date:20091117

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 7:51 AM, Magnus Manske
 wrote:
> I'm not here to discuss the wording of the fundraising slogans yet
> again, but this one screams "legal trouble":
>
> Wikipedia. Ad-free forever.
> [Progress bar] [Donate now button]
>
> I'd interpret this as "if we reach $7.5M, Wikipedia will be ad-free
> forever". I really wish that'd be the case, but if not, people (from
> simple dudes to legal trolls) might come out of the woodwork screaming
> fraud.

Strange, I'd interpret it as "Wikipedia will be ad-free forever. Now,
hand over the cash."

But afaik the foundation has never said such a thing. The last I heard
was Jimbo saying "not anytime soon, and only if there is some major
shift in public opinion".

Steve

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Featured churn

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 10:33 AM, Apoc 2400  wrote:
> I think there is a huge number of notable topics that we have not yet
> covered. Sure, there may be fewer sources about central Africa, but
> what about China and South America? The areas most Wikipedians care
> about are well covered, so we don't notice the gaps. The meme that
> Wikipedia is finished and we only need to add new things that become
> notable is very dangerous.

I wonder how we compare to Britannica et al in this regard. Certainly
we don't have many articles on African countries. But do other
English-language encyclopaedias?

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Office hours next Thursday, November 19

2009-11-17 Thread Cary Bass

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Cary Bass wrote:
> Hello all!
>
> Next Thursday's office hours will feature Véronique Kessler, the
> Foundation's Chief Financial Officer.  If you don't know Naoko, you
> can get to know her at
> .
delete "Naoko" insert "Véronique"

*blush*


- --
Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
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[WikiEN-l] Office hours next Thursday, November 19

2009-11-17 Thread Cary Bass

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Hello all!

Next Thursday's office hours will feature Véronique Kessler, the
Foundation's Chief Financial Officer.  If you don't know
Naoko, you can get to know her at
.

Office hours on Thursday are from 2100 to 2200 UTC (3:00 PM - 4:00 PM PDT).

If you do not have an IRC client, there are two ways you can come chat
using a web browser:  First is using the Wikizine chat gateway at
.  Type a
nickname, select irc.freenode.net from the top menu and
#wikimedia-office from the following menu, then login to join.

Also, you can access Freenode by going to http://webchat.freenode.net/,
typing in the nickname of your choice and choosing wikimedia-office as
the channel.   You may be prompted to click through a security warning.
It should be all right.

Please feel free to forward (and translate!) this email to any other
relevant email lists you happen to be on.  Also note, this is
Veronique's first foray into IRC, so lets show her how welcoming we can
be! :-)

- --
Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate


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Re: [WikiEN-l] The Internet? Bah!

Nathan  wrote:
> Now that it is what it is, any idiot can look back and say it was
> obvious what would happen. Far more people got it wrong 15-20 years
> ago, and I guess its good for a chuckle (especially since this
> particular writer was so condescending) - but hindsight is as perfect
> as foresight is rare.

Its not about having some kind of crystal ball, though. It's about
giving credence to people who understand the components and can, in
their mind at least, put them together long before they can be put
together in material form. It would help any confusion of course if
visionaries could explain their visions with more conviction and
convincing detail. But in that case though, the writer was just
completely and perfectly wrong about everything.

And that's in part due to (as you say) that conventional tendency. The
point here is that it's a tendency based in not giving credence to the
most competent visions, not just in natural incapacity. Even the
objections which haven't yet been totally disproven ('no
hypergovernment') will of course have to fall also, just to satisfy
statistical idealism.

And are laypeople today really going to start arguing with a David
Deutch or a Peter Shor? I think Stoll must have hit mid-age and that
set his thoughts back to 1983, in which state of mind he penned a
treasure trove's worth of postdated humor. Nobody could actually get
all the answers wrong - that is, nobody, but a guy who really knew all
the answers.

-Stevertigo
"And carried on without a comma...

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Re: [WikiEN-l] The Internet? Bah!

2009-11-17 Thread Ian Woollard

On 17/11/2009, David Gerard  wrote:
> And at least Clifford Stoll actually knew what the heck he was talking
> about, unlike most media pontificators at the time.

