User talk:Hydriz/Archive 8

Latest comment: 12 years ago by EdwardsBot in topic The Signpost: 25 December 2013

The Signpost: 30 October 2013

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  • Traffic report: 200 miles in 200 years
    The top 10 encapsulates the history of human aviation; at #1, a Google Doodle celebrating the 216th anniversary of the first parachute jump; at #10, the enduringly popular scifi film Gravity, a paean to human spaceflight. It's odd to think it's taken us 200 years to travel about that many miles up.
  • In the media: Rand Paul plagiarizes Wikipedia?
    While giving a speech on behalf of a gubernatorial candidate, Paul advocated his pro-life position, and compared allowing unrestricted abortions to the film Gattaca. He went on to use strikingly similar language and phraseology in his speech to what the Wikipedia page reads. The Washington Post's article conceded that Wikipedia is a widely used source for trivial information, but mocked the fact that a politician would view it as a reliable source.
  • News and notes: Sex and drug tourism—Wikivoyage's soft underbelly?
    In January we raised several potentially troublesome issues for the Wikimedia movement in taking on Wikivoyage, including the apparent inadequacy of the English Wikivoyage sex-tourism policy, hurriedly strengthened against mention of child sex after our inquiries. However, both sex-tourism and illegal-activities policies remain equivocal about how the site should treat entries about sex tourism more generally, and drugs that are classed as illicit in almost every country. Yet the Signpost has found it remarkably easy to locate material in Wikivoyage that violates both the spirit and the letter of the policies.
  • Featured content: Wrestling with featured content
    This year's WikiCup competition has finished, while three articles, five lists, and six pictures, were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia last week.
  • Recent research: User influence on site policies: Wikipedia vs. Facebook vs. Youtube
    Laura Stein, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, has concluded that, based on her comparison of user policy documents (including the Terms of Service) of YouTube, Facebook and Wikipedia, Wikipedia offers the highest level of participation power overall.
  • WikiProject report: Special: Lessons from the dead and dying
    With Halloween, the Day of the Dead, and other gloomy celebrations this week, we're taking a look at Wikipedia's dead and dying. For some dead WikiProjects, the sole purpose of their life was simply to serve as a warning to others. Some of these projects may still be salvageable, but for most, a revival is unlikely. Here are some projects that never got off the ground and the lessons that can be gleaned from their follies

10:31, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

The Signpost: 06 November 2013

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  • News and notes: Alleged "outing" of editor's personal information leads to Wikipedia ban
    As part of the second major "outing" controversy to hit the English Wikipedia in less than a year, the Chelsea/Bradley Manning naming dispute was dragged into the spotlight yet again when the English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee ruled by motion to remove the administrator tools from and ban long-time Wikipedia contributor Phil Sandifer.
  • Traffic report: Danse Macabre
    It's fair to say that commemorating death was a strong theme this week, with Lou Reed's passing generating interest, as well as a Google Doodle celebrating the costume designer Edith Head. And of course, the world's greatest celebrations of the dead, Halloween and the Day of the Dead, were also popular this week.
  • Featured content: Five years of work leads to 63-article featured topic
    HMS Hood, one of the most famous warships of the Second World War, was a battlecruiser and therefore part of what is now the largest featured topic on Wikipedia: "Battlecruisers of the world". The topic was promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia last week alongside eleven articles, three lists, four pictures, and two other topics.
  • WikiProject report: WikiProject Accessibility
    This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Accessibility, a project that strives to make Wikipedia accessible for users with disabilities. The project improves Wikipedia's guidelines and Manual of Style, collects useful templates and scripts, and provides support to impaired Wikipedians.
  • Arbitration report: Ebionites 3 case closed
    The Ebionites 3 case has closed with an interaction ban for the two editors involved in the dispute.

