WikiEN-l December 2005

wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org

192 participants
299 discussions

Digital Universe
by Justin Cormack 25 Dec '05

25 Dec '05

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/19/sanger_onlinepedia_with_experts/ Anyone know any more about this? No mention of licensing terms I see on www.digitaluniverse.net Justinc

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Re: [WikiEN-l] The George W. Bush article: is this still a wiki?
by Brian 25 Dec '05

25 Dec '05

I think this problem has been thoroughly discussed on the article's talk page, and the evidence clearly shows that this variable drastically cuts down on the number of random vandalisms. Please leave your complaints on the talk page rather than fishing for support on the mailing list. Oh, and I am that idiot. :) brian0918 ------ Is this still a wiki, or do we have a policy of hindering edits on certain articles? The George W. Bush article is rather large, about 95 kilobytes, but fortunately like most of our larger articles it's divided into many smaller sections which can be edited individually. Except they can't. Someone has *deliberately* inserted a "noeditsection" directive into this article, and all suggestions that this hinders editing are resisted, on the grounds that, as well as hindering legitimate edits, it hinders vandalism. I'm in a bit of a spitting fury over this. It seems to be the silliest situation. If I want to correct a spelling error, I should not be hindered in doing so by the action of some well-meaning idiot.

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A simple vandalism analysis tool
by Tony Sidaway 25 Dec '05

25 Dec '05

My vandalism analysis tool, which uses a simple but powerful methodology developed by Brian0918, analyses edit summaries on articles to spot probable vandalism reverts by recognising the summary patterns of standard rollbacks, and edits labelled "rvv", "rv v" or "rvc". It was developed for English Wikipedia but probably has applications beyond that, and the methods developed here have obvious utility beyond the recognition and reporting of vandalism. You can visit it here: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~tony_sidaway/ Please try to break it, and tell me what happened. There is a link to a discussion page for that purpose. The rationale is that, while vandalism is difficult to recognise electronically, a pretty easy and reasonably reliable way to track vandalism on a popular wiki article is to examine edit summaries and count the proportion of them that indicate that the editors apparently believed themselves to be reverting vandalism. A highly experimental adaptation of this script to recognise (only) rollbacks on the German Wikipedia is here: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~tony_sidaway/cgi-bin/vandalismus.cgi The text of the latter CGI script is currently in English, although it is analyzing German text. As I know nothing about internationalization I have no idea whether it will always perform correctly if UTF-8 multibyte characters (such as o-umlaut) are entered. This simple test seems to suggest that it does work: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~tony_sidaway/cgi-bin/vandalismus.cgi?article=Köln Wikipedia is an international project and I welcome any and all testing input on this. Presently I don't know of any edit summary patterns that non-administrators on the German Wikipedia use to indicate that they're reverting what we on English Wikipedia would recognise as simple vandalism--as I'm unfamiliar with their practises I'm not even certain that they draw the same distinctions that we do on English Wikipedia between intentional and overt disruptive edits (simple vandalism) and more subtle vandalism or trolling. Any help on this that German speakers can offer would be most welcome. Although I address the German Wikipedia prominently because its community is highly advanced and well organized, its content comparable to that of the English Wikipedia, and (not least) Deutsche Wikipedia hosts the tool server, I would also love to produce useful tools for as many languages as possible--the skills I learn can be put to use in tools of more general use than the current one. The scripts I write can easily be internationalized. I cannot write good German (whenever I try, native German speakers beg me to stop!) but I can write good French and reasonable Spanish. I am particularly interested in Chinese, Indian languages, and Russian.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] A newbie on article prefill templating
by David Gerard 24 Dec '05

24 Dec '05

Matt Brown wrote: >On 12/20/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote: >> Same template, *on* by default. This is for newbies. Note this was a >> logged-in editor. >Since only logged in editors can currently create articles anyway ... I'd really really like anon page creation switched back on. (a) A prefilled template would give guidance to editors of goodwill; (b) editors of bad will are just creating accounts to write rubbish with anyway. - d.

