This is an archive of past discussions with User:Andrew Gray. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Latest comment: 13 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion
Hi Andrew,
I'll be coming along on the Tuesday at least and possibly the Wednesday too - though I may have to use the opportunity to visit the rest of the library (if it's too late to organise a reader's pass I can nip over the road to UCL). The period/region is not remotely my specialism so I have no idea about what should be uploaded. I'm just keen to see how the edit-a-thon works and how the archaeologists/academics get on with Wikipedia. Cheers, PatHadley (talk) 10:24, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
The "one link" rule/enforcement has gotten out of hand, I'm trying to get something closer to rationality. You seem to be one of the people with a "middle ground" view, and I'd appreciate any refinements to the proposal. If the proposed replacement at the top of the section is something you'd support, I'd appreciate it if you could leave a note. Thanks Boundlessly (talk) 21:49, 23 October 2012 (UTC)
The Signpost: 22 October 2012
Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Special report: Examining adminship from the German perspective Unlike the long-running disputes that have characterised attempts to reform the RfA process on the English Wikipedia, the German Wikipedia's tradition of making decisions not by consensus but knife-edged 50% + 1 votes has led to a fundamentally different outcome. In 2009, the project managed to largely settle the RfA mode issue in 2009 indirectly.
Arbitration report: Malleus Fatuorum accused of circumventing topic ban; motion to change "net four votes" rule One clarification request concerns the civility enforcement case– specifically, Malleus Fatuorum's perceived circumvention of his topic ban. It has resulted in thousands of bytes spent in vitriolic discussions, multiple blocks, and "no confidence" motions against the Arbitration Committee and one arbitrator, among other ramifications.
Technology report: Wikivoyage migration: technical strategy announced Planning for Wikivoyage's migration into the WMF fold built up steam this week following a statement by WMF Deputy Director Erik Möller about what the technical side of the migration will involve. Wikivoyage, which split from sister site Wikitravel in 2006, is hoping to migrate its own not-inconsiderable user base to Wikimedia, as well as much of its content, presenting novel challenges for Wikimedia developers
News and notes: Wikimedians get serious about women in science It is well known that women are underrepresented in the sciences, and that high-achieving female scientists have often been excluded from authorship lists and passed over for awards and honours solely on the basis of gender. Also significant has been the underplaying in the academic literature, news reporting, and online, of women's current and historical contributions to science.
WikiProject report: Where in the world is Wikipedia? The WikiProject Report normally brings tidings from Wikipedia's most active, inventive, and unique WikiProjects. This week, we're trying something new by focusing on Wikipedia's dark side: the various regional and national WikiProjects that are dead or dying. How can some tiny municipalities and exclaves generate highly active, cross-language, multimedia platforms be successful while the projects representing many sovereign countries and entire continents wallow in obscurity? Today, we'll search for answers among geographic projects large and small, highly active and barely functioning, enthusiastic about the future and mired in past conflicts.
Featured content: Is RfA Kafkaesque? Eleven articles, including one on Franz Kafka, three lists, one image, and one portal were promoted to 'featured' status this week.
Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that you've added some links pointing to disambiguation pages. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ• Join us at the DPL WikiProject.
Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
News and notes: First chickens come home to roost for FDC funding applicants; WMF board discusses governance issues and scope of programs The first round of the Wikimedia Foundation's new financial arrangements has proceeded as planned, with the publication of scores and feedback by Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) staff on applications for funding by 11 entities—10 chapters, independent membership organisations supporting the WMF's mission in different countries, and the foundation itself. The results are preliminary assessments that will soon be put to the FDC's seven voting members and two non-voting board representatives. The FDC in turn will send its recommendations to the board of trustees on 15 November, which will announce its decision by 15 December. Funding applications have been on-wiki since 1 October, and the talk pages of applications were open for community comment and discussion from 2 to 22 October, though apart from queries by FDC staff, there was little activity.
