Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2019-04-30

Comments

The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2019-04-30. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Arbitration report: An Active Arbitration Committee (990 bytes · 💬)

← Back to 2019-04-30

Discuss this story

• Thank you for the report. If I may add one more thing, we welcomed Bradv as a full clerk. Mkdw ^talk 18:02, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

  @Mkdw: sorry, I'll add that for the next one. --DannyS712 (talk) 18:33, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

• Good luck on the next report. —pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 21:13, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Discussion report: English Wikipedia community's conclusions on talk pages (17,405 bytes · 💬)

← Back to 2019-04-30

Discuss this story

• I'm part of the team that's holding the Talk pages consultation, and I'm glad to see this writeup; it's a good summary of what's been discussed. The talk page team is currently working on a full report of findings that we hope to publish within a week or two -- bringing all of the discussions together, as well as some user tests that we've done this month. That report will wrap up Phase 1, and kick off Phase 2, where we'll talk about tradeoffs, and zero in on a product direction. Folks who are interested should watchlist the consultation page on mediawiki.org to see the report; I think it'll be interesting. I'm also available if people have questions about the consultation, or talk pages in general. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 21:27, 30 April 2019 (UTC)
  • Thanks! :) —pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 23:59, 30 April 2019 (UTC)
  • V. useful link to the Talk pages consultation. I was sorry to have completely missed the original discussion, but will be interested to see what is implemented. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 07:11, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

• The Fatal Flaw:

From the Talk pages consultation page:

"Wikimedia Foundation product teams have worked on communication tools before... By the end of this consultation, we'll have an overall product direction for a set of communication features that a product team will be able to work on in the coming fiscal year".

Before reading further, do you see the fatal flaw?

We are giving the same people who failed at a task before the job of doing it right this time. I realize that this will anger some people, but why should it? The WMF is great at running an encyclopedia. Nobody else, anywhere on earth, even comes close. However, running an encyclopedia does not magically confer the ability to create high-quality software, and the WMF has a pretty dismal track record in this area. Olympic-level athletes don't get angry when you tell them that their athletic ability does not magically confer the ability to repair automobiles or do astronomy.

One possible solution: Set aside a certain amount of money, and put out a call for third parties to solve this problem. Have the WMF pick some small number of proposals and let the community pick some small number of proposals, and pay the third parties to create prototypes of their solutions for all to try. Reduce the number by paying off and thanking the candidates that are of lower quality and giving the remaining teams more money to develop their ideas further. Finally, narrow it down to the one best solution (or decide that all the solutions suck and go back to square one with new requirements).

I have made this sort of proposal before. Inevitably someone claims that the WMF is already doing a a great job in every aspect of software development and that nothing needs to be changed. For those people I have a question:

On February 3 2006, it was reported to the WMF that our CAPTCHA system discriminates against blind people. See [ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T6845 ]. This appears to be a direct violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and leaves Wikipedia open to discrimination lawsuits.

So why, after 13 years of inaction, do we not have a set of software requirements (including a testable definition of "done"), a schedule with milestones and updates, and budget and staffing information for solving this? And if the WMF is not capable of solving it, why have we not put out a call for proposals in order to find someone who can? --Guy Macon (talk) 15:14, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Depiction of Wikimedia Foundation destroying Wikipedia with Visual Editor, Flow, and Mobile App instead of making obvious but boring improvements to what we have. —pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 12:33, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

Guy Macon: ...running an encyclopedia does not magically confer the ability to create high-quality software, and the WMF has a pretty dismal track record in this area. Olympic-level athletes don't get angry when you tell them that their athletic ability does not magically confer the ability to repair automobiles or do astronomy - thank you for this. I have been saying words to this effect for years. However, I do believe that that ACTRIAL/ACPERM was a milestone and finally brought home the message that the devs are not always right and need to listen to the community rather than impose their own management decisions without experience in crucial areas. The other issue of course is that as registered charities (and NGOs , for example) are not answerable to any shareholders, they are notorious for squandering money - easy come, easy go - as long as the paid staff get their salaries. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:55, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

ACTRIAL/ACPERM was really good. It surprised me how well it ended up. But it should not have been so hard. It should be easy to work together with the WMF from the start.

This brings to mind a related problem: Guy Macon and Kudpung could get together and discuss making some improvement to the software that runs Wikipedia. We could talk things over on a talk page, email each other, or even meet at a Starbucks and talk face to face. Likewise, WMF developer A and WMF developer B can get get together and discuss making some improvement to the software that runs Wikipedia, using any of the above forms of communication. In both cases the conversation can be completely open, with anyone throwing out possibly bad ideas for the other to tear apart.

But if a WMF developer ever dares to get together with Guy Macon or Kudpung to openly discuss making some improvement to the software that runs Wikipedia, he will be instantly fired and won't get a good reference. Developers are only allowed to communicate with the people who actually use the software on a day to day basis through the most formal -- and controllable by management -- methods. Thus we see things like the "2019 Talk pages consultation" above. And why I will never, ever, have an open conversation with any WMF developer about our 13 years of discriminating against a minority that is legally protected in the US. We will never see a set of software requirements that includes a testable definition of "done". We will never see a schedule with milestones and updates, and budget and staffing information for solving this. And we will never discuss even the possibility of putting out a call for proposals to solve this.

The sad part is that the actual people writing the code are in no way at fault for any of this. They are doing their best under the constraints they work under, and most of them -- maybe all -- are perfectly capable of creating and deploying high-quality software. The problem is the system they are embedded in. The problem is management, and it goes right to the top. --Guy Macon (talk) 07:48, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

Some readers take exception at criticisms of the WMF - who themselves claim their Executive Officer, though ...based in San Francisco, though it may be more accurate to say she lives in a metal tube in the sky, and accused The Signpost of misogyny. Such detractors would do well to read this excellent Meta-wiki essay on the dynamics of the relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and the rest of the movement by The Land - the community has a right to be informed and whether or not their work and interests are correctly represented by those whose salaries are generated by the unpaid toil of thousands. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:59, 10 May 2019 (UTC)

I'm glad people still read that essay :) Though do bear in mind that it's aimed at community members, as well as the WMF.... By the way @Guy Macon: you may have spotted that Diversity is one of the key features of the current work on the movement strategy, which means "are our projects actually accessible to blind people and if not what can we do about it" is the kind of question that is now getting serious thought. I am sure the Diversity working group would welcome you highlighting this issue. The Land (talk) 09:07, 10 May 2019 (UTC)

Done.[1] I would appreciate some of you who have commented here weighing in there.

