Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2013-05-27

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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2013-05-27. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Foundation elections: Candidates talk about the Meta problem, the nation-based chapter model, world languages, and value for money (10,436 bytes · 💬)

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Meta: "a specific kind of mess"?

Please see current and past discussion:

• Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Move, not merge, Meta to the Commons.
• Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-07/Op-ed, "Op-ed. Meta, where innovative ideas die". See the comments from many editors.

See also:

• WP:Integrated watchlists (shortcut for Wikipedia:Integrated, interwiki, global watchlists). --Timeshifter (talk) 07:17, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

• • Timeshifter, thanks; I'd forgotten about that op-ed ... it is just that, though, the opinion of a Wikimedian. I think we're hoping for a lot more community feedback and questioning of candidates (see the link to Meta above). Tony (talk) 09:17, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

The Op-ed got a lot of supportive comments. The Signpost is one of the few truly global communication tools that Wikimedia has. There would be a lot more community feedback and questioning of candidates if candidate discussion occurred on the Commons or on English Wikipedia, instead of only on Meta. See: meta:Wikimedia Foundation elections/Board elections/2013/Candidates. So few people check the Meta watchlist. Many more people from many more countries check the Commons and English Wikipedia watchlists. --Timeshifter (talk) 09:48, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Ah, and I still have a draft for a complementary op-ed highlighting all of the ways that we currently collaborate off-wiki rather than using Meta. It is easy to organize a one-off solution for a specific group; harder to do something that produces a useful RecentChanges feed for everyone who supports or watches meta-issues. Integrated watchlists are coming, slowly.

As to the commons/meta question - commons currently has such a strong bias towards media-savvy people and those familiar with its high-throughput processes that this could be socially complex. And I expect we will have additional thematic meta-projects such as WikiData in the future; forcing Meta to become double-meta, in a way. But we could make it much easier for participants in other communities to work on Meta; it should be a testbed for the best cross-project, cross-language, and cross-community collab tools. – SJ + 18:19, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

SJ. You are on the WMF Board of Trustees. Why is it the case that "Integrated watchlists are coming, slowly." This has been requested by so many people for years. Now that you are on the board I suggest you push for a massive increase in funding for developer work directly related to integrated watchlists. Here is another detailed page on it: mw:Watchlist wishlist. On a related note please see: Wikipedia:Petition to the WMF on handling of interface changes. That problem would also be solved by an integrated watchlist, because then Meta would actually be useful for communication between the WMF, developers, and editors across all Wikimedia wikis worldwide.

If that is going to take years more, then in the meantime the scope of the Commons needs to be expanded to include Meta, Outreach, Strategy, and other interwiki communications. There is no reason there could not be separate departments on the Commons for each of those areas. It would also help with templates in that they would not have to be duplicated anymore. I have 19,000 edits on the Commons. Commons admins would have no problems helping handle those additional communication and discussion tasks. They communicate constantly and skillfully with people from many countries who speak many languages. They are exemplary in this. Meta admins could become Commons admins, or start off with being given provisional admin status in order to work only on Meta pages.

There are many ways this could be done. One way is to do it with folders. As on Mediawiki.org at mw:Technical communications/Mobile documentation consolidation where there is a folder for Technical communications subdivided by sub-project. There are many such folders for various projects on MediaWiki.org. It would be easy to do this via Special:Export on Meta, and Special:Import on the Commons. One uses "Destination root page" in the Special:Import form on the Commons, and enters "Meta". So all pages moved from Meta to the Commons would start with commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta - I have tested this on another wiki when importing stuff between wikis. It works. --Timeshifter (talk) 09:15, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

Timeshifter, I see what you mean about adding namespaces or folders to commons. I thoroughly agree that an integrated watchlist would make Meta useful for communication between WMF, and users of meta:, mw:, commons:, wp: and other wikis. Not long ago we seemed on-track to have cross-wiki messaging, including talkpage alerts and watchlists. Now that has been bundled into Echo, which for its first iteration declared cross-wiki features out of scope. (However the discussion continues.) We do need to make watchlists more broadly useful specifically to enable tracking of a single issue or category across many wikis; that is certainly on my wishlist. Thank you for pointing me to that summary on mw. – SJ + 23:11, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

re: "almost entirely in English" - this may be true if you count all namespaces, but only about 50% of mainspace pages are in English. m:User:PiRSquared17/Random πr² (t • c) 15:27, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

