Re: [WikiEN-l] So who's beta-testing the Visual Editor?
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 6:43 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: This is all the Visual Editor edits in en:wp: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChangestagfilter=visualeditor It's not many. So please switch it on (you can still click Edit source to do references and templates) and give it a good kicking. A bug discovered now saves endless newbie pain later. As I think I commented elsewhere, the lack of references is a deal breaker for me, even for testing. A couple of times already I started making an edit with the VE, then went to add a reference...and hard to start over in the source editor. That said, I haven't seen any bugs. It looks really, really good. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Gallery policy
On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 12:49 PM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: However the overall format in the article is considered when considering what is appropriate. Image galleries create large breaks in the text and messy formatting due to issues with screen resolution. As a result there are best limited to where there is a solid need for such things. The other problem with image galleries is that they are often use to keep poor quality images in the article. Certainly when I've expanded articles with image galleries I've often killed of the images in the galleries entirely rather than using them in the article proper. Good points - although it's annoying that the weakness of our layout engine affects the content we can display. 2) The Commons links are incredibly obscure, and I don't think the average punter ever sees or visits them. It's like telling someone to ring the hotline for more information - they just don't. The link doesn't give any indication whether there are 2 images on Commons on 200. Not relevant. We're not serving our readers well by putting images behind a link that they won't see or use. 3) Galleries let you illustrate a much wider range of the subject matter than by simply placing images in the margins. For example, in the contentious [[Lamington National Park]], we could illustrate all the waterfalls, most of the important flora, fauna, and geological features. We could but if they were that important it should be possible to include enough text for the image to sit next to the. We also have extensive articles on flora, fauna, and geological features that people can go and look at if they want images of those things. Indeed - it *is* possible to include enough text. Should the current absence of such text preclude images? (A genuine question: is it ok for an article to be unbalanced in the short term?) You can try but you are unlikely to get very far. Yeah, figured. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] Gallery policy
Hi all, Do content policies still get discussed on this list? I'm a bit out of touch. Anyway, I seem to keep running afoul of the image use policy. Several galleries that I've added to articles have been removed. (And see this response to my second attempt to gallerise one article: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Stevageaction=editsection=236 ) The key parts of the policy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IG#Image_galleries) are: * Articles consisting entirely or primarily of galleries are discouraged, as the Commons is intended for such collections of images. -- it's not clear whether this includes articles that currently lack text (as opposed to articles that could never be much more than a gallery) * However, Wikipedia is not an image repository. A gallery is not a tool to shoehorn images into an article, and a gallery consisting of an indiscriminate collection of images of the article subject should generally either be improved in accordance with the above paragraph or moved to Wikimedia Commons. -- It's not clear what moving...a gallery...to Wikimedia Commons means. It sounds like this was intended for cases where the images existed only in Wikipedia itself, rather than being linked from Commons. On the other hand: * The images in the gallery collectively must have encyclopedic value and add to the reader's understanding of the subject. Images in a gallery should be suitably captioned to explain their relevance both to the article subject and to the theme of the gallery So, here's my thinking in response to the above: 1) Wikipedia is not for images, Commons is for images is just bad logic. Commons is a dumping ground for *all* images. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, and should illustrate its articles with as many or as few images as appropriate. (It's not like duplicated storage is a problem.) 2) The Commons links are incredibly obscure, and I don't think the average punter ever sees or visits them. It's like telling someone to ring the hotline for more information - they just don't. The link doesn't give any indication whether there are 2 images on Commons on 200. 3) Galleries let you illustrate a much wider range of the subject matter than by simply placing images in the margins. For example, in the contentious [[Lamington National Park]], we could illustrate all the waterfalls, most of the important flora, fauna, and geological features. 4) An image of captioned animals under a section entitled fauna (and likewise for flora etc) seems perfectly in keeping with the guideline under (on the other hand) above. Thoughts? Comments? Am I on the fringe? Are guidelines like this still subject to debate and change? Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Gallery policy
On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 10:51 AM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: It's a tricky one. I favour more image use, not less, but then I work with images a lot (outside Wikipedia), so I'm kind of biased there. I Yeah, I wonder if there is equally a pro-text/anti-image bias amongst some editors? (Me, I love images for skim reading - get a quick impression of a subject without having to read every word.) do think that galleries that are large and purely illustrative are not really suitable for Wikipedia. Honest question: what does illustrative mean in this context? Any image is illustrating something. Are you distinguishing between decoration (say, lots of pretty pictures of similar things) and adding information? Commons *categories* are not the equivalent of Wikipedia galleries, but you can create *pages* on Commons that you can arrange into galleries and divide into sections and annotate as needed. True, but putting effort into crafting such galleries on Commons seems...misplaced. I care about the encyclopaedia. And no one has ever heard of Commons. And no one ever goes there to find out more about a subject. Ever. I do think that a section or article paragraph on (say) waterfalls in a National Park known for having many waterfalls could have a limited gallery of a few waterfalls, but something showing *all* of them would either have to be part of a standalone article, or a wikibook on the topic, or a Commons page, and you should be able to link all three directly from the article section, rather than hiding the link away down the bottom of the article. Well I think there's only half a dozen or so in that national park. And there are only photos of two. (And excellent photos at that.) It is mainly a question of layout and placement and context, and can sometimes require creative thinking. The key is always to make the reader *aware* that image-rich resources are available, but not to shove the images in their faces. Give the reader options, but don't force-feed them. Yep. Wish there were better tools for this. An expanding box with one or two images shown as a teaser would be great. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] deployment of the first phase of Wikidata on enwp
Hi Lydia, Very cool. You might want to expand on this text: Language links in the sidebar will automatically come from Wikidata, once the article is linked on Wikidata. No special syntax is needed for that. Speaking as someone who knows nothing about Wikidata, the phrase once the article is linked on Wikidata doesn't mean anything. From a bit of digging around, I see that someone has to create a Wikidata page for each biographical subject, but who? Will the bot MerllwBot (that created the Mario Goeppert-Mayer page) eventually create all the others? What exactly should editors do at this point? Just sit back and wikidata goodness will flow? Or take active steps to replace lists of interwiki links with automatically generated ones? Steve On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 11:45 AM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: This is simply wonderful. Thank you, Lydia and WD team! Sam. On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 4:01 PM, Lydia Pintscher lydia.pintsc...@wikimedia.de wrote: Heya :) Third time's a charm, right? We're live on the English Wikipedia with phase 1 now \o/ Details are in this blog post: http://blog.wikimedia.de/2013/02/13/wikidata-live-on-the-english-wikipedia An FAQ is being worked on at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Deployment_Questions Thanks everyone who helped! I'm happy to answer questions at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical). Please also let me know about any issues there. Cheers Lydia -- Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher Community Communications for Wikidata Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. Obentrautstr. 72 10963 Berlin www.wikimedia.de Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l -- Samuel Klein @metasj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Another WP redesign
On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 9:16 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Looks nice! Feels a bit visually busy ... maybe not being used to it. The languages dropdown seems a bit mystery-meat navigation to me - perhaps head it Other languages like the Categories dropdown next to it. Yeah, the newer one is a lot easier on the eyes. Comparing the two, the reasons seem to be: - more space around between text and borders - the links in the TOC are black in the newer one (really effective!) I don't really have an opinion on all the elements outside the actual encyclopaedia content, as I think that's out of scope. Meaning, even if we had an opinion, it would be too hard to get it implemented :) Magnus, I spent a while trying to solve the image-overlapping-TOC problem, but I don't think it's possible with pure CSS, given the current page structure. With a little bit of javascript, you could set the TOC to position:relative (like the images) and set top to be minus its current vertical position. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Another WP redesign
