>
> Indeed. Looking at this:
>
> http://www.floatingsheep.org/2009/11/mapping-wikipedia.html
>
> This is a similar mapping:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Imageworld-artphp3.png
I think there is a huge number of notable topics that we have not yet
covered. Sure, there may be fewer sources about central Africa, but
what about China and South America? The areas most Wikipedians care
about are well covered, so we don't notice the gaps. The meme that
Wikipedia is finished and we only need to add new things that become
notable is very dangerous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-07-06/Featur…
I couldn't help but notice:
* Five articles were promoted to featured status this week
* Four articles were delisted this week.
* Twelve lists were promoted to featured status this week
* Eight lists were delisted this week
What a lot of churn. So the overall rate was merely +1 FA, +4 FL (and
also 3 topics and three images).
Is it always this bad?
Steve
http://www.examiner.com/x-9052-Orlando-Roman-Catholic-Examiner~y2009m11d13-…
"The Vatican's official Facebook application -Pope2You- which allows
users to receive the latest messages and photos of Pope Benedict VXI,
as well as to send virtual postcards to friends is English, Spanish,
French, German and Italian. Whatever happened to Latin? The Vatican
has also launched a Youtube channel with videos of the Pontiff.
Google, who owns Youtube, is working in association with the Vatican
Television Center and Vatican Radio on this venture. In WikiCath, the
official Catholic wikipedia application, young people are invited to
connect with their Pope under the slogan of 'New technology, New
relationship.'
Let's read the Pope's Message together.
The Pope has written to young people in a special way in his
Message for the 43rd World Day of Communication.
The application WIKICATH lets us read the message in a new way,
interactive and hypertext, through a platform built in the WIKI style.
WIKICATH has the commentary to the Pope's Message and the deeper
key concepts contained in Benedict XVI's text.
WIKICATH can be a useful tool for the personal reading of the
Message and a supplement for the pastoral care in Christian
communities."
Alas. If only it were named 'CathWik'.
(#wikipedia notes with its signature low humor that in WikiCath, one
sees in the URLs not 'Page's but 'Pagina's.)
--
gwern
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Andrew Garrett <agarrett(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: 2009/11/16
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Downtime this morning
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi all,
There has been some downtime this morning (about 15 minutes) due to a
software update.
I pushed a software update, and immediately servers started crashing
according to nagios. Looking at ganglia, it looks like the issue was
the familiar issue where scap pushes a few 4-CPU apaches into swap,
which then crash and come back a few minutes later. This time,
however, obviously a key memcached node fell over, causing a database
overload, resulting in the site being mostly inaccessible for about
ten minutes.
I prepared to revert the software update, but determined that the
problem was not the software update, and a scap would exacerbate the
issue. The problem resolved itself spontaneously.
We need to fix things up so the scap script is less liable to push
machines into swap :)
--
Andrew Garrett
agarrett(a)wikimedia.org
http://werdn.us/
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
If anyone was contemplating participating in [[Wikipedia:Newbie
treatment at CSD]], please don't create any more new articles under
undisclosed new accounts, whilst we discuss concerns that some users
have raised that the damage to the new page patrol process may
outweigh the benefits.
WereSpielChequers
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:38:53 +1100
> From: Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] How friendly are we to Newbies? Update on the
> create an article as a newbie challenge
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <b8ceeef70910272238p654f1ebdsfe94b15ad6a6fe8b(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 4:55 AM, George Herbert
> <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>> I want to personally look at the articles and responses in more depth
>> before I comment more, but this has been exceptionally valuable
>> research.
>
> Yes, can you please post the usernames and the articles that were
> created? If some were speedied, do you have the original text?
> Obviously we shouldn't be having an "omg rampant speedyism" debate if
> the articles were actually speedyable...
>
> Steve
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
I have been a Wikipedian for five years. I am an administrator, I have
written tens of articles, created hundreds of pictures, and made tens
of thousands of edits. I love Wikipedia and all that it represents.
I find the current "WIKIPEDIA FOREVER" banner to be creepy. I don't
have good words to express it, but it does not feel the right way of
soliciting donations.
I would call upon the Wikipedians responsible for the banner to give
it a deep thought about what message they want to convey to the
millions of visitors to the site. Thank you.
I've noticed lately that the blurbs Google is generating for Wikipedia
articles not only no longer reflect the article intros (for a long
time they were putting out whatever tripe DMOZ had about the article)
but are now selectively quoting the most opinionated piece of
POV-tripe phrasing that exists in the article.
This seems to be most easily demonstrated with recent movie articles
where google inevitable quotes some loud-mouth reviewer as the blurb
for the article. For example:
http://www.google.com/search?q=the+box+movie+wikipedia
And it's so rare that a movie is an F. I mean, if it's an F, it
shouldn't even be released." On the topic of the negative reaction to
The Box, Mintz blamed.
http://www.google.com/search?q=District+9+movie+wikipedia
"Sara Vilkomerson of The New York Observer writes, "District 9 is the
most exciting science fiction movie to come along in ages; definitely
the most"
(at least that one attributes it, a lot of the ones I've seen just
seem to cut to the POV)
For a while I thought it was just extracting text beginning at
"Searchterm is something" looking backwards from the end of the
article, but it seems to be more than that. Some older examples where
I've seen this now seem to be returning different results, I don't
know if its a timing thing or just chance.
Anyone know how to influence google's blurb generation to get more
sensible results?
On Sat, 14 Nov 2009 15:54:47 -0800, Ryan Delaney wrote:
> All those servers and all that bandwidth isn't
> free.
But from what I can see of their budgets, not all that much of their
funds are going to that. The rest is going for stuff like
maintaining an office in a much more expensive city than the cheap
one they used to have in Florida.
--
== 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/
