User talk:Hydriz/Archive 7
The Signpost: 11 September 2013
edit- In the media: Lawyer goes to court to discover Wikipedian's identity; Storming Wikipedia; Wikimedia UK Secretary in conflict-of-interest controversy; Does Wikipedia need a "right to reply" box?
'The National Law Journal reported on September 9 that lawyer Susan L. Burke has been taking legal steps to discover the identity of Wikipedia editor . Zujua had edited her biography, allegedly adding misleading content about various lawsuits in the process
- WikiProject report: WikiProject Indonesia
The Signpost went to Indonesia this week.
- Featured content: Tintin goes featured
Four articles, eight lists, and eight pictures were promoted to "featured" status this week on the English Wikipedia.
- News and notes: As deadline approaches, Individual Engagement Grants looks for ideas
The deadline for proposals to the Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) volunteer committee on Meta will pass on 30 September. The program is designed to fund projects that tackle long-term problem and have a significant editing community impact; it has previously supported solutions like The Wikipedia Library, which improves Wikipedian access to online reference sources like JSTOR (see Signpost coverage).
- Traffic report: Syria, celebrities, and association football: oh my!
While the Syrian Civil War crept its slow way into the minds of the public, with a new fourth related entry in the top 25, the top 10 remained dominated by celebrity, mainly sports and music. Two megabucks transfers stimulated public interest in football/soccer ahead of the 2014 FIFA World Cup qualifiers, while Lil Wayne's public apology ahead of his latest album release sent him to the top.
- Arbitration report: Workshop phase opens in Manning naming dispute ; Infoboxes case closes
Discussion over the Manning title dispute was off to a running start as evidence and workshop phases continued in the Bradley/Chelsea Manning naming dispute. The Infoboxes case closed with topic bans for two users, and a recommendation for community discussion of infoboxes.
The Signpost: 18 September 2013
edit- News and notes: Third time's the charm: the FDC's newest round of funding requests
The Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC), the volunteer-led body that evaluates chapter and (for the first time) thematic organizational annual plan grant requests to the Wikimedia Foundation, is preparing for its third round of public proceedings to deliberate on the distribution of several million US dollars of Wikimedia movement funds.
- WikiProject report: 18,464 Good Articles on the wall
This week, the Signpost headed to WikiProject Good Articles. As of publishing time, out of the 4,331,477 articles on Wikipedia, only 18,464 are rated as "good" (about 1 in 235).
- Featured content: Hurricane Diane and Van Gogh
Thirteen articles, six lists, and five pictures were promoted to "featured" status last week on the English Wikipedia.
- Technology report: What can Wikidata do for Wikipedia?
In this week's "Technology report", we look at how the growth of Wikidata can benefit Wikipedia. Gerard Meijssen is a highly active contributor and frequent blogger about Wikidata. We asked him to share his thoughts on how the new project benefits Wikipedia.
- Traffic report: Twerking, tragedy and TV
The top 10 is bookended by unlucky dates, as Friday the 13th fell just after the anniversary of 9/11. Breaking Bad's final season continued to draw attention, while interest in Miley Cyrus's youthful exuberance is fading only slowly.
The Signpost: 25 September 2013
edit- Op-ed: Q&A on Public Relations and Wikipedia
Over the last year, there's been extensive debate about whether public relations professionals and other corporate representatives should participate on Wikipedia and, if so, to what extent and what kinds of rules should be followed.
- Traffic report: Look on Walter's works
The saga of Walter White, chemistry teacher-turned-drug kingpin, as told in the critically adored television series Breaking Bad, has been a water-cooler necessity for years, and now, as it nears its end, audiences are feverishly following every plot thread to guess what the finale will reveal.
- In the media: Fox News: Wikipedia abandons efforts to purge porn from online encyclopedia
Fox News writer Perry Chiaramonte published an article detailing Wikipedia's alleged abandonment of its fight to remove pornography.
- News and notes: Last call for Wiki Loves Monuments; Community–WMF tension over VisualEditor
On 30 September, Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM), the Wikimedia community's global photo competition, will reach to the end of its submission period. The proceedings have been underway since the first of this month; national juries will start reviewing submissions for the first round of selections after it closes ... Community aggravation with one of the Wikimedia Foundation's signature initiatives, the VisualEditor, came to the fore again this week with the announcement and implementation of code blocking the tool.
- WikiProject report: Babel Series: GOOOOOOAAAAAAALLLLLLL!!!!!
This week, we continued our exploration of other language editions of Wikipedia by visiting the Spanish Wikipedia's Wikiproyecto Fútbol (WikiProject Football).
