Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2012-07-30

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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2012-07-30. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Discussion report: Discussion reports and miscellaneous articulations (950 bytes · 💬)

Misstatement in RfC link

There is a misstatement in the link to WT:Miscellany for deletion#RfC: Is MfD an appropriate venue to discuss portions of pages? (July 2012), "Deleting portions of an article If edit warring is happening in regards to deletion of a section of an article should the discussion be brought to miscellany for deletion?" The RfC seeks to clarify WP:User pages at MfD, not articles.

It has been well established that ordinary editing of articles, including whether a section should be retained or removed, is not a matter for XfD. WP:Articles for deletion#Before nominating: checks and alternatives C.1: "If the article can be fixed through normal editing, then it is not a candidate for AfD." Flatscan (talk) 04:38, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

News and notes: Wikimedians and London 2012; WMF budget – staffing, engineering, editor retention effort, and the global South (9,611 bytes · 💬)

I hope the WMF are taking into account that one of their "strategic key areas" for which they are increasing support, is affected by the recent arbcom ruling that "all pages related to India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, broadly construed" are now covered by standard discretionary sanctions. This may affect the Wikipedia experience of new and inexperienced editors recruited in the subcontinent. Discussion of this is here.

A minor point on the Telegraph article, is that its author seems unaware that arbcom members are not required to be administrators, they just almost always are. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 11:35, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

It's regrettable that WMF can't try to get at least one Wikipedian photo credentials for this Olympics. It is probably difficult, but it would be worth it to try. Maybe in Sochi?--Wehwalt (talk) 12:36, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm working on the Olympics. Sochi feels like a reach. (Accreditation probably would need to be submitted by mid-2013.) 2014 Commonwealth Games not as much. Even if we had an accredited photographer there, the pictures would only be allowable under fair use because of Olympic AND Foundation licensing restrictions. If people seriously want to make this happen, supporting the 2012 Paralympic coverage on Wikipedia and especially on Wikinews will be vitally important. Details on how to help can be found at Wikinews:Paralympic Games‎. --LauraHale (talk) 12:43, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Telegraph story

"He wrongly confuses the English Wikipedia's rules for controversial content with those of Commons, writing somewhat boldly that "Wikimedia Commons makes massive volumes of pornography freely available to any Wikipedia visitor."" Ahem, but each and every Commons file is accessible through a Wikipedia search (NSFW examples: [1], [2]), and every Commons file has its own page in Wikipedia: example (NSFW). Besides, Wikipedia contains thousands upon thousands of Commons links, especially so in articles dealing with adult content. JN466 14:38, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

And where exactly does Williams even so much as hint that there is child pornography on Wikipedia? Paranoid much? All he says is, But the incident will fuel debate over Wikipedia’s permissive policy on pornography. Fundraising materials boast that Wikipedia “is a safe and trustworthy website for children to do their research”, yet Wikimedia Commons makes massive volumes of pornography freely available to any Wikipedia visitor. He is contrasting fundraiser materials presenting Wikipedia as God's gift to underprivileged children, and a child-safe resource, with the presence of copious amounts of unfiltered adult material on this site. --JN466 15:01, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Jayen says, :And where exactly does Williams even so much as hint that there is child pornography on Wikipedia?"—This is part of it: "and with the UK government's proposed new controls "to protect children online ... potentially limiting access to Wikipedia".Tony (talk) 15:37, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

That's a reach. The plain reading of that is that "protecting children online" includes limiting their access to pornography, including the stuff hosted on Wikimedia projects. No hint about CP there. Ntsimp (talk) 15:58, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

+1 JN466 16:13, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

I suggest that someone edit this piece to remove the statement which falsely claims that there is a linkage to child porn in the Telegraph story. For one thing, there is no such connection made, and for another, this seems very much like the tactic all-too-often used to deflect criticism about the overuse of porn on WP (i.e., bring up the kiddie porn or censorship strawman). Delicious carbuncle (talk) 17:10, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Done. Note that I also undid this edit by The ed17 (talk · contribs). Removing 9.6kb of text with no explanation is clearly not a minor edit. WilliamH (talk) 18:19, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks William, I have no idea how that happened. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 06:49, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

I think we can safely assume ed17 didn't mean to cut off the entire page mid-sentence. Someguy1221 (talk) 19:08, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

I think it should be obvious that the Telegraph was fed this story by one of Fae's enemies, most likely the same tiresome gang of anti-sexual content campaigners who keep pestering Jimbo on his talk page and hang out with the nutters on Wikipediocracy. No doubt they're shopping it around various media outlets, so I wouldn't be surprised if there's further coverage. Prioryman (talk) 21:52, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

• Ashley van Haeften/User:Fae should have stepped down from his position as head of Wikimedia UK and the international chapters organization the moment that ArbCom passed the ban against him. This is political common sense and AvH is clearly a political man in a political position; the resignation should have been instantaneous. Now WP gets another black eye. Moreover, the porn issue just keeps on giving and giving — that large infected splinter in Wikipedia's backside will continue to fester until we have the moxie to place Commons under the supervision and control of En-WP.