...and it received that exact same response I got the last dozen times somebody claimed "You just aren't asking in the right place, Guy". :( --Guy Macon (talk) 16:12, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

As I have been bringing this up over the last five years or so, I have received multiple good-faith comments of the form "why don't you bring this up at X?" or "This is the wrong place for this, ask at Y". Every time I bring it up where they suggest. By my count, this is the 17th time I have done this. As Rocky once said, "That trick never works!" --Guy Macon (talk) 12:43, 10 May 2019 (UTC)

Are you talking about communication tools or the whole encyclopedia software? scope_creep^Talk 22:42, 10 May 2019 (UTC)

I think this week we should start a scoping exercise to determine what software features were a looking for in new software, get a slack group going, a Github project going and start casting around for developers. The thing that worries me is that I feel that by 2029 we will be still using the same software if things stay the same and I really think the WMF should be no longer be mentioned in the same breath as software. I am absolutely sure we can build an Open source software encyclopedia using a DevOps model approach, using volunteers software engineers thatincrementally building features using a consensus based approach to feature approval. The software isn't that complex. I think it would take less than three years. What do you think?. scope_creep^Talk 23:05, 10 May 2019 (UTC)

There are two aspects; one technical and one (for lack of a better word), "economic". It isn't really economic, but it does involve competition for limited resources.

The technical aspect is feasible. Start with a pilot run of one improvement, carefully chosen to be noncontroversial and easy to implement. Use it to put together all the details of how the team works together, what happens when team members disagree, etc. Once we have one improvement to the existing software that runs Wikipedia, we submit it to the WMF. If they accept it and add it to the software, we keep submitting new fixes until they reject one and no modification of the fix results in them accepting it. Once we get that first rejection of a good fix (which may be the first fix we submit, or may be the 1,000th) we then need to address the "economic" aspect.

The "economic" aspect is this: anyone can set up a new encyclopedia. Many have. They can copy the existing Wikipedia software, copy it and modify it, or create brand new software. They can even reuse all existing Wikipedia content. What they cannot do is make copies of the 47,429,670 registered users, 121,176 active editors and 859 administrators who, together, have made 1,220,151,249 edits, created 60,727,358 pages of all kinds and created 6,825,616 articles. A new encyclopedia is a non-starter. So, can we create an alternate front end which accepts user input and makes edits to Wikipedia? And which blocks a user when Wikipedia does, reverts vandalism when Wikipedia does, somehow adapts without breaking when Wikipedia get new features, and looks to Wikipedia exactly like a normal user -- including his IP address, browser cookies, etc. -- logging on and editing?

Feel free to create a detailed plan that addresses these issues. --Guy Macon (talk) 02:24, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

Yip. OK. We start with the current software, who guessed it. I'll start working on a plan. The scope is the UX and we need to deal with WMF. Has there been any work done on a plan, or a issues list, or potential problems list, scoping, of that ilk that you can send me, something that defines the size of the problem. Has there been any work done on it. Has there been work done on looking to partner with an external organisation that is capable of doing web-scale development and is will work with us. We need to look at the delivery models and see how they apply here. Is there impetus for actually starting the process now too get change happening now, say if I started talking to folk, put some feelers out. It not still a talking shop? Some momentum needs to be generated at the beginning to get it moving, possibly a strike to show the WMF that we are serious. It needs to be a group effort. The stability over disruption model is not something that can sustained over the long term. I was talking to a mate last night who works for Sony research and we talking about software and how it is driven by fashion and politics but mostly fashion. Its the look of new software that excites people, that newness, that makes them want to use it. Its a truism. When I look at it now I see something which is equivalent of flash. The last time I saw equivalent updates was when the menu system was reworked to look like facebook. That is astounding lack of vision. That vision that we create for a new UX, something beautiful and useful that will be updatable that will drive it. Guy Macon I see your on the WMF engineering team. Tell me what about the WMF, what is stopping them doing it themselves and have they done migration planning or have they looked at large scale feature planning/roll-out. Any research available on it? scope_creep^Talk 10:25, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

The first thing we really need is a standalone NGO called something like Wikipedia Software Foundation. With a proper legal basis that is a economic counterweight to the WMF, we can start raising funds and tie into industrial fund givers. The WMF are excellent at running Wikipedia as a product, but they are not good at delivering feature scale software as the users need on an on-demand basis. The political will is not there and unless there is some kind of change in the culture, it wont happen. The best we can hope for is to get an agreement which states they will implement the feature if editors want it and consensus for it. scope_creep^Talk 11:06, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

Re: "The best we can hope for is to get an agreement which states they will implement the feature if editors want it and consensus for it", there is zero hope of that ever happening. See User:Guy Macon/Wikimedia referrer policy, where the WMF rejected the clear consensus of the community. Your plan must include a workable method for cramming basic things like "stop discriminating against blind people" and "stop assisting marketers and spammers who want to gather data on Wikipedia users" down the throat of an unwilling and hostile WMF. --Guy Macon (talk) 16:12, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

Featured content: Anguish, accolades, animals, and art (263 bytes · 💬)

← Back to 2019-04-30

Discuss this story

• Nice layout here! -Indy beetle (talk) 19:31, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

Gallery: Notre-Dame de Paris burns (583 bytes · 💬)

← Back to 2019-04-30

Discuss this story

"Fair use" photo of Alaa Salah removed. Spirited Times. HTD.^JPDB

Sashi, I didn't quite get the connection, but in any case we can't post fair use photos here. Thanks anyway. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 21:03, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