WikiProject report: In recognition of... WikiProject Military History This week, we're checking out ways to motivate editors and recognize valuable contributions by focusing on the awards and rewards of WikiProject Military History. Anyone unfamiliar with WikiProject Military History is encouraged to start at the report's first article about the project and make your way forward. While many WikiProjects provide a barnstar that can be awarded to helpful contributors, WikiProject Military History has gone a step further by creating a variety of awards with different criteria ranging from the all-purpose WikiChevrons to rewards for participating in drives and improving special topics to medals for improving articles up to A-class status to the coveted "Military Historian of the Year" award.
Technology report: Improved video support imminent and Wikidata.org live The TimedMediaHandler extension (TMH), which brings dramatic improvements to MediaWiki's video handling capabilities, will go live to the English Wikipedia this week following a long and turbulent development, WMF Director of Platform Engineering Rob Lanphier announced on Monday ... Wikidata.org, a new repository designed to host interwiki links, launched this week and will begin accepting links shortly. The site, which is one half of the forthcoming Wikidata trial (the other half being the Wikidata client, which will be deployed to the Hungarian Wikipedia shortly) will also act as a testing area for phase 2 of Wikidata (centralised data storage). The longer term plan is for Wikidata.org to become a "Wikimedia Commons for data" as phases 2 and 3 (dynamic lists) are developed, project managers say.
Featured content: On the road again Thirteen articles, ten lists, nine images, one topic, and one portal were promoted to featured after peer reviews.
Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
The article that I started at your Dunhuang event last week is being picked over at its DYK nomination. As it may go to the front page soon, this would be a good time for others to chip in. Perhaps you might ask Susan to take a look... Andrew Davidson (talk) 13:21, 31 October 2012 (UTC)
Latest comment: 13 years ago3 comments1 person in discussion
Hi Andrew,
I wanted to check with you about the geonotices for Boston that were just posted. Thanks for your help but I don't see either of them on my watchlist and another local editor I asked didn't see them either. Is there something wrong or do I just need to wait a bit for them to take effect? Thanks, GabrielF (talk) 05:31, 3 November 2012 (UTC)
I figured out the problem - In the geonotice.js file under the end time for many of the events there is a . being used to separate hours and minutes rather than a colon. I replaced these with a: in my vector.js file and the notices showed up. )(The UK meetings are formatted correctly, which is why you were seeing the UK notice) GabrielF (talk) 17:26, 3 November 2012 (UTC)
Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Can you please change the geonotice from "Join Wikipedians from your area at the Boston Wikipedia Loves Libraries event on November 10 or the Cambridge Wikipedia Loves Libraries event on November 17th!" to "Join Wikipedians from your area at the Boston Wikipedia Loves Libraries event on November 10 and/or the Cambridge Wikipedia Loves Libraries event on November 17th!". We'd love to have people who can, come to both. Sven ManguardWha?17:37, 4 November 2012 (UTC)
Training Session
Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Op-ed: 2012 WikiCup comes to an end J Milburn is a British editor who has been on the site since 2006. He is one of two judges of the WikiCup. Here, he uses an op-ed to explain the way the WikiCup works and to review this year's competition, which ended recently.
News and notes: Wikimedian photographic talent on display in national submissions to Wiki Loves Monuments The results of most of the national heats for Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) have been published on Commons. A maximum of 10 images have been submitted by all but eight of the 34 participating countries, and the international jury for what is the largest competition of its type in the world is set to announce the global winner in four weeks' time.
In the media: Was climate change a factor in Hurricane Sandy? Hurricane Sandy was the largest Atlantic hurricane on record and has caused millions of dollars in damage. Naturally, Wikipedia covered it. But was Wikipedia's coverage unbiased?
Featured content: Jack-O'-Lanterns and Toads This week, the Signpost interviewed two editors. The first, PumpkinSky, collaborated with Gerda Arendt in writing the recently featured article on Franz Kafka and won second prize in the Core contest last August. The second, Cwmhiraeth, collaborated with Thompsma in promoting the article Frog, which was featured last week. We asked them about the special challenges faced while writing Core content and things to watch out for.
Technology report: Hue, Sqoop, Oozie, Zookeeper, Hive, Pig and Kafka The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for October 2012 was published this week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month. TimedMediaHandler also went live.
