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The Signpost: 23 March 2016

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Is the Foundation a starship or a chatbot adjacent to a female horse named Gaia?

@Nocturnalnow: recently called control of the Foundation the "wheel of this starship." I think that metaphor is an understandable first attempt, but flawed. We shouldn't be asking who's giving orders, but rather who is most likely to not say things that turn the chatbot to destroy all humans mode. 174.29.40.217 (talk) 14:29, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

Centaurides, plural. EllenCT (talk) 02:29, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Networks of Power, Degrees of Freedom

Networks of Power, Degrees of Freedom, published in International Journal of Communication 5 (2011), 721-755.

Key quote (condensed):

"When we speak, then, of networked society or networked economy, we are speaking primarily about an understanding of a particular historical moment when computer-mediated networks of information and communications have come to play a particularly large role.

As with other moments experienced as major transformations, this moment too has generated its own utopias and dystopias, but more important, it has also produced hopes and fears.

The fears range from the creation of a much more thoroughly instantiated surveillance society, where everything we do is visible to the state and/or to one or more major corporate behemoths; to a cyber-terrorism Armageddon; to a loss of community and identity; and to a fragmentation of the public sphere.

The hopes include an unleashing of new, higher-velocity innovation and increased growth, government transparency and accountability; and radical individual freedom from the state and corporate power."

--Guy Macon (talk) 21:06, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Higher velocity innovation has occurred in consumer electronics, but what other sectors? Pre-internet growth was substantially larger than post-internet. In 1983-1985 it was 5.3%. This year it's been around 1% so far. We can't even get transparency from nonprofit boards, let alone government. All of these factors are dwarfed by the massive deflation in the energy sector as renewables drop under grid parity.[2] The good news is that energy prices underpin the commodities and manufacturing in almost all products. The bad news is that price increases have been occurring in the services: postsecondary education, health care, and retirement finance, as reflected in the lack of investments with the kind of returns on which the shift from defined benefit pensions to 401(k) plans and IRAs was predicated. EllenCT (talk) 22:26, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Okun and Rand: error dispassionate and impassioned

Jimbo, in this recent exchange, you wrote that you have minimal interest in income inequality and economic growth. Here's why I think you should have more:

1. "In 2010 elite opinion somehow coalesced around the view that deficits, not high unemployment and weak growth, were the great problem facing policy makers. There was never any evidence for this view [because] low interest rates showed that markets weren’t at all worried about debt. But never mind — it was what all the important people were saying, and all that you read in much of the financial press. And few politicians were willing to challenge this orthodoxy. Most notably, those who should have stood up for public spending suffered a striking failure of nerve. Britain’s Labour Party, in particular, essentially accepted Conservative claims that the nation was facing a fiscal crisis, and was reduced to arguing at the margin about what form austerity should take." -- Paul Krugman 23 October 2015 (emphasis added.)
2. "Not all prosocial behaviours are motivated by empathy. Cooperation, for instance, is a fundamental aspect of all biological systems from bacteria to primates, and seems to follow a very simple rule: natural selection favours cooperation, if the benefit of the altruistic act, b, divided by the cost, c, exceeds the average number of neighbours, k, which means ${b \over c}>k$. In this case, cooperation can evolve as a consequence of ‘social viscosity’ [1,] and not as a consequence of empathy explicitly." -- Decety et al. (2015).
3. "On occasion, Bernie comes up with libertarian views when he talks about taking away the cronyism on Wall Street, so in essence he’s right, and occasionally he voted against war." -- former Texas congressman Ron Paul 5 February 2016 ("when asked if there was a candidate who was truly for the free market.")
4. "When you have the top 1% getting money, they spend 5-10% of what they earn. When you have the lower end of the economy getting money, they spend 100-110% of what they earn. As you've had a transfer of wealth to the top and a transfer of income to the top, you have a shrinking consumer base basically, and you have a shrinking velocity of money. Bernie is the only person out there who I think is talking at all about both fiscal stimulation and banking rules that will get the banks to begin to generate lending again as opposed to speculation." -- "Gordon 'greed is good' Gecko inspiration" Asher Edelman 9 March 2016 (watch the co-panelists' reaction to this opinion here)

The right wing in both the US and UK has become so extreme that much of it is now on what had been called the extreme left since the 1975. I continue to maintain that Art Okun's error had much to do with the rise of supply side economics in intellectual circles, and the novels of Ayn Rand did the same in the popular reading pastime materials of the era.

And I continue to maintain that you are in a unique historical position to do something substantial and long lasting about it. I wish I could say exactly what. EllenCT (talk) 06:58, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

And I continue to believe that I'm not well situated to speak publicly about an issue where I have neither expertise nor a public perception of relevance.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:26, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Doesn't the first quote directly pertain to the dynamics of the social circles you've chosen to move in since your move to the UK? EllenCT (talk) 12:44, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Not that I can see. I pretty sure you know nothing of my social circles, really. Don't make assumptions!--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:48, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Well, I'm not saying any of it is your fault, and I'm sorry if I assumed you still hung out with trickle downers and those who believe they are entitled to resort to political oppression or economic repression. But I'm sure if you chose to do the kind of survey of the totality of the peer reviewed literature reviews that you expect of your editors, you would see that you can have a positive effect. EllenCT (talk) 17:18, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

I don't believe I have ever "hung out with trickle downers and those who believe they are entitled to resort to political oppression or economic repression". I mean, I may have at some point, I'm not really sure of the exact political beliefs of all my friends. You seem to have some very funny ideas about either my beliefs or how I spend my time socially.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:40, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

You're one of the very few Internet celebrities worth corresponding with. I can't stop imagining a world in which you give a Davos speech on the flawed roots of trickle down, so all the billionaires who would have been even more wealthy in purchasing power terms if they hadn't spent so much lobbying for greed can all go outside and burn Okun and Rand effigies in the snow, and then come back inside and pull the strings to get back to whatever [3] would look like if [4] had fewer inflection points. Maybe you can condense it all down to an elevator pitch. I would even go so far as to suggest that the solution is such a win-win that the blue line on this graph need not decrease for the green line to continue increasing past all time highs. EllenCT (talk) 02:05, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

To EllenCT: What's the problem? This guy is not trying to get elected. He use some time to promote Wikipedia. He is not Jesus and he would probably be better off if he had focused on making money on this. And regarding inequality: I do consider it a major problem, but the best way to combat this in Wikipedia is to lift the quality of the project, not pester Wales with what he should do - or not. So forget about him, you and I should improve some article. Ulflarsen (talk) 15:39, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

It's not about the editors, but the quality of the articles. As much as Jimbo says he doesn't have an opinion or want to express them, he certainly has. Why should I spend time arguing with other editors who cite Jimbo as an authority when I could be asking him to improve his opinion here? EllenCT (talk) 15:53, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

I live in Norway. We follow the US presidential campaign, and we all have our ideas about it, but I don't think Wales should get into it. Again - inequality of income and wealth is a huge issue, as seen from the latest issue of Foreign Policy, but should Wales in any way interfer? I think not. He is just one among many, he is not elected and the act of starting Wikipedia gives him no special knowledge in this question.

If you think it is a problem (as I do) that a minor part of the world population own the most of its riches, then the best you can do here is to show it, in articles based on hard facts. Ulflarsen (talk) 17:41, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

I'm not suggesting that Jimbo interfere with US elections (although, unless he's renounced his US citizenship, I have every right to try to persuade him to, and I think trying to do so is a noble ideal) but I suggest there are many more ways to be prosocial on the Internet besides documenting the truth; documenting the way that the truth has been brushed aside in favor of trickle down propaganda, for one. But I'm also interested in the game theory aspects of the economics of cooperation, as I believe has been a long-running topic of discussion among wikipedians and their researchers. EllenCT (talk) 16:20, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

I am trying to imagine the sort of argument you might be in where an opponent cites Jimbo as an authority. I can imagine this happening if you are debating the history of Wikipedia, but my impression is that your area of interest is economics, and Jimbo has stated above this isn’t an area of expertise for him. Attempting to sway Jimbo’s views on subjects seems like an inappropriate use of resources. Why not point out to your opponents that invoking Jimbo’s authority is unlikely to be a valid argument if the subject is economics?--S Philbrick(Talk) 15:32, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

You apparently don't know the tag team I collected in the past two years. I'll try to find a diff. In the mean time, have a look at Talk:Economic growth#Evisceration of secondary literature in favor of primary sources et seq. please. EllenCT (talk) 02:05, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