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Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Larvatus [rape allegations)
by sydney poore 23 Dec '05

23 Dec '05

Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Larvatus This Rfc is a serious one. It involves child rape allegations, a US civil legal case, CEOs of international corporations, and a famous German band. It needs input from a broad range of Wikipedians. Before I removed the crime categories and POV content several weeks ago, I looked at Larvtus's blogs, the cited CA court cases on line, and Larvatus's entries on other websites. Content and categories were replaced and I was scolded (my perception). I didn't start the Rfc but I signed the request to acknowledge my attempts to modify the pages in dispute. I've asked Larvtus to step back and let the community decide how to write theses articles. I'm willing to step aside and let other Wikipedians make the decision, in fact I would prefer it.--Sydney Poore Go Bengals!

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Defamatory Biographies - another problem looming for Wikipedia?
by Keith Old 23 Dec '05

23 Dec '05

We have a real problem with unsourced defamatory biographies. This morning, while working on the Help desk, I responded to a letter from Lucianne Goldberg, who wrote seeking a deletion or correction to what she considered to be two highly offensive paragraphs in her biography. I looked at the article and saw that there were severe problems with some of the material in it. I have edited the article and sourced it as well as replying to her attaching a copy of the article as rewritten by me. I am awaiting her advice as to the specific information that was of concern to her. Once I have the specifics, I will advise further on the matter. However, the matter that I believe likely to be of most concern was in the original version of the article and has survived for nearly two months with multiple edits. There were no sources provided for the allegation. Frankly, this problem has the potential to be another big problem with Wikipedia. We need to pay particular attention to the biographies of contemporary biographies especially of controversial figures. In particular, we need to ensure that our articles are scrupulous in citing sources. We need to give instructions to recent changes patrollers to be on the lookout for biographies making negative claims without proper sourcing. Regards Keith Old Keith Old

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Verbose results from the Britannica vs. Wikipedia paper on nature.com
by Mathias Schindler 23 Dec '05

23 Dec '05

Hi, on http://fftw.org/~stevenj/Nature-reviews.doc, there is now a Microsoft Word document describing the "errors" (in a broader sense) found by the reviewing persons. With this list, it is now much easier to deal with these articles. Note that the kind of "error" varies from minor factual errors (wrong year) to some kind of overall criticism (wrong proportions for competing theories). However, it should be possible to bring the number of "errors" in those 42 articles down to a much lower number (...and we can introduce brand new ones, yeah!). Thanks for helping out. The folks at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_peer_review/Nature_December… will be thankful for your efforts in this matter. At de.wikipedia, I am preparing an FAQ about this review, you might want to join or do something in your own language. There was way too much misinterpretation done by the press (mostly "in favour" of wikipedia, which is not a good thing). Mathias

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Verbose results from the Britannica vs. Wikipedia paper on nature.com
by Daniel R. Tobias 23 Dec '05

23 Dec '05

On 22 Dec 2005 at 19:18, Mathias Schindler <neubau(a)presroi.de> wrote: > on http://fftw.org/~stevenj/Nature-reviews.doc, there is now a Microsoft > Word document describing the "errors" (in a broader sense) found by the > reviewing persons. Yuck... proprietary Microsoft formats suck. Why couldn't this have been done in a more standard, less proprietary form like ASCII or HTML? -- == Dan == Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/ Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/ Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/

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User:DrKinsey and associated IP address wrongly blocked
by Dr Leopold Hartenschwanz 23 Dec '05

23 Dec '05

Sirs, If an administrator coulod help me I would appreciate it. User:Curps has blocked my User:DrKinsey user account on the incorrect basis that I have been vandalising articles and creating user accounts with insulting things about him in the username. You will find details of how this situation arose on User:Curps talk page. I would appreciate it if somebody with the technical know-how could prove to User:Curps that he has made a mistake. I am not receiving messages from the mailing list, so please email me directly at hartenschwanz(a)fastmail.fm Regards, User:DrKinsey -- Dr Leopold Hartenschwanz hartenschwanz(a)fastmail.fm -- http://www.fastmail.fm - Does exactly what it says on the tin

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References in articles (was A newbie on article prefill templating).
by Jack 23 Dec '05

23 Dec '05

> to get through FAC > these days, you need the metric shitload of references. A lot of people > seem to put them <small>, which helps the less-interested eye gloss over > them reading the article. > -- David Gerard Would <http://tinyurl.com/9gaga> (Wikipedia:WikiProject Fact and Reference Check#Separate "Sources" namespace or subpage) not be better if the requirement for the number of references increase? -- User:Jeandré

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WikiEN-l December 2005