On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 10:46 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: Minor quibbles: * The header hits a common problem - treating read/talk/edit/history as four different interfaces to the same page, while they're really three interfaces to the page (read/edit/history) and one link to another page (talk) with its own three interfaces. So there are six interfaces. You expose the four most important ones this way, you make talk:edit a button or something that's part of the talk page itself, and you ignore talk:history. That's for nerds. (I'm not sure if I've ever looked at a talk page history. It's pretty rare.) In reality though, I think using tabs for actions is the wrong approach (and is after all what the old skin did). Buttons with standard glyphs, sparingly used, would work better. A big pencil button for edit, a less prominent discuss this button for talk, with history squirrelled away somewhere. You don't need a view button - standard behaviour would be to have something like a clickable page title or a - Roman Empire link on those other pages. * The three-column system will look strangely constrained for pages with very short (1 screen height) infoboxes or very few headings. Mmmm...dunno about strange. Lots of blogs etc have wide margins. * It's not clear what would happen to our usual mass of footer navboxes, most of which assume full-width screens. Perhaps they could be migrated to the side columns? Or they could remain full-width. That'd only be a problem if the article was short but had long right-hand-side infoboxes. You could deal with that by making the infobox column scrollable. Major quibbles * Languages have got lost entirely! (again...) Minor detail. It'd be great to have some cues that show which of the interwiki links have significant amounts of content (especially any with more content than the one you're looking at). Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Another WP redesign
Hey, that works :) I put it on userstyles.org. So if you use the Stylish plugin for Chrome or Firefox, you can add it here: http://userstyles.org/styles/82333/wikipedia-3-columns-magnus-manske Steve On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 11:06 AM, Magnus Manske magnusman...@googlemail.com wrote: For those of you who like to try out a similar three-column layout, this just fresh from the presses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Magnus_Manske/common.css (activates on wide screens only) On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 8:55 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 29 January 2013 12:10, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: I couldn't find a way to comment to the designer to point them to this thread or to the WP redesigns page ... can anyone else work out Dribble's exquisitely-designed interface? I found my way to the designer's website and emailed him about the redesigns page and this thread. He says thank you :-) - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Another WP redesign
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! Steve On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 11:31 AM, Steve Bennett stevag...@gmail.com wrote: Hey, that works :) I put it on userstyles.org. So if you use the Stylish plugin for Chrome or Firefox, you can add it here: http://userstyles.org/styles/82333/wikipedia-3-columns-magnus-manske Steve On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 11:06 AM, Magnus Manske magnusman...@googlemail.com wrote: For those of you who like to try out a similar three-column layout, this just fresh from the presses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Magnus_Manske/common.css (activates on wide screens only) On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 8:55 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 29 January 2013 12:10, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: I couldn't find a way to comment to the designer to point them to this thread or to the WP redesigns page ... can anyone else work out Dribble's exquisitely-designed interface? I found my way to the designer's website and emailed him about the redesigns page and this thread. He says thank you :-) - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Another WP redesign
On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 9:23 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Trouble there is that newspapers are portrait and have pages, but screens are usually landscape and (the important bit) stretch indefinitely vertically. A good example of the problem with doing it like a newspaper is https://sites.google.com/site/sophieinnorthkorea/ - brilliant article, but on a laptop screen the layout is just really confusing. And newspaper layouts are handcrafted for exactly one width and height. It's hard enough to get articles to display nicely with embedded images and infoboxes with a single column - could that really work multi column? Maybe a better use of the extra horizontal space would be to expand some of the embedded images and infoboxes out of the text? I was going to point to theglobalmail.org as an interesting example of a multi-column layout on the web (horizontal scrolling!) but it looks like they've caved in and gone to a conventional one column vertical layout. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] Page Ratings analysis?
Hi all, Just wondering if there is any published analysis from the Page ratings widget that appears on every page. My subjective impression is that the ratings data is pretty bad, but I'd be interested to read up. Thanks, Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How our competitors are doing
On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 9:58 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Their article on us is great, though: http://conservapedia.com/Wikipedia Wow, that's awesome - the whole introduction is gold. In fact, so much to enjoy about that article - even the effect of scandals on Wikipedia foundation donations, which appears to show...well, nothing really. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Manual Of Style
Oops, your question wasn't rhetorical? :-) I haven't consulted it in years, but nor have I ever really used it to beat people over the head with. Steve On Apr 1, 2012 5:44 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 1 April 2012 01:11, Steve Bennett stevag...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 5:23 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: When was the last time you looked at the Wikipedia Manual of Style for use in your own writing? And not to tell someone else they were wrong about something. What's wrong with that? That's how most rulebooks work - people internalise the rules, and only consult the written form when two people's understanding of the rule differs. So what's your answer to the question? - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Manual Of Style
On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 5:23 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: When was the last time you looked at the Wikipedia Manual of Style for use in your own writing? And not to tell someone else they were wrong about something. What's wrong with that? That's how most rulebooks work - people internalise the rules, and only consult the written form when two people's understanding of the rule differs. The reverse case would be worse: if you were frequently consulting the MoS before making changes, it would imply that the rules were arbitrary, hard to remember, and lacked internal logic and consistency. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Article Landing Pages - functional prototype to test and comment on
On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 12:01 AM, Steve Bennett stevag...@gmail.com wrote: Did someone change the password? Those details aren't working for me. Oic, you can create your own account on the labs site. My thoughts: - The choices use the article wizard, create a draft, create this article myself are a bit confusing. Especially the first two - that's a really unusual distinction that doesn't make much sense to me. I'd expect the choices to be between I'm a newbie and I'm experienced. - The create a draft option seems to just dump you in your sandbox. I think you need to add a lot of support to make that a useful thing to do (like telling them how to get from first draft to published - if there is such a mechanism). Here's an alternative mechanism: There are two choices: 1) Help me create an article 2) Expert mode Option 1 takes you to the article wizard (whatever that is...) Option 2 takes you to the create a draft (ie sandbox) editor. After you save, there's a button to request assistance in publishing it. That also provides information on how to activate the secret Option 3, which skips the sandbox altogether for future article creation. (Probably a preference somewhere...) Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] A reader's experience with The Closed, Unfriendly World Of Wikipedia
On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Tony Sidaway tonysida...@gmail.com wrote: Now whatever the merits of his case, this chap does have a point about the unfriendliness of the environment. It isn't so much that we've gone out of our way to be unfriendly, but the tool we use to interact--the wiki, in other words--isn't really very fit for the purpose. Wikis are _supposed_ to invite contributions, but here we seem to have built a big maze that only frustrates people who in good faith want to help us to make it better. I don't think anyone has been disputing that fact in at least 5 years. And the foundation is working on it. It's a hard problem. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Slidershow: Proposal for a JavaScript-based feature to enhance some articles
On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 4:09 AM, Timwi ti...@gmx.net wrote: div class='slidershow' style='width: 300px' ; Term One : [[Image:Image One.jpg|300px]] Description One ; Term Two : [[Image:Image Two.jpg|300px]] Description Two ; Term Three : [[Image:Image Three.jpg|300px]] Description Three /div Why not integrate it with the existing gallery syntax? Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Rating the English wikipedia
I would think that percentages of FA/GA/A/B/C/Start/Stub with respect to page hits would be much more illuminating. Ooh, I'd like to see that. And to get a list of pages that are well below par considering their popularity. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] WYSIWTF