The whole thing is stupid. No duh that one of AvH's myriad enemies or critics fed the story to the right wing press. That's irrelevant. It was inevitable. It was extremely irresponsible of AvH/Fae to place the project in that position by failing to resign at the appropriate juncture. The best thing he can do now is to do what should have happened a week ago — STAND DOWN. Carrite (talk) 04:09, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Quite. The technology correspondent of the best-selling broadsheet newspaper in the UK isn't just going to write things because someone rang him up. He writes them because there is a story and the reason there is a story is that Ashley van Haeften has chosen to remain in position, his fellow trustees have decided to back a mate rather than consider what is best for the charity and the Chief Executive has failed in his duty to advise the trustees adequately on what is necessary for the welfare of the charity. The question is will enough of them see sense before the annual fundraiser? Or are they going to risk the story coming back to hit them then?--Peter cohen (talk) 15:33, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

And might I ask if you were involved in feeding them this story? Prioryman (talk) 19:13, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Why? The only person to hold responsible for the story is the credited author. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 00:40, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

hmm WMUK memebers now trying to get enough people together to force an EGM http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Call_for_EGM_2012 .©Geni 01:42, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

Might be a good time to consider fixing arbcom. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your talk page please reply on mine) 02:09, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

Because it produced one decision you happened to disagree with?©Geni 02:21, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

Note that Fae has now resigned as chair. (link). WilliamH (talk) 14:04, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

Which has also been reported by the Telegraph: Wikipedia charity chairman resigns after pornography row. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 16:26, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Recent research: Conflict dynamics, collaboration and emotions; digitization vs. copyright; WikiProject field notes; quality of medical articles; role of readers; best wiki paper award (8,055 bytes · 💬)

Why does the number of Wikipedia readers rise while the number of editors doesn't?"

If Standford University wanted to know "Why does the number of Wikipedia readers rise while the number of editors doesn't?" all they had to do was look at the nuclear power industry. Our site is like the power station, with the editors as the fuel rods and the guidelines, policies, bureaucracy, etc, as the control rods. Our problem on site is the the editors are increasingly frustrated by the control rods, which seem to sink further into the reactor each year and as a result of the control rod insertion more and more editors are experiencing the difficulty of having to work harder to get the article material heated to acceptable levels. Those at the top of the reactor have already experienced a total retardation of the nuclear fission process, while those at the bottom are unable or unwilling to pick up the slack. Despite this disturbing trend it does not effect the readers, who are outside the reactor's water loop and thus interact with the articles only in the heat exchanger, and as long as there is sufficient energy to boil the water - or in this case, to be more precise, maintain the articles and add new ones (even at a reduced rate) - the readers in the power loop will continue to power the machine that keeps Wikipedia moving. TomStar81 (Talk) 14:28, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

TomStar81, I liked your analogy a lot but I wonder how many readers without training in nuclear engineering will be able to understand you. :-) Respectfully, Hispalois (talk) 00:53, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

To be fair to that analogy how often do the average people understand scatter plots and technical diagrams and so forth. All I've done is recycle that 'keep people in the dark about the true interpretation of the results' mentality to the site by giving my own analogy. I will concede a point though that there are people out there who would be unable to interpret this analogy without a little help, so allow me to enlighten anyone who needs a little help with the interpretation of my analogy: open File:PressurizedWaterReactor.gif and observe the process. Wikipedia editors are playing for the red team, while the readers are playing for the blue team. The whole process can be researched by reading our articles on nuclear power and nuclear fission. At the same time, the readers can help our improvement of the articles in question by providing feedback as to the ease of understanding the articles and where the article's need to be improved. TomStar81 (Talk) 06:33, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Why would anyone expect any correlation between the number of Wikipedia readers and editors, or their respective rates of change? Individuals read Wikipedia to obtain information. Individuals edit Wikipedia for a wide variety of reasons. There is no causal relationship between the numbers of readers and editors, and therefore no reason to expect numerical correlation.—Finell 19:24, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

I agree with polite Hispalois: I like the TomStar81 analogy too. I just wanted to point out that even if a reader hasn't got much training in "nuclear engineering" they can always check the "nuclear fuel" article on wikipedia in order to see what are wiki-editors compared with. But what about a rod ? He could find something about it but on wiktionary, please check it out: rod . Reading between the lines, though, I smiled after the hidden phallic symbol that there is behind a "rod". Is wikipedia still a male world? Well... if you take a deeper look at the hyperlinked article on what is a "phallic symbol" in psychoanalysis... you will discover that "Women, not having the phallus, are seen to "be" the phallus". At least according to Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). Have a nice weekend. Maurice Carbonaro (talk) 21:32, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Without going so far as to read the paper, I'm still boggling at "The first model makes the assumption that editors act as predators and articles have the role of prey". Sometimes it feels the other way round. Still, most carnivores would love to be able to create their own prey, I'm sure. Johnbod (talk) 01:12, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

bug

It looks like something's broken in the mediawiki handling of English->Thai interwiki links, because the wikicode

