Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2011-06-27

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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2011-06-27. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Featured content: The best of the week (597 bytes · 💬)

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Portal:Hudson Valley was promoted to featured status as well, of course (as mentioned on the talk page of last week's "Featured content") Bencherlite^Talk 00:40, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, better now in next week's, I think. Tony (talk) 02:16, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

In the news: Russian president uploads to Wikimedia Commons; brief news (3,258 bytes · 💬)

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• Wikipedia:1984 Bulwersator (talk) 07:02, 28 June 2011 (UTC)
• There is serious problem, even mentioned in this article "Inzwischen verlassen sich, wie Kenner bestätigen, Mitarbeiter von Ministerien, des Bundespresseamtes, von Presseabteilungen großer Konzerne, ja auch die meisten Journalisten fast blindlings auf die Einträge bei Wikipedia." - google translate Bulwersator (talk) 07:06, 28 June 2011 (UTC)
  • Ohne Zweifel, wahr; aber what people don't realize (or admit to themselves) is that that phenomenon is inevitable anyway. All that can be done is to try to keep it in check to a reasonable extent. Call out the embarrassing breaches for social censure, but don't expect the breaches to stop occurring. Forgive me if I'm preaching to the choir. I'm shooting from the hip in this comments namespace. — ¾-10 00:40, 29 June 2011 (UTC)
• Perhaps we have a gender gap in part because people think an article about a wedding dress is a typically "female" topic. Powers ^T 15:00, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Don't you know? It's the stock PHB solution to reach the female market, "And we'll have a model in pink for the ladies." -- llywrch (talk) 04:08, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

The fact that the dress article was subject to a deletion debate with much discussion including by Jimbo himself should be noted. Rmhermen (talk) 16:32, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

My favourite part about this story is that shortly after Jimbo called for 100 articles about famous dresses, the Category:Individual dresses was created, and now we're quickly approaching the 100 article mark, largely thanks to User:Dr. Blofeld! :D Mlm42 (talk) 18:55, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Scary. The question is, is User:Dr. Blofeld female? =) Powers ^T 01:10, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

One thing I love about WP. Point out a flaw, and someone just may take some big steps to mitigate it as soon as you do. It's cool because it kind of takes the wind out of the sails of WP haters. Not saying that anyone involved in this particular instance was a WP hater (don't know without spending time to check). But the same principle is at work. — ¾-10 18:01, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

News and notes: ArbCom database theft; WikiLove to roll out on the English Wikipedia; brief news (13,963 bytes · 💬)

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Wiki-Love was pretty cool 6 years ago when it was WP:Esperanza. Night Ranger (talk) 01:10, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

I liked the Esperanza idea more. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 02:00, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

What's the meaning of the "green blob" in the language committee logo? I stared at it for 5 mins and couldn't deduce any meaning out of it. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 02:19, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Rosetta Stone is my guess. WikiCopter 02:26, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes, the description of the image says Rosetta Stone. Sumsum2010·T·C 03:24, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Maybe some lines of text on the blob would help ... — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 04:53, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

• "While the leaks so far do not appear to have revealed any particularly controversial actions of ArbCom" *blinks* Um...alright, if you say so. I understand that the Signpost probably wouldn't want to comment on the controversial actions, since that means they would be commenting badly about Arbcom and such, but still, there's more than enough stuff in there that can be deemed "controversial". Silverseren^C 04:28, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

I personally find ArbCom to be a load of horse pork. I find all administrator things boring in general, but ArbCom is a whole new level of tedium. My advice is just to backpedal away from these sorts of things. _{If you don't get it, horse pork is a contradiction} ResMar 17:24, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

I agree with Resident Mario that ArbCom can be a whole new level of tedium sometimes, and I'm on the darn thing. Newyorkbrad (talk) 03:25, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

I work in an area of engineering that is especially prone to industrial espionage (electronic toys) and we use the following method as an anti-leak countermeasure; every so often, we send out multiple versions of a particular email with slightly different wording. Sometimes just a few recipients get a variation, sometimes half of them do (with a different split each time). That way, if an account is compromised, the content of the leaked emails contains a hard-to-obfuscate signature identifying which account is leaky. Has anyone at Wikipedia considered using such a system? --Guy Macon (talk) 04:50, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

That's a good system if you want to identify employees who leak stuff broadcast to them, but within one committee you have the slight awkwardness of deciding who gets to be monitor and who gets to be monitored. You also need a completely different design for the archives as everyone who has access has access to the same archive, and we don't want to shift to a broadcast system as we don't want each of these arbs having their own archive on their own kit. But as we need to shift to a different system in order to delete stuff it would be good if we could introduce something like this as well. ϢereSpielChequers 19:28, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

This would require some back-end programming of the archive system, so it might not be feasible - if I was in charge of making it happen it I would ask the developers and follow their advice. As for who does the monitoring, in the toy industry we usually choose someone with good analytical and technical skills who doesn't know the members of the mailing list or care about the issues they deal with. Using that as a guideline, everyone on the arbcom mailing list - including Jimbo - would be monitored. Another thing that we find to be helpful is to do penetration testing; while some might assume that a mailing list leak implies malfeasance or carelessness on the part of a list member, it could just as easily be true that someone used a brute-force password guessing program with a large dictionary or installed a keylogger on their PC. A good security consultant will identify any weak passwords and find any malware. All this is a bit of a pain, but less so than having confidential information leak out. Guy Macon (talk) 15:19, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Citizendium

