Comments

The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2011-03-14. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Arbitration report: New case on AE sanction handling; AUSC candidates; proposed decision in Kehrli 2 and Monty Hall problem (0 bytes · 💬)

Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-14/Arbitration report

Editcountitis: Report on Editcountitis. 27% of all edits have been done by just 4,000 editors (387 bytes · 💬)

Graph and pie charts

The numbers on the graph and pie charts are nearly illegible even when seen full-size. Perhaps someone can tweak this? I'd also suggest having a label on the X axis of the graph, and perhaps percentages on the pie charts. Thank you to Kevin for gathering the data and analysing it. Risker (talk) 03:23, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

Features and admins: The best of the week (997 bytes · 💬)

Umm...Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Gfoley4? -- DQ (t) (e) 02:57, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Wait...I guess that's next week. -- DQ (t) (e) 03:02, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

It says at the top that the window for F and A is Saturday to Friday UTC (so the page can be prepared properly by the Monday deadline. Did we make a mistake this time? Tony (talk) 07:42, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

In the news: Paying US$1,000 to correct a Wikipedia error; brief news (6,395 bytes · 💬)

For US$1,000 annual fee, new website publishes corrections to coverage on Wikipedia and elsewhere

I listed ICorrect at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard.[1] -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 09:20, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
I LOLed at the 'David Tang is a creep' one. :) Also, the Ming Pao article was ranked first for 'interesting' in yahoo! news and they didn't even mention this. Kayau Voting IS evil 15:05, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
LOL, me too. How dare they exaggerate David Tang's creepiness! ;P -- œ ^™ 08:38, 16 March 2011 (UTC)
I've actually suspected, even before the signpost article was written, that Tang was testing the site with that one. :P Kayau Voting IS evil 15:22, 18 March 2011 (UTC)
So ICorrect "does not set out to police the veracity of people's corrections"? Perhaps someone will start up ICorrectICorrect.com... PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 02:05, 16 March 2011 (UTC)
Someone should start iUncorrect: for half the price, they'll vandalise the person's Wikipedia article in creative, unpredictable ways. —Tom Morris (talk) 10:01, 16 March 2011 (UTC)
Clear conflict of interest. Reminds me of MyWikiBiz.Jasper Deng (talk) 19:02, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

US psychological society starts Wikipedia initiative

Just noticed that the "broad goals" of the initiative look like a derivative work of the goals of Wikiproject Psychology. Not complaining though: WP's psychology coverage badly, badly needs whatever help this initiative will provide. MartinPoulter (talk) 22:04, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Briefly

Uh, so, "construction management" means something different in the UK than it does in the U.S.? Powers ^T 15:06, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
- I don't see much activity in construction management's history and there are no talk page comments since November. Tempest in an invisible teapot? Rmhermen (talk) 18:30, 18 March 2011 (UTC)
- Another article about CIOB's concerns, with a quote from Wikimedia UK's Mike Peel: [2] Regards, HaeB (talk) 14:02, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
The mentality these days may be that if you can't afford the expert encyclopedias and their sites' subscriptions, you have to help create your own free encyclopedia. -- Jeandré, 2011-03-15t20:31z
I mentioned in a (yet to be moderated) comment on Paolo's blog, and think it's worth pointing out here as well: there should have been a mention of the "Wikipedia Timelapse" video (alternative version with better quality), from March 2006, which also covers the London bombings. --Waldir ^talk 03:10, 18 March 2011 (UTC)
I believe that Quain is touching on a valid truth but that he misextrapolates from it. The costlessness of information will never be either of the extremes, either 0% or 100%. It will always be somewhere in between. Not sure if it's accurately measurable throughout all of human life, and what the exact real numbers are, but if you want to argue qualitatively that we are moving from, say, 5% in 2000 to 30% in 2010 and we'll eventually be back at 20% again someday, well, I would just say, so what? You can't make any grand point about crowdsourcing participation level or cultural impact living or dying off of that. Just fluctuating after a peak. Kind of a nonstory. Oh well, I could be wrong about this, but I doubt it. — ¾-10 03:11, 18 March 2011 (UTC)
@Quain: It's hard to take this article seriously as an "opinion" piece when it makes so many claims that are blatantly false. I would, however, like to issue a retort to the last few paragraphs about "basic principles": Freedom of speech and freedom of the press exist (at least in part) to allow people to freely criticize the government, thereby insuring true consent of the governed. How is one supposed to make accurate claims about one's government if one does not have free access to information about that government? While Quain has the luxury of being able to rely on traditional media forms, he doesn't seem to realize that in many developing countries, social media is the only way to get the information one needs. As such, we should make every effort to insure the information available is comprehensive and accurate, regardless of what some overpaid suit has to say about the matter. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 15:28, 20 March 2011 (UTC)
Kudos to WPians who have been covering the horrific Japanese earthquake and tsunami; great PR to be mentioned in the open press. Tony (talk) 08:49, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