These are all marginal issues. They aren't particularly relevant to real wealth growth which is industrial and technical. Think longer than last years income in the century time frames. The wealthy steam train industrialists - earned many times over their workers. Yet, travel was horse and plane. Indoor plumbing? Electricity? refrigeration, central heating and cooling? Instant news? recorded entertainment? Medical care? Income inequality over near term is simply a wedge issue that doesn't drive real improvement and takes focus away from the drivers of wealth gain which is innovation and efficiency. As long as wealth is being created (and yes, indoor plumbing, cure for polio, heating and cooling, etc are creations of wealth) the immediate redistribution of money is irrelevant. Would you rather be the richest person in 1800 or middle-class today? In 100 years, they will see us all as poor. --DHeyward (talk) 11:33, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Income distribution is a larger determinant of growth than most of the other factors traditionally attributed to it (see Chart 4 here.) But I agree with you that the primary drivers of growth are technology and development. However, with increasing inequality comes increasing privatization of research and development, which severely inhibits the pace of technology advances. Public R&D spending is a small fraction of what it was during the US's postwar growth period in the 1940s-60s. (See [5] but understand that in the 1940s, the federal portion was much larger than the left hand side of the graph implies.) When wealth measured by dollars concentrates, wealth measured by patents successful in the marketplace concentrates, too. And as patents concentrate in the hands of a few, you see the increase in pharmaceutical costs, lawyers displacing developers in software, and many similar inhibitory feedbacks. Those issues are enormous, not marginal. And the push-back that many editors (not just me) get from people who ignore these factors is exactly why I was trying to engage with Jimbo about the realities of the effects of finance industry size[6][7] and college administrations[8][9] on the cost of formal education, because it has become the largest and fastest growing component of median family spending. Jimbo is a sought-after speaker on developments in contemporary education, and his supply side baggage is both a problem and an opportunity. EllenCT (talk) 17:29, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

I would disagree and say that income distribution is an output of growth, not an input. Wealth is created. Your chart of R&D spending as a percentage of GDP is interesting because it doesn't plot GDP which grew very rapidly. Federal spending on R&D didn't decline even in inflation adjusted dollars (with notable exceptions in 2009 where it did decline in real dollars but the chart shows an increase as a % of GDP because GDP tanked even harder). It didn't rise as fast as GDP did and the fact that private research climbed faster than GDP is another indication of wealth creation. Your very near term measure of concentration fails to realize the overall benefit. It's easier to see when we look back on industrialists and technologists. A world with the internet and billionaire Bill Gates is a better place than before that disparity. A world with trains and wealthy industrialists was a better place than before trains. A world with a polio vaccine and the ability to fund scientists is a better place. The idea that the benefit hinged on whether Jonas Salk became wealthy or that the input is wealth is not supported, only that benefits are created and the output distribution of wealth is largely irrelevant when looking at the larger picture of overall wealth creation. Wealth is not a zero sum game and the argument that the poorest 1st world people are better off than the richest 1st worlders of only a few generations ago is very real. --DHeyward (talk) 21:18, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

The Internet was funded by the public, and Bill Gates is the poster boy for anticompetitive practices. I agree, trains and vaccines are great, and look forward to the new generation of hyperloops. What do you think of [10]? EllenCT (talk) 22:35, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Related questions: is Piketty's $r>g$ from Capital in the Twenty-First Century related to Adam Smith's tendency of the rate of profit to fall ("TRPF") as a cause? If the proportion of surplus labor extracted as profit required to be returned to labor is the fundamental extent of regulation determining position along the continuum from pure capitalism to socialism, then what is the optimal value for that proportion and how should it be transferred? Clearly the optimal value depends on the wealth of both the capital and labor involved in the transaction, which is not so strange because most OECD people have bracketed income taxation. And profits in the US, by the way, are way up since Ronald Regan's second term, but not capacity utilization.

And the four quotes above are just the first in a series, e.g.,

“ There was a time when I would talk about a difference between 'makers' and 'takers' in our country, referring to people who accepted government benefits. But as I spent more time listening, and really learning the root causes of poverty, I realized I was wrong. 'Takers' wasn’t how to refer to a single mom stuck in a poverty trap, just trying to take care of her family. Most people don't want to be dependent. And to label a whole group of Americans that way was wrong. I shouldn’t castigate a large group of Americans to make a point. So I stopped thinking about it that way—and talking about it that way. But I didn’t come out and say all this to be politically correct. I was just wrong. ”

-- Paul Ryan March 23, 2016. EllenCT (talk) 17:19, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

“ If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when. ”

-- technology venture capitalist Nick Hanauer, 2014. EllenCT (talk) 02:13, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Search recent changes, and other Inspire Campaign proposals

Do you know anyone who wants to make a search engine? meta:Grants:IdeaLab/Search recent changes. I also like meta:Grants:IdeaLab/Conversion tools that handle citations: LaTeX to wiki markup language. EllenCT (talk) 01:27, 19 March 2016 (UTC) I changed my mind. meta:Grants:IdeaLab/Simple English for Science articles is far better. EllenCT (talk) 19:44, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Do you know anyone who wants to make a search engine? Rhoark (talk) 01:39, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

What? For someone who named themselves after an anti-utilitarian, I don't see you or anyone else complaining about the decline in fundraising brought about after the recent difficulties. EllenCT (talk) 02:57, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Stagnation of math pages: I think Jimbo realizes the "stagnation" against improving math articles is not due to wikitext markup but rather a severe case of wp:OWN, where not only technical formula additions are reverted but also explanatory text is reverted as unnecessary clarifications because the math jargon and concise formulas are considered "complete and sufficient" as if math articles were formal proofs for readers to be presented with the simplist derivation of broadest scope: "I can define that math term in less than 24 words and 7 formulae across 5 sub-disciplines". Any additional words to explain issues to laymen, or give practical common examples of math in society, are often reverted with disdain, regardless if you can prove "Fermat's last theorem" in one page as Q.E.D.; they are just reverting improvements to math pages as a reflex reaction to deter expansions. Instead, we need several math wp:RfCs where 50-70 users agree to allow explanations and practical examples to be added into major math pages, such as "Euler's totient (phi)" example as the count of reduced fractions with denominator n; otherwise there are likely many herds of 5-7 users who will enforce stagnation of math-speak pages. Currently, the huge article (or dissertation) "Beta distribution" contains more than 400[!] math-tag formulas with relatively few clear examples of practical applications; the mind boggles of formula-hoarding. -Wikid77 (talk) 02:39, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

The only way this could be on topic is if you wanted me to link to meta:Grants:IdeaLab/Simple English for Science articles because https://xkcd.com/435/ EllenCT (talk) 02:57, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Those pages are great links about the issues of writing better math/science pages, but my response above was about translating LaTeX into wikitext markup, for your link to "meta:Grants:IdeaLab/Conversion tools that handle citations: LaTeX to wiki markup language". -Wikid77 (talk) 12:50, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

I see. I figure BibTeX is as good as any other format that Google Scholar can export citations in. Are EndNote, RefMan, or RefWorks any better? EllenCT (talk) 01:39, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

By the way, @Wikid77: what do you think of Jimbo's assertion that bots will never be good at writing articles? EllenCT (talk) 04:00, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Well Jimbo is probably right about bots will never be "good" at writing articles, as Jimbo had noted good poetry can be difficult to write, but I think bots could be "good enough" in many cases, if the bots had AI text patterns (of heuristics rules) for how an article should be worded, and so we observe a million WP pages about basic species data as written by bot uploads. -Wikid77 (talk) 12:50, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

I think bots can already be good at filling out infoboxes with citations, which is far better than I know how to use WikiData to do. (I am not yet technical enough to understand wikidata:WikiProject Source MetaData and not interested enough in writing things that computers can read but people can't to acquire the necessary expertise.) I think bots can already be "good enough" for most readers at filling out some of the article templates in the manual of style, but certainly not good enough for more than 95% of editors, yet. EllenCT (talk) 01:39, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Created meta:Grants:IdeaLab/Bot to search for and recommend infobox and wikidata citations. Endorsements most welcome. EllenCT (talk) 02:42, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

• In order to check the assertion of Wikid77 concerning the maths pages in general, and the Beta distribution in particular, I have posted the following message at the talk page :

== To own or not to own ==

At User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#Search_recent_changes.3F, someone has pretended that page Beta distribution is owned by a terrific dragon that delete any contribution that tries to make the article clearer and shorter (see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AJimbo_Wales&type=revision&diff=710796589&oldid=710789244). Let us try if this assertion contains any part of truth. Pldx1 (talk) 17:32, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

And I have also modified the section "Characterization" of the article in order to have a sentence that begins with: "the beta distribution is characterized by"... Let us see what will happen! Pldx1 (talk) 18:01, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Should have checked other math page: @Pldx1: see page "Euler's totient function" for revert of 7-word clarification, "have no common factors other than 1" (see: dif670); same truth, different dragon. However try to re-add that key phrase of "no common factor" and explain the count of reduced fractions with denominator n as an example of Euler's phi. The reverts of explanations in math pages has been happening for many years, with removal of similar 7-word phrases added to clarify a term. -Wikid77 (talk) 23:19, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Does anyone think Beta distribution or Euler's totient function wouldn't benefit from meta:Grants:IdeaLab/Simple English for Science articles? EllenCT (talk) 02:43, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Does anyone think it's ironic that Wikid77 is simultaneously complaining about the cruft that has accumulated in some articles from many little additions of clarifying text or somewhat-related facts, and also complaining that his own additions of the same sort of material were reverted? As for the general feeling that math articles should be written in easier-to-understand text (while not losing their actual content): in many cases I agree but it's not easy; it requires both an advanced understanding of the material and talent at exposition. Suggestions for how to attract more editors like that would be helpful. Suggestions for attracting mobs of 50-70 mathphobes to tear the walls down are not. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:20, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

I've mentioned this thread at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics#Stagnation of math pages. Similar ideas have come up many times in the past and there is an FAQ answering some questions about mathematical articles at the top of the project talk page. In particular

"Are Wikipedia's mathematics articles targeted at professional mathematicians?

