WikiEN-l April 2011

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35 participants
23 discussions

Wikipedia a reliable source for political info, study says
by Fred Bauder 14 Apr '11

14 Apr '11

"Brown found that all of the verifiable biographical information in those articles was completely accurate." (candidates for governor of U.S. states) http://scienceblog.com/44345/wikipedia-a-reliable-source-for-political-info… Adam R. Brown PS: Political Science & Politics / Volume 44 / Issue 02, pp 339 - 343 Copyright © American Political Science Association 2011 Published online: 08 April 2011 DOI:10.1017/S1049096511000199 Fred

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Slow Response Time When Editing
by Marc Riddell 13 Apr '11

13 Apr '11

Is anyone else experiencing an extremely long response time when trying to edit the English Wikipedia? When trying to "Save Page" on my last two edits, both resulted in time outs and wouldn't, or couldn't, complete the edit. In both cases I finally gave up. Any suggestions? Marc

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Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
by WereSpielChequers 12 Apr '11

12 Apr '11

We already have several rivals, including the Chinese, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu_Baike and the largest online encyclopaedia Hudong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudong At some point in the near future translation software will improve to the point that they can compete against us in languages other than Chinese. Also I suspect we are already losing ground to more inclusionist projects such as IMDB. We will still have a niche in languages they aren't interested in, and among people who care about copyright. But my suspicion is that we are unusual, and that most potential editors are more annoyed by having their contributions rejected by deletionists than by something in the small print that says their words now belong to the website they've written them on. Willingness to adapt to the desires of National Governments and even cultural prejudices also creates niches in much if not most of the world. I've no idea how good Chinese to Arabic translation software is, but the combination of an adequate translation and a filter agreed with relevant governments or religions would probably beat us in the Arab world. I don't like the idea of political censorship, but I do like the idea of enabling people to make their own choices as to what they see. If our user preferences included two stick figures and a sliding bar that enabled every option from burka to thongless then my personal choice need not concern others any more than theirs mattered to me. Other interesting niches would be for a "child safe", unscientific or mono-dialect encyclopaedias. I'm not convinced that the young earth creationists with their American English at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservapedia or the Australian English equivalent at http://www.astorehouseofknowledge.info/Main_Page are sufficiently mainstream to do this, let alone the absolutist flat earthers at http://conservapedia.wikkii.com/wiki/Main_Page But I suspect that a mainstream trusted brand could find a niche here, perhaps even with a bowdlerised mirror of Wikipedia. I've seen many newbies get an early warning by starting their wiki career "correcting" articles to the version of English that they are comfortable with, and I'd like to see us resolve this by making display dialect a user preference http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:More_multi_dialect_wikis I think this would have a secondary benefit that identifying and appropriately marking ambiguous words such as bonnet, hood and fender would make it easier to translate those articles into other languages. Other options would be for a site that ended the inclusionism/deletionism conflict by abandoning notability and concentrating on verifiability or aiming for comprehensiveness. That seems to work for IMDB but possibly you need to restrict this to specialist pedias - aiming for coverage of all films and their cast is one thing, but on a general pedia you need to set a threshold somewhere unless you are prepared to have articles for pet guinea pigs. WereSpielChequers

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How to start a viable competitor to Wikipedia?
by David Gerard 12 Apr '11

12 Apr '11

Larry Sanger started Citizendium with a detailed plan for precisely how it would work, which he detailed in a Slashdot article in 2005 and kept firmly to. This produced the weird phenomenon where he treated user suggestions like they were *threats*. I just read a Paul Graham article which contains a line summing up the problem here: If you want a recipe for a startup that's going to die, here it is: a couple of founders who have some great idea they know everyone is going to love, and that's what they're going to build, no matter what. Knowino (and Argopedia, and the survivors of Citizendium, and everyone in fact) needs to look at this and see what they can do. Is there room in the encyclopedia game? I sure hope so. How do you beat Wikipedia? Work like a startup. Wikipedia now changes at dinosaur pace and seems utterly unable to solve the problems it knows it has, let alone the ones it doesn't. If room to zip around it exists, something small enough to be nimble can find it. - d.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] How to start a viable competitor to Wikipedia? Step 1 allow people to edit
by WereSpielChequers 11 Apr '11

