Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2015-05-27

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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2015-05-27. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Discussion report: A relic from the past that needs to be updated (595 bytes · 💬)

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Glad to see the Discussion report back! It's a hard article to compile, so praise is rightfully due. -- llywrch (talk) 17:21, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Absolutely. I think everyone is happy to see the return of this section. Nice work. Gamaliel (talk) 16:03, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Featured content: When music was confined to a ribbon of rust (2,762 bytes · 💬)

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• Where are the GAs? Nergaal (talk) 20:49, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

• The editor who ran the script to generate the list is taking a break (I think that's the answer). Xanthomelanoussprog (talk) 21:20, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

• @Nergaal and Xanthomelanoussprog: Not quite: As stated at the time, the bot that handles GAs stopped logging promotions. It hasn't updated since April 15, when it thought all GAs had been removed from the list. . I brought this up (1, 2) and... no-one seems to care very much. Frankly, if the GA team isn't interested in documenting GAs - and it's been a month and there's not been any sort of real response - it's probably not the job of the Signpost to do it by hand, with massively more work. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 02:34, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Always good to see Featured Topics mentioned here. Credit also goes out to Red Phoenix, Indrian, SexyKick, and TheTimesAreAChanging for their individual works on the articles in the Sega consoles topic. GamerPro64 21:33, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

I've credited those users in the report. Thanks for the idea. – Juliancolton | ^Talk 21:56, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

• Regarding the photo above, I have one that looks very much like that. It's not archaic, but it did quit working. You'd think if it looked that good and came from a company as trusted as Radio Shack ...— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 19:49, 1 June 2015 (UTC)
• I don't know which of the three compilers wrote the description of the C120 tape but it definitely falls into the true and very funny category - especially the Kate Bush bit. Nthep (talk) 14:11, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

In the media: Scrubbing Parliamentary biographies; Wikipedia's invisible history (5,828 bytes · 💬)

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• I find it very sad that the "10% female" tale is still being told, when we have known for some time that the percentage is higher than that, and increasing. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:06, 29 May 2015 (UTC).
  

Er, we have? But "the single article for six seasons of Sex in the City versus the 43 articles about Top Gear" is certainly nonsense. Category:Sex and the City has 16 articles, ok one on the film, and only one on an individual episode. But the List of Sex and the City episodes has a lot of info. Category:Top Gear heads a tree of 98 articles by my count, but this covers all foreign editions, and UK ones back to 1977. Heaven knows where 43 comes from. This comparison at least makes a change from the usual SATC/Sopranos one, pioneered by the New York Times 5 or more years ago. As usual the NS article fails to suggest that people unhappy about it should go and edit themselves - it doesn't seem likely they will encounter much trouble from existing editors in the area, since there don't seem to be any. It seems the world's media can only handle one Wikipedia story per decade. In the 2000s it was accuracy and "Wow, anyone can edit". In the 2010s it is gender imbalance. Johnbod (talk) 04:07, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

A good chunk of that article is about efforts by women to encourage other women to edit, so it seems they are suggesting that. Gamaliel (talk) 13:58, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Not really - but Jenni Murray did cut straight to the chase on Woman's Hour starts at about 16:40 in. Johnbod (talk) 18:55, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Thank you, I'll give this a listen and include it in the next ITM. Gamaliel (talk) 19:20, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

• While the real proportion of female editors is above 10% -the exact number is unknown- the big problem is that they are too few and that many of them prefer to hide their gender. It is not unfrequent to hear of female editors with female-sounding nicknames that ask to have them replaced with neutral or even masculine ones in order to avoid "problems". That's very worrying. B25es (talk) 05:47, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

• re:An Aboriginal Wikipedia? disappointing article from my perspective as a Wikipedian who has been working on this project for more than 12 months. The article itself carries a lot of inaccuracies, many of the questions asked and left unanswered had as far as we knew been addressed more than 6 months ago. Unfortunately this may be a side effect of Clint being isolated in Sydney some 2500 miles from WA where the project work is happening, the joys of the Australian distance factor. The statistics quoted are of those that speak Noongar at home, does not include those who speak the language elsewhere, nor does it count people who are less than fluent. I think any who read the entire article should do so with the knowledge that its just one persons perspective and its more indicative of some of the challenges we all face in the development of long term projects. Gnangarra 06:20, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

• We'd love to have you or anyone else involved with this project to write about it in the Signpost. Gamaliel (talk) 13:58, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Politicians' biographies

The problem with that story is that as usual no one asks whether all the content that was removed was appropriate in context. No one asks whether Wikipedia biographies should properly be long laundry lists of any and all complaints ever published about a politician in a local or national paper. No one asks who the anonymous editors were who added the material that was removed. Would the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography use a source like "Quote of the day: “Bob was a terrible lover ...", London Evening Standard, 17 December 2012.?