Humour: Jimbo and Larry walk into a bar ... (2,198 bytes · 💬)

← Back to 2019-04-30

Discuss this story

So where are the jokes then? ——SerialNumber54129 17:53, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

I see a snarky joke against WMF, it's a good enough joke for me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ --qedk (t 桜 c) 21:11, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

Some of those "jokes" seem taken from WP:JOKES where there is further attribution for them. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 23:47, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

• It certainly proves the old adage, if you can't do something properly... ——SerialNumber54129 05:58, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

• Jimbo & Larry walk into a bar. The bartender asks, “Aren’t you the guys who invented Wikipedia? Jimbo replied, “Yes, I am.” ^Atsme _Talk 📧 17:18, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

• Jimbo & Larry walk into a bar (disambiguation). Eighty-nine possible meanings later, they wonder just what they were thinking?--agr (talk) 21:11, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

or, Jimbo & Larry walk into a bar (disambiguation), check the talk page to see what's going on, and see a proposal to merge Clowntown City Limits into 2 Headed Dog. Widefox; talk 11:32, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

In the media: Is Wikipedia just another social media site? (13,350 bytes · 💬)

← Back to 2019-04-30

Discuss this story

• Great article here. I'd say in terms of Wikipedia being a social media site, cooperation is a necessity here, whereas it is not on most social media websites. Facebook and Twitter do not require anyone getting along to be considered successful (just look at all of the media coverage of "X slams Y on Twitter over Z" and all the retweets each person gets), but without attempts to reach an understanding in edit debates Wikipedia would flounder. Also funny that we came up in the Mueller Report, I was not expecting that. -Indy beetle (talk) 19:20, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

• User:Indy beetle blasts User:Smallbones in the comment section over comparisons to social media. Click here to see why this matters. Argento Surfer (talk) 19:56, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

• Wikipedia is social but it not a social media site. For one thing, editors have pages of listings of their contributions preserved. Who would think of their Tweets or Facebook posts as editorial contributions? They are opinions, reactions, thoughts, memories, emotions. They are the epitome of subjectivity (for good or ill). While I think we can accept that we all have our biases, Wikipedia editors strive for objectivity, to make contributions to the collective knowledge. There are many other ways they are different but this element strikes me as being core to both of their purposes. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 21:07, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

  Liz, our Wikipedia article on social media defines it as "interactive computer-mediated technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, career interests and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks." Surely Wikipedia is devoted to the creation and sharing of information? Hawkeye7 (discuss) 22:57, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

• "Foundation staff members expect [partial blocks] to be introduced to English-language Wikipedia this year" (NYT). Is that this RfC? Or will WMF introduce it some other way? StAnselm (talk) 04:52, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

• Though not literally a social media site, there are definitely things to be learn from the problems of social media sites and their attempted solutions. Since mainspace pages are only 20%ish of the site, most of the other 80% is the goal-oriented social interaction necessary to build the encyclopedia. I'm very much looking forward to the outcomes of the Community Health strategy working group. WikiMedia projects have an opportunity to show how community-lead strategy can turn show real change from the 'toxic Wikipedian culture' news stories. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 07:00, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

• Overall this is well-written, but I have to note the irony of an article that laments personal attacks on Wikipedia, then follows that up by describing the editors on one side of a deletion debate as a "network of trolls". Korny O'Near (talk) 14:05, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

@Korny O'Near: Thanks for the compliment and for the heads up. In my defense I'll say that the description of a "network of trolls" was in Harrison's Slate article - not those exact words - but certainly the idea: Quoting:

"By this point, though, the internet trolls had descended. The Verge’s Mary Beth Griggs recounts the online harassment in grim detail. Trolls set up fake Twitter accounts and fake Instagram accounts in Bouman’s name and had the fake Bouman claim that her colleague Andrew Chael wrote 850,000 of the 900,000 lines of code that were written into the algorithm that found the black hole. ..." and it goes on in some detail.

So my fault here is in letting Harrison's description of the internet's network of trolls, being mistaken for a group of folks at Wikipedia's AFD. I haven't checked the AFD in detail to see if there were indeed trolls there - so that really is something I apologize for. I believed that this description would be taken by readers as a summary of Harrison's article. In a dozen words or so, I still think it was a pretty good, but not perfect, description of that article. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 15:54, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Maybe you should just remove that phrase? As you note, even the Slate article doesn't use that phrase to describe anyone on Wikipedia. The most it says is that some Wikipedia editors made "nasty and sexist" comments (although the one example cited doesn't seem especially nasty or sexist). Simply removing "network of trolls" would be a more accurate summary of the article. Korny O'Near (talk) 16:17, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

@Korny O'Near: - sorry for the delay in getting back. The real world sometimes gets in the way. I did replace "network of trolls" with simply "those". That does reflect my view that, while there might be a network of trolls on the internet in general working against Bouman, I haven't seen any evidence that a "network of trolls" invaded Wikipedia's AFD discussion. I don't know how well that aligns with Harrison's intention - my original reading was that he thought the 2 groups to be connected, on my 4th(?) reading now, I'm not sure of his intended message. Thanks for the feedback. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 17:49, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Looks good, thank you. Korny O'Near (talk) 22:15, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