No, we target our articles at an appropriate audience. Usually this is an interested layman. However, this is not always possible. Some advanced topics require substantial mathematical background to understand."

Looking at both the examples picked these are quite advanced topics unlikely to be encountered before undergraduate mathematics. The beta function is quite a specialised distribution which I've never been formally taught. Euler's totient function is a topic which would come up when studying number theory, I think I covered it in the third year of an undergraduate maths degree. If this were to be taught the ideas of coprime numbers and relative primes would have been well established before. That said I do agree that the Beta function could used a very good pruning. I'm less sure of the merits of adding explanation to every linked term as this could lead to explosion in the length of the lead.

There is a problem with the lead in mathematics articles WP:Lead says "The lead should identify the topic and summarize the body of the article" which is a very different thing to providing a simple english explanation of the topic. Often there will be an introduction section just after the lead where there is more space to introduce the topic in an understandable way.--Salix alba (talk): 07:42, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

They are topics one might come across fairly early on, I'd aim the start of the article on the totient function at a 16 year old who is interested in maths, and the Beta distribution at an 18 year old who knows for instance about the Poisson distribution. There is not much point at aiming them at anyone with less maths or interest that that. There is little point I can see for instance in explaining what relatively prime means in the lead of totient function and a link is quite enough. And I agree the Beta distribution article does look like it should be pruned a bit, for starters probably some of it is duplicated elsewhere and can be referred to. Dmcq (talk) 09:25, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

By omitting the simple clarification text for "relative prime" (as "have no common factors other than 1"), then people are assuming the difficult-to-read "Euler's totient function" would be improved by wikilinking to "Relative prime" as if that would not also be another difficult-to-read page. Linking one confusing page to other confusing pages is unlikely to simplify the overall understanding of topics. Instead the reality is that jumping into article "Relative prime" is likely to mega-confuse people who are struggling to understand the purpose of Euler's phi. Here is the reality, folks, as below is the intro of page "Relative prime":

In number theory, two integers a and b are said to be relatively prime, mutually prime, or coprime (also spelled co-prime) if the only positive integer that divides both of them is 1. That is, the only common positive factor of the two numbers is 1. This is equivalent to their greatest common divisor being 1. The numerator and denominator of a reduced fraction are coprime. In addition to $\gcd(a,b)=1\;$ and $(a,b)=1,\;$ the notation $a\perp b$ is sometimes used to indicate that a and b are relatively prime.

References

Now, compare that explanation of relative prime to the simple 7-word phrase "have no common factors other than 1" versus a long-winded page about "relatively prime" or "mutually prime" or "coprime" (also spelled "co-prime"). The main issue is to focus on understanding a whole concept, rather than oversimplifying a page by removing 7-word phrases where a wikilink into another large page could explain an unknown term with over 300 words or two integers a and b. Hence, the decision to allow 7-word phrases to remain in a math page should be decided by groups of about 50-70 users, to get a broader consensus of opinions. -Wikid77 (talk) 16:53/17:09, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Who do you think is the audience for the article? Also if you look at the second statement of the lead it restates the definition using gcd. You are talking about adding extra cruft to the article. Moore words are not always an improvement, as WP:POLICY says - "Avoid esoteric or quasi-legal terms and dumbed-down language>"."Verbosity is not a reliable defense against misinterpretation. Omit needless words. Direct, concise writing may be more clear than rambling examples." If that is good enough for policies and guidelines why is needless verbosity good for articles? As far as I can see the audience would know the terms used, extra words just leads to a longer definition and hides what it is about. Were you confused about what coprime meant? Or are you talking on behalf of some imaginary person who wouldn't be interested in looking it up? Dmcq (talk) 17:49, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

The audience for "Euler's totient" is every single person (per Jimbo: "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment"). See tangent topic: "#Euler's totient read 70% as much as Circle". -Wikid77 (talk) 20:11, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

This is a complete nonsequitur. It's hard to imagine having a real conversation about the target audience of articles with a person who thinks it is responsive. Your edit got reverted; boo-hoo. Either try and get some consensus in favor of it on the talk page or quit whining. --JBL (talk) 13:17, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

• In number theory, the Euler's_phi_function belongs to the class of functions whose first and most representative element is the Euler's phi function. This is the opening assertion of the en:wp article, and this is so true that no citation is given to backup the claim. Two corollaries can be deduced from this assertion: (1) the article needs some rewriting ; (2) it would be imprudent to ever try. Pldx1 (talk) 16:49, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

There's nothing like that in the article you pointed at. Dmcq (talk) 17:49, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

The article used to say something roughly like "In number theory, the Euler phi function (unimportant cruft describing its notation and linking to the more general concept of an arithmetic function) is (actual definition)" Apparently, Pldx1 is unused to reading Wikipedia articles, doesn't know to skip past all the unimportant parentheticals, and misread the link to arithmetic functions as being the definition. But I don't think people should have to learn to skip the parentheticals before they read Wikipedia articles. These less-important things should be saved for later in the lead. I have edited the phi function article to do so, but this is a problem with Wikipedia writing that extends far beyond mathematics. For instance, perennial punching-bag-article Pokémon starts off by saying that "Pokémon (unimportant cruft) is a media franchise (more unimportant cruft) centered on fictional creatures called "Pokémon", which humans known as Pokémon Trainers catch and train to battle each other for sport." The unimportant cruft (how to spell it in Japanese, who made it, etc) should be moved later so that readers get the most important ideas first. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:41, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Dear User:David Eppstein. You are saying that "Pldx1 is unused to reading Wikipedia articles [and] doesn't know to skip past all the unimportant parentheticals". Nevertheless, one cannot totally exclude that "Pldx1, while appearing as unused to reading Wikipedia articles, seems to be used as being understood.". Pldx1 (talk) 22:08, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Dear User:Dmcq. What kind of beast could be an arithmetic function ? Pldx1 (talk) 18:57, 21 March 2016 (UTC) signed afterwards

Arithmetic function uses an unmatched curly brace instead of prose in its introduction. EllenCT (talk) 19:37, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

The article is obviously a disaster in many ways, but at least I have replaced the ridiculous example in the introduction with something more reasonable. --JBL (talk) 21:35, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

There's two points there. Firstly that it should just have been described as a multiplicative function as in the second paragraph - and it looks better being in the second paragraph. Secondly the article on arithmetic functions doesn't have a decent definition in it and looks like a list rather than a proper article. I think I'll go and remove the arithmetic function bit. Arithmetic functions are basically analogues of things like the log function - if some condition $p(m,n)$ is true, either always or if they are coprime are the only usual ones, then $g(f(m),f(n))=f(h(m,n))$ where g and h are some arithmetic operations, in fact h is multiplication in anything interesting. For instance the sum of the indexes when a number is expressed as prime factors is one and they don't have to be coprime. $f(12)=f(2^{2}\cdot 3^{1})=3$, $f(10)=2$, $f(120)=f(12\cdot 10)=3+2=5$. Dmcq (talk) 21:41, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Well it seems somebody has already removed the reference to arithmetic function. Dmcq (talk) 21:46, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

And well that's a bit embarrassing, arithmetic functions are simply functions from the natural numbers, may include 0, to integers, reals or complex numbers. So the start of arithmetic function is correct. That was just me working from the only ones of interest I've come across. So basically most of the functions of interest in number theory - which means the term doesn't mean much if one is considering a number theory problem. The additive and multiplicative ones are very interesting though. Dmcq (talk) 22:49, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, I thought that proposal I said I also liked was about BibTeX, which is already in BibDesk-to-wikitext and Citoid Please disregard that one. EllenCT (talk) 19:45, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

The thing with math is that it's best understood by actually doing math, e.g. a random person is more likely to appreciate the content of the Wiki article on Euler's totient function if he/she were to try to find a simple proof that 2003 is a prime number without doing trial divisions and would encounter my answer :) . Count Iblis (talk) 05:25, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Understood yes, but explained? Can't we make sure that the prose stands alone and use the advanced typesetting like we do images, so that the prose can stand alone no matter how much the additional material helps? People need to be exposed to mathematical notation, but they shouldn't be expected to know it in advance. EllenCT (talk) 14:57, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

This discussion has diverged (←look, a math pun!) from its original purpose. As I understood it, the original question was about simple English for science articles. But now the focus has shifted to criticizing specifically Euler's totient function and beta distribution. Neither of these are perfect articles (of course, since there are no perfect articles), and I think much of the criticism is misplaced (especially of beta distribution, which is a very thorough article on a quite specialized topic), but I would rather the discussion return to its original purpose.

Most readers, if they are interested in science and mathematics articles at all, are interested in elementary ones. Mathematical examples might include number, addition, algebra, geometry, circle, and so on. In physics, good examples would include mass, velocity, force, and electric charge. I am no chemist, but I think molecule, acid, and chemical element are likely to interest general audiences. Improving these articles would have the greatest impact on Wikipedia's accessibility simply because of these articles' visibility.