News and notes: Foundation reports editor trends, technology plans and communication changes; brief news (6,238 bytes · 💬)

The relative drop in retention is obviously worrying. I am wondering though, do we have numbers available on the net amount of editors who are still active one year later? A quick look at the chart suggests (though there is no evidence) that this number is fairly constant. If it is, or is even rising slightly, there is less to worry about. Does anyone know if and where these numbers can be found? Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 09:15, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I think the information you want is at Editor_Trends_Study/Results. Even if that's not what you're looking for, it is an interesting & informative read. -- llywrch (talk) 17:07, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

It was an interesting read. I'm wondering though where I could find the tabular data from these charts, if available. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 21:31, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

As you can see at Editor Trends Study/Software, both the software used to generate the datasets from the Wikipedia XML dumps and the tools for analysis are open source. That page has step by step instructions for recreating his software platform if you want to run your own analysis -- more at Methodology too. My understanding is that it's actually not in tabular format currently, since he stores everything on his server hosting MongoDB (which is document-oriented). However, Howie who worked on the study might have it in CSV form though in order to generate the graphs, so you should ask on the talk page of the March Update. Steven Walling at work 22:57, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I'll repeat here a suggestion I made at Wikipedia talk:Modelling Wikipedia extended growth, but that page doesn't appear to attract much attention any more. I'd be curious to know what the trend in the ratio of stubs:non-stub articles. If the ratio since the 2006 peak of new articles has been in favor of non-stub articles, that would support the "low-hanging fruit" hypothesis of declining new article creation -- viz., it is easier to improve an existing article than to create a new one. But if the ratio has remained roughly the same then the cause of the new article fall-off might be due to increased barriers to new article creation. (I don't know whether the XML data dumps would permit one to easily determine how the number of links to a page or template increased or decreased over time, which is the only way I can think of to arrive at this ratio.) -- llywrch (talk) 17:44, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Article count inflation happens all the time with (what should be) the smaller Wikimedia wikis. Recently, the Malagasy Wiktionary jumped from 10,000 to 100,000 entries in the space of five months with entries copied verbatim from other wikis, such as "stop". – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 08:08, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Hats off to User:Utcursch for recognizing the value in providing useful quality content over junk stub farms. I applaud his decision. -- œ ^™ 08:22, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

The thing I don't get is why people who ought to know better are surprised that recent new editors don't stick around as long and blame it on how hard it is to use tools, that they aren't feeling welcomed, etc. Certain people are more suited for editing an encyclopedia than others. Individuals who read books, have editing experience and have a desire to share knowledge are only a subset of the general population. It seems to me that if someone hadn't already become an editor years back based upon hearing about Wikipedia and being interested, odds are good they just weren't all that interested. Early adopters are going to be more suited for the tasks involved, obviously, and the pool of available potential newbies will just get worse and worse as time goes on. That's not to say that we should not treat newbies with respect and welcome them, but I think we already do that to the extent we should be. As a basic philosophy we ought to do more to hang onto and encourage long time contributors who have proven themselves to the project. While Wikipedia is the encyclopedia anyone can edit, not everyone should be editing it regularly. They can contribute what they can add of value, and as time goes on and articles are already established newbies will have less available to do. And that's a good thing. DreamGuy (talk) 14:42, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia is getting big, is widely used and I would assume we could at least attract 10 times as many contributors. So why don't we? Two factors, learning to edit and motivation, of which I think the last is the most important. Most people are not self-starters and need to be told by someone they respect, community leaders etc. So even though we need to have a welcoming environment and keep on trying making it easier to contributer, I think we really need to have various big-shots to recommend contributing. Ulflarsen (talk) 19:22, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the idea. If the WMF acts on your idea, we'll likely end up seeing Jimmy Wales' mug at the top of every page for the rest of the year. And the PTB will also disable our ability to suppress these messages even for users with a login. -- llywrch (talk) 22:46, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Technology report: Left-aligned edit links and bugfixes abound; brief news (4,962 bytes · 💬)

