Hi Kevin,
I am ok with this list being notified that a discussion is
happening on Commons that is relevant to multiple wikis, and
am ok with asking people from this list to contribute to the
discussion on Commons.
I am hoping that we can keep the discussion to a single
location, and I described some ways to encourage that
consolidation in my first post on this topic.
You are right that there have been a number of times in the past
when discussion relevant to a single wiki has moved or forked
onto this list. I still think the best practice is to consolidate
the discussion in a single place. Notifications about the discussion
and requests for more participation can be made far and wide if
that seems proportionate to the nature of the issue being
discussed.
I described what I feel are best practices, but I respect that
you feel differently and I respect your good intentions for
the projects.
Pine
Could someone please point me to all the studies the WMF have conducted
into the reliability of Wikipedia's content? I'm particularly interested in
the medical content, but would also like to look over the others too.
Cheers.
Anthony Cole <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Anthonyhcole>
There seem to be emails going around about possible misuse of images
to covertly promote a brand on Wikipedia. As far as I can tell, it is
a hoax, perhaps to throw mud at a well known company.
Discussion at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost#Cracking_Wi…
If anyone has real evidence of misuse, it would be useful to share a
real example rather than pointing to hoax videos off-wiki. It would
have made a good April Fool.
Fae
--
faewik(a)gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
Hi Kevin,
My comment here expresses my personal opinion only.
I
understand how bringing this issue to Wikimedia-l could seem appropriate because Commons is a project that has an unusual degree
of cross-wiki influence and activity. While it's ok to
notify Wikimedia-l that this issue is being discussed,
the main body of the discussion should stay on-wiki on Commons [1]. Per
the essay about wikidrama on English Wikipedia [2] and the "Principle of Least Drama", it is best not to make "the same point in multiple
places", as split discussions are often more difficult to follow and
spread the drama to more places. Also, when placing notices of
discussions from other wikis to this list, I think it is best to follow
the detailed guidelines for Requests for Comment from English Wikipedia
[3] which ask users to write "a brief, neutral statement of the issue". In general, cross-wiki and cross-list *advocacy* (not mere notification) from anywhere else to this mailing list
could be considered
canvassing [4]. I think you were well-intentioned in posting a notice to this list
but I would ask you to do it a bit differently in the future.
Thank you for raising the issue for discussion. I think you have good points, and you should make them on Commons, where it appears that other Commons contributors agree with you that this situation could have been handled differently [1].
Pine
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page#Dead_bodies.3F
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Drama
[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Canvassing
I apologize for that formatting mess. Emails that look beautiful in my Hotmail editing window get mangled when I send them to lists, and this seems to happen on a regular basis. I'll try sending this again.
--
Hi Kevin,
My comment here expresses my personal opinion only.
I understand how bringing this issue to Wikimedia-l could seem appropriate because Commons is a project that has an unusual degree of cross-wiki influence and activity. While it's ok to notify Wikimedia-l that this issue is being discussed, the main body of the discussion should stay on-wiki on Commons [1]. Per the essay about wikidrama on English Wikipedia [2] and the "Principle of Least Drama", it is best not to make "the same point in multiple places", as split discussions are often more difficult to follow and spread the drama to more places. Also, when placing notices of discussions from other wikis to this list, I think it is best to follow the detailed guidelines for Requests for Comment from English Wikipedia [3] which ask users to write "a brief, neutral statement of the issue". In general, cross-wiki and cross-list *advocacy* (not mere notification) from anywhere else to this mailing list could be considered canvassing [4]. I think you were well-intentioned in posting a notice to this list but I would ask you to do it a bit differently in the future.
Thank you for raising the issue for discussion. I think you have good points, and you should make them on Commons, where it appears that other Commons contributors agree with you that this situation could have been handled differently [1].
Pine
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page#Dead_bodies.3F
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Drama
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Canvassing
Samuel Klein wrote:
>Integrating spam control more deeply into all of our tools and
>services - including particularly MediaWiki - is important for many
>audiences.
Many MediaWiki system administrators complain about the levels of spam
that their small wikis receive. Any help in this area would almost
certainly be appreciated.
The ever-helpful wm-bot in #mediawiki offers two links:
<wm-bot> For information about combating and handling spam in MediaWiki,
see <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam> and
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anti-spam_features>.
>Is there an overview of current anti-spam tech (for MW in particular,
>but related: for our preferred Ticket-handling and Mailing-list
>toolchains), and projected roadmaps?
I don't think any of this exists directly, but it'd probably be nice to
have. For mailman (mailing lists), I believe we use SpamAssassin and
mailman's built-in list moderation.
OTRS (ticket handling) receives a lot of spam, but I think a good portion
of it gets appropriately filtered. Rjd0060 or another OTRS admin could
speak to this more precisely.
MediaWiki (the Wikimedia wikis) have anti-spam bots, global and local link
blacklists, global and local AbuseFilter filters, a few dedicated
MediaWiki extensions, and probably a dozen or more other tools that I
can't remember right now.
Spam prevention often quickly gets into a discussion of CAPTCHAs, which I
can briefly and vaguely recap. We have a refresh button on the CAPTCHA
displayed on Wikimedia wikis now. Due to how easy they can be broken, I'm
not sure we'll ever have audio CAPTCHAs, though there's continued demand.
Foreign language CAPTCHAs could maybe be coming soon, if we can figure out
how to not make them impossibly hard due to accented characters. And
there's perennial discussion of tying in Wikisource and its manual optical
character recognition (OCR) work with a CAPTCHA system, as reCAPTCHA, now
owned by Google, continues to remain a non-starter.
In terms of integrating spam control, I'm not exactly sure what you mean.
It's largely a cat-and-mouse game involving pattern detection and
recognition. I don't imagine there's any "one size fits all" solution
here, though as said, I imagine any help we can give or receive in the
area of spam mitigation would be welcome.
It also occurs to me that you may be interested in pages such as
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FLOSS-Exchange> as well.
Hope that helps. If you have more specific questions, please ask. :-)
MZMcBride
Can't we create a way that will simplify merge propsals into a simple
1-minute procedure? A template with:
Merger [Quercitrin] into [Quercitin], Motivation [bla bla bla] that would
automatically display the merge notice on all revelant pages?
Best regards,
Rui
--
_________________________
Rui Correia
Advocacy, Human Rights, Media and Language Work Consultant
Bridge to Angola - Angola Liaison Consultant
Mobile Number in South Africa +27 74 425 4186
Número de Telemóvel na África do Sul +27 74 425 4186
_______________
phoebe ayers Wed May 7 23:22:07 UTC 2014
>>And those peer review systems have lots and lots of problems as well as upsides.
Nothing is perfect. The peer review system is definitely flawed. One flaw, actually, is that it is hard to find good reviewers. Once it took a year and a half. This is an economic problem. There is a strong incentive to publish, because of the status and recognition it brings. There is no comparable reward for review work. I enjoy it, because it exercises my critical powers. But there is little other form of reward.
E