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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2017-12-18. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Arbitration report: Last case of 2017: Mister Wiki editors (0 bytes · 💬)

Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2017-12-18/Arbitration report

Blog: Close encounters of the Wikipedia kind: Astronaut is first to specifically contribute to Wikipedia from space (774 bytes · 💬)

  • Wonderful to hear that WikipediaWorld is expanding. ―Buster7 ☎ 23:19, 20 December 2017 (UTC)
  • Great work Andy Nick-D (talk) 05:48, 22 December 2017 (UTC)
  • Awesome! What a great story :D -- œ™ 01:05, 27 December 2017 (UTC)
  • well done!--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 21:38, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

Featured content: Featured content to finish 2017 (754 bytes · 💬)

The subtitle of this piece: "Featured content to finish 2017". I wondered why the SP would end this page. Maybe that's not true. Tony (talk) 06:58, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

Gallery: Wiki loving (1,985 bytes · 💬)

  • Extraordinary array of photos. Just extraordinary. Tony (talk) 07:01, 18 December 2017 (UTC)
  • Those are some fantastic photos. Thank you all.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  02:11, 19 December 2017 (UTC)
  • "A peak in the Nilgiri mountains backdrops this shot of a simple suspension bridge over the Gandaki River in Nepal." It's over 1,000 miles from the Nilgiri mountains to Nepal. I know these pictures are photoshopped, but that's going too far. Maproom (talk) 22:52, 21 December 2017 (UTC)
    • @Maproom: At the picture's page on Commons it says "Nilgiri South (6,839m) forms an impressive backdrop to a large suspension bridge over the Kali Gandaki river near Tatopani", but to my limited understanding of geography, that doesn't make sense either. A good picture, but a mystery. Maybe "Nilgiri South" is not in the Nilgiris.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  00:12, 22 December 2017 (UTC)
      • With just a little bit of searching I found Nilgiri Himal in Nepal, which has three peaks, on of which is Nilgiri South - Evad37 [talk] 00:46, 22 December 2017 (UTC)
  • There's an error below Dzharylhach National Nature Park photo - it should link to Commons:User:Yunyk rather than Commond:User:Vadym Yuny (sic). No such user (talk) 12:11, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

Humour: Here's What's Missing (4,238 bytes · 💬)

Well, it might tickle some funny-bones. EEng 11:19, 18 December 2017 (UTC)
Maybe, but I am happy to say that I was able to create it based upon the suggestion of another editor.(this made me very happy) Your comment is funny, so you can take credit for the improvement to the humourosity. And since I am the humour editor of the Signpost, and an expert on the topic of humour, I can tell you that there is a possibility that you might be mistaken. AND most important of all: The number of comments that appear after the humour article is directly correlated to the pageviews. So you just 'upped' my readership - thank you. Best Regards, Barbara (WVS) ✐  ✉ and Merry Christmas 14:55, 18 December 2017 (UTC)
I'm just glad someone decided to shoulder the burden, is all. --Ser Amantio di NicolaoChe dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 16:30, 18 December 2017 (UTC)
You're all on my last nerve. Proud to increase your pageviews.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  03:52, 19 December 2017 (UTC)
...which increases Barbara's PageRank wbm1058 (talk) 18:58, 19 December 2017 (UTC)
..lovin' it.Barbara (WVS) ✐  ✉ and Merry Christmas 23:33, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

Interestingly there is a language conversion feature built into MediaWiki, and English to Pig Latin is one of the options! The feature is mostly for languages such as Chinese that can be written in different scripts, but the Pig Latin option is useful for developers who might not speak those languages and need to test the feature. See phab:T45547. Sadly I don't think the Pig Latin variant is enabled on the live Wikimedia sites. the wub "?!" 22:51, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

Seriously? I'm not feeling so original right now. Can you post something amazing here in Pig Latin? How about the first sentence in the George Washington article? Barbara (WVS) ✐  ✉ and Merry Christmas 23:33, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

As a follow-on to this article, I found more info on this subject at Artistic language#Jokelangs, and Constructed language (a bit too deep for me). One thing I really like about Wikipedia is always learning something new. Cheers! — JoeHebda • (talk) 02:29, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

