Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2010-04-26

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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2010-04-26. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

From the team: Introducing Signpost Sidebars (547 bytes · 💬)

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I like the sidebar, especially the Technology one. Over time, I bet you'll be able to find cool uses for them in each article type. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 03:33, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

I really enjoyed this new layout. Thanks. --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 10:27, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

In the news: Making sausage, Jimmy Wales on TV, and more! (3,389 bytes · 💬)

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The court case articles illustrates how dumb journalist and lawyers/judges can be, plenty of examples in that one article but they left a real gem of ignorance for right at the end referring wikipedia.com instead of .org (a reflection on a lot of things, one ignorance and secondly an underlying assumption of wikipedia as a business rather than an organisation perhaps...). Mathmo ^Talk 13:05, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

I think it's likely a general ignorance about the internet as a whole (do they know the difference between .org, .biz, .com, .gov) that extends to irresponsible use of Wikipedia. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs^(talk) 13:50, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Actually, I'd much rather WP: does NOT become a source of crucial evidence used to make such life-changing decisions, as it was here (usually it's used for background info). Remember the Taner Akçam case back 2007? My countries official clearly needs to better learn to sue their sources. Circéus (talk) 14:32, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

If you look more closely at the Taner Akçam case, you'll note that the nonsense that was used to detain him was an old revision from about 3 months before he was detained. While there is a strong case for not using Wikipedia in court decisions for the obvious reason that it's (non-pre-moderated) user-generated content, this particular case isn't nearly as strong. You have (infamously paranoid) airport security being given an old revision that claims he's a terrorist, which was likely fed to them by some Turkish critics of his work (some of which examines the contested Armenian Genocide). A source from our article on Akçam, this CBC piece, says of Akçam that in "the University of Minnesota article he wrote in March after the event, he suggested that outside groups critical of his research might have sent the entry to border officials in anticipation of his arrival." {{Nihiltres|talk|edits|⚡}} 15:56, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Even high school and college students are smart enough to use the sources that Wikipedia cites - that way they have the same information and they're not directly citing Wikipedia. It drives me a little crazy when I see people ignore the sources from which we get our information. ALI ^{nom nom} 16:31, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

How cute: Larry Sanger tries to plagiar^W imitate Platon. In his dialogue Phaedrus, Platon wrote about an Egyptian king called Thamus, who claims that writing is a remedy for reminding, not remembering. And it gives the appearance but not the reality of wisdom. --h-stt !? 14:17, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Museums conference: Wikimedians meet with museum leaders (2,558 bytes · 💬)

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Hats off to everyone who attended; what a great idea. —Kevin Myers 14:06, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

The day focused on Wikipedia was energetic and thrilling; thanks to Liam and everyone who made it happen. I'm sorry I couldn't stay past the day of my talk. The attendees that day were self-selected to be interested in Wikipedia and making a collaboration possible, but the feedback I've heard from the rest of the event has been similarly interesting. We've certainly crossed a hump in public perception within the cultural and education sectors, now we need to find ways to turn that into broader participation. –SJ+ 17:56, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

• Nice to read that. --Saki ^talk 08:08, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
• There's an ongoing discussion about The Wikipedia Lists of 100 Project related to museums. The project started as a result of the Wikimedia@MW2010 workshop, see

• {{MuseumsWiki}}
• {{MuseumsWiki}}

--ThT (talk) 06:30, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

"Wyatt discovered that the prohibition against adding "external links" was being interpreted by museums as a prohibition against adding references in addition to promotional links." Interesting. This could probably be used to make a good case for amending guidelines on external linking and self-promotion (probably the wording rather than the guidelines themselves) if it means this misunderstanding can be cleared up. I hope someone more familiar with policy can have a look and see what might be behind this. — Trilobite 17:41, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

• This is already well covered at WP:GLAM (and exhaustively so in the talk archive), which ought to be the first port of call for museum people interested in editing, but seems to get very little traffic at present. Johnbod (talk) 16:46, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

News and notes: Wikimedia announcements, Wikipedia advertising, and more! (3,101 bytes · 💬)

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• I will admit, with much embarrassment, that my heart stopped for a second when I saw the headline "Wikipedia advertising (and more!)" ALI ^{nom nom} 16:33, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
• I must admit, mine did as well. Can someone clarify the purpose of these? --Ouro (blah blah) 17:08, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

• As a Signposter (that sounded way to much like composter), we create article titles to grab reader's attention and get them to read the story. In newspapers around the globe, the same hype system works quite well.--mono^{National Pretzel Day} 04:19, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

• My error. I meant - why were the advertisements ordered in the first place. What is their purpose? Sorry for the mix-up! --Ouro (blah blah) 06:35, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

• Maybe the Foundation has more money than they know what to do with? Naw, that couldn't be it. -- llywrch (talk) 05:13, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

• Are the subway and the production company doing this gratis, or does Wikimedia Deutschland have money to burn? ~ Ningauble (talk) 18:50, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
• Unless the advertisements are geared toward attracting donations or new contributors, I really don't see the point. Don't we already get like 80 bazillion hits per minute? --Cryptic C62 · Talk 18:14, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
• I like the idea of Wikipedia advertising, but can't imagine that "we" would pay for it. Maybe this is a way for the transit system to attract readers to its other ads: having something identifiable, interesting, and essentially free might be worth it to them. Smallbones (talk) 01:17, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

