Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2011-06-13

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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2011-06-13. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

In the news: Revere, Palin and Colbert generate activity; British Wikipedia "cleanser"; brief news (3,617 bytes · 💬)

lol @ the Palin/Colbert story.
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 03:23, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Really love the British Wikipedia "cleanser". Livened the day up a bit.--The wikifyer's corner 06:26, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

I wonder if Colbert's actions amount to incitement to computer trespass? Rich Farmbrough, 17:45, 15 June 2011 (UTC).

Well, there's a comment on the Colbert blog about this. As a Kiwi with no particular political opinions I have no particular interest in Palin or her controversies. But I noticed with interest that comment on Colbert's blog which pointed out that Revere himself, in a letter recapitulating the events, did in fact say that he had warned the British not to proceed because the American forces were too strong.

The link given is on a Wiki blacklist so I can't post it here, but it resolves to the archive <http://www.masshist.org/database/img-viewer.php?item_id=99&img_step=1&tpc=&pid=&mode=transcript&tpc=&pid=#page1>. There one finds a 'Letter from Paul Revere to Jeremy Belknap' narrating some events surrounding the ride which Revere had not seen in any previous history. It includes this tidbit concerning British officers who stopped him on the way:

"(A British officer) demanded what time I left Boston? I told him; and aded, that their troops had catched aground in passing the River, and that There would be five hundred Americans there in a short time, for I had alarmed the Country all the way up."

Which means Palin was correct to assert that Revere had warned the British not to come, the Americans were too strong! The question is, would posting a link to that be Original Research as complained of? It seems to me not. It is after all a secondary source quoting an accessible primary.

--Sdoradus (talk) 05:33, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

The Palin/Revere story parrots the claim of the left-wing blogosphere that Palin supporters edited "the article about Revere, to better suit her version of the events." This may have happened, but my own cursory look at the Revere article suggested that the opposite was true. It seemed to me that Palin critics, rather than Palin fans, were most active trying to get her version of events into the article, in order to make her look bad. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm not really interested enough to go through the edit history to find out. However, I would have been interested in reading a Signpost analysis of the edits in question, rather than the uncritical sneer at Palin supporters that we got. Perhaps this is an example of a classic pitfall of biased journalism: a story that is too good to check. Has anyone actually examined the edits? —Kevin Myers 10:36, 17 June 2011 (UTC) (Full disclosure: I'm not a Palin supporter.)

I suspect you're right. jorgenev 14:54, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

News and notes: Wikipedians 90% male and largely altruist; 800 public policy students add 8.8 million bytes; brief news (9,342 bytes · 💬)

Editor survey

The survey did not even include my main reason for editing Wikipedia — I learn from the experience. JRSpriggs (talk) 06:29, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Me too, and I suspect this is a major motivation for some of the editors contributing in language they are learning as opposed to languages they already know. ϢereSpielChequers 12:58, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Public Policy Initiative wraps up

I have a general concern about the Ambassador program. I really don't get the impression that a lot of these people will stick (don't see them moving into other areas of Wiki, little bit of interaction I had, they were passive or tentative).

The other thing is the articles they were generally writing was not where we need help. More stubs on small towns or fire departments is not what this place needs (some may even be non notable). What we need is better coverage of the core. Someone like NYM (an AP Bio student) doing an FA on a turtle is much more worthwhile. We could use more work on the elements, species, important historical people (presidents for instance), "Great Books", etc. Taking one of those to GA+ could be a good "research paper".

I am sure it was a fun project for the policy kids, but just think we could do more effective "slaving runs on the colleges". I DO hope that the organization and lessons learned can be leveraged. But more to other departments.

TCO (talk) 01:48, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

This was formerly difficult due to the program's limitation to Public Policy articles, which was in turn a restriction imposed by a source of funding. Moving forward this fall the program is opening up to all areas, which should generate a lot more opportunities for contributions in core articles and in under-covered areas. Dcoetzee 02:43, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

"improving articles they worked on "from an average score of 6.88, before the project, to 16.54"." Out of what? 20, 25, 100, 1000, 7/18ths of a super banana parp? -- Jeandré, 2011-06-14t13:44z

