User talk:FacetsOfNonStickPans

Pervez Hoodbhoy

Pretty strong speech [1]. I never heard him giving political speeches before. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 20:23, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

"This is not a country that was made for the Armed Forces of Pakistan. This is country that was made for its people." Lots of the comments like the speech too. The topic for the distinguished panel was "The Never-Ending Battle For The Pakistan Narrative" with the programme blurb itself being rather strong and setting the tone -

...Pakistan has been in search of one (national narrative) since independence and its contested nature is reflected in the long delay in passing the Constitution, and the fact that the first two Constitutions were passed without unanimous consensus. Hopefully the new national narrative will be more pragmatic than ideological...

Curiosity got to me so saw the other three panelists too and how they spoke. Hina Rabbani Khar said some strong lines too in a gentler less angry way though - We don't have much to celebrate.... we have done a fantastically bad job... India is a no-go area.... The world we are living in makes Pakistan look almost okay and normal.... Trump selling fear, Boris Johnson selling fear, Austria selling fear, Modi selling fear, I would go on to say, Imran Khan, selling fear.

So yes, relatively a much stronger speech by Pervez Hoodbhoy. DTM (talk) 13:06, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

And Hoodbhoy also mentioned Manzoor Pashteen, interesting. DTM (talk) 11:48, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

DiplomatTesterMan and User:Kautilya3 good share. Hoodbhoy was the product of the pre Zia era education. I wonder if Pakistani education system that was made fundamentalistic by Zia can still produce such open minded thinkers and scholars. DBigXrayᗙ 13:18, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

You don't know the "leather jacket girl"? [2] [3] -- Kautilya3 (talk) 13:34, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

Kautilya3, Indeed I was not aware of this student activist. There will still be activists like her raising their voice against the army rule. But my point was on scholars and thinkers. DBigXrayᗙ 13:47, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

Please see about 12,000 pageviews in December

[4]. I was just checking out why so many pageviews for that article. I'm guessing that there was an article in Croatia that referred to The Signpost article, or that there was a final resolution. I might as well ping @GregorB: here to see if he knows. We should definitely find out if there was a final resolution. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 22:13, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Smallbones, I remember an article Bri had written (Wikipedia not trumped by Trump appointee) which got quite a lot of media coverage, but didn't cross 6000 views. Of course, in Bri's case they took the story, with only two or three of the media outlets actually mentioning Signpost or Bri. I wonder what the difference between the type of media coverage would be. I had actually sent a mail yesterday about the same to GregorB. Please do reply here. It's easier to co-ordinate I guess if this topic happens here rather than at different places.

As for this article and what happened in December, narrowing it down, what happened on 8 Dec 2019 (or a day before) - 8379 views peak, with the coming days showing the falloff to 3898 to 378 and then normalcy rather quickly. A quick google search does throw up some basic answers.

A comprehensive article was published on 8 Dec in Index.hr - (transl.) "Croatian Wikipedia is such a garbage that its owners even raised their hands" which also has a clear and direct link to the Signpost article. "(transl.) We are not honored by the article The Curious Case of Croatian Wikipedia , which was published in the official WMF online newsletter by GregorB". This was coupled with links on one or two discussion boards off-wiki.

But yes @GregorB: would be most apt to answer this in a better way. DTM (talk) 10:11, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for looking at this. First I should correct you about "Wikipedia not Trumped ..." The author is actually me, Smallbones, not Bri. The total pageviews on that look like 5,344 [5]. Not bad IMHO, for being published on Christmas Eve. Probably the big difference between the WSJ which mention our article and the index.hr article is the actual link in the index.hr article. So not much for a direct comparison there. It might have more of a direct comparison with my article and the User:David Gerard article from this January. But David, besides being a long-term Wikipedian, is also something of a professional journalist specializing in the Crypto field. He's got a tremendous following among crypto-skeptics so high pageviews is something I expected when I invited/arm-twisted his contribution to The Signpost. This isn't an argument to ignore the "extra pageviews" but it should probably be pointed out as a special case. Now, compare that to my following among readers outside of Wikipedia ... well, possibly it's 1 (my wife), but probably lower. Not much higher in any case. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 14:39, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

I concur, Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2018-12-24/Op-ed, "Wikipedia not trumped..." was by Smallbones with just some copyedit contribution by me. ☆ Bri (talk) 15:14, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

@DTM: Indeed, the Index.hr article you mention is obviously the culprit. (For the record, I was actually not involved at all with it.) While Index.hr is a popular news portal in Croatia, it is nevertheless surprising to me how many people actually clicked that link.

Another factor that may have somewhat contributed is, of course, the still ongoing Meta-Wiki RfC that also links back to the Signpost article. GregorB (talk) 22:44, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Reporter interested in speaking to DiplomatTesterMan

Hello,

My name is Karishma Mehrotra. I am a reporter at the Indian Express. Please email me at karishmaindianexpress@gmail.com. I'm interested in speaking to you about your work on Wikipedia!

Karishma Mehrotra