13:02, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Wikimedia Highlights from October 2013

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Highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation Report and the Wikimedia engineering report for October 2013, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement
About · Subscribe/unsubscribe · Distributed via Global message delivery, 18:26, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

The Signpost: 13 November 2013

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  • Traffic report: Google Doodlebugs bust the block
    The numbers this week are beyond anything that has been seen since this report began. The top view count beats the average by an order of magnitude. Usually the appearance of numbers this big on the list is due to spamming, but in this case it seems they are due to honest interest; more specifically, Google Doodles, which for the first time claimed all five top slots. This column has raised numerous times the power of a Google Doodle to shine light on Wikipedia, but the wattage has never been as high as this.
  • Special report: FDC staff raise the benchmarks for activities, impact, planning, and governance
    The supporting staff of the Wikimedia Foundation’s powerful volunteer Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) have released their assessments for the third half-yearly round of funding applications. The applications for the newly named annual plan grants were submitted by affiliated entities on 1 October, and comprise a total of more than US$5M in bids.

The Signpost: 20 November 2013

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  • From the editor: The Signpost needs your help
    As I said in August, contributing to the Signpost can be one of the most rewarding things an editor can do. The genre is refreshingly different from that of Wikipedia articles, and can allow writers to use a different range of skills. The need for an independent, volunteer-run Signpost continues to grow, given the increasing complexity and financial expenditures of the global Wikimedia movement, not to mention the English Wikipedia.
  • Book review: Peter Burke's Social History of Knowledge—ambitious, fascinating, and exhaustive
    Peter Burke's A Social History of Knowledge: Volume II: From the Encyclopédie to Wikipedia is a broad and wide-ranging look at how knowledge has been created, acquired, organized, disseminated, and sometimes lost in the Western world over the last two and a half centuries, a sequel to his 2000 book covering the prior three centuries, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot.
  • Featured content: Rockin' the featured pictures
    Four articles, five lists, and thirty-four pictures were promoted to 'featured status' this week, including an image of a small fraction of the 18,000 taxis that serve Hong Kong.
  • WikiProject report: Score! American football on Wikipedia
    This week, we headed over to WikiProject National Football League. With 10 Featured Articles, 61 Featured Lists, and 142 Good Articles (as of publication), this WikiProject has done a lot of work improving American football articles.
  • News and notes: Foundation to Wiki-PR: cease and desist; Arbitration Committee elections starting
    The Wikimedia Foundation has sent a formal cease and desist letter to Wiki-PR—the public relations agency accused of breaking Wikipedia policies and guidelines by creating, editing, and maintaining several thousand articles for paying clients through a sophisticated array of accounts. The Foundation's attorneys, Cooley LLP, have demanded that Wiki-PR's employees abide by the site's Terms of Use and the language of a community ban from the English Wikipedia.
  • Traffic report: Ill Winds
    It's not hard to guess which event is leading interest in the top 25 this week. The sheer scale of Typhoon Haiyan is staggering; estimates place its maximum windspeed upon first landfall in the Philippines on November 6 at 315 km/h, which would make it the most powerful tropical cyclone ever to reach land. To date, the storm has killed nearly 4000 people and damaged or destroyed nearly 4 million homes.
  • Arbitration report: WMF opens the door for non-admin arbitrators
    Back in March, when the March 25 Arbitration Report covered the Audit Subcommittee appointment discussion, a statement from the WMF legal division clarified its position that access to deleted revisions required an RFA or RFA-identical process; therefore AUSC committee appointments were not open to non-admins. The WMF legal team has now further clarified its position, saying that running for and winning an election for arbitrator would qualify as the type of rigorous community selection process required for the checkuser and oversight rights held by arbitrators.

