Wikipedia-l March 2007

wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

62 participants
48 discussions

Quiz extension
by Tim Starling 26 Mar '07

26 Mar '07

Lrbabe's Quiz extension has been enabled on all Wikiversity wikis. Documentation: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Quiz

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Fwd: censership (from Yiddish Wikipedian)
by Mark Williamson 26 Mar '07

26 Mar '07

Dear all, I received the following message regarding censorship from a fellow Wikipedian (from the Yiddish Wikipedia) commenting on the chilling effects of censorship (in this case religious censorship). ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: willi boy <boywilli(a)gmail.com> Date: 25-Mar-2007 10:53 Subject: censership To: Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com> i saw your comments on the mailing list. this censorship think is frightening can we maybe make use of the new times in wikimenia foundation like the resignation of danny and the hiring of bastiqe because this will eventually hit the yiddish wiki as well since most speakers are religious. yours trully -- Refije dirije lanmè yo paske nou posede pwòp bato.

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English Wikipedia 0.5 release ready!
by David Gerard 24 Mar '07

24 Mar '07

http://titoxd.blogspot.com/2007/03/and-for-some-big-news.html - d.

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Looking to interview Wikipedians
by Benjamin Keith Johnson 23 Mar '07

23 Mar '07

I am a researcher seeking to interview Wikipedia contributors of any and all levels of experience and involvement. In-depth, one hour interviews will be conducted over the phone or email beginning March 27. Compensation for your time will be provided – a $10 gift certificate to Amazon.com. Must be 18+ and U.S. resident. Contact Benjamin Johnson, Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media, Michigan State University, by email at john2429(a)msu.edu or by phone at 517.230.1272. Thanks! Benjamin

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GeoHack can now be localized
by Magnus Manske 23 Mar '07

23 Mar '07

By request, I changed my geohack tool, which is used by many wikipedias to provide a list of map and data resources for given GPS coordinates, to optionally use localized templates. For that purpose, I've moved the en template to [[Template:GeoTemplate]]. For localization (say, "fr"), you have to 1. copy the text of [[en:Template:GeoTemplate]] to [[fr:Template:GeoTemplate]] 2. edit [[fr:Template:GeoTemplate]] to the local language 3. call geohack with the additional parameter "language=fr" (URL generation is usually done by templates, so a few fixes on your wikipedia should do) I still say that Map Sources/GeoHack should become part of the default MediaWiki installation for wikipedias via extension. Using the toolserver for this was a quick hack (thus the name) after the original server went offline. It HTTP-GETs the [[Template:GeoTemplate]] for /every single request/, which is bad for both toolserver and wikipedia servers and could be solved internally much more elegantly. Magnus

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Look Who's Using Wikipedia
by Frederick "FN" Noronha 16 Mar '07

