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.
On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 9:05 PM, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
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.
<snip long analysis>
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.
Well, only if there is no discussion. I think moving to the talk page is far better than outright removal. It does at least give editors a chance to review what has been included and what has been excluded. And talk pages *should* be for editors and not really for readers. I frequently use the talk pages to help draft articles and as a place to put material that I'm not quite sure is ready for inclusion yet. Putting everything straight into an article can make it harder to organise things later.
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.
I agree absolutely that external links and further reading should be used far more than they are. I think the problem is that people are paranoid about link farms and link spam and look at number of links rather than quality or organisation. It does help to organise very large external link sections into subsections, both to help readers (in finding what may be of interest) and the editors (in trimming where needed and organsing what is there).
- 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.
If there is no discussion, you would be fully justified in adding the source yourself. If there is discussion, then, well, you need to discuss. Have a look at my recent talk page edits for one way in which I use article talk pages. The other aspect to all this is that many editors make editorial decisions silently, in their head, or briefly mentioned in edit summaries, and it can be hard for later editors to understand why something was cut or trimmed down. If a longer explanation is posted to the talk page, that can help, though for the largest articles, having mini-essays on the talk page explaining how each individual section of the article was put together would be a massive undertaking. What I do think would be helpful is a subpage for each article (or article talk page), listing the rejected material (sometimes the material is better placed in a different article). That would save a lot of repetition and aid organisation not only of the included material, but the excluded material.
Carcharoth
Personally, I've given up on talk pages. The reason is many of them don't have actual "talk". I see a blue talk link and go there and all that is there is a template "this page is part of wiki project xyz". I'd really like it if that kind of information about a page was somewhere other than "talk".
Sent from my iPhone
On Oct 12, 2011, at 1:56, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 9:05 PM, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
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.
<snip long analysis>
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.
Well, only if there is no discussion. I think moving to the talk page is far better than outright removal. It does at least give editors a chance to review what has been included and what has been excluded. And talk pages *should* be for editors and not really for readers. I frequently use the talk pages to help draft articles and as a place to put material that I'm not quite sure is ready for inclusion yet. Putting everything straight into an article can make it harder to organise things later.
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.
I agree absolutely that external links and further reading should be used far more than they are. I think the problem is that people are paranoid about link farms and link spam and look at number of links rather than quality or organisation. It does help to organise very large external link sections into subsections, both to help readers (in finding what may be of interest) and the editors (in trimming where needed and organsing what is there).
- 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.
If there is no discussion, you would be fully justified in adding the source yourself. If there is discussion, then, well, you need to discuss. Have a look at my recent talk page edits for one way in which I use article talk pages. The other aspect to all this is that many editors make editorial decisions silently, in their head, or briefly mentioned in edit summaries, and it can be hard for later editors to understand why something was cut or trimmed down. If a longer explanation is posted to the talk page, that can help, though for the largest articles, having mini-essays on the talk page explaining how each individual section of the article was put together would be a massive undertaking. What I do think would be helpful is a subpage for each article (or article talk page), listing the rejected material (sometimes the material is better placed in a different article). That would save a lot of repetition and aid organisation not only of the included material, but the excluded material.
Carcharoth
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Not so bad idea,
I like the templates and those informations very much. However, if such info could be on some third tab I might be happy.
regards
Petr Skupa [[u:Reo On]]
On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 1:50 PM, Angela Anuszewski < angela.anuszewski@gmail.com> wrote:
Personally, I've given up on talk pages. The reason is many of them don't have actual "talk". I see a blue talk link and go there and all that is there is a template "this page is part of wiki project xyz". I'd really like it if that kind of information about a page was somewhere other than "talk".
Sent from my iPhone
On Oct 12, 2011, at 1:56, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 9:05 PM, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
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.
<snip long analysis>
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.
Well, only if there is no discussion. I think moving to the talk page is far better than outright removal. It does at least give editors a chance to review what has been included and what has been excluded. And talk pages *should* be for editors and not really for readers. I frequently use the talk pages to help draft articles and as a place to put material that I'm not quite sure is ready for inclusion yet. Putting everything straight into an article can make it harder to organise things later.
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.
