WikiEN-l August 2011

wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org

34 participants
16 discussions

Linkage bloat
by Carcharoth 11 Dec '11

11 Dec '11

Is there any chance for progress to be made on this? I recently ran into this problem again at a featured article candidate I was reviewing. It is has a very worthy 'National Historic Landmarks' set of templates at the bottom, but unfortunately this leads to massive template linkage bloat. Of the over 100 articles that link to this article, I estimate that only three links are from within the text of other articles - the rest are from the templates. If I had been able to see at a glance that this article was linked from two other articles, I would have been able to make a suggestion to link back to those articles, and maybe link from other articles. As it was, I was unable to do this and this caused some problems (which it is best not to go into here). So is there anyway to encourage or help with whatever needs to be done here? Carcharoth On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 4:10 AM, David Goodman <dggenwp(a)gmail.com> wrote: > agreed. The footer templates are the biggest source of linkage bloat. > the templates are useful, and we need some way of keeping track of > what should be in them when we add or delete articles, but they make > working with what links here for any practical purpose extremely > difficult. They'd be much more helpful if they were separated. > > On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 9:52 PM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com> wrote: >> On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 1:34 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: >>> On 07/02/11 10:56, Carcharoth wrote: >>>> On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 10:19 PM, Magnus Manske >>>> <magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com> wrote: >>>> >>>>> Many of these links are due to templates, which I can do little about. >>>> >>>> Can *anyone*, even in principle, do something about that? It really >>>> bugs me that the "what links here" function doesn't distinguish >>>> between links arising from templates (often not directly relevant) and >>>> links directly from the article wiki-text. If the answer is something >>>> to do with parsers, please do explain! >>> >>> Yes, it's possible. It was necessary to register links from templates >>> in the pagelinks table so that when a page is deleted or created, the >>> HTML caches can be updated so that the link colour will change. With a >>> schema change and some parser work, it would be possible to flag such >>> links so that they are optional in "what links here". >> >> That would be wonderful. It might even get me to create a bugzilla >> account to vote for a bug if there is one open on this...(of course, >> one problem is still that some templates are relevant to article >> content and some are not - the ones that generate distracting links >> are the navigational ones that tend to be at the bottom of pages, the >> footer templates - and I'm not sure if infobox links would count as >> template links or not - they are generated from parsing of a template >> parameter, but don't appear in the template itself, unlike the footer >> navboxes). >> >> [In case anyone is confused, an example is the massive footer >> templates that can lead to Nobel prize winners decades apart linking >> to each other, or diverse topics within a broad area linking to each >> other, though only through templates and not in the text. Oh, and some >> links appear in both footer templates, infoboxes, and the article >> 'text'. Not sure how that is handled.] >> >> Carcharoth >> >> _______________________________________________ >> 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 >> > -- > David Goodman > > DGG at the enWP > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG > > _______________________________________________ > 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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I like this
by James Farrar 20 Oct '11

20 Oct '11

"10:20, 29 April 2011 Jimbo Wales (talk | contribs) m (37,376 bytes) (moved Kate Middleton to Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge over redirect: Marriage to the Duke of Cambridge) (undo) " He must have had his finger on the button waiting for Beardie[*] to pronounce them man and wife... [*] I can call him that; my mother knows him reasonably well

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User:RickK2
by Rick 25 Sep '11

25 Sep '11

If anybody recognizes this email address as coming from me originally (User:RickK), I would just like to say that the person calling themself User:RickK2 currently editing on Wikipedia is NOT me. Since my account has been locked from my access, I have no other way to address this problem. RickK

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Invitation to Participate in Wikipedia Survey
by Bo Xu 12 Sep '11

12 Sep '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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Front Page on BLPs
by Tony Sidaway 02 Sep '11

02 Sep '11

Here is an interesting article by David Swindle of Front Page, about Wikipedia's problems with biographies of living persons. Swindle sees it in terms of a persistent left wing bias. I won't pretend to agree with everything he says--it is not helpful to compare Michael Moore to Ann Coulter or Keith Olbermann to Glenn Beck. The gist of the article has merit, though. I think he makes some reasonable points about the biographies of Noam Chomsky and that deceased poster child for youth rebellion, Che Guevara. http://frontpagemag.com/2011/08/23/how-the-left-conquered-wikipedia-part-1/

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How to contact the author of a wiki page?
by Peng Yu 27 Aug '11

27 Aug '11

Hi, I have some questions regarding a wiki page, so I want to ask the authors of the page to get clarifications. Does anybody know how to find the authors and contact them, for example, for the following page? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta-binomial_distribution -- Regards, Peng

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Hudong
by Tony Sidaway 25 Aug '11

25 Aug '11

I hadn't heard of Hudong before. This article by Rebecca Fannin calls it "China's Wikipedia" and says it has a 95% market share and more "than 5 million entries from 3.6 million contributors." http://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccafannin/2011/08/23/why-draper-funded-chin… English Wikipedia has had an article about Hudong since 2008, and Chinese Wikipedia has had an entry since 2007. According to Wikipedia the software has some interesting social networking features, but is not free software although the source may be downloaded freely. This provides an interesting chance to peer through the looking glass. Although apparently monolingual, Hudong is comparable in size to Wikipedia at the same age. It's a commercial startup and runs on advertising income. Already one can see that it has followed a different path from that of Wikipedia.