• Efforts to broaden the definition of "social media" have a short-range political utility. The Internet used to appear uncensorable, so powerbrokers have dealt with it in a complicated multi-step plan. First, companies that were net money losers fought to gain oligarchic control over the users while accustoming them to having anything too interesting deleted. Next, they repeatedly expanded what they wouldn't allow. Governments continually chastised them for "not doing enough" while exploring the idea of not censoring speech, but censoring social media, which is to say the unsympathetic network of corporate oligarchies with a huge impact on people. This drove a lot of stupid, undesirable content e.g. racism onto the networks of the remaining sites that were more freewheeling. The next step was to call those sites "toxic cesspools" of such undesirable thought and try to wipe them out by conspiracies in restraint of trade as admiring governments looked on. And to put a finishing touch, well, any forward-looking pundit can see you have to call everything "social media" in order to "regulate" it. Pretty soon two people trying to whisper a government-disapproved fact far from microphones in a public park will be prosecuted as social media moguls... at least, unless we have the insight and strength of character to find some way to intervene, such as raising the outdoor temperature of the park to 300 degrees in the shade through judicious carbon emissions. In the meanwhile though, in the interests of obstructionism, I'd say that Wikipedia is not social media but collaborative media. The difference being that in social media a thousand people say something and then the one that most confirms their uninformed prejudices gets upvoted to the top. But on Wikipedia a thousand people say something and they edit war until a poor average is struck. Wnt (talk) 05:22, 2 May 2019 (UTC)
• On Katie Bouman, it sounds like Slate has discovered deletionists: "The debate also shows how a minority of internet encyclopedists are more concerned with disputing individual merit than creating a reference source that serves the public interest.". Though really the deletion discussion was not nearly as close as they made it sound: it was a "snow keep"! Wnt (talk) 05:38, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

The harassment of Pax Ahimsa Gethen is very disconcerting to me. I have met this editor once and we have communicated a few times. This is a thoughtful, kind, knowledgeable person and a talented photographer with much to contribute to this encyclopedia. We must take all reasonable steps to stop this harassment and welcome these contributors from marginalized communities. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 07:15, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

@Cullen328: Thanks for the kind words. I invite any readers interested in more context on my experience to check out the links on my user page. Funcrunch (talk) 18:33, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

@Funcrunch and Cullen328: Did you read the interview with Katherine Maher in this edition? She says "I don’t think most of the on-wiki policies we have today are conducive to creating safe and welcoming spaces. Far too frequently, people use our policies to walk the line while still engaging in harassing behavior." Sometimes folks at the WMF kind of mumble, sometimes there are many different sides to issues and they have to address all the sides and just end up confusing people. Maher did not mumble here, she didn't confuse anybody with this. It looks to me like the WMF - certainly the ED - wants to do something about harassment. Can you come up with what they, or we (the en:wiki community) need to do? It's time to step up to the plate. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 01:09, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

• Note: Betteridge's law of headlines is in effect for this article. —pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 21:12, 5 May 2019 (UTC)
  • Sure, questions in headlines can usually be answered "no". But I often marvel at how much like a social media site we are. And few people talk about that here. Actually I don't do Facebook, but it's impossible to avoid the characterizations of it. So it's not a yes-or-no question. More like "how far have we gone down that path?" And when the NY Times says that we're a type of social network, I think it's worth discussing. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 01:09, 6 May 2019 (UTC)
• @Chris troutman:, the "In the media" snippet on the main Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost page looks borked: "Is Wikipedia just another social media site? Harassment, a black hole, the Mueller Report, and Mötley Crüe - just another social media site?". Cut'n'paste goof from "Traffic report" section? DMacks (talk) 04:45, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

  @DMacks: I agree; I'm looking into it. Chris Troutman (talk) 12:52, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

• Comment - nice work, Smallbones - it certainly is food for thought. WP has many similarities to social media sites for the reasons mentioned above and the following key elements: anything notable can be included, anyone can edit/create content, we have user pages and treat WP as a community. While the pedia offers what most consider encyclopedic information, there are also aspects of it that make it appear more like the newspapers of yore which offered sections for news, business, sports and entertainment along with a mix of promotion and advertising. We try to eliminate the latter mix but I'm truly concerned we're losing ground because of paid editing and how far PR agencies and the like will go to accommodate paying clients. We also have our share of social justice warriors and other advocacies pounding at our doors. As they say, temptation knocks but opportunity more often rings the bell, and WP offers far too many opportunities in that regard. ^Atsme _Talk 📧 11:50, 23 May 2019 (UTC)

Interview: Katherine Maher marks 3 years as executive director (2,770 bytes · 💬)

← Back to 2019-04-30

Discuss this story

One thing I thought was truly interesting is that when asked about achievements of the community and the WMF, Maher responded exclusively with accomplishments of the editing and contributing communities and did not point to anything produced by the WMF itself. To some extent that is the fundamental question about the WMF; it is absolutely critical to facilitating the work of the community by maintaining the software, but otherwise what does it do?. Nathan ^T 00:06, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

Resource curse due to passive income must be a challenging fundamental for any organisation. Widefox; talk 11:12, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

Beyond maintaining the software, another WMF function that I think is important for supporting community is grants. I've received grants to help with edit-a-thon costs and conference travel, for instance, and they've been immensely helpful. The majority of Wikimedia contributors, however, don't come into contact with grants, and I think it's often hard to say how much WMF support (such as grants) factors into community achievements. Airplaneman ✈ 19:51, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

These were very good questions to be asking the foundation in my view, covering both their work and the largest community concerns about them. Thanks, GreyGreenWhy (talk) 10:28, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Seconded. Good questions, and good answers. Legoktm (talk) 07:26, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

• Indeed - not a meaningless set of puff questions, nor a set that might cause unneeded disputes. Nosebagbear (talk)
• I would be interested to know both what the WMF employees, and the seemingly vast myriads of consultants (also relevant for "where is the money going?") think of the functionally unique organisational structure of having both a large traditional organisational group of employees that can agree or disagree with changes, but also a massive group of individuals involved in the body that not merely could, but do, throw out advanced ideas and proposed solutions. The only functional equivalents might be some major political parties. Nosebagbear (talk) 21:27, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

News and notes: An action-packed April (1,143 bytes · 💬)

← Back to 2019-04-30

Discuss this story

No mention of the DYK April Fools? The C of E God Save the Queen! (talk) 18:10, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

@The C of E: I liked the zombie activist one. It must have been a bunch of work for the April Fools' DYK noms/schedule. Clovermoss (talk) 03:40, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

Tell me about it @Clovermoss:! For something that is supposed to be fun, there is such a frustrating number of obstacles put in the way by people who don't share your sense of humour. The C of E God Save the Queen! (talk) 08:01, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

News from the WMF: Can machine learning uncover Wikipedia’s missing “citation needed” tags? (7,308 bytes · 💬)

← Back to 2019-04-30

Discuss this story

• How will this change affect articles on philosophy, interpretive social sciences, and the humanities? Many articles in those areas could be improved with better citations, but some articles have fairly solid coverage without many citations beyond the few books that are being discussed. This article says that "opinions" need citations while "book plots" do not. Where do interpretive synopses of complex works fall into this? Often, insufficient book reviews exist for coverage of a humanities/social science text for the article to focus on quoting reviews (though this is usually recognized as best practice), so interpretation is necessary for much of these works, which may look a lot like opinions.
  
