User talk:John Carter
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WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 2
For this month's issue...
Making sense of a lot of data.
Work on our prototype will begin imminently. In the meantime, we have to understand what exactly we're working with. To this end, we generated a list of 71 WikiProjects, based on those brought up on our Stories page and those who had signed up for pilot testing. For those projects where people told stories, we coded statements within those stories to figure out what trends there were in these stories. This approach allowed us to figure out what Wikipedians thought of WikiProjects in a very organic way, with very little by way of a structure. (Compare this to a structured interview, where specific questions are asked and answered.) This analysis was done on 29 stories. Codes were generally classified as "benefits" (positive contributions made by a WikiProject to the editing experience) and "obstacles" (issues posed by WikiProjects, broadly speaking). Codes were generated as I went along, ensuring that codes were as close to the original data as possible. Duplicate appearances of a code for a given WikiProject were removed.
We found 52 "benefit" statements encoded and 34 "obstacle" statements. The most common benefit statement referring to the project's active discussion and participation, followed by statements referring to a project's capacity to guide editor activity, while the most common obstacles made reference to low participation and significant burdens on the part of the project maintainers and leaders. This gives us a sense of WikiProjects' big strength: they bring people together, and can be frustrating to editors when they fail to do so. Meanwhile, it is indeed very difficult to bring editors together on a common interest; in the absence of a highly motivated core of organizers, the technical infrastructure simply isn't there.
We wanted to pair this qualitative study with quantitative analysis of a WikiProject and its "universe" of pages, discussions, templates, and categories. To this end I wrote a script called ProjAnalysis which will, for a given WikiProject page (e.g. Wikipedia:WikiProject Star Trek) and WikiProject talk-page tag (e.g. Template:WikiProject Star Trek), will give you a list of usernames of people who edited within the WikiProject's space (the project page itself, its talk page, and subpages), and within the WikiProject's scope (the pages tagged by that WikiProject, excluding the WikiProject space pages). The output is an exhaustive list of usernames. We ran the script to analyze our test batch of WikiProjects for edits between March 1, 2014 and February 28, 2015, and we subjected them to further analysis to only include those who made 10+ edits to pages in the projects' scope, those who made 4+ edits to the projects' space, and those who made 10+ edits to pages in scope but not 4+ edits to pages in the projects' space. This latter metric gives us an idea of who is active in a certain subject area of Wikipedia, yet who isn't actively engaging on the WikiProject's pages. This information will help us prioritize WikiProjects for pilot testing, and the ProjAnalysis script in general may have future life as an application that can be used by Wikipedians to learn about who is in their community.
Complementing the above two studies are a design analysis, which summarizes the structure of the different WikiProject spaces in our test batch, and the comprehensive census of bots and tools used to maintain WikiProjects, which will be finished soon. With all of this information, we will have a game plan in place! We hope to begin working with specific WikiProjects soon.
As a couple of asides...
- Database Reports has existed for several years on Wikipedia to the satisfaction of many, but many of the reports stopped running when the Toolserver was shut off in 2014. However, there is good news: the weekly New WikiProjects and WikiProjects by Changes reports are back, with potential future reports in the future.
- WikiProject X has an outpost on Wikidata! Check it out. It's not widely publicized, but we are interested in using Wikidata as a potential repository for metadata about WikiProjects, especially for WikiProjects that exist on multiple Wikimedia projects and language editions.
That's all for now. Thank you for subscribing! If you have any questions or comments, please share them with us.
Harej (talk) 01:43, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
Infoboxes II
Hope you don't mind, but I decided to be WP:BOLD and added Infoboxes II to WP:LAME. Hawkeye7 (talk) 02:07, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
Talkback
Message added 16:11, 3 April 2015 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.
North America1000 16:11, 3 April 2015 (UTC)
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-- Robert of Ramsor (talk) 18:07, 4 April 2015 (UTC)
Just a quick heads up that I've toted the piece on Grace Tsutada to Articles for Deletion. Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Grace_Tsutada. Carrite (talk) 15:25, 5 April 2015 (UTC)
This week's article for improvement (week 15, 2015)
 The wheel is one of the most famous and useful inventions in the history of technology
The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection: Previous selections: Garbage picking • Antagonist Get involved with the TAFI project! You can... Posted by: MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of EuroCarGT (talk) 00:14, 6 April 2015 (UTC) • |
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Hello, from a DR/N volunteer
This is a friendly reminder to involved parties that there is a current Dispute Resolution Noticeboard case still awaiting comments and replies. If this dispute has been resolved to the satisfaction of the filing editor and all involved parties, please take a moment to add a note about this at the discussion so that a volunteer may close the case as "Resolved". If the dispute is still ongoing, please add your input. Montanabw(talk) 01:22, 6 April 2015 (UTC)
Today's articles for improvement
- Hello John Carter:
- This week's voting for TAFI's upcoming weekly collaboration has begun at Week 19 of 2015. Thanks for participating!
This week's article for improvement (week 16, 2015)
Hello, John Carter.
The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection: Previous selections: History of technology • Garbage picking Get involved with the TAFI project! You can... Posted by: MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of EuroCarGT (talk) 01:25, 13 April 2015 (UTC) • |
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Rockefeller Foundation article.
One thing I have been criticized for is taking down a claim on the Rockefeller Foundation article that RF helped fund Joseph Mengele's work. I find that difficult to believe, and the original source was Edwin Block, author of IBM and the Holocaust. They changed it to a better source, I believe. But I still question the claim. The Rockefeller Foundation is one group many anti-Masonic conspiracy theorists like David Icke have obsessed over, so there's a lot of false information circulating about it. I think the claim should at least be discussed, whether it should be kept in the article. Also, I believe the Rockefeller Foundation is left-wing politically, just like the family is for the most part, and Nazism is traditionally considered to be on the right-wing side of the political spectrum. Glenn Beck has claimed the Rockefeller Foundation has communist art in it, and they did actually hire a Bolshevik named Diego Rivera to paint it, so he may be right. That would seem to be the opposite of Nazism to me. --PaulBustion88 (talk) 22:45, 13 April 2015 (UTC) "The Rockefeller Foundation funded Nazi racial studies even after it was clear that this research was being used to rationalize the demonizing of Jews and other groups. Up until 1939 the Rockefeller Foundation was funding research used to support Nazi racial science studies at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics (KWIA.) Reports submitted to Rockefeller did not hide what these studies were being used to justify, but Rockefeller continued the funding and refrained from criticizing this research so closely derived from Nazi ideology. The Rockefeller Foundation did not alert "the world to the nature of German science and the racist folly" that German anthropology promulgated and Rockefeller funded for years after the passage of the 1935 Nuremberg racial laws.[1]" That was one statement I took out but I reluctantly restored. I think that should be questioned. Here's another one, "Some of its infamous activities include:
- Funding various German eugenics programs, including the laboratory of Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, for whom Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.
- Construction of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute's Institute for Brain Research with a $317,000 grant in 1929, with continuing support for the Institute's operations under Ernst Rüdin over the next several years.[2]" Rockefeller Foundation--PaulBustion88 (talk) 22:48, 13 April 2015 (UTC)
Mediation rejected as VictoriaGrayson and Montanabw have no interest in joining in
Any advice? Looks like mediation is simply rejected. Alas.. Prasangika37 (talk) 18:42, 14 April 2015 (UTC)
- ^ (Gretchen Schafft, From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004)
- ^ Edwin Black (September 2003). "The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics". History News Network. (Also published at San Francisco Chronicle). According to HNN, this material was drawn from Black's books "IBM and the Holocaust" and "War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race".