WikiProject report: Listening to WikiProject Songs This week, The Signpost sings along with WikiProject Songs which focuses on articles about songs of every generation and genre. The project initially began as a rough outline in October 2002 and was reimagined in March 2004 using its parent WikiProject Albums as a template.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Development
Tpt wrote an awesome SpecialPage (Special:EntitiesWithoutLabel) that lists all items without a label in a given language (merged; will be in next deployment)
Tpt changed the page to create new items to allow you to enter links as well
Created patch for review for next deployment on wikidata.org
Anyway. You're getting this note because you've participated in discussion and/or asked for updates to either the Article Feedback Tool or Page Curation. This isn't about either of those things, I'm afraid ;p. We've recently started working on yet another project: Echo, a notifications system to augment the watchlist. There's not much information at the moment, because we're still working out the scope and the concepts, but if you're interested in further updates you can sign up here.
In addition, we'll be holding an office hours session at 21:00 UTC on Wednesday, 14 November in #wikimedia-office - hope to see you all there:). I appreciate it's an annoying time for non-Europeans: if you're interested in chatting about the project but can't make it, give me a shout and I can set up another session if there's enough interest in one particular timezone or a skype call if there isn't. Thanks! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 10:45, 10 November 2012 (UTC)
Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hey there. Can you please change the Geonotice from the Boston and Cambridge item to the Cambridge only item, as we discussed last week? The Boston event was yesterday. Thanks! Sven ManguardWha?18:07, 11 November 2012 (UTC)
Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
News and notes: Court ruling complicates the paid-editing debate Last week, media outlets reported a ruling by a German court on the problem of businesses using Wikipedia for marketing purposes. The issue goes beyond the direct management of marketing-related edits by Wikipedians; it involves cross-monitoring and interacting among market competitors themselves on Wikipedia. A company that sells dietary supplements made from frankincense had taken a competitor to court. The recently published judgment by the Higher Regional Court of Munich, in dealing with the German Wikipedia article on frankincense products, was handed down in May and is based on European competition law.
Featured content: The table has turned Thirteen articles, six lists, and five images were promoted to 'featured' status last week.
Technology report: MediaWiki 1.20 and the prospects for getting 1.21 code reviewed promptly In late September, the Technology report published its findings about (particularly median) code review times. To the 23,900 changesets analysed the first time (the data for which has been updated), the Signpost added data from the 9,000 or so changesets contributed between September 17 and November 9 to a total of 93,000 reviews across 45,000 patchsets. Bots and self-reviews were also discarded, but reviews made by a different user in the form of a superseding patch were retained. Finally, users were categorised by hand according to whether they would be best regarded as staff or volunteers. The new analyses were consistent with the predictions of the previous analysis.
WikiProject report: Land of parrots, palm trees, and the Holy Cross: WikiProject Brazil As promised, we're expanding our horizons by featuring projects that cover underrepresented areas of the globe. This week, we headed to WikiProject Brazil which keeps track of articles about the world's largest Portuguese-speaking country. The project has shown spurts of activity and continues to serve as a hub for discussions, despite the project's collaborations, peer reviews, and outreach activities being largely inactive.
Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
News and notes: FDC's financial muscle kicks in The WMF's Funds Dissemination Committee has published its recommendations for the inaugural round 1 of funding. Requests totalled US$10.4M, nearly all of the FDC's budget for both first and second rounds. The seven-member committee of community volunteers appointed in September advises the WMF board on the distribution of grant funds among applying Wikimedia organizations. The committee, which has a separate operating budget of $276k for salaries and expenses, considered 12 applications for funds, from 11 chapters and from the WMF itself for its non-core activities. The decision-making process included community and FDC staff input after October 1, the closing date for submissions. Taken together, the volunteers decided to endorse an average of 81% of the funding sought—a total of $8.43M, which went to 11 of the 12 applicants. This leaves $2.71M to be distributed in round 2, for which applications are due in little more than three months' time.
WikiProject report: No teenagers, mutants, or ninjas: WikiProject Turtles This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Turtles. The young project started in January 2011 and has accumulated 5 Featured Articles, 3 Featured Lists, and 6 Featured Pictures. The project maintains a combined to-do list and hot articles meter, a popular pages ranking, and a collection of resources for turtle articles. We interviewed Faendalimas and NYMFan69-86.