  I guess I'm just worried that half of humanities wikipedia will become "unverified," or worse, "unverifiable," overnight, if the ML algorithms' sensitivity is set just a little too high, or it never gets trained on H/SS articles.- - mathmitch7 ^{(talk/contribs)} 19:04, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

• Mathmitch7 This is an interesting point. Although there's no cause to be worried because there has been no "change"—no new products have been developed, no community policies have been changed. If a wiki decided to adopt this technology (for example, in a new kind of CitationBot), then they would have control over implementation. If WMF decided to incorporation citation need predictions into a MediaWiki feature or something (and there are currently no plans to do that), then they would be suggestions, not mandates. Individual wikis still determine what notability and verifiability mean. Cheers, Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 15:29, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

• Other comments have mentioned the humanities, but I work extensively in the biology projects and you might be surprised at just how many unsourced or poorly-sourced claims there are. I don't generally work with our best articles, to be fair, but this is a problem for all of enwiki--NOT just the humanities. Honestly, while I do think that this kind of tool would be extremely helpful for us in figuring out what needs citations, I also think it is the cart leading the horse. The problem with lacking citations has NEVER been that people don't understand when we need them. Sure, there are plenty of inexperienced editors who just cobble an idea together without sources because they don't know better. But I would argue strongly that the bottleneck has always been that finding and citing refs is a pain in the rear. There, I said it. What I really think that WMF should focus on to solve the WP:V problem is making research and citation easier. Look at what Microsoft and Google have been doing with their word-processing software. I think we should be BOLD and consider ideas like having research tools built into the editing interface, including (for starters) links to other WMF resources. Many journals and other sources actually create citations for you automatically, now, but they are in different formats. What about machine-learning tools to reformat citations semi-automatically (reviewed by a person) and strip information out of them? What about redesigning the code editor to improve syntax highlighting to make it easier to see refs or easier to see article text, depending on need? Those are all ways which I think would directly support the goals of WP:V very well. Don't get me wrong. I like the citation checking concept. But it isn't any good without a way to dramatically increase the amount of sourcing by editors, especially the less-dedicated. Prometheus720 (talk) 02:45, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

• This! I think that's a great idea. Sometimes articles already point in a direction of a citation but don't connect all the dots ... I think ML could definitely help us out with that!
  My only potential concern (which could be mitigated!) is definitely about citational politics: it seems that an ML system would likely point us toward the already over-cited resources, instead of new resources that could substantially contribute to an article. I don't think that's a problem per se, just a new technical/political challenge to consider. How do we point people toward quality resources that aren't widely used? How do we know they're quality if they're not widely used? Maybe there's a cultural reason they're not used (i.e., pseudoscience that has all the packaging of legit science but supports totally bogus claims that most people already know are to be avoided). Just a thought! - - mathmitch7 ^{(talk/contribs)} 03:11, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

• @Mathmitch7: I actually was referring to just reformatting citations. Throw at it some citations with all the info needed of various types of sources, and then say, "Here, clean these up and make them look the same." Even better, it could actually follow the doi or other link and collect any additional information which might be needed, or perhaps even go out and find a doi link. I would not want to use machine learning to find new citations. That would be dicey as you pointed out. Prometheus720 (talk) 16:09, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

• Pages about citations:

• User:Greg L/Sewer cover in front of Greg L’s house
• User:Guy Macon/On the Diameter of the Sewer cover in front of Greg L’s house

--Guy Macon (talk) 15:49, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Why are the images in this article... images? For someone using a screen reader, or with images turned off, they provide no information. The image at the top of the article is decorative, fine. The distribution of reason labels might be difficult to turn into a text explanation. Understandable.

But 'Reasons for adding a citation', 'Reasons for not adding a citation', and 'Examples of sentences that need citations according to our model, with key words highlighted': Why are these images and not text? All three could be communicated as effectively in text, without the accessibility failure. The first two are especially bad. There's no good reason for these to be images and not text. If you (the people who wrote the article, the people who created or added the images, the Signpost editors) thought about this and made the decision to use images rather than text, why did you not add alt text?

I would fix it myself were I more expert in the use of Commons and editing of image files here. That wouldn't, however, change the copies of Signpost that are on talk pages or in other locations.

Please read the section on images on the Accessibility page of the Manual of Style, and please, don't do this again. BlackcurrantTea (talk) 05:28, 13 May 2019 (UTC)

Opinion: The gaps in our knowledge of our gaps (18,821 bytes · 💬)

