Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2015-06-03

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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2015-06-03. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Blog: How Wikipedia covered Caitlyn Jenner’s transition (6,175 bytes · 💬)

Bruce Jenner was a man

• I don't care. I will never get Wikipedia to change this but I will always take the position that during the time he was actually a man, Bruce Jenner was a man and anything he did should be referred to with male pronouns.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 21:07, 8 June 2015 (UTC)
  • Agree. I think we sacrifice too much for MOS:IDENTITY, which may lead to unencyclopedic things like "she competed in men's decathlon" or "she played John Doe in the film John Doe". Looks like at this moment the only reasonable solution is referring to such people by their last name. Brandmeister^talk 10:11, 9 June 2015 (UTC)
    • Why would that be considered "unencyclopedic"? Kaldari (talk) 21:23, 9 June 2015 (UTC)
      • But the guide should be what reliable sources say, not what our personal position on gender identity is. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 08:46, 10 June 2015 (UTC)
        • What if those reliable sources are out of date? What if those reliable sources contradict BLP? Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 18:44, 10 June 2015 (UTC)
          • MOS:IDENTITY specifically addresses that: "Wikipedia favors self-designation, even when usage by reliable sources indicates otherwise." — Preceding unsigned comment added by Skyerise (talk • contribs)
            • And that's my point. ;-) Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 21:12, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

• Interesting the mind set of those wanting to be encyclopedic but forget the human aspect of what they are covering. This is one of the reasons why Wikipedia has a hard time retaining editors. People are not respected in a manner that is both encyclopedic and sensitive to those living people involved. It is a criticism of Wikipedia that is not that far off base.--Mark Miller (talk) 02:17, 10 June 2015 (UTC)
  • We are writing for a broader audience, not only for people familiar with Wiki arcana, like MOS. A 12-year-old reader has every right to believe that prior to one's transgender transition he/she was referred to via different pronoun. In my opinion, that part of MOS should be amended accordingly. It's not our job to tamper with history by extrapolating it backwards by default without explicit notice of the person in question. If a transgender person hasn't mentioned any preference as to how he/she wants to be referred to in the past, then so be it. Brandmeister^talk 08:13, 10 June 2015 (UTC)
    • "We are writing for a broader audience, not only for people familiar with Wiki arcana, like MOS". Of course, just as journalist use a manual of style book and do not write for those familiar with it. Readers have is an expectation of getting accurate information. Whatever is decided, it should never be about anything but accurately covering the subject and doing so within our stricter adherence to BLP policy.--Mark Miller (talk) 23:03, 10 June 2015 (UTC)
• If SHE competed in Men's Decathlon, SHE should be disqualified. He was a he when he competed, and that's that.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 17:45, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

I think that the question which may be waiting to be asked relates to the extent that Jenner internally identified as being a woman or a man. If she felt like a woman trapped in a man's body (and still eligible to compete) then this sounds fine to me but should, in some way be cited. If he felt like he was then a man and even if he had preference to be/become a woman then the male pronoun certainly fits. My gut reaction is that we shouldn't categorise all histories of trans women in the same way.

Imagine a person who is biologically clearly of one particular sex and yet, say, is a cross dresser and identifies with the opposite or their biological gender. In these cases, she or he could certainly be restricted to performing in male or female events according to biology but this would have no relevance to the gender identity of that person as that individual person perceives it. GregKaye 11:44, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

If SHE (by gender identity) competed in the Men's Decathalon (as a biological male) then SHE has done nothing wrong. For any of a variety of reasons she may have preferred to have competed in the women's event but these events go by biology at birth. As to the opening statement "Bruce Jenner was a man" I would agree that he or she certainly was. GregKaye 11:50, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

The consensus by those that are trans is overwhelmingly against you. I am grateful that the policy on Wikipedia, and other Wikimedia projects, is to follow the route of dignity and respect for the person and prefer their self-identification, however that pans out. It's a good thing. --Fæ (talk) 13:04, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

Discussion report: The deprecation of Persondata; RfA – A broken process; Complaints from users on Swedish Wikipedia (13,868 bytes · 💬)

NPA?