Additionally, I think these articles are the ones where it is easiest to make stylistic improvements. These are the articles that are closest to everyday experience, and where the technical aspects are most likely to have easy explanations in terms of familiar ideas. One might argue that it's more technical articles that are in greater need of elementary explanations; but first, there are a lot of those articles, and they are read less; second, they are precisely the articles where such explanations are less likely to exist; and third, even if they do exist, they are more likely to require the help of specialists who may not be willing or available. Concentrating on those articles will lead to a smaller impact.

I think the list of Wikipedia:Vital articles is a good starting point for this effort. Many of the articles on that list are about basic topics but are underdeveloped. I don't know how many of them are too technical, but it would be a huge improvement if they all had clear prose. Ozob (talk) 15:07, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

That sounds very sensible. Getting any C or lower standard article in the vital articles level 3 up to B class at least sounds a very worthwhile and attainable objective, and level 4 is certainly worth looking at too. Vital articles seems a good list of subjects which should be accessible, or at least the first few sections should be, to practically anyone and are worth spending effort on. 16:58, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Another list worth having a look at is Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Frequently viewed/List which is the top 500 articles in terms of page views. Its a bit out of date but probably still representative. (I might try and regenerate it). This has quite a different view of whats important, number 2 of the most view list Standard deviation is not a vital article, and some of the vital articles like Shape don't make the most viewed list. --Salix alba (talk): 22:25, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

It would be great to survey those and score them by how well their prose stands alone without the help of mathematical notation, in their introductions and otherwise, and by how well the notation used is explained. EllenCT (talk) 13:54, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

"Teachers’ most challenging assignments collected from the network schools exhibited greater opportunities for independent learning in mathematics and real-world connections in English Language Arts than the challenging assignments collected from the non-network schools, but were not significantly different on other opportunity measures (including complex problem solving, communication, and conceptual understanding in mathematics)." -- http://www.air.org/resource/providing-opportunities-deeper-learning-2-3 EllenCT (talk) 15:45, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

• Article about angles is described as vital. It says that an angle is the figure formed by two rays, called the sides of the angle, sharing a common endpoint, called the vertex of the angle. And also that angles can be measured. What is missing ? The key property, that says how to decide if two angles are equal or not (i.e. equivalent or not up a certain property). This is the same process as measuring the length of a rod. Suppose that Bob starts from something known to him, i.e. from his own reference stick. And then he makes copies of this stick and dispose them each at the end of the other. If three copies are used, Bob will say that the length of the rod is three times the length of his reference stick. Suppose that Alice comes now with her own unit, say a centimeter, measure the stick and find say 7cm. What will find Alice if she measures the rod with her centimeter ? Why are we sure that she will find 21cm ? That happens because the length is an objective property that exist independently of any measure. The same occurs with angles. And here, defining the sum of two angles independently of the measures is crucial since measuring angles happens to be difficult. Pldx1 (talk) 19:00, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Re "What is missing? The key property, that says how....," sorry, please see WP:NOTHOWTO, which I think is the worst of the WP:NOTs. EllenCT (talk) 22:48, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Indeed, the "WP:NOTHOWTO" restriction is often misread to prohibit as "not-how-did" such as, How did they get those Bonsai trees to stay so small[?]. For that reason, many computer programming language pages have had few examples, because some people imagined showing how a language did code an algorithm would be teaching "how to" use a language, and a vast amount of computer knowledge has been omitted from WP pages, such as "statement functions" coded for decades in FORTRAN IV (~IBM) language. -Wikid77 (talk) 20:11, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

Dear User:EllenCT. When I say: The key property, that says how to decide if two angles are equal or not (i.e. equivalent or not up a certain property)., your reply is: sorry, please see WP:NOTHOWTO, which I think is the worst of the WP:NOTs. How to know if you are joking or not ? Pldx1 (talk) 11:34, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

I agree allowing declarative and episodic knowledge while forbidding procedural information would be funny if it wasn't true. I also don't like WP:NOTDIR because I think we should be providing the headquarters telephone number for corporations which are required by securities laws to disclose their phone numbers but try to keep them from a disgruntled public. Which do you think is worse, Angle not telling readers how to determine if angles are equal, or Citibank not telling readers how to lodge a service complaint with the office of their CEO? EllenCT (talk) 12:58, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Pldx1 is not describing a procedure that one should carry out in practice, but rather a claim relating a mathematical model (abstract angles in Euclidean geometry) to the physical world: "this model is 'right' because if one were to ...." Which is another good moment to point out that it is not just some strange coincidence that many math articles are hard to understand. --JBL (talk) 13:12, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

"Euler's totient function" read 40% as much as "Circle"

A look at the pageview stats shows page "Euler's totient function" got 700 pageviews (300-900) while page "Circle" got about 1,000 pageviews per day (see: stats.grok Euler's totient). Despite protests from some math experts, to "consider the readers" of advanced math pages (as implying "readers who have mastered all simpler math terms beforehand"), the large numbers of math-page weekly pageviews during Monday-Friday seem to indicate a student/work-oriented readership, and we cannot exclude many readers who might wander to an advanced math-page due to curiosity (about Leonhard Euler?), rather than due to a grand plan to increasely read ever-more advanced topics, first mastering the concept of "relative prime" (coprime) before moving up to "Euler's totient function". Instead, people are more likely to hear about "Euler's phi" and then read it is described as the count of positive numbers below a value which are relatively prime (have no common factors other than 1). Hence, we find the readership of page "circle" as about 1,000 pageviews per day, but "Euler's totient function" gets 700 pageviews/day (300-900) in the same period, even though math experts might have predicted the readership of Euler's phi would be below 5% of Circle readers, rather than 70 percent in November 2015. We need to move beyond the notion of so-called "Vital articles" instead to improve "Frequent articles". -Wikid77 (talk) 19:43, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

I just checked the more recent data in the more up-to-date dataset at [11] and it only looks like about 40% (not 70%), but point made in either case. My question about "frequent articles" though is - do we really want to concentrate on Justin Beiber or Madonna or whoever is the rage this year? How do we decide what is a meaningful frequent article? Smallbones_(smalltalk) 20:00, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

The world decides what is "notable" while readers decide what is "frequent" and so editors need to focus on "readable" for every single person, rather than describe a term only by math formulas and wikilinked jargon because "consider the readers" can ensure readers will know the prerequisite math terms (not true) by the time they want to read an advanced math topic. We also need to describe topics in "Justin Beiber" or "Madonna" (or "Madonna Ciccone" etc.) for the lay person, as explaining notability and significance in simple terms, not just as "double-platinum" or "free of original sin" or other special jargon, but add 10-word phrases to clarify terms for general readers. The excessive reliance on jargon can be found in many topics, not just math or rock music. -Wikid77 (talk) 21:26, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

This is an awful lot of words being devoted to your disagreement with one (not very interesting) edit/revert pair. Obviously it is not the case that every technical term can be explained in prose in context whenever it is used in Wikipedia, and (shocker!) different editors will have different opinions about where to draw the line. --JBL (talk) 21:58, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

But your proposed edit includes jargon that may not even be recognized as such. Not all readers know what "common factors" means, they are more familiar with the non mathematical meaning of the term factor (the "X factor", "California could be deciding factor in GOP race", "alcohol a suspected factor in fatal crash"...), and may not realize that it refers to a specific mathematical meaning. Which leaves them in the unenviable position of not only not understanding the explanation, but also not knowing why they don't understand it. So you'd have to include yet another wikilink to Integer factorization... Prevalence 10:29, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

• What a great joke. The second sentence of the Integer factorization article is about quantum computing, while the third sentence is about breaking the RSA cryptographic scheme. I don't see how this could help in understanding that any fraction with denominator 12 is the sum of an integer part and one of the following fractions ${\frac {0}{12}}=0,{\frac {1}{12}},{\frac {2}{12}}={\frac {1}{6}},{\frac {3}{12}}={\frac {1}{4}},{\frac {4}{12}}={\frac {1}{3}},{\frac {5}{12}},{\frac {6}{12}}={\frac {1}{2}},{\frac {7}{12}},{\frac {8}{12}}={\frac {2}{3}},{\frac {9}{12}}={\frac {3}{4}},{\frac {10}{12}}={\frac {5}{6}},{\frac {11}{12}}$. Obviously, understanding how to reduce fraction 4/12 into 1/3 requires some prior knowledge: dividing 4 apple pies in 12 parts requires to know what is an apple pie, and reproducing the experiment requires to know how to make an apple pie. Pldx1 (talk) 17:12, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

lol, I didn't look at content of the article. Divisor would be more suitable. Prevalence 17:42, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Sunday at the Museum by Honoré Daumier

• Let us sort the former list by reduced denominators. Obviously this requires to have some ideas about how to sort a list, but when there are only 12 items, this is not too difficult anyway. One obtains: ${\frac {0}{1}},{\frac {1}{2}},{\frac {1}{3}},{\frac {2}{3}},{\frac {1}{4}},{\frac {3}{4}},{\frac {1}{6}},{\frac {5}{6}},{\frac {1}{12}},{\frac {5}{12}},{\frac {7}{12}},{\frac {11}{12}}$. How many of each kind? 1,1,2,2,2,4. With obviously 1+1+2+2+2+4=12. What a surprise indeed! And even a Surprise (emotion), as illustrated by the famous caricaturist. Pldx1 (talk) 23:25, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Explain terms by phrases used in 200 webpages

