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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2015-08-05. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Blog: Get help editing Wikipedia with the new “Co-op” mentorship program (3,836 bytes · 💬)

Great, you've established that

a) People edit more if other users give a shit about their edits,

b) Wikipedia has a bunch of complicated rules, and that puts people off,

c) Few people unsterstand the very basic concepts of statistics.. (Sampling error). 75% of people in this room have green hair, 100% are male, 50% are German. Clearly this world is dominated by green-haired German males.

Brilliant. How much of my donation-money did that cost?— Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.104.23.2 (talk • contribs)

And you are? ResMar 03:51, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
Someone editing Wikipedia. Same as you. 88.104.23.2 (talk) 04:03, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
Well! If you participated in the mentorship program, you could learn things such as:
a) It cost (your donation/total donations)*($26160) from your donation! So, since you donated like $10, it cost you 26 cents. Except it didn't, because a donation is a gift, not an investment, so you don't get to attach strings to it.
b) That if you put ~~~~ after your comment, it will sign it for other people to read- even as an anonymous IP who doesn't want to associate their username with their bitter comments, even though they're clearly a regular editor since you found an internal newspaper article 1.5 hours after it was posted!
c) That it's spelled "Wikipedia" and "understand", "German" is capitalized, and that you put a space after a period that ends a sentence!
d) That you can't complain about sampling error when the mini-report didn't tell you the sample size of the non-mentored group they compared against, and therefore can't tell how statistically significant the results of 49 people changing one variable are! --PresN 03:53, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
Your first two points have been long known and this project was about developing a space with them in mind. If you have some other solution, I'd appreciate hearing it. I, JethroBT drop me a line 08:06, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
don't know why you are getting snippy with the ip. he merely exemplifies the bitey culture that prevails. for more check out m:Grants talk:Evaluation/Community Health learning campaign. this community has a culture problem, and the pushback to change will be enormous, and was to be expected. it will take a revamping of how we onboard newbies; i am glad to see a refreshing of mentoring, which along with teahouse is the way forward. (i would suggest also paid mentors / ambassadors as is done at wikihow.) Duckduckstop (talk) 19:31, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
You have little basis for criticizing the IP's grammar if you post a sentence like "Funded by an Individual Engagement Grant, myself and our team assessed the current state of help spaces on the English Wikipedia and created the Co-op, a mentorship space informed by our research." (bold added). Your program sounds great, by the way. Edison (talk) 19:54, 8 August 2015 (UTC)

Editorial: Wikipedia better equipped to deal with systemic bias than traditional publishers (5,278 bytes · 💬)

Sorry to steal your thunder, but I've created pages on EvaMarie Lindahl, Helen Frances Gregor and Nadia Khodasevich Léger.

Other well-known and incontrovertibly important but missing female artists are Louise Bourgeois, Sonia Delaunay, Eva Gonzalès, Barbara Hepworth, Berthe Morisot and Bridget Riley. Not included in the list of 100 are the likes of Rachel Whiteread and Elizabeth Thompson (aka Lady Butler).

Some other relevant (if slightly older) links on the lack of recognition for female artists, in terms of reputation, accessions to public collections, and auction prices: [1] [2] [3] Good luck with your editorial. -- Theramin (talk) 00:41, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

  • Last March we run a small edit-a-thon about women and selected randomly 99 names. We looked up generalist encyclopeadias for some background. Only one third of them did appear (combining three differente encyclopedias in English, Spanish and Catalan). And it's not only women that are underrepresented. Any middle quality writer in Spanish or English would end up mentioned in traditional encyclopeadias, but only the very very best writers in, say, Hungarian or Chinese would be even mentioned. Engravers seldom appear, for instance. So we are infact doing a better work than our paper counterparts. B25es (talk) 06:18, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
  • Bridget Riley was the first who occurred to me as i was reading the piece above. Normally I don't hop on these bandwagons but there's an aspect of this that particularly bothers me: when extremely talented women artists are ignored in such a précis, that omission makes them seem marginal even when in fact, in the world of working artists like themselves, they are not. – Athaenara ✉ 20:50, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

Perhaps better equipped, but when it comes to fighting SPAM Wikipedia fails hopelessly. Lip-service, no action. The Banner talk 06:33, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

  • Did "Taschen require public shaming"? The article does not imply that the "contact" was a public letter, it rather implies that Taschen were very responsive to a private contact.
  • A hugely under-represented group are second and third rank authors, quite probably especially female. These are not always easy to find reliable sources for - especially those who fall between stools, not old enough that contemporary commentary is public domain and in the scanned archives, not new enough to be Internet original sources.
All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 12:15, 6 August 2015 (UTC).