← Back to 2019-04-30

Discuss this story

• I think that continuing to analyze other demographic lines among our editors would actually make each representation challenge much easier to solve. For example, we have identified the lack of women editors--but is it totally a lack of women editors, or is it partially due to another factor such as age, income, disposable time, education, and so on which is represented by proxy in women? We don't know 'which' women are editing Wikipedia, and we also don't know which women are not. We don't know who to target because we don't know who the low-hanging fruit are. I'm not even sure we know what really attracts people to Wikipedia in the first place. I dare to say that Wikipedia is one of the most overlooked places on the entire internet. I am very much interested in any research teasing out these factors, and if the WMF designed an opt-in census to answer some of these questions, I would be all over it. We don't just need more women editors or African editors. We need more editors just to maintain and continue to build the content which is already well-represented. Prometheus720 (talk) 02:33, 1 May 2019 (UTC)
• Oral knowledge is almost entirely unrepresented. This does not only affect indigenous knowledge of a myriad of African / South American / Asian population groups but also stuff right in front of the noses of the first world: Areas where knowledge and skills transfer is demonstrative or narrative are barely covered as overview, see e.g. Drumming, a redirect to Drum with no coverage at all of drumming as a performing art, or Scouting, an article describing the organisations with no detail on the skill and knowledge set obtained. --Pgallert (talk) 09:04, 1 May 2019 (UTC)
  • @Pgallert: I'm sure you've considered this already, but wouldn't this lead to a scandal when somebody puts in vandalism and sources it to "oral knowledge"? I could see it being extremely offensive if some high school idiot decides to make up shit about some African culture, source it to "oral knowledge", and this is only discovered 5 years later. (Yes, people can already invent fake written sources right now, but at least that can theoretically be checked much faster if it comes under dispute.) SnowFire (talk) 10:42, 3 May 2019 (UTC)
    • Perhaps there is something to learn from how oral historians deal with this situation. Richard Nevell (talk) 10:56, 3 May 2019 (UTC)
      • I agree, this sounds like a solved problem--just not a problem which most of us are trained to deal with. I would also defer to folklorists and oral historians and so on to improve how Wikipedia handles this issue. Prometheus720 (talk) 14:14, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

Jar'Edo Wens would like to have a word with you. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 01:32, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

@SnowFire: The idea is not to reference it generally to "oral sources", but to a specific narrator, occasion, place, and time. See the last reference in Wikipedia:Oral citations experiment/Articles/Otjinene for an example. My main argument is that such reference would in principle be verifiable by going there again and asking, as opposed to gossip which of course exists in oral cultures as well. --Pgallert (talk) 04:29, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

@Pgallert and Bobbyshabangu: one thing that would help with verification would be to have some sort of depository or depositories of audio or video or transcripts to "prove" verifiability. I like Bobbyshabangu's idea of uploading audio to Commons, but I can see Common's admins having problems with it - e.g. how do they know the 30 minute tape is what it claims to be? Maybe WikiSource would work. Or how about working with a library? Depositing 10 tapes wouldn't be much of a hassle (in theory), but if you got 5,000 tapes it certainly would be. And who to allow to deposit the tapes. This is getting into the area of what oral historians probably have done already and have guidelines, best practices, etc. Maybe have a conference where you (or they) train interviewers over two days, discuss specific problems. Oral histories are actually pretty common. In the US I've seen internet depositories for things like African-American history of Delaware (audio), chemists (mostly video). There's a UK site that has a lot of authors, scientists, and cultural figures. The US government (WPA?) did oral histories of former slaves back in the 1930s (in book form now). So it can be done in a systematic, verifiable way. And don't forget Studs Terkel (radio host, author) Smallbones_(smalltalk) 03:27, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

@Pgallert:. I noticed that although you have done oral citation draft on Otjinene, it didn't get incorporated into the mainspace article. Was there some sort of pushback from the community or other challenges? Or simply because it became low on the priority and kind of forgotten about it? OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 20:08, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

@OhanaUnited: One of the conditions of the WMF grant was to restrict this experiment to non-mainspace in order not to be seen as influencing policy. But there is also community reluctance; you're actually the first editor to mention that we should use this reference. --Pgallert (talk) 12:01, 21 May 2019 (UTC)

@Pgallert: I think you misunderstood. I didn't say, recommend or conjecture that the community should use this reference. I merely asked what happened to it. Can you cross out that inaccurate statement? OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 19:42, 21 May 2019 (UTC)

Your answer already clarifies... but as you wish. --Pgallert (talk) 05:08, 22 May 2019 (UTC)

• I (being a long-term female editor) have tried repeatedly to engage women of my acquaintance in editing Wikipedia with no success of which I'm aware. This is largely among highly educated, English- & computer-literate women, otherwise covering a fairly broad spectrum of age, geographic location, first language, work sector, &c. There's difficulty in engaging with the technical tools, even among those who act as webmasters on other sites. There's a strong sense that editing is for other people (not necessarily men). There's a belief (not unjustified) that Wikipedia isn't interested in their concerns. There's a sense that it's a toxic environment for women. Probably much more detailed information is needed, but not so much for the relatively few women who succeed in carving a niche here as a long-term editor, but for the many who don't even hit the edit button. Espresso Addict (talk) 13:15, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

@Espresso Addict: - an interesting comment. I can't think how to do so diplomatically, but perhaps some research into our experienced female editors as to why they felt they were able to participate and if there's any common factors we could use to guide at least initial efforts to expand the demographic? Nosebagbear (talk) 11:03, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

• I would *love* to see regular demographic analysis done by the Foundation (and/or independent researchers support by the Foundation) and pitched a project like this to research foundations in the UK a few years ago. The idea was to canvas ideas on what to analyse from a broad range of stakeholders and conduct an annual (random) survey that adds new questions that can be pitched to the research team before the annual survey. The important thing is not the breadth of variables from the beginning but rather that we have some important variables that we know already would be useful to track. hfordsa (talk) 07:18, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

  @Hfordsa: what was the reception when you pitched your project to research foundations? Was your having less than 150 edits on the English Wikipedia seen as a disadvantage, or more as a positive thing? When you say that you would love to see "independent researchers support by the Foundation (sic)", would that involve financial support? And if so, how would that work? MPS1992 (talk) 21:57, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

