Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia Leadership (was NY Times article on gender gap in Wikipedia contributors}

[Mark]

On 2/3/11 11:59 AM, Carcharoth wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 4:04 PM, Andreas Kolbe  wrote:
>
>> The next ten years of Wikipedia should be about multiplying the number of
>> real-life scholars and experts participating. The Ambassadors program is a
>> good start. Once the demographics change, the rest will follow; and until
>> the demographics change, all the talking will avail nothing.
> This is an excellent point. Though you may get some angst from those
> already present who may feel pushed out as they see the culture of
> Wikipedia changing (think how hard it has been for some of those
> present from the very beginning, or near the beginning, to adapt over
> the last ten years). How to manage such change is an interesting
> problem.

It's important to make sure we do maintain the aspects of Wikipedia's 
culture that have made it work, though. I'm a professor in my day job 
(though I was an undergrad when I became a Wikipedian), and I don't see 
academia and academic experts as holding all advantages, though they/we 
do do well in the having-a-lot-of-domain-knowledge arena.

What about Wikipedia's culture actually led to an encyclopedia being 
written, with a lot of good information, and a fairly neutral tone for 
the most part? That's something Nupedia didn't succeed in, and on the 
second point is something even most academic-press books don't succeed 
in--- the median overview book on a subject sneaks in quite a bit of 
opinion and original research, and sometimes even digs at academic 
opponents if the editors let them get away with it, which is why you 
can't really read an academic book without *also* reading a few 
journals' reviews of it.

-Mark


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Re: [WikiEN-l] Tabloid sources (was Wikipedia leadership})

[Mark]

On 2/4/11 6:08 PM, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
> "I do not permit any of my students to cite your encyclopedia as any
> kind of reliable source when they write papers for me. Wikipedia is too
> much a playground for social activists of whatever editorial bent wherein
> the lowest common denominator gets to negotiate reality for the readers.
> No thanks."

I run into these kinds of reactions fairly frequently, but honestly I 
don't see how they're in tune with reality. There at least seems to be a 
bit of knee-jerk reactionary sentiment going on (and among academics, 
some turf-defending and credentialism).

I certainly encourage my students to read Wikipedia, though I also 
encourage them to follow up the sources and consult alternative sources. 
There are indeed "social activists of whatever editorial bent", but 
that's true of academic presses as well! A well-developed Wikipedia 
article in my experience is less likely than an academic book to 
completely ignore a large number of sources; academics are much more 
willing to decide "field X is crap" and ignore it entirely, e.g. if you 
look at how economists treat critical theorists and vice versa (and how 
economists treat economists from rival camps).

Consider, say, our article [[History of U.S. foreign policy]]. It could 
be better, certainly could be more detailed (though some sections point 
to more detailed separate articles), but it's not bad overall imo. It 
covers some opposing views, both in terms of historiographic disputes 
and political disputes. Now compare it to a recently published Princeton 
University Press book on the history of U.S. foreign policy, "Empire for 
Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to 
Paul Wolfowitz". The book is of course more detailed than our article, 
and includes some excellent material that we should cover. But if you 
were to ask which one is influenced more by "social activists" and which 
one more neutrally covers conflicting views of U.S. history and foreign 
policy, we beat the book by a large margin!

And it's hardly an isolated example, if you look at the list of recent 
publications by academic presses, there is a whole lot of social 
activism going on. Not that that's even necessarily bad; academic 
presses don't serve the same role as an encyclopedia. But it's strange 
to criticize Wikipedia from that standpoint!

-Mark


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Re: [WikiEN-l] Otto Middleton (a morality tale)

[Mark]

On 5/11/11 2:40 AM, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
> A while ago there was a discussion at WP:V talk whether we should
> recast the policy's opening sentence:
>
> "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth—
> whether readers can check that material in Wikipedia has already been
> published by a reliable source, not whether editors think it is true."
>
> (As usual, the discussion came to nought.) That sentence -- whose
> provocative formulation has served Wikipedia well in keeping out original
> research -- is a big part of the problem.

I think that sentence serves a good purpose in the *opposite* direction, 
though. An opposite common source of Wikipedia-angst is people who have 
good first-hand knowledge that something is both true and notable, but 
sadly, lack any good sources to back that up. So it's worth emphasizing 
up front that our criterion is verifiability as a descriptive matter, 
not truth and notability in some sense of absolute truth. So, some 
legitimately interesting and important stuff may be excluded, at least 
for now, because it hasn't been properly covered in any source we can 
cite. We just aren't the right place to do original research on a 
person, music group, or historical event that the existing literature 
has somehow missed, *even if* it's a grave oversight on the part of the 
existing literature. I wrote a bit more about this elsewhere: 
http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability.html

But it does get more problematic in the opposite direction, as you say. 
I see the motivation there too: there is a sense in which, if something 
is being discussed a lot, it becomes something we have to cover just by 
virtue of that fact. Meta-notability is also notability, so it would be 
absurd imo to claim that [[Natalee Holloway]] shouldn't be covered. 
Regardless of your opinion on the merits of her media coverage, she 
received such a large amount of it that her disappearance is an 
important event in early-21st-century popular culture. Heck, if we 
wanted *absolute* and philosophical rather than descriptive notability 
standards, I would delete almost every article on a 21st-century noble 
family as irrelevant nostalgic garbage (should anybody care who's the 
pretender to the French throne?).