Math pages should be explained with common phrases used in many related webpages about those math topics, with little need to invent helpful phrases out of thin air to be debated for consensus. For example, when I advised to include 7-word or 10-word phrases to explain terms in a math page, the intent was to use phrases which clarify the meaning for general users, such as found in teaching texts or introductory pages. For "Euler's totient function" as the count of numbers below a value which are relatively prime, the added phrase "have no common factors other than 1" was not a term which I invented, but rather a common phrase used in over 200 webpages on the Internet (see Google Search: find "have no common factors other than 1"). -Wikid77 (talk) 16:50, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

I agree. Why has mathematics been trying to teach factorization of polynomials in algebra, before statistics? Was there some time in history when someone factored a polynomial for work? EllenCT (talk) 17:39, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Why teaching how to deal with polynomials ? Let us see how User:EllenCT will obtain $~~{\frac {1}{n}}\,\sum _{j=1}^{n}\left(x_{j}-a\right)^{2}={\frac {1}{n}}\,\sum _{j=1}^{n}\left(x_{j}-{\overline {x}}\right)^{2}+\left({\overline {x}}-a\right)^{2}~~\mathrm {where} ~~{\overline {x}}={\frac {1}{n}}\,\sum _{j=1}^{n}x_{j}$ without dealing with polynomials ? (I suppose that User:EllenCT will recognize this basic formula in statistics.)
In the same vein, asking "was there some time in history when someone factored a polynomial for work ?" amounts to ask "was there some time in history when someone solved an equation for work ?". Once again, how to know if User:EllenCT is joking or not ?. Pldx1 (talk) 18:17, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

What percentage of the population would you say needs to be able to factor algebraic polynomials? Do you agree that proportion was larger in the past than it is now? Whether you agree with Arthur Benjamin that statistics should be taught before calculus do you think it would be better to teach statistics before algebra? Do you think we can derive recommendations for primary and secondary school educators from article readership statistics? It seems like you might be suggesting that things should be taught in the order that they can be derived, instead of their order by utility. I don't agree with that, because that would mean teaching Peano axioms before multiplication. EllenCT (talk) 18:55, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Polynomials are a major part of the deterministic (non-random) aspect of mathematics, whereas statistics analyzes the stochastic, due to random sampling rather than exhaustive testing. Both are crucial, and functions (or differential equations) are approximated by numerical integration of Taylor series or other polynomials. Algebra is fundamental to statistics, as the best introduction to math equations and formulas; hence, teaching algebra to youngsters as "new math" using the unknown boxes "[_]" as variables. -Wikid77 (talk) 19:38, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Taylor series approximation polynomials are likely to have non-integer coefficients and thus be less amenable to factoring. Therefore a LaTeX to wikitext converter should be a low priority. EllenCT (talk) 01:29, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

@Wikid77: I am also interested in your opinion of whether we should try to derive recommendations for primary and secondary school educators' syllabus ordering from article readership statistics? EllenCT (talk) 18:58, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

There is extreme danger in treating the readership stats as a measure of relevance, interest, or intrinsic application, because we have found how the spamming of wikilinks, as in zillions of copycat navboxes (although each rarely clicked), can shift a major slant to higher pageviews when wikilinks are mega-spammed (as a "law of large numbers"). Perhaps that is why page "Euler's totient function" has high pageviews, while the similar common term "Euler's phi" has had almost no pageviews per month. Instead, treat pageviews as a type of "curb appeal" for what to fix/update (paint) fastest, even though the backyard topics might be more important for people who want to dwell in a topic (or house). The extreme mega-spamming of wikilinks needs to be reduced, because it can focus undue effort to maintain pages people do not really read, just view as a mega-linked curiosity. There are real megapages, such as "Hello (Adele song)" or "Wiki" versus bizarre spam such as "script kiddie" which had high pageviews. Can you name other spam pages? -Wikid77 (talk) 19:38, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Could the danger of making a poor recommendation to primary and secondary school educators about the order in which they teach concepts really be extreme? They aren't going to change billions of textbooks without an airtight reason. There could be a benefit in trying to see whether it is possible to make such an airtight case. I understand the risk you see and urge you to consider that it has a concordant opportunity. Maybe Euler's totient function appears on some organization's high priority study guide, or some script's test to see whether it is connected to the Internet. I would say that your suggestion to reduce the number of terms required to explain mathematical concepts may be part of the puzzle, as is the relative utility of those concepts which could be related to their popularity here. Or more properly, it would be if your advice had been heeded before Wikipedia's math articles got such a bad reputation relative to the rest of it, which happened prior to 2005 as far as I can tell. I can name lots of spam pages and pages spammed in readership statistics, but I would prefer not to because that's often what their authors want and I don't want to perpetuate their value. EllenCT (talk) 23:09, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Simple technical questions cannot be masked by weasel generalities. Let us recall some of these simple questions. (1) How to deal with geometric angle without a clear statement about how to decide if two angles are equal? (for example, this is required before we can measure angles). (2) How to obtain the characteristic property of the variance without some algebra about polynomials ? let us add: (3) How to determine the variance when the probability distribution is proportional to exp(-x^2)... without using some calculus  ? Concerning the new new-maths mantra, having a real proba/stats attitude doesn't mean ignoring algebra, calculus, equation solving or anything else. This is rather considering that variability is unavoidable, and shouldn't be ignored. But oversimplifying everything, as in the TV speach quoted by User:EllenCT, is only misleading (more details in "How to lie with statistics", an interesting reference). Pldx1 (talk) 15:48, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

(1) Congruence (geometry) has sections on polygons and triangles, but not angles. Does it really need one? It seems overly pedantic to me, but I would not object to the improvement and suggest you make it if you want such a section there. (2) Factoring polynomials, which is rarely used in practice compared to before the advent of electronic data processing equipment, is not just "some algebra." The important algebraic properties of transitivity, commutativity, and associativity are taught in basic arithmetic, before division is introduced, and I am not suggesting that should change. I am suggesting that there is a clear path to try to determine the most effective use of educators' time, which does not stay static over the decades. (3) It is not necessary to derive an algorithm for exponentiation of fractions in order to learn how to use algorithms which fit exponential curves, and saying otherwise can waste time. Requiring math to be taught in the order in which concepts can be derived is like forbidding teaching about dinosaurs, genetic drift, or isotopic half-lives because a universe older than 6,000 years is politically inconvenient in many communities. EllenCT (talk) 02:26, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

When launched, this topic was discussing how some key articles in elementary maths are written here, in English Wikipedia. Having this discussion here, at Jimbo Wales' talk page, was not unreasonable. Being quite immediately faced with the Citibank headquarters telephone number, the dinosaurs, and some TV shows seems an amusing description of how sausages are made here. Therefore, if User:EllenCT want absolutely to discuss the "recommendation to primary and secondary school educators about the order in which they teach [the math] concepts", may I suggest that teachers should avoid the recommendations made by someone who seems ignoring that to solve "x^2-3x+2=0" is exactly the same problem as to factor the left hand member into "(x-1)(x-2)". Asking "was there some time in history when someone solved an equation for work ?" is a great joke (or, at least, should be one). Pldx1 (talk) 08:07, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

By the way, article Congruence (geometry) has the same logical flaw as article angle, even stated more crudely. Defining "Two objects are congruent if they have the same measure" is absurd, since the sentence "this rod measures three units" means that I made three congruent copies of the unit, and put them side by side to cover the rod. How to know that the copies are congruent (aka equal) to the unit ? By measuring them ? When you define something with a definition that cannot be used, the shame of the unusability is not upon the concept you have poorly defined. Pldx1 (talk) 08:30, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

On the contrary, factoring polynomials is not exactly the same as solving equations. The latter is far more general, as it may be numerical or analytical, more common in practice, and actually utilized by ordinary people in industry and commerce on a very much more frequent basis. Please do not use quotation marks to imply that others wrote something that they did not write. How would you prefer that congruence be defined? EllenCT (talk) 16:45, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

MoodBar: try again at meta:Grants:IdeaLab/MoodBoxes?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T88954

I would like to have an update on the Mood Bar. EllenCT (talk) 03:00, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

The MoodBar was badly written software that was incompatible with much of MediaWiki; it was intended as an experiment, not an ongoing production wiki extension, and is designed as such. It came to my attention as an oversighter and checkuser because we could use neither tool on its output. It made it essentially impossible to deal with banned users from the checkuser perspective. From the oversighter perspective, many people did not realize that they were handing out private information into a publicly viewable space (including their IP if they weren't logged in); almost everything you can imagine an oversighter routinely removing from visibility (including phone numbers, names linked with IP addresses, vicious personal attacks, and threats of harm to self or others) was impossible to remove. It took months to develop a useful workaround for suppression; once it was available, oversighter workload increased by about 20% - and it didn't always work as it should. Few people were paying any attention to it, those who did follow it were usually taking time from content management, and there was no way to get back to people who asked questions or made comments. At this point, the people who developed and maintained MoodBar have all left the WMF (except Timo Tijhof, who is now Senior Performance Engineer and has a very different focus); nobody is actively maintaining it or working with it. Risker (talk) 04:18, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

