WikiEN-l March 2010

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45 participants
52 discussions

At University of Denver, Journalism Students Required to Write Wikipedia Entries
by Keith Old 26 Mar '10

26 Mar '10

Folks, >From Resource Shelf http://www.resourceshelf.com/2010/03/25/at-university-of-denver-journalism-… College students know the online resource of which they dare not speak: Wikipedia, the voluminous internet encyclopedia demonized by many in higher education—and a resource that two University of Denver instructors use as a centerpiece of their curriculum. Denver journalism students are writing Wikipedia entries as part of a curriculum that stresses online writing and content creation as readers move to the web en masse. Journalism instructors Lynn Schofield Clark and Christof Demont-Heinrich said students are told to check their sourcing carefully, just as they would for an assignment at a local newspaper. [Snip] Students in the university’s Media, Film, and Journalism Studies Department have composed 24 Wikipedia articles this year, covering everything from the gold standard to San Juan Mountains to bimettalism, an antiquated monetary standard. Demont-Heinrich said the Wikipedia entries didn’t require old-school shoe leather reporting—because the online encyclopedia bars the use of original quotes—but they taught students how to thoroughly research a topic* before publishing to a site viewed by more than 68 million people a month… * We wonder if the University of Denver library, librarians, and library resources were part of the training? Sorry if someone has already posted this. -- Keith Old 62050121 (w) 62825360 (h) 0429478376 (m)

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Firefox can't find the server at en.wikipedia.org.
by WereSpielChequers 26 Mar '10

26 Mar '10

Anyone know what happened to wikipedia this afternoon? "Firefox can't find the server at en.wikipedia.org" WereSpielChequers

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It's Only a Theory (and free culture)
by Carcharoth 25 Mar '10

25 Mar '10

For those in the UK who can access the BBC iPlayer, you might be interested in yesterday's episode of a comedy/debate program called "It's Only a Theory". The show is obscure, but not obscure enough to not have a Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_Only_a_Theory Episode 7: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nxks7 That episode featured Andrew Keen (the second guest), who presented his theory that "user-generated media is killing culture and economy". He didn't mention Wikipedia (he was more focused on blogs and social networking sites and free downloads of music), though at the end he did bring in free culture as part of his argument (saying that free culture can be damaging). A bit lightweight (the show is part comedy part semi-serious debate), but interesting. If you don't want to watch the Andrew Keen bit, the first guest talks about the threat of bees becoming extinct or seriously depleted, which is worth watching. For the record, the bee killing theory was rejected and the user-generated media theory was accepted (again, the voting is not entirely serious). Oh, and that page I linked to has a 3-minute clip focused on the segment "Is User Generated Media Killing our Culture?" http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00542f2 Carcharoth

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Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Trending Topics On Wikipedia
by David Gerard 25 Mar '10

25 Mar '10

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Everton Zanella Alvarenga <everton137(a)gmail.com> Date: 2010/3/15 Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Trending Topics On Wikipedia To: "Mailing list do Capítulo brasileiro da Wikimedia." <wikimediabr-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, wikipedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Google has Google Trends, Twitter has trending topics, and now so does Wikipedia. Pete Skomoroch, a Senior Research Scientist at LinkedIn and blogger at Data Wrangling, built a trending topics page for Wikipedia. The homepage ranks the top-25 Wikipedia articles with the most pageviews over the past 30 days, as well as the fastest rising articles in the past 24 hours. More: http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/11/wikipedia-trending-topics/ http://www.trendingtopics.org/ -- http://blogdotom.wordpress.com/sobre _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

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bringing back the theory
by Tyler 25 Mar '10

25 Mar '10

I'm new to this list, but I read in this beloved book I own that there has been an ongoing discussion that accounts created at the English Wikipedia will one day also work for Wiktionary, foreign Wikipedias and other Wikimedia projects. How come that hasn't come yet?

