Comments

The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2016-06-05. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Arbitration report: ArbCom case Gamaliel and others concludes (3,685 bytes · 💬)

It's encouraging to see a restrained set of remedies from ArbCom. I expect and hope that these will be sufficient. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 20:17, 5 June 2016 (UTC).
- If humour is not allowed on Wikipedia, how are we meant to bond into a community that can work together? Are we to give up a tradition dating back to the start of Wikipedia because some people don't like anything but seriousness, and are we seriously going to say that an editor participating in a long-standing tradition should be blasted for it, and hounded off the sit? For shame, Arbcom! For shame! Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 21:03, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
  - I like April Fool's humor myself. But the problem here wasn't that Gamaliel engaged in April Fool's humor. It was the fact that when several people expressed concerns that the humor was out of bounds and violated policies, Gamaliel's conduct on hearing that wasn't acceptable. If he'd said "Okay, let's have the community discuss this and see what they think", most of us wouldn't ever even know anything had happened. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 22:12, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
    - Yeah, but then side issues came into play. All in all, it wasn't a horrible decision and seems proportionate. Montanabw ^(talk) 01:38, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

Well, score one more for the gamergate playbook- get a group of dedicated people to just keep pushing over and over for long enough, and the editors you don't like will eventually snap or push back too hard, and then either get blocked or resign in disgrace. In a way, it's surprising that it took so long for people to figure that one out. --Pres N 03:31, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
- @PresN: This didn't involve the gamergate crowd. Gamaliel claimed that it was, but subsequent evidence disproved that claim. Please don't continue to perpetuate a lie. One of the findings of fact against Gamaliel was specifically for this sort of behavior.--v/r - T P 05:59, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
Here's a link to the April Fool's RFC: Wikipedia:Requests for comment/April Fools' 2. Spirit of Eagle (talk) 18:42, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

Does Arbcom think admonishing JzG will have any effect at all? He's been behaving atrociously for years. DuncanHill (talk) 19:00, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

I am deeply saddened by Gamaliel's departure from the project, but Adam Cuerden seems to misunderstand the reasons why. In no way was his April Fool's humor the cause, but rather how Gamaliel responded to those who disagreed with the joke and made the plausible argument that the joke was a BLP violation. Read the evidence. Combative behavior in defense of goofing around is never a good idea. I suspect that Gamaliel understands that now. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 05:30, 11 June 2016 (UTC)

Featured content: Overwhelmed ... by pictures (1,372 bytes · 💬)

That aurora photo is beautiful ... but when I click on it, nothing happens; when I hit Play Media, I get sent to this screen without the annotation. What I really want is File:Aurora Australis.ogv, which gives data from which it might be deduced that the photo is a 40:1 time lapse, but I have to cut and paste from the link to get there. As pretty as these pictures are, I think we forget sometimes that we don't just want to ooh and aah, we want to be educational. Ideally the video would be paired with an ugly little panel that tells us the time and the position of the satellite, allowing us to cross-reference a map with the usual extent of the aurora etc. We'd see how high the satellite is and have a link to understand what that lovely little "membrane" that seems to bound the atmosphere of the Earth really is, etc. There has to be some way to add a whole lot of context into videos so they can be better understood. "HVML" has not yet been invented (those awful annotations on YouTube don't even count as far as I'm concerned) but it's about time we do so! Wnt (talk) 10:47, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

In the media: Jimmy Wales on net neutrality—"It's complicated"—and his $100m fundraising challenge (7,845 bytes · 💬)

Gender gap If my memory serves me (and it does) research showed that women edited more contentious articles on Wikipedia than men. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 20:20, 5 June 2016 (UTC).

@Rich Farmbrough: does the effect survive removal of outliers? Link, please? EllenCT (talk) 21:24, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

I have dug a little into where the "avoiding conflict" came from: the article says "less comfortable with editing others’ work (a process which often involves conflict)," and the abstract of the study says "expressed greater discomfort with editing (which typically involves conflict)" - while Signpost says " factors such as women's inclination to avoid conflict (resulting in a greater reluctance to edit other people's work). In other words it appears (subject to reading the study itself) that chain of interpretation has moved a posited motivation into being an observed phenomenon. This type of re-writing is not unusual with social sciences, and not unheard of with hard sciences.

The paper with the "more contentious" result is Lam, et al.

We found that 5.20% of the “female” articles described in section 4.2 are protected, while just 2.39% of the “male” articles are protected, c2(1,N =23989)=129.1, p<0.001. Thus, articles that have a higher concentration of female editorship are actually more likely to be contentious than those with more males.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 20:35, 6 June 2016 (UTC).

