Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-09-27/News and notes

Kiev moves to Kyiv

@Bri and Smallbones: in While most participants in the RfA cited Wikipedia's common name policy is RfA meant to be RfC or RM? --DannyS712 (talk) 22:49, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

• Good catch! I've changed it to RM. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 23:03, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

Jagwar

As Jayen466 said: "Whatever Wikipedia as a community is doing, it is more of a vehicle for contributors' self-indulgence than it is a concerted endeavour to bring free knowledge to the world." Our community coddles editors like Jagwar and AmaryllisGardener because that's what we're really about, which is sad. Chris Troutman (talk) 00:54, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

• The Malagasy wikidictionary problem is basically Scots Wiki 2.0. And whereas an encyclopedia with poorly written information and bits of gibberish is ineffective, a dictionary without proper definitions is downright useless. While a user is technically responsible for their bot, it seems we need to be more stringent in enforcing actual competent human review of their edits. I hope more audits are conducted in the future. We were too late to prevent this problem on the small wikis, but more audits may at least keep it from getting worse by exposing these deficiencies to the wider community. -Indy beetle (talk) 04:11, 28 September 2020 (UTC)
  • I believe there is a Monty Python sketch that explains the issue very well. (IIRC, it involves the line, "My hovercraft is full of eels." And if not, it should.) Come to think of it, there are many issues very well explained by Monty Python sketches. -- llywrch (talk) 20:51, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Total number of pageviews

This is a misleading and not very useful metric, as it includes bot and spider views. Admittedly, the fault largely lies with the Foundation's Wikistats 2.0 tool, which mentions this issue in the small print - "In this data we try to separate bot traffic and focus on human user page views" - but nevertheless presents the total views as the default. The trick for following that "focus on human user page views" recommendation is to click "Split by agent type" in the left sidebar and then use the checkboxes to select the right combination of metric components. (Also, while the linked data documentation fails to mention it, be aware that a substantial amount of views were reclassified as "automated" starting in May 2020.)

Separately, while it seems indeed true that there was a coronavirus-related traffic peak around April and May, pageviews drop considerably from April to August every year due to seasonal changes. So the comparison in the article ("... down from the recent high in April ...") is not very meaningful.

Regard, HaeB (talk) 02:07, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

The Tropical cyclone WikiProject

That's a rather usual name for a tropical cyclone... --Guy Macon (talk) 06:35, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

I'm not sure this is an official naming convention yet, maybe just an unofficial plan. I know the agency in charge of this has run out of regular people's names and moved on to Greek letters, e.g. tropical storm Beta. I don't see any reason that they couldn't use the names of various WikiEntities if they run out of Greek letters. So we could have tropical storm "Tropical storm", or Hurricane WMF, tropical storm Women in red, or category 5 hurricane The Signpost. . Let me know what you think. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 12:39, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

"Some people don't understand things as well as I do." --Gracie Allen

--Guy Macon (talk) 14:31, 28 September 2020 (UTC)