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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by A1candidate (talk | contribs) at 14:34, 24 May 2015 (→‎Your comment in Radio Times). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.


    New User Intro

    Hello Jimmy/Mr. Wales/Jimbo

    Just wanted to introduce myself to you here. Hope to meet you tonight at the Israel Wikimedia reception. From my Page:

    I'm an old fan and freelance net promoter of Wikipedia, but I'm just now starting to Edit. Been meaning to for a long time; now motivated by Jimmy (Mr. Wales?) being awarded the Dan David Prize last night (congrats!).

    I also did my first edit in your wiki article. Pending inclusion since it's semi-protected and I'm new. Knowadiz (talk) 05:23, 19 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

    Welcome! Yes, come up and say hi tonight if you can!--Jimbo Wales (talk) 09:03, 19 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    Nice article on it here. I see Hagit Meishar-Tal is missing an article. She should meet GNG, a summary in a book here. Can somebody start it?♦ Dr. Blofeld 09:54, 19 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    Can somebody do me a favour and list 10 articles they wanted translated from Hebrew wikipedia into English and try to get some people to start them while this is going on, I think it would be a good thing. As part of the WP:Intertranswiki project, I will put 10 Israel articles up on a given subject. Perhaps Yoninah or Cliftonian or somebody else seeing this can pick a topic and list 10 articles like Israeli scholars or something? Obviously the idea is to translate initially and then improve upon it with adequate sourcing and additional content.♦ Dr. Blofeld 10:03, 19 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    Israel is not my area of expertise—I just live there. But I'm flattered that you thought of me. Please let me know if there's any other way I can help out. —  Cliftonian (talk)  11:20, 19 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    Jimbo, I missed the Wikimedia reception. Couldn't access the address link. Went to the roundtable event early, thinking it was there - it wasn't. Stayed for that, though. You left fast before I could introduce myself. I wrote you a letter and brought it to the hotel. Did you get it? Knowadiz (talk) 13:12, 20 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

    ..... Don't know if this is the right way to add to a talk section, but here goes. Dr. Blofeld - do you want this for now while Jimbo is here, or long term? Maybe I can help later. Cliftonian - I'll look for you there tonight! Jimbo - thanks for the response and invite. Looking forward to it. Hope you're surviving the heat wave here. Knowadiz (talk) 13:11, 19 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

    Yes, 10 articles asap which can be a focus during whatever wiki meeting you're having which is going to generate some interest and encourage people to get involved in Hebrew translation. 10 Israeli scholars would be ideal. Can you identify 10 articles on Israeli scholars you want started which have articles on Hebrew wikipedia or are missing?♦ Dr. Blofeld 13:41, 19 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    @Knowadiz: I'm afraid I won't be there tonight because I have work (I am not affiliated to Wikimedia Israel and wasn't aware of this event until today). But I hope we will meet another time. In the meantime please feel free to message me on my talk page if you ever need a hand with anything. Good luck! :) John, aka —  Cliftonian (talk)  15:02, 19 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

    @Knowadiz: Are you not interested in Hebrew translation into English either? ♦ Dr. Blofeld 11:22, 20 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

    Dr. Blofeld - I am interested, at least to suggest to you some articles to translate. I saw your User Page - should I contact you about it there? Pretty impressive bunch of WikiWork you've done. Knowadiz (talk) 13:12, 20 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    @Knowadiz:, Yes,on the talk page of the project. If you could let the others at Wikimedia Israel and who are interested in improving coverage about Wikipedia:WikiProject Intertranswiki/Hebrew missing articles can be identified.♦ Dr. Blofeld 17:50, 22 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

    Jimbo, please HELP, your Page admins are...

    Hey Jimbo,

    I do not want to disturb you, I know you are really busy but I think your Wikipedia Admins aren't the cleverest.

    Please take a look at this Talk about my article Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mister Miau#Mister Miau

    The problem is that I just said that my partner and I are working with sony together and the Admin Ritchie333 (User:Ritchie333) directly thought I were sharing my Wiki account with my partner, just because I said "We are working with sony..". I didn't go deeper into the story, thats why I said yes I did that, bla bla...

    I don't get it why he thought that I was sharing my account. They could at least check my IPs. Sometime I were not logged into my account while I was answering to their messages. I think it makes them fun to delete, block or ban users-/articles. They just want to push their stats, you should forbid that.

    Please help me out. It's two statboosting-addicted admins against me. The other admin is User:Joseph2302. He immediately said "delete and block user", also just for boosting his stats

    Please HELP ME JIMMY!