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Editing anonymously though having an account and other moral dilemmas.
by Bod Notbod 25 Aug '11

25 Aug '11

Hi, There's a company operating in the UK that has a large number of controversies attached to it. Because this mail will be publicly viewable/searchable (and for other reasons that may become clearer as you read on) I shan't name them. The article for the company already has a substantive controversy/criticism section. It needs much better referencing. I am able to do this; I have a good source (The Guardian) and I'm sure there are others. I'm good at identifying acceptable and unacceptable sources. The trouble is that this company could have a profound impact on my life and they have shown themselves willing to play hardball with internet critics. One site - which supports a vulnerable section of society - was closed down just today, and it's that which has got me fired up. But frankly, the company scares me. I'm finding it hard to even hint at how they could effect me without giving too much away, so I apologise for being vague. So, my questions are: 1. Is it ever acceptable to purposely edit an article when logged out (ie, as an IP) if one has an account of long standing? 2. If I did this IP editing, would I have [ complete / little / no ] protection from being traced as the source of the (perfectly sourced) information I place in the article? 3. Provided my edits are all perfectly sourced, will the WMF defend my anonymity? (I do know that the WMF has a good track record here). 4. If you would advise against me pursuing this as you feel I cannot adequately mitigate risks to myself, perhaps you could put yourself in an imagined similar situation: imagine you have a powerful sense that a company is acting unjustly but that company has a hold on you. You know that Wikipedia could reflect some of the injustice (all sourced from WP:RELIABLE) but that you are placing yourself under threat. What would you do to get this information into an article? A couple more points: I guess some of you may be thinking "well, hang on, you have a Conflict of Interest here, so you should go nowhere near it." It's difficult to argue against that without revealing details that begin to bring my edifice of protection tumbling down. I would liken my situation to someone living on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico who chooses to write about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. [1] I may be personally effected by mistakes/negligence on the part of this company. But I'm not employed by them. My relationship with them is akin to your relationship with the company that provides your water. My relationship with the company is that they provide an infrastructure that I rely on and that they are proving themselves to be increasingly unreliable and opposed to free speech (according to reliable sources). If writing about the oil spill as a Gulf resident would be COI, then mea culpa: I'll take note and back off. I'm interested to hear your views, With high regard for my fellow Wikipedians, Bodnotbod ----- [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill

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Front Page on BLPs
by Daniel R. Tobias 23 Aug '11

23 Aug '11

On Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:11:41 +0100, wikien-l-Tony Sidaway wrote: > Here is an interesting article by David Swindle of Front Page, about > Wikipedia's problems with biographies of living persons. Swindle sees it in > terms of a persistent left wing bias. And (at least when I went there) it plays annoying audio ads when you go there, placed "below the fold" so that you can't even quickly find the "stop" button for them... makes one appreciate all the more how Wikipedia is one of the few major sites that doesn't have any ads (well, except the periodic fundraising pitches, but so far those don't blast audio at you). Hopefully the form of hell that marketing people will go to after they die will include an eternity of ads blasting at them from all directions. > I won't pretend to agree with everything he says--it is not helpful to > compare Michael Moore to Ann Coulter or Keith Olbermann to Glenn Beck. Why not? Of course they're not all identical other than their political views... no two people are. However, they all have in common being outspoken commentators for political causes, so the differing treatment of the outspoken leftists vs. outspoken rightists is relevant. -- == 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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Spoiler wars revisited
by Gwern Branwen 15 Aug '11

15 Aug '11

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/spoilers-dont-spoil-anything/ > "I’ve always assumed that this reading style is a perverse personal habit, a symptom of a flawed literary intelligence. It turns out, though, that I was just ahead of the curve, because spoilers don’t spoil anything. In fact, a new study [upcoming in _Psychological Science_] suggests that spoilers can actually *increase* our enjoyment of literature. Although we’ve long assumed that the suspense makes the story — we keep on reading because we don’t know what happens next — this new research suggests that the tension actually detracts from our enjoyment. > > The experiment itself was simple: Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt of UC San Diego gave several dozen undergraduates 12 different short stories. The stories came in three different flavors: ironic twist stories (such as Chekhov’s “The Bet”), straight up mysteries (“A Chess Problem” by Agatha Christie) and so-called “literary stories” by writers like Updike and Carver. Some subjects read the story as is, without a spoiler. Some read the story with a spoiler carefully embedded in the actual text, as if Chekhov himself had given away the end. And some read the story with a spoiler disclaimer in the preface. > > ...The first thing you probably noticed is that people don’t like literary stories. (And that’s a shame, because Updike’s “Plumbing” is a masterpiece of prose: “All around us, we are outlasted….”) But you might also have noticed that *almost every single story*, regardless of genre, was more pleasurable when prefaced with a spoiler. This suggests that I read fiction the right way, beginning with the end and working backwards. I like the story more because the suspense is contained." -- gwern http://www.gwern.net

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WikiEN-l August 2011