Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-12-30/Year in review

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Thanks for that interesting article. It is clear that "https everywhere" was not thought out fully. Plus ça change... All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 15:50, 30 December 2015 (UTC).[reply]

Yes, I agree with Rich. -- llywrch (talk) 00:21, 31 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Facepalm Someone scorched earth to make a stupid joke. That's just not needed. GamerPro64 16:56, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

There wasn't much to choose from on Wikimedia Commons. My first choice would have been an image of Vivian James. Gamaliel (talk) 23:56, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

No I understand. Not that many people would get who Vivian James is anyway. GamerPro64 00:28, 31 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, I disagree that it's anywhere near that simple. Plainly, "HTTPS everywhere" is a cost/benefit analysis. Given that global surveillance has been revealed to be worse than even the worst fears of privacy campaigners, there's a strong benefit for users in providing HTTPS by default — enough that WMF is suing the NSA over it, after all. If the cost of that is that Chinese users can't access Wikipedia through the Great Firewall (which almost all Chinese Internet users know how to evade in any case), there's certainly a case to be made that the cost/benefit analysis pays off. Reasonable people may disagree, of course :o) — OwenBlacker (Talk) 17:43, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the overview! Ziko (talk) 19:02, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Nerd alert: "HTTPS encryption protocol" is not really correct. HTTPS isn't an "encryption protocol"; it's just encrypted HTTP. "Encryption protocol" would, I suppose, refer to a cryptosystem itself, though the phrase "encryption protocol" is not widely used in the relevant fields; more precise terms are preferred. --71.119.131.184 (talk) 20:12, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I spent a fortnight in China in 2015 writing up the 2015 Women's U25 Wheelchair Basketball World Championship, and Wikipedia is not blocked. I have twelve articles to prove it! Hawkeye7 (talk) 21:11, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Don't quote me on this, but I vaguely remember having read somewhere that hotels and similar places in China that are frequented by foreigners sometimes have unblocked Internet connections. --71.119.131.184 (talk) 01:28, 1 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
That's also what I heard, which makes this intel more credible. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 08:30, 3 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I haven't seen evidence that any blocking was precipitated by the switch to HTTPS-only. Reports at the time indicated that all HTTP access for the Chinese-language version of Wikipedia was already blocked.[1][2][3] The English-language version does seem to usually be unblocked. Perhaps this shouldn't be so surprising. —Emufarmers^(T/C) 04:26, 31 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

An excellent overview! One detail is slightly askew: the Gamergate attack on Wikipedia may in fact date back to the origin of Gamergate itself. Gamergate’s first notable action was its effort to terrorize Zoë Quinn, and while many threats in the early days were broadcast on Twitter using the #Gamergate hashtag, the first one Quinn saw was actually an edit, since revdel’d, to the info box on her Wikipedia bio. The analogy between Gamergate and Anonymous is novel and intriguing, though I would point out that Gamergate targets have predominately been private individuals where Anonymous primarily has targeted corporations and government agencies. MarkBernstein (talk) 21:40, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

...Wikipedia’s ever-dwindling editor base—a decline perhaps also attributable to the adoption of mobile devices...

Please, for the love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, stop repeating this unsubstantiated nonsense. Like Cullen and hundreds of others, I've been editing from mobile for a decade now, first with HTC, then with an iPod Touch, and now on IPhone. I've written GA articles, reviewed many more, and patrolled recent changes while on the run. This quaint notion that mobile has led to some kind of decline in editing is not just absurd, it demonstrates that old habits die hard. Viriditas (talk) 02:43, 31 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, Viriditas, for your comment. I, too, have made tens of thousands of edits, written and expanded many articles, helped about a thousand newbies at the Teahouse, all on Android smart phones. I have even written an essay, Smartphone editing on this subject. Two billion sophisticated Android smart phones have been sold in 2014 and 2015. We should be encouraging and supporting and enabling mobile device editing, instead of moaning that it is way too hard. It isn't. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 03:33, 31 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I've just within the past few weeks seen, several times, highly experienced editors state they didn't do some task because they were on a mobile device at the time, so there evidently are things that are not as easy to do on mobile devices as there are on "regular" PCs. Certainly you can probably do pretty much anything if you devote enough time and effort to it, but if the aforementioned people have difficulty with something I can't imagine your average drive-by editor will bother with it. And sure, I don't think most of the people who bring up mobile as an issue are in despair that the project is doomed because of it; they just want to remind people to keep mobile editing in mind, and maybe think more resources ought to be devoted to improving mobile editing. --71.119.131.184 (talk) 07:44, 31 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The only task that is more difficult for me on my phone is the act of research on Gbooks. Otherwise, PDFs and other indices work fine. And I think this really needs to be said: both desktop and mobile have terrible editing interfaces. There are hundreds of different things we can do, but unfortunately the community here is resistant to change and is very narrow in their approach. I've all but limited my editing because I just can't stand this place anymore. Viriditas (talk) 21:56, 31 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Approximately 18 months since Lila Tretikov became executive director, the WMF has experienced almost 100% turnover.
I'm not sure how you arrived at this particular figure. I'm looking at the staff page and I see dozens of names that I recognize as having been there for years. There's certainly been turnover, and maybe more than usual, but I don't think it's fair to round to the nearest 50%. —Emufarmers^(T/C) 04:42, 31 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
- You've got the wrong definition of turnover. See Turnover (employment)#Calculation. Bgwhite (talk) 10:18, 1 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  Okay, you're right, I was being sloppy. A quick count of "{{staff member"s on the staff page indicates there were about 200 employees 18 months ago and about 280 today. So 100% turnover would be about 240 employees leaving during that time, right? That would certainly be surprising. —Emufarmers^(T/C) 02:52, 3 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I take strong resentment to how the GG situation is described. There have been many other editors, such as myself, that have been trying to make the article a neutral account of the situation struggling against both the mass throwaway accounts trying to swing it towards a pro GG stance (including attempts to include inappropriate BLP, etc as identified) and editors that have a strong anti GG opinion that were not behaving in a cooperative manner when facets of neutrality were brought up for discussion (the reason those editors were sanctioned by the decision). The Arbcom case put those actions of neutral editors too in the spotlight as it has been shown that both sides of GG take anyone that does not conform to their view as the opponent, which is not always true. What is apparerent, not just from GG or gender debates or the like is that current Wikipedia policies do not work well in ongoing controversies in the current mainstream media market that is competng for eyeballs from bloggers and social media. Many Arbcom cases over the past two years boil down to situations of editors working to keep neutral stances for WP articles fighting against both lopsided coverage of ongoing controversies, and other editors strongly convicted to one side or the other not working in cooperation. I have been thinking for the lasdt few months of how WP needs to clarify (not change) policies to make sure there are clear routes to resolve debates on ongoing controversies as to avoid what we are seeing in several arenas presently, which I plan to propose soon. --MASEM (t) 12:32, 1 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

To elucidate the matter of employee turnover (#9), have a look at the Glassdoor reviews of the Wikimedia Foundation. Things there are worse inside than they look from the outside. Something needs fixing there. -- llywrch (talk) 23:56, 1 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- It couldn't be any worse than the moronic idiocy on Wikipedia. Their employees are drawn from the Wikipedia community, so you've got a problem right off the bat that can never be fixed. Viriditas (talk) 01:30, 2 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]