User talk:Uwappa

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Happy editing! I dream of horses (Contribs) Please notify me with {{U|I dream of horses}} after replying off my talk page. Thank you. 02:03, 12 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

COVID-19 pandemic in Australia

Can you tell me the source for this figure in your edit of "302" here?
NSW health stats @ [1] say 262 new cases to 8pm on 4 August.
Regards, 220 of ^ßorg 06:32, 5 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Johns Hopkins data is it? I read that before too, Doh! 🤦🏻‍♂️
I think we need to add a citation to the chart, per WP:VERIFY. 220 of ^ßorg 06:36, 5 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It is a bit if a quest:

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
select Australia in the left pane
mouse over the chart in the right hand top corner. Tooltip pops up and shows 4/8/21: 302

Uwappa (talk) 06:48, 5 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

D'oh again, I believe that's all Australia, I was looking at the NSW only figure!
I think we have too many charts & graphs. Inthink there is also an equivalent graph on the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia (statistics)#Cumulative cases page. They're not easy to keep up to date & IIRC some weren't updated for several weeks, I then had to figure out how to do it from scratch. I've added some explanatory notes when I can. 220 of ^ßorg 08:55, 5 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

No probs. Yes it is all of AU. Extended the chart description. The chart should be easy to maintain. Just add

a date to the X values and
a number of cases to the Y values.

It takes only one Wikipedian to add this on a daily basis to keep the chart up to date. That should be doable. Uwappa (talk) 09:20, 5 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

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FYI

There's a roundtable with the evaluation of the cabinet formation team tomorrow. Dajasj (talk) 18:18, 12 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Watched it. Not much news. To be continued... Uwappa (talk) 20:31, 13 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah there will be a debate! Dajasj (talk) 07:22, 14 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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Graphics, and Talk Page discussions

As you've made some perceptive contributions in the area of climate change (CC), I didn't want to discourage your enthusiasm. However, my experience is that the CC community of editors has high standards for content, including graphics, and it has been somewhat uncommon that self-developed, unconventional graphics overcome inertia and gain consensus.

Related: your posts on Talk Pages are often in the top 5-10 percentiles of verbosity and digressions/tangents/philosophizing, which has a negative effect on editors who are mostly time-constrained volunteers (example reaction: "this discussion is now almost hopelessly impenetrable"). Similarly, posting a half-desktop-screenful of conjecture about what another editor is "worried about" is personal, and does not advance the purpose of Talk Pages: to improve specific articles.

I hope you take this post as constructive suggestions. —RCraig09 (talk) 06:06, 31 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, the English Wikipedia currently misses graphs such as

simple climographs what defines a climate?

impact of local climate change. Is it heading to a danger zone? Will agriculture remain possible?

global warming against the limits of the Paris agreements. Have we crossed the +1.5 limit yet?

How did expectations for crossing the +1.5C limit change?

It amazes me that no current graph in the English Wikipedia targets these questions.

While the official WP:OI encourages Wikipedians to upload own images, it is an agonising slow process to overcome inertia. I do appreciate your contributions in successfully overcoming inertia for graphs such as

,

and

.

Please take a look at the history of

and see how your constructive suggestions have improved that graph. I hope to see more of such comments from you. Uwappa (talk) 09:42, 31 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

A gentle reminder that many editors have limited time, and that shortening your Talk Page posts to be less like exhaustively thorough essays, will ultimately get better results. —RCraig09 (talk) 18:17, 10 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

On the topic of readability

In response to our conversation on the talk page of climate change scenario, I wanted to comment further but felt it might fit better here than there:

I know you keep mentioning the inverted pyramid style but I don't know if it's highly applicable to an encyclopedia. It's more for a story, news article, blog post or alike, isn't it? I think the guidance about summary style might be more relevant for us: WP:SUMMARY.
It's true that many Wikipedians in the Climate Change WikiProject have a very academic writing style, but there are also some who do put an emphasis on readability (like you and me), for example User:Femke. I often get told I use too much jargon, so I need to do better!
We have two great tools at our disposal now: one is the Wikipedia readability tool that lights up difficult sentences in red. And one is Chat-GPT where you can use prompts such as: "simplify this sentence XXX". Or "Write the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article on xxx". Or "What is a good first sentence for a Wikipedia article on xxx".
In general, we need a mixture of editors: some who focus on content, some who focus on readability, some who focus on charts, images and so forth.
By the way, in the project that I am working on, we have given readability quite a high weighting in our quality scoring system (20 out of 100).
Looking forward to further discussions and collaborative editing with you. :-) EMsmile (talk) 20:44, 20 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. I've changed your list into an numbered list, so you can match my reaction:

Yes, I think the inverted pyramid is unknown, underrated, but the way to go for any online text. In a way, WP articles already have this structure, with the lead up front. I think the inverted pyramid should be applied to paragraphs too. Please have a look at Jakob Nielsen's https://www.nngroup.com/articles/inverted-pyramids-in-cyberspace/ It's bloody old, from the mid 90's but still valid. In short: People do not read, they scan. That applied to me too when reading WP. I scan and only start reading when something interesting catches my eye. This scanning is a sloppy process. People miss things, just like I missed the word 'mitigation' when it was not hyperlinked. So I think the inverted pyramid should be applied to paragraphs. People will scan the first few words and continue reading if the paragraph offers what they were looking for, or... skip to the next paragraph. I fear that people scan current 'academic' paragraphs too, read the first few words, get disinterested by details and miss the interesting part because they already hopped on to the next paragraph, only to have the same experience over and over again. Their conclusion: WP is full of irrelevant details, it's boring and fails to describe high level stuff.
Again, see Nielsen, 1997: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/ Those old results still hold. There is theory available to tailor writing for online usage. I fear this decades old theory is not yet mainstream at universities. Students still learn to write for paper, get rewarded for doing so, that is what they learn to do. So they are unconscious incompetent when they face the big bad world. I fear that fresh graduates are clueless and as WP editors will fiercely resist a writing style that deviates from what they've been rewarded for at their university.
I think you are just seeing low hanging fruit at the moment. What I am suggesting is to start at the other end: Know how to write readable text from the start. There is science available that offers way more theory about this subject than Jakob Nielsen does. It's been decades since I studied that theory but I still have the books. It is based on Russian psychology, where humans are goal driven creatures. That is way different from American psychology which treats people as objects that react to stimuli. I have not seen any of this theory in the English language. The translation of the science name would be "function psychology", the science that deals with human-thing interaction. It solves problems like, from hard to easy:
Помогите, я не понимаю этот текст!
Help, ek verstaan nie hierdie teks nie!
Hilfe, ich verstehe diesen Text nicht!
The theory explains how to design things that suit humans, including text, in short: Humans function in a 5 step loop:
observe -> interpret -> learn -> think -> act
-> observe -> interpret -> learn -> think -> act
-> observe -> ...
It is like a spiral that goes round and round in circles, but also up and up to higher levels. There is theory available to make all 5 steps easy for humans in 3 dimensions: distance, quantity and structure. So it's 15 chapters in total.
The Russian text was hard because it was way too small print (hard to observe) and also hard to interpret as you probably struggled to interpret some Russian characters and Russian is probably not one of your foreign language skills anyway. You probably did get 'текст' right as those characters happen to be similar to roman alphabet.
The characters in Afrikaans were small, yet big enough to observe, familiar alphabet and you probably even managed to interpret some or even all of the words.
The German was a joke, you had no problem at all, you probably still remember it and it made you think, what to do with this? Hopefully it even triggered an immediate action, made you smile. Those were 5 successful steps: observe, interpret, learn, think and act.
Well designed text is easy to read, easy to interpret, easy to keep in short term memory so info is available for thinking about the next action towards the goal. I still have the old books available and am willing to share the bit of theory that is about writing easy texts for humans.
Fully agree. This matches the Aboriginal way of thinking that I value so much. You need different people in your group to survive the hard life in the desert. Aborigines celebrate their differences. See the westernised version in "Dream team" at page 14 of the dragon dreaming PDF. I like to apply function psychology, design charts and texts that suit the human eye, memory, brain. In the English speaking world this seems a skill that is mainly used for advertising and designing addictive mobile apps. At WP, function psychology seems unknown, unheard of, not valued.
g'd on ya mate!
Same enthusiasm here! Working on WP can be fun once you find the right people to cooperate with. This is a rare joy for me. At WP I often have the feeling to be "Einer, der in der Wildnis weint", so I've scaled down my WP activities. I have the impression you are someone who has the brain power to understand and value the theory of function psychology and could even get happy and exited when you realise how it can be applied to writing texts that are ridiculously suitable for humans. I would love to share the bit about writing texts, but be warned: the theory is weird, the books are like from another world, your brain will refuse it at first. And you'll be shocked when you see your first test results, they will pale Nielsen's. There is a problem to bypass though: no books, no theory available in English and... I am not sure if it is possible to order the books. Still, would you be interested in the theory? Wäre es in Ordnung, wenn ich auf meiner deutschen Diskussionsseite über eine Möglichkeit schreibe, das Sprachproblem zu umgehen? I would love to see you apply the theory to WP texts and be amazed when you see how those new texts score in your automated tools. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Uwappa (talk • contribs)

Great to see somebody else passionate about readability here. One key element of readability is text and paragraph length. The more you write, the more difficult it is to parse, even if individual ideas and text is easy. Did you know, among the myriad of policies and guidelines on Wikipedia, there is none on readability (if you don't count WP:Make technical articles understandable, which only deals with technical articles. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 18:02, 21 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes! That is the dimension 'quantity'. More text means:

more to observe. Ideally text can be read with just one eye fixation, no need to move the eyes to next words or lines. Traffic signs are a good example, e.g.
more to interpret. That is especially true for text in foreign languages. Pity the verbose native speaker who uses a lot of words in an attempt to be clear to a foreigner. Example: versus
more to remember, the human short term memory is limited.
more to think about. The human may try to split the process which burdens the memory even more. Or simply think about just one thing and forget to process the rest. Or even worse: suffer overload and do nothing at all. An example: versus
more actions to take. Preferably the number of actions is just one, like a click on a hyperlink.