On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 9:10 PM, Magnus Manske magnusman...@googlemail.com wrote: 3) Clicking outside the edited section should do something (ie, prompt you to save or abandon) What if you want to copy something from outside the section? (Assuming paste would work...) Good point. 4) Double-clicking inside the edited section still does its default behaviour (edit the whole page) Is it possible that you turned that behaviour on in your user settings? It's off by default, AFAIK. Yes, I do have that setting on. I mentioned not as a help me, double-click is doing the wrong thing but because lots of other people will probably have it on, too. So it's something to be aware of, and if there's any way of killing that behaviour while editing with FTW, then do it... Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Support needed for Wikipedia QnA website to open
On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 5:47 AM, Tom Jenkins tomjenkin...@gmail.com wrote: StackExchange http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StackExchange, a free Question and Answer network of websites would start a website dedicated to Wikipedia and Wiki questions if the community only supports the project by voting for it. This website would have a very unique set of IMHO this is a pretty good idea. OpenStreetMap did the same thing, and it's worked out pretty well: http://help.openstreetmap.org/ It's not the ideal forum for everyone (mailing lists are better for in-depth discussions and explorations of ideas) but it serves a purpose. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] WYSIWTF
On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 1:32 AM, Magnus Manske magnusman...@googlemail.com Nice :-) Update : WYSIFTW now with auto-collapsed references! Hey Magnus, not sure if you're looking for more feedback, but, I just tried the section editing and: 1) Can't paste into it (ctrl+v). Other keys also don't work right (home, end...) 2) Can't edit the last character of a section 3) Clicking outside the edited section should do something (ie, prompt you to save or abandon) 4) Double-clicking inside the edited section still does its default behaviour (edit the whole page) However...this is really cool. And not just for newbies. It instantly makes it much more appealing for me to make a minor change, because it's so much faster (one less page refresh). Please keep going with it. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] WYSIWTF
Ok, I got it - there were some spurious blank lines. Ok, um, it does what you said it does :) Now, how to make this a compelling demonstration that this is _the way foward_? Steve On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 7:01 PM, Magnus Manske magnusman...@googlemail.com wrote: On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 12:30 AM, Steve Bennett stevag...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 9:39 AM, Magnus Manske magnusman...@googlemail.com wrote: Force-reload, go to an article, and you'll see a new WYSIWTF tab (I trust you can decipher the acronym ;-) Hi Magnus, I'm not getting an extra tab. Perhaps I've done something stupid, but I stuck the above code in vector.js, reloaded, nothing. Same in Chrome, FF, Opera. What simple thing am I missing? Not sure - works for me. Have a look : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Magnus_Manske/vector.js Maybe some other script in your vector.js dies before it gets to the include point? If so, try moving the lines to the top of vector.js. Cheers, Magnus ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia is not a dictionary (was: Re: Old Wikipedia backups discovered)
On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 9:56 PM, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: Wikipedia is not a how-to manual. The grinches did get rid of the recipes though; not many left. I'm ok with that one because there can be many recipes for each dish, and it quickly becomes very arbitrary. But each word only has one etymology, so there isn't that problem. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia is not a dictionary (was: Re: Old Wikipedia backups discovered)
On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 12:39 AM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: No, there isn't. And that's why Wiktionary can work. But articles about words don't belong in an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias talk about the concept behind the word, not the word itself. I think your meh example is perfect. Wiktionary: what does meh mean? Wikipedia: why is meh even a word? In this example, the concept *is* the word, with its cultural history, associations etc. The word's Simpsons origins, the debate over whether it was a real word, its inclusion in the list of 20 words that defined a decade - all of this is interesting, notable, relevant, and probably out of place in a Wiktionary article. You wouldn't do it for just any word, perhaps, but this one even has a referenced claim to notability. I think what I'm trying to say is: any word which is itself notable deserves an encyclopaedia article explaining why. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] WYSIWTF
On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 9:39 AM, Magnus Manske magnusman...@googlemail.com wrote: Force-reload, go to an article, and you'll see a new WYSIWTF tab (I trust you can decipher the acronym ;-) Hi Magnus, I'm not getting an extra tab. Perhaps I've done something stupid, but I stuck the above code in vector.js, reloaded, nothing. Same in Chrome, FF, Opera. What simple thing am I missing? Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The next Apollo programme: usable WYSIWYG on WMF sites
On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 11:11 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Please discuss there ... I'm not on Foundation-L, so I'll discuss here: So, specification of the problem: * We need good WYSIWYG. The government example suggests that a simple word-processor-like interface would be enough to give tremendous results. Yes. * It needs two-way fidelity with almost all existing wikitext. No. As Magnus has suggested, it needs, with a high degree of reliability, to split Wikitext into chunks that it can edit, and chunks that it can't. And the former category should be much larger than the latter. Even something that can't edit tables, template transclusions, or references would still be very valuable. * We can't throw away existing wikitext, much as we'd love to. Of course. * It's going to cost money in programming the WYSIWYG. Probably. * It's going to cost money in rationalising existing wikitext so that the most unfeasible formations can be shunted off to legacy for chewing on. Only if you make the assumption I questioned above. * It's going to cost money in usability testing and so on. Maybe. Once we can trust it not to break existing pages, then I think we can turn it on and will have no trouble collecting reams of feedback. Usability testing would be useful for optimising it, but isn't needed at the start. I think we would get a long way with Magnus's kind of approach. Maybe even with some server side support: the server splits the wikitext up into pieces that it knows the client can deal with. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Britannica tries for Indian market
On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 10:08 AM, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote: According to the article they do, but only if you give them your name and address and then let a professional verify your edit. Also you can only edit for free for the first 24 months, then you have to pay them. Brilliant! Paying for the privilege of writing their encyclopaedia for them! Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] CZ fork: Tendrl
On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 8:50 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: I can picture a model in which lots of other people write what turn out to be feeder wikis for Wikipedia. But I can't see what's really in it for the volunteers on those wikis. Are you serious? What's in it for them is the ability to participate in the community of their choice, protected from the occasional madness that is Wikipedia. And more to the point, *knowing* they're protected. They would never have random strangers coming along criticising their work (or if it happened, they wouldn't know about it), or complaining that they used the wrong template or category or something. (Not that that happens all that much, but perception is what it is.) How you manage the feeding process would be very interesting. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Cubans start online encyclopedia
On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 1:49 PM, Keith Old keith...@gmail.com wrote: Cuba has begun its own online encyclopedia, similar to Wikipedia, with the goal of presenting its version of the world and history. Cool, well at least it's not duplication of effort. If there are going to be any other online encyclopaedias, it's better (from that perspective) that they not try and be NPOV. It does sound like a possibly highly amusing anti-conservapedia. Someone should create a mashup. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] CZ fork: Tendrl
On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 3:12 PM, Tony Sidaway tonysida...@gmail.com wrote: Four or five years ago I quite confidently pronounced it unlikely that the success of Wikipedia could be sustained beyond 2010. Once the novelty wore off, I thought, people would drift away to the next shiny new thing. By now it seems clear that Wikipedia could last at least another six months or so, to my surprise and delight. I too will toast the problems of success in our January celebrations. Yup, I reckon Wikipedia got really lucky. It was created at a time when there weren't many other collaborative projects that the average schmoe could get involved in. Then it managed to hit this critical size where there was a massive passive user community. Whenever you have a large number of people who *need* something, sustainability gets a lot easier. Also, I credit the WMF with some amazingly good governance in the last couple of years. I'm incredibly impressed with how they've taken Wikipedia to the next level, in terms of outreach, fundraising, user interface improvements, etc etc. They're doing all the things a foundation should. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] What proportion of articles are stubs?