100 million dollars is far too low, unless endowment fundraising is planned for multiple years. Please see e.g. [1] and meta:Talk:Endowment#Goal proposal. EllenCT (talk) 22:03, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
- An endowment isn't going to free WMF from needing to go hat-in-hand on a regular basis, as much as we'd like to believe. Some years ago that question came up concerning our local public library (which at the time was a private non-profit), & it was revealed that endowment revenue produce somewhere between 5-10% of the revenue needed by a non-profit. (And when the library was taken over by the county, there was a brief struggle over control of the endowment -- one of the former trustees believed he could spend it better than the county could.) -- llywrch (talk) 17:29, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
Why are we perpetuating BLP violations here? Just because The Daily Mail wants to talk about it doesn't mean we should as well. It doesn't matter if we put the BLP violation in quotation marks, we are still perpetuating it (twice in the same article), which is potentially damaging the reputation of the person under discussion. Kaldari (talk) 23:19, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
- I went ahead and removed the specific attacks from the image caption. They are still in the article, however. Perhaps they should be removed there as well. Kaldari (talk) 23:27, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
@EllenCT: I'll suggest that the WMF *not* try to use the endowment to fund itself in perpetuity. What that would do is insulate it from performing services beneficial to the public and potential donors. It could then become a self-perpetuating, self-indulgent monster over the next few decades. This type of thing has happened often with long-lived foundations. Also, we do not really know what society's needs will be in 30 years. Perhaps something like Wikipedia will not be needed - something better and cheaper may have replaced it. Let me give you an example of a foundation that started with a good purpose and lots of money, has had to change over time. In 1905 Milton Hershey founded the Hershey Trust Company to fund a school for white orphan boys from Pennsylvania who would be trained for basic mechanical and farming jobs. Wonderful as far as it goes, and I won't blame MH for limiting it to whites and boys - back then it would likely have been impossible to include blacks and girls in an overall program like this. Over time the Hershey Chocolate Company expanded rapidly, becoming huge. The trust owned the whole company at one time. They also ran out of Pennsylvania orphans. Today, they recruit single-parent children from the whole east coast (great as far as it goes), and spend more on each one than the best private schools. Then they fund 4 years of any US university for them. They also argue and occasionally get into trouble on how to split up the rest of the money. (In the 60s and 70s, blacks and girls were finally let in).
My point is not that Hershey Trust is good or bad, only that, even 40 years in the future you never know how the goals of the foundation will be changed - or should be changed.
I propose that the interest on the endowment should be able to "keep the lights on" for several decades in the future. We owe it to past editors to keep their work on the internet for at least 10 years. We also may lose potential partners (GLAMs, universities, etc.) unless they know that we have the resources to stay open for several decades.
But other than that, the WMF should be able to go to the public each year with accomplishments and a program that will convince the public to keep on funding it. That will keep the WMF lean and relevant.
The principal of the endowment should only be used in cases of ultimate emergency - I believe the word in charity circles is exigency - the near equivalent of bankruptcy in the corporate world. If the WMF shows that it can't come up with accomplishments and a program that will convince the public to fund it, then it will be time to change the management and use part of the endowment to give the new management a fair start.
If it looks like the foundation won't have any prospects of being useful or relevant (remember - large changes occur over decades), then the endowment can be used to keep the then current text up on the internet for another 10 years.
$100-150 million should be able to accomplish all of that. I assume something like a 3% return over inflation which will likely be the case in the long term from a basic, no-brainer, index strategy. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 16:36, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
- Heh, Smallbones, you could have used the example of endowments set up to fight tuberculosis. There was a point in the 1950s where the disease was considered extinct & non-profits were stuck with all of this money they couldn't re-allocate to other worthy causes. Anyway, for reasons I mention above I doubt an endowment could provide more than 10% (at most). Good for funding special projects or covering short-term shortfalls, & an endowment would provide a place to put interest earned on unspent donations. (IIRC, the Foundation currently has tens of millions sitting idle for months; their current practice to keep onhand one year's budget against donation shortfalls.) Otherwise, your points make a lot of sense Smallbones. -- llywrch (talk) 17:44, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

News and notes: WMF cuts budget for 2016–17 as scope tightens (4,702 bytes · 💬)

@Mdennis (WMF): regarding online courses for the training platform for functionaries, are there any public examples (perhaps with identifying details omitted) of safety problems which we most urgently need to address? Can we please have Twine/Twee versions of such online courses for review? (Please see Entweedle for creation of Twee from Twine.) Can we also please have online Twine/Twee courses about how to edit well? I'm sure you could get the community to make some of those if you asked. Please see [2], [3], [4], and [5] for context. EllenCT (talk) 14:55, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