So I am a great fan of 'less is more', especially for text in leads. Chop text down to the core!

And yes, fully agree! I think WP should have guidelines for writing easy-to-read texts. And that is where the theory comes in. What makes a text easy to read? Uwappa (talk) 18:58, 21 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, there is a lot of text to read here... I'll ponder over it and digest it! Just a quick reaction to So I am a great fan of 'less is more', especially for text in leads. Chop text down to the core!: I disagree about making leads too short. In my opinion, around 500 words is a great target for the lead of most of our climate change articles. And the most important paragraph of the lead is the first one of course. If the lead is too short then it usually is not doing a good job at summarising the article (unless the article itself is super short, of course). There is some guidance on lead length here MOS:LEADLENGTH. (my own preference of 500 words is a bit above the suggested maximum of 400 words; OK, I might have to adjust my preferred length down a bit). EMsmile (talk) 22:28, 21 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

In addition to WP:technical I found only little bits of theory and it is scattered:

Readability
Plain_language
Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
Chunking_(writing)
WP Manual of Style Lead section
WP Manual of Style Lists
Help:How_to_write_a_readable_article
User:Tony1/Redundancy exercises: removing fluff from your writing

Readability could describe the 3 improvements from Nielsen's Nebraska example:

concise text
scannable layout
objective language

MOS:PROSE could favour a scannable layout with less words and objective language. The given example looks similar to Nielsen's but... oddly favours the prose. Uwappa (talk) 17:21, 24 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Barnstar for diligence

		The Barnstar of Diligence
		for your quick and persistent edits that maintain and improve Attempted assassination of Donald Trump, cheers Forich (talk) 02:01, 17 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

wow, thank you! Uwappa (talk) 06:44, 17 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi

How are you? Gryllida (talk, e-mail) 07:58, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Привет. I am puzzled by your question at WP:Village_pump_(technical)#How_to_delete_from_talk_page. To remove a section from your talk page, just hit 'edit source' and remove all text of the section. Why would you need a script? Uwappa (talk) 08:05, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Body roundness

For any talks on the concept of body roundness, please create a page Body roundness and use that talk page.

BRI calculator

Moved from User talk:Zefr to here. Zefr (talk) 04:21, 30 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Uwappa's comments:

Today a major breakthrough for the calculator, see User_talk:Doc_James#That’s_2_small_steps_in_a_sandbox,_1_giant_leap_for_mankind.

It is getting serious now, allowing people to compute a healthy waist size with height as only input. That is already far beyond the commercial BRI calculator. And this one is free, on Wikipedia, for everybody to use. So I expect it to be quite popular.

Not there yet, a few more steps to go,

integrate the calculator with some plain English documentation.
no progress yet seen from you and user:JMF on WHtR based colours, NICE based health risk levels and Zang's based mortality risk.

What I'll do: boldly go forward and set those texts and references myself and open the door for a flood of comments. Most people don't know what they want till they see what they get.

I expect the sandbox version to be ready for usability tests soon. That requires someone with people skills, preferably in a country that is using the complex feet and inches for height.

Would that be something you would be happy to do as 'a founding father' of the calculator? See a how to do video of usability guru Jakob Nielsen on YouTube. His WP page Jakob_Nielsen_(usability_consultant)

What you'll need:

great people skills,
preferably have access to max 5 people (even 1 will do) with less than 100% Cognition, like young children, people suffering from Alzheimer's.
preferably people that are used to feet and inches, the most complex input for height
If they can work with the calculator, you know that the people with full capabilities will do, but not vice versa.
'Standard' people will do to if no challenged available.
good eyes and ears, see and hear what people do. What they do is more important than what they say. Opinions are irrelevant, it is the success rate, the speed of actions and the problems that are valuable.
respect for people. You are testing the design, not the participants.
ability to listen and see with your eyes, ears and mind open but your mouth closed. Just shut up and hide your own knowledge of BRI, WHtR and the calculator. Control yourself don't jump in, and help, don't give advice and tips, don't discuss solutions. The most valuable thing is a list of found problems that you can share with your fellow team members. Helping would destroy that valuable result.
time with second accuracy, pen and paper to write down start time of actions and results.
the courage to be blund, report found problems via a wikipedia talk page.