The sinking ship that is Meta

It's funny how some people are so desperate to close all discussion about moving Meta somewhere where significant numbers of people might actually use it, and its watchlist. 2 such discussions were closed by admins in less than 10 hours after they were started. One discussion on Meta, and one on English Wikipedia:

• Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Move, not merge, Meta to the Commons. Closed in less than 10 hours. I started this discussion. I am in the top 2000 editors in number of edits on Wikipedia. It is funny that the closing admin said discussion needed to occur on the Commons and Meta. I had notified Commons and Meta about the discussion. It is amazing the amount of misconduct admins get away with nowadays. Especially amusing in light of the following:
• meta:Proposals for closing projects/Closure of meta-wiki. Closed in less than an hour, and then reopened, and re-closed, etc., and finally closed after 8 hours total. It was proposed by the respected editor, User:Rd232, who is in the top 1000 editors in number of edits on Wikipedia. It was a proposal to move Meta to another location, or to its own namespace.

Finally, I noticed this today:

• mw:Technical communications/Mobile documentation consolidation - Mediawiki moving documents from Meta to Mediawiki.org. People are leaving the sinking ship that is Meta.

The bottom line is that unless WP:Integrated watchlists is implemented in a serious way, Meta will slip further and further into the deep waters of oblivion. One thing I noticed from the Village Pump discussion is how little interest Meta evoked except almost exclusively from editors and admins from Meta. Most people ignore Meta, and that is sad, and it is an injury Meta inflicts on itself by ignoring constructive ideas and criticism. --Timeshifter (talk) 07:20, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

Um, the project to move Meta content to MediaWiki.org has nothing to do with this. Meta-Wiki used to host technical files about extensions, but a separate wiki was set up for that. πr² (t • c) 15:11, 2 June 2013 (UTC)

It looks like a lot more than that. See mw:Technical communications/Mobile documentation consolidation and the lists there. --Timeshifter (talk) 16:44, 2 June 2013 (UTC)

So? The Mobile team wanted to move its content to MediaWiki.org. I'm sure it's not because of the problems you name with Meta. Even fewer people check their MediaWiki.org watchlist, as you would say. ;) πr² (t • c) 19:16, 2 June 2013 (UTC)

Meta and MediaWiki.org have similar problems concerning integrating their watchlists with one's home wiki watchlist (English Wikipedia for me). Mediawiki.org also uses the hated LiquidThreads for their talk pages. --Timeshifter (talk) 12:27, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

Election delayed by one week

As posted on Meta, the Elections Committee has delayed the start of voting for one week.

Thanks to the Signpost staff who have been diligent in bringing information about these elections to the English Wikipedia community. Risker (talk) 21:15, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for the note, Risker. I've updated the relevant Signpost pages. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 22:36, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

In the media: Pagans complain about Qworty's anti-Pagan editing (2,077 bytes · 💬)

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Pagans complain about Qworty's anti-Pagan editing

Here is a search of 2013 Signpost articles for Qworty. And here is a search of all Signpost articles. Search form is at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Archives. --Timeshifter (talk) 08:54, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Penalty for citing Wikipedia

Please tell me that this professor did not remove correct information, i.e. did not engage in vandalism. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 09:23, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Not that I am aware of as of yet ... nothing to that effect was mentioned, at least that I saw, in the story or elsewhere based on a cursory Google search. Phightins is Gone (talk) 12:15, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Let's hope this doesn't really happen. You know, there is the possibility that this may result in WP:3RR issues. And then said professor can't do that anymore! Thegreatgrabber (talk)^contribs 23:19, 2 June 2013 (UTC)

It's rather amusing that a large percentage of the comments on that article came from Jeff Peters and Greg Kohs. Can't imagine why they'd have an axe to grind with the site... --SarekOfVulcan (talk) 13:58, 4 June 2013 (UTC)

Recent research: Motivations on the Persian Wikipedia; is science eight times more popular on the Spanish Wikipedia than the English Wikipedia? (2,137 bytes · 💬)

Popular articles

• On "why the data was limited only to few months in 2009", the reason is surely very simple: until bug 42259 is fixed, querying pageviews data is nearly impossible, so they had to use a small sample and they ended up using the same they already had (in usable form) from previous research. As for the other questions on classification, they are IMHO important to a point; a deeper possible flaw is that the popular articles of en.wiki will usually not exist at all on other Wikipedias, which don't create them or even delete them: of course, if an article doesn't exist it can't take a big proportion of your pageviews but this tells nothing on how popular the topic is. From the review I don't understand if this was considered by the paper. --Nemo 07:46, 31 May 2013 (UTC)
  • I don't recall seeing this point raised. Different notability criteria on different Wikipedias are indeed a valid point to consider, good thought. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 09:21, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