As one of the replies to your post notes (sorry, I seem to have 
misplaced who it was by), one of the problems is more pragmatic. Perhaps 
we *should* cover some such figures, but only in a limited sense. But 
once we have an article, there's a slippery slope where everything 
tangentially related now can flood in. Perhaps that's what we should 
tackle, though. Is it possible to improve our methods of keeping 
marginal junk out of an article, while stopping short of entirely 
deleting and salting the article?

-Mark


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Re: [WikiEN-l] Otto Middleton (a morality tale)

[Mark]

On 5/13/11 7:57 AM, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
> The job of WP:V is to make sure that assertions in Wikipedia are 
> verifiable;
> it's not to ensure that verifiable stuff cannot be deleted.
Hmm, I suppose I disagree, but then I'm a fairly strong inclusionist; if 
it's verifiable, it belongs in Wikipedia, cited to the source that 
verifies it. But I don't think that's incompatible with adopting a 
stronger line on WP:RS. The main problem here imo is that a certain 
class of sources (newspapers writing about celebrity rumors) does *not* 
actually reliably verify anything, therefore we shouldn't treat them as 
a reliable source that does.

Are there any cases where editors should have discretion to delete 
*actually* solidly verifiable information, like some piece of physics 
information sourced to multiple well-respected physics review articles?

-Mark


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Re: [WikiEN-l] Millions for salaries, not one cent for defense

[Mark]

On 7/21/11 10:59 PM, Andrew Gray wrote:
> On 21 July 2011 21:19, David Gerard  wrote:
>
>> Indeed. But everyone would be happier if JSTOR stopped trying to
>> enclose the public domain.
> The *Royal Society* are the ones trying to enclose the public domain.
> JSTOR host the scans and provide the metadata to make it usable.
>
> [...] Yes, this content being open would be a wonderful thing, but I
> honestly think we're at risk of identifying the wrong villain if we
> keep insisting that JSTOR qua JSTOR are evil and must be brought to
> heel. The Google Books approach suggests a way we could get release of
> the material to work, but it's the RS we'd need to engage with to get
> it to work. There's very little benefit I can see to be gained by
> chasing JSTOR here, and a real risk of poisoning the waters for future
> cooperation.

I agree that JSTOR aren't the only ones at fault, but my interactions 
with them have generally not given the impression that they're 
interested in serving the public domain, either. If anything, they have 
a very protective attitude towards "their" database, taking a more 
aggressive stance than many of the journals who actually own the content 
in question. They've been completely uninterested in developing any sort 
of free-access policies, despite the fact that, from what I know from at 
least one journal, some journals would in fact make some of their old 
content freely available through JSTOR, if JSTOR offered that as an 
option that they could choose--- something like the NYTimes, "pre-1923 
free, post-1923 pay" archive policy. But JSTOR doesn't even allow a 
journal to mark any portion of their archive non-paywalled, much less 
actually push for anything like that.

In fact, they even bargain fairly stingily when it comes to temporary 
and partially free access. For example, the "19th Century British 
Pamphlets" collection was scanned thanks to a public research grant, 
which as a condition required JSTOR to give free access to all UK 
educational institutions through 2019. But they wouldn't agree to make 
it completely free, or to offer free access for more than 10 years; 
that's JSTOR's unwillingness to let go of control over their archive, 
the funding body did not demand a 2019 sunset for free access, or the 
restrictions on who could access it.

I hope you're right that they can be encouraged to engage in more 
productive collaboration in the future, but for my part I'm hugely 
disappointed and disillusioned with them. At one point in the late-90s 
it seemed like they might become something of a larger-scale Perseus 
Project, balancing a need for continued funding of their project with a 
mission of digitizing humanity's common heritage and making it freely 
available online. But I haven't seen any evidence of their leadership 
having that kind of vision.

-Mark


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[WikiEN-l] on citing Wikipedia in U.S. court opinions

[Mark]

Making the blog-rounds, there was a Utah court case that includes 
surprisingly lengthy (and generally positive) discussion on whether and 
when to cite Wikipedia in court decisions:


* http://www.utcourts.gov/opinions/appopin/fire_insurance081612.pdf

See footnote 1 (page 5) in the majority opinion, and a separate 
concurring opinion filed by another judge solely on the 
Wikipedia-citation question (starts on the bottom of page 7). My 
favorite part is where they cite the Wikipedia article "Reliability of 
Wikipedia" as part of the analysis.


Embarrassingly, the article of ours they cite, [[Jet Ski]], is actually 
in a sort of sorry state. But they seem to do so only for the relatively 
mundane usage note in the opening paragraph, which explains that "Jet 
Ski" is a trademark, but is often used imprecisely, in colloquial usage, 
to refer to other similar devices not manufactured by Kawasaki. I guess 
the OED doesn't have a note on that yet? Or maybe they don't have OED 
subscriptions over at the court? Alternately, maybe they just liked the 
way we worded the explanation and wanted to quote it rather than 
re-explaining the same thing in their own words.


-Mark


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Re: [WikiEN-l] links to open courses?

[Mark]

On 10/4/12 2:47 AM, phoebe ayers wrote:

Here is something I've been thinking about lately. Do we have a policy
or a practice on linking to open courses in articles, for instance the
MIT courses available at http://ocw.mit.edu?

As universities increasingly move to posting their courses and
lectures online, it seems to me like these would be useful links to
curate and add to the relevant (broad) articles.



