Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-10-30/News and notes

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Considering that a siteban was proposed for Tony1 on the English Wikivoyage, that does call into question the objectivity of this story: voy:en:Wikivoyage:User ban nominations/Archive#User:Tony1 --Rschen7754 21:47, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Tony1 and I don't always see eye to eye, but that block, and the discussion leading to it, is one of the most pathetic things I've ever seen on a WMF project. Wikivoyage blocked a user for criticizing the project, plain and simple. His word choice was just the excuse that the blocking admin used. Could he have been nicer? Sure. Would that have mattered? After seeing that discussion, I seriously doubt it. Really, really sad. Sven Manguard Wha? 22:56, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Rschen, since you're so keen to raise it, I am one of many—small fry—and it didn't matter to me personally; the worrying aspect was that it suggested the existence of a certain block-happy behaviour by a few admins (among others, you were named). Indeed, a Wikivoyager has pointed the Signpost to a number of recent instances of apparently gratuitous blocks. A weird one is this one just days ago, as intimidation against writing this. Given its falling numbers, the site can ill afford to turn away editors who lobby for change. You're welcome to continue this on my en.WP talk page; but the broader phenomenon is really for others, not me, to discuss. I just present the facts. Please note that I have authored or co-authored four substantial coverages of Wikivoyage over the past 15 months. Tony (talk) 23:50, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Tony, just to make sure I don't misunderstand - in response to Rschen7754 claiming you have a COI due to being blocked, you are responding with the claim you don't have a COI because there exists another user on wikivoyage who has been blocked. Is that accurate? Bawolff (talk) 00:11, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Well it's that, and also the use of quite provocative images that are used nowhere on Wikivoyage (knowing that most people won't read the captions)... just to prejudice the reader. I'm very disappointed. --Rschen7754 00:13, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Those images are especially yellow journalism-esque. They clearly imply that they come from Wikivoyage, or relate to it in any way, but are really just random salacious images from Commons. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 04:25, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

A discussion of whether Wikivoyage's policies on illegal activities, drugs, etc need updating, and how to improve monitoring of edits for problems, would be welcome at voy:Wikivoyage talk:Illegal activities policy. However, I would ask that anyone who is concerned about this issue to please read the relevant section(s) of the articles that are being referenced, as some of the quotes used in the Signpost article seem to lack context - for example, the quote from the Amsterdam article is three sentences here, but those three sentences come from different places within a six paragraph section in voy:Amsterdam#Cannabis and other drugs, and those six paragraphs are strongly slanted towards addressing safety concerns for the large number of visitors who choose to experiment with available drugs there. -- Wrh2 (talk) 22:04, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) This article on WikiVoyage is a rotting load of holier-than-thou tripe. All the puritan attacks on Commons sexual content were not enough. I suppose there is still a need to go all tut-tut on the fact that -gasp!- people do pay for sex and like to smoke pot? What about instead dealing with it, and acknowledging that we're not all Boy Scouts? I don't do drugs nor I hang out with hookers, yet I do not feel the need to judge who does or to censor information that they may find useful. --cyclopia^speak! 23:58, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

"This user has been a thorn in our side almost from Day 1". Wow, WikiVoyage is becoming a trolling den more and more, as it's hate of Wikipedia and Wikipedians, as well as of any criticism, keeps on growing. In this case I don't support censorship, but it's a very interesting issue that Tony should be commended for bringing more light to. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:52, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Bounty and Reward Boards

Its good that the mention of these two boards being up for deletion are on here. I personally called to have both closed. Though with this, there can be more discussion so progress can be made towards the final outcome. GamerPro64 21:14, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

signpost being used as a stick to beat other projects with

I'm kind of getting tired of all these attack the sister project stories on the signpost. Now please don't get me wrong, there are important issues involved, and its important to discuss them. However this type of one sided editorializing does not do this. Combined with the other lets beat on the sister projects with a stick articles that the signpost has published in the past (but never a negative article about wikipedia using this type of tone) seems mostly to foster an us vs them mentality then anything else. Bawolff (talk) 23:13, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

+1 - Commons and Wikinews have been recent targets. --Rschen7754 23:15, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

+1 Legoktm (talk) 23:16, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

VW page views

Stating "Its page views have dropped 12% from the levels in January when the new site was launched" needs to be put into context. I would say it is a sign of just how well WV has done. In January WV was getting international media attention. After that its viewership fell and now is nearly back to the level it was when it was getting this attention. That this occured after only 6 months is amazing. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 23:48, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

There's also bugzilla:52688 which is probably throwing a wrench into it. Legoktm (talk) 00:06, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

"Citation needed". How were those stats obtained? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:52, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

And what is wrong with sex/drug tourism, exactly?

Everyone seems to be taking it as a given that something wrong is happening here. So long as nothing illegal (both de facto and de jure) is going on then more or less everyone benefits from sex and drugs tourism. Women are lifted out of poverty, relatively speaking*, and drugs are either provided by the government in a couple of countries, or are cannabis - and the two obvious places to go for cannabis are either Christiana in Cophenhagen or most of the Netherlands.

I actually find this cultural imperialism of red state us hypocritical puritanism much worse than any so-called exploitation.

*yeah, they may still have pretty unpleasant living conditions by western standards, but relatively speaking it's a pretty decent deal.

Egg Centric 01:17, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

This really should have been an op-ed

This raised some interesting points, and it's not as bad as the Farmbrough piece in the Arbitration Report a while back, but The Signpost really needs to do a better job drawing the line between articles and opinion pieces. Furthermore, it was a breach of basic journalistic ethics for Tony to not disclose his personal involvement here. I understand that The Signpost has a lot of work to do with relatively little resources, but I expect better than this. — PinkAmpers&^{(Je vous invite à me parler)} 01:48, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Fair point. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:53, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

The search engine problem

As the unnamed editor indicated, Wikivoyage is not attacting enough readers and new editors because search engines virtually always rank its articles below Wikitravel's. And it's not just Google. Until that changes, WV will struggle. Can the wider WMF community not help with this? Nurg (talk) 03:12, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Tony1 is following a long tradition of Australian journalism in trying (successfully) to sensationalise the ordinary and non-controversial.