I can't remember whether I read this when it came out- if I did, and I
think I did, I quickly dismissed it; it was clear even at the time
that things were going to continue to change, and more and more things
were likely to pile online. His essay was essentially a static view of
the *internet*. Even then... not going to happen.

> - d.

-- 
-Ian Woollard

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Re: [WikiEN-l] The Internet? Bah!

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 5:07 AM, stevertigo  wrote:
> http://www.newsweek.com/id/106554
>
> Linked and digged from a current article. Quite chuckleworthy.

So cool!

>The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper,

reddit.com pretty much did for me.

> no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher

Jury's still out.

>and no computer network will change the way government works.

How did Obama get elected again?

>Consider today's online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows 
>anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging 
>editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The 
>result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens 
>band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When 
>most everyone shouts, few listen.

Answer: blogging.

>How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an 
>unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly 
>pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach.

Answer: Kindle. Or any netbook, really.

>Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll 
>soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

He was wrong about the books, but right about the newspapers. We don't
"buy" them.

>I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and 
>it takes 15 minutes to unravel them--one's a biography written by an eighth 
>grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an 
>image of a London monument. None answers my question,

Answer: Wikipedia

>Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for 
>county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and 
>position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of 
>computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.

Boy, that sure changed. I love what the internet has done to state
government departments in particular - you can get access to so much
information so easily now.

>We're told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will 
>happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored 
>software.Who needs teachers when you've got computer-aided education? Bah. 
>These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive 
>teacher training.

I'm going to agree with him on this one.

>Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping--just 
>point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, 
>make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts.

Wow. I can't even imagine buying plane tickets any other way. (Oops,
not quite true, I bought a ticket at an airport in Borneo last month).
 Restaurant reservations...well some sites do it, I'd still ring up to
be safe. Negotiating contracts by email, definitely.

>Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in 
>an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?

Because malls are about much more than buying stuff. They're places
that deranged people go for pleasure. The net has replaced a huge
chunk of my offline shopping though. Food and secondhand books I
always buy offline. Everything else is probably 70% online.

>Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet--which 
>there isn't--the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: 
>salespeople.

Not anymore it's not. I've made tame enquiries into a couple of
products and been followed up by extremely keen salespeople. But as
pointed out, they're redundant in general.

>What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the 
>fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks 
>isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for 
>meeting friends over coffee.

Twitter, facebook, IM, Skype. But he's still kind of right.

>No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live 
>concert.

For once, he's dead on the money.

I actually love Cliff Stoll - I bought a hand-manufactured, signed
Klein bottle from him once. But it's interesting to see how all sorts
of assumptions and prejudices can make you so, so wrong. It appears in
retrospect that the correct vision for the future would be "anything
that genuinely relies on physical presence and sensation, like a rock
concert, can't be computerised. Everything else can, and will."

Steve

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Featured churn

2009-11-17 Thread Gwern Branwen

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 6:33 PM, Apoc 2400  wrote:
>>
>> Indeed. Looking at this:
>>
>> http://www.floatingsheep.org/2009/11/mapping-wikipedia.html
>>
>> This is a similar mapping:
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Imageworld-artphp3.png
>
> I think there is a huge number of notable topics that we have not yet
> covered.
> ...

Indeed:
http://en.wikipedia/wiki/User:Piotrus/Wikipedia_interwiki_and_specialized_knowledge_test

-- 
gwern

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[WikiEN-l] Featured churn

2009-11-17 Thread Apoc 2400

>
> Indeed. Looking at this:
>
> http://www.floatingsheep.org/2009/11/mapping-wikipedia.html
>
> This is a similar mapping:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Imageworld-artphp3.png

I think there is a huge number of notable topics that we have not yet
covered. Sure, there may be fewer sources about central Africa, but
what about China and South America? The areas most Wikipedians care
about are well covered, so we don't notice the gaps. The meme that
Wikipedia is finished and we only need to add new things that become
notable is very dangerous.
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Featured churn

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 12:29 AM, Carcharoth
 wrote:
> The closest I've come to writing about things in other countries is here:

Aww, I'm a *much* better person than you:

New Zealand: Broken River, New Zealand, Craigieburn Valley, Fox Peak,
Invincible Snowfields, Mount Dobson, Mount Lyford, Porters, Rainbow,
Snow Park, Mount Cheeseman, Temple Basin, Mount Olympus Ski Area,
Mount Potts, Roundhill Ski Area, Hanmer Springs Ski Area, Mount
Robert, Manganui

France:Carnac stones, Couesnon, La Trinité-sur-Mer, Sée River, Château
de Beauregard, Loire Valley, (Puiseaux River), Canton of Morez, Parc
de la Tête d'Or, Pontorson, Phare de la Vieille, Ar Men, Tourelle de
la Plate,

Central Europe: Mount Klin, Starý Smokovec, Adršpach-Teplice Rocks,
Lomnický štít, Czarny Staw pod Rysami, Tatranská Lomnica, Mount
Bystrá, Slavkovský štít, Váci utca, Hrebienok

UK and Ireland: Guinness Storehouse, Calcot Manor, Staxigoe

Bolivia: Villazón

Peru: Castaño Overa Glacier, Alerce Glacier

Other: Kushk River, Kushk, Saint Mary of Valencia Cathedral, Mustafa
Centre, Temple of Olympian Zeus (Agrigento), Breckenridge Reservoir,
A1 Motorway (Italy), Cirat‎, Peacock Alley (jazz club)


Don't worry though, I'm sure you'll get there! One day you can wallow
in your own multicultural global self-satisfaction too!

Steve

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Re: [WikiEN-l] The Internet? Bah!

2009-11-17 Thread Gwern Branwen

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 5:13 PM, David Gerard  wrote:
> 2009/11/17 Nathan :
>> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 1:07 PM, stevertigo  wrote:
>
>>> http://www.newsweek.com/id/106554
>>> Linked and digged from a current article. Quite chuckleworthy.
>
>> Now that it is what it is, any idiot can look back and say it was
>> obvious what would happen. Far more people got it wrong 15-20 years
>> ago, and I guess its good for a chuckle (especially since this
>> particular writer was so condescending) - but hindsight is as perfect
>> as foresight is rare.
>
>
> And at least Clifford Stoll actually knew what the heck he was talking
> about, unlike most media pontificators at the time.
>
>
> - d.

Which makes his article and his book _Silicon Snake Oil_ all the
worse: he knew better! (Although as an astronomer turned sysadmin who
hasn't done anything interesting since, I'm not sure how much we could
credit Stoll with in terms of history & sociology & trends.)

For example: "None answers my question, and my search is periodically
interrupted by messages like, "Too many connectios, try again later.""

Seriously, Cliff? Seriously? This is your idea of a cogent point, that
bandwidth sucked in '95? Yet you should've known perfectly well about
all the fiber being put in, that broadband tech like ADSL and cable
modems were realities in not just the labs but were becoming
commercial tech, that all the trends - all! - said that bandwidth
would just keep on going up.

"Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that
we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh,
sure."

Amazon was founded in '94, and started selling books just a few months
after this article. And Amazon was by no means the first to sell books
online. And his prediction we would never read books on computers,
with Kindle, has obviously been falsified. (E-paper, incidentally, was
first invented in the '70s, and the early '90s saw the development of
what Kindle would use, e-ink.)

And his 2 paragraphs on e-commerce? Equally risible. We can forgive
him for thinking salespeople necessary. (Although I can't; what, did
mail-order not prove in the *previous* century that salespeople were
unnecessary?) But saying that there was no way to send money online is
both ignorant and stupid. What, had banks for all the 20th century
been schlepping around documents and whatnot in cars and trains? No,
by '95, they had long been using electronic methods, routed over -
*computer networks*. Astonishing. (Paypal, BTW, was founded 1998.)

Cliff gets exactly *1* thing right: that computers will be largely
useless in juvenile education. When your competition is a stopped
clock and your predictions could be seen to be wrong or dubious even
before they were made, you know your prognosticating skills are bad.

-- 
gwern

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Re: [WikiEN-l] The Internet? Bah!

2009-11-17 Thread David Gerard

2009/11/17 Nathan :
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 1:07 PM, stevertigo  wrote:

>> http://www.newsweek.com/id/106554
>> Linked and digged from a current article. Quite chuckleworthy.