11 Apr '11

There is a difference between hosting a site and running a site. Jimmy's company wikia hosts a number of sites including Liberapedia - http://liberapedia.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page None of the various conservative sites seem to use wikia, unless that is Wikia allows sites to use their own domain name? Wikkii is definitely a rival to Wikia. They all seem to use wiki technology. I wonder if they are deliberately avoiding the indirect connection to Wikipedia by doing business with our founder? Interestingly only Liberapedia and one of the conservative sites, http://www.astorehouseofknowledge.info/Main_Page are actually open for editing. Conservapedia http://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page currently comes up as a 404 and http://conservapedia.wikkii.com/wiki/Main_Page allows you to create an account, but not to edit, not even to edit your own talkpage.... Has anyone done a study of these various sites to see if any have had a measure of success without allowing IP editing? As EN Wiki looks like rising the drawbridge to the extent of only allowing autoconfimred accounts to create new articles, it would be interesting to know if any successful sites are that restrictive. WereSpielChequers On 9 April 2011 00:08, Sarah <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 15:57, Bob the Wikipedian > <bobthewikipedian(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> Already been done, Conservapedia. The most disgusting mockery of >> conservatives I've ever seen. Then again, isn't this one of the sites >> Jimbo runs? >> > Definitely not. > > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l >

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Fwd: [Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness
by David Gerard 08 Apr '11

08 Apr '11

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Ting Chen <tchen(a)wikimedia.org> Date: 8 April 2011 20:35 Subject: [Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Dear community, on the IRC board meeting at April 8th 2011 the board approved unanimously the following resolution: We, the Wikimedia Foundation Board, believe that the continued health of our project communities is crucial to fulfilling our mission. The Wikimedia projects are founded in the culture of openness, participation, and quality that has created one of the world's great repositories of human knowledge. But while Wikimedia's readers and supporters are growing around the world, recent studies of editor trends show a steady decline in the participation and retention of new editors. As laid out in our five-year Strategic Plan, and emphasized by these findings, Wikimedia needs to attract and retain more new and diverse editors, and to retain our experienced editors. A stable editing community is critical to the long-term sustainability and quality of both our current Projects and our movement. We consider meeting this challenge our top priority. We ask all contributors to think about these issues in your daily work on the Projects. We support the Executive Director in making this the top staff priority, and recommend she increase the allocation of Foundation resources towards addressing this problem, through community outreach, amplification of community efforts, and technical improvements. And we support the developers, editors, wikiprojects and Chapters that are working to make the projects more accessible, welcoming, and supportive. The Board resolves to help move these efforts forward, and invites specific requests for Foundation assistance to do so. We welcome and encourage new ideas to help reach our goals of [[strategy:Openness|openness and broader participation]]. We urge the Wikimedia community to promote openness and collaboration, by: * Treating new editors with patience, kindness, and respect; being aware of the challenges facing new editors, and reaching out to them; and encouraging others to do the same; * Improving communication on the projects; simplifying policy and instructions; and working with colleagues to improve and make friendlier policies and practices regarding templates, warnings, and deletion; * Supporting the development and rollout of features and tools that improve usability and accessibility; * Increasing community awareness of these issues and supporting outreach efforts of individuals, groups and Chapters; * Working with colleagues to reduce contention and promote a friendlier, more collaborative culture, including more thanking and affirmation; and encouraging best practices and community leaders; and * Working with colleagues to develop practices to discourage disruptive and hostile behavior, and repel trolls and stalkers. ;Resources : [[strategy:Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary|Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary]] : [[strategy:Editor_Trends_Study|2011 Editor Trends Study]] ([[strategy:March_2011_Update|Executive Director's summary]], [[strategy:Openness|ideas]]) -- Ting Chen Member of the Board of Trustees Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. E-Mail: tchen(a)wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

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Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia. - maintanability of BLPs
by WereSpielChequers 08 Apr '11

