Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2011-11-21

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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2011-11-21. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Arbitration report: End in sight for Abortion case, nominations in 2011 elections (2,051 bytes · 💬)

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Tone

"Stay tuned to next week's arbitration report for the final results!". Really? This isn't reality TV. Jonathan Hall (talk) 01:53, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

I suppose you are accurate when you say this is not reality TV. What about it? JORGENEV 02:59, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Are you suggesting that you're not thrilled by the exciting conclusions of arbitration cases? ;) Nick-D (talk) 10:37, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

The "Stay tuned to next week's episode" line was used to end soap operas when I was a kid. Survivor & Fear Factor are new-comers. I read its use here as an allusion to the frequent complaint that Wikipedia is an online soap opera. -- llywrch (talk) 19:01, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

It's not a reality TV. It's a reality TV show in which we get front seats, and can throw virtual rotten eggs and tomatoes at anybody we want... --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me} 23:56, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Punt that football!

So ArbCom takes a case, ostensibly over a naming dispute, and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks later they decide.................. to form a committee to decide the question! How hard is this? ArbCom is the court of last resort to decide on the big questions of principle. It's a simple matter, two weeks max and show the POV-warriors the door.

Ridiculous. It's time to clean house in the coming elections, that's what I'm starting to think. Carrite (talk) 04:13, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

Discussion report: Much ado about censorship (335 bytes · 💬)

File nominated for deletion on commons

The file c:File:Day 12 Occupy Wall Street September 28 2011 Shankbone 31.JPG used in this article has been nominated for deletion but was kept

Message automatically deposited by a robot - -Harideepan (talk) 08:01, 23 March 2018 (UTC).

In the news: Indian wikiconference heralds expansion, fundraiser in Silicon Valley major donor coup, import of Wikipedia reconsidered (903 bytes · 💬)

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• "Why Wikipedia is More Important than Twitter" - Why is it so hard for the world to understand that Wikipedia is an online ENCYCLOPEDIA, which shouldn't even be mentioned in the same breath with social-media web sites, much less anything to do with marketing. -- œ^™ 09:57, 27 November 2011 (UTC)

• I don't think that the dividing line is all that bright. After all, Wikipedia is a collaboration of many on-line users. Yes, we want to emphasize editing that creates and improves encyclopedic content, but interaction between editors is part-and-parcel of that effort. -- Donald Albury 14:57, 27 November 2011 (UTC)

News and notes: Last-minute candidates for ArbCom, the Sue Gardner European Tour hits London (12,417 bytes · 💬)

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ArbComm election

Your list of Arb candidates is wrong. There are 18 candidates but you only have 17 names - User:Panyd is also standing--Elen of the Roads (talk) 01:31, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

I noticed that, fixed it, then noticed this. Sven Manguard Wha? 02:00, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

If you don't mind some criticism of prose style, the parenthetical bit in the opening of the lead story strikes me oddly. The asterisked arbitrators are only "outgoing" if they lose: "incumbent" might be a better word choice. And about "asterisked": this may be normal parlance is some circles but verbing weirds language. ~ Ningauble (talk) 15:25, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

And here I thought that "outgoing" referred to our personality traits! :-) Risker (talk) 18:13, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Per Risker, I've changed "outgoing". I'd written "sitting", which I think is the standard epithet in this context. "Asterisked", yeah, not pretty. Any suggestions for a better wording? I've had a go. Tony (talk) 13:27, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

Autowikiography

• the "Autowikiography" about Chris Nunn reading his own Wikipedia article is awesome. I'd guess that lots of article subjects would want to do this. Now if we could get Mick Jagger to read his article.... Smallbones (talk) 02:27, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

WMF-chief's tour of Europe

"Sue Gardner European Tour", really? And yet no comment about how much it's costing taxpayersWikipedians, or highlight from her excessive rider. --pfctdayelise (talk) 02:47, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

What? You think she's just hitting up spas? No, she's hitting up the chapters and major Wikipedia events in Europe. I don't see a problem moving the leader of the WMF around from major Wikimedia event to major Wikipedia event. Sven Manguard Wha? 03:06, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

It is always nice to take a business trip to a foreign clime; I've done it myself. But of course it is a business trip and that's why the business pays for it. Nothing to see here: Move along. Yours, GeorgeLouis (talk) 07:13, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Sue Gardner's citing a convenience sample as though it were useful for drawing conclusions should concern college-educated editors.

