Comments

The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2013-01-28. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Arbitration report: Doncram continues (149 bytes · 💬)

Discussion report: Administrator conduct and requests (0 bytes · 💬)

Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-28/Discussion report

Featured content: Listing off progress from 2012 (750 bytes · 💬)

Just a heads-up. There are 4 newly promoted featured portals in the next issue. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 04:20, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

Great work (that doesn't get highlighted often). - Dank (push to talk) 04:31, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

I've been following that with much, much, much interest. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 08:01, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

In the media: Hoaxes draw media attention; Sue Gardner's op-ed; Women of Wikipedia (9,001 bytes · 💬)

This hoax is very interesting; that such things can be perpetuated so is an unfortunate result of reviewing practices that don't actually check offline (and, indeed, online) sources, because doing so is, frankly, boring. ResMar 22:14, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

That article had ~150+ viewers every month in recent years, and 120+ since January 2008. It would be interesting to see the reader feedback from WP:AFT about this page. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 03:58, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

"his case shows the urgency with which the encyclopedia needs to modernize and adapt," … Wikipedia, modernize? It's the most modern institution on the planet, and it's constantly adapting, what tosh. As for the hoax conflict, doesn't it actually deserve its own page now that it is NOTABLE …? Even if it didn't ever happen. MasterOfHisOwnDomain (talk) 10:52, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

Cf. [1]. As for the notability of the Bicholim conflict Wikipedia hoax, I totally agree with you. There are dozens of sources from all over the world. Well, it's a wiki ... Andreas JN 466 15:33, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

Re notable hoaxes, we already have one article about a hoax on Wikipedia: Edward Owens hoax. A quick scan of list of hoaxes doesnt show up any hoaxes in other encyclopedia, but they have happened. Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography included many fictitious entries - see wikisource:Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Fictitious Entries John Vandenberg ^(chat) 22:26, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

The article on the hoaxes is excellent - great work. Nick-D (talk) 22:42, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! Andreas JN 466 02:54, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Of course it's greatly annoying, and duly concerning, that hoaxes occasionally will be perpetrated on Wikipedia; and of course Wikipedians should, and will, continue to work at, think about, and discuss the methods of prevention, detection, removal, aftermath, and so on. But anyone who writes about these hoaxes with some grave air that the sky is falling—such as "Wikipedia is doomed", or "the concept of a crowdsourced encyclopedia was congenitally flawed and should/may/will now die", or "Wikipedia was once great but is now on the verge of terminal atrophy"—is not sufficiently grounded in reality. I am reminded of the realist's response to criticism of democracy: "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried." Crowdsourced free encyclopedias are the worst kind of encyclopedia except for the alternatives. And when I say that, I'm not disparaging the form of encyclopedia that came before it, in which journalist-like educated people compiled well-referenced encyclopedias by consulting with experts and with reliable bibliographic sources. Those have good value in various ways. However, they cost money to compile and to use, they have always (so far) lacked comprehensiveness from the viewpoint of an internet-era scale of comnprehensiveness, and, as others have shown, they have never been completely free from hoaxes, inadvertent factual errors, or typos. They may continue to coexist with, fork off of, or build upon crowdsourced free encyclopedias, but they won't replace the latter. The signal-to-noise ratio of Wikipedia as a crowdsourced encyclopedia is about as good as that of many other parts of life, which is to say, entirely adequate to ensure continuance of the medium, because the majority of reasonable people will not close down an entire crowdsourced free encyclopedia in order to prevent a handful of hoaxes that are typically narrow in nature (the broad-natured ones are discovered) and are few enough to be listed on a single page. The majority of reasonable people will not throw out the baby with the bathwater. — ¾-10 17:33, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not, of course, the only place to have suffered hoaxes. The scientific community has had its fair share, including Piltdown Man (40 years until it was proven to be a hoax); the Sokal affair (admitted on the day of publication as a hoax, it is unknown how long it would have been believed if the author had not so admitted); Bower and Chorley’s Crop Circles; Charles Redheffer's Perpetual Motion Machine; Beringer's Lying Stones; The Turk Automaton Chess Player; the Archaeoraptor - there are many more in the Hoaxes in science and Hoaxes categories... PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 10:21, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

Hoaxes are annoying, especially when I believe them! Wikipedia is subject to them just like other online, and offline, information sources. I'm not so troubled by one-time antics. There's one person I've run across who leaves a path of hoaxes in his wake (NOT on Wikipedia). He writes well, and writes plenty of good "non-hoax" material. I don't understand what motivates his confabulating behavior. When he was 15 years old, even 21 years old, it was easier to sigh and think, "boys will be boys" or the equivalent. He's got a bachelor's degree and is 25 years old now, yet I continue to find his elaborate hoaxes scattered about, old and new. I don't know of any on Wikipedia. This is what puzzles me the most: It takes time and effort to create an effective and convincing hoax! Why do it, and why serially, especially without intent or prospect of financial gain? It wastes everyone's time, including the hoax creator. --FeralOink (talk) 15:58, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