On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 7:50 AM, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: On 29 November 2010 20:42, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: So does clicking Random Article and (gasp) judging for one's own self what is a stub produce a figure very different from 50%? I hit random and immediately produced a category error :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanarce One prose sentence! But on the other hand, a demographic table, and a map, and an infobox, and some statistics, and a navbox. Stub or not stub? *typity-typity-type-type* Not stub! Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] CZ fork: Tendrl
On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 10:15 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: http://www.basicprogramming.org/larsent/tendrl/index.php/Tendrl:Differences Everyone uses their own real names. Meh. You lose good editors that way. Potential contributors need to create an account to edit, but don't have to provide an autobiography. Sure, why not? Have only one or two bodies with clearly-defined authority. People have common sense: trust them to use it. That'll scale. Experts are invited to review articles, but they need to contribute as a regular editor for some time first. I'm sure the experts who are already tripping over themselves to write wikipedia articles will love that. We have a zero-tolerance policy on sniping and offensive remarks. Have a culture that looks down upon incivility and poisonousness with a sense of humour: laugh about things. That's not zero-tolerance. That's the way every project starts. Ensure that (administrators|wardens|whatever we decide to call them) feel no qualms about kicking out clearly disruptive people. If it was clear to everyone who the disruptive people were, there would never be any problems. But one person's troll is another person's misunderstood genius. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Well, it A/B tests well
Excellent, the fundraiser has high penetration, and recognition amongst the target audience segment! Combined with high clickthrough and conversion metrics, this campaign will achieve its target potential! Steve On Sat, Nov 20, 2010 at 2:09 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: http://thedailywh.at/post/1620254631/this-looks-shopped-of-the-day-the-next-logical We also need to get this included with downloads of Chrome: http://socialblade.com/show/2010/11/19/best-chrome-extension-ever-a-firefox-killer-wikipedia-style-browsing/ - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Why the Internet dooms universities
On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 6:24 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: This reads like a radical anti-egalitarian manifesto by some young Internet-based firebrand ... then I got to the end and my jaw dropped at the author's job. Heh, I'm obviously closer to this space than you - I wasn't surprised at all. Here's a blog post you may be interested in, from another small Australian university: http://ptsefton.com/2010/08/12/my-fave-two-reasons-not-to-release-opencourseware.htm It's worth pointing out, though, that where Wikipedia has been a runaway success, Wikiversity wasn't. Structured learning content (ie, courses) is not the same as unstructured snippets of information. And OpenCourseWare is not, as Jim Barber implies, user-generated knowledge in the same way that Wikipedia is. It's produced by paid experts, who just happen to give it away for free. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Three cheers for Wikipedia's cancer info (or two and a half)
On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 7:53 AM, Keith Old keith...@gmail.com wrote: The researchers write in their study's abstract, to be presented at the current annual meeting of theAmerican Society of Clinical Oncologyhttp://chicago2010.asco.org/: Although the Wiki resource had similar accuracy and depth to the professionally edited database, it was significantly less readable. Further research is required to assess how this influences patients' understanding and retention. Does this signal some advance in public perception of Wikipedia? At last we leave behind the question is it accurate, and move on to is it well written? Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] List of Rivers of Egpyt - what to do?
On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 1:34 PM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: Cos I've never understood how bugzilla works, and there's something weird about how you have to register over there and it is different from Wikipedia (I'm not even sure which servers it runs on). I tend to raise things here or at the technical village pump and hope someone on bugzilla raises it themselves (at least until I've worked out to my satisfaction how bugzilla works). What I should really do is subscribe to wiki-tech-l, but then I'd probably be told there to submit a bugzilla... It's really not too complicated, but the setup would be much more familiar to software developers than the average user. 1) Get an account at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/createaccount.cgi 2) It's operated by Wikimedia. Which server it runs on I don't know, and doesn't seem relevant. 3) Entering a new bug is relatively straightforward. There are billions of fields, but you should ignore most of them. Just make sure you get the product right (normally MediaWiki). And if you're feeling confident, choose the component. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] List of Rivers of Egpyt - what to do?
On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 2:10 PM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: If you do get a developer to do that, can you also ask for the what links here thing to distingush between links provided by template content and links provided by article content (i.e. non-template content)? Preferably with a link to the template providing the link? It used to be the case that what links here was a handy way of checking all the links you had made within an article (a good way to check overlinking and underlinking), but in articles where massive footer topic templates are present, you can get literally hundreds of links coming purely from the templates alone and sometimes only 30 or so from the actual article. I agree - why don't you start a bug in bugzilla? Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] List of Rivers of Egpyt - what to do?
So I decided to fill in a red link I saw on the community portal: [[List of Rivers of Egypt]]. I started creating the article, then reached the amusing realisation that perhaps there is only one. Yep, that one. So, do we just have a pathetically short list? It seems for completeness etc, that would be the right thing to do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_of_Egypt Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Jimbo on Commons
On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 10:08 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 11 May 2010 00:12, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: Can you explain why Wikipedia and Wikimedia tends to avoid having explicit guidelines on such matters? It's a gross NPOV violation. I don't see it, David. An NPOV violation would be something like a rule against articles on sexual practices discussing whether or not they appear in the bible, or something. I don't really see how the absence of graphic images changes the neutrality of the content otherwise. Fwiw, I've long thought the presence of graphic sexual pictures on Commons, and certainly in Wikipedia, does more harm than good, because it means the site can't be trusted in the eyes of librarians, teachers, etc etc. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Jimbo on Commons
On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 8:14 AM, Ken Arromdee arrom...@rahul.net wrote: I suggest that this is a piss-poor way to create Wikipedia policy. There's a substantial contingent of policy wonks who take any blanket policy statement as gospel and use it as an excuse to avoid even *trying* to figure out if some suggested exception to that policy is a good idea on the grounds that we don't do such things, ever. It's a triumph of rules lawyering over common sense. Of course, when questioned they will admit that exceptions are allowed, but their attitude to any proposed exception remains the same. IMHO, this occurs because it's a lot easier for people to decide does this follow the policy than is this a good idea. And eventually the policy gets elevated to some level of immutable axiom, rather than what it is — policy. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikimedia Announcements] Public Policy Initiative
On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 8:46 AM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: lobbying groups. A look through the articles in this category (if accurately placed there) may help UK readers of this mailing list to see what public policy means: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Public_policy_in_the_United_Kingdom I haven't a clue what it is called in other countries. The term seems familiar to me (Australia). It's actually self-explanatory, no? Policy that affects the public... My view? This seems rather a US-centric project. Yeah. I for one find it very frustrating that you can read the entire announcement talking about a certain number of schools etc and they don't even mention what country it's taking place in, or whether it's international. Fair enough that the money is spent only in US universities. But they could say so explicitly. Ho hum. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Related places tool
[4] http://tinyurl.com/y92rgo2 Doesn't work for me. Perhaps you could explain a little bit more on the webpage how to use it. Is there a required format for the page you link from the edit box? A little context would help... I can't get anything to work. http://toolserver.org/~magnus/related_places.php?kml=1language=enproject=wikipedianamespace=2title=Stevage Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Flagged revs on en:wp?