Ouyay are-yay ery-vay eye-n-kay in-nay airing-shay. Arbara-bay Age-pay; 07:12, 31 December 2017 (UTC)
DYK...I am the only speaker of Idioglossia Barbara (WVS) ✐  ✉ and Merry Christmas 14:06, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

In the media: Stolen seagulls, public domain primates and more (4,240 bytes · 💬)

  • The monkey could at least get attribution. Barbara (WVS) ✐  ✉ and Merry Christmas 14:35, 18 December 2017 (UTC)
  • The Wikipedia seagull on the currency note appears to have had a wee bit of artistic input in my opinion. Charles J Sharp who is interviewed in another part of this edition of the Signpost has a photograph that is merely flipped and reused in an Indian government postage stamp with no attribution and apparently used without permission. Shyamal (talk) 15:44, 18 December 2017 (UTC)
  • The article discussing This American Life is rather silly and insensitive. It laments "why oh why does Slater conflate Wikipedia with the WMF. Oh, how we're misunderstood!" Perhaps this photo might explain why.

David Slater: I soon got to know, from the good Wikipedians out there, that Jimmy Wales and many of the delegates were mocking me by printing out my image on great big boards that were placed all over the conference facility. And Jimmy Wales and various other people were encouraging the delegates to take selfies with my selfie.

Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 12:20, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

  • If they were to get from Wikipedia, at least they should've checked if it was public domain or not. Or how about putting a very tiny "(c) 200x Wikipedia user Cele4~enwiki. Licensed under BY-SA 2.0 DE." at the bottom of the bird? --stranger195 (talk • contribs • guestbook) 05:34, 25 December 2017 (UTC)

I understand that Slater feels victimized by a quirk in the law which he thinks is deeply unfair -- but at a certain point, if your life hasn't been ruined, and you still have your health, your family, and your job, then eventually you kind of have to realize that your persistence in a lost cause is ending up affecting you more than it does anyone else. In any case, his plight has very little to do with the Internet or Wikipedia/Wikimedia, but with the dusty tomes of traditional old-style law... Anyway, PETA acted far more obnoxiously than anyone on Wikipedia/Wikimedia. AnonMoos (talk) 13:00, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

I thought I’d have a look at this Everipedia”. I chose my hometown of Homer, Alaska as a sample article. And....wait for it... it’s a copy of the Wikipedia article in every way. So... what was the point again? Beeblebrox (talk) 22:37, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

I’ve now checked five or six more articles that I am very familiar with, and they are all just direct copies of WP articles, yet I am not seeing any attribution or other admission that the majority of their content is copied from here. Beeblebrox (talk) 22:40, 30 December 2017 (UTC)
Beeblebrox Everipedia considers itself a 'dynamic fork' Wikipedia. This means that they copy all Wikipedia articles, but users can further edit them on Everipedia. Thusly, Everipedia claims to have more articles than any other encyclopedia, but actually has very few articles written on its site. Eddie891 Talk Work 01:57, 31 December 2017 (UTC)
That’s weak. Beeblebrox (talk) 21:42, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

Interview: Interview with Charlesjsharp, regular contributor of Wikipedia's featured pictures (568 bytes · 💬)

Recent research: French medical articles have "high rate of veracity"; quality comparisons across languages; perceptions of credibility (3,932 bytes · 💬)

  • The plot of changes in the female ratio of bios and size. It's very interesting. A few points, though.

    First, is it supposed to be called: "Changes in female ratios and absolute numbers of biographies among the Wikipedias"? Is that what you mean? I first thought "size" meant average word/byte length of each bio.

    Second, great to convey three aspects in the one chart. But the steepness of the arrows, am I correct, is a red herring? The Norwegian- and Finnish-language WPs seem to start from a very low base, so I'm not sure how to interpret that. I don't know whether I care that the en.WP has a huge number of bios all-up, in this context. Still thinking about that.

    Third, what are we to understand from the sharp decline in the ratio in the Chinese WP?

