Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2010-09-13

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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2010-09-13. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Arbitration report: Tricky and Lengthy Dispute Resolution (585 bytes · 💬)

In relation to the CC case, there were 11,000+ words in statements and 173,700+ words in discussion on the proposed decision talk page at 00:00, 11 September 2010 (UTC), with another 10,000+ words being added hours later. However, all statements, along with a significant portion of discussion, were subsequently archived during the attempts to manage the quantity of discussion. At 00:00, 13 September 2010 (UTC), there were 34,000 words in discussion on the proposed decision talk page. Ncmvocalist (talk) 05:35, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Features and admins: "Magnificent" warthog not so cute, says featured picture judge (1,274 bytes · 💬)

Removed something that was not correct

Portal:Business and economics is still being discussed. It has not been delisted. -- Cirt (talk) 19:01, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. Dabomb87 (talk) 22:25, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

No worries, -- Cirt (talk) 04:20, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Think the FL I nominated that was promoted on 11 Sep is missing from the list. It should added here no? Thanks, ANGCHENRUI ^Talk♨ 09:30, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

AngChenrui, thanks for your comment: our window is from Saturday to Friday, to give us time to get the page ready for the Monday deadline. Your achievement will be listed in the next edition! Tony (talk) 09:41, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

No problem. Guessed it had to do with the publication window. Regards, ANGCHENRUI ^Talk♨ 11:43, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

In the news: Public Policy Initiative, Houellebecq plagiarism?, Article revisions as book (2,176 bytes · 💬)

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Colleges get serious

The article discusses mentoring programs. Can you add some information about how to help out? -- Ssilvers (talk) 21:07, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Ssilvers has already figured out the answer to this, but see Wikipedia:Online Ambassadors for more on the mentoring program.--Sage Ross - Online Facilitator, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 13:45, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

"The Wikimedia Foundation intends to recruit 15 more professors by the northern spring, and in the longer term to work towards widening the scope of the Initiative beyond the subject of public policy."

Who is the contact person for this at the WMF? -- Jeandré, 2010-09-17t20:56z

The main contact person for recruiting public policy professors is Annie Lin. I am also working on this, and interested professors (of public policy or anything else) can also sign up for the interest list at Wikipedia:Campus Ambassadors.--Sage Ross - Online Facilitator, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 13:45, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

Version history as books

Additional links, courtesy of TheDJ:

Audio from dConstruct talk

slides from presentation

Regards, HaeB (talk) 18:34, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Share this floater

The "share this" floating thing on the RHS is quite annoying, as it overlaps the text on my screen (1024x600), making the articles unreadable. Can someone move/disable it? User A1 (talk) 23:22, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

See Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost#Sharing tools. -- Jeandré, 2010-09-18t10:31z

News and notes: Page-edit stats, French National Library partnership, Mass page blanking, Jimbo on Pending changes (34,304 bytes · 💬)

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Pending changes

• Wales has been one of the most outspoken cheerleaders for Pending Changes (or whatever it's being called at the moment), it is impossible for him to act as a neutral mouthpiece for the community in this matter. His dismissive comments on his talk-page about the need for consensus suggest that he would have found some way to turn the two-month trial into something more permanent whatever the numbers were. It's time the Foundation realised that Wales does not represent the community in any way. DuncanHill (talk) 19:38, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Duncan is completely wrong about that. I am not dismissive of community consensus at all. I think consensus is necessary to make this a permanent feature. I have at no time said or suggested in any way anything like what he is claiming. Full stop. 65% of the votes were in favor of it, and there was significant dissent requiring further attention before we can hold a final vote.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 02:46, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

You've previously been very dismissive of voting, and you yourself have said that 65% is not enough... it seems your principles change to suit the result you've always wanted. You were entirely the wrong person to interpret the poll to the Foundation. You've fiddled a two-month trial into an indefinite continuation of the changes you have been trying to impose for ages. DuncanHill (talk) 14:38, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

I strongly support that we vote on features like this, and I think that 65% is not enough to make it permanent. I have not fiddle a two-month trail into an indefinite continuation of changes, nor have I been trying to "impose" any changes at all, not now, and not "for ages". It would be best, Duncan, if you pay attention to the facts here, rather than simply making up things out of thin air.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:23, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

So why not ask for a vote specifically on continuing the trial? As for trying to impose PC, you kicked the whole thing off by announcing (on your talk page, instead of in any of the more proper fora, but then that's par for the course for you) that you were going to ask the Foundation (of which you are a trustee) to turn it on, without any attempt at the time to gain consensus. You have been the main driving force behind this proposal from the start, you cannot possibly act as an unbiased interpreter of a confusing and malformed poll. DuncanHill (talk) 15:32, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