• I think they're free (if I understand Google's translation correctly). 160.39.221.164 (talk) 06:44, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

It should be noted that there was apparently only a test run of the Wikipedia subway "ads", and the project hasn't progressed further since April, according to this recent posting on the mailing list of the German chapter. Regards, HaeB (talk) 20:55, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

Technology report: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News (368 bytes · 💬)

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• There was in fact a software upgrade in October 2009 as well and possibly in September too. -- Bryan (talk|commons) 16:34, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

WikiProject report: WikiProject Gastropods (6,665 bytes · 💬)

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Questions answered by --Snek01 (talk) 15:14, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Question: "The project is home to one A-class article (Chittenango ovate amber snail) and six good articles ranging from Byne's disease to love darts. Were you involved with any of these articles and which article are you most proud of being involved with? Overall, what have been some of the project's greatest achievements?"

• That is not important if I am proud of these articles or not. I am not proud of them. Writing them was very easy. But I am proud of wikipedians like User:Antarctic-adventurer and User:Anna Frodesiak, that are writing valuable articles although they are not biologists. Featured articles are viewed about 13× times more often than DYK hook gastropod-related articles. But writing DYK hook articles is even much more easier (and more effective) than writing featured article and more articles provide more general point of view. It would be fine if they could reach featured article status, but it will not improve their quality. Standards for featured gastropod-related articles are much higher than for example for birds, for example no bird-related featured articles contains anatomy of the animal although detailed anatomy section is demanded for gastropods. Writing featured articles or trying to get articles to featured articles status is not my priority. I can easily tag my article with A-class article status without peer review as I did with Chittenango ovate amber snail and nobody cares.

Question: "There are no unassessed articles within your project. How did you accomplish this and do you have any advice to other projects with large backlogs of unassessed articles?"

• That did User:Invertzoo and User:Daniel Cavallari. This as an example of bad organizing of the project, such wasting of human power is very non-effective. That work could be done with a Bot. My advice is: tag unassessed articles by a bot as stub article with a low priority.

Question: "The articles on snails, pearls, and Gastropoda each receive over 2,000 views daily, however two of the three articles are only at C-class status. What are some of the biggest challenges to improving popular articles like these?"

• C-status for popular gastropod related articles is absolutely enough. Gastropods are out of scope of public, of scientists and out of scope of the whole human society. All informations about gastropods are usually very unbalanced and thus the project should belong to Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias.

Question: "What can the average editor contribute to gastropod articles?"

• This is the most important question.
• Go to the library or send an email to the right person and verify copyright status of malacological works published in the USA in 1923-1977. Wikipedia:WikiProject Gastropods/Texts#1923 - 1977 from USA without a copyright notice and later section. There are only two articles (written by me last week) that uses public domain text from the USA from that era. I believe that no other articles on the whole Wikipedia(!) uses public domain texts from USA from that time athough over 95% of books are PUBLIC DOMAIN. This is very interesting in comparison with about 5000 commons:Template:PD-US-no notice images about 5000 commons:Template:PD-US-not renewed images on commons. "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" should also support using free texts. Maybe it is a phrase for other projects, but for gastropods using such texts is the only way how to reach the full scope. Do you live in a city with English library or are you diplomatic enough? So do this task and you will be much more useful for the project than you think. (Links: malacologist, Category:American malacologists.)
  • Example: Go to the library and (carefully) check if there is copyright notice it this book: Pilsbry H. A. (1948). Land Mollusca of North America north of Mexico vol. II part 2. Acad. Nat. Sci. Philadelphia. pp. 521-1113. [1]. - Do this for every valuable book and let us to know on the project page. Every result (negative or positive) is useful. Thank you.

• Then you can add these public domain or Creative Commons texts and images from these sources. Me or wikiproject members will help you how to start. 20% of non-stub gastropod related articles contains incorporated some free text. This means that every fifth gastropod related article has text copied from some book or journal. This is the (maybe) highest amount of using such texts on wikipedia. But it is necessary, because nobody of us and of you can write it better than experts who wrote those books. I believe that ammount should get even higher in the future.
• I am (probably) the most active member of the wikiproject gastropods but I can contibute only at intermediate level of English and I there are (nearly) no English malacological books in libraries in the country where I live. So if I can write gastropod articles, than EVERYBODY OF YOU can write gastropod related articles also. The only need is your motivation. Your motivation can range from "I like gastropods" or "I want to be useful to Wikipedia" (there is not enough project members) to your intention, that you want to learn something new. I can guarantee for you, that you will certainly learn new things.
• You can translate from original German, French and Japan huge number of public domain sources. But I am not sure if there is enough useful sources on other wikipedias.
• There appeared no gastropod related featured image on the Main page since 2008... - and many more tasks...

Question: "Anything else you'd like to add?"

• When evaluating the project, there is necessary to evaluate also its effectivity. For example the WikiProject Gastropods is approximatelly (now) as big as for example WikiProject Mammals and WikiProject Birds altogether in its number of articles, but even bigger in its scope = in number of species, but number of its members is 9× (for all 20 listed Wikiproject gastropods members) or 17× (for about by guess 10 active members) lower for Wikiproject gastropods. So I think, that WikiProject Gastropods belongs to the most effective Wikiprojects. This is because effectivity has the highest priority in the project.

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