On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 4:37 AM, William Pietri will...@scissor.com wrote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_Forever Awesome. That trumps both Racing Legends ( http://www.racing-legends.com/news.htm) and Team Fortress 2. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The story of an article
On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 10:23 AM, Apoc 2400 apoc2...@gmail.com wrote: Fascinating! I note how the article Celilo Falls was created a brought up to four long paragraphs by User:67.168.209.23. Today IPs are not allowed to create articles and some want to limit it to accounts that are four days old and have made 10 edits. Wait, we still have the 4 day limit? I thought we ditched that when it turned out it made no positive difference. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The story of an article
On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 1:51 AM, altally altal...@googlemail.com wrote: When I started, I created an account from the beginning. Why? Because it wasn't hard to notice the big Sign in/create account link in the corner. Newbies aren't all clueless idiots. You are making the mistake of assuming newcomers all have no idea what they are doing. It's a fair approximation. Go look at the Usability videos if you need a demonstration. No, really. The average person is clueless in any domain which is unfamiliar to them. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How smart people fail to share
On Sun, Dec 27, 2009 at 11:30 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Everyone reading this list is probably pretty smart - Wikipedia is a nerd magnet, after all. So I liked this blog post explaining how people fail to share: http://www.lifebeyondcode.com/2009/12/26/why-some-smart-people-are-reluctant-to-share/ Nice. Most of my wikipedia writing is current - stuff I don't actually know much about, but am in the process of sharing. Because anything is better than nothing, I have no qualms about sharing it. Can you explain the obvious to people it isn't obvious to? With references? Yes, I can, but it can be tedious. I'd also comment that some of the most horrible text on Wikipedia is the obvious or even background thinking level stuff, where people try and write about stuff that is totally obvious to them. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] some attention regarding our ad placement
On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 1:19 PM, William Pietri will...@scissor.com wrote: against all sorts of content, including user-generated content. This led to two common sorts of freak out. One was brand managers who were shocked to see their beloved brand appearing on the same page with something that they didn't like, or imagined other people didn't like. The other was when self-appointed guardians of the public morals would seek out screen shots like these and use them to raise a ruckus, generally to get advertisers to stop funding things the busybodies didn't like. The third was people doin' it for the lolz. (You're talking about actual issues with advertising. This is just humour.) Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Random featured article...
On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 11:32 AM, Peter Coombe thewub.w...@googlemail.com wrote: The portal doesn't select from all featured articles, only those that have been on the main page. I do agree that the Featured Content portal is under-promoted though (in fact portals generally are) Yes, I don't really understand the decision taken on en not to show portals on article pages. On fr, for example, if you read a chemistry article, there's a Chemistry Portal banner at the bottom of the page. It works quite well. On en, I can't think of any path I'm ever likely to take that would lead me to one of the portals. Which really is a pity. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Random featured article...
On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 1:02 AM, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: 2009/12/14 Steve Bennett stevag...@gmail.com: Yes, I don't really understand the decision taken on en not to show portals on article pages. On fr, for example, if you read a chemistry article, there's a Chemistry Portal banner at the bottom of the page. It works quite well. ...there's such a decision? http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AWhatLinksHeretarget=Template%3APortalnamespace=0 They seems to be relatively widespread, though I wonder if it's just that some projects like them and some don't. Whoops, I stand corrected. Still a bit subtle though. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Random featured article...
On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 5:08 AM, Durova nadezhda.dur...@gmail.com wrote: deteriorating from brilliant prose into mediocre prose). If the community approved a featured star display for caption boxes the problem would Has this been proposed? It seems logical and inoffensive. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Teach Yourself Wikipedia in 10 Minutes
On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 1:43 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Threat not a promise: newish book, anyone read? I see the Signpost are [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom/Review desk|looking for a reviewer]]. I did try to get a publisher interested in Teach Yourself Wikipedia in early 2006. Do we know Michael Miller, the author? I must say Participate in the Wikipedia community sounds great as a bullet point, if all you need is the right 60 seconds of instruction. What useful information can you get across in sixty seconds? Please don't cry? Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] oh dear
On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 2:54 AM, Gwern Branwen gwe...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 9:35 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Wikipe-tan on b3ta. http://www.b3ta.com/board/9830507 - d. Looks like the urine pic is a 'shopped version of one of these: http://danbooru.donmai.us/post/index?tags=wikipe-tan Jesus H Christ, these things are so disturbing. I can't believe wikipe-tan came close to being the WP mascot. shudder Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Do we try to watch(list) the encyclopedia too much?
Strangely enough, the flaggedrevisions feature seems to provide a lot of what we need: 1) People don't have to watch changes as they happen, they can stumble on them when they go to save a new change 2) Changes are marked as patrolled, so far more efficient than 10 people all noticing the same change on their watchlist and deciding no action needs to be taken. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Do we try to watch(list) the encyclopedia too much?
On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 12:49 AM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: 3)The massive backlog in patrolled edits will kill the instant feedback wikipedia currently gives and reduce editing to a level where watching everything is no longer a problem. Only if all pages are set to show only the patrolled version to newbies. Which is not going to happen. It may happen to a few hundred pages. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Do we try to watch(list) the encyclopedia too much?
On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 2:38 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Perhaps one of our wizards could check how many pages are not watched by anybody who has edited in 2009. More useful and precise would be collecting page views of diffs. I don't know if we record them or not though. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Do we try to watch(list) the encyclopedia too much?
On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 11:30 AM, Mike Pruden mikepru...@yahoo.com wrote: Perhaps I'm the only one who finds this a little concerning in my part, but lately I've been feeling that too many users are trying to watch too much of Wikipedia at one time. Let me elaborate a little. It isn't uncommon for the normally active user to have hundreds, if not thousands, of pages on their watchlist. Then, when somebody makes an edit that a People still use watchlists? Mine quickly exploded out of control (I was briefly in the habit of reading the article of the day each day and making a couple of edits). Instead, I use: 1) The 'related changes' view of a list of stubs that I've written. 2) My contributions. It's imperfect, but it sort of captures what I'm interested in: changes made to any article I've created (I like watching the little things grow, flower, die) , and changes made to any changes I've made recently (to see how other people react etc). I've requested a single view that captures all this, a couple of times. The depressing thing about the first one is seeing just how much time and effort is expended on apparently trivial stuff: stub sorting, recategorising, interwikis, very minor style stuff. Probably 2/3 of the edits to my stubs don't affect the actual content of the article at all. I agree with the central point though: it's very easy to get into the habit of pouncing on any change. And inefficient, too. It would barely take more time for me to assess and react to a month's (or six month's!) worth of changes, than a day's worth. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] On this day in history...
On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 11:10 AM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.comwrote: There is a whole process now for requesting a main page featured article slot. Mainly because we have more featured articles being produced than there are available slots. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Today%27s_featured_article/requests Wow. Don't these people realise we have an encyclopaedia to write? Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Newbie recruitment idea: missing article lists
On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 8:23 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Most of the typos for MySpace.com and google.com had been created and deleted by db-R3 (typo unlikely to happen in real life). I recreated them with an edit summary pointing to that page, as evidence that people's typing really is consistently much worse than we'd like to think ... There is an argument that MediaWiki should really just have a very good natural language search engine that can guess what users are looking for, despite any typos. There's an even better argument that a hand-built search engine built by thousands of monkeys addressing every query individually will outperform it every time. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] On this day in history...
On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 11:55 AM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: day's events in history. Excluding Pearl Harbor (or anything similarly notable) from OTD because a related content item is featured elsewhere on the page suggests that the event itself is not notable enough to be listed on OTD. I doubt many readers will realize it was kept out only There is an assumption in this thread that the On this day shows the five most notable events that happened on this day, in history. Is that true? If it were, we would see a cycle that repeats every year, with the same five events every year. Is that a good thing? Personally, I'm very much in favour of on this day highlighting less well known events, rather than the bleeding obvious. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikimediauk-l] Anyone visiting VA with a camera soon?