English Wikinews

Rejected "due to a lack of 'newsworthiness' "? Heavens, that's a bit rich coming from a site that puts up on its main page the über-trivial alongside stories of world significance. Who cares that some regional football club in some Australian town beat another regional football club last Saturday? How could anything be rejected if that makes the front page? Tony (talk) 10:02, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

My understanding is that "newsworthiness" is a combination of what we'd call "notability" and timeliness; so an article on a significant topic written a week late would still be "unnewsworthy". Andrew Gray (talk) 12:01, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Technology report: Amsterdam hackathon: continuity, change, and stroopwafels (8,819 bytes · 💬)

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• "Other chapters supported the event by helping with participants’ travel and accommodation costs, as did the Wikimedia Foundation for its staff." Yes, and WMF also helped to sponsor several Wikimedia volunteers' travel and accommodation for the hackathon (as WMF also did last year for the Berlin event, and did to some extent in 2011 as well). Question: what does "the decision not to prioritise the grant-supported invitation of Wikimedia outsiders" refer to? Is there a specific set of people you're referring to, who currently do not contribute to Wikimedia projects but wanted grants to attend the event? Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Engineering Community Manager (talk) 03:14, 30 May 2013 (UTC)
  • (changed re. description of WMF sponsorship). Re: other points, there was some discussion of how aggressively the event would be marketed to people outside Wikimedia circles (in the general FOSS ecosphere), e.g. OSM, Mozilla, GNOME, with the conclusion that it would not be [aggressively marketed to those groups]. In any case, I can say from personal experience that I did not meet (m)any non-Wikimedians myself. - Jarry1250 ^{[Vacation needed]} 10:20, 30 May 2013 (UTC)
    • Could you point to any of that discussion, please? I'm happy to respond to it, and to take it into consideration in advising on next year's event, if I can see people's requests, suggestions, etc. Yes, the yearly Wikimedia developers' meeting is traditionally a meeting of Wikimedia technical contributors -- an "inreach" event more than an "outreach" event -- and sometimes opportunities pop up for collaboration with other FLOSS communities, but yes, that hasn't been an emphasis in past years, and it wasn't an emphasis this year either. I will note that the yearly hackathon has, in recent years, expanded more to include not just MediaWiki coders but more bot and tool authors, sysadmins, template makers, testers, designers, researchers, gadget and user script maintainers, and so on.

    I think the phrase "the grant-supported invitation of Wikimedia outsiders" is kind of confusing, now that I understand what you're talking about, because publicizing the event to people who are not currently Wikimedia contributors is a different matter from specifically subsidising their travel and accommodation. Hope that helps. And thanks for the fix regarding WMF sponsorship. Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Engineering Community Manager (talk) 13:33, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