I agree absolutely that external links and further reading should be used far more than they are. I think the problem is that people are paranoid about link farms and link spam and look at number of links rather than quality or organisation. It does help to organise very large external link sections into subsections, both to help readers (in finding what may be of interest) and the editors (in trimming where needed and organsing what is there).
- 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.
If there is no discussion, you would be fully justified in adding the source yourself. If there is discussion, then, well, you need to discuss. Have a look at my recent talk page edits for one way in which I use article talk pages. The other aspect to all this is that many editors make editorial decisions silently, in their head, or briefly mentioned in edit summaries, and it can be hard for later editors to understand why something was cut or trimmed down. If a longer explanation is posted to the talk page, that can help, though for the largest articles, having mini-essays on the talk page explaining how each individual section of the article was put together would be a massive undertaking. What I do think would be helpful is a subpage for each article (or article talk page), listing the rejected material (sometimes the material is better placed in a different article). That would save a lot of repetition and aid organisation not only of the included material, but the excluded material.
Carcharoth
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On 10/12/11 4:50 AM, Angela Anuszewski wrote:
Personally, I've given up on talk pages. The reason is many of them don't have actual "talk". I see a blue talk link and go there and all that is there is a template "this page is part of wiki project xyz". I'd really like it if that kind of information about a page was somewhere other than "talk".
I think I raised this point several years ago, to no avail. Perhaps something like a meta page. When I look at a talk page I'm really looking for other opinions on some of the material about which I have uncertainties.
Ec
On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 12:50 PM, Angela Anuszewski angela.anuszewski@gmail.com wrote:
Personally, I've given up on talk pages. The reason is many of them don't have actual "talk". I see a blue talk link and go there and all that is there is a template "this page is part of wiki project xyz". I'd really like it if that kind of information about a page was somewhere other than "talk".
That's not a reason to give up on them. Use them and get used to the fact that some are really empty though they aren't really. Some talk pages are also archived, so they are not actually as empty as they look. One thing I think talk pages are very useful for is editors learning different editing techniques from each other. Some editors learn by looking through the edits others make, while other editors learn better while discussing on talk pages. And all editors should remain open to both learning new things and teaching others.
Carcharoth
On 12 October 2011 06:56, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
I agree absolutely that external links and further reading should be used far more than they are.
Nah.
As in yes, but there's an entire noticeboard on Wikipedia devoted entirely to systematically stamping out external links, whether they're useful or not.
Some of the members go from article to article removing ALL the links that wouldn't get them permanently banned for removing.
One of the members of that board even decided that they should rewrite one of the guidelines so that it said that links can only be kept if there's an *overwhelming* majority that wants any particular link... and then in most cases if there's an RFC they effectively canvas by posting notices on the noticeboard to ensure that any majority isn't quite overwhelming enough in their eyes (and single purpose account !votes count for them), and it looks like they often edit war links away anyway afterwards, using sock puppets, irrespective of the result.
Well, we don't necessarily know who the sock puppet is, but if the sock puppet is reverted, members of the board frequently, publicly, revert the revert.
It does help to organise very
large external link sections into subsections, both to help readers (in finding what may be of interest) and the editors (in trimming where needed and organsing what is there).
That's the way it's supposed to work, but I've never seen an external links section that big, because if it got a tenth that size it would be put up on the noticeboard and then get gratuitously chopped. And I'm not talking about spam links here.
Carcharoth
Ian Woollard:
do You know their motivation?
I see this oversensitivity to the external links in czech Wikipedia too. I am not that much hurt by their removal, what is hurting me is that the cleaners are sometimes treating (in my opinion) well-intentioned outsiders as spammers.
Reo
On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 7:11 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.comwrote:
On 12 October 2011 06:56, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
I agree absolutely that external links and further reading should be used far more than they are.
Nah.
As in yes, but there's an entire noticeboard on Wikipedia devoted entirely to systematically stamping out external links, whether they're useful or not.
Some of the members go from article to article removing ALL the links that wouldn't get them permanently banned for removing.
One of the members of that board even decided that they should rewrite one of the guidelines so that it said that links can only be kept if there's an *overwhelming* majority that wants any particular link... and then in most cases if there's an RFC they effectively canvas by posting notices on the noticeboard to ensure that any majority isn't quite overwhelming enough in their eyes (and single purpose account !votes count for them), and it looks like they often edit war links away anyway afterwards, using sock puppets, irrespective of the result.