- Featured content: Wikipedia takes the stage
Twelve articles, six lists, and five pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia this week.
- Recent research: Automatic detection of "infiltrating" Wikipedia admins; Wiki, or 'pedia?
A conference paper makes a rather serious claim: "We find a surprisingly large number of editors who change their behavior and begin focusing more on a particular controversial topic once they are promoted to administrator status."
October 2013 AFC Backlog elimination drive
edit
WikiProject AFC is holding a one month long Backlog Elimination Drive!
The goal of this drive is to eliminate the backlog of unreviewed articles. The drive is running from October 1st, 2013 – October 31st, 2013.
Awards will be given out for all reviewers participating in the drive in the form of barnstars at the end of the drive.
There is a backlog of over 5100 articles, so start reviewing articles! Visit the drive's page and help out!
This newsletter was delivered on behalf of WPAFC by EdwardsBot (talk) 15:26, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
New features
- Special:Listfiles can now display old versions of files a user has uploaded. A new link was also added (Special:AllMyFiles) that gives a list of all files the current user has ever uploaded (that haven't been deleted).
- There is now an Android application to contribute to translatewiki.net from mobile devices.
VisualEditor news
- VisualEditor now has a new toolbar with drop-down menus for advanced tools.
- Many bugs were fixed, some related to copy-and-paste.
- You can now move references, list of references, templates and other elements with the mouse ("drag-and-drop").
- You are invited to comment on designs for the interface to add references in VisualEditor.
Future
- Developers are looking for ideas of small technical projects that new developers could work on. Please add your ideas.
- Developers are looking for wikis who would accept to try using secure links (HTTPS) for all users.
- You can join an IRC discussion about "Beta features", a tool to try new features, on October 3.
- You can join an IRC discussion about Flow, the new wiki discussion tool, on October 17.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
19:56, 2 October 2013 (UTC)
Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot
editWe are currently running a study on the effects of adding additional information to SuggestBot's suggestions. Participation in the study is voluntary. Should you wish to not participate in the study, or have questions or concerns, you can find contact information on the SuggestBot study page.
IMPORTANT CHANGES: We have modified the selection of articles SuggestBot suggests and altered the design to incorporate more information about the articles, as described in this explanation.
Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information.
Changes to SuggestBot's suggestions
editWe have changed the number of suggested articles and which categories they are selected from. The number of stubs has been greatly reduced, the number of articles needing sources doubled, and two new categories added (orphans and unencyclopaedic articles). We have also modified the layout of the suggestions and added sortable columns with various types of information about each article. The first two columns are:
- Views/Day
- Daily average number of views an article's had over the past 14 days.
- Quality
- Predicted article quality on a 1- to 3-star scale. Placing your cursor over the stars should give you a pop-up describing the article's quality (Low/Medium/High), current assessment class, and predicted assessment class.
The method we use to predict article quality also allows us to assess whether an article might need specific types of work in order to improve its quality. The work needed might not correspond to cleanup tags added to the article, since our method is not based on those. We have added five columns reflecting this work assessment, where a red X indicates improvement is needed. Placing your cursor over an X should give you a pop-up with a short description of the work needed. The five columns seek to answer the following five questions:
- Content
- Is more content needed?
- Headings
- Does this article have an appropriate section structure?
- Images
- Is the number of illustrative images about right?
- Links
- Does this article link to enough other Wikipedia articles?
- Sources
- For its length, is there an appropriate number of citations to sources in this article?
SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly, your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please let us know on SuggestBot's talk page. Regards from Nettrom (talk), SuggestBot's caretaker. -- SuggestBot (talk) 23:27, 5 October 2013 (UTC)
The Signpost: 02 October 2013
edit- Op-ed: Commons medical diagnostic images under threat from unresolved ownership
Medical images have transformed many aspects of modern medicine. Over the past two decades the increasing sophistication of MRI, CT-scanning, and X-ray techniques has made these technologies the cornerstone of diagnosing a range of conditions, replacing what used to be largely guesswork by doctors. They can be the difference between life and death for a patient, and their importance is underlined by the tens of billions of dollars spent on them annually just in North America. For Wikimedia Foundation projects, advanced images are now a powerful tool for describing and explaining, and educating our worldwide readership of medical articles.
- Discussion report: References to individuals and groups, merging wikiprojects, portals on the Main page, and more
Current discussions on the English Wikipedia include...
- News and notes: WMF signals new grantmaking priorities
In what will be remembered as a game-changing week for Wikimedia grantmaking, the Foundation's executive director, Sue Gardner, published a forthright and in places highly critical statement, Reflections on the FDC process, and grantmaking staff revealed that the WMF will significantly strengthen its targeting of optimal impact in funding.