There is a lack of clarity and vision as to what Wikipedia should be: A reputable reference work like Britannica? An anonymously compiled compendium of yellow-press gossip and hatchet jobs? A PR brochure? It is all of those, in part. Andreas JN466 18:26, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Well people do ask, and no doubt some of the relevant talk pages are full of discussion. But these matters involve subjective judgement in the application of our complicated rules and principles, and this is a summary. Without looking at these or the articles, the last two in the table seem clearly harmless/beneficial, the first one probably not. For most of the others one would have to dig. Johnbod (talk) 18:37, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

An excellent point that is generally missing from the news coverage. Sometimes people add crap to politicians' articles and it should be removed. Gamaliel (talk) 19:20, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

News and notes: WMF releases quarterly reports, annual plans (5,827 bytes · 💬)

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• While I like WMF stuff to be open, I understand why there may be reticence to committing to publish a SWOT analysis. The potential for existential, or at least very costly, threats, means that publication could potentially fall foul of the equivalent of WP:BEANS. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:02, 29 May 2015 (UTC).
  
  • It's confusing that op-ed style commentary is mixed in with an otherwise straight news story. Who exactly is saying that this is "alarming"? The Signpost, unnamed community members, or User:Resident Mario? Kaldari (talk) 21:08, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia's "outdated" look

Maybe I'm a minority of one, but I find these constant complaints about Wikipedia's interface as evidence of missing the entire point of what this website is attempting to accomplish.

I'm not defending the interface unreservedly -- there are things I don't like about it, & the fonts that Raureif are using are attractive. But when I look at various suggested "improvements", I end up wondering if they will really improve how every article will look, or just certain ones. And I wonder if all of those shiny bells & whistles come at the cost of using only certain versions of certain browsers & add-ons (e.g., specific versions & releases of Java, Flash, Javascript, etc.) leaving the rest of us with a blank page that tells us we need to upgrade something in our computer we shouldn't really need to. So when all is said & done, the interface works, & it really is the least worst possible interface. It allows a lot of people who have been donating our time, money, & effort at building Wikipedia to do the job without being distracted about whether the software on our computers is good enough. We can focus on getting the facts & citations right without worrying if the picture selected for the article is edgy enough. (Or whatever is the current fad in graphic design right now.)

And that's the point of Wikipedia -- we're creating the content. We're translating the names, dates, facts & opinions from its current print form into a digital form that our readers can build with. Or as one article the folks at Raureif linked to put it, if someone stumbles upon Wikipedia and thinks "Urgh, it's so ugly!" that person wasn't using it. He was looking at it. This doesn't mean people shouldn't experiment with the interface, & try to make it better; they just need to keep two things in mind before they talk about "improving" it. The first is that they shouldn't have their panties bunched up for Wikipedians not caring about the interface as much as they do; again, we're creating content, God dammit. Second, if they come up with a truly better interface that allows people to better extract the information, they should be prepared to share it with the community that built Wikipedia for the same price they paid for the content; no one is forcing them to use what we've given them for free, God dammit. -- llywrch (talk) 07:29, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

You will enjoy this essay, which is linked from Wikipedia:Unsolicited redesigns. I remember one proponent of an inadequate redesign talking about how ordinary Internet users are "design-starved" ... um, no - David Gerard (talk) 09:19, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

David, did you happen to follow the sole link in my comment, & from which I drew a close paraphrase? -- llywrch (talk) 17:24, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Well ... I was correct you'd enjoy it! *cough* - David Gerard (talk) 16:26, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia:2015 main page redesign proposal/draft/Guy Macon --Guy Macon (talk) 09:52, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Guy, your suggestion (linked) has stripped the overcrowded main page design of all of its redundant and low-value nonsense. All it needs is a modern visual design, preferably based on mouse-hovering as long as accessibility is not an issue with that. Then we'd be taken seriously. --Tony1 (talk) 15:34, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Low-bandwidth access is for the mobile site. The regular site needs to be as full-featured as possible in a modern web setting, and so this is the wrong direction to be going in as a flagship. The point is possibly moot: the community long ago demonstrated an incapacity for making design choices, for one, and, colloquially, traffic is more and more being led away from the (terrible, terrible) main page these days. ResMar 15:48, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Priorities

"Engineering makes up the bulk of the WMF's expenditure; there is good reason for this, since surveys again and again show that stakeholders believe this should be at the core of the Foundation's purpose."

Well, here's my view on the subject. In a word, Wikimedia's biggest issues are social, and these can't be solved with technical solutions. --NaBUru38 (talk) 01:20, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

Recent research: Drug articles accurate and largely complete; women "slightly overrepresented"; talking like an admin (6,690 bytes · 💬)

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• Thanks for the coverage of this research. The gender research is most useful, although the centrality and gendered language results were already known, if I remember correctly. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:15, 29 May 2015 (UTC).
  