DuncanHill should realise that that he does not represent the community in any way. Joy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.44.191.121 (talk) 01:18, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

I don't recall ever claiming that I did. DuncanHill (talk) 20:12, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, but you keep saying you care about consensus, and then you immediately say that the "65% support" means that there is consensus to keep it. Which isn't what I think consensus is about at all. Just because some users were in the minority doesn't mean they can be ignored. To quote myself from below, "there seems to be the idea here (and Jimbo seems to think it too) that there are two parties, and you have to end up upsetting one, so why not upset the smaller one? However, this is not how consensus should work. I think both "parties" need to be much more willing to compromise, so we can reach a solution which encompasses everybody's ideas." - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 05:31, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

But it is patent nonsense to ignore a substantial majority, is it not? Ronk01 talk 05:49, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

I'm not saying we should ignore what you claim is a majority, I'm simply saying that you shouldn't ignore what appears to be the minority, just on the basis that it's a minority. We need to try to address points raised by both both sides, rather than just making sure the majority is happy. I don't even know why we have sides in the first place, it would be easier to make sure everyone is listening to each other, if you didn't dump them into two different sections which just increases hostility/competition, rather than promoting discussion/co-operation. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 08:23, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

Not sure how you can argue that 65% isn't a majority, it might be 1% away from consensus, but it is a majority. Besides that, it is impossible to make any moves until later today, when the timetables fro release are posted. Ronk01 talk 16:36, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

• At this point, the best thing to do with PC (until the second straw poll) is to leave everything as it is, to turn it off would mean semi-protecting half a million articles, and thus making Wikipedia less accessible. Ronk01 talk 21:06, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Because the poll was biased... and as I said before, no single option was voted for by 50% of the voters, even allowing editors to vote for multiple options - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 16:40, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

Your analysis was shaky at best. It was decided that the support sections would be lumped into one option for simplicity. And before you say that there were editors who said that they would vote for option one over any option but theirs, I checked, and those votes, if moved to oppose, do little to affect the 65% majority that was established. Ronk01 talk 17:23, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes but the editors who we are actually looking at, are those who haven't stated their opinion on PC, and it's being assumed that they support it in any form. As I said way down below " it's apparently okay to assume that anybody in the support column thinks we should have PC in any form, despite some clearly stating that they preferred option 1 over some other options, but it's not okay to assume that they oppose the other options"? - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 21:18, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

Well the point of a vote is to determine the views of a cross section of a population, however, only fifty two thousandths of a percent of active Wikipedians cast !votes, all we can say is that of 52/1000 of a percent of active Wikipedians, 65% want PC in some form, and only 35% want it off in some form. We can not go around saying that there is no consensus for PC, since a tiny fraction of a fraction of a fraction voted! In reality, this resembles one of the petty content disputes that I mediate, not a logical discussion of a new feature that has not caused any major disturbances that were not fixed within seconds. We need more editors involved, and we need to have a community discussion, not a squabble among a few diehard advocates of their position. Ronk01 talk 23:17, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

• IMO, calling the 65/35% Support/Oppose statistic in favor of implementing pending changes is bullsh*t; that poll was clearly stacked in favor of the support camp since they had multiple options for support whereas the oppose camp had only one choice. Why no one wants to go back and actually tally the 'support on option x' figures is beyond me, but I would be willing to bet then when you look at those numbers no single option has more than 50% support, which poses a problem since any attempt to create unity by ignoring options will result in shift by the supporters in a neglected camp either a different camp, or to the oppose camp. Should the opposes then start to gain momentum its entirely possible that the opposition will end up outnumbering the support camp. Just an observation. TomStar81 (Talk) 02:56, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

It has been decided that a simple majority will be sufficient to keep PC running until PC 2.0 has been released, assuming tha tthe timetable for release is reasonable. Ronk01 talk 03:35, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Not when the poll is purposely designed to skew in favour of implementing pending changes. You may be able to fool some people, but not the rest of us. Plus, who says simple majority is consensus? Wikipedia doesn't work by going with simple majority votes. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 04:00, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

• That those who oppose PC seem to think that they can discount the opinion of 65% of people who weighted in I find a little strange. I thank Jimbo for stepping in and supporting the opinion of those in the majority.Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:54, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

