Comments

The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2011-07-25. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Arbitration report: New case opened; hyphens and dashes update; motion (679 bytes · 💬)

BLP

What is BLP? Is it expected to be known by the intended audience? --Mortense (talk) 23:23, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

Biographies of Living Persons. -- Bk314159 (Talk to me and find out what I've done) 23:51, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

BK - thanks for making "BLP" a link to the relevant policy, so that readers who don't know its meaning can easily find out. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 14:14, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

Featured content: The best of the week (505 bytes · 💬)

Just a note - Theobald was a joint nom between myself and Malleus. (The pic is also mine!) Ealdgyth - Talk 13:08, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, fixed. NICE WORK! Tony (talk) 15:28, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

In the news: Open access clash with copyright; rising reader satisfaction; the wiki-correlates of geopolitical instability; brief news (9,191 bytes · 💬)

For god's sake, Wikipedia is not a "social media site". It's an encyclopedia. Yes, we cover popular things, often very well, but at the very least very thoroughly. Yes, some people do use their talk pages as chat boards or "walls", although that's technically frowned upon. Yes, the WMF has shown a desire to make Wikipedia more like a social network by implementing or planning to implement such features as WikiLove and the MoodBar, even though WikiLove has stirred some resentment, and if the WMF bothered to properly ask Wikipedia about MoodBar, it would get even more opposition than Wikilove. But, as I just said above, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. The purpose of the talk pages is to facilitate collaboration and help run the project. As long as people keep lumping Wikipedia in with such nonsensical timesinks as Facebook and Twitter, Wikipedia will never be as trusted or respected as it deserves. Sven Manguard Wha? 04:19, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

For god's sake, Wikipedia is not a "social media site". It's an MMORPG :-) --Slashme (talk) 14:53, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

On a mostly unrelated note, I echo Mat Honan's statement. I think that the Feedback tool, while spawned from the desire to get inside the heads of readers (a good idea), is implemented in a way that will produce little constructive feedback. A better idea would be to attach a comment box to the tool, and then have volunteer editors filter though the comments, filter out useless "8==D" style comments, sort the rest, and pass their findings onto the foundation. Insight on why a reader gives something 2 stars is more valuable than the simple knowledge that a reader clicked the two stars button. Sven Manguard Wha? 04:24, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

There's a VP thread about MoodBar here, as noted there, it has nothing to do with "making Wikipedia more like a social network"; it's simply a tool for collecting microfeedback about annoyances, frustrations and other elements of the new user experience. As explained in the VP thread, this first deployment is a minimal test to examine the S/N ratio of the collected feedback. We should find out pretty quickly whether this approach generates useful data or not.

Similarly, with AFT, the feedback tool simply represents a first view of what a tool like this can be used for. You can see that we've been thinking about many possible different future directions for this tool on mw:Article feedback/Extended review, including extended comments and meta-moderation of those comments. I wouldn't discount the value of the data that it's currently collecting, and which is available for further digging into here, but I agree that free text comments are the logical next frontier for the tool.--Eloquence * 22:43, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

The experience of Reddit has been that no amount of pleading will stop people from downvoting things they disagree with. One interesting idea is to give the user two votes, one for article quality and one to express approval/disapproval of the topic. A possible further refinement would be to discount votes on quality by voters who always mark articles they disagree with as low quality and always mark articles they agree with as high quality. Guy Macon (talk) 00:09, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

The existence of multiple rating categories, instead of one, is partially designed to counter or detect rating bias. For example, you could look for raters who rate in extremes across categories, or specifically look for raters who rate articles both as 1 in "objectivity" (a rating category that is more likely to elicit approval/disapproval) and in "well-written" (a rating category that should be fairly independent of the rater's view on the topic).--Eloquence * 02:07, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

Of course it's a social media site. Anywhere people gather is social; Wikipedia has a society; and we are definitely in the media business. Powers ^T 20:16, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

Aaron Swartz

While I'm not criticizing this part of the story, as it's been widely echoed in the media, just as a comment it's not clear to me if it's actually true that "JSTOR have said they ... have asked the US Attorney's Office to not pursue criminal charges against Swartz". The JSTOR statement is very legalistic, and I've dealt with enough lawyers and PR flacks to be suspicious of their phrasing. -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 23:06, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

What else could they mean? -- œ ^™ 12:04, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

They could mean merely that they aren't ones who do the criminal prosecution (the government does), which is quite different from asking not to prosecute. For the Federal government to undertake such a prosecution against the expressed wishes of the main victim is possible, but it's odd enough to wonder about JSTOR's PR. Note their statement does not say "have asked the US Attorney's Office to not pursue criminal charges against Swartz". You might think it says that, but close inspection shows it does not in fact say that anywhere. Which is a good signal to wonder if one is being fed a PR line. -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 12:54, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