Last summer we had a WIKI-KIK (Edit-a-thon) around this project in Sweden. EvaMarie and Linda Fagerström hosted the event at Malmö konsthall, and Ditte was one of the participants. /Axel Pettersson (WMSE) (talk) 12:37, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

  • According to Science Heroes, two women (I presume from their first names) have contributed to the measles vaccine and thereby saved the lives of over 100,000,000 people. And yet Wikipedia has no article on either Anna Mitus or Ann Holloway. JRSpriggs (talk) 09:23, 7 August 2015 (UTC)
Added here and here. Johnbod (talk) 15:30, 7 August 2015 (UTC)
  • I've never heard of those female artists who are supposed to be so great. The ones listed with Frida Kahlo I had heard of, but not the others.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 18:01, 7 August 2015 (UTC)

Featured content: Maya, Michigan, Medici, Médée, and Moul n'ga (758 bytes · 💬)

I just wanted to tell you that I always check out Featured Content each week, to learn but sometimes just to look at some beautiful photos, paintings and illustrations. Thanks for putting it together each week. Liz Read! Talk! 19:32, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

Seconded! Abyssal (talk) 23:31, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

In the media: Probe into Nehru edits launched; dangers of the right to be forgotten (1,383 bytes · 💬)

  • The Wales quote sounds very much like "Censorship is suppression of speech I disagree with." It's important to remember that censorship is not necessarily bad.
  • As to intimidation being a touchstone, we use intimidation on Wikipedia, and in the wider world, to censor. It could be argued that the community sanctions are relatively mild, on their face apparently being limited to withdrawal of permission to edit Wikipedia. Actually this is not true, by limiting individuals ability to correct things said about them on Wikipedia we affect their employment prospects (something similar is celebrated by Mike Godwin elsewhere in this issue) and that includes not just subjects of articles like the professor who has claimed to have his employment prospects blighted by coverage introduced by a SPA, but Wikipedians who may not be eligible for roles that require "good standing".
All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 14:11, 6 August 2015 (UTC).

I guess offensive content can be removed from Wikipedia now, so long as it's not being removed by a government. Abyssal (talk) 23:44, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

News and notes: VisualEditor, endowment, science, and news in brief (0 bytes · 💬)

Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-08-05/News and notes

Op-ed: Je ne suis pas Google (15,916 bytes · 💬)

"I understood and, to some extent, sympathized" "I opted to ... take the story ... to the press. ... the ex-convicts, ... became more famous" "that kind of happy outcome" These statements do not really hang together.

And here we go giving the story more publicity. What is the message here? "Mess with Wikipedia at your peril?"

I have no objection to putting up a stout defence of content, as in this case and the French defence ministry case. I do object to grave dancing, and to using Wikipedia as a bully pulpit to defend material which would never survive our own policies.

And contributors might like to remember that "here" does not mean the United States to the majority of Wikipedia editors.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 12:01, 6 August 2015 (UTC).

Remember that this article was copied-with-permission from a specifically US blog, so it's reasonable to assume that the vast majority of the original audience are Americans. Nyttend (talk) 12:09, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
That's not how I read it. To quote another of us old EFFers, "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." As most of us have surely observed by now, the peril lies in attempting to abuse legal and regulatory systems to stifle public access to the truth. In the age of the Web, this almost always backfires. For freedom of the digital press, and for everyone who benefits from the free (in both senses) flow of information, it is very much a happy outcome that some half-forgotten killers did not get away with forcing an encyclopedia to rewrite history and hide the truth.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  13:02, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
I think I made it perfectly clear that I disagree with these sort of lacuna. However if you think that "the Internet" or even "Wikipedia" are "For Great Justice" you have not been paying attention. You could start by reading "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" or simply look at examples of doxxing and swatting. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 14:01, 8 August 2015 (UTC).
14:01, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
Yes, I should have caught and changed that before republication for a global audience, so the fault is mine and not Godwin's. Gamaliel (talk) 15:33, 6 August 2015 (UTC)