Technology report: Structural reorganisation "not a done deal" WMF Executive Director Sue Gardner was forced to clarify this week that proposed structural changes to the Foundation's Engineering and Product Development Department were not a "done deal" and that it was "important that you [particularly affected staff] realise that ... your input is wanted". The reorganisation, announced on November 5 and planned for the middle of next year, will see its two components split off into their own departments.
Featured content: Wikipedia hit by the Streisand effect Seven featured articles, four featured lists and ten featured pictures – including the photograph that spawned the Streisand effect – were promoted this week.
Discussion report: GOOG, MSFT, WMT: the ticker symbol placement question Current discussions on the English Wikipedia include the question of ticker symbol placement and the notability of various types of creative performer.
Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello Sir.
Thank you for putting the question concerning Frederic Bourdin on the right place and sorry for the mistake. But as you can see someone simply erased it; and that's what the problem is; No one is helping me with this. Where this should be a simple editing problem it became a full mess because a couple of editors Bbb23 and Dennis Brown are restricting access to this article.
I don't understand why they don't let people edit this article with fully reliable sources sur as: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmmakersonfilm/9459425/The-Imposter-interview-with-the-Chameleon.html
and http://www.sptimes.ru/index_bp.php?action_id=2&story_id=36586§ion=4
concerning the fact that Bourdin's grandfather wanted her daughter(Bourdin's mother) to abort because of Bourdin's father was Algerian.
It's fact and part of every other Wikipedia version of Bourdin. But everyone that tried to change it has been blocked, threatened and else.
And of course it's very unfair and ludicrous.
Can you help me with this, if I don't find honest Admin who will look at the facts, then I will be also blocked because I tried contribute Wikipedia.
Thank you again. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Idontfeelthesame (talk • contribs) 18:38, 21 November 2012 (UTC)
Disambiguation link notification for November 22
Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that you've added some links pointing to disambiguation pages. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ• Join us at the DPL WikiProject.
Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi you may have noticed I expanded the 15th (Imperial Service) Cavalry Brigade article, after a copy edit by the guild I aim to put it up for a GA Review. Many thanks for pointing out the brigade history, if you find any more drop me a line as I would always be interested. Once again thank you.Jim Sweeney (talk) 15:35, 25 November 2012 (UTC)
Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
News and notes: Toolserver finance remains uncertain On November 24, a general assembly of Wikimedia Germany (WMDE) voted on the fate of the Wikimedia Toolserver, a central external piece of technical infrastructure supporting the editing communities with volunteer-developed scripts and webpages of various kinds that are assisting in performing mostly menial tasks.
Recent research: Movie success predictions, readability, credentials and authority, geographical comparisons An open-access preprint presents the results from a study attempting to predict early box office revenues from Wikipedia traffic and activity data. The authors – a team of computational social scientists from Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Aalto University and the Central European University – submit that behavioral patterns on Wikipedia can be used for accurate forecasting, matching and in some cases outperforming the use of social media data for predictive modeling. The results, based on a corpus of 312 English Wikipedia articles on movies released in 2010, indicate that the joint editing activity and traffic measures on Wikipedia are strong predictors of box office revenue for highly successful movies.
Technology report: Wikidata reaches 100,000 entries Wikidata, the new "Wikimedia Commons for data" and the first new Wikimedia project since 2006, reached 100,000 entries this week. The project aims to be a single, human- and machine-readable database for common data, spanning across all Wikipedia projects, which will "lead to a higher consistency and quality within Wikipedia articles, as well as increased availability of information in the smaller language editions" while lowering the burden on Wikipedia's volunteer editors—whose numbers have stalled overall, and continue to dwindle on the English Wikipedia.
WikiProject report: Directing Discussion: WikiProject Deletion Sorting This week, we uncovered WikiProject Deletion Sorting, Wikipedia's most active project by number of edits to all the project's pages. This special project seeks to increase participation in Articles for Deletion nominations by categorizing the AfD discussions by various topic areas that may draw the attention of editors. The project was started in August 2005 with manual processes that are continued today by a bevy of bots, categories, and transclusions. The project took inspiration from WikiProject Stub Sorting and some historical discussions on deletion reform. As the sheer number of AfDs continues to grow, the project is seeking better tools to manage the deletion sorting process and attract editors to comment on these deletion discussions.
Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
News and notes: Wiki Loves Monuments announces 2012 winner The global jury of Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM), the world’s largest photo contest, announced its results on 3 December.
Featured content: The play's the thing Three articles, two lists, and four images were promoted to 'featured' status this week.
Technology report: MediaWiki problems but good news for Toolserver stability Deployments of MediaWiki 1.21wmf5 cause widespread problems for users across wikis when HTML and CSS updates came temporarily out of sync. On the first wikis targeted for deployment, this was caused by the different cache invalidation rates for HTML (typically one month) and CSS (typically five minutes). The retrospective on the problem highlighted the fact that that the test wiki – the WMF's answer to a production environment that individual developers can no longer practically emulate themselves – actually demonstrated the exact problem that would later manifest itself on production wikis. It went unnoticed.
WikiProject report: The White Rose: WikiProject Yorkshire This week, we went searching for white roses in the lands of WikiProject Yorkshire. The project began in May 2007 as a way to improve articles about the historic English county of Yorkshire and its modern-day administrative divisions and cities. Since then, the project has accumulated 31 Featured Articles, 14 Featured Lists, 91 Good Articles, and a monstrous list of Did You Know entries. Despite all of the effort improving Yorkshire articles, the project has experienced waning participation in the last few years. The project still publishes a newsletter each month, monitors the popularity of and recent changes to its articles, maintains a portal, and collects resources for contributors to use.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Development
Deployed new code on wikidata.org with a lot of bug fixes and a new Special:EntitiesWithoutLabel (all changes here)
http://test2.wikipedia.org now uses Wikidata (click “edit links” at the bottom of the page), and we are working to enable the synchronization of changes to test2 and display links from the repository
Added wbsetqualifier API module
Added wbremovequalifiers API module
New JavaScript wb.Api now used for labels, descriptions, aliases and sitelinks
Improved Selenium tests and PHPUnit tests
Selenium tests now independent from ULS
Selenium tests for statements UI
Existing statements can be edited now
Filtering anons and Wikidata in RecentChanges on client now works correctly
Added extra checks on client RecentChange save point to avoid duplicate entries
Started an experimental branch with API methods for claims
Link to Commons Media displayed for Snak values of related data type
Improved styling of statements in JavaScript mode
Improvements in templating engine
Started working on adding Statements to existing section of Statements
Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello!
The well known chauvinist romanian wiki-troll User:Iaaasi returned (with a new croatian fake identity) He is now active alias user: Irji2012
He is often active in Hungarian-related aricles, he enjoy edit-warring deleting good sources and sentences from important articles, and he like to break the rules of wiki even 3 revert rule.
Can you arrange about this notorious wiki-troll?
Thank you!
Peter. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.0.49.97 (talk) 10:51, 8 December 2012 (UTC)
Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
News and notes: Wobbly start to ArbCom election, but turnout beats last year's At the time of writing, this year's election has just closed after a two-week voting period. The eight seats were contested by 21 candidates. Of these, 15 have not been arbitrators (Beeblebrox, Count Iblis, Guerillero, Jc37, Keilana, Ks0stm, Kww, NuclearWarfare, Pgallert, RegentsPark, Richwales, Salvio giuliano, Timotheus Canens, Worm That Turned, and YOLO Swag); four candidates are sitting arbitrators (David Fuchs, Elen of the Roads, Jclemens, and Newyorkbrad); and two have previously served on the committee (Carcharoth and Coren). Four Wikimedia stewards from outside the English Wikipedia stepped forward as election scrutineers: Pundit, from the Polish Wikipedia; Teles, from the Portuguese Wikipedia; Quentinv57, from the French Wikipedia; and Mardetanha, from the Persian Wikipedia. The scrutineers' task is to ensure that the election is free of multiple votes from the same person, to tally the results, and to announce them. The full results are expected to be released within the next few days and will be reported in next week's edition of the Signpost.
Featured content: Wikipedia goes to Hell Eight articles, four images, six lists, and one topic were promoted to 'featured' status on the English Wikipedia this week.