[[th:วิกิพีเดีย:บทความคัดสรร|featured articles on the Thai Wikipedia]]

disappears entirely, causing the fuzzy logic paragraph in this article to have this mangled phrase:

to discern the (88 at the time of the study) from non-featured articles

-R. S. Shaw (talk) 21:30, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. Sonia has added the missing colon. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 00:05, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Thai Featured Article study and overfitting

There are only 91 featured articles in the Thai wikipedia, 88 of which used by the study. I'm not sure that's really a good enough sample size to get good results. (Okay, sure, there are 75,000 Thai WP articles total, which is a good sample set, but they picked only 100 "normal" articles.) The fact that their algorithm caught *all* the FAs makes me a bit suspicious too - it's easy to make a model catch everything with lots of specific hacks, but it's not clear if you get a good model going forward - overfitting. (Think of weird edge case FAs in English WP promoted in 2007 with cleanup tags in the middle of a FAR - it'd be weird for a non-overfit / non-super-generous model to mark it as featured, so some error rate is "good.") If they'd had, say, 400 featured articles to play with, and fed 300 of them into the corpus + 10K non-featured articles, and then had to guess on the remaining 100 FAs mixed in with a different 10K normal articles, then the results might have been interesting. As it stands, alas. I'd also want to see a very low rate of false positives ideally since so many "normal" articles are easy to rule out just on basis of, say, footnote count; an algorithm that could tell the difference between articles with lots of footnotes because they're radioactively controversial recent events vs. ones with lots of footnotes because they're featured.

Obligatory Nate Silver link: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/models-can-be-superficial-in-politics-too/ . (Nice & simple overfitting explanation with examples, although presidential elections have an even tinier sample size.) SnowFire (talk) 17:58, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

Admin, emotion, women..what?

That has got to be one of the oddest paragraphs I have read about anything gender gap related in a long time. How does linking to policy make one emotional? I'm confused by that. I also don't understand - do more women link to policy as compared to what male editors? I find that hard to believe, but, I'm a staunch anti-link to policy supporter when working with new editors, at least. It's research like this that makes me often wonder what use it is to us (anymore?). I also understand if some women might have to find ways to defend "ourselves" by having policy as a back up, but...even then, I don't see that in the areas of Wikipedia where I hang out. I'm assuming "gender aware" means women recruiting women or...? And I don't know why that is news, it's old news :) SarahStierch (talk) 17:24, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Technology report: Talking performance with CT Woo and Green Semantic MediaWiki with Nischay Nahata (3,041 bytes · 💬)

• Thanks for focusing on Nischay Nahata's Google Summer of Code project; I think it's going to be very helpful for Semantic MediaWiki in a variety of ways. A few points of correction: "Semantic MediaWiki" is both an individual extension and the name given to the group of extensions that make use of it; SMW is in fact in use on one Wikimedia wiki, Wikimedia Labs (that counts, right?); I don't think academia makes for any significant portion of SMW's usage; and I don't think anyone with any serious knowledge of the matter would call SMW and Wikidata competitors: SMW is intended for single-language wikis, while Wikidata (or more accurately, the software it will run on, Wikibase) is intended for massively multilingual wikis like Wikipedia. You could argue that wikis with a few languages could use either system, but I would hardly say that makes the two competitors. Yaron K. (talk) 14:57, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Personally I consider labs to be an "internal" thing and not a "project" (in the sense of an open wiki for collaboration on writing down the sum of human knowladge, yadda). However I could see an argument both ways on that. translatewiki also uses SMW, and well it is separate from Wikimedia, it is highly integrated with our (non-english) projects. Bawolff (talk) 17:20, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

• • Thank you as ever for the corrections, Yaron, I do struggle to report with the same contextual depth on SMW as vanilla MW, especially in summary format. The competitors reference is to a thread last month on wikidata-l (I deliberately shan't link to it) in which one SMW advocate accused Wikidata of "rewriting SMW (and various of its extensions) almost from scratch" etc., etc. It's a hugely complex issue, especially since Wikidata phase 2 isn't fixed itself yet. I shall try to give a better researched (and longer) overview in the future, I promise :) . - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 19:21, 1 August 2012 (UTC) (n.b. just in case it's confusing, the claims in question were later removed, not by me)

Thanks for responding, and for clarifying. I didn't know we were allowed to change the articles themselves... :) I mean, it's a wiki, but that's still a little unexpected. I also didn't know about that wikidata-l thread - I'm not on that mailing list. I just looked it up, and now I have to reiterate what I said about "anyone with any serious knowledge of the matter". :) Anyway, it's still good to see SMW being mentioned, and you (or anyone else) are always free to write to the semediawiki-user mailing list if you want quick feedback on anything. Yaron K. (talk) 04:30, 2 August 2012 (UTC)