I'm rather disgusted by the whole way pending changes is being implemented, the supporters seem to care only for the number of users in the support and oppose sections, and not what those users are actually saying. I think it's ignoring consensus and based only on numbers. Also, the "majority support" seems to get used as a justification for almost completely ignoring the opposes, despite it being clear that we don't use majority support at Wikipedia (take a look at AfD, RfA, RfB etc.). That pending changes wasn't turned of after the trial expired shows that the "people at the top" had already decided that this was here to stay, and Jimbo's "evaluation" reads more as a personal opinion then a proper representation of the community. Anyway, I did a bit of my own research into the poll, if we take every vote, and unless there is an explicit support for an option, we assume it's an oppose to that option (e.g. Support 2 and 4 = oppose 3). Then we get these results (bear in mind that this is something of an estimation, since, despite careful examination of the supports, I may have missed some explicit supports of other options. I won't vouch for this being completely accurate, and if you want to verify it you'll need to look at the poll yourself):

Total votes: 624
If option two is implemented:
Explicit supports: 117
Opposes: 507
If option three is implemented:
Explicit supports: 308
Opposes: 316
If option four is implemented:
Explicit supports: 162
Opposes: 462

I used a .NET C# program to store the data ("voter" class with four booleans for each option) anyone who would like to use it just ask me, and I can try to format it for you. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 09:03, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Firstly your "count" is an extremely biased example of why individuals with a strong POV should never count votes. (Look what happened in Florida in 2000)I would remind you that the straw poll has been reinterpreted as a decision to keep PC running until a second straw poll which would be a simple yes or no vote over whether to keep PC turned on until PC 2.0 is released. Ronk01 talk 14:01, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Erm... care to explain how a simple count can be biased? All I'm trying to show is that no single option at the straw poll got >50% support, so simply claiming a majority is in support is misleading. Also, I don't see how this poll could be interpreted as a decision to keep PC running until a second trial, since it didn't even have the option of turning it off until a second trial is organised. Maybe because there is a false belief among the supporters of PC that the opposition only want PC turned off completely, never to return, and are unwilling to compromise? When in truth plenty of people want it turned off for now, while problems are fixed, and then on again once it actually works - Kingpin¹³ (talk)

I knew it: independent of the true total no option did have 50% support. For my part I would demand an rfc on the outcome and a recount so we can get an actual, factual read out of the PC system rather than an a rigged poll. TomStar81 (Talk) 16:17, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

What has me concerned -- & is pushing me towards opposing pending changes entirely -- is that no one in favor of leaving PC on has provided a convincing reasoning -- or frankly, any reasoning -- for implementing it. We're not talking hands here; supposedly consensus on Wikipedia is not determined by number of votes. What we're talking about here are persuasive arguments for or against making changes. About the only analysis of this experiment that has been done is Wikipedia:Pending changes/Metrics/Preliminary Analysis, whose primary point -- whether intended or not -- is that no one who started this test had any idea of how to evaluate it as a success or failure. Providing a rationale for the change would make it easier for those of us -- like me, until now -- who have no strong opinion on the matter to accept the change, instead of suspecting this to be little more than a public relations stunt which will not benefit Wikipedia in the long run. -- llywrch (talk) 20:25, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

What needs to be considered is the fact that all of the individuals who voted for the keep options want PC kept, while they might not agree on exactly what form, they do agree that it needs to stay. Unfortunately, the vote came very, very close to 2/3, which means that either a significant majority gets angry, or a minority gets angry. PC was released too early, it has flaws. But flaws can be fixed (in fact take a look at this.) PC was meant to change the way we protect articles in such a manner that Wikipedia is more open to IP contributors, and to protect minor articles (like low traffic BLPs) that IP's make major contributions to, and are thus unsuitable for Semi-protection. Two months was not a long enough period to test PC, thus the lack of and conclusive research, the time period simply was not statistically significant. Reviewers had to learn how to use PC, Admins needed to learn which pages PC worked on, thus the initial troubles (along with the technical problems that PC 2.0 should fix). PC is a tool, that like semi-protection can be used to protect pages, but it doesn't stop IPs from editing like semi-protection does. Remember, IP's make 20% of Good Faith edits, and only 30% of all IP edits are vandalism. To address problems with the poll itself, the polling period was far too short, more editors needed to be involved, because with the way it was, only editors who care one way or another about PC voted (with several exceptions). That is not an acceptable way to poll, neutral editors are needed to ensure that the interests of all Wikipedians are represented. Of course, Straw polls do not establish consensus, but how do we have a discussion between thousands of editors? Ronk01 talk 21:53, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