> Now that it is what it is, any idiot can look back and say it was
> obvious what would happen. Far more people got it wrong 15-20 years
> ago, and I guess its good for a chuckle (especially since this
> particular writer was so condescending) - but hindsight is as perfect
> as foresight is rare.


And at least Clifford Stoll actually knew what the heck he was talking
about, unlike most media pontificators at the time.


- d.

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[WikiEN-l] In the news: how Ratzinger got his Internet on

2009-11-17 Thread Gwern Branwen

http://www.examiner.com/x-9052-Orlando-Roman-Catholic-Examiner~y2009m11d13-The-Vatican-in-cyber-social-networking

"The Vatican's official Facebook application -Pope2You- which allows
users to receive the latest messages and photos of Pope Benedict VXI,
as well as to send virtual postcards to friends is English, Spanish,
French, German and Italian. Whatever happened to Latin? The Vatican
has also launched a Youtube channel with videos of the Pontiff.
Google, who owns Youtube, is working in association with the Vatican
Television Center and Vatican Radio on this venture. In WikiCath, the
official Catholic wikipedia application, young people are invited to
connect with their Pope under the slogan of 'New technology, New
relationship.'

Let's read the Pope's Message together.

The Pope has written to young people in a special way in his
Message for the 43rd World Day of Communication.
The application WIKICATH lets us read the message in a new way,
interactive and hypertext, through a platform built in the WIKI style.

WIKICATH has the commentary to the Pope's Message and the deeper
key concepts contained in Benedict XVI's text.
WIKICATH can be a useful tool for the personal reading of the
Message and a supplement for the pastoral care in Christian
communities."

Alas. If only it were named 'CathWik'.

(#wikipedia notes with its signature low humor that in WikiCath, one
sees in the URLs not 'Page's but 'Pagina's.)

--
gwern

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Ad-free forever?

2009-11-17 Thread Casey Brown

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 3:51 PM, Magnus Manske
 wrote:
> I'd interpret this as "if we reach $7.5M, Wikipedia will be ad-free
> forever". I really wish that'd be the case, but if not, people (from
> simple dudes to legal trolls) might come out of the woodwork screaming
> fraud.
>

Some might think that, but to me that means:  "Help us keep Wikipedia
Ad-free Forever -- donate."  It's not a promise, it's a dedication to
staying ad-free that we need help on from the donors.  It address the
"now" , while leaving open the possibility of ads in the future.

-- 
Casey Brown
Cbrown1023

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[WikiEN-l] Ad-free forever?

2009-11-17 Thread Magnus Manske

I'm not here to discuss the wording of the fundraising slogans yet
again, but this one screams "legal trouble":

Wikipedia. Ad-free forever.
[Progress bar] [Donate now button]

I'd interpret this as "if we reach $7.5M, Wikipedia will be ad-free
forever". I really wish that'd be the case, but if not, people (from
simple dudes to legal trolls) might come out of the woodwork screaming
fraud.

Or maybe I'm just too paranoid.

Cheers,
Magnus

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[WikiEN-l] NASA scientist tells conspiracy theorists to go to Wikipedia

2009-11-17 Thread David Gerard

http://astrobiology.nasa.gov/ask-an-astrobiologist/intro/nibiru-and-doomsday-2012-questions-and-answers

I was struck by the repeated suggestions to look this stuff up on Wikipedia.


- d.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Downtime this morning

Aryeh Gregor  wrote:
> The original message was not cross-posted.  Andrew posted it on wikitech-l 
> only.

Well if a 17 minute site crash is "no big deal" as Tim said.. Then a
little casual informative crossposting ain't worth frettin over, eh?

-Stevertigo
"You're hopelessly hopeless...

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Downtime this morning

Tim Starling  wrote:
> Actually neither of them are "caching managers" or have any direct
> role in caching.

OK. "Various monitoring tools" is sort of sufficient.

Stevertigo wrote:
>> "Caching" basically just
>> means keeping wiki pages in RAM so that things get fetched quickly -
>> most people are not logged in so they get the same HTML
Tim Starling wrote:
> This is not particularly accurate either.

