Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2013-04-01

Comments

The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2013-04-01. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Featured content: What the ? (2,829 bytes · 💬)

• "Cheetahs on the Edge (Director's Cut)" - is there no "Featured video" category?--ukexpat (talk) 14:59, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
• Small typo: "Petualangan Sharina" should be "Petualangan Sherina". Cheers. Bennylin (talk) 15:56, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

• Fixed, thanks. If you spot a typo it's ok to boldly fix it. --Pine^✉ 19:34, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

• Thanks Ben. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 01:04, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

• I agree with Ukexpat. If there is no featured video category, we may want to add one. Zell Faze (talk) 17:02, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

• As far as I know, all videos on English Wikipedia and Commons that are featured go through FPC. It seems to work ok, and adding another featured queue for reviewers to watch is something that I think would just create extra work with no meaningful benefit. --Pine^✉ 19:34, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

• I only asked because it looks kinda odd for a video to have a caption referring to it as a "Featured picture".--ukexpat (talk) 00:33, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

• A motion picture may be picture as well :) Probably some day FPs and featured videos acquire a more general title of featured media. Brandmeister^talk 00:38, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

• "Featured media" would include featured sounds, and so far as I know, no one has proposed a merger of featured pictures with featured sounds. We could rename "featured pictures" to "featured visual media" but I think that's more trouble than it's worth. --Pine^✉ 00:48, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

• "it looks kinda odd for a video to have a caption referring to it as a "Featured picture"" - As Brandmeister says, they are also "motion" or "moving" pictures. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 01:06, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

News and notes: Funding for the Wikipedia Library and six other projects; April Fool's Day ructions (4,960 bytes · 💬)

• April Fools' Day is pranks are inconsistent with Proverbs 26:18, 19.—Wavelength (talk) 15:21, 5 April 2013 (UTC) and 16:26, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
• Oh wow. Reading the flak this years April Fools Day has gotten kinda makes me a little embarrassed for participating. I mean its a day for laughs and in the end we recieved disappointment. GamerPro64 15:38, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
• I always find the angst about April Fools Day to be rather amusing. But if you look at pageview stats for the DYK hooks, I think it is also clear that they are extremely popular with readers. I did one of the DYK hooks, Sam LoPresti. The article had 7000 views on April 1 against a daily average in March of just over 10. Comparing against some of my other DYKs on obscure hockey players, Bill Cook had about 500 views on its DYK day against 20ish on a normal day, and Mickey MacKay was 800 against 15-20 for a normal day. For some other of this year's April 1 gags, James Bond (American football) had 7500 views, Śmigus-Dyngus had 47,000 (!), John le Fucker was around 16,700 and Clive Mantle was at 25,000. Personally, I think our annual debates about whether or not it is appropriate to use the main page for gags considerably misses the point. Our main page gags gets readers interested in a wide variety of topics they never would read otherwise. And that is far more useful and valuable to this project than yet another attempt to MFD a core policy page or RFA a known vandal, or other similar, tedious pranks. Resolute 15:40, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
• Yes, I did create a joke AfD. No, I do not feel ashamed about it. Why would I? I did five things that I feel are important for such a piece:

1. I did not edit the actual article page (keeping it out of article space - though in this instance it might have been a good joke to do it with, I respected the suggested guidelines).
2. I used the humor template on the AfD page.
3. For the subject, I used something that could be tied to the last 364 days historically (the Harlem Shake, which became big in early February of this year).
4. I tied my topic into an older joke (Rickrolling).
5. Had it been allowed to run its course, I would have closed it.

Look at a "proposal" I make back in 2011. No one complained, everyone knew it was a joke, and thus it was allowed to run its course. Surely they saw I was hanging around and watching it. If you want a good source for opinion on April Fool's Day pranks, some of the people making the funny comments there might be good sources, especially TenPoundHammer (whom I believe I had alerted to the "proposal" and went over to join in). I closed the discussion in the first fifteen minutes or so of April 2 as promised, and nothing was said of it again (except perhaps on talk pages talking about what they thought of the joke, but I did not research this at the time). Heck, I've seen people make joke edits to Jimbo's talk page, such as being welcomed to Wikipedia and receiving an offer from extra-terrestrials. I myself witnessed and eventually reversed, on a different user's page, an indefinite flogging. As for my joke AfD: delete that darn Harlem Shake nonsense.

