Folks,
Would someone help me here? What is the current policy regarding linking
dates such as Birth and Death in biography articles?
Thanks,
Marc Riddell
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
This may have come up before so if there's a previous discussion on en
or here, please direct me to it.
Do we have an official stance on using primary sources like the US
census and the Social Security Death Index to prove a case of [[age
fabrication]]? My take on it is that it is prohibited original
research, using primary sources to disprove secondary ones, compounded
by the fact that we could easily confuse the subject of the article
with another person of the same or similar name.
If you want to be specific, here it is: Every published source has a
birthdate of 1918 for the late psychic Jeane Dixon. However the SSDI
has her birthdate as 1904 and the brother-in-law of her nephew swears
on the talk page that the 1904 date is the correct one. I think the
1904 is correct, and it's frustrating because likely no journalist or
historian is going to bother publishing something about such a minor
matter, but my opinion is irrelevant and we should defer to published
sources. Verifiability not truth and all that. Or should we IAR in
cases like this and go with the "correct" date?
I'm sure many of you caught the news
article(http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/wikitrust/) about
Adler and Alfaro's research(http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1242572.1242608)
in wiki trustability being applied to live Wikipedia. It just so happens
that I have been working on a similar problem from a completely
different direction during my research and am ready to share this work
with the community. I have designed and implemented a user script
modification that I call HAPPI and am currently running a
non-profit/academic analysis of its usefulness. The script adds a
couple of new controls that will appear over the edit pane. These
controls will allow you to toggle the highlighting of wiki text while
you edit it. If you'd like to give it a try, please see the
documentation page and consent form for more information.
Screenshot: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/37/HAPPI_example.png
Documentation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EpochFail/HAPPI
Consent form: http://wikipedia.grouplens.org/HAPPI/consent
-Aaron Halfaker
Grouplens Research
University of Minnesota
If you want to know how Flagged Revisions feels from an unprivileged
position, go to Wikinews and fix typos. I just did this on
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Geelong_win_2009_Australian_Football_League_Gra…
- check the history. I'm not an admin or reviewer on en:wn.
What did it feel like? Curiously unsatisfying. The fix not going live
immediately left me wondering just when it would - five minutes/? An
hour? A day? It felt nothing like editing a wiki - it felt like I'd
submitted a form to a completely opaque bureaucracy for review at
their leisure.
Don't take my word for it - go typo-fixing on Wikinews and tell me how
it feels to you.
So, yeah. I remain a big fan of flagged revisions for those times when
we need it - basically, as a less-worse alternative to protection or
semiprotection. But it really does kill the wiki motivational buzz
dead.
- d.
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The IRC channel that will be hosting Rand's conversation will be
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client, you can always access Freenode by going to
http://webchat.freenode.net/, typing in the nickname of your choice and
choosing wikimedia-office as the channel. You may be prompted to click
through a security warning. Go ahead.
The channel is also available through the Wikizine site at
http://chat.wikizine.org/
and picking one of the two gateways, while choosing "wikimedia-office"
from the dropdown on the next page.
- -- Cary Bass Volunteer Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free
Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
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Apparently due to some miscommunications, a lot of people didn’t realize
that the FlaggedRevs labs test wiki has been active and waiting for
people to poke at it for a month, since just before Wikimania!
We need interested people to be get up as local administrators to try
out the the per-page stabilization settings (accessed via the ‘protect’
tab); by default most pages do not activate FlaggedRevs in the
configuration we’re testing for English Wikipedia.
I’ve added a couple quick notes to this affect on the main page:
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
We're collecting some folks to be bureaucrats and help set up more test
admins so we can get things going quick!
Also posted on the Wikimedia tech blog:
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/flaggedrevs-test-wiki-awaits-you/
-- brion
On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 3:11 PM, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
[snip]
> plan, and Brion is hoping to invest some of his remaining time with it
> in helping to get the extension ready for en.wp. It's not trivial: The
> scalability concerns at that size are a step more serious than with
> de.wp,
Of course. But I wasn't expecting a turn up on English Wikipedia yet.
I'm asking why the 25 lines of configuration that EnWP specified have
not yet been added to the test wiki at
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
> and we're also concerned about the potential negative impact on
> participation.
Please help me understand the implications of this statement.
The English Wikipedia reached an overwhelmingly strong decision to try
a particular mode of operation. I hope you can appreciate how
difficult it can be to balance various interest and achieve agreement
on a change with such a widespread impact on a project as large and
well established as EnWP.
Enhancements were made to the software by volunteers to support the
proposal and a configuration was designed. Since then there has been
almost no progress in turning up a public trial wiki with this
configuration for testing and further refinement.
Now, "we" (I do know know for whom you speak) are concerned about an
underspecified concern regarding a negative impact on participation.
So? Now what? Does the now staff obstruct the rollout with passive
resistance and year+ delays? Based both on the actions thus far and
on your statement this is what it sounds like to me.
Is this sort of over-concern regarding participation, so paranoid that
it obstructs a simple time limited trial of an article selective
feature, the behavior we can now expect from the WMF now that it has
substantial funding tied to unspecified participation goals?
I too am concerned about participation: I'm concerned that people who
came to build a project together will not want to participate under a
Wikimedia Foundation which views its contributors as 'users' rather
than partners.
Reaching a design for the policy and configuration and educating and
convincing people is the result of thousands of hours of volunteer
labor from hundreds of people across several years. Moreover, the
ability to reach a decision to try something at this scale is a ray of
hope that EnWP hasn't become totally stuck and immune to change. All
of this is wasted if the Wikimedia Foundation isn't able or willing to
hold up its side of its partnership with the community.
> The user interface is well-suited for the current de.wp
> implementation, but needs some TLC to work for the "flagged
> protection" use case.
The community has largely taken care of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_rev…
Of course, there will need to be additional refinement but that can
not proceed until the test wiki is up.
> We're committed to getting there but at this stage I can't give you a
> better promise than allocating some percentage of the core team to
> supporting the UI development, testing, and production roll-out,
> hopefully resulting in a full production roll-out prior to the end of
> this year.
When will the test wiki be activated? This requires something like
pasting 25 lines of configuration, an extension install, and kicking a
maintenance script.
Even if everything else is delayed having the text site up and running
would allow the community to test and provide feedback to volunteer
developers who can refine the software in advance of the availability
of resources for the large scale deployment.
