Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2013-07-24

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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2013-07-24. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Arbitration report: Infoboxes case opens (11,842 bytes · 💬)

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• The account of so-called "Kiefer.Wolfowitz and Ironholds" case is flawed. My concern has been the discovery of years of IRC comments by Ironholds, including after his employment by the Wikimedia Foundation as "communty liason".

Wikipedia and WMF have prioritized increasing the number of women editors, and so the community must address misogyny, particularly by administrators and WMF staff. User talk:Ironholds has discussion by 28bytes (talk · contribs) and Floquenbeam (talk · contribs) that is worth reading. Wikipediocracy and The Examiner have recently featured a report on Ironholds's IRC activities; more quotes from IRC are available at Wikipediocracy (at the unfortunately named thread, "Down with Ironholds").

The ArbCom case started as a request to clarify the status of Wikipedia's IRC channels, which use WMF's trademark "Wikipedia", which Jimbo Wales stated were ArbCom's responsibility (2007), and which are still promoted at WP:IRC. ArbCom has suspended its usual procedures of evidence, for this case, but won't allow discussion of IRC. For example, Administrators' canvassing other administrators on IRC to support an indefinite block of me cannot be discussed.

Kiefer.Wolfowitz 21:08, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, we traditionally allow wide leeway on Signpost talk pages, but this is quickly going over the line. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 06:13, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
The most recent story from Wikipediocracy spun off the Examiner article mentions Ironholds's purported comments and his reply about taking those comments "in context." I don't hang out on IRC but I am aware that some do. I was directed to IRC not long ago to participate in a discussion about Snuggle so I'm not sure how WMF can claim that the activity on IRC is beyond their purview. If the context of conversations on IRC reveals that crude sophomoric comments are the norm, then WMF needs to drain the proverbial IRC swamp before contagion spreads onto dry land. Prior to now I assumed conversations germane to WMF projects took place on talk pages. I'm lead to believe that IRC is the smoke-filled backroom where the wheeling and dealing actually takes place; provincial editors like myself aren't privy to the decisionmaking in the gutter. Chris Troutman (talk) 23:46, 25 July 2013 (UTC) Some conversations germane to WMF projects take place in pubs, too. (Not smoke-filled, these days.) Should WMF prevent these conversations happening? --Demiurge1000 (talk) 01:16, 26 July 2013 (UTC) No, I'll agree that WMF can't control the myriad of wiki-centric conversations that take place off-wiki. I think a forum/chatroom WMF formally conducts business in becomes the responsibility of WMF to monitor. If a bunch of editors take their conversations "away from the flagpole" that's their own business. If a bunch of editors take their conversation across the street to a public location that's also a long-time WMF conference room, it's a problem for WMF in my opinion. If WMF can't control/monitor IRC maybe it shouldn't take official business there. Chris Troutman (talk) 02:01, 26 July 2013 (UTC) Some WMF people, based in San Francisco, have indeed been in pubs in London, on occasion, to discuss WMF matters with ordinary Wikipedia editors. I don't think they got there under their own power (it's a long way), so I think that WMF paid for their travel costs. Was that more "official business" than whichever people are behind "snuggle"? Or not? --Demiurge1000 (talk) 02:14, 26 July 2013 (UTC) Incidentally, my advice would be ... don't believe everything that you're "lead to believe". I've seen this "IRC" thing of which they speak, and there isn't much there. Unless you're very bored, that is. And even then... --Demiurge1000 (talk) 02:17, 26 July 2013 (UTC) If the pub in question was just a place a couple editors met up on their own time, probably not. If the pub was the venue for an official WMF meeting, yes, it was as official as the IRC chatroom I interacted in for Snuggle. And yes, I've used phrases like "lead to believe" and "purported" because I'm not certain of the claims or the evidence behind them. I'm not looking to falsely accuse any of the named parties, I'm just expressing concerns about apparent trends in business practices. Chris Troutman (talk) 02:26, 26 July 2013 (UTC) Official WMF IRC chats (like, say, office hours which this snuggle thing may have been) are logged. Do you have a belief that such an official event was not logged; and was also a venue for "backroom wheeling and dealing"? Why do you think so? --Demiurge1000 (talk) 02:32, 26 July 2013 (UTC) I'll answer questions with questions: Is the discussion being logged the recognized determiner of "official business" in comparison to "just some folks shootin' the breeze"? As the uninitiated Wikipedian, shouldn't I expect administrator noticeboard discussions to be transparent? Although I knew WMF utilized IRC chatrooms for business, the Wikipediocracy article is the first time I've heard of "quasi-formally sanctioned Internet Relay Chat (IRC) forums dedicated to Wikipedia administrators and users" and I am concerned if the reported conversations are tolerated there. Chris Troutman (talk) 03:00, 26 July 2013 (UTC) One hears a lot of things at Wikipediocracy - all very fascinating. When one realises that such things are pushed by scientology advocates, one learns to take them with a very large pinch of salt. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 03:42, 26 July 2013 (UTC) Readers can Google "Demiurge1000, Russavia, and IRC" (wikipedia-en.08-12.log) and make their own evaluations of an editor who tells a child how to avoid his parents' email-controls (and then continues the relationship at another Wiki). Kiefer.Wolfowitz 06:02, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