I bet reading these now, you (the reader) are getting a bit of a laugh, are you not? If certain editors here would realize that having fun like this for one day without causing actual destructive harm is actually GOOD for you, then this whole need to debate the merits of the whole thing would not be necessary. It's a chance for editors who are serious for the other 364 days to have a little fun. Done in small quantities, there is no harm intended by it, and it should be recognized as such. If anything, create a group to help control it, or dictate criteria to follow, but don't outright ban it or threaten to block editors. Wikipedia is like Google in being a top site; if Google can have a little fun, surely we can as well. And that's what I think. CycloneGU (talk) 02:26, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

Special report: Who reads which Wikipedia? The WMF's surprising stats (11,202 bytes · 💬)

Note: For stats, charts, and graphs see: commons:Category:Wikimedia statistics.

countries such as the Balkan states that were assimilated into the Soviet Union for most of the 20th century - I'm sorry to disappoint you, but there is only one country that formerly belonged to USSR and is close enough to Balkan to be mixed up. That's Moldova. And in its article in en.wiki, Balkan is not even mentioned. Check your facts. --Oop (talk) 13:17, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for being so polite. I erred, of course, in mixing up Balkan and Baltic—call it a typo. Now corrected. Tony (talk) 13:24, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

Is the 25% increase in the last year due to link prefetching? Regards, Sun Creator^(talk) 14:05, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

• I think there might have been a minor issue with Hong Kong being listed as a non-English speaking country when considering that it was a British Territory until 1997 and that English is used in there. The C of E God Save the Queen! (talk) 15:41, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

English is one of two official languages in Malta, and 88% of its citizens speak English. Does this qualify it as a "[m]ajority native English-speaking country" (per the first image)? Wrad (talk) 15:57, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

I had in mind that 2% of Hong Kong people are native speakers of English. I suspect that few Maltese are native speakers. Tony (talk) 23:55, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

Ok, makes sense. Incidentally, I'm red/green colorblind, and I have trouble distinguishing between lines in some of the lower images. For future Signpost articles, could we use a different color scheme? Wrad (talk) 00:29, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

How are the monthly views exatly measured? Some very interesting results there. FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 16:25, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for the interesting investigation. One of the surprising points for me was that Comoros actually have the best viewing-ratio in favor of ar WP, yet in over three years of working there I haven't seen a single Comorian editor, I have thought because of that the french was the dominant language for Comoros. In general, it seems that the more developed and educated Arab countries tends to have lower or average views of ar WP, that sounds interesting. Another point worthes mentioning (inspired by "Chequers" comment below) is that, from my own experience, size and growth of a native language's WP is essential for page views. For example, some articles that was developed from few poor sections to FA level in ar WP (Example) had raised page views as much as 20 times in one year. Better content, Much more visitors --aad_Dira (talk) 08:10, 6 April 2013 (UTC).

Namibia is definitely not a Portuguese-speaking country. I assume the author got confused with the neighbouring country of Angola. LouriePieterse 22:57, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

Lourie, you're right to question this. Languages of Namibia says "English, the official language, is spoken by less than 1% of people as their native language. Among the white population, 60% speak Afrikaans, 32% German, 7% English, and 1% Portuguese (current figures show that they are in fact 4–5% of the total population of the country nowadays, i.e. 100,000 people)" (my italics). Nevertheless, the WMF's stats show that the share of views from that country to the Portuguese WP has declined from nearly 10% in 2009 to less than 1% now (put "Namibia" into your finder once you've arrived on that big stats page). Can you shed any light on this? And Erik, I wonder whether it's possible to track down whether the sharp dip in Portuguese WP views throughout the world in 2010 is an artefact of collecting the stats? Tony (talk) 05:59, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

I have a plausible solution to this apparent anomaly. Firstly, I have only quickly looked at the statistics page now, but it would have been nice to see how the total amount of views increased for the country. It is my believe that the amount of Portuguese views stayed relatively the same, but that the other languages increased. I say this because access to internet connectivity increased dramatically in the last few years. It might be possible that the Portuguese views are attributed to higher-class individuals from Angola that only visit Namibia, or even higher-class nationals. Having geolocation information would help with understanding this, as I believe most of this traffic will originate from Windhoek. Secondly, I know some people from Namibia, including a friend who owns an aviation business in the northern areas, but have never heard of Portuguese nationals. I honestly do not know, as I have not even researched my above theory, I only speak out of experience. It is just most plausible in my mind that higher-class Portuguese visitors and nationals are responsible for that traffic and that as more people got access to the internet, that ratio declined. With more statistics, it will be easier to make solid conclusions. :) LouriePieterse 18:58, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

Namibia as a country had 0.002% of pageviews in 2009/10 and a tenth of that would be 0.0002% of global page views. I not sure how many hundreds of millions of readers we had in that era - but I think it has risen sharply to the 500 million a month of today. So it wouldn't be impossible for one in half a million of our page views in that era to be from one Portuguese speaking person in Namibia if by chance we had an active editor who lived there.. Alternatively it could have been a border anomaly with a Namibian company using one Internet portal for all its offices including one in Angola. I've known companies that ran their IT so that everything ran through head office, and as a result the subsidiary offices would appear to be geolocating to the wrong country. ϢereSpielChequers 19:45, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

Search engines?