Technology report: The new Visual Editor gets a bit more visual The Visual Editor project – an attempt to create the first WMF-deployable WYSIWYG editor – will go live on its first Wikipedias imminently following nearly six months of testing on MediaWiki.org. A full explanatory blog post accompanied the news, explaining the project and its setup. Once a user has opted-in, the editor can handle basic formatting, headings and lists, while safely ignoring elements it is yet to understand, including references, categories, templates, tables and images. At the last count, approximately 2% of pages would break in some way if a user tried the Visual Editor on them; it is unclear whether any specific protection will be put in place beyond relying on editors to spot problems.
WikiProject report: WikiProject Human Rights In celebration of Human Rights Day, we checked out WikiProject Human Rights. Started in February 2006, the project has grown to include over 3,000 articles, including 12 Featured Articles, 3 Featured Lists, 66 Good Articles, a large collection of Did You Know entries, and a few mentions "in the news". The project monitors listings of popular pages and cleanup tags. We interviewed Khazar2, Cirt, and Boud.
http://test2.wikipedia.org now uses http://wikidata.org for getting language links and wikidata.org edits affecting the existing articles on test2 show up in RecentChanges (if they are not hidden)
Statements (think of “population: 2.000.000” and similar things) are taking shape in the interface. They are still pretty buggy though at this point.
It is now possible to link to images on Wikimedia Commons in a statement (think of “image: sundown_at_the_beach.png” for example)
No longer possible to create new items and set labels when database is set to read-only
Added more tests to the GeoCoordinate parser
Make use of EditEntity in removeclaims API
Removed many singletons to reduce global state
Made SpecialSetLabel work with non-item entities
Improved settings system
Improved options of ValueFormatters
Improved options of ValueParsers
Moved label+description uniqueness check out of transaction to avoid deadlocks and changed it to only be enforced for edits changing any violating values
Fixed serialization of SiteArray
~=[,,_,,]:3
Had to fix reporting of aliases in wbsearchentities again
Implemented integration of baserevids for statements UI API calls for editconflict detection for statements/claims/snaks
Universal Language Selector fallback fix for Selenium tests
Report URL to entity in wbsearchentites API module
Moved the demo system to a larger server
Fixed several bugs in Statements user interface, most notably, adding Statements to existing sections and layout fixes
Added wikibase API module on the client to provide information about the associated repo (e.g. url, script path, article path)
A bunch of messages for autocomments were fixed (they are automatically added as an edit summary for edits on items and co in Wikidata - for example: “Changed [en] description: Finnish rock band”)
Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Thanks very much for these images. Great job! When will the BNF adopt the "Public Domain" license as the BL do? Unfortunately, not for tomorrow! Mel22 (talk) 19:17, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
A barnstar for you!
Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
The Original Barnstar
At least one editor in the Wikipedia Education Program identified you specifically as being a helpful editor! Thanks for being so welcoming to a newbie! JMathewson (WMF) (talk) 20:32, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
The Signpost: 17 December 2012
Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
News and notes: Arbitrator election: stewards release the results Seven days after the close of voting, the results of the recent Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) elections have been announced by two of the four stewards overseeing the election, Mardetanha and Pundit. Of the 21 candidates, 13 managed to gain positive support-to-oppose ratios, and the top eight will be appointed to two-year terms on the committee by Jimbo Wales, exercising one of his traditional responsibilities.
WikiProject report: WikiProjekt Computerspiel: Covering Computer Games in Germany In the past year, we've tried to expand our horizons by looking at how WikiProjects work in other languages of Wikipedia. Following in the footsteps of our previously interviewed Czech and French projects, we visited the German Wikipedia to explore WikiProjekt Computerspiel (WikiProject Computer Games). The project dates back to November 2004 and has become the back-end of the Computer Games Portal, which covers all video games regardless of platform. Editors writing about computer games at the German Wikipedia deal with unique cultural and legal challenges, ranging from a lack of fair use precedents to the limited availability of games deemed harmful for youths to strong standards for the inclusion of material on the German Wikipedia.