    Thank you very much.

    Best, Alex — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gtrpb (talk • contribs) 14:44, 21 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

    I'm not an admin, and never claimed to be- I also redacted the comments that you should be blocked as promo-only account, since it's not my job to decide. Also, as I mentioned, the article is promotional, which is why it should be deleted. Joseph2302 (talk) 14:53, 21 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    Also the word "we" had an implication that multiple users could have been using the account.
    @Ritchie333: They're complaining about you here. Joseph2302 (talk) 14:54, 21 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    Alex, there was clearly a misunderstanding regarding your use of 'we', but beyond that, I can't see anything problematic with the AfD discussion – they are certainly correct in stating that you have a conflict of interest. And the article fails to demonstrate that the subject meets our notability guidelines – which require evidence of significant coverage in third party reliable sources – making deletion more or less inevitable. I suggest that rather than wasting your time making silly claims about 'statboosting-addicted admins' (nobody gives a toss about such 'stats' here) you go back to running your record label. If it is successful enough, I'm sure someone without a conflict of interest will get around to writing an article on it eventually. AndyTheGrump (talk) 15:02, 21 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    @Gtrpb: Woah, slow down. I said "if", because other admins come down like a ton of bricks for account sharing. But you say you're not, and I believe you're not. The article was originally scheduled to be deleted per WP:CSD#A7, but I decided the claim to be affiliated with Sony was worth investigating further, so opened a full deletion debate. Now, I'm struggling to prove it. If I could have proved it with reliable sources, I'd have done that and there wouldn't even be a deletion debate (though I might have had a word with the CSD tagger about searching for sources). If somebody else can supply the proof, the debate will hopefully be closed as "keep" or "merge" and all will be well. Otherwise, you'll need to wait until the label has a hit record – that should do the trick. Jimbo doesn't get involved in day to day content stuff anymore, so I don't think he'll be able to offer any further advice, but you never know. PS: I can't see IP addresses; for that you need a administrator with the "checkuser" right, and they can only confirm account matches, never reveal IPs. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 15:06, 21 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    I don't think that being 'affiliated with Sony' establishes notability – notability isn't inherited. AndyTheGrump (talk) 15:17, 21 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    That's kinda why I started the AfD :-P Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 15:22, 21 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

    Thanks for the reply guys. @Ritchie: I was just wondering, because you have an Admin statics on your Wiki Profile. That seems like you're proud of the actions you're doing. Anyways. Let's delete it, add +1 to your stats and everyone is happy.(Y) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gtrpb (talk • contribs) 20:31, 21 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

    Page Weight Matters

    Background: Page Weight Matters, by Chris Zacharias

    "Three years ago, while I was a web developer at YouTube, one of the senior engineers began a rant about the page weight of the video watch page being far too large. The page had ballooned to as high as 1.2MB and dozens of requests. This engineer openly vented that “if they can write an entire Quake clone in under 100KB, we have no excuse for this!” Given that I agreed with him and I was excited to find a new project, I decided to champion the cause of getting the YouTube watch page to weigh in under 100KB. On the shuttle home from San Bruno that night, I coded up a prototype. I decided to limit the functionality to just a basic masthead, the video player, five related videos, a sharing button, a flagging tool, and ten comments loaded in via AJAX. I code-named the project “Feather”.
    "Even with such a limited set of features, the page was weighing in at 250KB. I dug into the code and realized that our optimization tools (i.e. Closure compilation) were unable to exclude code that was never actually used in the page itself (which would be an unfair expectation of any tool under the circumstances). The only way to reduce the code further was to optimize by hand the CSS, Javascript, and image sprites myself. After three painstaking days, I had arrived at a much leaner solution. It still was not under 100KB though. Having just finished writing the HTML5 video player, I decided to plug it in instead of the far heavier Flash player. Bam! 98KB and only 14 requests. I threaded the code with some basic monitoring and launched an opt-in to a fraction of our traffic.
    "After a week of data collection, the numbers came back… and they were baffling. The average aggregate page latency under Feather had actually INCREASED. I had decreased the total page weight and number of requests to a tenth of what they were previously and somehow the numbers were showing that it was taking LONGER for videos to load on Feather. This could not be possible. Digging through the numbers more and after browser testing repeatedly, nothing made sense. I was just about to give up on the project, with my world view completely shattered, when my colleague discovered the answer: geography.
    "When we plotted the data geographically and compared it to our total numbers broken out by region, there was a disproportionate increase in traffic from places like Southeast Asia, South America, Africa, and even remote regions of Siberia. Further investigation revealed that, in these places, the average page load time under Feather was over TWO MINUTES! This meant that a regular video page, at over a megabyte, was taking more than TWENTY MINUTES to load! This was the penalty incurred before the video stream even had a chance to show the first frame. Correspondingly, entire populations of people simply could not use YouTube because it took too long to see anything. Under Feather, despite it taking over two minutes to get to the first frame of video, watching a video actually became a real possibility. Over the week, word of Feather had spread in these areas and our numbers were completely skewed as a result. Large numbers of people who were previously unable to use YouTube before were suddenly able to.
    "Through Feather, I learned a valuable lesson about the state of the Internet throughout the rest of the world. Many of us are fortunate to live in high bandwidth regions, but there are still large portions of the world that do not. By keeping your client side code small and lightweight, you can literally open your product up to new markets."