On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 10:26 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Thomas Dalton just volunteered for something. Anyone got favoured VA exhibits we don't have a pic of? Get back to him with room, collection, cabinet, etc :-) VA = Victoria and Albert, a London museum, to save you all the trouble. I still wish we had better processes for matching photo requests with potential contributors. These situations are relatively common: a photographer, at fairly short notice, has a short period of time to take lots of photos in one area. There's no effective way to communicate with a large group of people to find individual items that need photographing - it's much better if the requests exist beforehand and can be gathered in some effective fashion. Theoretically, if there are pages with geo coords on the main page, and photo requests on the talk page, it would be possible to produce a map (google maps or open street map) plotting all these requests within some area, along with a list of what they are. I don't know how easy this sort of mashup is to make, yet. It also would fall down where there are multiple photos required for one article, as in this case. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Newbie recruitment idea: missing article lists
On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 3:30 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: I'm working on the theory that volunteers will work hard at whatever they damn well feel like. This is one way to get n00bs in, and doesn't preclude other approaches. Here's another: when someone searches for an article (let's say norwegian antarctic expedition) that doesn't exist, let's encourage them to add it - we have successfully located someone interested in a topic that we don't have an article about. This is a good start. The use case would go: 1) User searches, no match found 2) Wikipedia warmly encourages user to make the article, guiding them through the steps 3) Wikipedians nurture the newbie, remaining in contact with them as they make their inevitable fumbling mistakes 4) Newbie sticks around and makes other articles What actually happens 1) User searches, no match found 2) Wikipedia yells: Before creating an article, please read Wikipedia:Your first article. To experiment, please use the sandbox. To use a wizard to create an article, see the Article wizard. When creating an article, provide references to reliable published sources. An article without references may quickly be deleted. You can also start your new article at Special:MyPage/Norwegian Antarctic Expedition. There, you can develop the article with less risk of deletion; ask other editors to help work on it; and move it into article space when it is ready. If you wish to ask an informational question, please visit one of our help desks. translation: - Don't create an article (without reading piles of tedious documentation first) - Don't create an article (because we know you just want to muck around) - Don't create an article (without applying a higher standard of referencing than we do) - Don't create an article (because we will delete it mercilessly. write a draft and beg for approval first) - Don't create an article (because you don't actually know anything) (You know the rest of the use case) Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Newbie recruitment idea: missing article lists
Here's another: when someone searches for an article (let's say norwegian antarctic expedition) Incidentally, I find the following collection of facts rather curious in their ensemble: 1) Norwegian Antarctic Expedition was one of the most requested redlinks, with 25 or so hits 2) There is a WikiProject Antarctica/Norwegian Antarctica work group 3) Of the six or so norwegian antarctic expeditions I found with a quick bit of googling, only two were listed at [[List of Antarctic expeditions]]. 4) The above mentioned Norwegian Antarctica work group claims credit for [[Alien vs. Predator (film)]] as a featured article. Anyone have an explanation? Steve PS Oh, I have an explanation to 1) at least. Most, maybe all, of those hits are from pages imported from a USGS document, which are actually referring to a specific expedition in 1956-60. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Newbie recruitment idea: missing article lists
On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 10:00 PM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.comwrote: On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 10:46 AM, Steve Bennett stevag...@gmail.com wrote: Here's another: when someone searches for an article (let's say norwegian antarctic expedition) Incidentally, I find the following collection of facts rather curious in their ensemble: 1) Norwegian Antarctic Expedition was one of the most requested redlinks, with 25 or so hits Strange. 2) There is a WikiProject Antarctica/Norwegian Antarctica work group Not that strange. My perhaps-too-subtle dig: What is the Norwegian Antarctica work group *doing* exactly, if they haven't written [[Norwegian Antarctic Expedition]], written about any of the 6+ Norwegian Antarctic expeditions, nor even listed 4 of them on the List of Antarctic Expeditions? Answer: writing about Alien vs Predator, apparently... Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikimediauk-l] Anyone visiting VA with a camera soon?
On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 11:01 PM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Something for Commons, though? That's tricky, since Commons by definition only stores media, it doesn't have a framework of concepts to hang media off by default. That's why it would be very natural to use the Wikipedias as that framework, but to somehow channel the requests to a central place on Commons. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Newbie recruitment idea: missing article lists
On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 11:00 PM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Given the huge preponderance of readers over editors, the last point really should be first (visit help desks). Then I would go to drafting: If you are able to draft an article on this topic, you can start it at Special:MyPage/Norwegian Antarctic. And make sure that the Special page has a clear way of templating the page so that it goes into a help requested category, and generates a human welcome. Then give the three options (read Your first article, Sandbox, Article wizard) as exactly that: If you'd like to Basically that message seems to have the order stood on its head. Something that could be addressed easily, though. Yeah, but I'd go further. 1) Big blue button with informaiton icon. Looking for information on topic? We don't have any. :( Try [the help desk] or [Google]. 2) Big green button. Knowing something about topic? We'd love your help. Click here to start writing. And of course here takes them to a walled tutorial where they can start writing, with experienced wikipedians watching in real time to give them a few pointers. The most crucial tips (referincing, not copying text in) get shown as appropriate, but not in one massive up-front hit. Encouragement along the way. At the end, a message like Thanks! Hold the line, someone will give your article one final check over before it goes public. I wonder if we have the resources to support that. We seem to have plenty of resources to speedy delete or AfD most newbie contributions... Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Newbie recruitment idea: missing article lists
On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 3:17 AM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.comwrote: Thanks! I thought 807 was quite a lot, but then I saw David has created 1224... :-) I daren't ask how many redirects we have in total, though I am sure that is somewhere as well. Aww, just shy of 600 here. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] new articles from unconfirmed users queue - where is that these days?
