WikiEN-l May 2010

wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org

72 participants
72 discussions

Re: [WikiEN-l] [Foundation-l] Renaming "Flagged Protections"
by stevertigo 25 May '10

25 May '10

Erik Zachte <erikzachte(a)infodisiac.com> wrote: > Revision Review (or any similar term) clearly signals this is a human > process, which IMHO gets it 80% right already. Review of a "revision cue" or "edit cue" works. You are right, as both words "Flagged" and "Protections" convey an autocratic sense. Note, on wikien-l, some are discussing what kind of "revert etiquette" that Revision Review (formerly Flagged Protections) should use. "Revert etiquette" seems inherently contradicted, though its at a good sign that people are mindful that Revision Review can and probably will be used in the wrong way. -SC (crossposted to foundation-l and wikien-l)

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Reliable sources— some of these babies are ugly
by Gregory Maxwell 24 May '10

24 May '10

[ simulcasted to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Identifying_reliable_sources#Re… ] "Though he remains the president of the Wikimedia Foundation," ... "'He had the highest level of control, he was our leader,' a source told FoxNews.com. When asked who was in charge now, the source said, 'No one. It’s chaos.'" http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/05/14/exclusive-shake-wikipedia-porn-pr… In the classic tradition of WP:POINT violation I very much want to go around to the "Wikimedia", "Wikipedia", and "Jimmy Wales" articles editing them to reflect these surrealist "facts" as reported by this "Reliable Source"... but that would be needlessly disruptive. (And I fear similarly inspired people would continue that initiative, grotesquely smearing Erik to reflect the repeated libel from prior articles.) So, for the purpose of discussion, imagine that I did. Many of us have long been aware that the reporting in some professional media frequently has very little connection to reality. Many of us know that they usually perform little to no fact checking, and seldom even run their final drafts past someone with any experience in the relevant area for a sniff test. Since they apparently no longer suffer even the most minor harm from publishing some of the most outrageous errors, why should they? In particular, the online editions from many of these organizations appear to be fairly comparable to randomly selected blogs. Presumably they feel that they are just matching the qualities of their competition. So why do we treat them differently? I don't believe that this is, by any means, only a problem with Fox although they might be the most obvious and frequent example. Wikipedia reports what people say, not the truth of it— but we could report the words of a random blog in context exactly as we do Foxnews.com. We have an ethical obligation to not further misunderstanding when we know better, which is what I always saw as the most important justification for treating some sources as lesser than others. We know high-profile groups with a reputation to lose are going to take more care to get it right, and that their errors are more likely to trigger others to publish corrections. We could reasonably speculate that their journalists' affiliation is primarily to the truth, and this might not be as true of other information sources. We can also argue that the views, even false ones, from a major news provider are obviously more notable. But I can't say that these points really apply in many cases that we appear to be applying them: We would reject as reliable sources many hobbyist blogs (or even webcomics) with a stronger reputation to preserve, less obviously-compromised motivations, and _significantly_ greater circulation than some obscure corner of Fox News's online product. What can be the explanation for this discrepancy? Can we really continue in denial when these so-called 'reliable sources' make such obvious and egregious errors about our own projects? If nothing else, is it possible to write a circulation based criteria which reflects the reality that not all parts of a source have equal exposure?

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Re: [WikiEN-l] flagged revisions - autoreviewer even of minor edits
by Abd ul-Rahman Lomax 24 May '10

24 May '10

At 09:55 AM 5/24/2010, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: >At 09:13 PM 5/22/2010, Rob Lanphier wrote: >>What this means is that there would not actually be a separate "autoreview" >>group. Autoconfirmed users would be given the access rights. I made this >>simplification because I wasn't able to find any documentation of any clear >>decision on this front. >> >>Since that time, a debate was started over here: >>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Flagged_revisio… I've commented in that discussion. Briefly, it should be a separate privilege. It could be granted on request and approval, I'd assume, by any administrator, but it definitely should be a revocable privilege, not purely automatic (and not revocable except by blocking) with autoconfirmation.

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flagged revisions - autoreviewer even of minor edits
by WereSpielChequers 23 May '10

23 May '10

>> I suspect that any action by an autoconfirmed user will automatically >> accept something of any actions not yet reviewed. Will those >> autoconfirmed users get a warning that they might unwittingly be >> accepting edits they might not have reviewed? >> > > Yup, they do. There's a banner at the top of the page that tells them > exactly this. > > Rob > > I think this could cause complications. If I'm sorting out a typo like artists preforming songs or discuss throwers then I assume that if I'm marking my edit as minor no-one expects me to have checked the rest of the article. Is it going to be possible for admins to disable their autoreviewer status? WereSpielChequers

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Wikimania 2010: Call for Participation Extended
by Casey Brown 22 May '10