So if you could edit its output, would it be worth the 9% surplus in new editor retention? My favorite quote from the Phabricator thread is, "Broadly, I don't think we need additional feedback about the difficulties that new editors face, which seems to have been MoodBar's raison d'être. We have done and continue to do extensive user research, we've clearly identified the major pain points that new (and experienced) editors encounter (e.g., a lack of a visual editor), and we're doing some work to alleviate those hurdles." Well, @MZMcBride: you didn't have to read it if you didn't want to. EllenCT (talk) 07:03, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Hi EllenCT. I spend quite a bit of time involved in various parts of Wikimedia. I just re-read my comment at phabricator:T88954#1038853 and it's pretty smart! Subsequent to your post to this talk page in January 2015, there was a thread started at Wikipedia talk:New editor feedback#Re: Re-enable request from January in February 2015 that serves a response to the request to re-enable this tool. The answer to the direct question ("Will the MoodBar extension be re-enabled on the English Wikipedia?") seems to be a simple no. The questions and issues surrounding ongoing editor engagement and editor retention remain open. There are all kinds of neat ideas we could implement to make editing easier. Off-hand examples: allowing login via e-mail address, allowing login via Facebook and Google, allowing case-insensitive login, and allowing logging in on the edit screen. Adding large graphical smiley faces doesn't really solve much and the deploy of MoodBar created real issues for existing users, as noted by Risker. --MZMcBride (talk) 19:52, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Could this feature be duplicated by a user script? It would just submit a new section on some talk subpage reserved for Mood Bar comments. I think the text needs revision to make clear that this is a public comment, however. Non-Javascript readers like myself could just navigate to the talk subpage. That way you'd have all standard edit features by default, no reinventing the wheel required. In any case, you'd need no permission, unless and until you were ready to appeal to Wikipedia administrators to add your script to the site Common.js file. (Hail Eris!) Wnt (talk) 20:06, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Should we break the mood bar down into its component parts, and remove the part that actually caused problems (being able to view the comments) but keep the parts that didn't (being able to click on emotion icons and type in comments)? Maybe Jimbo would be the only one who could view comments initially, and only he and his designates would be allowed to read them. Then someone could write an essay that Being Able to View MoodBar Comments Is No Big Deal at which point a userbox would appear and then people who thought they could handle them would apply, and Jimbo could then turn the decision about who gets to view Moodbar comments over to the Community, with Signpost articles about the sad state of the WP:RFMC backlog. If that works out then someone can implement deleting comments.

Seriously, 9.25% more editors were retained. Why not? EllenCT (talk) 00:52, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

That's not actually what the study says, EllenCT. The study reporters themselves point out the possibility of self-selection bias (i.e., those who are more likely to participate are more likely to click the "feedback" link), and pointed out that only tiny percentage clicked the link (just over 13,000 of the 529,000 editors who were shown it, roughly 2.5%). Those who clicked the link (which implies observational skill and willingness to experiment) were about as likely to stick around whether or not they got a response; those who then took the next step and clicked a further link to rate the usefulness of their response (thus implying greater interest and willingness to participate, since they constituted only 14% of editors who received feedback) were the ones most likely to stick around, but they only constituted 5% of the editors who clicked the feedback link in the first place. We're talking about 5% of of the 2.5% of editors who clicked the link, about 0.1% of the editors. The actual number of additional "retained" editors that resulted was minuscule. There were serious questions about the scalability of the process because it depends on personalized responses from reviewing editors completed in a short timeframe. The fact of the matter is that it would be impossible to scale this up to address all new users: we don't have enough people who are interested or suitable for responding to "feedback" from new users now, and it will almost inevitably wind up with templated responses, which we already know are markedly ineffective in changing the retention rate.

In recent months, have done a fair amount of reflection on the drop in the number of editors (and to some extent, editor retention) and have tried to understand it by looking at what else was happening concurrent to that drop. One very major change was the implementation of edit filters, which drastically reduced the need for editors to revert intentional or unintentional vandalism/test editing. As well, we developed several highly productive and accurate anti-vandalism bots that catch a significant proportion of the vandalism/test editing that makes it through the filters. I've never taken an actual article off my watchlist, and anecdotally I can say that vandalism and test edits on those articles have almost completely dried up; filters catch much of it, and bots revert most of the rest. Thus, the entire cadre of editors who did almost nothing but vandalism reverts (there were thousands of them) had to find something else to do in order to contribute. Some developed other talents, but a lot of them just stopped editing. The percentage of active editors needed to revert vandalism has bottomed out at a few hundred at most, while almost all other tasks require significantly more skill. New page patrol requires knowledge of a wide range of policies and guidelines, AWB requires a level of technical proficiency and an eye for appropriateness of edits (and also significantly reduces the "low hanging fruit" available for new editors to fix), article improvement takes research and writing skill as well as editing skill. The bar for successful entry into the editing community is far, far higher than it was a few years ago, and an enormous leap from where it was ten years ago. (I believe it was WereSpielChequers who once pointed out that by removing all of the "easy" tasks, we were making it too difficult for new editors to get their feet wet.) We need a different kind of editor in 2016 than we needed in 2006, and we haven't yet figured out how to attract and develop that "new editor" yet - mostly because we haven't taken the time to figure out ourselves what we really need. Simply attracting more editors isn't the answer, as has been obvious for a long time. It's finding the *right* editors who want to be here and have the skills to survive. We're trying to solve the wrong problem with extensions like this. Risker (talk) 04:49, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

What exactly is the number you are using for "minuscule"? How about if, next to the edit summary, we add emoticons there and save that response data privately with each revision, so only administrators can see it? I would like to see that tested with and without various labels like "I am feeling _____ generally," "I am feeling _____ about saving this edit," "I am feeling _____ about other editors," and "I am feeling _____ about the subject matter I am editing." EllenCT (talk) 14:01, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

I'm not sure I understand what you're suggesting here, EllenCT; it sounds like an entirely different type of tool that would need to be designed, coded, tested and accepted by the community. With respect to your suggestion of restricting review and response tasks to administrators, since the majority of people who responded in the original study were *not* administrators (and there really aren't all that many active administrators anymore), I don't see how it would be reasonable to add "and respond to editing feedback from new users" into the administrator workload. I don't think we have enough interested *editors* including administrators to to this, and I'm sure we don't have enough administrators who would be interested in devoting the bulk of their Wikipedia volunteer time to this task. To be honest, I think there would be a lot more value in leaving a genuinely personalized talk page message on the talk pages of newly registered accounts that have successfully completed their first edit (perhaps actually talking about that edit), and inviting them to the Teahouse, which has a significant number of experienced and well-qualified volunteers who regularly and enthusiastically work with newcomers. Their success is noteworthy. Risker (talk) 15:45, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Good points. I am trying to understand why the MoodBar helped retain editors, and to propose an alternative implementing just the essential parts of that function. Perhaps summary statistics protecting individual privacy but showing trends over time, perhaps on a per-article basis, would be superior. What is your opinion of [12]? EllenCT (talk) 16:57, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

For the record, you used the word "minuscule" to refer to 216 expected additional new editors per year. EllenCT (talk) 15:38, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

I think the lack of low-hanging fruit is important not only in that present tasks require a higher degree of editor skill, but that even for skilled editors, the tasks to be done have a much higher cognitive load. The increase in our article standards and the proliferation of our guidelines mean that accomplishing something substantive requires sitting down and concentrating for a prolonged period; it's difficult to do meaningful work in the interstices of one's time. Our tools also haven't caught up with the changes in article standards. We once treated articles as permanent drafts; the implicit assumption behind the "trusted revision" model of reliability is that sometimes articles will be changed for the worse as they develop. We're less tolerant (at least on watched articles) of imperfectly-formed or conjectural material; rather than let it incrementally improve, it gets reverted. There are very good reasons for this, but the fact remains that we don't have an organized way of drafting additions to an existing article. We need unstructured space for doing that, but having structured tools for outlining a well-balanced article, building a bibliography of useful sources, examining material where sources are contradictory of confused, and the like could allow editors to tackle small, relatively easy, tasks, the results of which could persist and eventually be used for improvements in mainspace. Choess (talk) 14:30, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Actually there is still a lot of low hanging fruit one can offer newbies. I'm testing a welcome template Template:Welcome training that focuses on some of the opportunities. For example, the success of the GLAM program has left us a backlog of images to add to articles. I've seen very nervous newbies gain confidence by adding images to articles, and little risk of getting bitten. ϢereSpielChequers 21:11, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

Help wanted: meta:Grants:IdeaLab/MoodBoxes. EllenCT (talk) 15:32, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Ethics questions

The proposal looks something like this, although not sure about exact positioning on page, the total number of questions, or their formatting:

... Edit summary: [________________________________________________]
Summary preview: (→‎What is your solution?)
[ ] This is a minor edit [ ] Watch this page

Optionally, please choose pictorial representations of your mood:
I am feeling 😃 😊 😐 😒 generally	I am feeling 😃 😊 😐 😒 about this edit
I am feeling 😃 😊 😐 😒 about the subject	I am feeling 😃 😊 😐 😒 about my certainty
I am feeling 😃 😊 😐 😒 about the article	I am feeling 😃 😊 😐 😒 about Wikipedia

By clicking the "Save page" button, you are agreeing to Wikimedia's terms....
[ Save page ] [ Show preview ] [ Show changes ] ....