I have a mild preference against linking that kind of thing from general 
articles, because they seem, well, too general to me. Sure, an open 
course on statistics is a way to learn more about [[statistics]], but 
there are a million others ways, too: there are regular textbooks (often 
the best introduction), open-access textbooks (sometimes great), online 
tutorials, Wolfram MathWorld, YouTube lecture series, etc. Curating 
"more online resources about statistics" starts to seem more like a job 
for dmoz or Google, than for us.


I do try to link *specific* parts of online course materials from more 
specific articles. For example, if an open course has a particularly 
good tutorial overview / explanation of / derivation of transformation 
matrices as used in 3d graphics, imo it'd be appropriate for 
[[transformation matrix]] to link it, because that becomes more focused.


Best,
Mark

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikimedia-l] The new narrowed focus by WMF

[Mark]

I suppose I'll put in a positive word for what I see here so far. It's 
interesting because I was arguing, during the expansion of the WMF, for 
some things vaguely along these lines, but I had assumed that battle was 
lost by now.


Two things in particular I like:

1. The Wikimedia Foundation should not become some kind of overarching 
NGO, but should look at what we actually do better than other 
organizations, and partner with other organizations (or even leave it 
entirely to them!) in other cases. The strength of grassroots-driven 
organizations is that they have a necessary but limited bureaucracy and 
legal apparatus, which keeps the servers running, handles legal matters, 
gets money where it's needed, but mostly stays out of the way. I'm very 
skeptical of professionalization of such organizations, where the 
professional staff takes the lead in big, costly initiatives (nonprofits 
of that kind start looking more like a bizarro-world version of 
corporations, complete with highly paid executives and big org-charts 
and that kind of thing).


2. I'm hugely skeptical of the "Westerners bring enlightenment to the 
third world" style of philanthropy, which has a quite bad history, tying 
into colonialism and Christian missionaries. So I think it's a very good 
direction to have efforts in the Global South driven by people and 
organizations actually from there, rather than from a San Francisco 
office. It doesn't appear that this propose would rule out those being 
local Wikimedia chapters, or funded via the FDC process, just that the 
efforts wouldn't operationally be run from the US-based headquarters. It 
would also be nice to partner more with existing organizations: goals 
like, "educate rural Indians" are not new goals, and many organizations 
actually based in India, with longer histories, have much more knowledge 
about the sticking points than we do.


Plus, decentralization of operations and dissemination of funds to 
support decentralized operations seems rather in keeping with the 
general Wikimedia spirit.


-Mark


On 10/18/12 3:27 PM, David Gerard wrote:

-- Forwarded message --
From: Theo10011 
Date: 18 October 2012 13:48
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] The new narrowed focus by WMF
To: Wikimedia Mailing List 


Hi

Sue Gardner started working on this document on Meta a couple of weeks ago
- http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sue_Gardner/Narrowing_focus The
document outlines some rather big changes in the priority for WMF and
future responsibilities it will agree to keep. I am surprised by how little
attention this is getting from the larger community. There are comments but
mostly from the same individuals on Meta, little to none from some of the
most active voices and the larger English Wikipedia community.

This is the new direction being considered by the WMF, to basically abandon
or cut back on majority of activities from the last few year. Here are some
points-
1) No more Fellowships.
2) No more direct work in the developing markets (aka Global South- India,
Brazil, MENA)
3) No more support for International events, and cutting back on Wikimania

Instead of these, things like Editor engagement, Mobile and FDC/grant
making are being made priorities for WMF in the future. A large majority of
editors have had no interaction with grants and are unlikely to have so
with FDC as well, same with some of the mobile initiatives like Wikipedia
Zero which are limited to certain developing markets. A lot of these
changes will have a lasting impact, its not just relevant to those
interested in governance issues. Some of the implications are - Fellowships
would be removed all together, little to no spending on Hackathons,
possibly GLAM camps and other international events all together, less
spending on Wikimania and scholarships, the work in India and Brazil will
be moved away from WMF completely for a "partner" organization to take over
with a grant from WMF. If you do find some time, please consider taking a
look and commenting on these developments before they are approved.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sue_Gardner/Narrowing_focus

Regards
Theo

The document has some interesting quotes -

"The Wikimedia Foundation is not a think tank or a research institute.
We're not an advocacy organization or a lobbyist, and our core mission
isn't to keep the internet free and open. We are not a general educational
non-profit. (We are a website, or set of sites, and everything we do needs
to be understood through that lens.) We don't just reactively "support the
community"—responding to requests from editors and doing what they ask us
to do. Our purpose isn't to provide MediaWiki support for third parties
(but it's in our interest to ensure that a healthy third party ecosystem
develops around MediaWiki). We're not, ourselves, content creators. Our
purpose is not

Re: [WikiEN-l] Another WP redesign

[Mark]

On 1/30/13 1:41 AM, Steve Bennett wrote:

A couple of screenshots to save people the effort:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/767553/eiger-normal.png
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/767553/eiger-three-columns.png
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/767553/eiger-three-columns-more.png

Looking at these, it's remarkable that we've put up with such a bad
layout for wide screens for so long. I mean, seriously - that
eiger-normal.png looks *awful*. The text is far too wide to read
comfortably, and then there's this huge white space next to the
contents box.

And all with a tiny amount of CSS. Great job, Magnus!



I like it as well. Actually, I recall a previous version from Magnus 
that was sort of like this which I also liked; am I imagining that?


