Re: [WikiEN-l] [Foundation-l] Trouble in Ireland
On 26 Nov 2008, at 16:13, Zoney wrote: My vote is for Ireland to be a disambiguation page. Did you go and vote? As someone from Ireland I am not happy to have the page Ireland concern only the State, as the state is only part of both the island and nation. Yes, that's why we propose [[Ireland]] - disambiguation page, primary title [[Ireland (island)]] - geographical entity [[Ireland (state)]] - political entity Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Make your students edit Wikipedia for extra credit
2008/11/26 Nathan [EMAIL PROTECTED]: If our response to coordinated student editing is dismissive or punitive, and it often is, then we should not be encouraging educators to assign it to their students. It depends on the quality of the assignment they give. I liked this one because it was You have to make an actual good addition, no foolin'. We've had other student editing projects that have resulted in fantastically good new material. YMMV, but I certainly wouldn't regard it as an intrinsically bad idea. - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How to sabotage Wikipedia, for SEO spammers
2008/11/26 David Gerard [EMAIL PROTECTED]: http://www.bluehatseo.com/how-to-overthrow-a-wikipedia-result/ What an odious person. - d. Standard SEO. The attack line has been talked about for at least a year but so far no dirrect evidence that it works. In theory it should as long as you assume that google treats wikis like other websites. Due to their unusually high levels of inline linking in wikis this is questionable. -- geni ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] [Foundation-l] Trouble in Ireland
On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 7:16 AM, Sam Blacketer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 11/26/08, Steve Summit [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A reader typing in Ireland (or an editor linking [[Ireland]]) is almost certainly thinking about the country, not the geological structure. Most probably, most users who type in Ireland are looking for the article about the Republic of Ireland. However, we can't escape the fact that the term Ireland is ambiguous. Some users would be unaware that six of the 32 Irish counties are not currently part of the Republic. I would actually argue that a reader who doesn't know anything about Ireland (picture a schoolchild in the US doing a project for St. Patrick's day) would be expecting to get exactly the article that is currently located at Ireland. Both the current Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland articles are heavily focussed on the historical and political situation, and not the kind of comprehensive overview that is currently at Ireland. What if I don't even know there are two countries on the island, let alone which one is which? It's pretty confusing to be sent to a disambiguation page when I'm just trying to look up something that is a pretty basic geographical topic. Would just moving Republic of Ireland to [[Ireland (state)]] and leaving the rest alone be acceptable? The latter title would avoid any unfortunate political connotations as it's a straight disambiguation title, but would still leave the background article at the main title. -- phoebe ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Make your students edit Wikipedia for extra credit
On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 7:40 AM, Nathan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: When professors and lecturers assign editing Wikipedia to a group of students, our reaction is often not favorable. I've recently had a long series of e-mails with lecturers at the University of Scotland and Macquarie University in Australia about an assignment that was repeated at Macquarie in three terms. When the link between the student accounts was discovered recently, it turned into a long thread at AN/I where a number of unfriendly things were said about both the students and the lecturers - and the students' editing, which wasn't (I think) below what we would expect from new editors, was treated as a serious problem to be dealt with by blocks and rangeblocks if necessary. If our response to coordinated student editing is dismissive or punitive, and it often is, then we should not be encouraging educators to assign it to their students. Nathan Yuck. It's hard enough to help professors do the right thing (I just got back from giving a couple of classroom lectures about wikipedia) when they are so often clueless about how wikipedia works anyway, without extra complications from overzealous admins. There's a group of people listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects who are ready and willing to help with monitoring and cleaning up after such assignments, and helping craft them as well. -- phoebe ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How to sabotage Wikipedia, for SEO spammers
On 11/26/08, Gregory Maxwell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If WP is #1 or #2 and your spamvertisment is #4 you can increase your income greatly by getting WP delisted even if you can do nothing to improve the position of your site. Yes, especially if WP has an article which describes your goods or services as fraudulent. There are far more effective techniques that these SEO scummbags have not figured out yet. Might be better not to list them here and now but I imagine there are some software changes which could be made in the near future to be more able to counter these attacks whenever they do occur (rather than a couple of programmer-months later). For example I know edits which add [[wiki-links]] pointing to a specific page can be seen in (but not filtered from) the inverted related changes page. But for the technique described in this thread it would be helpful to have some way to track removal of incoming links. Something less tedious than comparing the current whatlinkshere to a saved whatlinkshere list from last week (which would require anticipating the attack). On a side note something like this for mysteriously emptied categories would be helpful too. Surely at least some of the edit/behavior patterns of the other tactics you allude to would be more easily recognized by a bot watching recentchanges than by a human stumbling upon a user with a couple strange and not obviously related edits. If you know the game already you are an a good position to prevent successful play of it. Match and exceed, as their mantra says. —C.W. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] [Foundation-l] Trouble in Ireland
Steve Summit wrote: David Gerard wrote: What's a one-sentence statement of the compelling reason from each side, stated from a neutral point of view? A reader typing in Ireland (or an editor linking [[Ireland]]) is almost certainly thinking about the country, not the geological structure. It's not just about those two extremes. If I state that certain of my ancestors came from Ireland around the time of the famine it is talking about Ireland as who whole before the disunification of 1922. This is about more than mere geology. So Ireland as the Republic or the State or whatever term you choose to use is clearly about what happened in the part that successfully cast off the shackles of occupation since 1922. For certain partisans of the Republic to assume a monopoly on the name, Ireland, seems an improper usurpation of the name for personal ends. Ec ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