    Source: [ http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters ]

    (Emphasis added, capitalization in original.)

    (Reproduced under fair use: "The first factor is regarding whether the use in question helps fulfill the intention of copyright law to stimulate creativity for the enrichment of the general public, or whether it aims to only 'supersede the objects' of the original for reasons of personal profit.")

    Given the above, I think that we should start a project -- a real project with measurable goals and a schedule -- to reduce page weight. --Guy Macon (talk) 22:53, 21 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

    I would support this 100%. The amount of stuff that comes from bits.wikipedia.org seems to be very large, for example. However WP does well by not having dozens of external gadgets and widgets and trackers like many sites. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 15:15, 22 May 2015 (UTC).
    I think our situation is a bit different now, because of the use of mobile. Folks in Siberia and Africa are likely now viewing Wikipedia on mobile (likely somewhat faster) than on just a slower version of our desktops. How weight affects mobile is something I don't really know. Perhaps the question might be whether we want different versions for regular vs. mobile articles? BTW, in general I do think about 5% of our articles go on too long - even if you can quickly skim a long article, there is a limit to that.
    I do want to ask a related question - I'd asked at the village pump and editors didn't have much to say there. I'm working on a very long list, List of municipalities in Pennsylvania. There are 2562 munis in PA (likely the largest number in the US) and were 10 fields in the table. It sorts wonderfully and is very useful. I was quite surprised by this because at WP:NRHP we always would break up lists of 250+ because they loaded too slow and caused other problems like long times in saving the page. That was about 4 years ago though.
    Someone suggested putting photos on the list, and we're now doing that as an informal project. Less than 1,000 pix to go. I don't see the size with the pix causing any slow loading or saving. The article size is now 320,686 bytes about twice the size of today's featured article on Rodents. My connection (in the US) is not particularly fast. But is this load going to cause other people problems? (Not too many Siberians will want to see the list of PA munis, but you never know) Will all the pix cause problems on mobile? Not that I'm thinking of doing it on this list, but how does video affect things?
    --Smallbones(smalltalk) 16:48, 22 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    Note that I removed the hatting on my related question. I had asked it before at the Village Pump with no real help forthcoming. I don't think that the Help Desk would do any better because it is a mixture of technical and policy questions. To spell it out, it is now possible to make a 3,000 item list/table on Wikipedia and include a few bells and whistles like photos and wiki-links. 1) How big can a table like this get, and how many bells and whistles can be added, before people start having difficulty in loading or saving it? 2) How well does an article like this work on mobile? Do we want to have different versions of lists like this for mobile? Smallbones(smalltalk) 21:56, 22 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    Please ask your totally unrelated question in a new section. Hijacking my discussion is very rude, and I would advise others here to not reward your rude behavior by responding to you. --Guy Macon (talk) 05:13, 23 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    Optimizing for mobile (limited CPU power, small screen) is a different engineering challenge than optimizing for slow / expensive per-byte connections. I do a lot of work involving third-world countries, and in the very remote areas it is far more common to see a hundred laptops connecting through a single WIFI connection to a single DSL than it is to see a hundred smart phones connecting to a nearby cell tower. --Guy Macon (talk) 20:14, 22 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

    Thanks Guy that was a fascinating story and very very relevant for us.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:31, 22 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