The main issue with the present layout, imo, is that wrapping text 
around images produces clutter for no real gain when pages are so wide. 
I do like wrapping text around images on narrower pages, such as a 
typical book, or narrower portrait-format screens. In those cases, the 
alternatives feel inferior to me. Narrow columns really don't work for 
me: I use the IEEE and ACM 2-column article formats regularly in my day 
job and do not find them either aesthetically pleasing or particularly 
readable. And using a wider column without wrapping results in the image 
taking up the whole page for a certain amount of the vertical space, 
which is only sensible if it's a major object of discussion which should 
narratively fit into the text, rather than a side illustration.


But at larger widths, you can put the side illustrations out in the 
margin, because there is tons of space.


-Mark


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[WikiEN-l] Wikipedian identity stronger than U.S. political partisanship, says study

[Mark]

Somewhat interesting new journal article:
* http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0060584

The researchers found that political discussions among openly 
Wikipedians who declare a U.S. party affinity on their user pages don't 
follow some of the common patterns observed in other online communities. 
For example, researchers have documented that among bloggers, those 
affiliated with the same party tend to discuss amongst each other much 
more commonly (what they gloss as " cyberbalkanization"); and they also 
reference the "other side's" in a way that's much more likely to be 
argumentative, dismissive, and/or negative. But on Wikipedia neither 
appears to be true: those who declare a U.S. party affiliation don't 
seem to either segregate into more discussion with others on "their 
side", or to have a clear pattern of more acrimonious interactions with 
the "other" side than with "theirs".


Taken for whatever it's worth, of course. One hypothesis is the one the 
paper offers, that our Wikipedian community identity trumps partisan 
affiliation when it comes to guiding on-wiki interaction patterns. A 
more skeptical hypothesis could be that the D/R split is actually, 
unlike in the U.S. political blogosphere, not one of the more vicious 
ones among Wikipedians to begin with, so is in a way an easier case. A 
guess: a different fault line, like Israel/Palestine, might turn up less 
positive results.


But in any case, it's an interesting read.

-Mark

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Re: [WikiEN-l] A definite version of WP:CRYSTAL

[Mark Gallagher]

G'day Andrew,

> 2008/11/13 Jay Litwyn :
> > Since I believe in global warming and I see a contest between it
> and
> > economics, I see a very hot dispute that really should be
> off-loaded. There
> > are so many other places for volatile information to go. In other
> words, if
> > someone did [[global warming]], I think they should expect to end
> up on
> > another site, unless the article is restricted to history.
> I think this is going to end in tears - where do we draw the line?
> Do
> we just not talk about global warming; do we talk about it as
> something that is believed to have happened up to and including last
> week; do we talk about it and imply it may continue to happen; do we
> talk about it in general terms in the future but give no numbers?
> I'm not sure this approach is helpful; it tries to deal with a small
> set of specific (percieved) problems by applying a draconian general
> rule. I mean, take cosmology. We'd be a shoddy encyclopedia if we
> didn't talk about the [[heat death of the universe]], a very
> well-known concept... but it's entirely hypothetical, it exists as a
> paper theory with some substantiating numbers, and it's several
> billion years ahead.

I seem to recall WP:CRYSTAL's original purpose was to stop people writing about 
predicted future events years before they occurred (e.g. [[Playstation 9]]).  
Actually, most examples I can think of come from computer games, film, or 
music.  Call WP:CRYSTAL just one of many tools to defend against overwhelming 
geekgasm.

The point was to prevent Wikipedians from making predictions (Playstation 9 
will come out in 2017, and it will be AWESOME!!!; Star Wars XVII will come out, 
and it will SUCK DONKEY BALLS!!!), not to stop us from reporting on others' 
predictions.  So it's entirely appropriate to have an article on [[Heat death 
of the universe]], [[Global warming]], and even [[2012 London Olympics]].  
Indeed, to ask the question --- is it appropriate to talk about global warming, 
heat death of the universe, whatever --- is to be elevating a badly-written 
policy above common sense.  Again.


-- 
Mark Gallagher
0439 704 975
http://formonelane.net/
"Even potatoes have their bad days, Igor." --- Count Duckula




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Re: [WikiEN-l] The Community vs. Scholarly Consensus

[Mark Gallagher]

G'day Will,

> In a message dated 12/17/2008 1:16:27 PM Pacific Standard Time,  
> writes:
> Short of  simply quoting Derrida verbatim, there is very little that
> 
> can be  gleaned from Derrida without any specialist  knowledge.>>
> ---
> Then why be short?
> Quote him.
> If you want the general reader to agree on your summary of Derida's
> belief  
> on A, then quote Derida discussing A.

I don't know if you've looked at our articles discussing deconstructionism 
lately, but the absolute *last thing* we need is more impenetrable writing.  
Quoting Derrida can be likened to pouring oil on troubled fires.

Phil has hinted at it, but the primary reason we should be able to summarise 
and rephrase the words of humanities experts is that if we don't, our articles 
won't make any gosh-darned sense ...


Cheers,

-- 
Mark Gallagher
0439 704 975
http://formonelane.net/
"Even potatoes have their bad days, Igor." --- Count Duckula




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[WikiEN-l] Image tagging: 33 months later

[Mark Wagner]

Back in March of 2006, I did a check of image uploading.  The results
were, to put it bluntly, appalling.

I've re-done the check with a new batch of 1,945 images.  This covers
a little over two days' uploading, where the original set was 1,866
images uploaded in a little over 24 hours.

For 1,945 images uploaded and not later deleted, 1,960 license tags
were applied.