It's interesting to note that BLP concerns (hysteria?) don't seem to reach The Signpost. That's kinda refreshing.
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 03:39, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

I think Aaron Swartz is popular enough with the sort of person who edits Wikipedia that his biography page will be treated well. This does not provide any guidance for the general case, especially someone NOT popular with that sort of person. -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 12:30, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

To my mind, this comment is really illustrative of the problems that we continue to have dealing with the BLP policy. It seems as though, since Swartz is "one of our own", that we're not as concerned with "protecting" him. Contrast that viewpoint with what's going on surrounding the Anders Behring Breivik article and it's pretty clear that there is a (rather severe) double standard in the community when it comes to dealing with BLP articles.
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 21:20, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

I look at it from the other direction - just as a statement of fact, he's both at low risk from people wanting to use Wikipedia to attack him, and has a high likelihood of being defended against any attacks which happen to be made. Of course there's favoritism, and that's wrong. I'm not approving of it. I'm simply saying he's one of the favorites. -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 23:15, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Could you elaborate on that, Ohms law? The Signpost takes its responsibility towards its subjects seriously, and if readers are concerned by our coverage of living people, I want to hear about it. Skomorokh 14:54, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Hey, I think it's great. If the Swartz article were new though, there's no way that it would survive here with the current climate surrounding biographical articles.
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 15:47, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

RIP Aaron Swartz

Just a link back to User_talk:AaronSw#RIP. Bennylin (talk) 14:23, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

News and notes: Oral citations; the state of global development; a gentler Huggle; brief news (1,483 bytes · 💬)

re successful Bureaucrat, "rare event"? I wouldn't say rare.. just, infrequent. -- œ ^™ 09:19, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

Template:Cite video is already in the inventory.©Geni 10:49, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

Regarding the "interwiki image suggester" bot, I think it would have been worth to mention User:Emijrp's images4bio Toolserver tool. --Waldir ^talk 19:24, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Does abyone know if there are pplans to enable a spell-check feture in the edit interface for those of us who aren't native users of English but contribute to this language wikipedia?--U5K0'sTalk_{Make WikiLove not WikiWar} 00:32, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
- The foundation are very, very unlikely to implement such a feature, which is really the job of a good web browser. Fortunately such browsers do exist. In particular Mozilla Firefox has been praised for easily allowing users to switch between spellcheck languages. - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 16:18, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Recent research: Talk page interactions; Wikipedia at the Open Knowledge Conference; Summer of Research (2,487 bytes · 💬)

Re speedy deletion tag: this article should not be deleted, since it is due to be published in two days' time as part of The Signpost. Tony (talk) 12:59, 23 July 2011 (UTC)

The quoted tweet is at http://twitter.com/sharingnicely/status/86409043664584704. Incorporate in references? --Mortense (talk) 23:58, 25 July 2011 (UTC)
Is anybody maintaining a database (or at lease a bibliography) we can access, of all those theses and peer-reviewed articles? --Orange Mike | Talk 14:26, 26 July 2011 (UTC)
- We are using a reference manager to track these papers internally at WMF and there's a public repository of scholarly Wikipedia research on this page. Current research projects (in particular internal research) are tracked on the research index on Meta. We're actually planning to have a dedicated session at WikiSym 2011 to discuss the best solution to build a collaborative and easily maintainable bibliography of Wikimedia research, so stay tuned. --DarTar (talk) 19:17, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

Turning back the clock: I suppose it's too much to ask for a readily-available tool that could show the contents of a category at a past point in time? - Fayenatic (talk) 06:19, 31 July 2011 (UTC)
- The only way to do this -- assuming you didn't make a list at the time -- would be to scan the dumps. Which is certainly possible (albeit one could only select a month, rather than any given day), although systermatic dump scanners are difficult to do on the Toolserver at the moment (each dump is 20GB or more, and there is no shared pool). - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 07:57, 31 July 2011 (UTC)
An excellent overview of recent research. Thank you, --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 15:21, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Technology report: Protocol-relative URLs; GSoC updates; bad news for SMW fans; brief news (1,674 bytes · 💬)

I'm going to switch to using the secure Wikipedia servers right away. I hope HTTPS reaches all users soon. --Nathan2055 ^talk 00:11, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

I tried using it a few times in the past, but gave up because of the annoying way in which my browser keeps issuing warning notices every time a new page loads. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 12:09, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

It's worth noting that the dfevelopment work noted above would make those warnings a thing of the past (that is, if they are what I think they are -- "This page contains insecure items"). - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 14:32, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

Google Chrome adds a bar to the top of each page saying "Insecure script has been blocked." and gives an option to load anyway. It's annoying, but not as annoying as Mozilla Firefox's dialogs. --Nathan2055 ^talk 16:47, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