Not specific to this article, a general observation. The jeremiads (which this article is not, as it has some actual data instead of overwrought ranting) on these gaps ignores what is to me a self-evident point. Wikipedia by its very nature thrives on above-average intelligent, socially-maladjusted people (as I am, anyone who's seen me at a meetup will readily attest) willing to spill reams of ink/electrons. It's a very solitary activity by its nature, involving a lot of working with machines. People come pre-programmed with certain inclinations (belief in pseudo-creationist blank slate nonsense notwithstanding), and the aforementioned traits are unevenly distributed in men/boys. And the way the world works men like me are more likely to have the time and resources to edit, which no amount of policy changes will change.
Now, this is not to argue against outreach, but rather these points. First, outreach that actively alienates the core user base here is simple self-destruction. Treating existing users as fungible dirt, their experience be damned, will backfire. Second, perhaps the world can adjust to us just a bit. Maybe, just maybe, we aren't always the source of the problem, and some other people could loosen up and try things our way. Wikipedia got this far as it is, so why exactly should uninformed outsiders hold us hostage; just maybe those of us who've been around have a few decent ideas which have kept things together. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 02:31, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

• I'm not sure I agree entirely. As Ritchie333 has pointed out repeatedly, WiR has largely been the exception to the going narrative that Wikipedia (as much of the internet) is a nasty place with a hostile in-group, and the only way you make it into the in-group is to go through the online hazing afforded to most new contributors. It's frankly the most collaborative place on the project. I think a lot of that has to do with a focus on outreach, and a continuity of culture that continues to support these users once they transition into the "online only" portion of community participation, which is where most of the work takes place. There may be a lot of reasons WiR has successfully fostered this organizational culture that we so often find lacking in the rest of the project, but whatever those reason are, we should be trying to emulate them everywhere else. GMG^talk 14:38, 21 May 2019 (UTC)

  @The Blade of the Northern Lights: I see no reason why editing Wikipedia should be a solitary endeavor or why it should look anything like it does today. As an actual new editor, I can agree with GMG that WiR and its associated projects have generally been uplifting and interesting places for me to do my work. That is saying something, given that I originally had no intention of doing much biographical work due to its difficulties. It has energy and movement behind it--much of the rest of enwiki feels old, neglected, and crumbling. The entire website screams 2000s when we are in the 2010s, and soon to be in 2020. This may sound harsh, but if this project was not so useful, it never would have survived. The way it has been managed has been atrocious. Well meaning, it seems, but atrociously executed. The onboarding process is terrible. Sure, you can learn from the tutorials how to do basic editing tasks, but if you want REAL help, you can use this strange talk page system that no other website uses to ask questions at TH or the pump, or you can spend HOURS reading pages of bureaucratic nonsense. Even then, many types of tasks really are not explained well, such as the proper use of HotCat or how to write a good Shortdesc. The adoption process is awful--I actually found someone who works well but he is terribly busy. Wikiprojects as a whole are designed so poorly that many have members lists hundreds long, but fewer than 10 active users. Wikiproject X isn't even that innovative conceptually--it's really just bringing Wikipedia more into line with modern standards of design and usability. WiR to me represents the baseline of what Wikipedia should be in most places. In an optimal world, WiR would get a B grade. Totally acceptable, but not the cutting edge. Instead, it is the cutting edge. And that is disappointing to me, deeply. I have read through the last several RfAs, and you know what? They are atrocious. The way people are treated during those thoroughly turned me off of pursuing that path. Character assassination is the best way to describe it. I'm not interested in that. I see rampant deletionism and inclusionism battles, a lack of translation support tools (I have gripes about the beta feature), a focus on template-editing instead of being bold, and a horrible onboarding process which almost seems designed more to inflate the egos of the people who have gone through it than to actually help people edit. I do not think that alienating the tiny group of editors who have been here for a long time is a particularly serious threat given the enormity of the potential recruits out there. Forget policy changes. What really needs to happen is that WMF needs to invest time and resources into making editing significantly easier, and it needs to be bold and start teching up. Many of the gadgets we rely on as a community need to be formally part of the editing process. Rater, HotCat, PetScan, and so on--these tools need more buy-in in the site design. Frankly many of the gadgets should be opt-out rather than opt-in. So much of the work on Wikipedia could be semi-automated--we could be having scripts do article assessments, short descriptions, categorizing, adding to Wikiprojects, sending dynamic notifications to project members--the works. That has nothing to do with women specifically, but that's ok. In combination with outreach, cleaning up the editing process should do wonders. Just my two cents. Prometheus720 (talk) 07:29, 23 May 2019 (UTC)

In generalities I don't think we're actually terribly far apart on a lot of things. Wikipedia is way hard to edit, and minus my abnormal (thanks ASD...) focus I probably wouldn't have figured it out. It is byzantine to break into, and often unnecessarily so. (Seemingly paradoxically I think it's partly from entrenched unwillingness to ease users in; I was the one who touched off what became ACTRIAL, and I ended up vindicated beyond even the measures I thought I'd be) Giving people a chance to figure things out is essential; as a specific example I remember when a small discussion made HotCat on by default, and because no one tried to train new users it went horribly wrong. And yes, RfA is generally a disaster (albeit one I got through unscathed, for reasons I don't quite get) and WikiProjects (MILHIST aside) are mostly worthless. I have no idea how to fix these problems, but they are real.
That said, for all the issues we have, I do believe those of us who've put out what's here (and in my case, to be brutally honest I pissed away a few years of my life doing so; my own fault, Wikipedia was only a medium) deserve better than to be cast as interchangeable jerkoffs who've accidentally stumbled into making a great resource for the world. All too often external coverage of Wikipedia does just that, to say nothing of the bile directed at us here (my most recent favorite was an invitation to commit suicide, thankfully I seem to be one of the few people who can see the humor in it instead of blaming some societal ill). As many people as there are who legitimately could be excellent assets, from my personal experience I remain thoroughly unconvinced that we're always the problem; the oft-repeated Randy cliche aside, self-styled experts have done plenty to make a mess of things (look here if you dare). Conversely, I'm hardly a prolific content creator, but what I have done is way outside the stereotype outsiders seem to want to shoehorn current Wikipedia editors into. And, at least in my experience, research is by its nature solitary; I hunt down material, read through it, and have to work very hard to collate it into something useful. I wish it was more social, that'd do me some world of good not to be the lonely dilettante at the library/screen, but that's how it's always gone for me.
This article does a good job of explaining the usefulness of outreach, to be sure, and I've helped with it at a few events. It's actually a lot of fun IRL, at least for me. Easier editing would make it much more attractive to so many of the people I've worked with. And at the same time, saying "we need to clean house, so join us and never mind the experience of everyone who's already here" strikes me as a very... odd... way of trying to get someone interested. I certainly wouldn't want to join some effort in which the front consisted of exuberant praise for newcomers and loud bitching about the long-term participants. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 07:53, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