    I have made a couple of proposals to try to get such a project started (or at least considered), but they have gone nowhere:
    I could, of course, post a policy RfC and get several hundred people to tell the WMF that yes, the English Wikipedia wants this to happen (and three people who support longer page load times...) and then spend a year pounding in the basic concept that unless there are published, measurable goals and a schedule it isn't a real project, but I would much prefer the WMF to support it because it is an obviously good idea. --Guy Macon (talk) 20:14, 22 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    There's at least 1 question hidden in here that I don't think is obvious, though I'm not likely to be one of the 3 peeople who support longer load times. 1st I do think there is a lot of brick-a-brack in some articles like long infoboxes, and templates that link to every member of some group of topics (perhaps 3 topics of 80 items each). Those could obviously be removed - but how much "weight" is thereby removed? Is it just the article size (that you see in the article history page) that matters, or is it calls on computing power from templates that most matters? Rephrasing: do we want to minimize the number of characters typed in the file or the number of templates?
    Also, there is material like photos and videos that I think are underused on Wikipedia. "A picture is worth a thousand words" may not apply to every article, but it probably does in articles on artists, museums, wildlife, and many other subjects. Our almost complete lack of video makes us one of the "least modern" websites around. I've met folks here who just don't see video as being an educational tool - everything that they consider to be educational can be written in words. I think that's dead wrong, consider which of the following gives more useful information a) an IPA phonetic transcription of how a person's name is pronounced, b) an audio recording of his or her voice pronouncing their name, or c) a 15 second video of the person introducing themselves? It's obvious to me that c is a clear winner.
    So does this "minimizing weight" project mean returning to a low image, no video encyclopedia? That's a tradeoff that is more a policy issue than a technical one. I couldn't buy into that. Smallbones(smalltalk) 21:56, 22 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    Actually, the number of characters is usually a very small portion of page weight. You can have a very large page that is pure text that has a very small page weight. It can be annoying for a human to read all of that, but it still loads very quickly. Templates don't matter other than the extra text and/or images they add to a page. At the level I am talking about, the only things that matter are the number of HTTP requests a page makes and the total number of bytes sent to the browser (the page weight).
    Here are some page weight resources for the curious, but of course the Wikipedia developers I am trying to reach already know all about page weight.
    --Guy Macon (talk) 05:13, 23 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm not an expert, but I think a simple way to lose "weight" is to lose Javascript. This can of course be done with a browser option, but not everyone knows how to use it. Also, even on the en.m. version of this page with scripts disabled, I still see script loaders in the source code. I know that shutting off scripts improves speed and has very few downsides - you lose sortable buttons, and no video I know of but animated gifs works without it, hidden text isn't hidden by default, and the Lua editor doesn't work. But 99.9% of the time this is of no importance, and there's some extra peace of mind about security. I think a Javascript-free version of each page (en.nojs.wikipedia?) would be useful. Wnt (talk) 15:16, 23 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    Again, how to reduce page weight is not the issue. Any competent engineer can do it without suggestions from us, and the WMF engineers have already done a lot of the easy stuff. What is left are things like this:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page has GZIP compression enabled.[1]
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page does not.[2]
    The question is, is it possible to enable compression for HTTPS without opening ourselves up to a BREACH (security exploit)?
    This requires research by a good engineer, and is not an issue that asking for opinions on Jimbo's talk page is likely to solve. As interesting as the topic is, we need to stop wasting our time talking about how to reduce page weight and concentrate on my proposal, which is to get someone at WMF assigned to working on page weight with with measurable goals and a schedule. They already know how to do it. --Guy Macon (talk) 17:00, 23 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    Are you sure that website works with HTTPS? I get my secure pages with gzip without issue. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 17:22, 23 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    I am using a customer computer at a remote site so I only have online tools at the moment. I looked up several more online tools. http://www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php shows the https as compressed, several others call the https version bad URL, and http://checkgzipcompression.com/ shows it as uncompressed. I will update this when I get home and am able to use tools that I trust. Until then I will assume that the gzip-test page is correct.
    At the risk of straying even farther from my own topic, it would be interesting to see why the WMF engineers don't think BREACH (security exploit) is a problem. I am expecting something like "we looked into that and determined that using compression is safe in our situation". As I have often observed, they are pretty sharp and are unlikely to have missed something like this. --Guy Macon (talk) 22:39, 23 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    I think checkgzipcompression.com is broken. Another test of richardstoolbox.com (verifysslcertificate.com) does not even recognize that Wikipedia has an SSL certificate. My info comes directly from the HTTP heades I receive. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 23:11, 23 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

    regarding kapu caste

    There is so much Of wrong information about KAPU(caste). please change it otherwise it sends a wrong information for the future,which spoils the whole community.kindly check it — Preceding unsigned comment added by 106.51.89.127 (talk) 09:04, 22 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

