Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2017-09-06

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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2017-09-06. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Featured content: Warfighters and their tools or trees and butterflies: take your pick of the best of Wikipedia (317 bytes · 💬)

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"Deutschlandand her three surviving sisters" need a conjunction. Jim.henderson (talk) 16:55, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

From the editors: What happened at Wikimania? (8,015 bytes · 💬)

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No more scholarships to those who don't turn in their reports! Why do I see so many heads looking down at their electronic devices in the picture? Are they busy taking notes, or just bored by the discussion? I watched this one online, and was underwhelmed by it. Certainly not worth paying rack rate to get in the door. wbm1058 (talk) 12:05, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

I agree. Turning in a report of the sessions attended should be a requirement for anyone receiving a scholarship. Not all of us can afford to attend, nor have the time to watch the live feed/video record in its entirety. Reports help broadcast what was shared. -- llywrch (talk) 18:31, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

This is already the case. According to wm2017:Scholarships, the following criteria result in instant disqualification from a WMF Wikimania scholarship:

1. The applicant received a scholarship in 2014, 2015 or 2016 but did not complete their post-conference report(s).
2. The applicant is a current or past grantee from any WMF Grant program and found to be non-compliant.

--Deryck C. 22:19, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

Out of 92 full scholarships only a dozen have posted their mandatory report for this navel-gazing exercise that ended a month ago. Chris Troutman (talk) 19:55, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

That's disappointing. -- llywrch (talk) 06:43, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Llywrch Chris troutman you both have been around long enough to know that there is no community organizer soliciting the reports and no guidance, feedback, or documentation on what constitutes a useful event report. There is no culture of writing reports and there is no culture of anyone getting positive feedback or even any feedback on reports.

You both seem a little grumpy about this and while being discontent can lead to making changes, I neither want you to feel powerless in the system nor obligated to do the labor of making changes. However, I do want you to be aware of options. Just today in the Wikimania-l mailing list Ellie, the WMF staff conference coordinator, sent an email out asking people to do conference reports. Chris, as you noted, the people at meta:Grants:TPS/Wikimania_scholars owe reports. I just posted a message at meta:Grants:TPS/Wikimania_scholars#Scholar_responsibilities saying that writing for The Signpost is one way to fulfill obligations of receiving a grant. If either of you wants to be involved in establishing the norms, all the requirements are in wiki for anyone to edit, so either you or anyone else you recruit could write the rules, give guidance to writers, actually write the scholarship recipients and ask if they would write for Signpost or whatever else, or be engaged as you like.

Almost none of the scholarship recipients know about writing obligations in exchange for the travel grant. If they do submit anything then whatever they submit is unlikely to be read or get comments because there is no culture or tradition of writing these reports for the sake of other Wikipedians, but there could be, and either of you could promote that.

I do not think that it is the place of WMF staff to establish any tradition, but if the Wiki community itself organized a tradition of accepting journalism in exchange for travel grants, then I think everyone involved would benefit and even that would be less of a burden for grant recipients than trying to write a report for an undefined audience. Thoughts? Thanks, both of you, for speaking up. I do not think you have any reason to be disappointed because you do have an opportunity here to author WMF grant reporting guidelines, which whether you accept it or not is really an amazing option for anyone who wants something to change. Blue Rasberry (talk) 23:09, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

"Grumpy" isn't the word for my mood; to repeat myself, it's "disappointed". And for several reasons

For one thing, many people want to attend Wikimania but can't, due to money; others would like to, but cannot due to other commitments. So being given a grant to attend Wikimania is a privileges do not have, & being cavalier about submitting reports disrespects those who did not enjoy this privilege. (I notice that there are reports from previous years, so I suspect submitting a report in return for the scholarship has been communicated better than you think. I also notice that as many as 9 more people turned in reports since Chris' post above, so maybe our comments are prodding people to file their reports.)

Another reason is that I would expect attendees to be motivated & excited about what they learn at Wikimania, thus eager to share this information. Were the sessions & interactions disappointing this year, & that is why the reports are coming in late?