1. Is it ethical to use editors' self-reported feelings "about this edit" or "about my certainty" for content curation and review?

2. Is it ethical to use editors' self-reported general feelings or their feelings about Wikipedia to assist with fundraising messaging? EllenCT (talk) 18:11, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

I propose that both uses are ethical. Any objections? EllenCT (talk) 02:28, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Founder's seat

Hi Jimmy. Would you please convert the founder's board seat to a community selected seat in 2017 and, if you wish to serve as a trustee, compete with other community members for a community seat that year? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 04:37, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

I'd think you might have some chance of getting this change made if you demonstrated that many editors support the change. How many? Well, IMHO the board would consider making such a change if 500 editors signed a petition for it. Maybe you could have an RfC or a straw poll (on some other page please)? My guess is that you might get 50 editors to support your position, but almost as many would be against it, with the vast majority of editors not caring one way or the other. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 14:38, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

I'm asking Jimmy, Smallbones. I think it's something he should do, and I'll be surprised if he doesn't think so, too. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 15:34, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

That seems perhaps a more radical solution than necessary. A less sweeping change would be to change the nature of the seat. Just brainstorming, but, if there are an even number of "regular" board members, then the Founder would participate as a non-voting advisory member, who only voted when it was necessary to break ties, and perform a sort of "executive role" by communicating board consensus (a role perhaps shared with the chairman). I'm thinking of how the VP of the US presides over the Senate, as a model. wbm1058 (talk) 15:48, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes, a radical change in legitimacy. First Jimmy simply took a seat on the board for himself. More recently, his entitlement to a seat has been determined by his fellow board members. I think it's appropriate for that entitlement to be determined by the communities who create and run the projects.

What I've asked would involve minimal practical change, though. I'm not asking for any change in his role. It's far less radical than the changes you've mooted, in that regard. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 19:59, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Well yeah, converting it to a community-selected seat is less radical than abolishing the seat. But, forcing him to run against, and risk being outvoted by a commoner wouldn't be dignified. So, I still think that a perpetual, albeit more ceremonial role would be more appropriate. In the UK, the Queen makes a lot of speeches, but they aren't the same as those of the Prime Minister. Our board chairmen need to take a higher profile; perhaps they should be subject to some sort of community-vetting or selection process which might give them more legitimacy in the eyes of the community. wbm1058 (talk) 20:55, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

• Be careful what you wish for, Anthony — for all his flaws, JW does remain something of a firewall against commercialization of the site. WMF is a big business now with tens of millions of dollars in the bank and there are sharks out there... I also think JW has value as a public face for the organization. I DO have problems with the lack of democracy in selecting the board and the lack of transparency in the board's operations, mind you. Carrite (talk) 15:51, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

• I heard Jimmy say in a video sometime in the last year that he wouldn't rule out Wikipedia moving to advertising if necessary. Jimmy will get elected as often as he runs, have no fear on that point. I think selection by the community is appropriate for someone who has assumed the mantle of spokesperson for the community. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 19:59, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

I have always opposed having advertising on the site. What I have said, many many times going back more than a decade, is that we have never absolutely ruled it out if necessary for survival. It is not something that is even remotely likely, it is not discussed at the board level, it is never proposed by staff or community, no one is considering it.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:20, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

The worse 2 things are A: all the brilliant devils in do-gooder attire...It takes a lot of experience before you can identify them, and B: their selected constant companions, some of the more easily influenced well-intentioned and real do gooders with less critical thinking abilities/experience, who the devils use like pawns to implement their dark plots (which always include violent conflict and/or loss of individual freedoms in some way or other). Blair is in the 2nd. manipulated "do gooder" category, imo, but Jimbo may disagree, but Jimbo is definitely not in either category at this point in time, imo. So, maybe better safe with the known quantity? or maybe not. I would be interested in seeing who/what the alternatives are? Nocturnalnow (talk) 19:52, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

I've seen this movie before. How about let's not call for a vote of no confidence just yet? Not until we understand who the villains are. Wnt (talk) 00:38, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Concur, I don't see any villains involved...maybe some pacific trustees but no villains. Nocturnalnow (talk) 04:32, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Sometimes the villain is right there under your nose, all along, from the very beginning. - 64.94.31.206 (talk) 12:11, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Not in this case. The easiest way to spot a villain is "you shall know them by their fruits". (villain being metaphorically the tree). And there has been no rotten fruit coming out of WMF's products that I can see. Besides, trust me, I can detect a possible villain as soon as they speak or write anything themselves (as opposed to being written for them). They are universally phonies because no normal person wants anything to do with an obvious villain. I don't see any phonies who have been here from the very beginning. Nocturnalnow (talk) 15:24, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

The future of search

As more millions of articles are added, mostly more people bio-pages have been added every day, then Wikipedia is expanding the "who's-who-in-whatever" coverage to include more billions of people, and so the wp:wikisearch operation eventually needs to limit searches by category, such as actors or politicians, etc. This limited wikisearch would focus the results on pages in particular categories, rather than try to find pages simply by words in the free-form text. However, I think we could still wait years for category-screened searches, but that means developing the software soon, aka now. -Wikid77 (talk) 11:15, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

I wish Jimbo had embraced semantic Mediawiki, rather than shit-canning it because he found it too complicated for his tastes. Imagine a world where you could easily search for all cities in Germany south of the 50th latitude line with at least 45,000 people. That's what Wikipedia is not doing. - 64.94.31.206 (talk) 12:17, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

I'm afraid you have a mistaken understanding of history here. I had nothing to do with any decision to either "embrace" or "shit-can" semantic MediaWiki. Furthermore, to the extent that I had any influence on it, it was in the opposite direction - far from finding it "too complicated for my tastes" I thought it was incredibly worthy of further exploration. Per what Wikid77 proposes above, I think semantic markup in some form is incredibly interesting and valuable - moreso now than ever before.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:23, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Isn't that doable in Wikidata?--S Philbrick(Talk) 13:59, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

I'm wondering how many people would want to do a complex search like the large southern German cities. I use to run a large online plant database where you could do advanced searches to match specific characteristics. The vast majority of searches were simply for the name or one particular property and only a few used the clever searches which I spent so much time developing. The lesson of google is people want free text searches not structured searches.

That said it would be interesting to see some sort of log/analytics for search to see what people really search for.--Salix alba (talk): 16:14, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

April 1 again

(Please note: this NOT a complaint. More like a feeble attempt at humor.)

Wikipedia goes nuts

On April Fools.

"Verifiability" is replaced by

"Ignore all rules".

The main page today

Is full of baloney.

Every DYK is true

But also phony.

I fell for a joke.

That makes me a chump.

I think I'll complain

At the Village Pump.[13]

--MelanieN (talk) 15:39, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Love it.--Cyberpower | My Talk 17:15, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 1 April 2016

• News and notes: Trump/Wales 2016

• In the media: Saskatoon police delete Wikipedia content about police brutality

• WikiProject report: Why should the Devil have all the good music? An interview with WikiProject Christian music

• Traffic report: Donald v Daredevil

• Featured content: A slow, slow week

• Technology report: Browse Wikipedia in safety? Use Telnet!

• Recent research: "Employing Wikipedia for good not evil" in education; using eyetracking to find out how readers read articles

• Wikipedia Weekly: Podcast #121: How April Fools went down

• Blog: Growing hashtags: Expanding outreach on Wikipedia

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:12, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

What James said publicly (2)

(Note: I'm copying Peter's comment down here to answer it, because it took me so long to find the time to dig up the original quote that a discussion ensued up above that confuses the issue, which is to answer a very specific question.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:55, 21 March 2016 (UTC)) Hi Jimmy. According to this, you wrote to James that "I'm not going to dig up the exact quotes, you said publicly that you wrote to me in October that we were building a Google-competing search engine and that I more or less said that I'm fine with it". My emphasis. That said, do you have the exact quotes? I can't find anywhere where James said this. Thanks Peter Damian (talk) 18:05, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

Sure, and let me provide some context because I think it makes my point very clear.

Note well - the only reason we are having this conversation is that someone published a private email. It was not my intention to publicly take James to task for this, but rather to ask him, privately, to explain it to me. I'd still like to understand it, and I think it's a shame that this conversation is public at all.

1. Back on October 6, James sent me an email saying "Did you realize that we have been developing a search engine for about a year in an effort to compete with Google?"

2. On February 24th, in the Wikipedia Weekly Facebook group James wrote "Yes I asked individuals on the board in Oct if they understand that we were building a "search engine" as before Oct I did not realize we were. JW said that he understood this all along and it was something we needed to do.." [14] Note well that James is responding to a comment which specifically discusses this as a search engine which "might compete with Google". At this point, it is difficult to understand James except as claiming that I knew about a secret project to compete with Google and was basically ok with it (or stronger: felt it was something that we "needed to do").