OK. Well (again, just pulling this out of my ear) either its the
wikitext or HTML that is cached, and it didn't seem to me like it made
sense to reformat each page as HTML each time it was called. Granted,
HTML is bulkier and takes up more RAM (50% more?), and that probably
outweighs the load/computensity issue of doing reformatting for each
time. (Something I didn't consider, as I was pulling... )

So, given what I assume is a rather steepish ratio of casual readers
(who need standard pages) to logged in editors (who need customized
pages), I just went with the HTML and figure the rest was smoke and
mirrors.

I didn't think though about how wikitext changes all the time, and
thus handling them as HTML would probably add a static element to how
pages are refreshed. Hm.

Anyway, sorry if I was less than accurate in my explanation.

> I think you mean LiveJournal.

Ah. True.

-Stevertigo
"I know I'll keep searching...

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Downtime this morning

2009-11-17 Thread geni

2009/11/17 Aryeh Gregor :
> As you can see, this doesn't really contain any info useful to anyone
> but server admins.  Which is why it was originally posted to
> wikitech-l, not wikien-l.

If of some interest though. http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/ is also of
general interest if you are trying to work out if a problem is just
you or wikipedia. It can also be of general interest with regards to
traffic patterns (for example the variation in page views seems to be
far less than the variation in image and text uploads).



-- 
geni

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Re: [WikiEN-l] The Internet? Bah!

2009-11-17 Thread Nathan

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 1:07 PM, stevertigo  wrote:
> http://www.newsweek.com/id/106554
>
> Linked and digged from a current article. Quite chuckleworthy.
>
> -S
>
> ___
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>

Now that it is what it is, any idiot can look back and say it was
obvious what would happen. Far more people got it wrong 15-20 years
ago, and I guess its good for a chuckle (especially since this
particular writer was so condescending) - but hindsight is as perfect
as foresight is rare.

Nathan

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[WikiEN-l] The Internet? Bah!

http://www.newsweek.com/id/106554

Linked and digged from a current article. Quite chuckleworthy.

-S

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Downtime this morning

2009-11-17 Thread Aryeh Gregor

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 11:11 AM, Charles Matthews
 wrote:
> The most important thing is to decide what we are going to cross-post to
> wikitech-l to induce equal bafflement. Something involving 57 different
> flavours of idiosyncratic interpretation of IAR, and who thinks that
> they could be safely ignored, might do.

The original message was not cross-posted.  Andrew posted it on wikitech-l only.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Downtime this morning

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 4:11 PM, Charles Matthews
 wrote:

> The most important thing is to decide what we are going to cross-post to
> wikitech-l to induce equal bafflement. Something involving 57 different
> flavours of idiosyncratic interpretation of IAR, and who thinks that
> they could be safely ignored, might do.

I nominate your post on Tottel's Miscellany... :-)

Is it really possible to have 57 different flavours of IAR? Actually,
I don't want to know the answer to that one!

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Downtime this morning

2009-11-17 Thread Charles Matthews

Carcharoth wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 3:07 PM, Aryeh Gregor
>  wrote:
>
> 
>
>   
>> As you can see, this doesn't really contain any info useful to anyone
>> but server admins.  Which is why it was originally posted to
>> wikitech-l, not wikien-l.
>> 
>
> True, but thanks for explaining anyway. Much appreciated, and I do
> find it interesting, even if my original post in this thread and some
> of the responses to it said or implied I didn't. 
The most important thing is to decide what we are going to cross-post to 
wikitech-l to induce equal bafflement. Something involving 57 different 
flavours of idiosyncratic interpretation of IAR, and who thinks that 
they could be safely ignored, might do.

Charles


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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Downtime this morning

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 3:07 PM, Aryeh Gregor
 wrote:

> As you can see, this doesn't really contain any info useful to anyone
> but server admins.  Which is why it was originally posted to
> wikitech-l, not wikien-l.

True, but thanks for explaining anyway. Much appreciated, and I do
find it interesting, even if my original post in this thread and some
of the responses to it said or implied I didn't. I've just been
reading the Wikipedia articles on naglios and ganglia, and they do
help quite a bit in understanding things.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Downtime this morning

2009-11-17 Thread Aryeh Gregor

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 7:25 AM, Carcharoth  wrote:
> And to be honest, if I had Googled myself some understanding of this,
> I may have ended up even more confused about it. If I had asked
> questions like this on the wikitech-l mailing list, would I have been
> told to Google the answer?