    • • Apologies for the late reply. I accept I may have been unclear here (it's a tricky area to be precise about), but basically I just wanted to capture your inreach/outreach event divergence (specifically, I was responding to Quim's discussion page post "After discussing with Sumana we agreed that this event is more of a Wikimedia-wide gathering than a real outreach event where we put a lot effort bringing newcomers"). - Jarry1250 ^{[Vacation needed]} 14:23, 5 June 2013 (UTC)
• It turns out the hostel does have smaller rooms available, but in order to use them you generally have to book about 6 months in advance. So next year, if the hackathon organizers use a hostel such as this one, WMF aims to offer its staffers the option of staying in those kinds of rooms at the hostel, so it's easier for everyone to mingle. Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Engineering Community Manager (talk) 03:14, 30 May 2013 (UTC)
  • Interesting. Of course, the discussion (however justified) is not just about where the single rooms are, but also the decision to use single rooms at all. - Jarry1250 ^{[Vacation needed]} 10:20, 30 May 2013 (UTC)
    • Right; you've probably seen this travel policy ("A single room with a private bath is the standard."), and I know not all Wikimedia community members like that part of the policy. I should note that a lot of WMF people stayed in two-person rooms or other accommodation (not single rooms) to save money, at the Amsterdam event, as well as at approximately every multiday Wikimedia event I've ever attended. Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Engineering Community Manager (talk) 13:33, 30 May 2013 (UTC)
      • Any stats? Like, how many doubles vs. single and most common reasons to prefer a single (are they asked a reason?). --Nemo 07:38, 31 May 2013 (UTC)
        • I don't have any statistics on this. Given that it's policy to offer single rooms, I am reasonably sure the travel coodinator does not ask WMF staffers "why are you acting in accordance with the policy?" :-) My personal recollection is that, at Wikimania and at Berlin or Amsterdam hackathons or for other Wikimedia travel, most WMF personnel who attend share rooms with our colleagues. I have sometimes stayed in a hotel room by myself because of a lack of other women to share a room with. Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Engineering Community Manager (talk) 15:49, 31 May 2013 (UTC)
      • I have no problem with employees having single, en-suite rooms. That's also the Wikimedia-UK policy for staff and volunteers. Yet in Amsterdam I was sharing a hostel room, not for the first time on a WMUK sponsored trip (on others, I have had my own room). Obviously, I made the choice to accept that arrangement (and I am grateful that I had the opportunity to attend), but there does seem to be an inexplicable difference between policy and practice; and the decisions seem to be arbitrary. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:56, 31 May 2013 (UTC)
        • Andy, hi! Glad we got to chat in Amsterdam. I think I'm a little confused regarding the policy/practice difference that you see, since the travel policy (which I think you're referring to) is about "people required to travel on behalf of the WMF"; am I right in inferring that you think this should also apply to all volunteers choosing to travel for Wikimedia-related purposes, whether funded by WMF, chapters, or some other Wikimedia body?

        The hackathon organizing committee this year consisted of some volunteers, some WMNL staff, some WMDE staff, and some WMF staff. I will probably be on the hackathon organizing committee again next year, and I will suggest we consider changing our approach: hosting subsidised volunteers in a hotel while keeping the budget manageable by reducing the number of people the committee subsidises. However, I will have to think a lot about what approach I would personally recommend; it's a tough question. Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Engineering Community Manager (talk) 15:49, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

        • While I don't really like having a double-standard for staff and volunteers, the hostel worked out great and it was a plus to share rooms with fellow Wikimedians. This was especially true because the event was at the hostel, so there was no better place to be. If I had to choose between more private rooms or more attendees, I'd pick more attendees every time. As for staff expectations/allowance for better accommodations, it's a trickier problem to justify. I think it comes down to the fact that staff are generally 'at work' during these events whereas volunteers are essentially on vacations. So volunteers come to expect that they might have less privacy and amenities, but then again, their job is not on the line to show up and be rested and ready. Case in point, I felt like working all night during the second day of the hackathon and sleeping through the morning sessions. I could do that, whereas I'm not sure that staff could. So that's one argument to justify differences. Ocaasi ^{t | c} 17:10, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

WikiProject report: WikiProject Geographical Coordinates (2,172 bytes · 💬)

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• In my experience, the best way to add coordinates information to Wikipedia articles (and Commons images) is by using the Geolocator tool, which calls itself "the Swiss Army Knife of georeferencing and geotagging". The best way to find this tool is by googling "geolocator swiss army knife", an easy search to remember. The tool uses google earth to help you find the coordinates of the place you want to geotag (you do it by pointing a pointer at the desired place), and then produces the coordinates in a "coord" (or Commons "location") template form that you can copy and paste straight onto a Wikipedia or Commons page, as appropriate. Bahnfrend (talk) 09:58, 31 May 2013 (UTC)
  • Thank you for that. I was just about to mention the same. The very idea of doing any of this stuff manually makes half of my face twitch. With geolcator it can be a really fun research game... it can get a little addictive though. --U5K0'sTalk_{Make WikiLove not WikiWar} 16:12, 31 May 2013 (UTC)
    • Yes, it can. And it's also important to bear in mind that using this tool isn't original research, but extraction by electronic means of information already published in a reliable source. Bahnfrend (talk) 23:43, 31 May 2013 (UTC)
  • Yes, thanks User:Bahnfrend et al. I just corrected the geo-coords for Downtown Disney (Disneyland Resort), which had been mistakenly placed in Florida vice California. This is a good gardening task. Chris Troutman (talk) 19:52, 2 June 2013 (UTC)
• I know about point coordinate templates. Is there something for polygons/regions? Shyamal (talk) 03:33, 4 June 2013 (UTC)