A last reason is that while I doubt I will have the opportunity to attend a Wikimania in the next couple of years -- I have two small children I help parent -- I would like to know more about what happens each year than the text of the keynote addresses & the haphazard notes of sessions & discussion boards. Knowing what attendees thought were the most events & topics raised would convey a sense of actually attending.

So not having any report of this year's Wikimania disappoints me. Maybe it disappointed its attendees this year. Or maybe the attendees refuse to live up to their responsibilities, both as scholarship recipients & as Wikimedians, to help make the information free & are disappointing the rest of us. -- llywrch (talk) 02:47, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

@Llywrch: I think your expectations are too high. The skill set required to get a scholarship is unrelated to the skill set to publish journalism, do conference reporting, or teach others in print. I want these things too, but instead of blaming the volunteers for going, I would say that it is unreasonable to expect these kinds of outcomes unless we had paid staff support to coach people and develop guidelines on how to write conference reports effectively. Every year the kind of complaints that you are sharing come out. Your complaints are valid, and things should change, but I do not think that it is reasonable to blame 100 volunteers every year in perpetuity when we have good knowledge that the same thing has happened for so many years in the past. Increasing the disappointment and negativity about the situation without changing anything else is not a path forward to change. I do not know what is constructive to change but I am sure that I have no desire to blame the scholarship recipients for behavior which the infrastructure here has established as normal. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:57, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

@Llywrch, Chris troutman, and Bluerasberry: The Wikimania scholarship team sent out an email to all Wikimania 2017 WMF scholars last week saying the deadline of reports will be 1st October. Come back on 2nd October to see the reports! Deryck C. 13:29, 15 September 2017 (UTC)

Humour: Bots (2,418 bytes · 💬)

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• I, for one, welcome the enlightened rule of our new Robot Overlords. They can't possibly do a worse job than the politicians we have already. --Guy Macon (talk) 03:01, 7 September 2017 (UTC)
  • Guy Macon, you've seemed to have caught onto how the Signpost humour works. It is the wikilinks that make the article funny, not the article itself. Good show! Barbara (WVS) ✐ ✉ 22:31, 17 September 2017 (UTC)
  • I second that! Madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We've been doing politics for millennia now. Time for a real change, bot-utopia or death! --Felipe (talk) 20:10, 8 September 2017 (UTC)
    • Yes, bot but after I have drummed up some article that needed to be created, using the citation machine that comes with Visual Editor, bots come in and change the refs...then another one comes in and changes those refs, and another and yet another. Those bots are padding their edit counts here. Also, big secret here, at Wikimania 2018 the bots are gathering pre-conference to plan their Coup d'état - of Wikimedia, no kidding. The don't worry about airfare since they can travel through the wires and cell phones. Barbara (WVS) ✐ ✉ 22:31, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

Coup d'ebot. EEng 22:45, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

• Regarding the bots who wanna retire in Africa, they have turbulence when flying there and the pilot announces, "Betcha wanna land."— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 18:42, 16 October 2017 (UTC)

In the media: Google's Ideological Echo Chamber; What makes someone successful? (1,287 bytes · 💬)

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• "뉴스에 나셨네요. 축하드립니다. 아이고 어쩌나." [You're on the news. Congratulations. I'm sorry.]

  fined 4 million won ($3,564) on September 1, 2017, for changing the Wikipedia pages of Moon Jae-in and Lee Jae-myung to say that they were North Korean

  This story was itchin for some diffs: The edits appear to be [1] and [2]—simple vandalism, unless I'm missing some later action, the kind of run-of-the-mill IP vandalism deleted on enwp every day (after minutes or, at most, a few hours), just as it was in the Korean articles. I'd be interested in the full story, perhaps for a future Signpost? czar 04:49, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

News and notes: Basselpedia; WMF Board of Trustees appointments (2,517 bytes · 💬)

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Odd to see the Cebuano wikipedia crossing the 5 million article mark, seeing as it has 20 million speakers and only 178 editors. Looks like they have a bot ([3]) churning out articles on cities and plants and animals; does anyone know why they seem to be the only wiki that is doing so? --PresN 15:25, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