No, but you didn't.  The message was originally posted on wikitech-l,
and wasn't meant for wikien-l.  It was a brief technical summary of
why the site crashed, directed toward people who know about the site
architecture and would get useful information from the description.
Explaining what all the terms mean wouldn't really serve the purpose
of the original message, which was to inform other people
knowledgeable about and/or responsible for the site's operation so
that the problem could be kept in mind in case it happened again, etc.
 I don't know what the point was of forwarding it to wikien-l, since
it doesn't contain any information that's useful to users.

The technical details are, in something closer to laymen's terms:
Andrew updated the software (scapped), and some servers crashed.
Looking at various monitoring tools (Nagios/Ganglia), he figured out
that some of the older, less powerful (4-CPU) application servers
(Apaches) didn't have enough resources to handle the update properly
(went into swap).  Unfortunately, this somehow (I'm not clear on this
part) drove an important caching server (memcached node) to crash
also.  The reduction in caching caused the database to overload, as
requests that normally would have been cached had to go to the
database.  This made the site mostly inaccessible for about ten
minutes, until the caches were repopulated enough to reduce database
load to normal levels.

As you can see, this doesn't really contain any info useful to anyone
but server admins.  Which is why it was originally posted to
wikitech-l, not wikien-l.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Featured churn

2009-11-17 Thread Ian Woollard

On 17/11/2009, Carcharoth  wrote:
> As long as history doesn't come to an end, and new people keep getting
> born and (annoyingly) becoming notable enough for a Wikipedia article,
> there will always be a need for new articles.

Maybe, but I don't know how many. That level doesn't seem particularly
obvious on the data yet.

It might be interesting for somebody to try sampling the new article
lists and try to work out what percentage of new articles are on a
topic that couldn't have been written before (say) the previous month.

Anyway, the world isn't ending (at least until 2012 ;-) ) and the
article quality is still marching ever upwards.

> Carcharoth

-- 
-Ian Woollard

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Featured churn

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 1:08 PM, geni  wrote:

> http://www.floatingsheep.org/2009/11/mapping-wikipedia.html

That is fascinating. Thanks for posting that link.

> Gives us some idea where the gaps are but not to the extent you might
> think (there are simply fewer citable sources referring to things in
> say the Central African Republic than the UK).

"there are more Wikipedia articles written about the fictional places
of Middle Earth and Discworld than about many countries in Africa, the
Americas and Asia"

Oops! :-/

The closest I've come to writing about things in other countries is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Allan_Broun

I had a load of sources on the talk page to follow up, but never found
time and left them there for anyone else who happened to chance along
(actually linking the articles from other articles would help there).

The history of astronomical research in India during the time of the
British Empire is actually quite interesting (if you like that sort of
thing). I've just been reading about the research carried out by John
Evershed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Evershed

I've glad to see we have an article on the observatory he did most of
his work at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodaikanal_Solar_Observatory

This article could do with expanding:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madras_Observatory

And this one could do with tidying up:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colaba_Observatory

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Featured churn

2009-11-17 Thread geni

2009/11/17 Charles Matthews :
> Bod Notbod wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 12:19 PM, Carcharoth
>>  wrote:
>>
>>
>>> As long as history doesn't come to an end, and new people keep getting
>>> born and (annoyingly) becoming notable enough for a Wikipedia article,
>>> there will always be a need for new articles.
>>>
>>
>> Not to mention people's irritating and continuing habit of publishing
>> successful books, making notable films (running the risk of creating
>> notable actors and other staff), creating successful companies with
>> successful products, progressing with scientific enquiry, advancing
>> technology, releasing new software...
>>
> Yes. To be tedious and pedantic about it all, once we have finished
> Phase 1 of enWP, where we were playing catch-up with the obviously
> encyclopedic topics like chemical elements and US Presidents (etc.), we
> get to Phase 2, where the new articles fall into several distinct classes:
>
> (1) articles about newly notable topics;
> (2) articles about fairly obviously encyclopedic topics, for which
> sources were available without too much trouble and which fit into
> existing coverage, but had been missed for whatever reason;
> (3) articles which are much like those in (2) to create, but only came
> to light after someone expanded existing coverage somewhere (new redlinks);
> (4) articles for redlinks where the supporting sources took a bit of
> quarrying out.
>
> So we are really saying that (1) is generally speaking the 'reactive'
> class. To some extent the rate of creation is not under "our" control
> (these articles will be started in some form anyway). The others are the
> 'proactive' classes: (2) really just requires people to read the site
> and notice places where redlinks are or should be, and create good stubs
> that are not a huge effort (the traditional form of growth). (3)
> requires upgrading stubs to generate fuller coverage, and then we are
> back to (2). While (4) takes us back to the "librarian" discussion:
> deeper-cutting research skills required. (There is really also (5),
> completism for lists, which gets through to me, but perhaps is a
> minority interest.)
>
> So what we get is a rate of growth by the article-number metric (not the
> only interesting measure) where one component is mostly to do with
> outside 'push', while the others are 'pull', and depend on how
> Wikipedians self-assign to tasks.
>
> Charles

