Comments

The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2012-12-10. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Featured content: Wikipedia goes to Hell (859 bytes · 💬)

Kudos to the Signpost for not wikilinking "lahars". Really makes you want to click on the link to find out. --Enric Naval (talk) 09:03, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, although as long as I've been writing this section I've tried not to link anything outside of image captions and the first sentence. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 12:42, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

*facepalm* I have been reading the signpost for years, and I had never noticed this..... --Enric Naval (talk) 16:27, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

News and notes: Wobbly start to ArbCom election, but turnout beats last year's (3,504 bytes · 💬)

My experience has not found paying / offering to pay people to edit is effective. WikEmerg was paying $600-1000 per article and had limited success. See here for further details [1] Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 23:04, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

My understanding from very limited German and a Google Translation is that the project is to explore how to help the community deal effectively with paid editors, rather than develop ways to enable paid editing with donor funds. The commentary in the Signpost was a little vague I think. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 23:28, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

No, the evaluation is wide-ranging and one of the explicit goals is for example that at the end "a written handout for various stakeholders (Communications agencies, GLAM cooperation partners, communications experts of businesses) how and to which extend they can operate in Wikipedia" (no. 10) has to exist and there is also a workshop to bring paid editors and the community together (no. 4). both are also explicitly included in the evaluation framework and there is a Euro15,000 budget for the "get together"-workshop. Therefore, I think the Signpost got "evaluating" quite right - after all, it is not claimed to solve the issue once and for all, regards --Jan eissfeldt (talk) 06:38, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Is it really the case that "every year frustration boils over in candidates and others who watch the election closely"? If so, those people need to go for a walk around the block! ;) Nick-D (talk) 07:21, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia is SRS BSNS. Reso lute 14:48, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Paid editing is happening, and is "working". 99% of it is covert and is being coordinated on other sites. Gigs (talk) 15:29, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

It takes €81,000 to investigate paid editing? That seems like a lot of money. I hope some good things come out of it at least. Kaldari (talk) 19:13, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

" KPMG states in the document that it represents the financial position "fairly, in all material respects" and that the year ended in "conformity with US generally accepted accounting standards"." This is not news; ALL US audit reports say this, except the ones that don't - now they are news. Reporting on these matters is a legal requirement, and this is "dog bites man". Put something, anything, in instead, like a couple of key figures. Johnbod (talk) 12:37, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Technology report: The new Visual Editor gets a bit more visual (3,777 bytes · 💬)

We're super psyched to have Matthew join our team. :) It's great to be able to hire someone who A) is a Wikipedian B) a developer of community tools like ProveIt. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 23:12, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

The VisualEditor opt-in is now available on enwiki: Preferences → Editing → Usability features → "Enable VisualEditor (only in the main namespace and the User namespace)". VPT announcement, thread. — Richardguk (talk) 04:37, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

I just enabled VisualEditor. I now have an extra tab on article space pages that allows me to select VisualEditor to edit the page. On selecting VisualEditor, you can edit the page similar to how you edit a MicroSoft word document e.g., to bold the text "foo", you need only select the text "foo" and press ctrl-b rather than use <b>foo</b>. What's even nicer, you can ctrl-z undo your edits while the VisualEditor is open, similar to MicroSoft word. VisualEditor doesn't appear to have a ctrl-y redo option. Looks like VisualEditor has trouble with transcluded elements and does not appear to see the page categories. Minor issues. Great work in bring VisualEditor to Wikipedia! -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 10:39, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

CTRL-z works already works in the old editing box. Not tried the new one yet - I'm stuck with IE7 on my office machine. We've been promised an upgrade for months! An optimist on the run! 11:46, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for pointing out the extra tab, I couldn't figure out why it wasn't working! Λυδ α cιτγ 09:57, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
Unless you're using Internet Explorer, Redo is Ctrl+Shift+Z rather than Ctrl+Y. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 10:22, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Great job on the VisualEditor work! It's coming along nicely. Reference support is crucial; hopefully that'll be implemented soon. For the UploadWizard, it'd be great if it supported transferring freely licensed videos from Flickr (it'd have to do conversion in the backend) or maybe even free videos from YouTube which hosts its videos in WebM format. 155.201.35.58 (talk) 17:43, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
- WebM support is very new still, so this might come sooner rather than later. That said, improving the UploadWizard is not a WMF-funding target, so it'll get done when it'll get done. - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 17:41, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

WikiProject report: WikiProject Human Rights (1,393 bytes · 💬)

This is a fascinating endeavor and I would like to one day see this WikiProject become one of the most supported in Wikipedia. So many people already enjoy volunteering their time to human rights educational projects and if only they realized the large number of people coming to Wikimedia projects to learn about these things, I think that many off-wiki volunteers would see the value of doing some teaching on-wiki. In many areas of human rights activism, such as the free speech issues Cirt spoke about, people interested in the topic also become knowledgeable of multiple points of view and I think there is potential for this community to come to Wikipedia and have instinctive understanding of how WP:NPOV works. I think this would be a good thing. Blue Rasberry (talk) 21:16, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks very much for your comment, Bluerasberry (talk · contribs), and we'd love to have you join WP:WikiProject Freedom of speech! :) — Cirt (talk) 02:08, 12 December 2012 (UTC)