That's easy: we open an rfc and let the community speak for itself. As to your conjecture that the PC trial came too soon, I agree. It should have been implemented with strict parameters and on predetermined articles to see how things would work. Releasing this to us in its current form was like asking us to understand and apply a concept that has no form or function. How were we supposed to do that. Moreover, the results on individual level are striking: no single PC option on support has a majority. I am not for pending changes, I admit that, but in the interest of fairness I will point out that for this to work on here in any capacity we need to disable pending changes, sit down, have a long conversation with the community about what went right and what went wrong, tweak the PC option, then conduct another trial on a controlled group of articles to see if the improved version of PC if properly applied would actually help the articles it was being applied to. For the time being, and RFC would help with sit down and have a long conversation with the community part of my plan outlined above. If nothing else, it would be a sign of good faith between disagreeing parties here. TomStar81 (Talk) 03:42, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

Ronk01, keep in mind that there is an even larger group whose opinion needs to be considered: the rest of the Wikipedia community who did not vote. While it would be simple to dismiss them for being "apathetic", I believe many of them are, in fact, interested but hanging back to see just how this process will end. If it appears that the process was rigged & Pending changes would be adopted, willy-nilly, then they will be very angry -- & there are far more of them than participated in this "straw vote" for or against it. It appeared that everyone involved was moving towards a do-over of this step of the process (it would not be hard to do better than a "straw poll" with four competing options), until Wales' impudent claim that everyone was for Pending changes -- well, everyone whose opinion matters to him. He obviously wants it, whether or not it works. Or whether anyone understands how to use it. -- llywrch (talk) 05:49, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

Also in reply to Ronk01 ;). Not all the people in the support column supported PC in any form, many specifically stated they preferred option 1 over some of the other options. Also, there seems to be the idea here (and Jimbo seems to think it too) that there are two parties, and you have to end up upsetting one, so why not upset the smaller one? However, this is not how consensus should work. I think both "parties" need to be much more willing to compromise, so we can reach a solution which encompasses everybody's ideas. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 07:51, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

I agree that an RFC is needed, along with a drive to get more community participation. I would however contend that, like any debate of this size, there are users who are absolutely unwilling to compromise on PC, on both sides. Ronk01 talk 15:10, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

I find it very depressing to see that PC is going to be continued despite what seems to be no consensus for it to continue at the current time. My rationale for not supporting its continuation was its rather broken state-- I felt that the interface was confusing, and it didn't do what it set out to do (let IPs edit high traffic articles). I feverishly object to this being forced down on us, and I'd welcome an RfC which didn't have a flawed straw poll method to it. Nomader ^(Talk) 07:14, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

The topic was also discussed in yesterday's IRC office hours with Sue Gardner, where she suggested holding another office hour specifically about Pending Changes. Regards, HaeB (talk) 08:56, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

I haven't seen a single attempt at compromise other than "Shut it down, RAWR!". Any of the folks opposed to PC want to suggest an actual compromise (instead of repeating their desire to trample the wishes of the significant majority)? BigK HeX (talk) 11:43, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

That's rich. A poll is set up and the only option for people who don't like PC is "shut it down completely", then you complain about users opposing it only saying they want it shut down? If you'd actually take a look through the poll you'd see that opposes have still managed to voice some of the problems they have with PC anyway, for example, it's slow, complicated for new comers, has poor review guidelines etc., all of which are things which could be fixed, and are all things the majority of the supporters would seem to support fixing as well. Sure, there are some editors who are opposed to it on principal, and that wouldn't be "fixable" as such. But the bulk of the opposition (including some opposed to it in principal) are not saying "Shut it down, RAWR!", and I don't think you should be representing the opposition like that, when many of them have given valid reasons for opposing. I also think that while we reach a compromise and improve PC, it should not be used in articles. This whole PC thing seems to have been a headlong charge, without actually stopping to think. There has been no proper centralised discussion on it, the trial was implemented through a poll (<not consensus), then kept in because the devs then decide to tell us they can't take it out, another arguably rigged poll is then used as justification to keep it in (again not consensus, and gives the impression this is a competition, and since the supporters have "won", the opposition is not important). I think by turning it off, and spending some time reviewing, will make the opposition feel like they're not being ignored for once. Also, you claim a majority are in support of PC, and yet out of all the users who voted on this poll, no single option was voted for by more than 50% of them, again showing that this poll was bias. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 12:11, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

So ... you are here pretty strongly requesting PC to be shut down, and you're also objecting to my characterization of the opposition's demands to "Shut it down RAWR"....?