Indeed. Looking at this:

http://www.floatingsheep.org/2009/11/mapping-wikipedia.html

Gives us some idea where the gaps are but not to the extent you might
think (there are simply fewer citable sources referring to things in
say the Central African Republic than the UK).


-- 
geni

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Featured churn

2009-11-17 Thread Charles Matthews

Bod Notbod wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 12:19 PM, Carcharoth
>  wrote:
>
>   
>> As long as history doesn't come to an end, and new people keep getting
>> born and (annoyingly) becoming notable enough for a Wikipedia article,
>> there will always be a need for new articles.
>> 
>
> Not to mention people's irritating and continuing habit of publishing
> successful books, making notable films (running the risk of creating
> notable actors and other staff), creating successful companies with
> successful products, progressing with scientific enquiry, advancing
> technology, releasing new software...
>   
Yes. To be tedious and pedantic about it all, once we have finished 
Phase 1 of enWP, where we were playing catch-up with the obviously 
encyclopedic topics like chemical elements and US Presidents (etc.), we 
get to Phase 2, where the new articles fall into several distinct classes:

(1) articles about newly notable topics;
(2) articles about fairly obviously encyclopedic topics, for which 
sources were available without too much trouble and which fit into 
existing coverage, but had been missed for whatever reason;
(3) articles which are much like those in (2) to create, but only came 
to light after someone expanded existing coverage somewhere (new redlinks);
(4) articles for redlinks where the supporting sources took a bit of 
quarrying out.

So we are really saying that (1) is generally speaking the 'reactive' 
class. To some extent the rate of creation is not under "our" control 
(these articles will be started in some form anyway). The others are the 
'proactive' classes: (2) really just requires people to read the site 
and notice places where redlinks are or should be, and create good stubs 
that are not a huge effort (the traditional form of growth). (3) 
requires upgrading stubs to generate fuller coverage, and then we are 
back to (2). While (4) takes us back to the "librarian" discussion: 
deeper-cutting research skills required. (There is really also (5), 
completism for lists, which gets through to me, but perhaps is a 
minority interest.)

So what we get is a rate of growth by the article-number metric (not the 
only interesting measure) where one component is mostly to do with 
outside 'push', while the others are 'pull', and depend on how 
Wikipedians self-assign to tasks.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Featured churn

2009-11-17 Thread Bod Notbod

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 12:19 PM, Carcharoth
 wrote:

> As long as history doesn't come to an end, and new people keep getting
> born and (annoyingly) becoming notable enough for a Wikipedia article,
> there will always be a need for new articles.

Not to mention people's irritating and continuing habit of publishing
successful books, making notable films (running the risk of creating
notable actors and other staff), creating successful companies with
successful products, progressing with scientific enquiry, advancing
technology, releasing new software...