On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 5:11 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Yep, that'll be my coupla hours' Wikipedia tonight: rescuing articles in the queue ... Also have a look at the article incubator, where articles that barely fail AfD get shunted. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Newbie recruitment idea: missing article lists
On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 2:39 PM, David Goodman dgoodma...@gmail.com wrote: I usually suggest to new-comers that they first spend some time improving and updating articles in their field of interest to get It depends what you mean by newcomer. I think it's easy to make the mistake of assuming a single entry point: There is some guy, and he has a burning desire to write an article for Wikipedia, and will jump through as many hurdles as necessary to make it happen. Whereas there are all sorts of ways people get involved, like following a surprising redlink, or talking to a friend, or reading about it, or whatever. The challenge is to get as much value out of each potential newcomer as possible: if someone has the inclination to write three articles before losing interest, we want them to write three articles. If someone could be a massive Wikipedia nerd if only someone would show them ropes, then...you get the idea. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Newbie recruitment idea: missing article lists
On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 3:02 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: While I fully agree with your nowhere near finished position, the argument you presented here is especially weak. All that shows is that the geodata coverage is not especially uniform. Yeah, that map has been popping up everywhere, usually with seriously over-reaching interpretations. The Burkina Faso/South Africa comparison is worth bearing in mind. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] New articles from the third world
On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 12:50 AM, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@googlemail.com wrote: And most of the time I think they are being treated OK by the deletionists. Though I did see one speedy tag where I wondered if the tagger would have tagged as non notable a nature reserve of over 10,000 ha in North America or Western Europe. Do we need affirmative action in favour of articles about Africa? Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Something on the nature of working for free
On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 9:02 PM, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com wrote: It's important to keep in mind that volunteers - anyone you're not compensating for the work - do what they want, and won't do that they don't want to. A lot of volunteer organizations implode when people at the core forget that. Yep. The trick is to get them to want to do what you need them to do. IMHO, Wikipedia doesn't make enough effort to set priorities and channel work towards them. An excellent example of someone reaching their tolerance level on stuff they don't want to do for free (althought it's commercial-ish work on an unfunded project, rather than a purely volunteer project for charity): Yeah, saw this on reddit. Not really the same though - sounds he like he was a normal contractor understandably pissed off after not getting paid. Don't think he ever intended to be a volunteer... ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] BLP task force meeting
On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 7:04 PM, Giacomo M-Z solebaci...@googlemail.com wrote: Oh that sounds really interesting, I will pay some money to join IRC and then get up at 2am to participate. Much more fun than doing it freely and openly on Wikipedia. Please stop trolling. (Moderator) ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] My most reused piece of free content
On Sat, Nov 21, 2009 at 5:03 PM, Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com wrote: Yeah, it is a great idea that's why we have article introductions, right? - causa sui Yep! Our style of having an introductory paragraph that is a summary of the salient points of the whole article (rather than a hook to get people to read the whole thing) is a great editorial choice in my opinion. It also makes our content, with the API, extremely re-usable. Yes...to a point. Our opening sentences very strictly define the topic, frequently with birth/death dates, names in other languages, and claim to notability. I'm thinking of a sentence that serves strictly to delineate this topic, and contrast with other articles. Compare: Kim Jong-il (also written as Kim Jong Il, Korean: 김정일; born 16 February 1941; official biographies state 16 February 1942[1]) is the Supreme Leader[2] of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (also known as North Korea). With: About Kim Jong-il, current leader of North Korea, his personal and public life. I don't know, I haven't really thought this out. For example, the National Library of Australia sucks in our introductory paragraph of articles about Australian newspapers for use in their newspaper digitsation project - for example, look in the top-right hand corner of their landing page for The Argus: http://newspapers.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/title/13 (they also do a similar thing with our articles about individual authors in their book catalogue search. Yeah, I love that site. :) http://newspapers.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/profile/user:public:stevage Do you have any professional connection with the site? I was nearly going to be doing some work with them, but it fell through. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Ad-free forever?
On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 9:23 PM, Bod Notbod bodnot...@gmail.com wrote: The strategy process is still ongoing and there are a number of proposals for adverts. I don't sense they're going to get any traction this time. But if the WMF severely lacked funds in future years I imagine everyone would start considering them. Yeah, that's probably a wise position for them to take. Incidentally, first hand anecdote that different advertising messages work for different people. Was cruising on the French wikipedia and there was an ad with a big progress bar, showing the total number of articles at 12 million (I assume cross all projects), heading towards 25. I was like yeah, I'd donate to make that happen! :) Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] New site for meta-discussion
On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 9:17 AM, Jake Wartenberg j...@jakewartenberg.com wrote: I've created website to complement these mailing lists a venue for discussion. It's at wikien.net http://www.wikien.net/. Please let me know if you have any feedback or questions. There have been a few of these. IMHO, the best website to discuss similar issues is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Village_Pump Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Usability Study Round Two!
On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 12:13 AM, Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com wrote: Go to Enable navigable table of contents in the editing tab of your user-preferences. It's the checkbox at the very bottom - next to the other experimental features. Yay. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] My most reused piece of free content
On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 3:00 AM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: Removed now, along with most of the article (which was a copyright violation). I actually kind of liked the idea of a very brief summary. Maybe not using the nutshell template, but it could work, particularly when you have a number of articles on very similar topics or different aspects of the same topic. The dab links kind of do it...but in a limited way. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Usability Study Round Two!
On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Parul Vora pv...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hi all! The Wikipedia Usability Initiative conducted an evaluative study of our progress thus far in mid-October. Highlights are posted to the blog here: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/11/18/ux-usability-study-take-two/ and if you really want the skinny, the full report is here: http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Usability,_Experience,_and_Progress_Study; Great stuff. It's always fascinating to see how ordinary users really work. Of course users think the save button is what they should push while working on a page, before they're ready to finally commit it... Oh, and enjoyed this understatement: terms like “transcluded” are new to most users I eventually stopped using the new interface because it didn't really have any benefits for power users (and the lack of a #REDIRECT toolbar button got annoying), and it was incompatible wih Popups. Looks like the newer gui's are making a big difference to novices though. (Can't wait until the TOC in edit mode is live: http://prototype.wikimedia.org/s-5/index.php?title=Main_Pageaction=edit ) Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Featured churn
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 12:29 AM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com 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 ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The Internet? Bah!
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 5:07 AM, stevertigo stv...@gmail.com 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 ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Featured churn
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 10:33 AM, Apoc 2400 apoc2...@gmail.com 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? ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Ad-free forever?
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 7:51 AM, Magnus Manske magnusman...@googlemail.com 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 ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How friendly are we to Newbies? Create an article as a newbie challenge now paused
On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 3:17 PM, stevertigo stv...@gmail.com wrote: The entire NEWT project is a disruption to make a point - and the No. The main goal is/was data collection - to find out whether the assertions made by the original blog post were accurate or not. It seems that there are grounds for considerable improvement, but we're not at crisis point. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] WIKIPEDIA FOREVER
On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 4:20 PM, Evangeline Han evanbe...@gmail.com wrote: Can the Foundation give an explanation as to why they went on with putting up that banner despite strong opposition from many people? Because their advice was that it would work. It probably is working. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 76, Issue 22
On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 1:14 PM, Daniel R. Tobias d...@tobias.name wrote: But from what I can see of their budgets, not all that much of their funds are going to that. The rest is going for stuff like maintaining an office in a much more expensive city than the cheap one they used to have in Florida. Well yeah, and 25 paid staff is expensive too. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] WIKIPEDIA FOREVER
It is pretty much traditional for the fundraiser to cause controversy, in fact. I know how Oleg feels. These days I ignore the ads, since I don't see why I should give money well as time: and they are obviously aimed at Wikipedia's readers, who outnumber the people seriously involved with the site by a factor of 10,000 or more by now. I don't see the banner any more: I don't remember dismissing it. Yeah, they could have avoided the controversy entirely by not showing them to logged in users. I also subscribe to the my tastes are not aligned with the PR company's tastes, but that's to be expected line of thinking. I guess the vague, icky feeling I get (and maybe some others feel) is that we, the volunteer editing army do all the work creating the product. But campaigns like this sometimes nudge slightly towards creating the impression that the WMF is sort of co-opting that product and marketing it as their own. (I'm deliberately hedging my words a lot here: impression, feel etc) Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia fundraising slogans from identi.ca and Twitter
On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 6:26 AM, William Pietri will...@scissor.com wrote: People are doing some interesting work with auto-optimized ad runs that we could look at adapting for next year. Given our massive amounts of traffic, we could accept a pretty broad range of slogans, and let the system sort out which are the most effective combinations. Money aside, there's something appealing about maximizing community involvement everywhere we can. Ew. Is that really what advertising and marketing have been reduced to? Spew out whatever random text as long as it gets the $$$? Please let us have some self-respect. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] deletionism in popular culture
On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 6:41 AM, Ryan Delaney ryan.dela...@gmail.com wrote: Well, now you've given me another guess: The problem with PWD is that it's wrong to have deleted material available for people to look at because that would encourage them to look at deleted content rather than undeleted material? (I haven't read the PWD proposal, but it seems self-explanatory.) Deletion is good because it totally dispenses with junk. Average article quality goes up when we ditch bad articles. It prevents people from spending time on really bad articles. Having deleted articles readily available would interfere with all that. There are places on the internet for all kinds of junk, regardless of quality or value. Wikipedia is not one. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] fictional categories
On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 12:37 PM, Ian Woollard ian.wooll...@gmail.com wrote: Schroedinger's cat very definitely is fictitious; it's not an experiment you can actually do and get an alive/dead cat that you can actually see, you would get either an alive cat, or a dead cat. I agree with the statement that it should not be in that category. Essentially, because schrodinger's cat is not a cat. Felix the Cat is a fictional cat. Simba the lion is a fictional cat, in a broader sense. Schrodinger's cat is a concept in physics that has nothing to do with cats or fiction. There is no notable fiction in which Schrodinger's cat features heavily, for example. To the OP: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. One bad category member does not justify nuking an entire family of categories. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How friendly are we to Newbies? Update on the create an article as a newbie challenge
On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 1:21 AM, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@googlemail.com wrote: I'm hoping that we won't have too many trick articles in this process, or articles that should be deleted but not by CSD (the criteria are write an article that doesn't meet the deletion criteria. Hmm, as for my own experimental article (which I loaded with a few newbie errors, but nothing too over the top), all that has happened was an established user came along and deleted two of the sources, and renamed a (deliberately misnamed) section heading. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Batu_Niahaction=history I can't really fathom his thinking. Sure, they weren't high quality sources, but they were the sources of the information nonetheless... Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How friendly are we to Newbies? Update on the create an article as a newbie challenge
On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 4:04 AM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:
I think you needed to point out which bits of information corresponded
with which sources.
