Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-12-25/Recent research

Multilingual contributors

The fact that Esperanto has a large number of multilingual contributors is not surprising. It's no one's native language (so every Esperanto speaker is fluent in something else), and it's usually the third, fourth, or fifth (or more) language. Jut updating articles about Esperanto can take you to many wikis.

I'd like to know whether these contributions were text, or if adding the same set of images to many Wikipedias counted the same as being able to write a sentence. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:53, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

Agreed. I occasionally contribute to other languages' Wikipedias, but almost always either to add images or to perform housekeeping or vandal-catching, and pretty much never without help either from other users or from Google Translate. Nyttend (talk) 12:54, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

Well, George Soros is a native speaker! --NaBUru38 (talk) 14:37, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

LanguageTool

I'd like to hear anything people have to say about open-source grammar checkers. The one mentioned here, LanguageTool, isn't likely to be useful. (When I asked it to check World War II, it told me: "The noun 'all' seems to be countable, so consider using: alls.") - Dank (push to talk) 19:51, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

LanguageTool looks like something interesting to play with, although you need to review your changes carefully before saving to ensure you're not changing text inside quotes. If you want to add it to your Tools menu, you can add this to your Custom JavaScript file:

// Add LanguageTool launcher in the toolbox on left
addOnloadHook(function () {
 addPortletLink(
  "p-tb",
  "http://community.languagetool.org/wikiCheck/index?url=" + wgPageName,
  "LanguageTool"
)});

GoingBatty (talk) 17:10, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

LanguageTools is a waste of time, as you'll see by running it on just about any article; try World War II. Anything that's trying to be a grammar checker ought to at least check the words it recommends ("alls") against a dictionary. But it's true that there are now serviceable open-source parsers that label parts of speech, and these ought to help us crowdsource a grammar checker. - Dank (push to talk) 18:06, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

MediaWiki Vector skin - action menu

Thank you for the user script! I think the LanguageTool WikiCheck looks very promising. I would really like to see it mark long complicated sentences that should be split to be easier to understand / more readable. For general grammar/typo checks, browser tools are OK.

Another tool, a bit similar, is "wikilint" or "autoreviewer" by user:Tim.landscheidt. I use it on German Wikipedia, but it also works on english WP. See wikilint about World War II and Zweiter Weltkrieg. How can I add this to the "dropdown action menu" by user script, any ideas? --Atlasowa (talk) 17:58, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

EC @ Dank, I suspect that any spellchecker applied to the English language Wikipedia would struggle somewhat with the way our spelling is consistent at the article level rather than the project level - so loads of typos will be of the kind "if Wikipedia's spelling follows American English conventions then all these are wrong, if it is supposed to follow English conventions then these are wrong". Another problem with such tools is that our articles contain a lot of names, including song names, some articles about popstars and their work are festooned with them. But the potential for this sort of thing is great, maybe we should offer some sort of a prize for a tool that finds as yet undiscovered errors on the site. But to be useful I would add the conditions that the errors must have persisted for a month undiscovered, and the level of false positives needs to be no more than fifty percent, otherwise there are better ways of improving the pedia. ϢereSpielChequers 18:40, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

The linked abstract states "If you want less errors in your Wikipedia: ..." If they cannot get their grammar right in their intro then LanguageTool is a long way from being a serious analytical or proofreading tool. I also agree with ϢereSpielChequers in that the inevitable conflict between American and British English usage is not addressed. Apart from conflict between Chicago and Folwer's, other distinctive forms such as Hiberno-English and Indian English will tend to be marginalised (NZ English spelling) and inappropriately "corrected" if LanguageTool were to be taken seriously. FanN | talk | 04:51, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

I can forgive them a few mistakes in their blurb, but to extrapolate 1.1 million errors from a sample where they concede that 171 of 200 were false positives is a bit tabloidy. 171 false positives out of a sample of 200 probable errors is too small to come up with a percentage or anything that one could meaningfully extrapolate like that. It would be wrong to say that it had a 85.5% false positive rate on the strength of such a small sample. But one can confidently say that their own figures indicate a very high proportion of false positives. looking at what their tool makes of Leonard Cohen gives an idea why. However if they can refine their tool to avoid song titles and so forth it might have potential. ϢereSpielChequers 08:44, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Integrity of Wikipedia and Wikipedia research

"... it is hard to see any benefit of this study ..." or of summarising it or otherwise reporting on it. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 08:16, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

re: Evaluation of gastroenterology and hepatology articles on Wikipedia

And indeed all the reasons mentioned there are why Wikipedia articles, imperfect as they are, are still much much better than most peer reviewed literature: they are accessible. Unlike the said study, which, paywalled or not, will not be read by not only most students, but even by most instructors and practitioners. Rather than wasting time trying to warn the students way from Wikipedia, the study should do the more constructive thing, which is to encourage the instructors and students to improve Wikipedia articles, as some others, commendable initiatives have done. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 12:13, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

This issue was the genesis of the Association of Psychological Science's Wikipedia Initiative. Both students and the lay public are going to read Wikipedia for medical guidance regardless of warnings from the professional community. To that end, bringing the professionals (or at least their students) to Wikipedia makes more sense. Chris Troutman (talk) 18:16, 2 January 2014 (UTC)