"The users does not seem to be willing to come up with any suggestions or solutions other than to disrupt and make a fuss." That comes uncomfortably close to a personal attack. One does not always need to have a "solution" for a complaint to be legitimate.  --Lambiam 10:51, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Indeed. Fel free to formulate how you wish to still be true to the situation. (t) Josve05a (c) 12:20, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Unclear

Not sure what this means "American Wikimedias make up around 80% of all money the Foundation makes" Does this mean donations from United States make up 80% of funding? Also it is best to use Canadians, people from the United States and Mexicans. While we from Canada and Mexico are technically Americans many do not use the term in that way. People often use it to mean just people from the United States. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:34, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

Per here 20% of editors from US [1] unfortuantely no ref or when this was.

Pere here most donations from US in 2012.

In 2014 things were lumped together by continent [2] and yes America (all three) were about 60% Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:45, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

May be a bad quote on my part of this pipermail. However, this is a report of discussion, and I just reported what others stated. (t) Josve05a (c) 23:16, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

The US is a relatively wealthy part of the world, and it is where the servers are hosted, I think if you go back a few years you will find there was a time when 80% of our money was raised in the US. However that day has long passed, especially if you look at all movement revenue including money raised directly by chapters such as Germany. ϢereSpielChequers 06:02, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

RfA

I believe these kinds of argument are wearing rather thin nowadays. Whether we at WP:RFA2011 actually launched any formal proposals for change or not it certainly sent the right message to those who were determined to disrupt RfA and/or turn it into a drama fest; we're also more active now at telling the trolls where to go with their votes. I think it's more a case that some would-be nominators are afraid of losing face if their nominee fails to get the mop. However, with very few exceptions RfA does what it says on the tin.

Most people commenting on the state of RfA fail to take into account the vast amount of data that was extracted by the participants at WP:RFA2011 which even if updated would still return the same factual conclusions today. The research generally put the blame squarely at the feet of those who were determined to disrupt the election process and give it a bad name, while the actual ‘facts’ revealed that the vast majority of voters are one-off, drive-by, fans, and vengeance seekers, with a few trolls and banned socks thrown in for good measure.

WT:RFA is the backbone of discussion on RfA, candidates, and adminship in general, and people would be well advised to at least watch that page more regularly before commenting anywhere else. However, it's also interesting to note - something that WereSpielChequers, who maintains a lot of the stats, might not yet have noticed - is that participation in discussions at WT:RfA has dropped in direct proportion year on year to the drop in promotions. I don’t personally know how to interpret that, but it is clear evidence that RfA being a ‘horrible and broken process’ does not quite ring entirely true today. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:02, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

• As usual, Guy Macon wields his ginormous hammer of truth and hits the kotowaza nail of independent thought on the head, just as the Wikipedia petitfoggers who worship bureaucracy as their evil machine god do each time they appeal to deru kugi wa utareru in the form of an RfA. Its demise cannot come soon enough. Anyone who wants to be an admin simply doesn't get it. Viriditas (talk) 02:05, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Well, Kudpung กุดผึ้ง, there was a pretty good turnout for NeilN's RfA. Your conclusions are interesting to me about the impact of who comes to vote in RfAs...I typically see very familiar names on the Support/Oppose/Neutral lists so I was unaware that there were a lot of drive-by editors participating. I'm not sure how quickly new editors would even come across an RfA as they are exploring Wikipedia. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 01:48, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

I had noticed that WT:RFA had gone quiet, not sure why that happened, but when people try to change or improve RFA they don't necessarily do so there. I'd also noticed that while total participation at RFA has fallen, it hasn't fallen as fast as the number of RFAs, hence the increase in activity per individual RFAs, over a hundred !votes and a stack of questions now being the norm. Hopefully this means if we could reform RFA to the point where a dozen new admins were being appointed per month we would still have sufficient participation for the RFAs. As for how new editors come across RFA, in my case I noticed a list of current ones on someone's userpage. ϢereSpielChequers 11:51, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

• @Liz:, WereSpielChequersTurnout at RfA has never been so good and a 100+ support is nowadays nothing to jump up and down about and hasn't been since my RfA nearly 5 years ago. However, in case anyone missed the conotation, if one lays the two bar graphs of the number of promotions and the activity at WT:RfA on top of each other, they are near idetical. Which leads to the logical assumption that interest in adminship in general has waned. That is different from editors of the right calbre being scared of what is in fact no longer so much a week of hell. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 18:03, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Well, I think that RfAs that might have been highly contested are now being withdrawn at an earlier stage (like the same day they were posted) but I don't have any data to support that impression. I think the perception of the RfA process is that it will be a grueling 7 day experience where people look for skeletons in your closet and inquire about unlikely hypothetical situations and if an editor sees signs that it won't be an easy pass, they are much more likely to end the process early rather than stick it out for the entire period. And who can blame them? Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 18:31, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Liz, I think you'll find that the vast majority of early closes are from candidates who didn't stand the slightest chance of ever getting through the first few minutes of transclusion and were either attempts to test our patience/vigilance etc or from other misguided souls who just couldn't be plain bothered to read one single advice page or even take notice of the last-minute 'in-your-face' warning banner about wasting their (and our) time. Such RfA are also a lot rarer than they used to be. So the experiment still stands: Anyone who is really interested should at least take the time to investigate by reading up on a lot of past failed and successful RfA, and note that interest in general in RfA/Adminship has waned significantly, otherwise what is reported is just conjecture.--Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:14, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