I used the secure servers for a long time, but occasionally I'd have long delays in page loading and it'd drive me nuts, probably not because of the overhead of HTTPS, but because the secure server infrastructure hasn't been scaled up fully yet. Dcoetzee 22:38, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Wikimedian in Residence interview: Wikimedian in Residence on Open Science: an interview with Daniel Mietchen (6,896 bytes · 💬)

A comment concerning the coverage of open access journals on Wikipedia. WikiProject Science deals with capital-S Science. As such it would be much more interested in articles on say Occam's Razor, Falsifiability, or articles about "Science as endeavour", making its scope a bit closer to what you would expect from a project named "WikiProject Natural Philosophy" instead. Anything that is closer to "actually doing science" will be taken care of by a more focused WikiProject such as WikiProject Physics, WikiProject Chemistry, WikiProject Biology, WikiProject Neurology, and so on.

In the case of scientific publications, the most relevant project (and it is quite an active one) is WikiProject Academic Journals. We do not particulary focus on open-access journals, mostly because open-access journals tend to be newer and most of them did not have time to become impactful, or became drowned in the sea of open-access online journals that flourished because of the greater ease and cheaper cost of online publishing compared to traditional print journals. What we do is focus on the impactful journals, especially those heavily-cited by Wikipedia, as we consider them to be those of greater relevance to Wikipedians readers.

There are similar efforts to improve the coverage of publishers, but journals have enjoyed the spotlight given by our compilation of journals cited by Wikipedia of WikiProject Journals for a few years now, while publishers have neither a compilation, nor a WikiProject dedicated to them. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 23:03, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for these hints - I certainly see overlap with WP:JCW and similar efforts for publishers and books. I especially like your bot, since I have compiled a small publisher-centric list by hand to get a similar overview. ---- Daniel Mietchen 03:04, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

No problem. BTW I checked your list... not really sure what its purpose is exactly, but some of those numbers are way off. For instance, many many citations to the arXiv are done through templates such as {{arxiv}} (531 times) and {{cite arxiv}} (841 times). And then there are the citations done through the |arxiv= parameter of citation templates, such as {{cite journal|arxiv=1234.5678}}, which would probably be in the few thousands. Likewise, by looking for journals from SAGE Publications by DOI, you will also miss citations to SAGE journals where the DOIs was not specified (or to books published by SAGE, if they publish books). The PNAS count should probably be closer to 20,000 if you compile all its possible spellings and abbreviations. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 07:30, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

The list was an initial attempt at quantifying the extent to which OA sources are being referenced and reused, to compare that to other sources, and to allow for these numbers to be recorded over time. I am aware that not all pages brought about via the link in the "Citing pages" column actually have citations proper, but most of them probably are. Likewise, a link from Commons does not automatically entail reuse; it might just be a figure drawn on the basis of data presented in a paper that is referenced there. DOI availability and spelling or abbreviation variants add to the noise, as illustrated by the case of Scholarpedia. As for ArXiv, I do not get your point - my search phrase was "arxiv.org/abs/", which is part of the URL that {{arxiv}} and {{cite arxiv}} use (though now both do it indirectly via Interwiki map). I haven't gone through the PNAS results in detail but found the high number of Commons pages linking there somewhat surprising. ---- Daniel Mietchen 14:49, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Just had a closer look at the PNAS results for Commons and noticed that 25,255 out of 25,298 are referencing one and the same paper on gene expression (doi:10.1073/pnas.0400782101; related to Gene Wiki).---- Daniel Mietchen 15:01, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

What I mean is that while {{cite arxiv}} uses the "arxiv.org/abs/..." urls, searching for the string "arxiv.org/abs/" will not reveal those citations to the arxiv, because the string "arxiv.org/abs/" does not appear in the raw text of the article.

By my count, "arxiv.org/abs" appears at least once in 1903 articles and "arxiv.org/pdf" appears at least once in 257 articles. {{arxiv}} appears at least once in 531 articles, {{cite arxiv}} at least once in 841 articles. There is also the arxiv:... type of links that are used, and arxiv:... appear once in at least 23 articles. The use of {{cite journal|arxiv=...}} is a bit harder to gauge, but it's used at least once in around 2460 articles. So usage is closed to 6,000 give or take a few hundred cases. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 15:50, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

I have now changed the search string from "arxiv.org/abs/" to "arxiv". This will bring in a few false positives but basically should solve the problems you outlined. -- Daniel Mietchen - WiR/OS (talk) 21:33, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

WikiProject report: Musing with WikiProject Philosophy (397 bytes · 💬)

Wooh, philosophy! ~~EBE123~~ ^talk_Contribs 20:05, 27 July 2011 (UTC)