Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-06-25/News and notes

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I posted a fairly lengthy response to wikimedia-l regarding the state of bot-created stubs at the Vietnamese Wikipedia. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 08:54, 29 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- Hey Mxn, I've updated the article above with information from you. Thanks! Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 15:25, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  - Thanks, The ed17. It can be misleading sometimes to compare active users across different language editions, because for instance Catalonia probably has better Internet penetration than Vietnam. But the number of active users is lower than many in the community would like: we're #25 among Wikipedias by views per hour but only #117 by editors per speaker. I think most view it as room for the community to improve – or a metric to game... – rather than as a knock against bot operators. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 08:57, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

We've made Slashdot! Thank you all for reading this story, and I hope you enjoy it; please suggest any improvements here. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 02:06, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I do hope there will be a contribution towards Wikipedia to assist -- it sounds like a lot of servers, storage and bandwidth will be consumed by this project. Wikipedia is free, but the hardware most certainly isn't.203.12.85.25 (talk) 03:55, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This headline is dubious, to say the least. NARA isn't uploading all its holdings. It's uploading all its digital images. Big difference. 32.218.35.228 (talk) 16:23, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- I wouldn't have wrote it in the article had Dominic not directly said "our goal is to have all of our holdings ... available on Wikimedia Commons". :-) Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 18:49, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  - The corollary here is that another of our big goals is that "one day, all of our records will be online." These are big goals when we are talking about more than a billion records, but the point was intentional that we are not limiting ourselves to previously digitized material. Our goal is that Wikimedia Commons should be an end point of the digitization workflow for all future digitizations, too. Dominic·t 21:45, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This is utterly absurd. NARA has billions and trillions of records. There is no way on earth that it is going to upload them all to Commons. The last estimate I saw of how long it would take NARA to digitize its holdings was > 1000 years. (See: [1], [2].) There is obviously some misunderstanding or miscommunication here. This probably just refers to NARA'S extant digital images, not to all its holdings. 32.218.35.228 (talk) 22:19, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Who's to say this pace doesn't pick up at some point? Anyway, to clarify again, this is about their entire holdings. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]}

Credulous, aren't you? The pace would have to pick up 1000% in order for the 1800 year estimate in the NY Times article to be reduced to 18 years. What has changed at NARA in the past 5-6 years to account for such an overwhelming change in pace? Nothing. Not one single thing. (Or perhaps the Koch brothers died and left all their wealth to NARA, and I missed the news.) You can believe whatever you like, but neither a flat earth nor the assertion that NARA will upload all its holdings makes the least bit of sense. 32.218.35.228 (talk) 00:30, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Just because a mission goal is big and audacious doesn't mean it is absurd. I think Wikipedians, who work for the mission of "a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge" will naturally understand this. The "billions and trillions of records" is made-up number, overstating the holdings (which may be several billion at most) by orders of magnitude. But, in any case, it's true that NARA has a lot of stuff yet to digitize before it can be uploaded. It is also true that it has millions of records already digitized which we aim to put on Wikimedia Commons, and that in itself is no small task. Dominic·t 00:59, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Tangential: Financial Express (India). Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 02:11, 27 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]