Also, "no single option was voted for by more than 50% of them, again showing that this poll was bias"

Yes there was an option with majority support... that being the option of "keep PC in some fashion" received 65% support. Using the breakout of support levels against supporters is asanine, as it is almost certain that most of the people supporting one of the options would find other "Support" options acceptable, even if their preference was for one. I can personally attest to that being the case for me. I, personally, noted my support for what I believed to be most appealing option, since it was pretty clear that Supports and Opposes would be grouped, as any other interpretation of the poll would be nonsensical, given that a simple 2-option poll was the obvious alternative. BigK HeX (talk) 12:17, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply, to respond to some of your points. I don't think I'm strongly requesting that PC be shut down here, I'm requesting that in a two month trial, the trial is ended after two months, yes. I also believe I'm displaying reasons as to why I think this, not just saying "Shut it down RAWR" (which implies I don't care about trying to reason, and just have my own opinion and don't care to discuss it, clearly (I hope) not true).
Okay, it's not my fault that this poll was poorly set up. You want to count it up assuming that anyone supporting option 2, 3 or 4, also supports the other options. I have counted it up as assuming that they don't (although I've also actually READ through the poll, to see if users have explicitly stated they also support the other options. Something which you have not, as if you had you would see that some users have also explicitly stated they are opposed to the other options). I'm not saying that I think that my count should be used as the final tally, I'm just trying to show that we shouldn't have a messed up poll (like this one) and then ASSUME that people are in support of certain options. Because the problem with assuming is that you can assume either way (as I have shown). I've tried to make it very clear how I counted up the supports/opposes for each separate option, something which has not been made clear for the final tally. I think there is a bit of a "blindfold" being pulled in front of the eyes of the community here, and I'm just trying to present a bit more data, a bit more clearly. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 12:42, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

I reviewed the poll discussion in-depth. From my review, the overwhelming support for PC is clear, even despite your .... interesting view on the segregated results. As for the "end of the trial" ... we had a two-month trial, and found significant support for PC in some fashion. The trial of PC has been extended on that strong support. Seems pretty reasonable. Jimbo asked multiple times for examples which would indicate that retaining PC-protection is causing problems on some article or another. I don't believe there was ever a direct response to that. If there's insignificant evidence of PC causing problems, then it seems pretty respectful of the strong support for PC to extend the trial. I've asked many, many, many times for compromise proposals from opposers, and just about every single response I got was based on "shut it down". Seems like we could be far more focused on specific problems.... BigK HeX (talk) 13:22, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

If you would post your review maybe we could examine it, rather than listening to you repeatedly claiming that there is overwhelming support for PC, without any evidence. Yes, I think it's very interesting too, that it's apparently okay to assume that anybody in the support column thinks we should have PC in any form, despite some clearly stating that they preferred option 1 over some other options, but it's not okay to assume that they oppose the other options (even after I read through the entire support column and made sure I wasn't counting anyone who explicitly stated they supported the other options too), I'm glad you agree. The original trial was a two-month trial, it was made clear it would be switched off after two months to allow for review, not that there would be a poll to extend it. This is a POLL, I think it's sad that one of the biggest technical changes to the way Wikipedia works in possible the last couple of years, is being rushed through with a poll. You can't judge community support like that, and the trial shouldn't be extended based on that. Especially when that poll is rigged to show a larger support for PC then there actually is. I just gave you three specific reasons PC is harmful, picked out from the comments at the poll, displaying large problems with PC, and yet you seem to have suddenly gone deaf, and still insist that everybody's response is "based on 'shut it down'" and I'm not focused on specific issues? Try actually responding to me message please (see message at 12:11). - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 14:13, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

It's a bit odd that you believe people "have suddenly gone deaf", when your responses didn't seem very relevant to my actual statements.

I said, "Jimbo asked multiple times for examples which would indicate that retaining PC-protection is causing problems on some article"

To which you referenced your comment that, "it's slow, complicated for new comers, has poor review guidelines". NONE of these points us to an article where we can find and view for ourselves indications of these problems. Moreover, it's been beaten to death that Pending Change is FAR SUPERIOR to the {{editprotected}} process that newcomers are forced to endure when the lack of PC-protection forces admins to use Page Protection.