• Citizendium is not Wikipedia. I fail to see why the Signpost insists on reporting on it. Sven Manguard Wha? 04:55, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Seriously, I don't know why anyone still talks about them. That project has been dead in the water for years. - Burpelson AFB ✈ 17:29, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

My thoughts exactly. ResMar 22:28, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

I can understand why Citizendium gets attention on The Signpost: Sanger was a founder of Wikipedia, & C. is his current project. However, it is becoming ever more clear that C. is a failed project, & despite his continuing efforts to show he is still relevant Sanger is becoming ever more marginalized. I agree with everyone else that The Signpost would benefit from dropping its coverage of both unless something undeniably newsworthy happens. Such as either Sanger or someone associated with C. wins an award -- or is indicted for committing a felony. -- llywrch (talk) 02:50, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Citizendium is family. It's the most famous fork of Wikipedia, even if it's done nothing of wide note in a long time. Marginal, though (and I'm saying that as the person who suggested this news item). Their previously raised funds run out in September, we'll see if they have sufficient interest amongst themselves (if the common "let's fund our hobby" model is sufficient) or the lights go out - David Gerard (talk) 08:01, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

OK, to explain what made me write up David's suggestion for this Signpost issue: There is, or have been, various aspects of Citizendium that make its development newsworthy for Wikipedians/Signpost readers. One is the competitor aspect, which was dominant in 2006/07 (OMG Wikipedia is doomed because its co-founder used his supreme insights about online communities to create a superior project), but it has become quite clear that Citizendium is unlikely to draw many readers or writers away from Wikipedia. Another one is the "family" aspect (what is our former chief organizer doing now?). A third aspect, which I advocated in a talk about Citizendium at Wikimania 2009 and consider the most relevant, is the unique value that Citizendium has as a testing ground for various perennial proposals that have been suggested countless times for Wikipedia, but are considered too disruptive to test out here. These include enforcing real names, special authority for "expert" editors, approved (stable) article version, and since last year, the charter, which is another interesting departure from Wikipedia "any policy is editable"/IAR culture. I believe that Citizendium's successes or, so far mostly, failures with these hold valuable insights for Wikipedians that are difficult to come by elsewhere, and that's why it is worth following them as a Wikipedian.

The present news is an update on how one of these innovations, the attempt to base the project on a stable "constitution", is turning out in practice (btw: diff of the changes), and also interesting in light of the expectations last year that it would enable the project to continue without its founder. The number of votes mentioned gives an idea of the size of the active community. I realize that not all readers are aware of the same amount of context, and that not all goings-on at Citizendium are worth reporting here.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 12:58, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

I understand your point. However, as the notice currently reads it sounds like episode 245 of a soap opera which has been repeating its material for some time. Or even less favorably, like a paragraph on one of the countless Trotskyite splinter groups which spend more time arguing over political purity than actually doing anything. A more in-depth article & discussion on events which support HaeB's justification might prevent the criticism I & others raised. (And if an event doesn't deserve that much attention, then Signpost is probably better off without it.)

As for the "testing ground for various perennial proposals" argument, why not offer some updates about Wikinfo, which is perhaps the oldest fork of Wikipedia still in existence? (IIRC, it was created back in 2004.) I had a peak at it a few months back, & was surprised not only to find it still in existence, but with a determined handful of members working away. And with far more articles than Citizendium ever produced. -- llywrch (talk) 03:25, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

WikiLove

It may have been worth mentioning the relatively high amount of media attention that the WikiLove extension received, e.g. [1], [2], [3], [4]. Reagrds, HaeB (talk) 06:02, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

There's a more complete list here. Kaldari (talk) 06:12, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

• Regarding orthography of American Sign Language, see one person's proposal. No such orthography has gained widespread adoption, but I think it's an intriguing concept. Dcoetzee 11:02, 28 June 2011 (UTC)
• If Wikimedia had better video software, you could have a video-only sign language Wiki, perhaps? At least it could function like spoken articles, but perhaps you could set up a set of standard video of sin language words and string them together to get the equivalent of computer voice-rendered text. Rmhermen (talk) 16:21, 29 June 2011 (UTC)
• Please disambiguate Copyright Act... --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 16:01, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

• What are you talking about with WikiLove being on the prototype wiki? It is on the english wiki and is as a script. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.249.130.76 (talk) 16:16, 28 June 2011 (UTC)
  • The official extension is on the prototype wiki. The script is older. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 17:39, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

• This probably isn't the right place for to make this comment, but 'Wikilove' is an awful and highly unprofessional name for a permanent feature. What's the matter with something like 'compliment'? Nick-D (talk) 05:54, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

It's not brilliant, but I quite like it. The Cavalry (Message me) 10:52, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Technology report: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News (149 bytes · 💬)

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WikiProject report: The Continuous Convention: WikiProject Comics (1,089 bytes · 💬)

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WTF does "The Stars and Stripes Forever" have to do with The Signpost? Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 00:56, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

For the past year and a half, every WikiProject Report has ended with a teaser alluding to the next project to be featured. Check out our previous reports in the archive for past examples. -Mabeenot (talk) 01:34, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Weird never noticed that. Anwyay, ignore me then. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 03:31, 28 June 2011 (UTC)