WikiEN-l October 2011

wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org

41 participants
31 discussions

University project on Wikipedia
by Maria Fanucchi 18 Oct '11

18 Oct '11

[Cross-posting this to Translators-l, WikiEN-l and Foundation-l, because there is a considerable amount of overlap, as you'll see. Volunteers from several Wikipedias may be needed, and the Foundation could eventually be involved if the project becomes an annual one. I apologize in advance to those subscribed all three lists.] Hello everyone, (Note: For those who don't know me, I am [[User:Arria Belli]]. Former admin and arbitrator over at fr:wp, and member of the LangCom. I met some of you at Wikimania 2008 Alexandria, where I did a presentation called "Translation in Wikimedia Projects" ex-aequo with [[User:Britty]].) I've just started a master's degree at the ESIT (Ecole supérieure d'interprètes et de traducteurs) in Paris, in English/French/Spanish translation. It's quite a good school; a large percentage of the interpreters and translators working in international organizations are graduates of the ESIT. My French-to-English translation professor has asked me to set up a project for all the students in her class, translating Wikipedia articles. We're a small group: there are only about 5 or 6 of us. What we'd be doing is taking articles from fr: and translating them to en:. Students are free to choose the articles they'll translate. Since I'm mostly active over at fr:wp, I will need some help from people on en:. Most notably, I think it would be wise to set up a small group of en:wp volunteers who could guide the students on a one-on-one basis in case they have trouble understanding wiki markup, references, etc. I would be coordinating the project, but I don't think I could field all the students' questions at once! Any volunteers? I want to make this as positive an experience as possible for everyone involved: the students, the professor and the institution. If the project is successful enough, it might happen again next year or even next semester, and become a regular thing. As a very important aside: My professor told me that professors in other language combinations might also be interested in Wikipedia projects of their own. Therefore, there could be an English-to-Russian project, or a French-to-Spanish one, or French-to-Korean, etc. I'll let you know as soon as I'm told whether this could happen. Even if no other language combinations are interested, they might be next year if this one is a success. Thank you, and happy editing. Maria Fanucchi [[User:Arria Belli]]

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Invitation to Participate in Wikipedia Survey
by Bo Xu 18 Oct '11

18 Oct '11

Dear Wikipedian, We, Prof. Bo Xu at Fudan University in China and Prof. Dahui Li at University of Minnesota Duluth, are interested in why and how people contribute to Wikipedia. You could make an important contribution to this research by completing a questionnaire at http://labovitz.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_3h4hthRyOWKxZVa. The survey is completely voluntary. All the data will be kept confidential. Your assistance in answering this questionnaire is highly appreciated. Sincerely, Bo Xu School of Management Fudan University

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2 years & 9 months later, Re: 6 months later: Knol update
by Gwern Branwen 14 Oct '11

14 Oct '11

On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 10:51 AM, Gwern Branwen <gwern0(a)gmail.com> wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA512 > > On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Anthony wrote: >> On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 10:30 AM, Gwern Branwen wrote: >>> >>> As will surprise none of the Knol nay-sayers here (in which number I >>> believe I can count myself), Knol hasn't done too great. >> >> Compared to what? I can't imagine Knol is much worse than Wikipedia when it >> was 6 months old. Knol just published its 100,000th article. When >> Wikipedia was 5 months old, it said on the main page "We've got over 6,000 >> pages already. We want to make over 100,000." The Wayback machine then >> skips ahead 5 more months, by which point Wikipedia brags "We started in >> January 2001 and already have over 13,000 articles. We want to make over >> 100,000, so let's get to work" >> >> To be sure, Knol has a lot of very serious problems with it. But it's only >> 6 months old. The concept is far from finalized. 6 months into Jimmy >> Wales' encyclopedia dream he was still working on Nupedia. A thread on Haskell-cafe asked whether Knol was a good place for documentation, which reminded me of Knol's continued existence. Like I did previously, I went looking and the performance of Knol in the years since has been quite bad: http://www.gwern.net/Wikipedia%20and%20Knol#knol-did-fail At this point, I'm comfortable asserting Knol is a failure, and have moved on to trying to guess when it will die, exactly: http://www.gwern.net/Wikipedia%20and%20Knol#knol-death-watch -- gwern http://www.gwern.net

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So ...
by David Gerard 14 Oct '11

14 Oct '11

... written anything good on the encyclopedia lately? - d.

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Point me to discussions with newcomers about notability?
by Johan Jönsson 12 Oct '11

12 Oct '11

Hey list, do you remember any particular discussions about articles (on the talk page, or AfD if enough newcomers found their way there) on English Wikipedia where you could see that new editors/outsiders didn't agree with the concept of notability, or how notability is interpreted among (most) Wikipedians? I know that I've seen them, I just can't seem where to find them. Thanks, //Johan Jönsson -- User:Julle

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Readers clicking through to talk pages
by Gwern Branwen 12 Oct '11

