User talk:Jimbo Wales

Wikimedia project index pages

At https://www.wikimedia.org, there are links to various Wikimedia projects, whose versions in various languages are displayed at Special:SiteMatrix.

• At https://www.wikipedia.org, the Wikipedia logo is ringed by 10 (of the) leading languages.
  • English (4 974 000+), German (1 858 000+), French (1 665 000+), Russian (1 256 000+), Italian (1 225 000+), Spanish (1 203 000+), Polish (1 135 000+), Japanese (984 000+), Portuguese (889 000+), Chinese (842 000+)
• At https://www.wiktionary.org, the Wiktionary logo is ringed by 10 leading languages.
  • English (4 168 000+), Malagasy (3 835 000+), French (2 808 000+), Serbian (849 000+), Spanish (835 000+) Chinese (831 000+), Russian (665 000+), Lithuanian (613 000+), Polish (479 000+), Swedish (473 000+)
• At https://www.wikiquote.org, the Wikiquote logo is ringed by 10 leading languages.
  • English (25 000+), Italian (21 000+), Polish (21 000+), Russian (10 000+), German (7 000+), Czech (7 000+), Spanish (6 000+), Portuguese (6 000+), French (4 000+), Turkish (3 000+)
• At https://www.wikibooks.org, the Wikibooks logo is ringed by 10 leading languages.
  • English (52 000+), German (23 000+), French (16 000+), Japanese (10 000+), Spanish (7 000+), Portuguese (7 000+), Polish (6 000+), Hebrew (5 000+), Indonesia (3 000+), Russian (1 000+)
• At https://wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page, the Wikisource logo is ringed by 10 leading languages.
  • French (1,209,000+), English (765,000+), German (349,000+), Russian (293,000+), Hebrew (141,000+), Polish (113,000+),Italian (106,000+), Spanish (102,000+), Arabic (78,000+), Portuguese (28,000+)
• At https://www.wikivoyage.org, the Wikivoyage logo is ringed by 10 leading languages.
  • English, German, French, Russian, Portuguese, Hebrew, Polish, Dutch, Italian, Persian

For each of those six projects, is there a process (human-directed or automated) whereby the 10 selected languages are consistently the 10 leading languages? For each of the first five of those six projects, is there a process whereby the associated numbers are kept up to date?
—Wavelength (talk) 20:59, 27 September 2015 (UTC) and 22:35, 27 September 2015 (UTC)

Without wanting to cause embarrassment to anyone, I wish to point out that the 10 selected languages for Wikipedia do not include Swedish, with more than 2,000,000 articles. (Please see Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-09-09/News and notes.) I acknowledge that the developers have to deal with many challenges, so it is understandable that this could have slipped past their attention. Also, I recognize that there is no explicit claim that the 10 selected languages are the 10 leading languages.
—Wavelength (talk) 15:54, 28 September 2015 (UTC)

@Wavelength: There is no formal process for these pages right now. The HTML and other assets for them exist on Meta, and there's a script that runs to package it all together. For example, m:www.wikipedia.org template is where the HTML for www.wikipedia.org lives. It's not a particularly sane way to run a website, but it's had the advantages of having a low barrier to entry for Wikimedians to maintain them. Right now they're maintained mostly by Mxn, although any Meta admin can edit those pages. My team has been working in consultation with Mxn to get those pages moved over to a more standard code review system so that we could do things like automate the updating of the statistics more easily and run some A/B tests to improve the page. If you have any further questions, feel free to ask me; I'd suggest not doing that here, as I think it's a bit off-topic for Jimmy's talk page. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 20:04, 28 September 2015 (UTC)

Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation, thank you for your reply. (I chose this talk page, because of a higher likelihood that someone reading my post would be able to answer it. Maybe a more appropriate page would be Wikipedia:Village pump (technical), but I am not certain that respondents there would be able to discuss other Wikimedia projects. At this time, I am generally refraining from posting comments to Wikimedia projects outside English Wikipedia, because of watchlist limitations.)

—Wavelength (talk) 20:30, 28 September 2015 (UTC)

@Wavelength: I know it isn't obvious, but the Wikipedia, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, and Wikivoyage portals' top 10 rings display the top 10 language editions by page views (the views per hour here), not by article count. The current policy is the result of a poll that the Meta-Wiki community held back in 2008 (with participation from the Wikipedia community, of course). The poll was motivated in part by concerns that small Wikipedias were gaming the system, inflating their article counts with bot-generated stubs. Volapük was perhaps the most egregious offender, but the same charge was levied against the Swedish Wikipedia at the time.

The current, longstanding situation is unfortunate, because the portals also display article counts, so it looks like that's what the wikis are selected and ranked by. Dutch Wikipedians have frequently asked about the criteria ever since the Chinese Wikipedia overtook them in page views, bumping them out of the top 10. It could very well be time to revisit the 2008 decision. I would encourage you to begin a new discussion at m:Meta:Babel, since the discussion would ultimately take place at Meta rather than an individual Wikipedia.