Indeed once again we have people needlessly whining about RfA being too hard when nine times out of ten those who are complaining that it is too hard didn't deserve the position anyways. So, to make themselves look better, they shout "Bureaucracy!" at everyone, as if we were the modern-day U.S. government.

Forget your own personal views and which administrators you like and do not like for a moment: what if we got more admins (not naming names) that tried to push their own ideological views onto others because they realise that Wikipedia is a platform that is very influential these days. So, with ulterior motives in hand, they go to RfA. With the current process, they don't get very far, because people smell fishiness early on.

If we loosen up the process, all that will happen is that more people who are not qualified to become administrators will get through. And, yes, the snowball may well head down a slippery slope into internal corruption (read: in such a case real, actual, bona fide bureaucracy would begin to appear). Tharthan (talk) 01:12, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

Persondata

• The wholesale removal of {{Person data}} would destroy carefully hand-crafted information about alternative names, and short descriptions which have been added since PLbot did the transfer. We have had this sort of vandalistic implementation of consensus before, where a more careful phased approach would preserve the value of the deprecated component while still meeting the requirement to remove it. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 12:44, 7 June 2015 (UTC).
  • Richard has been around here long enough to know that it is Wikipedia policy that "any good-faith effort to improve the encyclopedia is not vandalism... Mislabelling good-faith edits as vandalism can be considered harmful." The agreed removal of persondata has been discussed at length, both in the RfC and on Wikidata. Sadly, the remaining data held in {{Persondata}} and which has not already been transferred to Wikidata is not in a form which allows for its automated transfer (these problems with persondata have been known for some time). It's all well and good to say that the data is there, but if no-one is using it, it is unsuitable for transfer and it is impractical to transfer it manually, what's the point of keeping it? It just clutters article code and confuses new editors. Besides, it will still be in article histories for anyone needing to find it. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:14, 8 June 2015 (UTC)
    • Too much literalism going on here. Rich clearly said "this sort of vandalistic implementation of consensus". "This sort of" implies a less than literal implication. Viriditas (talk) 00:16, 9 June 2015 (UTC)
      • This sort of reply is incorrect. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:44, 9 June 2015 (UTC)
        • Sir, you are easily amused. Viriditas (talk) 20:59, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata gadget

As usual, links to village pump discussions break very quickly. So where is this Wikidata gadget that was referred to in that discussion? I can't find it.--greenrd (talk) 15:21, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

It's not on the Gadgets tab of Preferences, where I had expected it. It's two separate settings, one on the Recent changes tab ("Show Wikidata edits by default in recent changes and watchlist (does not work yet with enhanced changes)") and one on the Watchlist tab ("Show Wikidata edits in your watchlist"). Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 15:15, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

Featured content: It's not over till the fat man sings (1,761 bytes · 💬)

• Wait. This issue reports 24-30 May this month? Last issue was from 10-16 May. I think you guys missed a week. GamerPro64 17:36, 6 June 2015 (UTC)
  • Think the best solution at this point is to do the missing week next week. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 18:08, 6 June 2015 (UTC)
    • Did we miss a week or just use the wrong dates? Gamaliel (talk) 18:51, 6 June 2015 (UTC)
      • You may have missed a week. You failed to mention the new Featured Topic Overview of Lorde which became an FT on the 18th of May. I know the Signpost have trouble keeping track of FTs but I feel like Featured Articles were also not covered as well. GamerPro64 18:57, 6 June 2015 (UTC)
        • Resident Mario is working on a script to automate this process so we can avoid such problems in the future. Gamaliel (talk) 18:58, 6 June 2015 (UTC)
          • Definitely missed a week. I've checked. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 19:07, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

