. I tend to skim a lot when reading but this kept my attention reading the whole way through. -- œ^™ 06:53, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

Thanks so much for your kind words. An article takes hours to craft, often over a period of a number of days, so it's nice to know that people are actually reading the work. And if they enjoy it, then it's great to know that all the work has been worth it. – SMasters (talk) 05:57, 21 April 2011 (UTC)