To be clear, I'm not a great fan of the way we sort by page views but list the article counts. My mandate as a Meta administrator is to keep the portals up-to-date – manually – but not to make major design changes without first consulting the wider community. (I don't normally watch this page, so please ping me with the {{ping}} template when responding.)

 – Minh Nguyễn ^💬 04:32, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

@Mxn: Thank you for your reply. I appreciate your explanation of the selection of languages for the top-10 rings on the portals. Even bot-generated stubs can be informative. Probably they can be generated for any language (preferably not from an attitude of competition). I prefer that the top 10 languages on a portal be selected according to article count, entry count, page count, or a similar count.

—Wavelength (talk) 18:35, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

@Mxn: There is the possibility that even English will slip from the top 10 language versions of a Wikimedia project by every criterion except the age of the language version.

—Wavelength (talk) 22:01, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

@Wavelength: It's up to each language community to decide whether bot-generated stubs are desirable for their wiki. Some wikis have been enthusiastic about them, while others have been more skeptical. In the 2008 poll, participants noted that a few wikis had made a mockery of the article count metric with countless stubs that had little encyclopedic or linguistic value. Other metrics like edits or depth can similarly be gamed; page views per hour was viewed as a much more stable criterion. If you'd like to propose an alternative, please do so at m:Meta:Babel. – Minh Nguyễn ^💬 07:17, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

@Mxn: Thank you for your reply. I hope to examine the degree of usefulness of (some) bot-generated stub articles, but I have not found a subcategory for them in Category:Stubs.

—Wavelength (talk) 20:30, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

@Dr. Blofeld: If you are able to do so, please provide a link to a list or category of bot-generated article stubs, or even several such links.

—Wavelength (talk) 17:59, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

Bot-generated article stubs, which have been programmed to read existing data from numerous sources and convey a number of facts aren't the problematic ones. It's the manually created sub stubs which resemble bot generated articles which were done simply as a {subst:PAGENAME} and devoid of any factual content which are the problematic ones. Not problematic if somebody immediately expands them but the reality is most people are lazy and don't expand them. I've long had little to do mass stub creation. I don't regret the starting of the article subjects, I believe most articles I've ever started are notable, but I do wish the more generic ones had been done with a bot which could have been programmed to give actual information from the outset. A bot is OK for things like settlement stubs which have generic data, but for most things I agree that they should be written properly from the outset, a decent stub which is of some value to the reader at minimum. Most of those placeholder stubs in all honesty should probably be incubated until somebody can bother to write them properly. I don't have the time to research articles on villages in deepest Yemen or Mongolia. I just did what I thought was right towards making wikipedia broader in scope globally. as I said a few weeks ago, the article count, even my own article creation count is wildly inflated with such stubs. If you really look at what wikipedia has really produced of quality since 2001 it's under 100,000.♦ Dr. Blofeld 18:53, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

Video file of Jimmy Wales Speaks at Closing Ceremony of Wikimania 2014

Jimmy Wales Speaks at Closing Ceremony of Wikimania 2014

Jimmy, I was able to contact the YouTube user of this file File:Jimmy Wales Speaks at Closing Ceremony of Wikimania 2014.webm and successfully got him to modify his license to a suitable free-use license so we can now have that file on Wikimedia Commons. :)

Perhaps this file would be useful on a few Wikipedia articles.

On another media note, regarding my prior query about photos of Ahmed Mohamed -- were you able to get a photo from Social Good Summit, where Ahmed appeared on stage ?

Thank you,

— Cirt (talk) 19:09, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

Had to share..

Thought you might like this. This is what my instructor wrote on a recent microbiology assignment:

This was a comment in the instructions for a homework assignment by my college microbiology instructor-I didn't do what he said since I edit some of these articles myself and so know that they are reliable! 9/2015

I didn't follow his instructions because I edit microbiology articles and know they are typically pretty reliable. Best Regards,

Barbara (WVS) (talk) 20:35, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

Some editors are more than others.

I made the mistake of addressing what I saw as a BLP violation in a Russia related topic. Apparantly, when you discuss something on the talk page and don't reach concensus, you're not allowed to raise the issue on one single noticeboard, because that is considered WP:FORUMSHOPPING. Seems to me that the rules say differently, but maybe they don't apply when some editors are involved.

I have learned my lesson and will stay far away from articles controlled by POV pushers. Probably get a warning or ban for posting here, but wikipedia lost most of its charm anyway... Ssscienccce (talk) 23:04, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

Editing Wikipedia should be fun. I read the BLP you were involved in and am puzzled as to how you can "admire someone but not as a human being", which was the subject of the BLP. Raquel Baranow (talk) 00:02, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

What? Someone disagreed with you on Wikipedia? That must mean they are in the pay of Mossad, the KGB, Big Pharma, Monsanto and the Illuminati. Or, you know, maybe it can be fixed with a bit of calm discussion and not overreacting by posting a really rather trivial dispute on every single drama board on the project. Guy (Help!) 18:46, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

Overreacting snark to an overreaction doesn't actually improve anything. NE Ent

A good faith post on a noticeboard is not forum shopping, don't worry about it. But do accept the consensus there and on the talk page. NE Ent 19:16, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

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