In the media: Anonymous Australian editing targets football player, shooting victim (2,344 bytes · 💬)

• Regarding the mystery of the image claimed to be on the Rod Liddle article, perhaps this is another case of misunderstanding a Google Knowledge Graph? Those typically get their initial paragraph from Wikipedia [with a link], and so can to be mistaken as simply a Wikipedia article displayed as a search result. (WP:HD often gets complaints about the wrong image for these; the response, inevitable, is to suggest telling Google about Google's error.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:02, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

• It is - googling "Rod Liddle" does indeed bring up a Knowledge Graph showing Fabricant. Inaccuracies about Wikipedia in The Guardian - who'd have ever predicted that? Yunshui ^雲_水 08:55, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

• Regarding the line "...Goodes, whose mother was of Adnyamathanha and Narungga descent,..." I am pretty sure his mother is still alive, so shouldn't it be "is" instead of "was"? AtHomeIn神戸 (talk) 00:38, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

• Ooops! Fixed it. Thank you. Gamaliel (talk) 00:49, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

• Not sure that we should bother reporting reports about common mindless vandalism - the offensive edits to Goodes' page were only online for 8 minutes before they were reverted. The-Pope (talk) 13:27, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

• I've started ignoring the minor cases of vandalism. Sports media in particular seems fond of Wikipedia vandalism stories. But this one in particular got a lot of media attention, probably because it touched on larger controversial issues, and so it was impossible to ignore. Gamaliel (talk) 19:39, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

News and notes: Three new community-elected trustees announced, incumbents out (15,444 bytes · 💬)

• Blue? I don't see any blue names in the ranking chart, but I do see green ones. I've double checked my settings and looked from three different devices, and it looks green on all of them, not blue. Incidentally, red and green are the colours most difficult for colour-blind individuals to differentiate. Risker (talk) 18:59, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

Risker, thanks, and fixed. I completely forgot about red–green when bumbling about with the colours. Tony (talk) 08:19, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

• Mooted? Please be careful using words that have very different or even nearly-opposite meanings in different parts of the English-speaking world. In some countries such as England, "moot" typically means "open for discussion/presented as an idea." In other countries, "moot" typically means "unimportant" or "reduced it unimportance." davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 19:30, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

Good point. The use of 'moot' as a verb meaning 'to reduce or remove the practical significance of'[3] is an obscure use that I wasn't aware of until I looked it up in a dictionary, though the adjectival meaning of 'insignificant' is well known. (I guess it is OK to edit the article to use a better word: I don't think we should expect all Signpost authors to be familiar with obscure ambiguities around the world.) --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 12:34, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

• My suggestion for solving the "diversity problem," so-called, would be for Jan-Bart to take a wikibreak and resign his seat in favor of a female from outside of Europe and North America, preferably one older than 50 years old. Don't put "diversity" on the community-elected seats, put that on the board for its appointed 5 seats. The gender/age/ethnicity of those can be directly controlled. The last discretionary appointee was Guy Kawasaki, a North American male. Money where mouth is, and all that. —Tim Davenport /// Carrite (talk) 21:37, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

  Both Jan-Bart and Stu are stepping down at the end of their term this December, as noted two years ago when they were reappointed. And in fact the last two appointees fit the demographic you mention. – SJ + 00:18, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

  Concern trolling aside, I agree any solution to address this issue should apply to the entire board, not just the community seats. There's no reason the composition of the board can't be rearranged to have seats, either additional ones or re-purposed existing ones, designated for a specific continent, for example. Gamaliel (talk) 00:30, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

  Whether or not Carrite's suggestion was genuine, it is an eminently sensible way of achieving greater diversity, is guaranteed to achieve its aim, and can be implemented now if it's thought to be that important, without needing to change voting procedures and wait 2 years for the next election. I also agree with Carrite's suggestion that age diversity is important and should be taken into account along with gender and ethnicity.--greenrd (talk) 10:56, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

• I'm looking at the Facebook conversation and going "what the heck?" at some of the comments. "If you look at the voting counts, the election was, once again, dominated by major languages and projects. At this point, I seriously think the Board needs to do something in order to give more incentive to people outside of the U.S. and Europe to actually participate in our movement's politics." So the biggest projects should be disenfranchised? The English-language Wikipedia proportion of votes (30.64%) was actually less than the proportion of their eligible voters (35.38%). --NeilN ^{talk to me} 00:07, 7 June 2015 (UTC)
  • I've tired of pointing out that if you don't read English, you're in the gutter on Meta election pages: relying on the availability of volunteer translators is not going to work. Is it a comfortable moral construct that "if x language community can't supply a volunteer translator, that's their fault"? WMF elections are surely a high priority for contracted translation into targeted languages. For designing a system, even on a trial basis, I'd like to see an editor survey of English-language reading ability among the non-English-language communities, particularly outside Europe.

