There is currently an RFC in progress regarding proposed reforms to the
[[Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion]] policy. The discussion is about
reforming the prescriptive language of the policy to bring it into line with
fundamental Wikipedia principles and policies such as [[WP:NOT#BUREAUCRACY]]
and [[WP:POLICY]]. All editors are welcome to add statements and participate
in the discussion at
[[Wikipedia_talk:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion/Simplify_policy_RfC]].
Cheers,
Ryan
Hi All!
Thanks for all of the feedback, comments, and support. I just wanted to
let you know that our full report (including highlight videos!!) is now
up our the Usability Initiative's project wiki:
http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/UX_and_Usability_Study
- The Usability Team
Parul Vora wrote:
> Hi all!
>
> The Wikipedia Usability Initiative conducted a user research study
> with SF based Bolt Peters in late March to uncover barriers new
> editors face. We are in the process of completing a full report on our
> methodology, process and analysis, but wanted to share with you some
> of the major themes and findings in the meantime....
>
>
> Some quotes from our participants that illustrate these findings:
>
> “Usually it’s the most information in the easiest spot to access. It
> always looks very well put together….it boggles my mind how many
> people can contribute and it still looks like an encyclopedia.” – ‘Galen’
>
> “I like Wikipedia because it’s plain text and nothing flashes” –
> ‘Claudia’
>
> “Rather than making a mess, I’d rather take some time to figure out
> how to do it right."
> (later) "There sure is a lot of stuff to read.” – ‘Dan’
>
> “ [I felt] kind of stupid.” – ‘Galen’
>
> “It’d be nice to have a GUI, so you could see what you’re editing.
> You’ve made these changes and you’re looking at it, and you don’t know
> how it’s going to look on the page. It’s a little clumsy to see how
> it’s going to look.” – ‘Bryan’
>
> “[This is] where I’d give up.” – ‘Shaun’
>
>
> Check out the full post on the foundation blog:
> http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/04/24/usability-study-results-sneak-preview/
>
>
>
> We would love to hear any initial thoughts, opinions, and reactions.
> If you have any similar or dissimilar experiences - either personally
> or in your own work/research, we'd love to hear about that too!
>
>
> Always on your side,
> The Usability Team
>
Where did that donkey kick a man?
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/politics_and_the_english_language Politics and
the English language] is an essay where George Orwell takes issue with how
little people know about what Democracy is. An essay says that wikipedia is
not a democracy. The rest of us want it to resemble whatever we hav come to
understand that Democracy is.
"If language can corrupt thought, then thought can also corrupt language."
At the end of the essay, he stated six rules for clear writing. Number four
says write in the active voice. It is easy to forget that rule, and once a
sentence is passive, someone might recognize it without knowing how to
activate it. The vast majority of sentences containing "by" are passive.
i.e. "The man was kicked by the donkey.". Another way to write it is "The
will of the donkey caused the man to be kicked". That breaks rule number
three.
Forms of "to be" are other flag-words for passive voice. If a sentence
introduces object before subject, then it is passive. In an active sentence,
you can read cause and effect. In a passive sentence, things are more
existential; things just happen, or they just are. "The man was kicked into
the barn." is a passive construction. "Someone or something kicked the man"
is active, even though it uses inspecific pronouns. Sometimes, finding the
right pronouns is all you need for activating a sentence.
A donkey kicked a man into the barn.
_______
Spammerz suk Uranus tiL they're fuL uv politiks.
Please see [[Wikipedia:Advertising discussions]], a proposal I've made
to formalise guidelines on where and how the largest discussions
should be advertised around Wikipedia to ensure sufficient input to
major discussions. Improvements to the page and input on the talk page
would be appreciated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Advertising_discussions
Carcharoth
Whilst Googling for some information, I've just come across this:
http://www.wajoop.com/James-Robertson-Justice
which is clearly a machine translation of our
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Robertson_Justice
I'm particularly fond of "The Blow of Blow of Chitty of Chitty" in the filmography.
I defy anyone to read it without laughing as it's just kept me in pleats for 20 minutes.
Cheers
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Brion Vibber <brion(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: 2009/5/19
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] flagged revisions
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Quick update:
* Yes, we do plan to roll out an English Wikipedia test setup for
Flagged Revs.
* There's not yet a fixed schedule for it, but I'd like to see it up and
running in production before Wikimania. :) [August]
* Right now we're running round tidying up general things, getting the
1.15 release set up, and prepping to get our live sites updated to
development trunk -- nice things are afoot like a total upgrade to the
preferences backend which Werdna has done, yay!
* As we get back up to speed, we'll want to coordinate w/ Aaron to
confirm that we've got a configuration planned and that it'll look good,
and get that test config on en.labs.wikimedia.org and test.wikipedia for
a while before we roll it to en.wikipedia.
I'd also like to see folks ponder a bit on the final terminology for
things -- we'd also like to roll out the Drafts extension (for saving
your in-progress edit page in the background so you can return to it if
you accidentally close it or your browser crashes), but Flagged Revs
also uses the 'draft' terminology sometimes. We want to make sure we're
not going to be looking too confusing having both of those things in the
system.
-- brion
El 5/12/09 5:20 PM, private musings escribió:
> Hi all,
>
> The 'flagged revisions' bug (
> https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18244 ) - has, by my reading
> been 'reopened' for 2 weeks now. Being as this is a reasonably big deal in
> the wiki scheme of things, I presume it's possible that matters are being
> discussed, or otherwise moved forward in some way, behind the scenes, but at
> this point, I thought it was probably worth making sure that this hasn't
> just been sort of forgotten.
>
> I think the enabling of flagged revisions on the english wikipedia is a very
> important, positive step for the project, and hope it might be acted upon in
> reasonably good order as a high priority.
>
> Apologies if such prodding is not a great fit on this list - don't mean to
> bug anyone (geddit?) ;-)
>
> cheers,
>
> Peter,
> PM.
>
>
>
> On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 3:55 PM, private musings<thepmaccount(a)gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> It seems to me that there's been sterling work on the 'flagged revisions'
>> front - with the bulk of the credit due to User:Cenarium over on en, and the
>> various folk working away over there.
>>
>> With that in mind, could I please encourage a dev.s attention to;
>>
>> https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18244
>>
>> Hopefully we can enable the extension as soon as possible :-)
>>
>> best,
>>
>> Peter,
>> PM.
>>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8047076.stm
Options include "Google Squared" which mines for identifiable and related
facts and presents them in a spreadsheet, Rich Snippets which gives useful
previews of results and Skymap - which (as a cell phone app) uses GPS to see
where you are and where you are pointing to identify stars and
constellations. Neat stuff. Wish we could integrate this sort of thing into
Wikipedia, half of it probably uses data mined from the projects anyway.
Nathan