Op-ed: Finding truth in Sandy Hook This week's big story on the English Wikipedia is obviously the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting (which, by the time you read this, may be renamed 2012 Connecticut school shooting). Quickly created and nominated for deletion not once but twice, and both times speedily kept, the article saw the expected flurry of edits (a look at the history suggests an average of at least one a minute over the first day and a half) and more than half a million page views on the first full day.
Featured content: Wikipedia's cute ass Four articles, three lists, and five images were promoted to 'featured' status on the English Wikipedia this week, including a picture of a three-week old donkey (also known as an 'ass').
Technology report: MediaWiki groups and why you might want to start snuggling newbie editors MediaWiki users (including Wikimedians) can now organise themselves into groups, receiving recognition and support-in-kind from the Wikimedia Foundation. The project, backed by new Wikimedia technical contributor coordinator Quim Gil, has seen five proposals lodged in its first week of operation. The idea of MediaWiki groups mimics that of Wikimedia User Groups.
Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Peace is a state of balance and understanding in yourself and between others, where respect is gained by the acceptance of differences, tolerance persists, conflicts are resolved through dialog, peoples rights are respected and their voices are heard, and everyone is at their highest point of serenity without social tension.
Latest comment: 13 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
News and notes: Debates on Meta sparking along—grants, new entities, and conflicts of interest As part of its new focus on core responsibilities, the Wikimedia Foundation is reforming its grant schemes so that they are more accessible to individual volunteers. The community is invited to look at proposals for a new scheme—for now called Individual engagement grants (IEGs)—which is due to kick off on January 15. On Meta, the community is once again debating the two new offline participation models—user groups (open membership groups designed to be easy to form) and thematic organizations (incorporated non-profits representing the Wikimedia movement and supporting work on a specific theme within or across countries). In a consultation process on Meta that will last until January 15, the community will be discussing WMF proposals for a new guideline on conflicts of interests concerning Wikimedia resources. The draft covers COI issues for both volunteers and organizations across the movement.
WikiProject report: A Song of Ice and Fire This week, we spent some time with WikiProject A Song of Ice and Fire, which focuses on the eponymous series of high fantasy literature, the television series Game of Thrones, and related works by George R. R. Martin. The project was started in July 2006 and has grown to include 11 Good Articles maintained by a small yet enthusiastic band of editors.
Featured content: Battlecruiser operational Seven articles and two lists were promoted to 'featured' status this week, including List of battlecruisers. The article covers all of the battlecruisers—which were a type of warship similar in size to a battleship but with several defining characteristics—ever planned or constructed. The last British battlecruiser built, HMS Hood, is pictured at right.
Technology report: Efforts to "normalise" Toolserver relations stepped up Efforts were stepped up this week to sow a feeling of trust between the major parties with an interest in the future of the Toolserver. The tool- and bot-hosting server – more accurately servers – are currently operated by German chapter, Wikimedia Germany, with assistance from the Foundation and numerous volunteers, including long-time system administrator Daniel Baur (more commonly known by his pseudonym DaB). However, those parties have more recently failed to see eye-to-eye on the trajectory for the Toolserver, which is scheduled to be replaced by Wikimedia Labs in late 2013, with increasing concern about the tone of discussions.
Hello, Andrew Gray. Please check your email; you've got mail! It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. It's rather short this time because pretty much everyone enjoys some well-deserved vacation.
Development
Some of us unwrapped gifts (-:
Started working on supporting different kinds of Snaks in the user interface
Fixing support for PostgreSQL in core, which was broken with introduction of the sites stuff
Code reviewing of changes in MediaWiki core
Adding watchlist filter in client for Wikidata changes
Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
From the editor: Wikipedia, our Colosseum In the impersonal, detached Colosseum that is Wikipedia, people find it much easier to put their thumbs down. As such, many people active in the Wikimedia movement have witnessed a precipitous decline in civil discourse. This is far from a new trend, yet many people would agree that it all seemed somehow worse in 2012.
In the media: Is the Wikimedia movement too 'cash rich'? A recent, poorly researched and poorly written story in the Register highlighted the perceived "cash rich" status of the Wikimedia movement. ... The Telegraph and Daily Dot, among others, have alleged that there are multiple links between the WMF, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, and Kazakhstan's government, which is, for all intents and purposes, a one-party non-democratic state.