    What proportion of Japanese Wikipedians can struggle through an English-language candidate statement, and the instructions? Only two-point-something percent of their elegible editors voted. Isn't the apparently insular Japanese community one of the elephants in our living room? If we can get the data <cough>, we'll know whether to prioritise—for example, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, and Russian, over German and French, where a much larger proportion of eligible voters might have enough English. Don't we have stats from an editor survey some years back that show what proportion from each language group also read or edit en.WP? That would be a start, but new and better data are needed if this is to be a truly international body. I have to say that I'd rather spend money on good translation to make the movement more cohesive and more democratic through language accessibility than on some of the rather expensive offline activities I see being put to grantmaking that can make only a tenuous case for impact. Tony (talk) 03:22, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

  If chapters / user groups (I am not very clear on the distinction) think that hiring translators is important, they can apply for funds / use their existing funds to do this. I don't see why the foundation has to be held responsible if relevant chapters / user groups exist and don't make an effort.--greenrd (talk) 10:59, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

  I actually doubt that these chapters or user groups exist for every "relevant" language. And I think that if WMF wants diversity of candidates/voters/trustees it in fact is indeed their responsibility not to make that only hardly possible. → «« Man77 »» 11:31, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

  Surely all of these chapters of ours could handle doing translations...? If the WMF asked. ResMar 16:57, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

  Probably. I, however, doubt that it is their job to translate what WMF wants to have translated. But yes, most of them probably could handle that. This however fails to cover languages as unimportant as Japanese and Turkish. → «« Man77 »» 22:17, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

  • Concerning the Facebook thread, I'm disappointed that this walled garden was used as a forum to discuss Wikipedia; trying to access the thread, I find I need a FB account. I don't have a FB account for the simple reason I have enough online time sinks to deal with. Something I hope folks remember in the future. -- llywrch (talk) 23:07, 7 June 2015 (UTC)
• I'm very concerned by the results of the election. Denny and Dariusz don't want the the terms of use to forbid paid editing. James and Dariusz don't think that increasing the number of editors in the "global south" should be a priority, James doesn't think that it should be a priority to reduce gender gap. And neither thinks that Wikimedia should advocate for freedom of information. (Source) --NaBUru38 (talk) 23:32, 7 June 2015 (UTC)
  • NaBUru, it's an order of priorities; it doesn't necessarily mean that a candidate disagrees with pursuing a priority just because others might crowd in further up the list. Tony (talk) 02:26, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

I, for one, am quite satisfied with the results of the election. ResMar 12:51, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

James and Dariusz said that their top priorities are providing more engineering resources to improve user experience. I think that the Foundation should have as first priority to develop the community. I'm very concerned that the elected members of the Board are more worried about the website design. --NaBUru38 (talk) 21:27, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

And that matches what I most want to see from the our community advocates. ResMar 02:29, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

• Please flip your graphs so they're not completely counterintuitive. Also, now that we have multiple graph extensions, there's no reason for these graphs to be un-editable images. —Swpb^talk 13:30, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

I've fixed the first one; hopefully someone else can do the second. —Swpb^talk 14:55, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

Some improvements in the table, and the first graph I like, except it's now the opposite of the vertical arrangement of the second graph. I see no how-to guide for this "multiple graph extension". Tony (talk) 15:53, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

The syntax is here: mediawikiwiki:Extension:EasyTimeline/syntax. The second graph may be better arranged horizontally. There's also mediawikiwiki:Extension:Graph, but it's beta. —Swpb^talk 17:21, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

My impatience won out, and I did the second graph. —Swpb^talk 18:44, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

@Swpb: We're recruiting a data viz person at the Signpost right now. The problem with the Graphs extensions is that it's a full suite graphing utility that's hard to use directly and is very complicated, so we would love to have someone experienced with them or willing to learn them to help us out with our data visualizations. ResMar 20:47, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

@Resident Mario: Thanks for the offer. I really don't know EasyTimeline that well; my work above is very kludgey. I know you guys at Signpost are often shorthanded, and I'd love to help out when I can, but I can't responsibly commit to a regular role. —Swpb^talk 19:23, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