    I'd love to see more gender-based graphs like this, exploring more detailed questions of gender. Tony (talk) 07:27, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

I interpreted the slope of the arrows as showing the degree of concentration on adding female biographies. A high slope (jawiki) means that the added biographies concentrate more on females than the ratio on that wiki beforehand. A flat line would mean the added biographies are of the same ratio as existed beforehand. A downward slope (zhwiki) would mean the added biographies concentrated on men more than was already present on that wiki. Jujutacular (talk) 16:28, 18 December 2017 (UTC)
Yes, I think you're right. So we can match the slope with the rightward placement to get an idea of the composite impact, I guess. Tony (talk) 05:19, 19 December 2017 (UTC)
  • In the section "Assessing article quality and popularity across 44 Wikipedia language versions", I couldn't understand the graphs. Is it higher quality on the left or the right? What do the shades mean? I see the scales with their numbers but I don't know what they measure.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  02:41, 19 December 2017 (UTC)
    Higher quality in those graphs are indicated by green/blue, whereas lower quality are red/orange. The "presumed" lower quality can be interpreted as near the bottom of the scale. Using the first plot on the left as an example, you're almost certainly going to encounter a stub article (in red) if the article length is around 337 bytes. At the top of the same plot, you're nearly always reading B-class or better articles. Same interpretation applies for other graphs. As the number of references in an article increases, the article quality tends to increase. We can see that number of images used in the article is not a strong indicator comparing to article length or number of references, since there are some GAs and FAs with as few as 2 and 3 images respectively. And this graph tells us that half of the articles have 5 images or less. Number of header sections tells us more headers does not always lead to better article quality since FAs tend to cluster at around 8 to 13 headers. More headers beyond that could lead to information overload or contents which should be spun off to a standalone page. And finally, the last graph on the right shows that more references used over a shorter article tends to have higher article quality, but only up to a certain point. OhanaUnitedTalk page 19:40, 25 December 2017 (UTC)

Special report: Women in Red World Contest wrap-up (1,830 bytes · 💬)

  • It is a dream to take part in a World Contest like this. I personally appreciate this initiative because it empowers the gender equality between men and women. I think this initiative should be a result of the Sustainable Development Goals which was initiated in 2016 stating that eradicating gender inequality is also one of the goals. So as a participant I really like to create biographies related to women and also I always attempt to create articles which are generally ignored by most of the people in the world including Deaflympics, deaf and disability related articles. Abishe (talk) 06:41, 18 December 2017 (UTC)
  • Congratulations to the organizers and participants in this project. Reading abut the wide range of subjects and increasing Wikipedia's coverage of women is inspiring.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  17:59, 18 December 2017 (UTC)
  • Great article! I hope very much there will be support for repeating this contest next year and for adapting the tools so that they can be easily applied to other initiatives promoting the coverage of women on Wikipedia, perhaps in other language versions too.--Ipigott (talk) 14:33, 20 December 2017 (UTC)
  • Excellent. What were the requirements around "references"? User:Dr._Blofeld Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 23:25, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

Technology report: Your wish lists and more Wikimedia tech (2,590 bytes · 💬)

  • Hello Barbara, how are you doing? Yes. The Betts' tool was an external tool that stopped working and led to a request being put up on the Help Desk for an alternative tool. That's when I wrote the "Possible backlinks" script. I haven't checked since then if the Betts' tool has been repaired. Thanks, Lourdes 02:07, 20 December 2017 (UTC)
Hello, back atcha. I used the Betts tool the other day and it seemed to work. I even show it to new users when I am training them in person. Best Regards, Barbara (WVS) ✐  ✉ and Merry Christmas 12:55, 20 December 2017 (UTC)
Yes, you're right. The link http://edwardbetts.com/find_link/ is working right now. Lourdes 14:16, 20 December 2017 (UTC)
  • The Timeless skin is brilliant but doesn't seem to play well with gadgets like Twinkle. WaggersTALK 13:30, 19 December 2017 (UTC)
    • Scripts can be fixed by checking the skin and adjusting the portlet location (where they add their link) accordingly, like I did for my Rater script [1]. Twinkle is a bit of a special case since they want to add a whole menu, not just a single item, but they are aware of the issue [2]. - Evad37 [talk] 01:36, 20 December 2017 (UTC)
  • Should "discussions related blocking tools" be replaced with "discussions related to blocking tools"? Apokrif (talk) 08:50, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

Traffic report: Notable heroes and bad guys (775 bytes · 💬)

A commune that is for all intents and means a cult (complete with devolving into weird prophecies and murder). igordebraga ≠ 00:53, 30 December 2017 (UTC)


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