• With regard to coverage bias: I would have to wonder if it's not more likely that the sources used as comparisons underrepresent women, than that Wikipedia overrepresents them. With regard to language bias, historically notable females have had some family-related reason to become notable, be it family connections, early widowhood, or simply the identities of the men they married. I'm less concerned, then, with language bias on articles for women who were born 50+ years ago; it'd be interesting to see if the detected language bias still exists for newer biographies. Powers ^T 23:39, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
• Found this research article on popular pages' content quality: Wasted effort and missed opportunities. Is there a WikiProject or TaskForce addressing improvements of the most popular pages based on the Top 25 Report or other similar rating? — Preceding unsigned comment added by JayaJune (talk • contribs) 17:58, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

@JayaJune: That paper was already covered in last month's issue, see also the discussion on the talk page (including one of the researchers). See here on how to alert us about new papers that should be covered. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 07:05, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

• I'm skeptical about the conclusion that women are "slightly overrepresented" How do we know if they are not instead underrepresented in these databases? One of these databases is crowdsourced, which means it would certainly be subject to the same systemic biases as Wikipedia, and the other is a database generated from a book from a single author with a history of dubious scholarship. Gamaliel (talk) 19:26, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

@Gamaliel: I don't know of a reason why "crowdsourced" (btw: [1]) databases should be inherently more biased than those compiled by professionals, but of course you are asking a very important question about the authors' choice of gold standard. Here is what they wrote about it:

It is important to understand that a biased reference dataset will obviously impact our results. If, for example, our reference dataset is already biased towards men (i.e., it covers only extremely famous women but also less famous men) than the proportion of women who are represented on Wikipedia would probably be higher than the proportion of men. To address this issue we analyze the coverage using several independent reference datasets (Jaccard coefficient between the three datasets ranges from 0.0 to 0.12 for different language editions), assuming that each of them will have a different bias and seeking patterns that exist across all three datasets.

While I don't expect this paper will be the last word on gender-related content bias of Wikipedia, it's a lot more solid than many other claims that have been made about the topic, especially in the media. It is also consistent with Magnus Manske's recent blog post who compared Wikidata with VIAF and ODNB (finding both more "sexist" than Wikidata) and concluded that

"Strong gender bias towards men exists in the number of biographical items on Wikipedia and Wikidata, however, this bias appears to be to a large degree due to historical and/or cultural bias, rather than generated by Wikimedians. Since our projects are not primary sources, we are restricted to material gathered by others, and so reflect their consistent bias."

On the other hand, the 2011 "WP:Clubhouse" paper found evidence that "female" films are less well covered on WP than "male" films, and a 2011 paper by Joseph Reagle and Lauren Rhue concluded that "Wikipedia provides better coverage and longer articles, and that it typically has more articles on women than Britannica in absolute terms, but we also find that Wikipedia articles on women are more likely to be missing than are articles on men relative to Britannica".

Also, Max was too modest to mention his ongoing WIGI (Wikipedia Gender Index) project in his review. While - AIUI - it won't examine coverage bias directly, it will surely yield a lot of data that should make it much easier for others to look at possible evidence for such bias.

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 07:05, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

• Piotrus, about the paper saying that user talk page communication is associated with high-quality contributions: Does that analysis still hold true if you exclude current and former FAC coordinators from the dataset? Or is it only true when you include people whose "job" it is to edit FACs are included? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:17, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
  • @WhatamIdoing: I don't believe the article differentiates between coordinators and regular editors. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:57, 1 June 2015 (UTC)
    • I think it might get different (less significant, maybe still positive) results if the coordinators were excluded. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:29, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

Traffic report: Summer, summer, summertime (3,078 bytes · 💬)

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What is a Future class article? I've never seen one before. Hawkeye7 (talk) 23:52, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

Well, according to Wikipedia:WikiProject Professional wrestling/Assessment, it's an article that deals with "a topic about which details are subject to change often." AmericanLemming (talk) 00:44, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

• I've never seen it either (And I co-write this report!). Definitely a niche thing.--Milowent • ^hasspoken 01:37, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

I have seen it before. It's a rare class and not every project adopts it (just like A-class). But clearly the class needs to be re-assessed now that the event happened already. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 07:07, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

This is not a place I expected to run into a Game of Thrones spoiler. sigh —Naddy (talk) 12:16, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

The episode is two weeks old, dude. At some point, you can't call them spoilers anymore. Serendi^podous 12:18, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Not everyone can watch it on first release. Personally, I won't be able to see it until it's available for streaming or released on DVD (and the technical capability for streaming is a new thing for me); although I had already been spoiled on this by a different site. Two weeks isn't really a reasonable spoiler-expiry period for all readers. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 16:38, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

Which is the point. That episode is controversial, and so weas reported on other sites and in the news. And led to a spike in Wikipedia views. If that happens, I will record it; if it doesn't, I won't. Wikipedia doesn't do spoiler warnings and I don't intend to either. Frankly, if you come to this article expecting not to read about Game of Thrones, you haven't come to this article before. Serendi^podous 17:02, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

Mmmm... Seems like Signpost isnt automatically going into my talk page. Lightspeed2012 23:43, 5 June 2015 (UTC)