12 Oct '11

Pondering the utility of talk page edits recently, I've begun to wonder: how many of our readers actually look at the talk page as well? I know some writers writing articles on Wikipedia have mentioned or rhapsodized at length on the interest of the talk pages for articles, but they are rare birds and statistically irrelevant. It might be enough simply to know how much traffic to talk pages there is period. I doubt editors make up much of Wikipedia's traffic, with the shriveling of the editing population, which never kept pace with the growth into a top 10/20 website, so that would give a good upper bound. It would seem to be very small; there's not a single Talk page in the top 1000 on http://stats.grok.se/en/top and comparing a few articles like Anime, Talk:Anime has 273 hits over an entire month (http://stats.grok.se/en/201109/Talk%3AAnime) while the article has 128,657 hits (a factor of 471); or Talk:Barack Obama with 1800 over the month (http://stats.grok.se/en/201109/Talk%3ABarack_Obama) compared to Barack Obama, 504,827 hits (http://stats.grok.se/en/201109/Barack%20Obama) for a factor of 280. The raw stats in http://dammit.lt/wikistats are currently unavailable; I've bugged domas to get it back up but it's still been down for hours, so I went to http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-raw/2011/2011-09/ instead - each file seems to be an hour of the day so I downloaded one day's worth and gunzipped them all which is enough info to get a good idea of the right ratio. We do some quick shell scripting: grep -e '^en Talk:' -e '^en talk:' pagecounts-* | cut -d ' ' -f 3 | paste -sd +|bc ~> 582771 grep -e '^en ' pagecounts-* | grep -v -e '^en Talk:' -e '^en talk:' | cut -d ' ' -f 3 | paste -sd + | bc ~> 202680742 Looks somewhat sane - 58,2771 for all talk page hits versus 2,0268,0742 for all non-talk page hits A factor of 347 is pretty much around where I was expecting based on those 2 pages. And Domas says the statistics exclude API hits but includes logged-in editor hits, so we can safely say that anonymous users made far *fewer* than 58k page views that day and hence the true ratios are worse than 471/280/347. - If we take the absolutely most favorable ratio, Obama's at 280, and then further assume it was looked at by 0 logged-in users (yeah right), then that implies something posted on its talk page will be seen by <0.35% of interested readers (504827/1800*1.0)*100). - If we use the aggregate statistic and say, generously, that registered users make up only 90% of the page views, then something on the talk page will be seen by <0.028% of interested readers ((202680742/582771*0.1)*100). I suggest that the common practice of 'moving reference/link to the Talk page' be named what it really is: a subtle form of deletion. It would be a service to our readers to end this practice entirely: if a link is good enough to be hidden on a talk page (supposedly in the interests of incorporating it in the future*), then it is good enough to put at the end of External Links or a Further Reading section, and our countless thousands of readers will not be deprived of the chance to make use of it. * one of my little projects is compiling edits where I or another have added a valuable source to an article Talk page, complete with the most relevant excerpts from that source, and seeing whether anyone bothered making any use of that source/link in any fashion. I have not finished, but to summarize what I have seen so far: that justification for deletion is a dirty lie. Hardly any sources are ever restored. -- gwern http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Point me to discussions with newcomers about notability?
by Daniel R. Tobias 12 Oct '11

12 Oct '11

On Tue, 11 Oct 2011 01:08:41 +0100, Tony Sidaway wrote: > The only important rule here is to be bold. We really ought to take more > steps to disenfranchise those who repeatedly stamp on attempts to create new > content. They know who they are, and I mean it. We should stop them hard. So the way to deal with people who poison the Wikipedia atmosphere by stomping down hard on other people is.... to stomp down hard on them! Actually, the main people who should be stomped down hard on is the ingrates who top-post to this list with fullquotes, especially when three or more list footers trail beneath their untrimmed quotes. -- == 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/

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Call for Volunteers: If you can read a diff, you're exactly who we need.
by Steven Walling 12 Oct '11

12 Oct '11

Hi everyone, In the Community Dept. we've been collaborating with some Wikipedians to continue one of the research projects from the summer, namely involving the randomized testing of talk page templates to try and improve them. (If you watch WP:VPT, then you might've seen our announcements.) The great thing about doing randomized testing is that we get a more unbiased assessment of our experiment. The bad thing is that in order to do a proper job of crunching these numbers, we need help from people who can read wiki histories accurately and tell us what's going on. This is where you come in. Obviously no one is better primed to analyze diffs and editing histories than editors, so we're looking for a few (3-4, but the more the merrier) volunteers to lend us their experience this week. I know used the r word (research), which makes it sound not really important, but this is a live experiment on the projects. If we do this correctly, then we can do a better job of educating good faith editors, warning away those who cause damage to the encyclopedia, and keeping experienced Wikipedians from getting their user pages vandalized by angry people. ;-) The system we've got set up for analyzing these diffs is insanely simple if you're used to MediaWiki, so let me know either on the list or my talk page [1] if you might have an hour or two to spare. Thanks, -- Steven Walling 1). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Steven_(WMF)

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(no subject)
by Geoffrey Plourde 11 Oct '11

11 Oct '11

http://94.76.215.106/~chevrole/catalog/site.php?html143

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Italian Wikipedia
by Daniel R. Tobias 07 Oct '11

07 Oct '11

There have been a bunch of items in my Twitter feed about how the Italian Wikipedia has shut down in response to a proposed repressive law regarding mandatory takedowns of allegedly defamatory online material in Italy. I have some problems with such a move, as it sets a precedent of having a particular language edition of Wikipedia tied to an uncomfortable degree with the politics of one country just because that's the primary place the language is spoken. It's always been true that the separate editions of Wikipedia are by language, not country. The Chinese Wikipedia keeps operating despite the repressive censorship of China, and if that country chooses to block it, that's their problem. English Wikipedia doesn't belong to England, or America, or any other English-speaking country, though the fact that the primary servers are in the USA does force it to comply to U.S. law. Unless there are servers in Italy, the Italian Wikipedia isn't compelled to follow any Italian law, though there could be consequences for any Italy-based participants if they don't, including the possibility of individuals there being held responsible for what they write or fail to take down, or possible mandatory blockage of the site in that country if they choose to go the "Great Firewall" route. I remember the German Wikipedia being affected at one point by a court injunction, but that only shut down a redirected .de domain, not the site itself as a subdomain of US-registered wikipedia.org. -- == 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/

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WikiEN-l October 2011