Her stating that women are less likely to edit because the editing-interface is difficult to use is surprising; I had understood that women were able to complete difficult tasks, and had never heard of any systematic tendency for women to quit before men. Perhaps her putting down of women should stop before she lectures the rest of us again.  Kiefer.Wolfowitz 22:34, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Just because someone has not identified themselves as female doesn't mean that they therefore must be male. I think it is entirely possible that there are more women editors that Wikipedia/Wikimedia realizes. Shearonink (talk) 02:51, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

We now have multiple diverse indicators, survey responses, attendance at meetups, choice of userboxes, user preference gender choice which on some languages is more meaningful than in English. I could believe that any or all of them are out by a few percent, but as all of these indicate a substantial gender skew it seems reasonable to me that we assume a dramatic gender skew unless we get evidence to the contrary. ϢereSpielChequers 13:07, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

The photos of Sue Gardner's presentation seem to illustrate the problem of the lack of female editors ;) Nick-D (talk) 07:25, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

Hi folks. Just replying quickly to a few things here. First, I read pfctdayelise's comment differently from others here. I assumed she was poking a little fun at the Signpost headline, which could be read as implying that my trip was a junket. I didn't think she was, herself, criticizing it for being a junket. Regardless, thanks to the people who defended it as a perfectly normal work trip, which indeed it was. It was actually fairly gruelling, although in many ways enjoyable.

A couple of other comments:

On the whole I thought the Signpost article was accurate and fair, although I have two quibbles with it. One, I'm not sure that everything put inside quotation marks were actually direct quotes -- for example, I can't imagine myself using the word "smutty": it's a word that's fairly commonly used in the UK, but isn't much used by Canadians, including me. That's a small thing, not important. Slightly more troubling to me was the sentence "She made the remarkable admission that despite their keen appreciation of the significance and causes of the gender gap, Foundation staff had no plans to specifically combat it, but were instead relying on existing outreach efforts such as the Global Education Program to attract a more balanced gender distribution than that of the existing editing community." I do think the phrase 'remarkable admission' shades into editorializing. It wasn't an admission: it's our considered strategy. As I explained at the talk, the Wikimedia Foundation is aiming to reach women who are 'one degree of separation' from the current editing community. We don't think it would be very effective to aim to reach out to, for example, elderly women, or women who are less-educated than the average current editor today. That's predicated on the assumption that not everybody is suited to editing Wikipedia or will enjoy Wikipedia, and we will therefore likely increase our success rate in recruiting women if we focus on those who share many of the characteristics of our current editing community. That's why we're focusing on outreach efforts aimed at people in post-secondary education -- because there are lots of women in post-secondary education, and our experience with for example the Public Policy Initiative tells us that, when invited to participate as part of general outreach campaigns, women do respond to that invitation. In the PPI, for example, 40-50% of people who responded to the call for Campus Ambassadors were women. So, the Wikimedia Foundation reaches out to women via our global education initiatives, because we believe it will be the most effective way to recruit female editors. I felt like the wording of the article ("remarkable admission") implied there was no rationale behind our strategy, or that I did not explain the rationale -- neither of which is actually the case.

For Kiefer.Wolfowitz: I didn't say that the editing interface was a deterrent for women only, and of course it is not -- it is a deterrent to many people. Actually, almost all of the deterrents I discussed in my talk also apply to men: I am sure that many men feel they aren't thick-skinned enough for Wikipedia, for example. But the subject of my talk was the reasons women have given for not editing Wikipedia, so that's why I focused on what women have said.