Some of the articles need a bit more work. StAnselm (talk) 21:28, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

Other wikis aren't doing so because it's a terrible idea. All Ceb Wiki is doing is turning a bunch of low-quality uncurated databases into massive numbers of Wikipedia stubs that will never be maintained (and many of which contain bogus information). 99% of the articles on Ceb Wiki should be nuked. Kaldari (talk) 23:25, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

Agreed. And whoever maintains www.wikipedia.org apparently agrees, since even though it is second in terms of number of articles, it isn't one of the ten circling the globe, in fact there are two languages Chinese and Portuguese that have less than a million articles are in the grouping. (Waray is treated the same way, the globe has 10 of the top 12 wikipedias by articles, but Waray and Cebuano have less than active 200 users, with the smallest number of other users among the top 12 being Vietnamese with 1800-ish. Naraht (talk) 18:51, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

This speaks to the damage the WMF has caused by making the number of articles the unit of analysis. It is not progress to simply have more articles. Chris Troutman (talk) 00:07, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Naraht, the portals sort projects by usage rather than article count, since 2008: see m:Project portals. (Portals are run by the community and according to community standards, although right now they're hostage of a sub-standard WMF process.) --Nemo 06:09, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

Recent research: Discussion summarization; Twitter bots tracking government edits; extracting trivia from Wikipedia (438 bytes · 💬)

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It is great to read articles like this. I was excited with the information and this would motivate me to be a successful and consistent Wikipedian in the future. I also have to learn how to confront these challenges successfully and I really liked it. Abishe 14:39, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

Technology report: Latest tech news (969 bytes · 💬)

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• Re: "You can block users from sending you notifications", it would be helpful to generate a list (possibly accessible only to admins) of the users who have been blocked from sending you notifications the most. Those at the very top should be looked into to see if they are being disruptive. Perhaps percentage of notifications blocked as well as the total number? Also, this new feature needs a help page on Wikipedia. --Guy Macon (talk) 02:56, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

Hi Guy Macon, there's a documentation page here: Wikipedia:Community health initiative on English Wikipedia/User Mute features. I'll post a link next to that item, thanks for pointing it out. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 22:48, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

Traffic report: A fortnight of conflicts (959 bytes · 💬)

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I'm thoroughly enjoying the whimsical writeups in this page. Good work!-gadfium 04:26, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

Punctuation please, or something!

"Latest seasons of the show have been labeled by dissers as fanfic, given it is scheduled to end next year, possibly without the last two A Song of Ice and Fire books by George R. R. Martin (pictured) not having been published." Johnbod (talk) 04:37, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

Captain America image is free use

If you want some copyright-free images of punching Hitler, here are two: AnonMoos (talk) 16:37, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

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WikiProject report: New to you: WikiProject YouTube (1,980 bytes · 💬)

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I have not been particularly active on articles related to online video (which would probably be a better name for such a WikiProject imo), primarily because there are no reliable sources that focus specifically on the subject. I really wish there were a good number of sources to work with in this field. The project looks good, anyway, and I think I'm going to follow it :) ~Mable (chat) 08:06, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

I have learnt about the evolution of WikiProject YouTube in the English Wikipedia. Well thanks for writing articles like these that would inspire the viewers including me. Well I accept the fact that it is very difficult to find and access to references and other sources except the YouTube. Abishe (talk) 09:11, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

Public Relations / Advertising for YouTube

Why is a single brand featured as a project on Wikipedia and in The Signpost? How much does Google pay (or contributes in other forms) for it? It is simple advertising for Google and YouTube. And that is not allowed on Wikipedia. What about other video platforms? Do you remember our rules? If not - read this: WP:NOTADVERTISING. with best wishes from VINCENZO1492 09:16, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

The WikiProject has been nominated for deletion for these reasons. I hope a different solution can be found, however, as online video certainly needs a WikiProject distinct from Internet Culture. ~Mable (chat) 11:42, 7 September 2017 (UTC)