06:45, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

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596 Quality: High, Assessed class: B, Predicted class: FA Education in Singapore (talk) Add sources
14 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: Start Lush 99.5FM (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more sources Add sources
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10 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: Stub Pulse storm (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more images Please add more wikilinks Please add more sources Add sources
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550 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Start, Predicted class: Start Stomach rumble (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more images Please add more sources Cleanup
60 Quality: High, Assessed class: Start, Predicted class: GA Republic Polytechnic (talk) Please add more content Please add more sources Cleanup
11 Quality: Low, Assessed class: List, Predicted class: Stub 2010 in Malaysia (talk) Please add more sources Cleanup
66 Quality: Medium, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: C Malaysia–Singapore relations (talk) Please add more sources Expand
281 Quality: Medium, Assessed class: C, Predicted class: B White Latin American (talk) Expand
2,888 Quality: High, Assessed class: C, Predicted class: FA Erosion (talk) Expand
586 Quality: High, Assessed class: C, Predicted class: FA Shashi Tharoor (talk) Unencyclopaedic
891 Quality: Medium, Assessed class: C, Predicted class: B ReBoot (talk) Please add more sources Unencyclopaedic
0 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Unassessed, Predicted class: Stub Hunan–Hubei–Jiangxi Soviet (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more wikilinks Please add more sources Unencyclopaedic
630 Quality: High, Assessed class: C, Predicted class: GA PlayStation Network outage (talk) Merge
702 Quality: Medium, Assessed class: C, Predicted class: B Copyleft (talk) Please add more sources Merge
4 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Unassessed, Predicted class: Stub Gongqingcheng (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more images Please add more sources Merge
37 Quality: Medium, Assessed class: Start, Predicted class: B Samsung YEPP (talk) Please add more content Please add more sources Wikify
4 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Unassessed, Predicted class: Start Reg Vardy Band (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more images Please add more wikilinks Please add more sources Wikify
9 Quality: Medium, Assessed class: Unassessed, Predicted class: C Geeklog (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more images Please add more wikilinks Please add more sources Wikify
0 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Unassessed, Predicted class: Stub Junior University Musical Theater (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more images Please add more wikilinks Please add more sources Orphan
1 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: Stub Mudawad (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more images Please add more wikilinks Please add more sources Orphan
5 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: Stub Intercomprehension (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more images Please add more wikilinks Please add more sources Orphan
80 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: Stub Thakita Thakita (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more images Please add more wikilinks Please add more sources Stub
21 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Unassessed, Predicted class: Stub Userplane (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more wikilinks Please add more sources Stub
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4 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: Stub Sonar Radio (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more images Please add more wikilinks Please add more sources Stub
7 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: Stub Her World (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more images Please add more sources Stub

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Hello, Hydriz:

WikiProject AFC is holding a two month long Backlog Elimination Drive!
The goal of this drive is to eliminate the backlog of unreviewed articles. The drive is running from December 1st, 2013 – January 31st, 2014.

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!

A new version of our AfC helper script has been released! It includes many bug fixes, new improvements and features, code enhancements, and more. If you want to see a full list of changes, visit the changelog. Please report bugs and feature requests there, too! Thanks. EdwardsBot (talk) 09:17, 3 December 2013 (UTC)Reply

Delivered by EdwardsBot (talk) at 09:17, 3 December 2013 (UTC)Reply

The Signpost: 04 December 2013

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  • Traffic report: Kennedy shot Who
    Summary:Doctor Who nearly got cancelled in its first week because its premiere was swamped by coverage of the JFK assassination, which happened the same day. Thankfully, producers saw fit to rerun it the next day, which is now its official anniversary date.
  • News and notes: One decade of Wikisource; FDC recommendations raise serious questions
    The sister project Wikisource, the digital library that hosts free-content primary sources, is now a decade old. Wikisource, which now has versions in 63 languages, is the sixth type of project to reach ten-year milestone and will be the last until 2016. The Wikimedia Foundation's volunteer Funds Dissemination Committee has published its recommendations to the Board of Trustees on 11 new applications for annual grants by 11 WMF-affiliated organisations. The maximum total budget for the current and upcoming March rounds is US$6M.
  • WikiProject report: Electronic Apple Pie
    This week, we returned to WikiProject Apple Inc. for a peek at their newest articles about the latest in gadgets and software. The last time we took a bite out of WikiProject Apple, they had just finished merging WikiProject Macintosh and WikiProject iPhone OS. Today, the project is hard at work rewriting their primary article, improving the subject's outline, and adding to the project's list of 25 Good Articles and 6 Featured Articles.
  • Featured content: F*&!
    Seventeen articles, four lists, and twenty-eight pictures were promoted to "featured" status in the last two weeks.