Recent research: Female scholars underrepresented; whitepaper on Wikidata and libraries; undo patterns reveal editor hierarchy (7,748 bytes · 💬)

← Back to 2019-04-30

Discuss this story

• The quantitative data analysis in the paper by Schellekens, Holstege and Yasseri is pretty stark: whether you look at physics, economics or philosophy, a man active in one of those fields is considerably more likely - as much as twice as likely - to have a Wikipedia article as a woman. There is a clear selection effect or systemic bias at work. It is not just that there are fewer women active in these fields, or that women are less prominent: even for people of equivalent accomplishment, a man is significantly more likely to have a Wikipedia article than a woman. (That said, we didn't have an article on George Smith (chemist) until he won the Nobel prize last year, and we still don't have an article on the Stanford professor Tony Heinz, the only remaining redlinked former president of The Optical Society.)

  However, it is not correct to say that an article on Donna Strickland was "first deleted in 2014 due to lack of relevance". An article was deleted in 2014 as a copyvio. As far as I am aware, no one created a new article until a WP:AFC draft article in March 2018, which was rejected in May 2018 for lack of independent sourcing (see Draft:Donna Strickland). No one said she was not notable or lacked "relevance", whatever that means, let alone deleted an article for that reason. The Signpost from last year includes several articles discussing what happened at some length - for example - so I am surprised to see the events being misrepresented in this report.

  And now we have the debate around the article on Clarice Phelps, with its intersection of ethnicity and gender, which has reached its second DRV... 213.205.240.174 (talk) 16:01, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

• @213.205.240.174, Bluerasberry, ThomasNiebler, and HaeB: - (sorry for multi-ping, didn't know who wrote what) - "relevance" is indeed an odd choice of words. The original version was indeed deleted for copyright, and the link the deletion writing sits on goes to the declined draft, not the deleted article, linking to both the draft and the article's log history would seem reasonable. I disagree on the specific Strickland case (premised on AfC rules), but yes, this very interesting article was indeed a clear statement that it's not merely a paucity of sources that's leading to under-representation, the fault lies here, too. Nosebagbear (talk) 22:31, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

@Nosebagbear: "Relevance" does seem incorrect. You seem to have thought this through. We are a newspaper but still also a wiki - would you be comfortable correcting the text? Blue Rasberry (talk) 23:21, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

@Bluerasberry: - hi, I've made some changes in what I believe was a neutral fashion - please let me know if I've either failed with that or there are any copyediting errors. Nosebagbear (talk) 09:49, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

@Nosebagbear: I checked what you did. This is great! Wikipedia editors know that we do not judge "relevancy". We judge "notability" by the community-designed definition. Thanks for the changes. Blue Rasberry (talk) 10:39, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

I've seen "wp:undue" used all the time as a form of judging relevance on Wikipedia. AugusteBlanqui (talk) 11:59, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

Thanks Nosebagbear! I have also added a link to the Signpost's earlier coverage for fuller background.

We usually avoid changing the content of Signpost articles after publication, but corrections of this sort are a worthwhile exception.

Re "didn't know who wrote what" - there is a separate byline for each review (right below the section heading, I agree it's a bit confusing with the overall bylines on top), in this case Thomas authored it. But I should have caught this too, as the editor of this section / the research newsletter. Regards, HaeB (talk) 18:18, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Yes I spotted that in my most recent read and self-trouted myself! Nosebagbear (talk) 19:21, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

"Self-trouted". That's a phrase I wish I'd heard before. Nicely done. SchreiberBike | ⌨  19:50, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

I'm late to the party, but could "was declined by Articles for Creation for failing AfC notability rules" be changed to "was declined by Articles for Creation for failing to demonstrate notability"? This clarifies that, despite what about a million journalists have reported, no-one ever decided that Strickland was not notable enough for an article. The problem was that a particular draft did not adequately demonstrate notability. Adrian J. Hunter^{(talk•contribs)} 05:37, 10 May 2019 (UTC)

@Adrian J. Hunter: - my word choice did attempt to clarify that point - it doesn't do it particularly well (unless you already are a Wikipedian) but I'm not sure yours would clarify the point either Nosebagbear (talk) 08:19, 10 May 2019 (UTC)

• Love this column! The "Female scholars" study is really interesting. One methodological aspect I'd like to know more about is how they determined the existence of a Wikipedia article for a given researcher. Based on section C of page 3, it sounds like they may have just used the Wikipedia API to check for the existence of an article (or redirect) for "Jane Smith" or whatever the name was. If so, couldn't their results be caused (or at least confounded) by the fact that Wikipedia has more articles about men as a whole, and therefore a male scholar with a low h-index is more likely to get a false positive match for someone with the same name who does have an article? This would also be consistent with their finding regarding the negative interaction effect, which "suggests that Wikipedia's bias towards men is strongest among scientists with relatively low indexes". They mention manually checking the article-lookup results for 30 people and finding no errors, but I imagine an error rate of less than ~1 in 30 could still have a significant effect with a sample size of 15k. I'd love to get my hands on the data and poke around. One way you could try to address this would be to check the existence of an article for the given name, and verify that it's categorized somewhere under the umbrella of Category:Scholars and academics? Or they could grep the article's text for the name of the scholar's institution (which they have from Google Scholar). Maybe they already did something like that? Though I feel they probably would have mentioned it. Colin M (talk) 18:11, 6 May 2019 (UTC)