  • This is somewhat interesting, but it is not clear how it is related to Wikipedia/WMF till the end of the article. I'd strongly suggest that next time we run such a blog-copy, we preface it with at least a short introduction about why is it relevant to Signpost readers. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 05:08, 7 August 2015 (UTC)
  • Google was recently exposed by the Guardian for misrepresenting what the right to be forgotten is used for (Google accidentally reveals data on 'right to be forgotten' requests), consistently underplaying genuine privacy cases like revenge porn and instead harping on about how murderers would have the memory of their deeds erased from history (a theme recycled here), or politicians would destroy evidence of misdeeds. Yet the right to be forgotten is specifically about things in which there is no reasonable public interest. Wherever there is one, Google can and should simply refuse to remove links from search results. If they don't, they are playing silly-buggers. (Google used to have the motto "Don't be evil". Let's not forget that they're also the company who agreed to pay a half a billion dollar fine for making ad money from illegal drug sales.)
  • In this context, Mike Godwin similarly fails to acknowledge that even under European law, there is a balance between the right to know and the right to privacy. Moreover, Google seems to be making poor decisions on purpose in an effort to discredit European legislation. See for example this recent case, where Google honoured a request from a murderer convicted less than ten years ago, rather than bumping the request up to the information commissioner or simply rejecting it, as they are fully entitled to do: when the matter went to the Dutch court, the court ruled that there was no legitimate right to privacy in this case. So why did Google approve the murderer's request to have links removed?
  • Godwin has worked in the past as an attorney for the EFF and the Center for Democracy and Technology, both of which are groups Google has been noted to channel money to: (Google and Facebook's new tactic in the tech wars). It shouldn't come as a surprise that the same thing has been said about the "R Street Institute" Godwin works for now: Google Caught Funding Slew of Right-Wing Front Groups.
  • So why is the Signpost running this piece by him? Who made the approach? Andreas JN466 08:38, 7 August 2015 (UTC)
  • (Disclaimer: not normally a Wikipedia editor, was linked to this by a friend who is.)
  • The Guardian piece is just linkbait. What, exactly, is the point anyway? The "worst" RTBF requests I think everyone can agree on - including RTBF supporters - are from the likes of politicians seeking to suppress past misdeeds and the like. Of course Google would bring up cases like that to argue against it. There's apparently a huge volume of RTBF requests, and it's the *absolute* amount not the relative amount that matters, so I don't see the alleged relatively small amount of such cases as being some shocking revelation.
  • As for policy on when to remove, this shouldn't be Google's responsibility at all. It was a horrible decision that said "apply expensive court procedures, but outsource this to every website that wants to link to RTBF material." And as the article points out, the cheapest thing to do is to unconditionally remove even specious requests. It's an admirable stand on principle that Google isn't doing this and risking being dragged into court when they refuse, as it's expensive to explain why even obviously bad requests are wrong.
  • For "Mike Godwin fails to acknowledge": You're acting like that's something he doesn't know about, rather than arguing where to draw the line. Everyone agrees there's a balance to be struck, but in the opinion of Godwin and myself, European courts respect the right to information way too little. Look at the Ryan Giggs case for one example: if you are wealthy and had your feelings hurt, you can get courts to declare it illegal to publish, but for the standard person who can't go into court over everything, too bad.
  • The EFF & Google have largely similar ideologies. Dunno why you think it's surprising they might agree, any more than it'd be shocking that oil companies and Texan Senators might agree on something; this would be true regardless of if any money was involved. As for "Google caught funding slew of right wing front groups", sure, they probably fund some pro-competition & business friendly groups (shock! horror!), but per http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/28/in-silicon-valley-technology-talent-gap-threatens-g-o-p-campaigns/?_r=0 , Google's employees gave about 97% of their contributions in 2012 to Obama, 3% to Romney. Yeah totally in bed with conservatives there, not that it should matter even if they were, conservatives presumably have free speech rights too! Basically you're throwing around vague insinuations that don't actually make much sense. Most ideological think tanks say things because they *genuinely believe* it, not due to some nefarious scheme. RadRodent (talk) 21:35, 7 August 2015 (UTC)