- Featured content: Bobby, Ben, Roger and a fantasia
Six articles and two pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia last week.
- Arbitration report: Infoboxes: After the war
Editor's note: To go beyond the mere facts of cases, the "Arbitration report" invited several editors who participated in the recent Infoboxes case to comment on infoboxes: what they are, where new users can go to find out about them, specifications and protocols, best practices, and how the upcoming community discussion recommended by the Committee in the case decision should be framed.
- WikiProject report: U2 Too
This week, we revisited the enthusiastic editors at WikiProject U2. Started in June 2007, the project has grown in spurts, resulting in a collection of 8 Featured Articles and 24 Good Articles. The project maintains a to do list, portal, and a list of references.
Wikimedia Highlights from August 2013
edit
The Signpost: 09 October 2013
edit- Traffic report: Shutdown shenanigans
If you're living in the United States, what did you do during the government shutdown? Well, it seems most people watched the final episode of Breaking Bad.
- WikiProject report: Australian Roads
This week, we moved to the esoteric world of Australian roads.
- Featured content: Under the sea
Seven articles, six lists, and twelve pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia last week.
- News and notes: Extensive network of clandestine paid advocacy exposed
An investigation by the English Wikipedia community into suspicious edits and sockpuppet activity has led to astonishing revelations that Wiki-PR, a multi-million-dollar US-based company, has created, edited, or maintained several thousand Wikipedia articles for paying clients using a sophisticated array of concealed user accounts.
- In the media: College credit for editing Wikipedia
The University of California, San Francisco attracted substantial media attention over its new course offering that will give credit to fourth year medical students for editing Wikipedia articles about medicine.
- Arbitration report: Manning naming dispute and Ebionites 3 cases continue; third arbitrator resigns
A proposed decision has been posted in the Manning naming dispute. The workshop phase of the Ebionites 3 case closes 13 October. Arbitrator NuclearWarfare has resigned.
Welcome to The Wikipedia Adventure!
edit
- Hi! We're so happy you wanted to play to learn, as a friendly and fun way to get into our community and mission. I think these links might be helpful to you as you get started.
- -- 19:54, 2 August 2013 (UTC)
| Mission 1 | Mission 2 | Mission 3 | Mission 4 | Mission 5 | Mission 6 | Mission 7 |
| Say Hello to the World | An Invitation to Earth | Small Changes, Big Impact | The Neutral Point of View | The Veil of Verifiability | The Civility Code | Looking Good Together |
The Signpost: 16 October 2013
edit- News and notes: Vice on Wiki-PR's paid advocacy; Featured list elections begin
Media coverage on Wiki-PR, the multi-million-dollar US-based company that has broken several policies and guidelines on the English Wikipedia in its quest to create and maintain thousands of articles for paying clients, continued this week with a feature story by Martin Robbins in the British edition of Vice magazine.
- Traffic report: Peaceful potpourri
A slow week, with low overall views and the Top 10 dominated by longstanding pages. Gravity, Alfonso Cuaron's outer space-set action art film, not only held its position at the top of the US box office but climbed to the top of the Wikipedia chart as well, showing that it has become a major talking point.
- WikiProject report: Heraldry and Vexillology
This week, we studied coats of arms and flags with the folks at WikiProject Heraldry and Vexillology. Started in September 2006, the project has grown to include 20 Featured Articles and nearly 50 Good Articles. The project maintains a portal, a list of resources, and a variety of images and templates.
- Featured content: That's a lot of pictures
Six articles, two lists, and thirty-three pictures were promoted to 'featured' status on the English Wikipedia last week.
- Arbitration report: Manning naming dispute case closes
The Manning naming dispute case has closed, with a strong and unanimous statement by the Committee against disparaging references to transgendered persons. Sanctions were enacted against six editors.
- Discussion report: Ada Lovelace Day, paid advocacy on Wikipedia, sidebar update, and more
Current discussions on the English Wikipedia include...
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
New features
- You can now choose which language to show for SVG files that contain several languages, using the "lang" option, like
[[File:Gerrit_patchset_25838_test.svg|lang=de]]for the German layer of File:Gerrit patchset 25838 test.svg. - Developers are looking for wiki communities to try the new search system.
VisualEditor news
- You can now create and edit references inside media captions.
- You now need to press the "delete" key twice to delete a template, reference or image; the first time, they only become selected, to avoid accidental deletion of infoboxes and similar content.
- When you resize images, you will now still see them, and their size will also be seen in the center.
Future
- The new notifications system ("Echo") will be added to almost all wikis that don't already have it on October 22. It will notify you of changes and events that affect you.