Presumably out of 26, the highest possible score on the PPI's Quantitative Metric. I think that would be the equivalent of going from stub to B or C class, but I'm not that familiar with the use of the metric. --Danger (talk) 14:40, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Danger is correct the scores are out of 26 based on the Quantitative Metric. Research shows that the quantitative metric generates the same ratings as the 1.0 Ratings with a high degree of consistency. In the very few cases that it did not produce the same rating, there had been significant revisions to the articles between the 1.0 Rating and the quantitative score. I will get a full report of these results out as soon as possible! There is more information if you follow the link from the Signpost article.ARoth (Public Policy Initiative) (talk) 18:27, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Please remember that this was just a pilot program. As noted above, the choice of "public policy" articles was based on the wishes of the funding provider, but there were some B-class articles, and lots of C-class articles created from scratch that filled in a lot of holes in this area, which was, indeed, underserved in the encyclopedia. Going forward, the program will open up to, I believe, the whole range of academic subjects, and I hope that there are a lot of literature contributions, in particular. As for the students "sticking", the focus of the pilot program (again, because of the funder's preference) was not really on gaining new editors, but rather on encouraging universities and professors to introduce Wikipedia into the classroom. The education initiative was certainly successful based on the goals set for it, and I hope it will expand greatly in the future. As the attitude of academia changes towards Wikipedia, we may be able to mine universities as a major source of new editors in the future; but simply educating professors about the virtues of the encyclopedia is a great step forward. -- Ssilvers (talk) 21:31, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

The Public Policy Initiative has been a learning experience for students, professors, and Ambassadors. Wikipedians who participated in the program are working to expand and improve the Ambassadors' program. Please see Wikipedia talk:Ambassadors for more information. -- Donald Albury 10:58, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Transgender

I may be showing my age and ignorance here, but I was genuinely surprised to see transgender/transsexual at 1% of the gender pie chart. Of course 1% in this context could mean anything from >0.5% to <1.5%, but does anyone have a figure as to what proportion of humanity are transgender/transsexual? ϢereSpielChequers 12:58, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

I don't have the numbers but I would assume that the percentage in the general population is below or even way below 0.5%. But if this survey found 0.2%, it would still be tempting to round up if only to acknowledge that the number is not 0%. Pichpich (talk) 19:58, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Fudging data? Ugh. Carrite (talk) 03:27, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

Graduates

I'd be interested in seeing the education breakdown of the editors we have who are over 21. I'd strongly suspect that there will be a high correlation between the 27% in the 12 - 21 age groups and the 39% whose highest educational level so far is Primary or Secondary. Of course I'm hoping that the 13% of our editors who are currently 12 - 17 years old will all get degrees in the next ten years, but I suspect next to none of them have so far. So amongst our editors who are 18 or over over 70% are presumably graduates, and amongst those of normal university graduation age or above my estimate is that over 80% are graduates. ϢereSpielChequers 12:58, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Agreed that the "last level completed" analysis is rather uninformative given the inclusion of the lowest age category. Carrite (talk) 03:30, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

It should be possible for those who have the data to compare the two fields, or simply exclude the young from the graduate figure as I guestimated. ϢereSpielChequers 15:03, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

Well, I'd be interested in the results were editors asked questions to determine whether they are people who read far more books than average, & most likely would be teaching themselves about a given subject. Even if Wikipedia didn't exist. (Or maybe I'm the only Wikipedian who falls into this ideal category.) -- llywrch (talk) 04:38, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

Age breakdown refinement/Gender gap

Future surveys should have greater refinement in age categories: 40-49, 50-59, 60-69, 70+... WP is widely perceived as a "young mens' pursuit," but I have a hunch that there will be increasing participation in the future in upper age echelons — one key factor in editing being the availability of time. I'm also a little surprised that the gender gap is showing no signs of closing. I believe the often aggressive culture of WP, revolving around editing controversies, heated deletion debates (replete with a sense of "ownership" of the debate process by some aggressive nominators), and bannings, is a good part of this problem. But Wikipedia is what it is and inertia rules the process... Carrite (talk) 03:23, 16 June 2011 (UTC) last edit: Carrite (talk) 03:25, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

The Wikipedia Adventure

Just a note, we are excitedly looking for coders who can work on The Wikipedia Adventure. Anyone familiar with PHP, mediawiki, javascript, or ajax is heartily encouraged to leave a note on the project talk page or my talk page or email (wikiocaasi@yahoo.com). Cheers, Ocaasi ^{t | c} 23:58, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

Technology report: 1.18 extension bundling; mobile testers needed; brief news (1,028 bytes · 💬)

• The English Wikipedia's desire to have the "mark all [my] edits minor by default" preference disabled for all users was finally implemented, a year after it was first proposed.

It's been disabled since MARCH, what happened this week was everyone that already had the setting enabled had it unmarked in the db since it couldn't be via the web interface and that was causing issues for those that didn't want it enabled. Peachey88 ^{(T · C)} 00:15, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Not disabled. Hidden, on English Wikipedia only. Later it was set to off for all English Wikipedia users by a script. That way, users of other Wikis can still have the feature. Guy Macon (talk) 02:37, 14 June 2011 (UTC)