At this rate we'll never finish the encyclopedia. Once Wikipedia has
more cultural power I suggest we wield it to put a halt to all
activity until we've caught up. Once that's achieved I suggest that
all human endeavours are posted as requests through our OTRS and we
can tell the actor/scientist/inventor whether we are willing to allow
them to proceed (after we have assessed whether their activity is
liable to create something that meet our notability criteria) or
whether they must wait until we clear any current backlog.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Featured churn

2009-11-17 Thread Martijn Hoekstra

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 1:19 PM, Carcharoth  wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 5:59 AM, Ian Woollard  wrote:
>> On 14/07/2009, Sage Ross  wrote:
>>> On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 10:07 AM, Ian Woollard
>>> wrote:
>>>

 It's looking to me like 3.5 million is about the plateau, since the
 curve is bang on that, but we might make 4 million *eventually*.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Modelling_Wikipedia%27s_growth#Logistic_model_for_growth_in_article_count_of_Wikipedia

>>>
>>> I don't think the bell-shaped articles/day curve of the logistic model
>>> is a good description of the trends.  Since article creation peaked in
>>> 2007, the falloff in article creation has been much slower than than
>>> ramp-up.  Rather than falling back to close to zero articles/day over
>>> the next 5 years or so (as the logistic model predicts), it looks like
>>> we're heading to an asymptote of (I'm eyeballing it here) around 1000
>>> articles/day.  I expect 4 million articles a lot sooner than
>>> *eventually*.  ;)
>>
>> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enwikipediagrowth.PNG
>>
>> We're already down to 1000/day growth on the unsmoothed graph as we
>> fall off one of the two biannual growth peaks.
>>
>> Looks like the Wikipedia is still bang-on for 3.5 million articles.
>
> As long as history doesn't come to an end, and new people keep getting
> born and (annoyingly) becoming notable enough for a Wikipedia article,
> there will always be a need for new articles.
>
> Carcharoth
>

There are even articles that were deleted without prejudice before,
that *gasp* happen to do gain notability! (I happened to look over my
own deletion logs yesterday, and a handfull of articles that were (IMO
correctly) deleted without prejudice in the past, that are now decent
articles).

Martijn

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Downtime this morning

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 7:05 AM, Tim Starling  wrote:
> stevertigo wrote:
>> Carcharoth  wrote:
>>> nagios?
>>> ganglia?
>>> 4-CPU apache?
>>> scap?
>>> swap?
>>> memcached node?
>>> 
>>> Is it fixed now? Oh, good. :-)
>>
>> Off the top of my head...
>>
>> "Nagios" is ostensibly the report server and caching manager and
>> "ganglia" IIRC is a page caching manager.
>
> Actually neither of them are "caching managers" or have any direct
> role in caching. This isn't the forum to go into a detailed discussion
> of what they do mean, and a google search would do just as well to
> fill Carcharoth in, if he was actually interested, which he obviously
> isn't.

Why, thank you. :-)

Sometimes it is nice to get explanations (understandable ones) from
real people, not webpages.

This is why we have a Reference Desk and (possibly) mailing lists.

And to be honest, if I had Googled myself some understanding of this,
I may have ended up even more confused about it. If I had asked
questions like this on the wikitech-l mailing list, would I have been
told to Google the answer? Hey, maybe the Reference Desk *is* the
right place for questions like this?

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Featured churn

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 5:59 AM, Ian Woollard  wrote:
> On 14/07/2009, Sage Ross  wrote:
>> On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 10:07 AM, Ian Woollard
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> It's looking to me like 3.5 million is about the plateau, since the
>>> curve is bang on that, but we might make 4 million *eventually*.
>>>
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Modelling_Wikipedia%27s_growth#Logistic_model_for_growth_in_article_count_of_Wikipedia
>>>
>>
>> I don't think the bell-shaped articles/day curve of the logistic model
>> is a good description of the trends.  Since article creation peaked in
>> 2007, the falloff in article creation has been much slower than than
>> ramp-up.  Rather than falling back to close to zero articles/day over
>> the next 5 years or so (as the logistic model predicts), it looks like
>> we're heading to an asymptote of (I'm eyeballing it here) around 1000
>> articles/day.  I expect 4 million articles a lot sooner than
>> *eventually*.  ;)
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enwikipediagrowth.PNG
>
> We're already down to 1000/day growth on the unsmoothed graph as we
> fall off one of the two biannual growth peaks.
>
> Looks like the Wikipedia is still bang-on for 3.5 million articles.

As long as history doesn't come to an end, and new people keep getting
born and (annoyingly) becoming notable enough for a Wikipedia article,
there will always be a need for new articles.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] How friendly are we to Newbies? Create an article as a newbie challenge now paused