Well, we don't necessarily know who the sock puppet is, but if the sock puppet is reverted, members of the board frequently, publicly, revert the revert.
It does help to organise very
large external link sections into subsections, both to help readers (in finding what may be of interest) and the editors (in trimming where needed and organsing what is there).
That's the way it's supposed to work, but I've never seen an external links section that big, because if it got a tenth that size it would be put up on the noticeboard and then get gratuitously chopped. And I'm not talking about spam links here.
Carcharoth
-- -Ian Woollard _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 12 October 2011 18:11, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
On 12 October 2011 06:56, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
I agree absolutely that external links and further reading should be used far more than they are.
Nah.
As in yes, but there's an entire noticeboard on Wikipedia devoted entirely to systematically stamping out external links, whether they're useful or not.
Reminds me - we should at some stage do something about "noticeboards". Not
that they all need stamping out, but as unchartered processes, the more useful ones should graduate to having some sort of charter.
Charles
On 12 October 2011 18:42, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.comwrote:
Reminds me - we should at some stage do something about "noticeboards". Not that they all need stamping out, but as unchartered processes, the more useful ones should graduate to having some sort of charter.
Yes, and starting with WP:ANI; the Wikipedia is a Stanford Prison Experiment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
First you divide the users into two groups, we'll call them guards (admins) and inmates (editors) and then ensure that the admins are in the minority so that they HAVE to gang up on the editors. Then we give them unlimited power over editors and make sure that there's virtually no policies or guidelines that relate to severity of punishment.
What could *possibly* go wrong???
Charles
On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 6:11 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
That's the way it's supposed to work, but I've never seen an external links section that big, because if it got a tenth that size it would be put up on the noticeboard and then get gratuitously chopped. And I'm not talking about spam links here.
The trick is to trim and not let it get too large, but to keep it organised.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cook http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Holden
The former is still a work in progress, but the EL section sub-sectioning was prompted by advice I gave to the editor there.
One of the problems is that ELs that can be used as sources are rightly folded into the article, just as most see also links are folded into the article, but the difference is that ELs that are pointing to different media are fine to remain, as are ELs that are serving as further reading. The issue of whether sources can also be further reading is more contentious, but I maintain that this is possible, as readers should be guided as to which of the sources in use are useful as further reading, and shouldn't have to sort through the sources themselves to identify those useful for further reading.
Carcharoth
On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 9:05 PM, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Not to either agree or disagree with this but I wrote a substantial amount about the artist [[Rachel Whiteread]] years ago and through my research found out about a ton of works she'd done that I didn't feel merited inclusion. So I documented them on the talk page and I drew the conclusion that although they would overwhelm the article some article readers would be interested in the list.
So I placed a link to the talk page in the links section with a note explaining about the list that could be viewed there. Someone removed the link and the explanation saying that either the talk page information was good enough to be included in the article or it wasn't good enough to be noted in the article space. I didn't fight it, but thought it a poor decision.
Bodnotbod
On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 10:40 AM, Bod Notbod bodnotbod@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 9:05 PM, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Not to either agree or disagree with this but I wrote a substantial amount about the artist [[Rachel Whiteread]] years ago and through my research found out about a ton of works she'd done that I didn't feel merited inclusion. So I documented them on the talk page and I drew the conclusion that although they would overwhelm the article some article readers would be interested in the list.
But you shouldn't treat the talk page as an external place to link to. The article should be self-contained.
So I placed a link to the talk page in the links section with a note explaining about the list that could be viewed there. Someone removed the link and the explanation saying that either the talk page information was good enough to be included in the article or it wasn't good enough to be noted in the article space. I didn't fight it, but thought it a poor decision.
Linking from the article to the talk page is a violation of SELFREF. If you want to include appendix-type material, that is bset placed in it's own section at the end of the article, in a collapse box or footnote that makes clear it is not part of the main article, but an adjunct to it. A bit like an infobox is an adjunct, like a footer template is an adjunct, just like the styles and children bits of articles on royals are adjuncts, just like a list of works by an author is an adjunct. There are many articles that successfully manage this tricky process of ending the main text of an article, but then providing appendix-style sections at the end to add such material. It's not easy, but can be done without splitting off to a separate page.
Carcharoth