858 images, or 44%, were tagged with a non-free content tag, up from
40% in 2006. with album covers and logos making up slightly more than
half.  The vast numbers of promotional photos that were uploaded in
2006 are nowhere to be seen: only 20 images were so tagged.

At least 917 images (47%) were tagged with a free-content license tag,
up from 41% in 2006.  The most popular tags are PD-Self (334 images),
GFDL (250 images), and Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike (221
images)

Only 176 images (9%) did not have a license tag, a vast improvement
over 2006, when 26% were untagged.

500 of the images were checked for tag correctness.  Things are
looking *much* better than they were in March 2006: of the 494 tags
applied, 35 (7%) were clearly incorrect, and 34 invalid fair-use
claims were made.  In 2006, the error rates were 22% incorrect and 16%
invalid fair-use claims.

The most-misused tag by count is the self-creation tag (at least 21
images were not self-created), with the GFDL/CC-BY-SA-3.0 dual-license
tag especially problematic.  By proportion, it's CC-BY-3.0 (5 out of
12 incorrect).

On the non-free content side of things, the problematic tags are
{{non-free television screenshot}} (6 out of 10 used to illustrate a
person's biography), {{non-free audio sample}} (3 out of 4 samples
were over-long), and {{non-free promotional}} (2 out of 3 images were
clearly replaceable).  As before, album covers and logos tended to be
used correctly (74 out of 84 and 46 out of 57, respectively).

28 out of 254 free-content tags were incorrect, compared to 7 out of
205 non-free-content tags.  Breaking non-free content down by type of
media and getting rid of the generic "fair use" tags ("promotional",
"fair use", etc.) seems to have worked wonderfully.

We still need to do something about people uploading images with
incorrect information, but it's far less of a problem than it used to
be.

-- 
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Why infoboxes are good

[Mark Gallagher]

G'day Luna,

> I do think it's worth pointing out that literally every time I've
> mentioned
> dislike of infoboxes to non-WPians, the reply has been along the
> lines of
> "Why not? They're AWESOME!" I try to explain the objections, but
> usually the
> person is so set on the accessibility front that they can't see why
> anyone
> would want to avoid the boxes.
> It's not just bots that want information in an easily parsed format.

I think my perspective as (let's face it) an ex-Wikipedian is pretty similar to 
that of the common or garden-variety non-WP reader these days.  (This may be 
why I've become significantly more of an inclusionist since I stopped creating 
--- and deleting --- articles).  I tend to find the infoboxes alternately 
annoying and silly or practical and awesome, depending on my frame of mind and 
purpose.  If I'm after specific information --- e.g. a recent case where a 
colleague and I were arguing over the population breakdown of the UK --- the 
infoboxes save me time and prevent confusion.  If I'm just reading for the heck 
of it (cf. xkcd's "hours of fascinated clicking") they tend to be distracting.  
This is especially jarring in the case of subjects whose details don't break 
down easily into infoboxes, like real people.

As a reader, it's cool to quickly find the national motto of Burundi or the 
height of Centrepoint Tower without having to read through paragraphs of text.  
I love infoboxes!  But also as a reader, it's distracting to have a 
professional wrestler's "coach" or actress's bust size floating in the corner 
of the screen.  I hate infoboxes!  I guess you can break that down to say: it's 
nice when there is a consensus view of what a given infobox should say; it's 
less nice when the people who populate the infoboxes have different interests 
and values from you.


Cheers,

-- 
Mark Gallagher
0439 704 975
http://formonelane.net/
"Even potatoes have their bad days, Igor." --- Count Duckula




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Re: [WikiEN-l] Why infoboxes are good

[Mark Gallagher]

G'day Luna,

> I do think it's worth pointing out that literally every time I've
> mentioned
> dislike of infoboxes to non-WPians, the reply has been along the
> lines of
> "Why not? They're AWESOME!" I try to explain the objections, but
> usually the
> person is so set on the accessibility front that they can't see why
> anyone
> would want to avoid the boxes.
> It's not just bots that want information in an easily parsed format.

I think my perspective as (let's face it) an ex-Wikipedian is pretty similar to 
that of the common or garden-variety non-WP reader these days.  (This may be 
why I've become significantly more of an inclusionist since I stopped creating 
--- and deleting --- articles).  I tend to find the infoboxes alternately 
annoying and silly or practical and awesome, depending on my frame of mind and 
purpose.  If I'm after specific information --- e.g. a recent case where a 
colleague and I were arguing over the population breakdown of the UK --- the 
infoboxes save me time and prevent confusion.  If I'm just reading for the heck 
of it (cf. xkcd's "hours of fascinated clicking") they tend to be distracting.  
This is especially jarring in the case of subjects whose details don't break 
down easily into infoboxes, like real people.

As a reader, it's cool to quickly find the national motto of Burundi or the 
height of Centrepoint Tower without having to read through paragraphs of text.  
I love infoboxes!  But also as a reader, it's distracting to have a 
professional wrestler's "coach" or actress's bust size floating in the corner 
of the screen.  I hate infoboxes!  I guess you can break that down to say: it's 
nice when there is a consensus view of what a given infobox should say; it's 
less nice when the people who populate the infoboxes have different interests 
and values from you.