Also, I said, "I've asked many, many, many times for compromise proposals from opposers, and just about every single response I got was based on "shut it down""

And your response was that you gave a lot of rationales for shutting it down ... which only affirms my statement that all of the opposers keep proposing that we shut it down. Certainly there have been rationales given for shutting it down, but regardless of the rationales, the proposal has invariably been to shut it down. Do opposers not see any other routes???? BigK HeX (talk) 14:48, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

What I gave were specific problems with PC on the whole, which were causing problems on ALL the aritcles where it has been implemented. I beleive the Barack Obama article had a few problems with PC, since you want an article. At least some of the opposes seem to think that {{editprotected}} is a better system. My responses where, as I pointed out earlier, "all [...] things which could be fixed", not neccasairly reasons for shutting pending changes down. Again, as I said earlier, the opposition were not given any option except from to support the proposal to shut it down, due to the poor poll - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 15:00, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

Well ... the poll clearly had its problems. However, "shut it down" is the proposed move that I get even outside of the poll. I'm still interested to see whether any of the opposers have any other possibilities in mind. I came to this thread hoping that this would be a possible place to find such alternatives. BigK HeX (talk) 15:22, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

page blanking bot

Hi, I'm involved in that cleanup project and some of the statistics in the Signpost summary got mixed up. The correct picture seems to be:

• Darius did about 163k edits but a lot of them were minor
• Darius created slightly under 10,000 articles
• Darius made significant (non-minor) edits to about 23,000 articles including the 10,000 described above
• Darius made edits (minor or otherwise) to a total of about 40,000 articles
• Almost all the articles were about athletes or athletic events
• A lot of the articles don't seem to be copyright problems because they contain very little text (in some cases none at all), just lists of names and events and other such statistics. Darius wasn't big on writing prose, but he was quite skillful at table formatting, so many of his articles were in pure tabular form.
• The bot's initial run will blank only the 10,000 articles Darius created. A subsequent run to get the other 13,000 of the significantly edited articles will take more complex programming and is still under discussion. The remaining 17,000 won't be affected unless something changes.
• Manual review of some the affected articles indicate that about 10% (depending on who you ask) of the articles contain copyvio text, not 10% of Darius's total edits. It's not clear if that's based on only the 10k created (which would mean about 1000 vios), or 23k significantly edited (which would mean around 2300 vios). I don't think anyone expects the minor edits to contain vios, but checking this stuff is still a work in progress.

The main info/discussion page is Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents/CCI though it is getting sort of unwieldy and maybe it should be digested/reorganized.

User:Moonriddengirl and User:Uncle G are the main principals in this, more or less.

75.62.4.206 (talk) 23:25, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

This could be a problem for many other projects, too. Many smaller projects just copy/translate articles from the English WP, without checking for copyvios (or errors). So the copyvios could have already been copied to dozens of other projects. But unlike the German Wikipedia, those projects don't import the version histories of translated articles, so there's no easy way to find these articles. --Kam Solusar (talk) 13:05, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

A few post publication corrections are in order: thanks. ResMar 17:39, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

Public Policy Initiative: Experiments with article assessment (10,449 bytes · 💬)

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Discuss this story

• An interesting project. One immediate concern is that articles might be rated on how individual readers feel about the subject of the article, rather than the quality of its content. Jezhotwells (talk) 19:54, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

• While certainly better than the current rating system of... peer review, I personally don't think it can stand the test of time in the sense that articles can change quickly as new information becomes available or, say, if a single Wikipedian decides to take matters into his own hands. I'm not very sure how well an automated system would work well for this task, most of all. But this will be a Wikipedia-wide (yet optional, although this wasn't clarified on too much) switchover, and we will all stumble upon it at some point. My biggest question is: Is this update for the US only? --Γιάννης Α. ^✆|☑ 20:03, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

If you're referring to the Reader Assessment Tool, it's not automated; it presents aggregate scores based on all the ratings that individual users have done. As for the test of time, that's definitely a big challenge, figuring out how to deal with stale ratings. For the time being, I think the developers are things like a time-based half-life for ratings or a number-of-intervening-edits based half-life for ratings. It might be possible down the line to do better with a tool that compares how much of the current text is present in earlier rated versions to determine how much weight old ratings get. This will not be Wikipedia-wide at this point, it will only be available for articles in WikiProject United States Public Policy. This is basically a technology test and a conversation starter, at this point. But it will definitely be available to whichever wikis want it once the technology stabilizes.--Sage Ross - Online Faciliator, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 21:08, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

• On controversial articles someone will try to game this system but better they waste their time trying to game the article assessment than trying to game the article content. When 4Chan gets Goatse rated as the best article on Wikipedia we can all have a chuckle but it won't have any other effect. This tool looks like it might be useful for other sorts of automated polling of readers. We could add questions on age, income, education level, language fluency to the quiz and get some correllation going. Different readers could be asked different questions so the questionnaire doesn't get too long. When you start asking that level of detailed question however the question on anonymity comes up. Does this tool record the IP of each respondent?filceolaire (talk) 21:25, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

