WikiEN-l August 2011

wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org

34 participants
16 discussions

Article Feedback - Ramp up to 10% of Articles
by Howie Fung 15 Aug '11

15 Aug '11

Everyone, Just wanted to pass along a note to let everyone know that earlier today, we ramped up the Article Feedback Tool to 10% of articles on the English Wikipedia. That brings the total to approximately 374K articles with the tool deployed. We'll be posting additional information on the Foundation blog soon, but I wanted to keep everyone in the loop regarding the ramp-up earlier today. Howie

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WP:RSs
by Gwern Branwen 13 Aug '11

13 Aug '11

"Brain Diving: The Ghost with the Most" by Brain Ruh, _ANN_ http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/brain-diving/2011-08-09 > "This time, though, instead of a fictional book about the supernatural I'm going to be examining a nonfiction book about Japanese ghosts – Patrick Drazen's A Gathering of Spirits: Japan's Ghost Story Tradition: From Folklore and Kabuki to Anime and Manga, which was recently self-published through the iUniverse service. This is Drazen's second book; the first one, Anime Explosion! The What? Why? & Wow! of Japanese Animation, came out in 2002 from Stone Bridge Press and was an introduction to many of the genres and themes that can be found in anime. > I think the switch from a commercial press to self-publication may indicate the direction English-language anime and manga scholarship may be heading in. A few years ago, when Japanese popular culture seemed like the Next Big Thing, there were more publishers that seemed like they were willing to take a chance on books about anime and manga. > > Unfortunately, as I know firsthand (and as I've heard from other authors, confirming that it's not just me) these books didn't sell nearly as well as anyone was hoping, which in turn meant that these publishers didn't want to take risks with additional books along these lines. After all, all publishers need to make money in one way or another to stay afloat. In the last few years, the majority of books on anime and manga have been published by university presses, perhaps most notably the University of Minnesota Press. > > ...However, this puts books like Drazen's in an odd predicament. It's not really an academic book, since it lacks the references and theories something like that would entail, which means it's not a good candidate for a university press. However, since few popular presses have seen their books on anime and manga reflect positively on their bottom lines, there aren't many other options these days other than self-publishing. Of course, these days publishing a book on your own doesn't have nearly the same connotations it did decades ago, when vanity presses were the domain of those with more money (and ego) than sense. These days you can self-publish a quality product, get it up on Amazon for all to see, and (if you're savvy about these things) perhaps even make a tidy profit." -- gwern http://www.gwern.net

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Alec Conroy
by Milos Rancic 12 Aug '11

12 Aug '11

Anyone in contact with him? He has been frustrated with some recent events [1]; I got his email during the second day of Wikimania [madness] and I hadn't realized that I have to hurry before he closed his email account. I think that his insights are very important for Wikimedia movement and that we need people like he is. So, I would appreciate if anyone is able to reach him and tell him that we miss him. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Alecmconroy

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The "Wikipedia controvery" about Rick Santorum
by William Beutler 11 Aug '11

11 Aug '11

Today I posted a very long article about the controversy (ca. Aug. 2006- Aug. 2011) about the article currently named "Campaign about 'santorum' neologism<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_for_%22santorum%22_neologism>". I expect at least a couple followers of this list will find their username mentioned in the blog post linked here <http://bit.ly/santorum-wiki-problem> . Overall, my goal was to show how Wikipedia dealt with an extraordinarily challenging dispute about subject—what to call it, and what it should say—while balancing BLP and COATRACK, as well as (early on) NOTE and other policy-based differences. My take is that Wikipedia, for all its faults, dealt with it very well. The debate turned on several questions about what the very nature of what Wikipedia is all about, and how the community worked to resolve a very difficult case. I'm sure I've made some mistakes, as one may in trying to summarize 5 years and 200,000+ words of debate about a highly contentious subject, but I'd love to get any feedback from contributors here about both the long-term prospects for this article / topic as well as anything I've described in the 3,700-word post linked above. I hope this is the right forum for this message, and I'd certainly be interested in writing a follow-up if there's anything worthwhile to add. Otherwise, comments on the post itself are more than welcome. Cheers, Bill

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Image Licenses
by priyank bagrecha 06 Aug '11

06 Aug '11

Is it possible to get a list of licenses for all the images on wikipedia programmatically? Just the licenses, and a count of how many images have which particular license.

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Slidershow: Proposal for a JavaScript-based feature to enhance some articles
by Timwi 02 Aug '11

02 Aug '11

Hello! A friend of mine wrote a piece of JavaScript that would allow editors to create a little widget inside an article that lets the user flick through a series of images (like an interactive slideshow). Would this be something that would be welcome to be added on Wikipedia? For example, if you had several maps of the world coloured according to data for various years, the user could flick through the years and see how the map changes. This has several advantages compared to existing solutions: 1. Animated GIFs cannot be controlled by the user, so the user cannot look at a particular frame for the amount of time that they want, and nor can they easily move backwards to an earlier frame. 2. Placing many of these images in a gallery or stacked vertically makes it quite hard to interpret a progression or to compare a specific part of the image. The solution we came up with would allow editors to place something like this in the article wikitext: <div class='slidershow' style='width: 300px'> ; Term One : [[Image:Image One.jpg|300px]] Description One ; Term Two : [[Image:Image Two.jpg|300px]] Description Two ; Term Three : [[Image:Image Three.jpg|300px]] Description Three </div> and the JavaScript would automatically trigger on the “slidershow” classname and turn this into an interactive widget. To demonstrate what the widget looks like, I uploaded it here: http://timwi.de/wiki/slider.htm This currently works fine in Firefox, Opera and Chrome. (If there’s demand, we can try to get it to work in IE too). You can use mouse clicks, drag-and-drop, or the mouse wheel to operate the slider and flick through the images. Would this be something that would be welcome to be added on Wikipedia? It would only need adding to [[MediaWiki:Common.js]] and the above wikitext would magically start working. If this is the wrong place to ask about this, please suggest where to ask instead. Thanks! Timwi

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WikiEN-l August 2011