Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-06-19/News and notes

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Low voter numbers in WMF elections

• Regarding the voter numbers in WMF elections, I don't vote because I don't have any idea of who the candidates are. And that I trust that whatever decision that will be made will be a good one. Skalman (talk) 20:45, 20 June 2013 (UTC)
  • You are wrong. ;) The decision will be a good one only if participated: the WMF board can't act in isolation. --Nemo 21:12, 20 June 2013 (UTC)
    • I agree with Nemo, with the added bit that we (the Signpost) did extensive profiles of all of the candidates: the Board, part 1 and 2, and the FDC. Please read them, get to know the candidates, and make your vote. :-) Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 21:18, 20 June 2013 (UTC)
• The WMF elections have low numbers of voters because only Wikipedia insiders actually care anymore about what goes on at the heights of the WMF. Intrigue and power-playing are the lifeblood of said insiders, and so they will try to participate in decisions of power to the greatest extent possible. This is why ArbCom has not made any landmark rulings protecting content builders, but has merely existed to ensure that business as usual continues without getting too far out of hand. Wer900 • talk 21:31, 20 June 2013 (UTC)
  • I hate to agree with such a cynical comment, but I think Wer900 is right in that most potential voters do not view the WMF as having any direct operational influence on the projects. Perhaps this is the result of years of the WMF ducking responsibility for such things as child protection. When I raised the idea that the WMF's terms of use be used to deal with allegations of hostile environment sexual harassment (made by no less than Jimmy Wales), nothing happened, despite the very clear wording of the terms. It seems like that particular piece of boilerplate is intended for some other purpose than actually being used to deal with problem users. Perhaps voters don't see the relevance of voting for people that keep themselves at arm's length from the projects they manage. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 21:46, 20 June 2013 (UTC)
    • Then why not vote in people who will change that? There are individual editors running this year who are not members of chapters or have been disengaged with actual editing for some time. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 22:47, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

• how was which language you speak calculated for the voters. If its just which wiki is your sul home wiki, I think that is rather inaccurate. I was under the impression in previous years the voter list showed which wiki you voted from, which doesnt seem the case this year, but I might be mistaken. Bawolff (talk) 23:57, 20 June 2013 (UTC)
  • By home wiki: it's the best indication we have, and I think not too bad. English is likely to have a higher proportion of second-language speakers, of course; but they still regard en.WP, and its wiki-culture, as their home, apparently. Tony (talk) 01:25, 21 June 2013 (UTC)
• I'm an Arab and I didn't vote. Well, I was going to vote and I actually opened the previous Signpost issues and started reading them. I got bored half way and decided to go back to content creation. Mohamed CJ (talk) 00:50, 21 June 2013 (UTC)
  • I'm struck by the cynicism. I'm wondering whether participation in WMF "democracy" is not happening in the Arab Wikimedia world? Why are the Arab-speaking chapters and the Arab-WP community not organising for a good candidate or two to stand next time, with a policy platform that means something to Arab-speakers? Tony (talk) 01:46, 21 June 2013 (UTC)
    • I can't answer these questions as I'm not an active user of the Arabic WP (probably less than 10 edits), but I think it has to do with the weakness of the Arabic language content on the web in general. Mohamed CJ (talk) 06:42, 21 June 2013 (UTC)
      • Maybe the WMF movement needs your knowledge and ideas to make the presence of Arabic on our sites stronger. Tony (talk) 07:36, 21 June 2013 (UTC)
        • @Tony1: I'm interested in helping by whatever I can (probably after I return from the wiki-break starting tomorrow). How do you think I can help best? Mohamed CJ (talk) 13:01, 21 June 2013 (UTC)
        • Mohamed, now you've put me on the spot! There are now opportunities for forming a WMF-affiliated user group, which could become eligible to use the trademark and apply for funding if it presented a well-developed case for project activity. In a small country such as yours, the demographics favour the occasional physical meet-up. But finding other like-minded Wikimedians is critical, and a user group could link Arabic-speaking Wikimedians across that huge east–west distance. A good start would be to get together online with a few people and list ways in which the coverage of the Arabic language and Arab culture could be expanded and deepened (even including photography on Commons). I think the WMF volunteer AffCom (Affiliations Committee) would be willing to offer logistical and procedural advice; certainly one of their missions is to facilitate the formation of good user groups. I'm advised that there are no chapters in the Arabic-speaking world. Tony (talk) 14:48, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

The Indonesian voters are partly helped by campaign via Indonesian Wikipedia Facebook Groups. I curious though, how accurate the language count of the voters, if, let's say, I'm voting from Meta? Bennylin (talk) 11:13, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