Maybe it's just me, but left-aligned edit links look unprofessional to me. Powers ^T 15:10, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
Beware Hawthorne Effect: I realize it might sound good that more people used section-edit links when moved to the left, but they would look "weird" there, and hence more people will notice them to click, and if people know they are being observed then their performance often improves, as being on "their best behavior" (the Hawthorne Effect, when factory lighting was increased, or lowered, and productivity improved either way). Consequently, after people get accustomed to left-side "[edit]" then move edit-buttons back to the right-side and then more people will use them there: why? ...because they would again look different, more noticeable in the newer location. To challenge this, move edit-tabs to center, or even further right, and check the usage. Also, while we're experimenting, put a random do-nothing button saying "[click here]" in the middle of an article, and count how many do. Huh. Meanwhile, also compare to an occasional reminder that clicking each "[edit]" button will allow much faster editing of each section, and compare the effect of try-talking-to-me reminders, as well as shifting things around the page, to shock a user's attention. -Wikid77 16:28, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
- The vast majority of Wikipedia readers (in excess of 99%) don't edit. (Compare the number of page views to the number of edits.) The fundamental question is whether moving the edit link to be next to the section title will encourage some of these non-editors to consider editing. So a good design for this test would include the following: (1) separate those who do click into two groups, based on IP address - those who are at an IP address where an edit has occurred in (say) the past year, and those who are not; and (2) count both clicks and edits, not just edits, because our horrible editing interface clearly dissuades a large percentage of potential editors (once they see it), but it's still noteworthy if a person takes the initiative to start an edit, even though they don't finish it. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:12, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
  - It would help layout, to send the edit button to the left. Get less bunching up of edit buttons, easier text wrapping across sections.TCO (talk) 09:03, 16 March 2011 (UTC)
I found the left-aligned link to be a distraction while reading, creating minor confusion about whether the word "edit" was supposed to be part of the header or not. Yes, I could eventually get used to it but - - why? The benefits don't seem to justify the disruption. Rossami (talk) 17:31, 16 March 2011 (UTC)
Left-aligning the edit links would prevent them from bunching, a usability problem, which in my opinion is a good enough reason to make the switch. 155.99.231.77 (talk) 01:12, 17 March 2011 (UTC)
- IIRC, edit link bunching was declared to be "fixed" - maybe just on en.wp, I don't know - a few weeks ago. - Jarry1250 ^{[Who? Discuss.]} 17:17, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Jarry is right, a feature should not be justified as a work-around to a bug (fixed or not).
The assumption is that we want more people to edit. This is true, but it is not a blanket wish (for example there will doubtless be more vandalism too, which we would rather not have). So I hope the additional research covers the quality of the edits as well as the qunatity.

Rich Farmbrough, 17:45, 20 March 2011 (UTC).

Is there a way to revert this change via some LocalSettings.php or CSS settings? The left-aligned edit links are really distracting from the content and I find them not very nice to look at. Thanks, 194.246.123.103 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 03:33, 2 July 2011 (UTC). - PEBKAC. Fortunately, even with MW 1.17 the edit links appear to be aligned on the right side. Sorry for the noise :( -- 194.246.123.103 (talk) 18:55, 12 July 2011 (UTC)