However, he does raise, if only briefly and at the end, two important issues:

1. When is it appropriate to censor prima facie good faith contributions that are not libellous/legally controversial, gross personal attacks, obscene or hateful (either by excising "offending" contributions or by blocking editors) in WMF projects? And, even more importantly,
2. How can WMF get more bang for the bucks it has (nobly) expended on the Wikivoyage project by ensuring more eyeballs on their pages. The teutonic "Master of Puppets", Frank, has given Wikivoyage good advice as to how to achieve this, but most of the admins (Ikan Kekek, Nurg, Pashley, Peter Southwood and a few others nobly excepted) seem more interested in amateur sleuthing than taking up Frank's challenge. The bald fact remains that, as I write this, his test article still has the highest Google search ranking of any Wikivoyage article bar none. Just use a typical search phrase such as 'guide somerset tasmania' with the anonymised, non-personalised results from Google obtained by using the US site: https://startpage.com to check that for yourself, dear reader...

--118.93.67.66 (talk) 05:01, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

PS: Alice has e-mailed to say that the full text of this part of her quote was: "The readership is actually static with rolling hills and troughs. It's just that it should be 8-150 times greater and should be topping Wikitravel - that will never happen unless and until they adopt proper SEO - what Frank suggested is just the bare minimum of what is needed."

She also apologises for using me as her "meatpuppet" but respectfully points out that, after more than 6 years, she is still blocked from editing EN Wikipedia. :--118.93.67.66 (talk) 05:27, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

PPS: Alice has e-mailed me again to say that the full text of the relevant part of her separate e-mail to Tony1 (not that it makes much difference in my opinion to Tony1's "quote" to run the two e-mails into one) was:

"> Is the matter of spam taken seriously by en.WV?

Yes. it is but because Search Engine Optimisation is NOT taken seriously, (see the https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage_talk:Search_Expedition#Action_points_to_boost_our_readership thread for more detail) our readership numbers are only a small proportion of the original Wikitravel site and that means we are not so attractive a target of the spammers.

At Wikitravel the automated spam attacks have reached truly appalling dimensions."

--118.93.67.66 (talk) 05:43, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

• There's no particular tradition of sensationalising in the Australian press—at least none that is distinguishable from the press in other countries. The article presents the facts, and if you think the context makes it sensational, perhaps Wikivoyage might reflect on how to react in a positive fashion. There's a desperate need to attract female editors and readers; reducing the turn-off factor for them would be a good start, and creating a more inclusive social environment at the site would help, too. But instead, the boys—yes, they are all boys—are gathered around the camp fire working out how to attack me ("a jerk", "a dick", "a crap article", and a call to arms: "attacks against the author are 100% valid"). Flicking an email to FOXnews would be a very bad idea ("If we publicize this, we both get more publicity and give the lie to the claim that we can't tolerate any criticism"). And may I say that the comment above that "Women are lifted out of poverty" through prostitution displays the very problematic thinking that has landed the site in this unsatisfactory state. There are misconceptions about women and a regrettable association between developing countries and opportunities for sexual exploitation that some people might see as linking sexism and racism (although I don't).

  I didn't want to make suggestions, but my research on the site led me to think that centralising advice on prostitution and drugs rather than allowing it to scatter all over the place would be a way of controlling the message. And the message does need to be controlled by responsible hands in the English Wikivoyage community, given the sensitivities of those topics. Centralised advice is offered on other matters at the site.

  Once you get over the initial anger and personalised attack stage, this and other possibilities of making the guidelines more functional might float to the surface. Thank you. Tony (talk) 05:38, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Vikivoyage

Excuse me Viki Voyage, your Freudian slip is showing. Nurg (talk) 03:17, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

We do need more editors on Wikivoyage

And this is so immediately apparent here. Even though we are not @Wikivoyage, the same usual stuff crops up which has nothing to do with advancing Wikivoyage but a lot with fixed personal agendas and (hurt?) personalities. This is becoming boring like an old sitcom - very predictable, with the same characters and writers out of ideas. So, we have:

• The same guy as usual trying to make themselves better by proposing to formalize a policy on something moderately unimportant, and later building a whole campaign of personal self-gratification around it.
• The same guy as usual complaining to high heavens because he can't link to Wikipedia
• Not-logged-in people who ostensibly aren't Frank but somehow are only interested in said Frank, Frank's edits, Frank's proposals, Frank's situation with other users and discussing Frank

This sitcom is not "Golden Girls" and it's not getting any Emmys, it's just sad and boring.

So, if you're reading this and have absolutely no idea what's going on, just head over to Wikivoyage and start contributing. Despite all the negativity above, by and large it's just fan, rewarding and very easy. Once there are more of us, the sitcom becomes just an old TV rerun channel nobody watches. For now, it's getting undue prominence and gives the project a bad image. PrinceGloria (talk) 05:27, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

More readers = more editors

wouldn't you think?

Do you think there is a more important topic for discussion and action than the poor (and static) readership of Wikivoyage nearly one year after launch? Please be part of the solution rather than part of the personality fixation you so graphically describe (it should be obvious to anyone looking up my IP that I'm neither Frank nor Alice - although, as I've clearly stated above, I have been engaging in an e-mail conversation with the latter.) --118.93.67.66 (talk) 05:57, 3 November 2013 (UTC)