I sure did! I also needed to use bullet points - but I didn't know that.
I see the failed wikilinking for Bintulu was not
corrected.
Yup. Nor was the lack of bold for the first mention of the town. The
lat/long coords should also be {{coord|...}}'ed.
(How on earth would a newbie ever figure this stuff out...)
Oh, and was the spelling mistake intentional or
interestig? :-)
Heh, I think that was actually an accident. I originally wrote
popular tourist attraction, but thought really interesting was
more appropriate. :)
PS. User:Speleo87 for writing an article about a town near famous
caves (speleology)? :-)
Yup, my alterego is a 22 year old cave lover...
Steve
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Re: [WikiEN-l] How friendly are we to Newbies? Update on the create an article as a newbie challenge
On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 11:32 AM, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@googlemail.com wrote: The idea is to test the speedy deletion process with articles that shouldn't be speedy deleted. Links to several of the articles in the process and their fates have been posted to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/Newbie_treatment Hey, that's really cool. I've made my own lame newbie attempt to join the experiment. It's hard to write a convincing newbie stub article that you think deserves to exist, but could be dissed by a patroller acting in a hurry. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Can sweet reason still work on en:wp? Occasionally.
On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 8:35 AM, Ryan Delaney ryan.dela...@gmail.com wrote: to the end. Rather than saying I am invoking IAR and I did this because X, just say I did this because X. Disagree. The response to I did this because X is, But there's rule Y, which you should have followed. Explicitly evoking IAR makes it clear that you know about Y, and have a reason for ignoring it. That said, surely the original AfD closer should have invoked WP:SNOW, not WP:IAR. That's what he was really doing: saying there was no chance at all of consensus, therefore speedying the decision. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How friendly are we to Newbies? Update on the create an article as a newbie challenge
On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 4:55 AM, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com wrote: I want to personally look at the articles and responses in more depth before I comment more, but this has been exceptionally valuable research. Yes, can you please post the usernames and the articles that were created? If some were speedied, do you have the original text? Obviously we shouldn't be having an omg rampant speedyism debate if the articles were actually speedyable... Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] IAR
On 10/2/09, Ian Woollard ian.wooll...@gmail.com wrote: But the IAR policy is clear, if ANY policy, including BLP stops you improving the wikipedia then you can override it. ...until someone objects. The important caveat. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] deletionism in popular culture
On 10/3/09, Gwern Branwen gwe...@gmail.com wrote: Actually, there is one in there that strikes me as valid: the shield-mate one. I know I've read about the idea before in multiple contexts, and there's the obvious historical example of the Sacred Band. I don't know if it's *correct*, and it looks like no one has ventured into academia for some sources so deletion is likely, but that's far from a clear case. Ok, here's a hypothetical. Let's say out of any twenty given AfD's that close as delete, it turns out we get one wrong. Is that acceptable? Deletion is hardly the end of the world in itself... Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Classic commentary
On 10/3/09, stevertigo stv...@gmail.com wrote: '''Show the door to trolls, vandals, and wiki-anarchists, who, if permitted, would waste your time and create a poisonous atmosphere here.''' - Larry Sanger Out of curiosity, on which side of the door do you see yourself, Steve? Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] So what does Flagged Revs feel like?
On 9/30/09, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Again, I reiterate that all experienced editors should try editing as an IP for a while. See how well our propaganda matches the way we The thing that puts me off most, personally, is that the IP is recorded and published. I wouldn't really care if there was some other way to identify anonymous users, but raw IPs? Ick. (Not that I'm hiding anything, you only have to look through my photos and stubs to get a pretty clear idea of which suburb I live in. But still.) Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Age fabrication and original research
On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 11:32 AM, FT2 ft2.w...@gmail.com wrote: From a Wikipedia editorial stance, stating that date of birth has multiple reliable sources that conflict, is fine. Books state X, official government records state Y, both are RS enough to be worth citing and the difference is probably worth noting in the context of her article as well. Yep. I'd probably list the most commonly published one in the lede, with a footnote explaining the issue. One place I did something slightly similar was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_McTell - see the Note. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] FlaggedRevs test wiki needs you!
On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 10:24 AM, Brion Vibber br...@wikimedia.org wrote: I’ve added a couple quick notes to this affect on the main page: http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page Ah, I didn't know about this. Having a quick look now. Comments: - It looks like the UI could do with a bit of work - it took a fair bit of poking around to work out what status a page was in. - Language should be stabilised. I see the terms reviewed, sighted, draft, stable version, stable page, sighted page...but not flagged revision. We should use as few terms as possible and use them consistently. - Clicking the +/- shows some escaped HTML code (lt;revreview-statusqt;) - For that matter +/- seems much less obvious to me than a simple + - A red padlock, an eyeball, the term sighted page, and the word view draft. Whoa. Too much. Way too much. - There's a draft tab and an edit draft tab. - On the NYC article, I created vandalism but it was automatically sighted. Clicking the automatically sighted text just took me back to the article. - (Heh, that was confusing, I placed a request for admin, and it got approved, all within a minute or two...totally changing my experience of the system) - The admin interface is awkward too, especially having to go through protect and that flagged revisions can also be [[configured]] bit... - Having the tabs at the top change depending on the status of the page is confusing. Sometimes you have page and edit. Sometimes you have stable page, draft and edit draft. Maybe tabs aren't the way to go here. My overall impressions are that this adds a LOT of complexity. The mental model needed to work in this area is counterintuitive and just damn complex. I find the icons in the top right confusing more than anything. Before: You have a page, some previous versions, and a talk page. After: You have lots of versions of a page. There may be a stable page, a sighted page, a reviewed page. Or not. You might be looking at a draft (in which case the stable version is older), or you might be looking at a stable version (vice versa). So, please let's not inflict this on en without making a few decent improvements to the user experience. Steve ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