• Not to be a dick (since I have no problem with the content of this report), but... How exactly did this get posted while Neotarf is blocked? Isn't it against policy to make edits on behalf of blocked users? (Ping @User:The ed17) — PinkAmpers&^{(Je vous invite à me parler)} 01:16, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
  • By a technical definition, possibly. See WP:PROXYING. However, there's also "unless ... the changes are ... productive [and/or] they have independent reasons for making such edits." Either way, I personally think that this was a perfectly good place to use IAR. ;-) Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 02:18, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
    • Fair enough. — PublicAmpers&^{(main account • talk • block)} 21:16, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

Further evidence of IRC hijinks of WMF staff being forced up "against the wall" (with winks) has been twice removed here, [1] despite its being on-Wiki. Kiefer.Wolfowitz 13:17, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

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"If USENET is anarchy, IRC is a paranoid schizophrenic after 6 days on speed." -Chris "Saundo" Saunderson --Guy Macon (talk) 04:28, 26 July 2013‎ (UTC)

• Kiefer, I don't think this is the place to continue your crusade (be it right or wrong). Let's please not have any edit warring here. If you have concerns with those edits, you're not going to get anywhere on a Signpost talk page. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 13:32, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

But you've written a story about him, and he's alleging that you've misrepresented his position. Blanking his comments makes it look like you really are misrepresenting him, and are trying to hide that for some reason. If you meant to cover the story, quotes from the subject of the article, especially impassioned ones, would be golden nuggets you should be scrambling to collect.24.19.234.62 (talk) 21:42, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

There is a time and a place. He should write up an editorial rebuttal and submit it to the Signpost, not argue his case in the comments to a Signpost article. --Guy Macon (talk) 02:20, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

• 24, "Further evidence of IRC hijinks of WMF staff being forced up 'against the wall'" is not, to the best of my knowledge, part of the case as covered here. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 07:12, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

So you clamp down the discussion on this article but not on previous articles? Based on which principles or emotions? Kiefer.Wolfowitz 06:54, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

• Please discuss this article as you wish, but posting links to IRC comments and trying to argue your case here (as opposed to Arbcom) is well outside this talk page's scope. If the article writers have misrepresented your views in any way, a well-reasoned rebuttal (with diffs) would go a long way... rather than arguing new points. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 07:12, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Featured content: Engineering and the arts (686 bytes · 💬)

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• I tend to view featured content as having "good weeks" when they promote as many or more items than they feature on the main page per week (seven for FA, FP, one for FL) and "bad weeks" when they don't meet those thresholds. I'm glad to see that FA is having a good week, as the last few weeks haven't been good ones. Sven Manguard Wha? 20:16, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

In the media: Wikipedia flamewars (2,456 bytes · 💬)

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Sounds like Wikipedia Is Even More Sexist Than Everyone Thinks to me - AFAIK all the previous surveys were estimating editor ratios, while this is "users", who are readers + editors, and of course far more of the former. That only 23% of this group is female is new, surprising and alarming to me, though the Pew survey also seems to make some huge assumptions. Johnbod (talk) 01:32, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

I think you're misreading the blog post. If you look at the table included there it does say that 23% (well, 22.7%) of editors are female. Readership remains about equally split between genders.