- MediaWiki 1.22wmf22 was added to test wikis on October 17. It will arrive to non-Wikipedia wikis on October 21 and all Wikipedia wikis on October 24 (calendar).
- The interface to reset your password will soon be changed.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
09:11, 21 October 2013 (UTC)
The Signpost: 23 October 2013
edit- News and notes: Grantmaking season—rumblings in the German-language community
The next twice-yearly round of Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) grantmaking is soon to close for community questioning and commentary. Ten nation-based Wikimedia chapters and one thematic organisation are asking for a total of more than US$5M of donors’ money from the Foundation’s renamed annual plan grant process. Aside from Wikimedia UK ($708k), the three biggest asks are from the German-speaking chapters: Wikimedia Germany is asking for $2.4M and Wikimedia Austria $311k; and the German-language-related Swiss chapter is applying for $500k.
- Traffic report: Your average week ... and a fish
Media, sports and Google Doodles dominate, though a very odd fish decided to crash the party.
- Featured content: Your worst nightmare as a child is now featured on Wikipedia
Twelve articles, four lists, and four pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia this week, including the article on cabbage.
- Discussion report: More discussion of paid advocacy, upcoming arbitrator elections, research hackathon, and more
Current discussions on the English Wikipedia include...
- In the media: The decline of Wikipedia; Sue Gardner releases statement on Wiki-PR; Australian minister relies on Wikipedia
MIT Technology Review published a long article on what it called "The decline of Wikipedia". Editor involvement has decreased since 2007; according to the article, this has had an adverse qualitative effect on content, particularly on issues pertinent to non-British and American male geeks.
- WikiProject report: Elements of the world
This week, we headed to an elementary subject with WikiProject Elements. Founded by Mav in 2002, this project has grown to have 19 featured articles, 2 featured topics, and 68 good articles. The project also has a list of templates, and a periodic table of elements filled with pictures.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
New features
- The "Toolbox" section in the site sidebar is now called "Tools" in English. You can do the same in your language by editing the interface text on translatewiki.net. Someone else may have already done it.
VisualEditor news
Problems
- On October 22 (UTC), an error in the site settings caused
*.wikimedia.orgsites (like Meta-Wiki and Commons) to redirect towikimediafoundation.orgfor a few hours.
Future
- MediaWiki 1.23wmf1 was added to test wikis on October 24. It will arrive to non-Wikipedia wikis on October 28 and all Wikipedia wikis on October 31 (calendar).
- In the next days, servers in San Francisco will start providing (cached) content to users located in Oceania. If you are in that area and notice problems, please tell us.
- You will soon be able to test new features easily using the "Beta Features" view. VisualEditor will be in the list on sites where it works and isn't automatically enabled. Another example is a set of changes in the article text style.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
09:41, 28 October 2013 (UTC)
Wikimedia Highlights from September 2013
editArticles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot
editWe are currently running a study on the effects of adding additional information to SuggestBot's suggestions. Participation in the study is voluntary. Should you wish to not participate in the study, or have questions or concerns, you can find contact information on the SuggestBot study page.
IMPORTANT CHANGES: We have modified the selection of articles SuggestBot suggests and altered the design to incorporate more information about the articles, as described in this explanation.
Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information.
Changes to SuggestBot's suggestions
editWe have changed the number of suggested articles and which categories they are selected from. The number of stubs has been greatly reduced, the number of articles needing sources doubled, and two new categories added (orphans and unencyclopaedic articles). We have also modified the layout of the suggestions and added sortable columns with various types of information about each article. The first two columns are:
- Views/Day
- Daily average number of views an article's had over the past 14 days.
- Quality
- Predicted article quality on a 1- to 3-star scale. Placing your cursor over the stars should give you a pop-up describing the article's quality (Low/Medium/High), current assessment class, and predicted assessment class.
The method we use to predict article quality also allows us to assess whether an article might need specific types of work in order to improve its quality. The work needed might not correspond to cleanup tags added to the article, since our method is not based on those. We have added five columns reflecting this work assessment, where a red X indicates improvement is needed. Placing your cursor over an X should give you a pop-up with a short description of the work needed. The five columns seek to answer the following five questions:
- Content
- Is more content needed?
- Headings
- Does this article have an appropriate section structure?
- Images
- Is the number of illustrative images about right?
- Links
- Does this article link to enough other Wikipedia articles?
- Sources
- For its length, is there an appropriate number of citations to sources in this article?
SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly, your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please let us know on SuggestBot's talk page. Regards from Nettrom (talk), SuggestBot's caretaker. -- SuggestBot (talk) 23:37, 2 November 2013 (UTC)