For Shearonink, yes, ϢereSpielChequers is correct. The Wikimedia Foundation's primary source for data about the gender gap is the editor survey (which you can read about here on the Wikimedia Foundation blog, or go here to read the complete survey results), not the gender flag that people can set in their Mediawiki preferences. I think the editor survey is the best source because it's anonymous, and so there is no skew in the data resulting from people not wanting to publicly disclose their gender.

Thanks Sue Gardner (talk) 20:00, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

I was also taken aback by the "remarkable admission" clause, which seems to express an editorial disdain for the Foundation's efforts. A targeted and sustained campaign of outreach and consciousness-raising is hardly a case of doing nothing specific. Sue and the Foundation are engaged in a concerted effort to influence the organic development of the community in a manner that is entirely appropriate for the relationship between the Foundation and the projects it hosts. It is hardly a remarkable admission that they are not attempting direct intervention. ~ Ningauble (talk) 17:53, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

For the record, yes, Sue, you understood my comment as I intended. :) --pfctdayelise (talk) 08:07, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

Pedants

• Perhaps unnecessary pedantry might be one of the things that we could actually do something about. Of course there are content issues and technical issues where an unusual level of exactitude are required, but some small percentage of the community do seem to see others as a collection of diffs rather than real people. Just sayin'. Rich Farmbrough, 18:38, 23 November 2011 (UTC).
  

Boobies

I think the file File:Boobies.jpg was given that name by a flickr user and automatically copied to Wikimedia Commons using that name. No nasty Wiki people involved. It is only recently that we have been able to rename files. The same problem happened with File:Strawberry Love.jpg (NSFW) which was "polluting" the search results for the word strawberry. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 21:58, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

The file was incidently renamed during the event by an attendee. Regards, Rock drum _Ba-dum^Crash 18:34, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, I was happy it was renamed: I'm grateful to whoever did that. And yeah John, I had heard it was probably a Flickr import. I wasn't trying to make the point that naming a file Boobies is a bad thing in-and-of-itself, or that people who do it are in any way nasty --- my point is just that if someone is reading an article and sees on it an image called Boobies, it might lead them to feel more like they're in a lockerroom (a comment that I've seen made by a few female readers, mostly related to image galleries on Commons userpages), rather than in an encyclopedia. Because boobies just isn't a particularly neutral, educational choice of words ;-) So I'm glad we can rename files now. Thanks Sue Gardner (talk) 22:42, 27 November 2011 (UTC)

Sue's tour

Sue also kindly stopped by to join the Wikimedia UK board meeting - you can see the video recording of this here. AndrewRT(Talk) 22:16, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

Technology report: Mumbai and Brighton hacked; horizontal lists have got class (149 bytes · 💬)

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WikiProject report: Working on a term paper with WikiProject Academic Journals (1,972 bytes · 💬)

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Great writeup. An oft-overlooked aspect of Wikipedia's coverage I'm glad has some dedicated attention! Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs^(talk) 03:34, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

• Wikisource quietly has started Wikisource:WikiProject Academic Papers and it has a little momentum, though there is some pull on the older works too. — billinghurst sDrewth 06:32, 22 November 2011 (UTC)
• For non-science journals, equivalent indexing guidelines would be the MLA Bibliography for literature, and for general periodicals Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. I'm mentioning those because unless things have changed drastically in the years since I got my B.A. in English, when it comes to the humanities educators are more concerned with getting students to read & respond to the primary texts than to introduce them to the secondary literature. (Which is the reasonI suspect most Wikipedia articles in those subject areas suck: how does one follow the rules for writing an article on, say, Watership Down if one has no idea that material may exist in Modern Language Notes or TriQuarterly?) -- llywrch (talk) 18:48, 22 November 2011 (UTC)
• Thanks for a great interview, both in terms of questions and replies. I am interested in joining forces to cover OA journals more systematically. -- Daniel Mietchen - WiR/OS (talk) 21:29, 22 November 2011 (UTC)