Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2013-05-06

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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2013-05-06. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

In the media: New Wikipedia for Schools edition; Anders Behring Breivik's Wikipedia contributions (2,383 bytes · 💬)

He used a Commons image File:Knights Templar Cross.svg on the cover of his manifesto... (Surprised that he didn't pick up on the Turkish Abductions.) -- AnonMoos (talk) 21:27, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

The best inaccuracies from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/10030060/Wikipedia-you-dont-get-to-decide-whos-interesting.html:

• "there is a sort of committee deciding what should be preserved for prosperity, and what should be thrown into the wastepaper bin of cyber-space."
• "her Wikipedia page has been deleted by the shadowy figures at governing body Wikimedia"
• strongly implying it was her English Wikipedia page
• Wikipedia referred to as "wiki" in the dek of the article

— PinkAmpers&^{(Je vous invite à me parler)} 04:15, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

• Link to Reuters article on Sarah Sterch is giving a 404 "Page not found" (from UK, in case that's relevant). PamD 07:05, 11 May 2013 (UTC)
  • A Google search shows that the url in the article is (or was) correct. Unfortunately, even the cached version of the page isn't functional. And while the trust.org internal search engine shows that article as a search result, clicking on the result, to go to the article itself, produces the same 404 error. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:43, 11 May 2013 (UTC)
    • Well spotted, both of you. As far as I recall, the text was identical to that on womensenews.org. Andreas JN466 04:01, 12 May 2013 (UTC)

News and notes: Candidates nominating for Foundation elections; Looking ahead to Wikimania 2014 (6,630 bytes · 💬)

• "The current two-year terms for these trustee positions ends on 1 September" should read "The current two-year terms for these trustee positions end..." — Preceding unsigned comment added by Anthonyhcole (talk • contribs)
• (FDC) "in-person attendance at two to three meetings a year in San Francisco" - note that the meetings aren't necessarily in San Francisco - e.g. the last one was adjacent to the chapters meeting in Milan. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 08:22, 11 May 2013 (UTC)
• (Wikimania 2014) "This will be the first time a major wiki event has been held in the UK" - except for GLAM-WIKI 2010, EduWiki Conference 2012 and GLAM-WIKI 2013. ;-) Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 08:25, 11 May 2013 (UTC)
  • Mike and Anthony, thanks to both of you for spotting these. Let me know if my fixes aren't ok. Tony (talk) 09:32, 11 May 2013 (UTC)
• Ting Chen resigned, effective May 5th. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:24, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

• What is the predicted number of 2014 attendees based on? Ironholds (talk) 15:16, 12 May 2013 (UTC)
  • Well yes. And 2013. I asked that question already. Tony (talk) 02:20, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
    • Ah. I can't seem to see it :). Ironholds (talk) 02:48, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
      • And now I'm prompted to look here for his response. Mmmm ... mmmm! Any stats people around? There are two issues, IMO: first, the unbroken line should turn into a dotted line to indicate prediction; second, the method of "software" prediction should appear somewhere ... at worst in a footnote, but briefly in the caption would be better. Or the predictive part removed altogether. Rcs, could you dot the line and add to the caption? Tony (talk) 03:25, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Vaguely stats-y over here. I'd strongly suggest removing or at least adding a caution to that graph; if it's based solely on the rate of increase of attendance, it's not going to be at all accurate. Reasons:

1. Attendance is not influenced solely by popularity. Other factors are invariably going to include geographical location (if we hold it in Australia, for example, we're likely to price a lot of people from Europe or North America out), scholarship numbers and the value of those scholarships, appeal of the core city and appeal of the core bid. These are not constants, and they are not things that can be guaranteed to increase at the same rate.
2. Even if popularity is the only factor, I don't understand the statement that Wikimania will continue to gain popularity. In terms of the exposure of the event, sure, we get press coverage every year. This has been happening for quite a while, now. In terms of the exposure of the movement: our reader numbers are growing, certainly, but it's worth noting that the increase has actually been retarded over the last couple of years compared to the rate we were going at before. That can't be guaranteed to keep going up at the same rate. In terms of editors, our community is actually shrinking, year-on-year; same problem.
3. You're inevitably going to run into a hard ceiling; if we set up an event for 1,500 people and 2,000 ask for tickets, that's fine. That's great. But 500 are going to lose out. If Wikimanias continue to be organised in the same way, we've got a practical limit on the number of attendees (and I'd argue that more attendees would alter the culture substantially).
4. There is probably an argument to be made for non-Wikimedians attending, and bypassing the popularity problem that way: researchers, for example, or government organisations. But again, this is something that is going to vary a lot depending on location and the roots the movement has in that location. Ironholds (talk) 05:10, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