Put the following wikitext anywhere, like a sandbox of your homepage. {{Body roundness index/sandbox}}

I'll be happy to share some more sources on usability testing if this is something that would be fun to you.

PS: I updated the BRI page today. Please check my work. Uwappa (talk) 21:54, 29 October 2024 (UTC) ________________________[reply]

Uwappa - some observations.

1. Y you are skilled and diligent in working on the calculator, and evidently excited and having fun. Congratulations!

2. Y your talk page comments are too long; WP:WALLOFTEXT - few people are likely to read all of the content. Be concise.

3. Y the BRI article has fewer than 30 editor watchers, WHtR about the same, and BMI a few hundred. Your talk page and article edits are not being seen by many editors who will respond to you.

4. In progress inform other talk pages - WT:MED, obesity, weight loss, anthropometry, and similar ones to draw attention. Among these articles related to BRI, BMI and obesity have the largest public viewership (10s of thousands per month), so their talk pages may attract other editors to BRI and your template and article talk page comments.

5. until other editors work on the BRI page, I don't plan to participate substantially or answer what are WHtR-based colours, NICE based health risk levels and Zhang's mortality risk. I'm not interested in testing the usability of the calculator. My preference is to let the BRI article stand as it is until editorial input by others.

6. your comment: "compute a healthy waist size with height as only input" - this is your and Cmglee's work (and is good), but it is not the published BRI calculation, which is what the article is for. It seems your enthusiasm has you on a mission to guide readers to healthy weight. This is not the goal of the Wikipedia BRI article. You might visit the Wikidata Project Medicine talk page to raise interest and get feedback.

7. Changes to the BRI calculator inputs and health/obesity descriptors have to be based on a published source, even if the relation to WHtR is obvious by arithmetic. We need a source. Otherwise it's original research and WP:SYNTH of various sources to make a new statement, such as "no increased health risks" which is not a statement by Thomas, Zhang or any BRI source, but the NICE guideline. To me, this is synthesis and leading the reader to advice... note WP:NOTADVICE.

8. I don't care much for the cylinder graph in the BRI article - it is over-technical for the casual user (MOS:JARGON), looks repetitive and crowded in the section, and is WP:WFTWA. It may be okay by itself in a bottom gallery to preserve the derivation details.

9. For the most part, I'm taking a break from further activity on the BRI article and calculator, so may not respond to additional comments here or on other BRI talk pages. Zefr (talk) 04:21, 30 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I was just hoping that usability tests would be a fun activity for you and you may board the ship again. Sorry to see you go. There will be some people who will jump to it and love to do some tests. No worries.
Yes, for now I love this little project. Its energising! What a lot of fun with just 2 input parameters, weight and height.
Your concerns are valid and likely be shared by other Wikipedians, so they better be addressed fast. I will put all of your points on my TODO list.
About WP:SYNTH: no worries. Yes, that sounds very serious. And yes the calculator even looks like AI now!There will be answers to WP:SYNTH in:
- Template_talk:Body_roundness_index#AI_or_not_AI?
- Template_talk:Body_roundness_index#Colours_for_Body_Roundness_4.0
- which will result later to BRI and WHtR specific references, like Zang's graphic and the Thomas BMI->BRI mapping using WHO classifications.
user:Cmglee's cylinder graph looks great to me. To me that is more clear than the math formula. It has taken me weeks to understand what that math formula means. The graph is clear to me instantly and tells the same 'story' as the formule for the rest of us. Many people can not 'read' graphs. To them they are just useless illustrations. That is probably another difference between you and me. Please be aware that other people may have brains like me, struggle with math formula's but instantly understand a well designed graph.
Your comments so far have been sometimes difficult for me. Probably you and me have a very different brains. So be it. Recommended reading, something I love and thus not your cup of tea, but still: the great resistor
No I don't want a crowd yet. What 3 people can do in 3 days, will take 30 days for 30 people. You can do the 30x30 math yourself :D Just now a quick reaction from an unknown user was a pleasant surprise for me, probably not your cup of tea, but still User_talk:JMF#c-Remsense-20241030041100-Uwappa-20241030040200 in User_talk:JMF#中国房间_=_AI_OR_NOT(AI)
My estimation: The BRI calculator, that you started, will ripple quickly. The calculator template is soooo easy to use, javascript safe and can really take Wikipedia into this century, upgrade from a online version of a paper encyclopedia with text and images, basically over the web of last century.

User_talk:Doc_James#Top_100_medical_calculators excites me. To me it is fun that a Wikipedia bunch of volunteers can outclass a commercial operator.

Sorry to see you go. Thank you again for all your comments! Have fun. Wikipedia is on a voluntary basis, stay only if you enjoy it! Uwappa (talk) 06:25, 30 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]