• I think the rating scale is indeed better in the aspects mentioned in the text, but I would suggest it to be simplified with a 5-point scale for each measure. That would make it more intuitive (worst-bad-average-good-best), it would relate directly to the star rating from the Article Feedback Tool, and the template could still calculate the overall score by giving different weights to each measure. As it is right now, in includes the same kind of learning curve than the 1.0 system (note how both can be partially solved with the use of html comments, but fail on their absence). --Waldir ^talk 11:37, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, it's a tough needle to thread. A 5-point scale for each factor has two downsides: there aren't enough points to differentiate between every class for comprehensiveness (Stub, Start, C, B, GA, and A/FA all have different requirements for that), and it risks implying that every factor is equally important. But I agree with the advantages you point out. Whether they outweigh the downsides, I'm not sure. Personally, I hope the Article Feedback Tool will evolve in a more reader-oriented direction, because I don't think readers think about article quality in the same terms as editors. For Article Feedback Tool, I'd like to see something like a single 5-star rating for the whole article, then a question like "Did you find the information you were looking for? [yes, some, no]" and an input box to leave comments.--Sage Ross - Online Faciliator, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 12:46, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

I thought the 1.0 correspondence was given by a weighted average of all the components, not only from the comprehensiveness scale. In that sense, I don't see why a 5-point scale invalidates the inference of the 1.0 rating, but I probably am interpreting the conversion the wrong way. As for the implication that all factors are equally important, that imo doesn't sound as much of a problem. And even if it did that, I don't see how it would affect the assessment. --Waldir ^talk 19:38, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

I don't think it makes sense to have a complicated system of assessment. An editor who is experienced in an area can eyeball an article and tell you whether it is Start, or C or B. As someone said above, every article is a moving target anyway, so why worry so much about assessements. So what if a C-class article gets grade-inflated to B: It still needs careful work to be ready for GA. IMO, editors spending all this time on assessment ought to be researching and writing instead. -- Ssilvers (talk) 21:15, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

I agree; there's no point in devising an assessment system so complicated that it takes significant time away from editing. Especially since we don't really know how much article assessment helps towards article improvement. Lampman (talk) 04:43, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

Of course, writing is a more important task than assessing. But effort and activity on Wikipedia is not very fungible; different people put their energy into different things, and we can't just transfer that energy from one area to another (for the most part). More detailed assessments (especially optional ones like this, where the simpler version is always an option) provide an opportunity to a) give a more accurate indication of an article's quality, which is important for things like creating offline versions and b) give editors a more specific indication of how an article can be improved.

In this case, we also need to do measurements of article quality as part of the requirements of the Public Policy Initiative grant, which Amy Roth determined would be impractical without a more quantifiable assessment system.--Sage Ross - Online Facilitator, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 14:48, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

What I like to do with assessments is to leave a list of suggestions for improvement on the talk page, like I did today at Talk:Kerry Ellis. -- Ssilvers (talk) 05:22, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

I agree with the comment above, that it won't prevent Wikipedia:Gaming the system. But it might ease tension a bit in cases where determined POV pushers repeately delete the "NPOV dispute" tag from articles which they are censoring or otherwise distorting.

It will work best on articles which aren't the target of edit wars. --Uncle Ed (talk) 20:03, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

• I really like the idea of "group-sourcing" the quality of an article with this mechanism. If I may, there does need to be some sort of counter n = X which shows how many votes have been received to generate the ratings... 20,000 responses means more than 2 responses that way. There also needs to be some protection against "revoting," which will inevitably happen in contentious articles as a sort of plebiscite on whether the reader approves of the content... Still, this is a really good step and I hope there comes a day in the not too distant future when all Wikipedia articles have a sort of "group-sourced" feedback section. Carrite (talk) 16:27, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

I just thought of a problem. Wikipedia articles generally start small and weak and get bigger and better over time. Yet an article can accumulate ratings for years in its small, weak state — then be improved — and still be saddled with obsolete "old" ratings. There needs to be some sort of a reset mechanism for massively expanded articles or some sort of automatic elimination of ratings more than, let's say, a year old to keep the ratings more or less as fresh as the article. Carrite (talk) 16:31, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

Yep. That's one of the big challenges that the developers are thinking about, how to deal with stale ratings. Hopefully, once people get some experience with how the ratings work during this pilot, we can come up with some ideas for dealing with that problem effectively.--Sage Ross - Online Facilitator, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 16:36, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