08 Apr '11

Tom, The maintanabilty test strikes me as an interesting one, but I'm not sure it scales. On Citizendium you had essentially one language and a relatively small community, on Wikipedia you have: * * a much larger multilingual community so exponentially more difficult to know if someone is sufficiently interested to update it when the subject dies. * a large proportion of editors who edit as anonymous IPs, so you have no easy way to discover in advance whether an article would be updated if the subject died. * tools such as http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Death_anomalies_table so you don't need someone on the Lain Wikipedia to be keeping an eye on whether someone is alive, there could be someone on the French, Russian or Tamil wikipedias and it then gets circulated as a death anomaly. * the critical mass that means that when someone notable dies a bunch of newbie and IP editors often turn up at their Wikipedia article As for the obscure English grocer, at present he wouldn't have an article unless he was notable for something else - not every sportsperson stays in sport till their retirement. I think you could expand notability a long way without including every shopkeeper, but as I said I think this is easier for IMDB and similar specialist pedias than for us. One area where I do think we could make a difference is to change our policy to accept the concept of transient fame. For example anyone signed as a player of a major football club is of interest to a certain section of our readers, if they are dropped from the squad without ever playing then they cease to be of interest. Currently our policy requires them to have made a first team appearance, but "currently in the squad or having in the past made a first team appearance" would be more rational. WereSpielChequers On 8 April 2011 11:30, Tom Morris <tom(a)tommorris.org> wrote: > On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 11:09, WereSpielChequers > <werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> Other options would be for a site that ended the >> inclusionism/deletionism conflict by abandoning notability and >> concentrating on verifiability or aiming for comprehensiveness. That >> seems to work for IMDB but possibly you need to restrict this to >> specialist pedias - aiming for coverage of all films and their cast is >> one thing, but on a general pedia you need to set a threshold >> somewhere unless you are prepared to have articles for pet guinea >> pigs. >> > > One of the things Citizendium gets right in policy terms is to recast > notability in the terms of 'maintainability'. An article on > Citizendium is only deleted if (a) it's obvious junk (though not > explicitly listed, that's basically CSD-type criteria - vandalism, > propaganda pieces etc.) or (b) it's not maintainable by the current > community of editors. > > It seems a pretty good candidate to be a bounding threshold for > inclusionism. And it's something that is sort of required for BLPs. A > rough test might be something like this: if you've got a BLP article > and that person were to die or their status changes radically, would > the article be updated? If Tony Blair or George H.W. Bush were to keep > over dead tomorrow, the WP article would be updated, and the CZ one > would be too, even with only a very small community of editors. But > what happens if the man who runs the grocery in a small village in > England dies? Who updates his article? That is what a maintainability > policy gets you. > > The benefit of such a maintainability policy is that a lot of articles > don't need much maintenance like BLPs do. It's not like Isaac Newton > is going to rise up from the grave and become an Oscar-winning actor > and make his encyclopedia articles invalid. And it seems a reasonable > presupposition to think that once an encyclopedia like Wikipedia has > an article on the Cabbage Patch Dolls or Plato's Republic or the > evolution of horses or whatever, the amount of updating isn't going to > be too drastic. > > -- > Tom Morris > <http://tommorris.org/> >

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Re: [WikiEN-l] How to start a viable competitor to Wikipedia?
by Daniel R. Tobias 08 Apr '11

08 Apr '11

On Fri, 08 Apr 2011 01:26:41 -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote: > I confess that when my wife and I are sitting in front of the TV, and a > question arises from whatever we are watching, Wikipedia's relevant > articles become a first source of information on our laptops while we're > watching. When we do that we seldom feel the need to follow the sources. One time I can recall that such a situation came up was during the Super Bowl halftime a couple of years ago; somebody I was watching it with started wondering how old Bruce Springsteen (the feature performer there) was, so I grabbed my iPhone and looked it up through a Wikipedia app. Unfortunately, the page had just been vandalized to alter his birthdate to be 10 years earlier than it really was, so I got a wrong answer. -- == 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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Advertising a work depicting child sexual abuse
by Andreas Kolbe 08 Apr '11

08 Apr '11

The [[Fan service]] article on en:WP has for some time included an image advertising "Kogaru Diaries", a graphical work that features depictions of child sexual abuse (erotic spanking of prepubescent girls). The work is not notable; nor is its creator, beyond the fact that he is banned from Wikipedia (by ArbCom) and Commons, and allegedly also from DeviantArts. While we encourage the creation of original artwork, using free artwork to advertise non-notable -- and in this case likely illegal -- off-site content in Wikipedia seems a bit off. Is there anything in policy about this? Incidentally, the fan service article also features Wikipe-tan in a bikini to illustrate the fan service concept. Use of both images is being discussed on the fan service talk page. Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fan_service&oldid=422954498 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fan_service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kogaru1.jpg http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Kogaru1.jp… http://spankingartwiki.animeotk.com/wiki/Kogaru_Diaries http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/1466A.html http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode18/usc_sec_18_00002256----000-… Andreas

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Fwd: [Wikimediauk-l] Media coverage of Cancer Research UK workshop
by David Gerard 04 Apr '11

04 Apr '11

This sort of thing is happening a bit lately. It strikes me as possibly a somewhat more manageable form of expert participation than throwing individual well-meaning experts into a wiki cagefight with individual persistent idiots. How's the community tending to treat such groups? - d. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Martin Poulter <M.L.Poulter(a)bristol.ac.uk> Date: 4 April 2011 11:38 Subject: [Wikimediauk-l] Media coverage of Cancer Research UK workshop To: wikimediauk-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org BBC News (linked from front page and 4th most popular item currently!) Cancer charity to tidy up Wikipedia http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12887075 The Times Cancer Research UK to edit information on Wikipedia http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/health/news/article2971655.ece (NB behind a paywall) -- Dr Martin L Poulter ICT Manager, The Economics Network Based at the ILRT, University of Bristol: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ The full experience: http://infobomb.org/ Wikipedia contributor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MartinPoulter _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org

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WikiEN-l April 2011