Cheers,

-- 
Mark Gallagher
0439 704 975
http://formonelane.net/
"Even potatoes have their bad days, Igor." --- Count Duckula




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Re: [WikiEN-l] Why infoboxes are good

[Mark Wagner]

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 12:02, Luna  wrote:
> Any band article with an infobox tends to attract
> small-time battles over the specific list of genres to include, too, I've
> noticed

I've always thought the proper solution to this is to hardcode the
"genre" line to read "music" -- although I suppose this would lead to
edit wars over the use of such infoboxes in articles on rappers.

-- 
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

[Mark Nilrad]

In general, about article creation, this has obviously slowed quite a lot. 
However, I think that is a good thing, as that means that article writers now 
have a chance to catch up to all the new articles. That is why the precentage 
of articles that are GAs, FAs, or FLs is rising, and will continue to rise.

Currently, these 3 categories combined make up about 1 in 277 articles (0.36%). 
It's better than before, but it obviously could go a lot further. That's why I 
think the focus during Wikipedia's "adolescent" should be article improvement, 
and not so much creation.

On a related topic, really the only way to increase in this way is by getting 
for users. I'm curious, as the growth in Wikipedia has slowed, has the numbers 
of ACTIVE users slowed as well? Because really, beyond just the policies and 
long-winded arguments on ANI, there's the fact that you can't watch over all 
the articles that Wikipedia has without getting more and more editors. Another 
reason why being nice to newcomers and leaving a good first impression is so 
crucial. Obviously, as you can read in the Slashdot comments (and many other 
places), this is not Wikipedia's strength, at all.

Mark Nilrad



  
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Poetry thread

[Mark Nilrad]

So, it appears that after the poetry thread is declared dead on arrival, it 
revives itself. Weird.

Anyway, moving this topic in another direction (without rhyming couplets), I 
want to say that not having fun is really a, ahem, serious pastime for a lot of 
people. People (yes, that's a WW) criticize Wikipedia for taking it seriously, 
and perhaps it's because a lot of editors can't find a modicum of joy in 
editing in Wikipedia. I wonder how you can spend hours doing something so 
serious. The reason I slave away on it, doing a lot of grunt work, is because 
it's fun to me (in the end, at least). I hope other editors can feel the same 
way.

Mark





From: Scientia Potentia est 
To: English Wikipedia 
Sent: Sunday, March 15, 2009 10:49:30 AM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Poetry thread

Durova, you forgot the cardinal rule of Wikipedia, which is that any semblance 
of fun is strictly forbidden, on order of the cabal. I mean, seriously, why 
would we edit it for FUN?

bibliomaniac15

--- On Sat, 3/14/09, Durova  wrote:
From: Durova 
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Poetry thread
To: "English Wikipedia" 
Date: Saturday, March 14, 2009, 7:31 PM

Let's stop fighting like caterwauls and doggerels. ;)

On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 7:12 PM, Ray Saintonge 
wrote:

> Durova wrote:
> > There was no prior conflict as far as I know.  Just good faith
> > misunderstanding.
>
> Excellent
> > All in the pursuit of good doggerel.
> Caterwaul in pursuit of doggerel bites its own tail.
>
> Ec
>
> ___
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> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
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>



-- 
http://durova.blogspot.com/
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Re: [WikiEN-l] NPOV is a big lie

[Mark Nilrad]

Bill,
It's not any good to make blanket statements about Wikipedia based on one 
article in your experience. This is what a lot of journalists do when writing 
about Wikipedia, and then proceed to lambast/praise/poo-poo or whatever based 
on that single experience. That is what it looks to me like you are doing.

I'm sure there are a good number of article that have "been maligned over and 
over again". But then, I am certain there are literally millions of articles 
that are great, and that have no problem with them (in that regard, anyway). As 
people have said, articles like the Cabal one are in a minority.

Noble Story





From: Bill Carter 
To: English Wikipedia 
Sent: Thursday, April 9, 2009 9:24:34 PM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] NPOV is a big lie

FT2: You must be a part of Wikipedia's propaganda ministry. I offer you facts 
about one striking instance in which journalist Alan Cabal has been maligned 
over and over again. Who knows how many other
Wikipedia articles are being treated in such a way, and only if people
come forward will we get a good idea.




From: FT2 
To: English Wikipedia 
Sent: Thursday, April 9, 2009 7:16:31 AM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] NPOV is a big lie

This is (when stripped down) basically a "straw man" post. It uses quotes by
others saying "A"as a rhetoric device in a question where the issue isn't
"A" at all, and in effect, conflates the two to try and make its point. It
then presents its point as made when in fact it hasn't made it at all, nor
even contains any attempt to do so. It's either sloppy logic or a rhetoric
device. Either way it has no place in honest communication, except as a
mistake to be retracted when spotted.





  
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Re: [WikiEN-l] New Book - Cyberchiefs

[Mark Nilrad]

How much good can there be to say about the leadership for WMF? 

Meanwhile, At the same time as this is published, the lovely "co-founder" issue 
springs up again. How ironic.

And by the way, just wondering: when you say you studied Wikipedia, does that 
mean just English Wikipedia, or the whole Wikimedia Foundation?





From: Mathieu O'Neil 
To: wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Sent: Thursday, April 9, 2009 3:34:05 PM
Subject: [WikiEN-l] New Book - Cyberchiefs

[apologies for cross-postings]

Hi everyone

Thought some people might be interested to know about my new book 'Cyberchiefs' 
which analyses leadership and organisation in free software projects, weblogs 
and wikis - in fact one of the case studies is on the English Wikipedia. See 
below for publisher blurb.