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Chile earthquake article vs Haiti earthquake article
by Carcharoth 23 Mar '10

23 Mar '10

Has anyone been following the way editing has developed on the en-Wikipedia articles on the Haiti and Chile earthquakes? It looks quite different to me. For some reason, the editing has tailed off a lot on the Chile earthquake article (could the fact that the article was semi-protected for the past 5 days have anything to do with that?), but the editing on the Haiti earthquake article kept on going. Of course, the Haiti earthquake (rightly) got more press coverage, but our article on the Chile earthquake is not in a good state. Compare the en-wiki article with the (es) Spanish Wikipedia one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Chile_earthquake http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terremoto_de_Chile_de_2010 The Spanish Wikipedia one is a lot better organised and better focused. The en-Wikipedia one is more rambling and fails to focus on Chile and says a lot more about the tsunami warnings around the Pacific (which is old news now). There are suggestions on the talk page to try and fix this: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:2010_Chile_earthquake&diff=3… But I still find it surprising. It is not as if there is a lack of sources in English (though there are more in Spanish), some of which I put on the talk page which got zero response. Compare with the Haiti earthquake article (which also had large blocks of semi-protection, so that can't explain it): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Haiti_earthquake Anyone have any idea why the two articles developed (and stalled) in such different ways, and had a very different pattern of editing volume and frequency? Is it purely down to the Chile earthquake getting less news coverage? Carcharoth

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[Wikipedia-l] Fwd: [PRESS] Quality of Wikipedia entries depends on authors' collaboration
by Erik Zachte 21 Mar '10

21 Mar '10

This is very interesting. Here is the abstract and link to full article. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1565682 In a way there are similarities with Luca de Alfaro's wikitrust work, in that this study also focuses on profiling editors as means to predict quality. >From the article: We categorized the contributors that belong to cluster 1 as all-round contributors since they were engaged in almost all types of actions. Contributors in cluster 2 were labeled as watchdogs since most of their actions were reverts. Cluster 3 included contributors who created sentences while seldom engaging in other actions and were hence called starters. Contributors that belonged to cluster 4, on the other hand, not only created sentences, but justified them with links and references. They were therefore classified as content justifiers. Both starters and content justifiers, however, rarely modified existing sentences created by themselves or other people. Cluster 4 included copy editors who contributed primarily through modifying existing sentences. Finally, those who primarily focused on removing incorrect sentences, references and links were termed cleaners. Thus, a contributor for a given Wikipedia article could assume one of these 6 roles or could be a casual contributor. Erik Zachte

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Flagged Protection: ready for more testing
by William Pietri 21 Mar '10

21 Mar '10

Hi! On behalf of the FlaggedRevs team, I'd like to announce that Flagged Protection, the proposed use of Flagged Revisions on the English Wikipedia, is ready for more testing. We have made a number of changes to improve clarity and usability for both novices and experienced editors. If you have an hour or two to devote to testing it, we'd love your thoughts. You need not jump in immediately; we'll be posting updates every week or so. But we'd like it to be in the best shape possible for the upcoming trial. Since we've been working without feedback for too long, I expect this first week or two will be bumpy, but bumps now are preferable to bumps later, so bear with us. To check it out, start here: http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page There's space for questions and discussion on the labs site, and I also welcome direct email and talk page questions. Thanks, William

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100 free Credo accounts for Wikipedia editors
by Erik Moeller 19 Mar '10

19 Mar '10

Credo Reference ( http://www.credoreference.com/ , formerly Xrefer) has generously agreed to provide up to 100 free accounts to their reference library (more than 2 million articles from countless reference works), for research purposes. If you might find this useful, please go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Credo_accounts and follow instructions to apply. There's a minimum requirement of 600 edits and six months participation. These accounts will be given on a first come, first serve basis. There's no bigger underlying master plan - I've met with them a couple of times, and they want to help. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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At least it's not *just* YouTube...
by Gwern Branwen 15 Mar '10

15 Mar '10

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/technology/15fedflix.html "Duplicating Federal Videos for an Online Archive" "Ms. Pruszko is a volunteer for the International Amateur Scanning League, an invention of the longtime public information advocate Carl Malamud. The league plans to upload the archives’ collection of 3,000 DVDs in what Mr. Malamud calls an “experiment in crowd-sourced digitization.” Armed with nothing but a DVD duplicator and a YouTube account, the volunteers have copied and uploaded, among other video clips, an address by John F. Kennedy; a silent film about the Communist “red scare”; a training video on farming; and a Disney film for World War II soldiers about how to avoid malaria, in Spanish. So far, nothing elusive has emerged — but the project is in its infancy. ... In red envelopes labeled “FedFlix,” his DVD-by-mail variation on Netflix, the volunteers mail the DVD copies to Mr. Malamud’s home in Northern California, where he uploads them to YouTube, the Internet Archive Web site and an independent server. Mr. Malamud said that the volunteer work hardly reduces the need for the government to increase its own digitization efforts." -- gwern

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WikiEN-l March 2010