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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2012-12-17. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Discussion report: Concise Wikipedia; section headings for navboxes (1,344 bytes · 💬)

Who's in charge here?

You've missed a deadline. Carrite (talk) 17:38, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

We delayed publication to write up the Arbcom results. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 22:03, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

And aren't some of the items repeated from [1]?Jim.henderson (talk) 01:34, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

I believe J36 repeats prominent discussions that are still ongoing and active. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 01:43, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
  • It's em-dashes not en dashes. Mari Adkins 16:55, 20 December 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by MariAdkins (talk • contribs)
    • Actually, "en dashes, hyphens, and any other small horizontal lines" (which includes em dashes) is a direct quote from the proposal. Art LaPella (talk) 21:09, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Featured content: Wikipedia's cute ass (950 bytes · 💬)

  • Tits and ass. Oh my. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 06:32, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
Gotta say, this headline brightened up a very soul-crushing night working the ER. Kudos! — The Hand That Feeds You:Bite 09:12, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
  • Indeed. Thanks, I needed that. ;-) — Sctechlaw (talk) 02:15, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

News and notes: Arbitrator election: stewards release the results (6,802 bytes · 💬)

  • Yay! I'm so glad the elections are over. Thanks to the community and everyone who helped out. MBisanz talk 23:13, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
  • Graphs fixed, thanks to WereSpielCheckers' note. The article didn't mention that MBisanz has produced a draft policy/guideline for future ArbCom elections. Community input is welcome. Tony (talk) 01:30, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
  • Um, this might be deja vu on my part, but I'm pretty sure I've been (mistakenly) labeled British before. I just like saying "chaps", guys, and I think "grey" is a nicer-looking spelling. :) Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs(talk) 02:11, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
  • Shouldn't it be "Elen of the Roads, Beeblebrox NewYorkBrad, and Jclemens" that had low "no votes" in SmokeyJoe's graph? There are six candidates with lower "no votes" than Beeblebrox. Not sure why he chose a line graph either, x-axis is candidate name... joining the dots implies a trend, when there isn't one. --Surturz (talk) 03:54, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
  • Surturz, I thought about that; but at the same time NYB had the lowest oppose vote and the highest support vote of any candidate; the three candidates mentioned had spikes in both supports and opposes (less so Beeblebrox, but the three patterns were still distinct for him); this made all the difference to their outcomes, since the low no-vote was balanced by a high oppose vote, unlike NYB's result. Nevertheless, congrats to all "low no-vote" candidates, who nevertheless did garner more support than those in the vicinity (see graph, where the line formatting, incidentally, does show the bumps on an x-axis ordered in terms of descending S/(S+O), which is linear). Tony (talk) 11:40, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
  • In the graph of votes, it would be interesting to compare applicant's success with their order in the list of applicants' names. Personally, I suffered from "voter's burnout syndrome" by the time I got to candidate 4, and was somewhat disappointed to learn I was supposed to vote for seven people or something like that. There was way too much required reading for the voters, in my opinion. As I recall, I didn't finish voting, but just clicked the vote button out a feeling of "enough is enough"! Jane (talk) 09:09, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
  • As far as I remember, the Israeli chapter has been trying to change this law since its founding in 2007 or somewhere near that time. Might be wrong, but 2010 definitely seems very late. EDIT: I noticed that the 2010 figure comes from Itzik's announcement, although it seems to be referring to the time when a parliamentarian was officially approached and/or accepted our position, not when the first steps were taken to make this happen. —Ynhockey (Talk) 10:34, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
  • Ynhockey, is it worth changing the text at this point, and if so, can you suggest the change here? Tony (talk) 11:40, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
  • Just a nit: I'm a system administrator, not a web developer.  :-) — Coren (talk) 14:42, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
  • I don't think it's surprising that the turnout was higher. There was much arb-dramah in November. Rich Farmbrough, 23:15, 20 December 2012 (UTC).
  • Quibble about the sentence "Of the 21 candidates, 13 managed to gain positive support-to-oppose ratios ...". All candidates gained positive support-to-oppose ratios because the number of support votes and oppose votes were both positive, and a ratio of two positive numbers must be positive. Perhaps this is meant to say 13 candidates had suppor-to-oppose ratios above 1 (ie. more support votes than oppose votes), while the other 8 had ratios below 1 (ie. more oppose votes than support votes)? Mathematically, S / O > 1 is identical to S / (S + O) > 50 %, so it could also be meant to say that 13 candidates received more than 50 % support (amongst voters who took a position on the candidate). EdChem (talk) 00:09, 21 December 2012 (UTC)
  • Just wanted to drop a note saying I semi'd the page for a bit because of vandalism.