Technology report: Looking back on a year of incremental changes In the first of two features, the Signpost this week looks back on 2012, a year when developers finally made inroads into three issues that had been put off for far too long (the need for editors to learn wiki-markup, the lack of a proper template language and the centralisation of data) but left all three projects far from finished.
Interview: Interview with Brion Vibber, the WMF's first employee Brion Vibber has been a Wikipedia editor for nearly 11 years and was the first person officially hired to work for the Wikimedia Foundation. He was instrumental in early development of the MediaWiki software and is now the lead software architect for the foundation's mobile development team.
Featured content: Whoa Nelly! Featured content in review At the beginning of the year, we began a series of interviews with editors who have worked hard to combat systemic bias through the creation of featured content; although we haven't seen six installments yet, we've also had some delightful interviews with people who write articles on some of our most core topics. Now, as we close the year, I would like to present some of my own musings on the state of featured content—especially as it pertains to systemic bias and core topics.
WikiProject report: New Year, New York This week, we're celebrating the New Year from Times Square by interviewing WikiProject New York City. Since December 2004, WikiProject NYC has had the difficult task of maintaining articles about the largest city in the United States, many of which are also among the the most viewed articles on Wikipedia. The project is home to 22 Featured Articles, 7 Featured Lists, 32 pieces of Featured Media, and a lengthy list of Did You Know? entries.
Recent research: Wikipedia and Sandy Hook; SOPA blackout reexamined Northeastern University researcher Brian Keegan analyzed the gathering of hundreds of Wikipedians to cover the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy. ... A First Monday article reviews several aspects of the Wikipedia participation in the 18 January 2012, protests against SOPA and PIPA legislation in the USA. The paper focuses on the question of legitimacy, looking at how the Wikipedia community arrived at the decision to participate in those protests.
Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello Andrew,
I believe I was checking the Neil Armstrong article when I saw the template break like that (If I recall correctly, some words in brackets had gone onto another line). Looking at it currently, it does not seem to break, so thank you for removing the line break and sorry for the confusion:). TerryAga (talk) 11:06, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
Disambiguation link notification for January 4
Latest comment: 13 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Charles Blackader, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Shorncliffe (check to confirm|fix with Dab solver). Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ• Join us at the DPL WikiProject.
For what it's worth, only one error in LCCN data integrity (re Rosemary Simari Harris). And I know how to report directly to LC (having previously exchanged email with its integrity office).
By experience I know a few "disintegrities" at WorldCat and many at VIAF --whose kinds I have illustrated here by Rosemary Jeanne Harris and Emily Gravett respectively. And I don't know that there is yet an effective way to report them. Here and there some editors direct others to Wikipedia: VIAF/errors but I doubt that is effective.
By experience I know there are many disintegrities at GND (many at least re English-language writers and illustrators who may not be notable) but they seem to be flagged "not differentiated" which I take to mean a known problem, not an error to report.
Of course there are many disintegrities here at Wikipedia in our biographies. I don't know them by experience and have no reason to doubt that Wikipedia: VIAF/errors is an effective place to report them. --P64 (talk) 18:23, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
I kind of non-answered there. As for Wikipedia:VIAF/errors I second P64's interpretation, VIAF feels responsible for errors matching Wikipedia persons to VIAF clusters, this is not different from the way the twenty-something "regular" VIAF constituent databases are handled. Since VIAF is a virtual authority file (and not the universally centralized) it is neither technically nor organisatorically in any position to cause corrections of flaws and inconsistencies in the constituent databases and worse, to my knowledge there does not even exist a survey of the contacts and processes at the participating institutions (which kinds of change request can where be demanded by whom, are there commitments to process requests "from outside" and so on). VIAF itself had to struggle with that and recently introduced their internal xA database : One can interpret this as a pure "workaround database" as VIAF resigning from the idea that at least the most obvious problems will be fixed by the responsible parties in a timely manner when communicated to them... Thus "directly reporting" through available channels to LC/NACO participants is the way to go if "LCCN" records have to be tweaked and reporting to VIAF is reserved for the (albeit sometimes overlapping) case that a wikipedia article encounters bad company in VIAF. -- Gymel (talk) 00:45, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
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