22 May '10

Due to numerous requests we have extended the submission deadline for Wikimania 2010 as follows: * Abstract Registration: May 24, 11.59 p.m. (Pacific Time) * Notification for workshops: May 29, 11.59 p.m. (Pacific Time) * Notification for panels, tutorials, presentations: June 3, 11.59 p.m. (Pacific Time) See the Call for Participation for more details: http://wikimania2010.wikimedia.org/wiki/CFP Thank you for helping make Wikimania 2010 a successful event. :-) See you in Gdansk, July 9-11! With best regards, Wikimania Team -- Casey Brown Cbrown1023

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Updated new search interface on the prototype
by Casey Brown 22 May '10

22 May '10

On 5/21/10, Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com> wrote: > now need to try typing the title of the longest article (which was > mentioned somewhere recently) to see if that will break the new gizmo. > :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_word_in_English ;-) -- Casey Brown Cbrown1023

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Flagged Protection Revert Etiquette (Re: Renaming "Flagged Protections")
by Rob Lanphier 22 May '10

22 May '10

On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 9:58 PM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com>wrote: > By the way, I'm assuming that some edits will be of the sort "I would > normally remove the material and start a talk page discussion". In > that case, is the right thing to do to approve the edit and then > remove the material and start a talk page discussion, and presumably > as a reviewer, your edit removing the material won't be caught up in > flagged revisions itself? Starting a separate thread since this is off of the naming topic. I don't think it's necessary to accept the edit, since the unaccepted version is never really marked as "rejected" in the edit history per se, but rather, just never gets promoted. The edit will still exist in the edit history, so it's not lost forever. The right thing to do is to do the exact same thing you would do with an unprotected page. If it's not obviously vandalism, you can use the undo function with a polite note in the edit comment to discuss the change on the talk page. Presumably, you're doing this as an autoconfirmed user, which means that your edits will be automatically accepted. Rob

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Updated new search interface on the prototype
by Naoko Komura 22 May '10

22 May '10

Hi, everyone. We have received problem reports and feedback that search queries were truncated sometimes and the search suggestions were hard to read or chose due to the limited width. We apologize for introducing broken behaviors in using the search. In order to mitigate spreading the problem, the new search function was disabled on May 15, and the search field was increased by fifty percent on May 18. We are aware that this temporary fix still does not accommodate the search for long article names. We have updated the new search interface to address the issues above and it is currently staged on the the prototype [1]. This update addresses the reported issues such as truncation of search queries [2] and the search suggestions are cut-off [3]. Prototypes in various languages are also available here[4]. Please give it a spin and let us know your feedback. If the functionality is confirmed solid, we would like to re-enable the new search feature later this week. Thanks a bunch in advance, - Naoko User Experience Programs @ WMF [1] http://prototype.wikimedia.org/en.wikipedia.org [2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23498 [3] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23558 [4] http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Prototype -- Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Wikipedia-l] full-text searching since the Vector switch in en.wikipedia
by Nathan 22 May '10

22 May '10

cc'd to lists that people read On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 4:03 PM, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il> wrote: > I sincerely hate to sound repetitive and annoying, but since the switch to > Vector in en.wikipedia it's impossible to run a full-text search of > Wikipedia using the search box if there's an article by the same name. > > The "Search" button is gone, because it was supposed to be possible to run a > full-text search in the redesigned search box without that button, but > apparently this doesn't actually work. It's only possible to run a full-text > search by switching back to Monobook or by manually going to Special:Search > (there's no link to it anywhere). > > So basically, for five days already it's practically impossible to search > for information within Wikipedia. Read this again: it's impossible to search > Wikipedia. Am i crazy if i think that this is a very severe problem? > > This is reported as a bug: > https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23558 > > The right thing to do is to restore the go and search buttons immediately > and consider reintroducing the new search box after it has been thoroughly > tested. Is there any reason not to do this? > > -- > אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי > Amir Elisha Aharoni > > http://aharoni.wordpress.com > > "We're living in pieces, > I want to live in peace." - T. Moore > _______________________________________________ > Wikipedia-l mailing list > Wikipedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l >

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Flagged Protection update for May 20
by William Pietri 21 May '10

21 May '10

As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update. The quick summary is that we are continuing with pre-rollout activities, including UI polish, text and naming cleanup, and rollout planning. One important milestone passed is that Tim Starling has looked over the code and done some profiling and given it his blessing from a performance perspective. He and the rest of the ops folks feel like the production gear is also in good shape for rolling this out. However, to prevent unpleasant launch surprises we've put in a configurable limit to the number of pages protected with this. We'll start out at a limit of 2000 and bump it up based on actual production performance. We believe we are technically ready to try out a labs version of the German config, just to double-check that our recent work will cause them no headaches. However, we need some German-speaker at least hazily familiar with FlaggedRevs to prepare the main page and help us with a call for testers. Any assistance there would be appreciated! Speaking of assistance, we always welcome people trying out the extension before it goes live. You can do that here: http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page To see what we've changed this week, there's a list here: http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Flagged_Protection_upd… To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and Backlog: http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157 We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter until this goes live on the English Wikipedia. William

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WikiEN-l May 2010