WikimediaIndia-l March 2008

wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

9 participants
7 discussions

Single User Login
by guru brahma 26 Mar '08

26 Mar '08

Hi all, Pl. see this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2008-03-24/Single…. Of late, I've been more off Wikipedia than on it; so, I do not know how the community reacts to SUL. I personally feel that SUL is indeed a good system in non-controversial cases where there is no conflict of 2 users having the same username on different Wikimedia projects. It establishes one's identity clearly and completely even for projects on which we may not have been working and thus the uniqueness of our usernames is protected. I also believe that it is important that people who have gone for SUL signal that their username is unique on all Wikimedia projects - I created the template http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:User_unified_login to signal that. Pl. feel free to use it/ improve it or include it in various Indian language based Wikimedia projects. Thanks, Gurubrahma. http://freewillanddestiny.blogspot.com/ --------------------------------- 5, 50, 500, 5000 - Store N number of mails in your inbox. Click here.

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Really short articles
by Blnguyen 25 Mar '08

25 Mar '08

Hi everyone. I noticed this being discussed a while ago. I just went through the interwikis on some of the Indian cricket bios, and in some wikis, particularly Marathi, there are a lot of short cricket bios. Most of these have no main body text and only an infobox and some stub notice. Worse still, a lot of articles just have an empty infobox and the stats aren't even filled in That might cause a person to think that mr.wiki is some dumping ground. I couldn't read the articles obviously, but a lot of them seemed to be cut and pasted incorrectly, because in some of them, there is only one sentence and the only link is to the Tendulkar articles.

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article Religious harmony in India listed for deletion
by Mahitgar from Marathi Wikipedia 23 Mar '08

23 Mar '08

The article Religious harmony in India listed for deletion second time.I wonder why people should have POV against Religious harmony in India but that POV is quite apparant that is the reason it is listed Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Religious harmony in India here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Religious_harm… see article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_harmony_in_India I request those who want to keep this article do vote at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Religious harmony in India so I can keep working further on this article. If every 10 minutes if some one or other wants to delete the article how do I spend more time to improve the article ? Openion from people working on India related projects is needed urgently. Thanks and looking forward to support Mahitgar (talk) 12:00, 23 March 2008 (UTC) Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Noticeboard_for_India-related_t…" Categories: Non-article India pages Unlimited freedom, unlimited storage. Get it now, on http://help.yahoo.com/l/in/yahoo/mail/yahoomail/tools/tools-08.html/

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Tough for beginners on Wikipedia?
by Sidin Vadukut 22 Mar '08

22 Mar '08

Hi People, I am working on a news story about the people behind the India-specific Wikipedia pages and how a bunch of really eclectic personalities spend tons of time to ensure pages are clean and useful. However one of them mentioned that it is slowly becoming more and more difficult for new writers to join in as contributions have become extremely complicated. Some of the simplest things lead to disputes and trivialities cause locks on certain articles. I was wondering if you guys had an opinion on this? Is Wikipedia increasingly becoming more and more difficult for first-timers? I am talking about those who intend to specialize in certain topics and be active and regular. I work for the mint-Wall Street Journal in Mumbai. I was asked to mail this group by Angela Beesely. Thanks and regards, Sidin Sunny Vadukut. www.livemint.com

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Tough for beginners on Wikipedia?
by Ravi shankar 12 Mar '08

12 Mar '08

Leaving aside the wikiquette and formailities, the mediawiki software itself makes it tough for newcomers. Even one Post-Doc friend of mine could not figure out the simplest wiki syntax! People are more comfortable with WYSWYG editors. I had been watching wikipedia for last 3 years. MediaWiki has hardly shown any improvement in usability and interface. It's time more developers put in more effort in improving ease of using media wiki. Other free software around the same time frame have improved dramatically. Thanks Ravi ____________________________________________________________________________________ Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your home page. http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Wikimediaindia-l Digest, Vol 6, Issue 1
by Mahitgar from Marathi Wikipedia 11 Mar '08

11 Mar '08

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Tough for beginners on Wikipedia?
by Utkarshraj Atmaram 11 Mar '08

11 Mar '08

On 10 March 2008, Sidin Vadukut <sidin.vadukut at gmail.com> wrote: > However one of them mentioned that it is slowly becoming more and > more difficult for new writers to join in as contributions have > become extremely complicated. Some of the simplest things lead to > disputes and trivialities cause locks on certain articles. > > I was wondering if you guys had an opinion on this? Is Wikipedia > increasingly becoming more and more difficult for first-timers? I am > talking about those who intend to specialize in certain topics and > be active and regular. I am not sure what exactly do you mean by "contributions have become extremely complicated". Are you referring to Wikipedia's now-somewhat stringent standards for accepting articles? Or do you mean that the wiki-syntax is too difficult? Or are you concerned that the cabals, vandals and trolls are scaring away the new contributors? As a society, Wikipedia is bound to grow more complex as it grows. If the new contributors face a problem that they do not know how to deal with (vandalism, another abusive user etc.), they can head over to the new contributors' help page (the link to this page appears on the help page): <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:New_contributors'_help_page>. Wikipedia's standards for accepting articles have evolved over the years. Most Wikipedians will accept that the standards have become more stringent, but these standards are necessary because in addition to a lot of positive contributors, Wikipedia also attracts a number of vandals, trolls and spammers. Very short articles created without references, inappropriate pages, images uploaded without a license or text copied from another website are bound to get deleted. Most newly-created articles or newly-uploaded images are deleted because they're either copyright violation (e.g. image of the user's favorite actress copied from a film website) or because they're outside Wikipedia's project scope (e.g. an article on an little-known school band). New users can avoid such experiences by learning a few basics of contributing to Wikipedia. On the article creation page, the users are presented with a few instructions and a link to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Your_first_article>. Creating an article that'll not get deleted is as simple as following these instructions. The disputes (trivial or non-trivial) are a part of any large collaborative project. This is not something specific to the new users; controversial topics (e.g. Israel-Palestine) will always attract disputes. The new users generally find themselves embroiled in disputes, when they make controversial edits an article without going through the talk page archives (where the issues might have been discussed more than once in the past). An example is the article on Muhammad -- many new users try to remove the images from the article, without bothering to read the talk page, where the rationale for including the image is explained in detail. The vandals and trolls are a serious problem. Citizendium <http://en.citizendium.org> is trying to deal with them (and other issues like reliability) by disallowing anonymous editing. At Wikipedia, we have an article validation proposal <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation> in the works. It can be tested at <http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox> As for understanding the wiki syntax, and the Wikipedia policies and guidelines, these are the minimum basics. The users who joined Wikipedia three years ago also learned them. Wikipedia is just like any other project open to public participation. Before people start contributing, they need to learn a few basics. The set of "basics" grow larger as the project grows larger. Regards, Utkarshraj http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Utcursch

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WikimediaIndia-l March 2008