Without considering technical matters, it's pretty easy to know when an article has mostly likely moved out of stub or start status, simply by looking at length and number of footnotes. A 1000+ word article with 5+ footnotes can't possibly be a stub; a 1500+ word article with 10+ footnotes is almost certainly "C" class (or better) rather than "start class". I'm not arguing here for machine-grading; rather. Rather, it seems clear that it's easy for a computer to determine that a specific, older rating should be discarded because an article has changed sufficiently since that particular rating was done. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:31, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

Sister projects: Biography bloopers – update on the Death Anomalies collaboration (5,618 bytes · 💬)

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• Am I the only one who has a problem with the title? "Biography bloopers", to me, is a very informal phrase that implies humor and lightheartedness when the opposite is the case. I'm sure I'm not the only one who associates the term "blooper" with an amusing error that happens in film-making. Determining whether an individual is dead or not is anything but amusing -- it is of the most serious of tasks on this site, and should be treated as such. The title does not effectively express the solemnity of the tasks or subject matter; in my opinion, WereSpielChequers the author clearly was trying to force a humorous title where one does not belong. "Update on the Death Anomalies collaboration" would be a perfectly fine title on its own. Xenon54 (talk) 21:14, 13 September 2010 (UTC)
• If you don't like the title, then change it.--Rockfang (talk) 21:27, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Although WereSpielChequers is the principal author of the article, it has been edited by many others, and that part of the title was not added by him. Regards, HaeB (talk) 21:55, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

I was unaware that Signpost worked like that. I was under the impression that one person wrote each article, unless multiple people are credited (which is sometimes the case). It's quite a misleading byline, although I should have known better and checked the history. Xenon54 (talk) 22:00, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Well, normally we avoid making significant changes after publication. The subtitle has already been copied to other places where it can't be changed (e.g. [1]), so one has to decide whether removing this concern is worth the inconsistencies. Regards, HaeB (talk) 22:48, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

I disliked the Bloopers title, not the tone I wanted and I'm glad it is now closer to my original suggestion. But as this was in the nature of a press release from me to the Signpost I have been trying to restrict my subsequent editing of it to factual corrections and accept anything stylistic as the "ruthless editing" which the Signpost is entitled to do. ϢereSpielChequers 00:47, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

If you didn't like it, why didn't you change it before publication? Tony (talk) 03:23, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Maybe he assumed that if he simply got something into a readable form, another Wikipedian would help him to express his idea with helpful edits -- which is the original intent of Wikipedia:Ignore all rules -- rather than simply commenting snarkily in response to his confessed dissatisfaction over his original wording. -- llywrch (talk) 20:41, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

I actually don't like bloopers either... :( ResMar 01:00, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

My original title was Death anomalies - the power of Signpost, I wasn't dissatisfied with my original, afterall the core of this story was thanking the readers of Signpost for resolving most of the outstanding anomalies. But I do recognise I've got a COI with an article on a project I started, so I've tried to stand back and let the Signpost crew do what they will with my submission. I think if I write another article and some changes happen that I'm not too keen on I'll ask the other Signpost contributor to add their name to the byline - that way no-one will assume that I'm responsible for part of an article that I didn't write or agree with. ϢereSpielChequers 23:43, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

Number of languages

Merlissimo has added another 8 languages this week, so that makes nearly 80 projects which are compared for anomalies, though currently only 5 are extracting reports. There are bound to be more anomalies emerging as more projects extract data or have data extracted from them, I also suspect that more anomalies will emerge as projects improve their categorisation - some projects have a lot of under-categorised articles. ϢereSpielChequers 12:19, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

WikiProject report: Getting the picture – an interview with the Graphic lab (1,964 bytes · 💬)

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An atypically interesting and useful WikiProject report, thanks Rock drum. Skomorokh 18:56, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Fascinating project with great results; I particularly like the before/after pictures. -Reagle (talk) 12:04, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

I would like to know, if 3D models will be ever used on Wikipedia. See for example Talk:PRC (file format). --Snek01 (talk) 12:29, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

PDF files are allowed and supported. And since PRC files can be embedded in PDFs then they are usable. Why don't you upload a sample on Commons? If the thumbnail is rendered correctly then there's no reason not to use such files. -- Orionist ★ talk 07:10, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for all your comments guys, I really appreciate them. :) Rock drum _Ba-dum^Crash _{(Driving well?)} 16:05, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, useful information. --Extra 999 (Contact ^me + _contribs) 01:03, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

I'm a little disappointed no maps that the graphic lab worked on were showcased in this article. --Golbez (talk) 16:00, 15 September 2010 (UTC)