Also if anyone's looking for it, the full research article is here. The link in the blog seems to be broken. the wub "?!" 18:30, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

It looks like a fair bit of fuzzy math to me. They basically concluded that the survey results were biased by self-selection and then tried to figure out how much the results should be fudged to account for the bias. As the abstract says, the results are "contingent on explicit assumptions". Kaldari (talk) 05:29, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

"Flamewars" indeed. What are discussed are edit wars. The fact that the journalist conflates content disputes with flaming people in no way implies that the Signpost, which knows better, should follow suit. Charles Matthews (talk) 07:30, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

The problem with the editing wars piece (and I sent a message via Twitter to two of the authors) is that it doesn't mention the existence of protected pages. Obviously, some of the most controversial Wiki articles have been locked and protected and are thus not targets of active editing wars. But, of course, the investigators have no access to data about people who have tried to edit locked pages but failed. So, this aspect (that the most controversial articles are locked) was not acknowledged at least, not in the article abstract or in the media reviews I read. Newjerseyliz (talk) 14:52, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

News and notes: Wikivoyage turns ten, but where to now?; Wikipedia Zero expands into India (13,717 bytes · 💬)

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Not a word on the decrease in total edits after the visual editor was made opt-out for registered editors and compulsory for IP editors? Really? EllenCT (talk) 21:42, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

• Ellen, could you link us to where you got this information from? Tony (talk) 08:12, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

(not ellen) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:VisualEditor%27s_effect_on_newly_registered_editors/Results 192.12.81.1 (talk) 09:32, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. Is that based on pre-roll-out data (up to 1 July)? And I've heard rumours that a bug affected the gathering of those data. Getting too technical for me, but just wondering ... Tony (talk) 10:13, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

Tony, I'm not sure whether it is final yet as the page has been through many revisions, some quite major, but Figure 2 at [2] looks particularly troubling and I hope you ask about it. EllenCT (talk) 23:03, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

The problems with the study itself appear to be minimal (false whitelisting being the biggest culprit - estimated at ~2% of test participants). The only statistical issue I can see is that its unclear why the std error bars are so large with such a large population - probably real though. The results are mostly negative - users edit less, less often, less successfully. Whilst some of the results fall outside statistical certainty, they all trend in bad directions. There was one exception to these mostly negative results I noted, good faith edit fractions go up (statistically significant, and usefully - maybe some "bad faith" edits are due to user confusion?). Its odd that WMF doesn't look at these results in their meeting, and that the A/B results were not available (though conducted) before the rollout. That seems a poor use of data. 192.12.81.1 (talk) 11:50, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

• I have some sorry confusions about Wikivoyage anniversary. It is the anniversary (10th) of Wikitravel.org (where also I am editeur), but you say it is Wikivoyage anniversary? But Wikivoyage was made in 2006... So ten years not until 2016. And ten years of English Wikivoyage (even more confusing making-- does each language version have its own anniversary??) not until January 2023! I see that some Wikivoyage members are from Wikitravel, but what are they celebrating? It cannot be the "community" because they did not all join at one time at Wikitravel... So perhaps maybe the proper title is "Some Wikivoyage Members Celebrate 10th Anniversary of Wikitravel That They Used To Edit." It it just strange the way you write it. Do you celebrate a wedding anniversary still of a woman/man you broke up with? Wikivoyage was born 2006. They can party in 3 more years if they still are existing. BostonMarketChicken (talk) 22:53, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

• Welcome Internet Brand employee (as they and the vandals are more or less the only people left at WT). You seem to misunderstand how wikis work. It is the community that has been alive since 2003. In fact the user who made the first edit to this content, has not made a change to WT since Jan of 2012 and is know editing at WV.[3][4] In fact I think IB removed his admin rights at WT some time ago as he is not listed here[5]. He however is an admin at WV. So yes the WV community stretches all the way back to 2003 and includes the original founder of the idea and the guy who made the first edit. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 05:05, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

As someone amusingly pointed out on twitter, a group of ex Wikitravel editors, who are now at wikivoyage, deciding to celebrate a 10th anniversary, is like America deciding to celebrate a 1500th birthday because they used to be part of England. Pathetic attempt to look older & more established (and relevant...) by riding Wikitravel's coattails. Sad. You people are really obsessed with internet brand too. BostonMarketChicken (talk) 17:51, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

Ah yes, that would be the internet troll that I made the unfortunate mistake of responding to. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 21:37, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

• Meh, Wikivoyage. I quickly stopped caring for it when most of my edits were reverted, as apparently adding links to Wikipedia is forbidden ([6]), even if Wikipedia has a useful page on a subject. If Wikitravel wants to boycott Wikipedia, I don't see why we should care about it. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 10:27, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes Wikipedia has a policy against doing just that on Wikipedia. It do not see this as unreasonable especially since there is a link to the corresponding Wikipedia article on every page. Look to the left under related sites. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:48, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

You misunderstand the issue. The links I wanted to add were to related Wikipedia article, equivalent of blue links, for topics Wikivoyage has no articles - things like specific museums, buildings, organizations, etc. I see them as equivalent to image articles. For a small, slow growing project, when we can expect those entries to be created in many years in the future, if ever, not adding those links is, IMHO, a major gutting of usefulness. But it is not a fight I care to fight, other than as long as it is the case, I don't feel like wasting my time contributing to Wikivoyage. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 22:04, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