    Also, not a huge fan of myself, Tim, and Salvio being reduced to just our various roles as clerks/AUSC members respectively. But a minor point I suppose. NW (Talk) 08:37, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

    • Thanks for semi. Your roles as clerks/AUSC members was in a general context of "already experienced in Arb-related roles". Yes, we could have been more expansive in the descriptions of the successful candidates as editors. Tony (talk) 04:11, 22 December 2012 (UTC)
      • Gotcha. As I said, minor point and I understand better where you are coming from now. Best, NW (Talk) 08:41, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

Op-ed: Finding truth in Sandy Hook (7,249 bytes · 💬)

  • Definitely. Wouldn't immediate semi-protection or PC-ing of pages like this work to keep away the less desirable edits? — Crisco 1492 (talk) 23:18, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
    • Certainly, but the same argument could be made that semi-protecting the entire encyclopedia would serve the same purpose. We do not do that, and we are reluctant to do it for individual articles, for a very good reason: that we want IPs and new users to edit articles. We only reluctantly shut them out if there are too many vandals out and about, but it's not a desirable state. Powers T 23:33, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
  • Seems to me that such an article would be a perfect opportunity to test out PC on a current high viewed and edited article. We can see if it works well or not in such a situation. That should be done next time. SilverserenC 00:59, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
  • Maybe--but who gets to approve the edits, admins or regular editors also? Besides, I wonder how that works when you have an edit per minute and want to reject an earlier edit. It's an interesting proposition, though. But what you're doing, then, is shrinking the number of gatekeepers even further. I'm not saying that's a bad thing: it probably is a good thing. At the same time, there will be a lot more clamoring about censorship. I'm surprised that it's actually relatively quiet on the talk page as far as that is concerned.

    I tell you what, it's certainly something to consider next time, yes. Drmies (talk) 03:22, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

  • I'd think about it. We should have some decent field testing. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 06:33, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
  • If memory serves, one of the things we concluded from the initial trial was that PC isn't so good at pages like this - fast moving pages means that edits tend to pile up one on another, and by the time a version gets patrolled it's been edited again. Andrew Gray (talk) 10:42, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
  • "either supplant or compliment" - oh dear. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 00:21, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
  • I went back to check; indeed. Ah well, Demiurge, it's cutting-edge journalism. I tell you what, that article is chockful of data; a geek could have a field day with it. And it's interesting to see how we are studied... Drmies (talk) 03:22, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
  • I think the suggestion above about a page of "breaking news guidelines" is a pretty good one - we do the right thing in most cases, but there's a lot of effort expended on reinventing the wheel sometimes. WP:BREAKING, where I'd expected to find something, just points to the notability policy. Andrew Gray (talk) 09:43, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
    • … where there are seven paragraphs of guidelines for editors on not rushing. You could always help Drmies to write User:Drmies/Notoriety, too. Uncle G (talk) 09:57, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
      • Mmm, though those seven paras are oriented more towards the question of whether to have an article at all rather than "so, now we have one thrust upon us, how do you practically handle it"? Things like the recommendation to create and protect names, past decisions on when to apply semi-protection, etc. (And thanks for the notoriety page, I'd not seen that before!) Andrew Gray (talk) 10:42, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
        • I hadn't seen it either, Andrew. Odd, no? Then again, Uncle G forgot he wrote up WP:LGB. Drmies (talk) 15:37, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
  • I think where we can do better than established outlets are in two areas
    1. We do not need column inches or minutes of commentary, therefore we do not need to report poorly sourced information
    2. What we do report is always sourced, and in the early stages should always be explicitly attributed - in a sense, by doing this we can only be reporting truth

The rush to report is not wholly negative, people come to us for information, and that it is recent is no reason per se to exclude it. And while the editorial decisions on what to leave out and what to put in do benefit form being a little on the conservative side, it is important to remember we are only documenting as a tertiary source and are capable of revising the content rapidly. On the other side of the coin, we need to remember that, deny it as they might, journalists will also be turning to Wikipedia, though they seem to be better at understanding our nature of recent years. Rich Farmbrough, 20:52, 20 December 2012 (UTC).

  • I have argued before that the tendency of articles on recent events to balloon into an unorganized mess is actually a desirable first stage in the article evolution process. It's always better to clean up a long article with many sources than to try to grow one after sources and enthusiasm are no longer readily available. Dcoetzee 14:01, 22 December 2012 (UTC)
    • I wish people would archive the sources that they do use, though. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 14:06, 22 December 2012 (UTC)
  • "all the truths we thought we knew about the trench coat mafia being bullied by the jocks." What is THIS supposed to mean? GeorgeLouis (talk) 05:20, 23 December 2012 (UTC)
  • Times change I guess. I protected the Osama bin Laden article on the day of his death only to be promptly overturned by other admins. This despite the fact that edits were occurring so fast I couldn't remove some "naughty words" vandalism and the fact that for at least an hour the article stated that the U.S. President had gone on TV and declared Osama was dead - at a time when all that had, in fact, occurred was an announcement that the President would soon speak. But the ability for everyone to edit was judged more important than mere facts then. Rmhermen (talk) 13:46, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

Technology report: MediaWiki groups and why you might want to start snuggling newbie editors (629 bytes · 💬)

  • Interesting report. Thanks! --Pine✉ 08:53, 21 December 2012 (UTC)
  • It would also help if some folk didn't block at the drop of a hat. Rich Farmbrough, 17:39, 23 December 2012 (UTC).


WikiProject report: WikiProjekt Computerspiel: Covering Computer Games in Germany (555 bytes · 💬)

This was a great interview and an interesting insight into a sister project that faces many similar problems to our own WP:VG, as well as some different issues as well. Thanks to those involved. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs(talk) 04:09, 20 December 2012 (UTC)


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