A million articles... With a bot

I must say I find it hard to understand why so many people are vehemently opposed to bot-generated stubs. I myself am very much in favor of bots doing the tedious work of creating stub articles for individual species in invertebrate zoology and botany. I do understand the inevitable Immediatist versus Eventualist disagreement on Wikipedia, but still... I am amazed that in Wikipedia (of all places!) so many people intensely dislike the idea of bots creating these helpful little stubs. Once stubs are in place it is extremely easy for relative newcomers to add images or other useful pieces of information. It is a big nuisance to have to create your own stub every time you want to add an image of a species that is not represented, and I think many people who are not very experienced may be put off by that necessity. I know that some people loathe stubs, but until we ban humans from creating stubs (which are much more likely to be error-prone and much harder to fix), I don't see why we should say it is terrible to let bots create them. Invertzoo (talk) 00:06, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

I'm with Invertzoo on this matter. I think such stubs are useful. Like seed crystals. It seems to me that regardless of their being sketchy on a social/statistical/competitive_ego level (i.e. to pump up stats to achieve 'milestone' recognition) the use of such stub creating bots still has a practical benefit in seeding encyclopedic articles. I'd like to encourage folks to give consideration to how much 'keeping score' and 'viewing things as a competitive game' may be influencing some peoples attitudes. Their initial emotional responses. Would this issue be any where near as contentious if weight hadn't been given to a numerical milestone in the first place?

Technology progresses and automation is part of that. I'm not writing this with a stick in the mud, nor on papyrus w/ a reed pen, nor on vellum w/ a quill, nor on paper with a typewriter. It seems sensible to me to take advange of software based tools in a software based environment. Subject to human consideration and oversight. A consideration might be to flag such stubs for review or automatic deletion if there's no growth within some period of time, say 6, 12, 18 months or whatever and to have them posted into an organized category so that folks who specialize in the relevant fields may easily access them. Feed, facilitate, and foster them instead of damning their diminutiveness. --Kevjonesin (talk) 04:27, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

I am torn with Lsj's style of editing, especially after bearing witness to what it has done to the Cebuano and Waray-Waray Wikipedias, where his bot was first deployed. On the one hand, yes, bots do help increase the coverage of a given Wikipedia, but it does no good if they stay as stubs forever ("permastubs"). The Cebuano and Waray-Waray Wikipedias are beset with the problem of having tens of thousands of stubs on virtually everything, but no editors to expand the content. We can't presume that editors will just magically jump in and edit: what if they don't?

For me, I will always emphasize quality over quantity on smaller-language projects. I would prefer a Wikipedia which has thousands of well-written articles, compared to a Wikipedia which has hundreds of thousands of permastubs. --Sky Harbor ^(talk) 06:58, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

The bot won my contribution time

As someone who often tries to add photos of plants or animals that I know almost nothing about (having simply copied their binomial from a label), I completely agree with Invertzoo. I would really prefer not to have to look up all the bits and pieces to make a stub if they can be scripted from a database. If the stub is already there, I can even add a picture to another language wiki. I guess that's why sv:Gudeoconcha sophiae ceb:Gudeoconcha sophiae war:Gudeoconcha sophiae, and sv:Epiglypta howinsulae ceb:Epiglypta howinsulae war:Epiglypta howinsulae have illustrated articles about Gudeoconcha sophiae and Epiglypta howinsulae, species which live(d) solely on an English speaking Island, while the English Wikipedia does not! (Undoubtedly User:Invertzoo, a Gastropod expert, will help me rectify this, but that's not the point.) --99of9 (talk) 10:23, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

This makes perfect sense. I do wish that WMF projects would lose their sense of base-10 thresholds as some kind of competition; it really detracts from the quality of articles as the more important benchmark of success. Tony (talk) 10:42, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

If the base-10 competition inspired the bot to write stubs for me to add to, then I'm not that unhappy with it. But I'm all for celebrating quality as well as quantity. Do you have a way of benchmarking quality across wikipedias? (Even within en-wiki - do we celebrate e.g. base-10 FA/GA/FL/FT/FP moments?)--99of9 (talk) 11:57, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Raschka's comments: wording/grammar mess

The following needs someone who actually knows what it's supposed to mean to fix it:

Raschka told the Signpost that these articles were stubs a impart little useful information to readers—he asks, "who could be helped [these] fragment[s] of data?"

Should it be "were stubs that impart" or "were stubs and impart" or something like that? And the direct quote is [fixed from the original] but winds up still making no sense. Should it be "helped [by these]"? DMacks (talk) 00:44, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Fixed, thanks! I tried to make two sentences into one and then forgot to fix the grammar. :-) Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 00:51, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick fix! DMacks (talk) 05:18, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Where voters come from

I noticed the statistics regarding where the voters come from. It does skew the numbers greatly that all links to the SecurePoll page in the Signpost article and the meta page explaining where to vote, are to the English Wikipedia version. If a great number of people have an account there, I wouldn't be surprised if many of them didn't bother changing the URL to their home wiki. -Svavar Kjarrval (talk) 01:07, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

An account is not enough, they also have to be active enough to be eligible on the wiki where they open Special:SecurePoll; for most users that's only their home wiki, though e.g. I may be eligible on a dozen wiki. The Meta pages link either to Meta or to a local page, only the English version should link here. --Nemo 08:17, 21 June 2013 (UTC)