Can we please stop treating US sources as the 'default' ie not needing country of origin adding, whereas most 'foreign' sources (to Americans) are deemed to need qualification with country of origin. In this article, Republika is described as Indonesian, TechCrunch is described as Japanese, the Sun is described as British, and the Sydney Morning Herald and Age are described as Australian. Not one single source is described as American. You really need to get it into your heads that Wikipedia is international, not American and American material should not be treated as the default. If you qualify some, you should qualify all. 86.133.55.193 (talk) 08:59, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

Eventually we will probably need to do what you suggested in your last sentence. Sooner would be fine by me. This is why qualifying with country is important: Source publication names are not unique. I've had problems when referring to the television network, ABC, unless I distinguished between the U.S.A.'s ABC or Australia's ABC. Oh, I see now! We could drop adjective descriptions of country of origin, and use Wikilinks for source references, which provide that information. User 86.133.55.193 is correct! That would also solve the problem of "American" as an adjective. I realize that it may be on U.S. passports (I haven't had one for awhile, so I'm not certain of that), but it annoys me to no end to see American instead of U.S.A., as there are many nations in the Americas. Since I live near the U.S.- Mexico border, it is particularly bothersome. I would expect it would be for Canadians too. (I thought TechCrunch was purchased by AOL. I don't recall who owns AOL, I thought it was NBC? Or General Electric? Or some other U.S.-domiciled corporate entity. Is TechCrunch actually Japanese?) --FeralOink (talk) 18:49, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

News and notes: Khan Academy's Smarthistory and Wikipedia collaborate (996 bytes · 💬)

Thanks for a good article on the Wikipedia:GLAM/smarthistory collaboration. This is a project that's still developing and may set a precedent on how Wikipedia deals with massive open online courses and similar projects. If you want to help develop this area in the right way, please just click the project link above and join in. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 21:09, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Smallbones is so right about it being difficult sometimes to properly cite basic interpretation because it's so obvious — no right-minded academic after all would care to devote their essay to first principles. Hope this collaboration helps. MasterOfHisOwnDomain (talk) 10:45, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

Recent research: Lessons from the research literature on open collaboration; clicks on featured articles; credibility heuristics (659 bytes · 💬)

I'd broadly agree with the idea of making ratings more visible, but I think this really has to come after a rethink and an update of the way we handle quality-rating metadata. At the moment, talkpage assessments are frequently several years out of date, and often patchily assigned. There's been some work on resolving this, but ultimately it's going to involve a lot of heavy labour and a lot of volunteer hours. Andrew Gray (talk) 17:27, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

Technology report: Developers get ready for FOSDEM amid caching problems (2,457 bytes · 💬)

Readers interested in FOSDEM, see also mw:Events/FOSDEM.--Qgil (talk) 00:34, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
Job queue - Note, the api can still return an estimate (emphasis on estimate, its known to be wildly inaccurate in some cases). Currently it shows enwikipedia has about 30000 jobs. Bawolff (talk) 15:36, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
Sure, but it's not possible to see trends (unless one is very careful and notes down the numbers, of course). Ganglia was made public five minutes ago, here's the graph again.[2] :-) --Nemo 20:53, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
Thanks Nemo. Welcome back, Ganglia!
The Ganglia data would be a little more useful if it showed the maximum and minimum values for each aggregated period, instead of only the value for an arbitrary point in time in each hour/day/week/month.

It would be more helpful for a log to show also the timestamp of the oldest job as well as the number of entries over time. Better still, a breakdown for each type of job – something like:
SELECT job_cmd, COUNT(*), MIN(job_timestamp) FROM job GROUP BY job_cmd;
I don't think the job tables are replicated to the toolserver, so Ganglia would probably be the easiest way to make this information available.
— Richardguk (talk) 23:36, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
got to say its really nice to see ganglia back.Bawolff (talk) 23:38, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
Richardguk, I agree with you but we don't even have a ganglia graph for all wikis (gerrit:37441)... Maybe you could propose some patch to ganglia, or to gdash [3] (where we have [4])? --Nemo 10:07, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

WikiProject report: Checkmate! – WikiProject Chess (641 bytes · 💬)

Thanks for the awesome report Mabeenot. We excerpted it on the Wikimedia blog and plan to put out social media publicizing it. Matthew (WMF) 19:53, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the kudos! –Mabeenot (talk) 22:25, 31 January 2013 (UTC)