16 Mar '07

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1595184,00.html Look Who's Using Wikipedia Thursday, Mar. 01, 2007 By BILL TANCER The Wikipedia home page Poor Wikipedia. Professional Golfer Fuzzy Zoeller is suing one of its contributors for a defamatory cyber-attack. And last year, television host and comedian Stephen Colbert urged his audience to vandalize a Wikipedia entry about elephants to prove the point that in a model where any user can edit encyclopedia entries, those entries are only as good as their source. Take the case of retired journalist John Seigenthaler, a former assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who was wrongfully accused of involvement in the assassination of Robert and John Kennedy by an anonymous Wikipedia contributor in 2005. Given the controversy stirring around Wikipedia, the history department at Middlebury College has banned its use as a research source. When did the online form of the dust-covered encyclopedia become such a magnet for drama? Academics are split on the usefulness of Wikipedia, which bills itself as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." The sheer volume of content (Wikipedia claims over 5.3 million entries, 1.6 million in English) is partly responsible for the site's dominance as an online reference. When compared to the top 3,200 educational reference sites in the U.S., Wikipedia is #1, capturing 24.3% of all visits to the category, according to Hitwise data. But as the recent drama illustrates, a body of online knowledge built by an army of 75,000 volunteer, anonymous contributors and editors is prone to anything from simple benign errors to outright information vandalism. Search and Internet behavior data provide alarming insight into this powerful but volatile resource — alarming because one of the core groups of Wikipedia users are school children. Determining the extent to which students leverage Wikipedia requires some data detective work. The search terms that users enter to navigate to the site are the most revealing. Along with searches for various anime cartoons, sex topics and information on the most recently shorn, exposed or departed celebrities, the majority of top terms bear a close resemblance to elementary school homework and research projects. During the month of February, which is also Black History month, three of the top 20 terms sending traffic to Wikipedia were for prominent black historical figures, while two other searches were likely motivated by President's Day. In fact, changing time-frames to any other month during the school year reveals a similar result. (Source: Hitwise) Along with the impressive growth in visits to the site, 680% in two years, charting those visits over time confirms student activity. Over the last three years of growth, traffic dipped during the summer months and the weeks of spring break and winter vacation. One of the reasons for Wikipedia's stellar growth rate in visits is all the traffic it receives from search engines, over 64% last week. In fact, due to Google's algorithm for displaying search results and the abundance of links in any given entry, Wikipedia has become the #1 external site visited after Google's search page. As students begin their online research, they could view the prevalence of Wikipedia references in Google as proof of the accuracy and reliability of the source. Given the search exposure and sheer volume of data available on the site, they might fall into the trap of relying on a single source for their education. Hopefully their research projects won't involve elephants or professional golfers. Bill Tancer is general manager of global research at Hitwise. -- FN M: 0091 9822122436 P: +91-832-240-9490 (after 1300IST please) http://fn.goa-india.org http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com What bloggers are saying about Goa: http://planet.goa-india.org/

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How many editors are there?
by David Gerard 15 Mar '07

15 Mar '07

Yet again I have a journalist question: "How many editors are there on Wikipedia?" I can't find any solid numbers on this. I recall a graph showing that activity per person is a power law graph, meaning there's no sharply-definable answer. Does anyone have any idea? - d.

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Campaign by linguists to improve English/Russian coverage of linguistics
by Brianna Laugher 14 Mar '07

14 Mar '07

Language Log is a widely read blog covering linguistic issues that goes back to July 2003. (It's even licensed under CC-BY-SA! how progressive :)) http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004301.html A recent post about [[en:User:Koryakov Yuri]]'s campaign to improve linguistics biography and general coverage in Russian Wikipedia. Probably more to come. Also a nice anecdote from an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts: -- In my large intro course yesterday, there was an unfamiliar hand in the air a lot of the time, and the student's questions and insights were the best I've had all semester. It was puzzling, because I didn't recognize him, and he seemed to know much more about syntax than one would expect. (It was our first official day on the topic.) After class, he came to the front and introduced himself as a prospective student, just out of high school. He said linguistics was his passion in high school. I said, "What? How?" And he replied, "Wikipedia". -- regards, Brianna user:pfctdayelise

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Moldavian
by Andre Engels 13 Mar '07

13 Mar '07

On the Moldavian Wikipedia it says for over a month "This wiki has been closed for now." Is there any outlook on whether 'for now' means 'for ever' or that it will be re-opened at some time? I am asking because I want to know what to do with the interwiki for the bot. If the wiki is closed down for good, I intend to remove them silently; if it will be opened up again some time soon, I want to keep them in the same way as to 'normal' Wikipedias. -- Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels

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Re: [Wikipedia-l] Notability changes from Jimbo's view
by Ian Tresman 12 Mar '07

12 Mar '07

At 12:03 12/03/2007, you wrote: >On 11/03/07, GerardM <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > everything is measured. Worthiness is this new word created by the American > > television guy and it means whatever you make it. > >You are thinking of "truthiness". Worthiness is a well-established >English word, I don't know how long its history is but I am guessing >it extends back well before the history of television. The Oxford English Dictionary indeed lists "Thruthiness", redirecting to "Truthy" described as " Characterized by truth; truthful, true. Hence "truthiness, truthfulness, faithfulness.". Regards, Ian Tresman

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Wikipedia-l March 2007