Cheers,

 

Mathieu



  
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Re: [WikiEN-l] An open letter to Jimmy Wales

[Mark Nilrad]

Wikipedia says Wikipedia was "a complementary project for Nupedia". 
Citenzendium says Wikipedia was "an accidental spin-off of Nupedia". Is there 
any reason to say that? How can a project be an "accidental spin-off" of 
something else?

Noble Story





From: Carcharoth 
To: English Wikipedia 
Sent: Saturday, April 11, 2009 2:00:37 AM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] An open letter to Jimmy Wales

On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 6:13 PM, David Gerard  wrote:
> 2009/4/10 Jon :
>
>> I was scanning the list today so I've not read every message in this
>> thread.  What is citizendium?  Is there a linky?
>
>
> http://citizendium.org/
>
> It's another attempt to make a wiki-based free content encyclopedia
> that isn't Wikipedia.

We also have an article on it, as well as one on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizendium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia


Citizendium have an article on Wikipedia and also one on Citizendium:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Wikipedia
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Citizendium

It's quite interesting reading those four articles and comparing them.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] ulitzer.com

[Mark Nilrad]

I guess they don't want to aim too low on their expectations.

"Within the next five years, TIME Magazine, Harvard Business Review,
Scientific American, Condé Nast Traveler, and Wikipedia will be
replaced by Ulitzer."




From: geni 
To: English Wikipedia 
Sent: Thursday, April 16, 2009 8:29:23 PM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] ulitzer.com

2009/4/16 David Gerard :
> http://linux.sys-con.com/node/921937
>
> That's basically a press release. The description looks like
> descriptions of Knol. Anyone used this?
>
>
> - d.

As of the first of feb they claimed to be pre-beta. Things may have
moved on but by the time I found that I was starting to suffer
buzzword poisoning.

Looking at http://main.ulitzer.com/ they appear to be some kind of
tech based online magazine. Either way I doubt they are really
competing with us or Knol. I would like to know what "three
dimensional live content offerings" is meant to mean and how "dynamic
topic structure" differs from either blogger's auto generated related
links or wikipedia's category system.


-- 
geni

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[WikiEN-l] And Wikipedia's best area of coverage is...

[Mark Nilrad]

Tropical cyclones. Anyone surprised? That's followed by Illinois, and the 
Simpsons. I made a full list at User:Noble Story/Project stats.

Actually, I was surprised at how good the Vital articles coverage was. 16% of 
the articles are "approved", which is eleventh best. Not bad, as opposed to 
what some have said at WP:FAC recently, about the lack of work on vital 
articles.

Noble Story



  
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikialarm

[Mark Nilrad]

Why is this needed when there are already RSS/Atom feeds for every article 
history?

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Peloponnesian_War&feed=rss&action=history

That's one, for example. Did they just happen to overlook that?





From: Carcharoth 
To: English Wikipedia 
Sent: Wednesday, May 6, 2009 1:54:16 PM
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikialarm

Spotted on another mailing list:

http://wikialarm.com/

"Don't let your company get caught out in a damaging online reputation
management situation or even a Wiki Circularity disaster – signup to
wikiAlarm today and safeguard your reputation on the Internet’s most
popular information channel. "

http://wikialarm.com/home/why/
http://wikialarm.com/home/how/

They seem to be doing this in a responsible way, providing the following links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ/Organizations

I wonder what their business model is?

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] False quote regarding Maurice Jarre

[Mark Nilrad]

Similar to the story of adding one more name for a German politician. This 
seems very hypocritical of "traditional" sources, to call Wikipedia unreliable, 
and then copy it verbatim. How many more embarrassments do they need to take 
before they stop?





From: William King 
To: English Wikipedia 
Sent: Thursday, May 7, 2009 9:09:14 PM
Subject: [WikiEN-l] False quote regarding Maurice Jarre

Fox News picks up Reuters story regarding the late French composer Maurice 
Jarre:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,519283,00.html

Reuters interviewed Shane Fitzgerald, the Irish student who made up the false 
quote on Jarre's Wikipedia biography.

Your thoughts???

William King
(Willking1979)
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Date conditional switching templates

[Mark Nilrad]

The thing about the template is that after the date it's useless; it can just 
be plain text. So, someone will come and remove it, which is just the same as 
having to update the date manually.



  
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Nofollow and sister projects

[Mark Wagner]

On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 14:59,  wrote:
> Are links created by templates nofollowed or followed?
> That is, someone creates a template like {{Brittanica|Edward VI}}
> or whatever.
> What's the follow treatment ?

The same as anything else: if the template creates a one-bracket link,
it gets "nofollow"; if it creates a two-bracket link, it doesn't.

-- 
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]

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Re: [WikiEN-l] MediaWiki is getting a new programming language

[Mark Wagner]

On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 19:23,  wrote:
>
>  The language chosen will hopefully be as ENGLISH-like as possible, even it 
> that means it requires more typing.? The hyper-complex and excessively 
> structured codes of most languages make it difficult for the vast majority of 
> our contributors to even try to make a break into them.
>
> In addition to that, English-like languages are easier for programmers in 
> other languages to pick up because they seem more sensible than learning a 
> whole new set of obscure codewords and symbols.? A language that uses "AND" 
> instead of "&", "+" or "[]".? A language that uses "NOT" instead of "-", "/" 
> or "_".

Every few years, English-derived programming languages become
fashionable as a solution for programming being difficult, and every
few years, another generation of advocates discovers that it isn't the
obscure codewords and symbols that make programming difficult.