    • Well indeed, Texan senators may genuinely believe there is no anthropogenic climate change, for example. This may have nothing at all to do with the fact that the oil industry funds their campaigns. Similarly, people at The Heartland Institute may genuinely believe whatever it is they believe, and the industry funding just came in because those beliefs are congruent with the beliefs certain industries would like to see spreading, since that would improve their bottom line. (The Heartland Institute is not irrelevant here, as Godwin's present employer, the R Street Institute, broke away from The Heartland Institute in 2012 over a climate change dispute.) Still, if someone comments on a dispute between a multi-billion-dollar company and a democratically elected government, any financial ties between the author's employer and the company in question should be prominently disclosed, just to alert readers to the possibility – or indeed likelihood – that they are essentially dealing with a piece of paid-for PR. Andreas JN466 08:41, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
    • Google may, and indeed should, bring up the worst RTBF cases. However neither they nor Godwin nor Wales should cite those cases as if they had been successful or indeed had a remote chance of being successful. Doing so is not only bad thing to do, it also lessens our faith in those advancing the statements.
    • Discussing the very real civil liberties issues on both sides of these arguments is important, characterizing it as "those crazy <insert political bias of choice> Europeans" does not advance the discussion. Remember, in the US, it is (in certain circumstances) possible to have criminal records sealed or expunged, but arrests, for which you may not even have been charged, remain available in perpetuity.
    • All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 14:16, 8 August 2015 (UTC).
@Jayen466: Andreas, you raise some valid concerns. First, the idea for running this op-ed was 100% mine. The first Godwin heard about it (and, for that matter, the other editors on the Signpost as well) was when I emailed him asking for permission to republish it. We've been wanting to increase the number of op-eds we run, but my efforts to solicit editors to write on particular topics have been largely unsuccessful. So instead we're trying to find interesting pieces that have appeared elsewhere and republishing those, beginning with Guillaume Paumier's excellent piece last week which he originally posted on his blog. When I found Godwin's blog post in the course of looking for items for ITM and noticed he'd published it under a Creative Commons license, I thought it would be more interesting to republish it instead of merely recounting it in a paragraph in ITM. If he had brought it to us, I would be a little wary because I know think tanks regularly try to "place" their writings in the media. But the Signpost isn't exactly a prime target for think tanks, I suspect.
I was not aware that Google had given funds to R Street, and had I known I would have wanted some kind of disclosure like the note I just added to the op-ed. I don't know if that would have stopped me from running it. Google also gave money to the National Urban League and People for the American Way, and I'd run pieces from them in a heartbeat if they were somewhat related to Wikipedia. I'm more concerned about R Street's association with the Heartland Institute, whose relationship to science moves it from the category "people I disagree with" to "lunatic fringe". But I don't believe Heartland's anti-science stance has had any impact on the issues discussed in this article.
  • Just adding a note with regard to the relationship between Heartland and the R Street Institute -- R Street's only "association" with Heartland is some members of its staff resigned from Heartland precisely in opposition to Heartland's climate-change-denial position. (R Street's work on environmental policy accepts the indisputable fact of climate change.) I'll add that, although it's true Google is one of R Street's funders, my focus on the Right To Be Forgotten predates my employment by R Street, and, in fact, R Street has received no money from Google regarding RTBF policy or other international internet-policy issues. Those pieces of my portfolio came with me from Internews and from Wikimedia Foundation itself, where I did some of the earliest work on RTBF. MikeGodwin (talk) 13:09, 26 September 2015 (UTC)
When the Signpost discussed a previous op-ed by Godwin, it prompted a vigorous discussion about whether or not the Signpost was being used as a vehicle for certain odious viewpoints. When you run a publication like this, you want to offer a diversity of viewpoints, including ones you disagree with, but you also run into the danger of being someone else's megaphone. This danger is compounded when we have a very limited pool of writers to draw from. Readers don't always understand that so many of our decisions are based on not what is best way to cover something, but who is available to write about it.
When it comes to RTBF, Americans - who are some of the loudest voices on Wikipedia - do not have much familiarity with this concept and so tend to think of these issues solely in free speech terms. American readers of the Signpost would benefit from a European perspective on these issues. You would be an ideal candidate to write a Signpost op-ed on this topic, hint, hint.... Gamaliel (talk) 22:58, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for the explanation of the background, G. (And the Ed. note.) I would have been concerned if the suggestion had come from the WMF. I'll bear the op-ed offer in mind. ;) --Andreas JN466 12:53, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