EllenCT (answering for Maggie as she is quite busy), the delivery platform for the training will be chosen after consultation with the functionary groups, but the options are open. This is the first I have seen of Twee/Twine - we'll look at it more closely, and be sure to include it as an option on the table when talking with folks. Thanks for letting us know about it! In terms of expanding this training to other topics, such as general editing, we have to be careful not to "bite off" too much for this project - but, we want to prioritize re-usability and adaptability, and formats we come up with may well be useful for more topics. For examples of safety issues, we will be looking at cases our team has handled internally, cases admins and functionaries have dealt with, as well as more public examples, such as ArbCom cases related to harassment. Much of these problems are handled privately, so I'm not sure of the best public example to point you to ... The research you shared looks great - already reading some of it now! Thank you! Patrick Earley (WMF) (talk) 14:05, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

@PEarley (WMF): happy to help. Twine and Twee produce javascript which works offline, too, for free. EllenCT (talk) 14:19, 8 June 2016 (UTC)

Good to know! Patrick Earley (WMF) (talk) 15:20, 8 June 2016 (UTC)

Is there any way to get a list of all the individual WMF salaries to calculate a Gini coefficient from year to year? Based on a recent discussion at Jimbo's page I would be interested to see whether there is increasing economic inequality overall within the ranks of WMF employees. Wnt (talk) 03:45, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

What's the difference between Product and Technology departments? --167.57.119.144 (talk) 23:19, 8 June 2016 (UTC)

Super short version: Product makes the things folks use to donate, edit, read, and find, while Technology supports that work and makes sure things don't blow up. :) There's a list of teams within each on MediaWiki.org. CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 14:46, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

"Wikidata—which now has the third-largest community after those of the English Wikipedia and Commons" - I wonder... how, exactly, is the size of Wikidata's community measured? What's the definition of "community"? After all, many edits on Wikidata are made by people who never actively visit Wikidata, through automated processes. For example, if you move an article in Wikipedia, this may result in a Wikidata edit attributed to your account such as this one - one doesn't need to visit Wikidata or even know of the project... So, if Wikidata's community size would simply be measured by the number of account names showing up as contributors to Wikidata, that would be misleading in my opinion. The actual, active community of Wikidata in the sense of people who participate in project discussions etc. looks rather small to me. Gestumblindi (talk) 03:13, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

Traffic report: Pop goes the culture, again. (434 bytes · 💬)

Another well-written report by Serendipodous. Chris Troutman (talk) 22:19, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

WikiProject report: WikiProject Video Games (3,545 bytes · 💬)

Hmph. Should've expected my answers to the interview wouldn't be here. Guess they were too boring to add. GamerPro64 20:43, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

Maybe late? AGF. Montanabw ^(talk) 01:36, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

Nah. I emailed it to her and she said my answers were very good. So I guess it didn't flow well with the other answers. GamerPro64 02:01, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

No, that's my bad, GamerPro64. I knew I was screwing something up--and I had a personal thing going on at the same time I was finishing things up. I'm very sorry. Maybe I can do a follow up since I have another person who did respond late. Let me run that by the SignPost. :) Megalibrarygirl (talk) 17:11, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know. Whatever works out is fine by me. GamerPro64 22:01, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

Yes, at Video Games assessment page I see there are over 30,000 articles. That is impressive. Wondering what percentage of games that might be? Cheers! — JoeHebda • (talk) 04:05, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
- That's a silly thing to ask: that's a bit like asking how many drawings are out there. Just going to one of those free flash game websites will show that there are infinitely many games that don't get the kind of coverage needed to meet WP:GNG. Friends of mine keep trying to create games without really making anything worth playing ^_^; Unless if you're asking what percentage of the articles are about specific video games. That could be a pretty interesting question. ~Mable (chat) 08:39, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

I'll echo the call for more articles on non-English video game topics. There are large gaps in our coverage of Chinese, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese video gaming. If there are any editors who have knowledge of RSes in these topic areas, we'd love to hear some input at WT:VG/RS! -Thibbs (talk) 17:33, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
- We could always use more speakers of Japanese too! soetermans. ^{↑↑↓↓←→←→ B A TALK} 12:38, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

Thanks @Megalibrarygirl: for a well-researched, well-written article. I have added it to the 2008 and 2009 Signpost articles about the same WikiProject at Category:WikiProjects featured in The Signpost. Ottawahitech (talk) 23:05, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

Interesting read. I feel the same way about WP:VG. A lot of collaboriation and feedback, but also working solo. @Czar: I feel the exact same way about AfD! :D soetermans. ^{↑↑↓↓←→←→ B A TALK} 12:38, 7 June 2016 (UTC)