08:38, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Wikimedia Highlights from November 2013

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Highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation Report and the Wikimedia engineering report for November 2013, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement
About · Subscribe/unsubscribe · Distributed via Global message delivery, 04:46, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

The Signpost: 11 December 2013

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  • Traffic report: Deaths of Mandela, Walker top the list
    When one edits this page for too long, one is tempted to appoint oneself as the psychoanalyst for the human race, or at least the English-speaking portion thereof. Since nearly everyone uses Wikipedia, the constant stream of TV updates, pointless celebrity scandals, and inquiries after who has died can seem like a dreary peek into humanity's surprisingly banal collective consciousness.
  • In the media: Edward Snowden a "hero"; German Wikipedia court ruling
    Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales caught headlines last week when he referred to former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden ... Loek Essers of the International Data Group, (IDG) News Service is reporting that a German court has held Wikipedia liable for its content, but still does not have to fact check the information in advance.
  • News and notes: Wiki Loves Monuments—winners announced
    Amid great anticipation the international prize winners have just been announced for the fourth annual Wiki Loves Monuments, now the world's largest photographic competition and one of the biggest events on the Wikimedia movement's calendar. ... The first prize has gone to David Gubler's photograph of a Swiss train crossing a viaduct.
  • WikiProject report: WikiProject Wine
    This week, the Signpost interviewed the Wine WikiProject.
  • Interview: Wikipedia's first Featured Article centurion
    On 7 December, Wikipedia editor Wehwalt reached the momentous milestone of 100 featured articles with History of Chincoteague, Virginia. Quite apart from the reading and research, that's around three-quarters of a million words of finalised text, not counting footnotes, image captions and the rest.
  • Featured content: Viewer discretion advised
    Three articles, one list, and eight pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia last week.
  • Technology report: MediaWiki 1.22 released
    On 6 December, the latest version of the MediaWiki software was released. In development from March 2013 through October 2013, the release featured anti-spam and counter-vandalism improvements.

08:24, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

The Signpost: 18 December 2013

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  • Traffic report: Hopper to the top
    An animated Google Doodle for computer programmer and naval rear admiral Grace Hopper generated another record-breaking hit count for the year, though the count for the list overall was lower than for that of the previous holder.
  • News and notes: Nine new arbitrators announced
    A little more than six days after the close of voting, the results of the annual Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) elections have been announced. Of the 22 candidates, 13 managed to gain more supports than opposes, though only one gained the support of more than half of the voters. Eight were elected to two-year terms, and a ninth will serve for one year.
  • Technology report: Introducing the GLAMWikiToolset
    This week, the GLAMWikiToolset, or GWToolset, is being deployed to the Wikimedia Commons. It allows for GLAM organizations to batch upload content based on various metadata stored in an XML schema. In the past this has been done by various bots, but now it will be easier for GLAMs to do it directly.

08:22, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

The Signpost: 25 December 2013

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  • WikiProject report: More Great WikiProject Logos
    We saved one last special report for 2013. After our well-received review of great WikiProject logos a couple years ago, it was only a matter of time before we collected a new batch of interesting iconography that showcases the creativity of the Wikipedia community. Hopefully, these logos will also inspire other projects to liven up their drab pages.
  • News and notes: IEG round 2 funding rewards diverse ambitions
    A significant move by the Wikimedia Foundation has been to broaden the types of activities it funds to develop several different programs for judging and allocating that funding, and to set up volunteer committees that initially assess applications for funding.
  • Technology report: OAuth: future of user designed tools
    Last month, the OAuth extension was deployed to all Wikimedia wikis. OAuth is a standard used for allowing users to authenticate third-party applications, also known as consumers, to take actions on their behalf.