Traffic report: Mrityorma amritam gamaya... (5,271 bytes · 💬)

Indian subjects

Clearly Indian-related subjects in English Wikipedia are getting increasingly greater number of visitors. Particularly Bollywood is proving its force even in English. But how does this translate into visits of the same subjects in say Hindi Wikipedia. Is Hindi Wikipedia developing fast enough to cater for this increasing influx of viewers from India and other parts of the world regarding Indian subjects? Just curious. werldwayd (talk) 12:54, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

One factor to keep in mind is that not everyone in India speaks Hindi. Bengali, Telugu, Marathi and Tamil all have speaking populations larger than Great Britain, and even "Hindi" includes several sub-languages that are not always mutually intelligible. If Wikipedia is to be believed, then English, at 125 million, is India's second language, with as much as 50% the number of Hindi speakers, depending on how one defines "Hindi". That also makes India the second-largest English-speaking nation in the world after the United States. Serendipodous 13:15, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
One week a trend does not make. Indian subjects are not garnering an increased presence on Wikipedia overall in any way: rather, a number of prominent Indian topics peaked in the news recently, and that audience flexed its collective muscle and brought those topics to the top of the viewcount. Put another way, for the purposes of illustration: if Barrack Obama experiences a (say) 30% increase flux in traffic and makes this list, does that mean that interest in the entire United States, as a topic, has increased? Of course not.
The data here is not a demonstration of a trend per se so much as it is a demonstration of another lesser but nevertheless interesting fact: that high-production Bollywood films can carry view hits just as well as high-production Hollywood ones. ResMar 18:28, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
I'm afraid you're wrong; not about Bollywood rivalling Hollywood- that's correct, but this has been going on for years, not weeks. In fact, the last eight or nine months, when Indian topics have been in remission, has been the exception, not the rule. That the English language Wikipedia would be dominated by the world's first- and second-largest English-speaking populations (the US and India) makes perfect sense. What's surprising is that it has taken this long to happen. Serendipodous 18:37, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
Judging topical traffic off of a weekly top-ten list is like measuring Wikipedia traffic by extrapolating from main page hits: an appealing but meaningless shorthand. Top ten hits, though interesting from a causal perspective, are borderline statistical noise.
For measurements of long-term trends I suggest looking at popular pages data. ResMar 22:39, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
We also have a top 25, and we do an annual list as well. The trends that occur in the top 25 are pretty well represented in the year-end list. Serendipodous 23:51, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
I concur with Serendipodous that in the 2.5 years this chart has been kept, I subjectively feel that Indian topics (particularly pop culture) are showing increased relative popularity. Certainly if Mario or anyone wants to do a more rigorous analysis of this hypothesis using the WP:5000 they are strongly encouraged to do so. I suspect it could be worthy of publication if done right, based on some of the research we see published using viewcount statistics. I would also hazard to guess that the English wikipedia is getting the most attention. An article like Bajrangi Bhaijaan is currently much more comprehensive in English than its Hindi or Urdu versions. --Milowent • hasspoken 05:48, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject report: Meet the boilerplate makers (1,824 bytes · 💬)

  • I'd like to thank everyone involved in editing and improving template usage - both those connected with the project and those not. It's often a rather thankless and complex, and occasionally stressful, arena to work in. I see a genuine desire to make things both more useful and user-friendly here, which is great to see. Most of my disagreements actually stem from technical limitations. The sooner we can get VisualEditor to directly edit such facets in-article and get templates linked up with WikiData, the better. For example, many navigation templates needn't be language-dependent and many infobox fields could be populated by centralised WikiData. I appreciate all efforts and the ethos in action. SFB 22:13, 9 August 2015 (UTC)
  • @Pigsonthewing: Just had a thought around the colour accessibility issue: do you think it possible to develop code for the {{navbox}} template which could identify problematic combinations generated through non-default colours applied in fields like "titlestyle"? SFB 22:18, 9 August 2015 (UTC)


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