-- 
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Featured churn

[Mark Gallagher]

G'day Charles,

> Steve Bennett wrote:
> > On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 5:06 AM, Andrew Gray wrote:
> >> I have, interestingly, been noticing it moving in exactly the opposite
> > direction; articles with a couple of paragraphs of text, a reference
> >> or two, an image or an infobox, being marked as "stubs". There's
> >> standards inflation at both ends of the rating system...
> >
> > IMHO, this kind of thing is one of Wikipedia's greatest failings. We
> > still can't even agree on a definition of things like "stub", and it
> > seems to be in everyone's interest not to. People like stuff like that
> > being subjective.
> >
> > (FWIW, I think it's reasonable to have "stub" be relative to the
> > expected content. Two paragraphs on a country would clearly be a
> > "stub". Two paragraphs on an obscure medieval scribe might be the most
> > comprehensive resource possible.)
> > 
> The stub business goes back almost forever, though. And the affection 
> for grey areas is not the dominant trend: there are people who seem to 
> have the MoS and its pickier points as bedtime reading. There has always 
> been an adequate definition of stub, which relates to the idea that the 
> article as stands has serious missing information, so is incomplete in 
> an essential way. So Steve's FWIW is correct (no, I haven't looked up to 
> see whether some genius has changed the definition of stub). I've never 
> taken much notice of what is and isn't denominated a stub.

In fact (and to return to the original topic ;)), I would argue that Steve's 
comprehensive two-paragraph article on an obscure-but-important mediaeval 
scribe could even be considered a Featured Article, if it was Pure Awesome in 
all other respects.

But, thanks to feature creep ...

* '''Oppose''', too short 


-- 
Mark Gallagher
0439 704 975
http://formonelane.net/
"Even potatoes have their bad days, Igor." --- Count Duckula


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Re: [WikiEN-l] Admins can now rename files!

[Mark Wagner]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 13:14, David Gerard  wrote:
> http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/file-renaming-enabled-for-admins/
>

Again?  Bets on how long it'll last this time?

-- 
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]

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Re: [WikiEN-l] WIKIPEDIA FOREVER

[Mark Wagner]

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 02:38, Oleg Alexandrov
 wrote:
> I find the current "WIKIPEDIA FOREVER" banner to be creepy. I don't
> have good words to express it, but it does not feel the right way of
> soliciting donations.

I know exactly what I dislike about it: it feels like the sort of
propaganda that totalitarian states produce.  Throw in a picture of
Jimbo giving the Roman salute and you're done.

-- 
Mark

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[WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikimedia-l] VisualEditor on English Wikipedia

[John Mark Vandenberg]

-- Forwarded message --
From: "ENWP Pine" 
Date: Jun 3, 2014 5:02 PM
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] VisualEditor on English Wikipedia
To: "wikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org" 
Cc:

Because VE has repeatedly been mentioned in this list as something that is
improving and may help us with acquisition of editors and their knowledge,
I have started to draft an RfC about re-enabling VE on English Wikipedia.

I am not proposing any specific outcome in the RfC. My goal is to set up a
framework which the community can use to decide which of several paths we
would like to take.

This is not my personal RfC, I just happen to think that with recent
discussions trending positively about VE's improvement over the past
several months and with the comments in this list about its possible value
to acquiring new editors, I'm willing to put in some time to draft a
framework for a discussion on-wiki. I am providing this note to let the
community know that someone (me) is drafting a framework for on-wiki
discussion. If someone else wants to start an RfC before I get around to
starting one, that's completely ok.

Cheers,

Pine

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Wikimedia-l] Offwiki

[John Mark Vandenberg]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 2:59 PM, MZMcBride  wrote:
> Wil Sinclair wrote:
>>Hi all, I've started a new wiki called Offwiki: http://offwiki.org.
>>Our community discusses potential changes to Wikipedia and its
>>Wikimedia sister projects that aren't easily discussed in forums like
>>this mailing list. We also try new ideas that we hope will be adopted
>>on-wiki- both social and technical in nature.
>
> Welcome back!
>
> I enjoyed the utensil analogy on the main page. It's very cute. :-)
>
> ---
> Spoon: If Offwiki were common cutlery, it would be a spoon. It's
> not a knife, because we don't make our points here by hurting Wikipedia
> or other Wikipedia-related sites. And it's not a fork, because we're
> here to build a better encyclopedia by making Wikipedia itself better.
> ---
>
> I also applaud the effort in setting up your own MediaWiki installation.
> MediaWiki is a neat platform; it can be a bit brutish at times, but it has
> a lot of nice features, including a decent support structure and a vibrant
> development community behind it.

We have had a number (not enough!) of Wikimedia (usually Wikipedia,
and typically English Wikipedia) discussion sites, but has there been
any previous ones that have used mediawiki?  That is, other than
Meta.. ?

IMO it is unfortunate that Wil didnt hasnt made more use of Meta, and
I am curious what the reasoning behind that decision was.  There are
very few people banned from Meta, thought it does happen occasionally
and is usually reversed if they can behave.

I am also very curious about who came up with the Offwiki term 'Flounder'.
http://offwiki.org/wiki/Meta:Proposals#Flounders
To me it feels like a very nasty slur against Jimmy Wales.

Also, will Offwiki be multilingual?  Does it intend to cover projects
other than English Wikipedia?  If not, it isnt very relevant to the
wikimedia-l list, but is of course relevant to wikien-l which I have
cc:d which appears to be its primary focus.

--
John Vandenberg

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