    Information icon Thank you for your suggestion. When you believe an article needs improvement, please feel free to make those changes. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the edit this page link at the top.
    The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold in updating pages. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes—they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page, or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome. You don't even need to log in (although there are many reasons why you might want to). 81.168.78.73 (talk) 10:52, 22 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    Caste articles are sort of a special case. They notoriously tend to get filled up with, um, inadequately sourced information. In fact that page is semi-protected, and if you look at Talk:Kapu (caste), you will see that virtually every proposed edit has been rejected because no source was provided. So, the proper approach is to propose an edit on the talk page and be sure to provide at least one reliable source that supports it. Looie496 (talk) 13:16, 22 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

    Quixotic plea

    You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Wikipediholism test. Thanks. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 06:31, 23 May 2015 (UTC)Template:Z48[reply]

    RfC on acupuncture

    Since you've previously made some strongly worded comments on alternative medicine, I feel that your input over here might be useful. -A1candidate 06:38, 23 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

    I will quote the substantive part of Jimbo's comment, which is indisputable: "If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals - that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately." His well-known "lunatic charlatans" comment about people who operate outside that scientific framework was clear, and in my opinion, does not need to be reiterated. If Jimbo chooses to elaborate, then fine. Cullen328 Let's discuss it 06:56, 23 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    My concern is that many editors, including at least one administrator, are misusing Jimbo Wales' comments. Notice the way in which a longstanding administrator quoted this essay during a recent arbitration request. -A1candidate 07:25, 23 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

    With regards to this...

    ...and with the choice of "Fight the power"... do you intend to declare war on your homeland? :-P

    Other than that, considering British politicians were also previously interviewed, couldn't there have been more talk about their proposals to restrict and monitor the Internet? Not to mention banning HTTPS... -- Mentifisto 11:04, 24 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

    Your comment in Radio Times

    "When I first launched Wikipedia on 15 January 2001" [3]. This is the truth, but not the whole truth, and highly misleading. It was Larry Sanger who launched the wiki, under the domain Nupedia.com, on January 10 2001. This was immediately followed by a sort of mutiny among the Nupedia volunteers. Carl Anderson, Professor of Classical Studies, Michigan State University, called the wiki 'silliness'. Gaytha Langlois, Professor of Ecology, Bryant College, Smithfield, thought it was merely a “variation on structured chat rooms”. Nearly all the academics objected, apart from John Horvath.

    To resolve this, you suggested installing 'the wiki' under a totally different brand name. "That way, we separate the wiki from the Nupedia brand name. It is very important to all of us who have an emotional stake in Nupedia that we not harm the reputation of Nupedia". Shortly after (January 12th) you dismissed the wiki as a sort of chat room, and not even that. " The wiki software, in its current incarnation, is so wide open that it is hard to see it’s [sic] purpose other than as a chat room mechanism of sorts. Even then, I don’t know ". Larry came up with the name ‘Wikipedia’, and the wiki was re-launched under Wikipedia.com, January 15 2001.

    In your closing speech at Wikimania 2014, you said that truthfulness is something that is 'very, very valuable' . "Obviously truthfulness is very important if you're writing an encyclopedia, because you're not supposed to just make stuff up." Well truthfulness starts at home, right?

    Peter Damian (talk) 13:12, 24 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

    So he told the truth but did not include the entire history of Wikipedia? What is your point? Chillum 13:21, 24 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    See the whole truth. Peter Damian (talk) 13:26, 24 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    While many people find Wikipedia a great place to spread truth, that is not really why we are here. Chillum 13:48, 24 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    "Obviously truthfulness is very important if you're writing an encyclopedia, because you're not supposed to just make stuff up." Peter Damian (talk) 13:57, 24 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment - I think this is more about giving due credit to other people who've also played a key role in creating Wikipedia in its original form. It is not about "spreading the truth", but simply setting the record straight. I doubt Jimbo Wales had any intention to hide the truth, but I have to say that unless one is the sole creator of something or some idea, it's always more ethicial to share credit with others ("We launched Wikipedia") rather than crediting yourself only ("I created Wikipedia"). I'm not too familiar with the history of Wikipedia, but if Peter Damian's statement is correct, then I tend to agree with him that "truthfulness starts at home" and we should focus on being more truthful instead of holding the moral high ground and going as far as to accuse others of deceit. -A1candidate 14:34, 24 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
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