• Gibraltar and Monmouth "successful"? I guess if you mean in terms of inserting advertising for tourism boards into the encyclopedia and backroom payoffs for chapter board members. It's amazing that WMF would allow yet another program like those two to be formed. Gigs (talk) 18:35, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
  • By any metric I've seen, Monmouth was highly successful. Gibraltar, if you'll take another look at the article, has a different qualifier ("controversial"). Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 00:31, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
    • "Advertising value for Monmouth alone has been estimated at £2.12 million". Successful at exploiting the encyclopedia for commercial gain, yes. Monmouth may not have been the main focus of the scandal, but it was every bit as corrupt. Gigs (talk) 15:16, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
      • I think we may have to come to terms with varying degrees of exploitation. I'll take a Monmouth-like project where historical objects get QR codes (and yes, the resulting publicity that leads to revenue for them) over the ridiculous companies peddling Wikipedia content for financial gain like Books LLC. Where's the backlash against them? Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 00:17, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
        • Why would there be backlash against something that's explicitly allowed by our license and mission? Our content is licensed for any use, even commercial. That's completely different from someone looking to corrupt our content for commercial gain. Gigs (talk) 18:24, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Technology report: Foundation successful in bid for larger Google subsidy (4,804 bytes · 💬)

Hi all. I'm trialling a "Comment" box this week. It's been a running complaint for some time now (and not without merit) that I intermingle my thoughts and the "facts" of the situation too greatly, even without thinking about it. Given that (a) this tends to manifests itself when I have little time to write the report more carefully (b) I have a decreasing amount of time to write the report and (c) I'm going to be missing or contributing only minorly to significant numbers of issues in the near future due to RL changes, I thought it was high time I did something about this. My exact proposed solution is based on that employed by the BBC. I quite like it, but YMMV. Thoughts? - Jarry1250 ^{[Vacation needed]} 22:21, 7 May 2013 (UTC)

Not bad, not bad at all. Getting other people (users, developers) to comment on the stories would be nice too for different issues. ^demon^{[omg plz]} 20:33, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

The title of the report kind of made me think that wmf was getting 100 grand towards its general engineering budget, which would be a bit different. Bawolff (talk) 18:06, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

It's more akin to, say, Google's contribution to the Wikidata project, but even more tied than that I guess. Still a whopping amount though! - Jarry1250 ^{[Vacation needed]} 20:52, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

About "(normally but not exclusively staff)", the count of users mentors in GSoC 2013 shows 18 WMF employees, 3 WMDE and 16 "other" (Wikimedia / MediaWiki independent volunteers, WikiWorks, Wikia, Kiwix...) Let's see what the % will be once we know the projects approved. And I guess Google gave us the slots we requested because we all deserve their trust? I am impressed by the average quality of the project proposals as much as by the great response we have got from volunteering mentors. Thank you for reporting!--Qgil (talk) 22:11, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

Somebody PLEASE leave a link to the rfc for the orange bar, because I REALLY want to leave a piece of mind with the people who removed it (for all the good it won't do, I know, but it will make me feel better). TomStar81 (Talk) 06:45, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

Never mind, I found it. Left a piece of my mind too :) TomStar81 (Talk) 06:51, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

What a joke. $100K from Google, who are now making it look like Wikipedia article content is being served by their search engine. Should be $100M. Bloody thieves. --Surturz (talk) 00:41, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

• RfC for new-messages orange bar: The opinion poll about restoring the orange bar, for Have-new-messages, is under WT:Notifications, as thread:

  WT:Notifications#Do_we_want_the_orange_bar?, most replied under WT:Notifications#Yes

The count on 21 May 2013, was: Yes 147 (80%), No 36 (20%), growing at the rate of 5 "yes" to each "no". -Wikid77 19:06, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

• Notify urgency by color of message-bar: Another suggested design was to highlight ANI notices or important posts, such as by bar-color for URGENT, which might be a tag placed into a user-talk page, under each urgent message. Many people noted seeing a red number at username, but not on all old browsers. -Wikid77 19:06, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

• Perhaps Google students could write software to spot important features to add: Many people complained that the orange-bar fiasco was due to out-of-touch decisions, about what features would really help writing the encyclopedia. For example, suppressing the orange-bar message, such as by customizing a tiny-font message style, might have been the total work needed about messages. Meanwhile, the remaining Edit-conflicts should be auto-corrected, such as simply append a 2nd reply after the 1st at the same line number, rather than enter "edit-conflict" mode. Edit-preview would be much easier if a 2nd <Show_Preview> button was also above the edit-buffer area. In fact, the edit-buffer could auto-shrink to a few lines when editing a short page, so editors would have less scrolling around short pages. Anyway, perhaps ask the Summer of Code students to prioritize valuable improvements to Wikipedia, and they might have some good ideas. -Wikid77 19:06, 21 May 2013 (UTC)