If you're interested in the graph extension, I recommend reading https://github.com/trifacta/vega/wiki/Tutorial . Bawolff (talk) 05:45, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, Bawolff. I've read a little and bookmarked it. Strikes me that to get it out to editors more widely, a video tutorial, tightly produced with animation and voice-over (and subtitles into other languages), would be a good spending of donors' funds by WMF tech. The Youtube file currently available is a start, but at 52 minutes' duration is far too big a chunk for most users; I also wanted something that gets straight to process after a brief intro explaining, in 20 seconds, the advantages of interactivity and editability onwiki. Worth chopping into two to four shorter, digestible, specifically themed tutorials, don't you think, aimed at Wikimedians who know the basics of spreadsheets? Tony (talk) 08:27, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

@Tony1: Well you could say that about quite a few things related to mediawiki :). But yes, a video tutorial might be nice (I don't honestly expect anyone to make one, but it would be nice). I expect that the tutorial I linked to would be mostly useful for people who are programmers, and our target audience is not just people who know how to program (And even then, I know how to program, but the section on data transforms is still a pretty big mystery to me). Bawolff (talk) 22:20, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

@Swpb: You did that with EasyTimeline!?! I'd assumed you did it with the new Extension:Graph extension that has been enabled on-wiki. This extension enables an extensive visualization grammar called Vega, and I'm super enthusiastic about finding someone who can do Vega graphs for us, even if I don't have the time to learn to do it myself. You can see examples of the capacities of the grammar here. In the long-term this grammar will rarely be used naked: just today I ported over one Lua wrapper template, from the German Wikipedia in this case, which makes doing this much simpler. Yurik suggested on my talk page that a bot that centralizes all of the graph templates either to Mediawiki or to Meta would be the best long-term solution. I have some ideas about data you can start building visualizations of using just this template, but stuff like force graphs or tree maps would also be lovely to see. ResMar 23:01, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

llywrch You and I are in the same boat my friend. Tharthan (talk) 01:34, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

Special report: Towards "Health Information for All": Medical content on Wikipedia received 6.5 billion page views in 2013 (4,963 bytes · 💬)

"... Wikipedia was the single most used source of Ebola information in the 3 most affected countries (Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea), ahead of CNN, CDC, and the World Health Organization (WHO) during the worst part of the outbreak." That is pretty intriguing. How can we ensure that the articles in this important area do not fall prey to the "rot" that is typical on Wikipedia? As long as Wikipedia can not guarantee any level of quality, let alone a high one, it seems unlikely that many serious health organizations would be willing to enter into partnerships that could improve the breadth and availability of our content in this area.--Anders Feder (talk) 04:58, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

We have already partnered with the NIH, Cochrane collaboration, UCSF College of Medicine, and are working a bit with the World Health Organization. They are interesting in these partnerships not because our content is universally great but because it is universally highly read. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 03:27, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

But to what extent and for how long? For the resources it takes to cope with all the vandalism and edit wars they could probably build a new hospital instead. Eventually someone will question the cost-benefit relationship.--Anders Feder (talk) 03:39, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Been a few years for the NIH, Cochrane and UCSF. They are not putting in the resources required to build a hospital :-) which is 100s of millions to billions. Would be nice if they did though. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:07, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

"Would be nice if they did though." That's what I mean :)--Anders Feder (talk) 04:11, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Yes most initiatives are fairly small at this point in time. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:13, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Unfortunately, Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) is becoming a problem in fringe articles. Especially with organic food MEDRS is often used to keep positive, verifiable information by reliable sources (like agricultural colleges and universities) out of the articles. That is undermining the stature of MEDRS. The Banner talk 15:00, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

Have not really followed the content dispute regarding organic food. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 03:27, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Haven't followed any content dispute either, but that may be seen as a positive influence of MEDRS. Widefox; talk 17:45, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

• Nice article, signpost writers/editors. But what does "equal to 127 volumes the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica" mean? Approximately 4 times the size of the 32-volume EB, or 127 times the size of the entire EB? --doncram 07:32, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

4 times the 32 volume EB Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:25, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Okay, thanks. So "127 times the size of one volume of the 32-volume EB" would be more accurate but awkward, so I revised the article in this diff to say what you just said. Revert/reword if not helpful but I think this is good. Thanks. --doncram 19:52, 8 June 2015 (UTC)