I suspect that some of these transitions are down to search engines. Search engines will vary their results by geography of searcher if they don't have more to go on, and if they shift from defaulting a country to En Wiki to AR wiki then the result could be significant.

Size of native language wiki will also be an issue, for people who speak languages such as Maltese and Slovenian a very high proportion of subjects will not be covered in their native language.

Another thing that will vary over time is the taught foreign language in a country. In much of the former Soviet block anyone born before 1975 will have been educated in a society where Russian was at least the first foreign language one learned, but the younger generation will have probably been taught English. Perversely as the Internet becomes more common in such countries it will spread from the young who usually have some English to the old whose non-native language is Russian. ϢereSpielChequers 08:10, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

Readers choose Wikipedia over or by google?

Search engine changes is a good guess. I wonder how the google Knowledge Graph (deployed 2012) influences stats, does it link to english WP articles if you search in another language without a WP article?

My first thought about these stats was: Wikistats artefact? I read discussions about excluding bot pageviews in stats (which is done with a broad brush so far?) and about the strange mobile view stats. There are many questions. BTW, i have to say that the speculation about a sudden german popular-culture-interest spike is a really silly explanation! --Atlasowa (talk) 19:47, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

One problem with excluding bots is in identifying the bots. The easy way is to look at accounts with the bot flag currently set on, that has the not inconsiderable problem in exercises like this when you look at old edits that some very active bots have been retired and deflagged. Hence the importance of also looking at lists of formerly flagged bots. I think the German popular culture theory is that the DE wiki has become less focussed on that area and thereby not covered that part of the market so well, rather than a change of interests amongst German internet readers. However I don't speak German so can't check the theory. ϢereSpielChequers 08:49, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

Atlas, I'm sure a lot of people are interested in why German-speakers appear to be visiting the German WP less and other WPs more. I'd be very pleased if you could provide some hypotheses here. Tony (talk) 13:10, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

Comoros

Comoros had bugs in its stats, I think they were corrected : Wiki stats gives 80% French, 10% English et 2 % Arabic (http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2012-12/SquidReportPageViewsPerCountryBreakdownHuge.htm). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Loup Solitaire 81 (talk • contribs) 01:51, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

Technology report: Wikidata phase 2 deployment timetable in doubt (1,475 bytes · 💬)

Wikidata

Hey :) A bit of clarification on the Wikidata part: The lag was attributed to Wikidata but there were other massive template changes going on at the same time and Wikidata was likely just a contributing factor. As for the deployment: We have a new date for deployment. It is April 8, so next Monday, if there are no further issues. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 13:29, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

I just want to say that I explicitly felt like these user experience issues shouldn't hold up deployment of phase 2 to English Wikipedia, and I'm heartened that other enwiki editors and key Wikidata supporters like Erik chimed in with constructive ways we can improve things for new and old editors alike. I still am cautious about the impact of Wikidata on editor engagement and retention, but they're not insurmountable problems. All things can be solved with some elbow grease and clearing thinking about the interaction design. In any case, thank you Jarry for highlighting concerns about usability when it comes to deploying new features. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 21:21, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

WikiProject report: Special: FAQs (2,370 bytes · 💬)

• 
  Caption1
• 
  Caption2

It would be a lot more helpful to link to a list of projects. I am trying to find the women writer project, and it is very difficult to get a list of active projects. You also can not search for a project page. LoveElectronicLiterature (talk) 14:16, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

This page is disturbingly interesting. I recommend publishing it as a subpage of Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide or at least making sure it is linked from there. --Elitre (talk) 13:22, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

Disturbingly interesting? I've never heard that before. :) –Mabeenot (talk) 23:35, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

I know, right? Not so sure it conveys the meaning I want, but pretty sure everyone still gets it :-) Elitre (talk) 06:49, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

Can an article's WikiProject assessment be reviewed (i.e. re-assessed)? If so, how? Headhitter (talk) 23:10, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

@Headhitter: It depends on what class the article is. Many of the "lower tier" ones (List, Stub, Start, C, B) are usually assigned by one editor and therefor can be changed by another if the article improves or decreases in quality. However, some of the other ones (GA, FA, FL) require formal review both to promote and demote the articles (read more on the linked pages). A-class isn't widely used, and criteria for this class vary from project to project.

tl;dr: Yes, they can be reassessed. You can do it yourself, except for when you want the article to be promoted/demoted from the "official" class-markers (i.e GA, FA, FL etc.) where formal review is required. If it concerns A-class status you need to consult the relevant WikiProject's guidelines. Sincerely, InsaneHacker (💬) 23:29, 7 January 2018 (UTC)