So you think contributing to a travel guide is a waste of time because you can't add multiple links to an encyclopedia? That's a very odd metric. Anyway, if you'd bothered to ask someone why we might have certain rules in place, maybe you'd have the opportunity to gain greater understanding. Powers ^T 02:28, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Given that most tourists would be pleased to gain instant access from a WV ariticle to WP articles about places, buildings, monuments, and other tourist attractions treated in the WV article, reverting the judicious insertion of links to related WP articles seems like a xenophobic practice. But WV needs unique guidelines to ensure that it doesn't become a link-farm. More broadly, I've encountered a resistance to change at WV that is regrettable in the light of its sagging model. It needs attention if it is to retain (even increase) its share of the readership and editorship—there's increasingly good competition around. Tony (talk) 02:35, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Actually, you've chosen to interpret opposition to proposals which you happen favor as a general resistance to change. They're not the same thing. The site has changed considerably since the migration. Powers ^T 12:01, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Errr ... almost the same thing. Out of interest, can you bullet the main ways in which the site has changed since migration just seven months ago? Tony (talk) 12:49, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

If I must, though I can't warrant that it's exhaustive (and note that migration was ten months ago, not seven):

• All-new mainpage (spearheaded by a newcomer to the community, I might add, and enthusiastically embraced)
• Implementation of page-heading banners to increase visual appeal of articles
• Progress toward dynamic maps generated on the fly from article listings
• Implementation of the Tourist Office, where users can ask travel questions (including a link from Wikipedia's Reference Desk)
• Conversion from legacy XML listing tags to proper MediaWiki templates
• Conversion from footnote-style external links to more-standard front-linking
• Better organization of travel topics
• Implementation of clickable maps (on high-level geographic articles like continents and countries) for navigation
• Establishment of Twitter and Facebook accounts
• Establishment of cooperative agreements between Wikivoyage and official tourist/visitor bureaus

-- Powers ^T 15:42, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

• @User:LtPowers, @User:Tony1. It is true I could've discussed this on WV more; I have now done this at wikivoyage:Wikivoyage_talk:Sister_project_links#Inline_links_to_Wikipedia. You may be interested in reading my fuller description of the issue there, and joining the discussion. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 13:26, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

• Thanks for the story and especially for quoting and linking to JamesA. I've now reached out to WMF's heads of Analytics and Operations to ask them to follow up (regarding Wikivoyage requesting better analytics to help them drive readership). Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Engineering Community Manager (talk) 14:14, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
  • Thank you a whole lot Sumana for taking the time to reach out to them! And thanks to the editors of the Signpost for taking note of our pledge, I hope we will get a major boost in our efforts thanks to that. On balance, the three logos selected for being presented at the Signpost are perhaps the three very worst ones submitted, so I hope this is just done not to promote any particular option while the voting's on (as those are quite unlikely to garner much support, hopefully). Have a great day everybody and head over to Wikivoyage to chip in your bit about your favourite destination - or your hometown! CU there, PrinceGloria (talk) 15:53, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
    • Prince, I chose them because they're hideous, in the hope that readers would be aghast and go straight to vote for something more appropriate. The risk of unfairly advertising those candidate logos flickered through my mind, but I quickly dismissed this under the circumstances. I think Ed might have changed one of them before publication. Tony (talk) 14:52, 28 July 2013 (UTC) Ah, yes, the blue boat is a substitue ... vaguely presentable, actually. Tony (talk) 14:53, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

• Truly fantastic news about Aircel deciding to join Wikimedia Zero! I have followed the work done in this field with great interest and I am very curious to know how long time the companies are bound to provide free access to the population in order to be able to take part in Wikimedia Zero? Best, John Andersson (WMSE) (talk) 22:42, 28 July 2013 (UTC)
  • John Andersson, I asked Kul Wadhwa (Head of Mobile and Business Development at WMF) to respond to your question. He said: "3 years. However, the program is evaluated after the first year and can be terminated by either party if there are issues one way or the other. However, we've been fine with all of our other partners so far  :)" Hope that helps! Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Engineering Community Manager (talk) 16:08, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

WikiProject report: WikiProject Religion (490 bytes · 💬)

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I have not had a chance to read this wikiproject report yet (I am behind on a lot of things), but just happened to see that one of the interviewees is currently also a candidate for wiki-adminship XOttawahitech (talk) 14:17, 26 July 2013 (UTC)