3. This astonished me because it so completely misrepresents what I said in October, and not in passing but in a full conversation that we had. I explained to him in significant detail that we were not "developing a search engine for about a year in an effort to compete with Google". I first said "I wouldn't have described it in that way, nor do I think the Foundation would, but yes, I'm aware of work in the area of improving search and discovery across all our properties." And then I later went on to explain in some detail the difference between work on internal search and a "search engine... to compete with Google". A quote from my email: "I'm not really sure what is causing your confusion here. Perhaps it is just the term "search engine" which in some contexts may mean "a website that one goes to as a destination in order to find things on the web, such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo" and in other contexts can mean "software for searching through a set of documents and resources"." I went on to give some examples of cool stuff we could do using structured data to answer basic questions. He then conceded that "Yes so I think an open source knowledge engine like IBM's Watson and an open source search engine are cool ideas." He went on to raise 4 objections, and for me the most relevant one was the lack of community consultation - my answer to that, in full was "Third, I am always in favor of more community consultation. But I've been fighting very hard for a long time against the absurd notion that the community should vote on software. Voters in the community will not all be well-informed and a populist campaign can easily come to the wrong answer on technical matters. So this consultation needs to happen in a much more hands-on way - and it isn't cheap to do. So, I agree that this is a serious question. For me, it's more of a question of what kind of consultation should happen and when. A commitment to explore a concept through an external grant doesn't strike me as the right point necessarily to engage in a full-scale consultation."

For further reference, what I mean by "full-scale consultation" is what the legal team did with the new terms-of-service - which required huge numbers of man-hours. I'd say something more light weight than that was called for here - zero community consultation is the wrong thing (I'm always in favor of more community consultation), and voting the wrong thing. But openly discussing that we are seeking funding for explorations of how we might do cool things with internal search and discovery isn't the sort of thing that needs to be kept secret for any reason, and there are great smart people and developers in the community who can help refine ideas and help to avoid potential problems.

Elsewhere on this page, James has now backpedalled on a claim that most people quite naturally read as him being threatened with removal from the board if he didn't vote to approve the Knight grant. Peter has done a fine job of pointing that out.

I'd like to remind everyone that while I voted with the majority to remove James, I was not behind it nor even a vocal advocate for it. I voted with the very strong majority because I could see the anger that other board members had with him and that they had lost trust in him. Indeed, I told James in an email before the board meeting "I intend to vote with the majority, whatever that may mean." I think it is not possible to have a functioning board where the vast majority of trustees has lost trust in someone. If you read all that I have just written, I think you can understand some of the reasons why the board lost trust in him.

Finally, I continue to make the case to the board that greater transparency is desirable with regard to the reasons for James' removal. I wish I could tell you more, but that will have to wait.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:55, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

When one disagrees with the majority, one well ought to vote against the majority. Clearly my opinion on such matters differs from yours. Else one becomes a "nodder" a la Wilmot Mulliner. Collect (talk) 22:46, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Oh, I agree completely. When one disagrees with the majority, one ought to vote against the majority. Clearly, and in all cases. That's the "disagree" part. The "and commit" part is to say that in many cases, even if I have lost a vote, I should support the majority result going forward. Not every issue that doesn't go my way is worthy of a campaign. This is a matter of general ethics, and something that we should encourage (for example) on-wiki. I think picture A should be used in an article. Most other people think picture B should be used in an article. Fine, I should let it go, and I should support the general principle that 1 person shouldn't engage in a campaign to undermine majority decisions in cases like this.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 05:20, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Distant cousin of Mr. Mulliner. wbm1058 (talk) 23:31, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

• Geesh. Can we stop this hairsplitting? So perhaps James didn't clearly say that he understood that you did not support a Google-like engine when he said you supported building a "search engine". Clearly there are outdated documents that mislead in that direction. At the same time I was getting the impression you were saying that the "Knowledge Engine" wasn't about search at all, though it was never clear what it was about if not search. I think the community finally mostly understands this distinction. Can we drop this now? wbm1058 (talk) 00:46, 23 March 2016 (UTC)
• Re: "commitment to explore a concept through an external grant". But this is only partially that. The majority of funding is from general donations for "keeping the encyclopedia online & ad free". yes, more hairsplitting over lies of omission wbm1058 (talk) 00:46, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes, and the majority of funding is for objectives that, as far as I know, are not regarded as particularly controversial.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 05:20, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

• Re: you've "been fighting very hard for a long time against the absurd notion that the community should vote on software". Does that mean you are against the 2015 Community Wishlist Survey? wbm1058 (talk) 00:46, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

No, I am very strongly supportive of that survey and of similar efforts.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 05:20, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

• So, as I understand it, James was not bounced over Knowledge Engine concerns, nor was he fired because of issues with the executive director. The main reason he was fired, and the board does not trust him, relates to some other concern which, somehow despite other leaks related to those issues, somehow has managed to remain secret. And some on the board insist that it remain secret. Is that right? wbm1058 (talk) 00:46, 23 March 2016 (UTC)
  • This, IMO, is the question. It's rather amazing how much is withheld without explanation, with "confidentiality" as a reason. Confidentiality is of course a good reason to withhold some information, but when it's used as a general justification to avoid entire topics, it stretches credibility. Jimbo Wales, could you at least answer whether this issue, as described by Wbm1058, is what's at play? With the now-infamous December 30 email, for instance, would it really be so impossible to publish it with a couple black redacting marks through a couple sentences? -Pete (talk) 00:30, 24 March 2016 (UTC)
• I'm sympathetic of the idea that putting a feature plan is not great. There's a difference between a 'full-scale consultation' and a situation where even staffers who were close to the team expressed confusion about the ultimate goals, plan, funding situation, and so on. Also, it's pretty easy to avoid a large conflagration if you dole information out over time and don't directly step on people's toes. Flow, superprotect, and so on directly affect people where they work. Anyway, what's probably most interesting about this is the idea of a culture of secrecy. We saw that this was a major complaint among staffers, but you haven't really engaged it except to say that you don't agree with being secretive (except you seem to agree with keeping board deliberations pseudo-secret). Did you ever respond to James and help him push for a plan to consult the community? Or is that something which was discussed secretly so you can't say? Hard to know whether this secrecy derives from executive session confidentiality or it is more about being polite and respecting the lack of detailed records around the (semi-open) board meeting. II | (t - c) 04:07, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

I am not 100% sure what you are asking. I am strongly supportive of the staff always speaking as openly as possible, which in most cases means completely openly, about plans and ideas for the future.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 05:20, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

• Thanks for replying to Peter, Jimmy. My reaction is similar to those above. And I'll add, that in my view, the WMF board very much sees us "competing" in a certain way with Google and other companies that reuse our content; this is the "existential challenge" that we discussed before and that Lila referenced in her "Why We Changed" note.. "Competing with Google" doesn't necessarily mean trying to overtake them across their all their businesses or even in general search, and you seem to be framing it that way. "Competing with Google" in the sense of a) wanting people who are seeking knowledge to come to wikipedia.org instead of Google, and b) wanting people to stay within WM/WP domains instead of kicking back out to Google... I would think you are 100% with that. But your response addresses nothing about that, and the WMF did indeed seem to be doing that for the year prior to Oct 2015... and I believe that you would have said that, too. There is a bunch of other misdirecting stuff in what you wrote as well, as others have noted above.

I am still looking for the board or WMF staff to tell the story of what went on with planning around search over Lila's tenure, and there is still a big hole where we are looking for that. Jytdog (talk) 04:29, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

I have not seen anyone on the board express the idea that we are "'competing' in a certain way with Google". It certainly is not a primary motivation or consideration - not even in the limited sense that you indicate. Of course we should have some concern about whether actions by other players online, and changes in Internet user behavior over time, will impact us - and this is both a positive and negative thing - change can be good for us or bad for us, and our response to change can be good for us or bad for us.

As for the story you are looking for, I'm afraid that board won't have any more information than you've already been told - and I don't think staff has much to add either.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 05:20, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for replying to this. I am now very troubled by James statement that "The board approved the Knight Foundation grant. I supported its approval following pressure which included comments about potentially removing members of the Board.". James claims above that he only meant a temporal 'following', rather than causal, but it seems to me that (a) any reasonable person would read the 'following' as causative, and more importantly (b) that James would have understood that any reasonable person would have read it this way. If so, then James seems to have been deceiving us, which, as I say, is troubling. Peter Damian (talk) 07:56, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

User:Peter Damian I stated "I meant it to mean that the statement regarding possible removal occurred before the KF vote not that the statement necessarily occurred in a conversation directly about the KF vote. I do believe that the conversation in which it occurred related somewhat to the KF grant but I understand that others may parse the relatedness of the conversations differently." So I meant that it happened before the Knight vote. And I believed it related to the Knight grants issue but I also acknowledge that others may parse things differently. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 10:41, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

So when you said "I supported its approval following pressure which included comments about potentially removing members of the Board" you did not mean to say or imply in any way that you supported its approval because of the pressure? See Cooperative principle. Peter Damian (talk) 11:00, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

There was a few things at play. Yes threats of being removed played a part in my decision making. We had already agreed to disagree in a few prior "votes". I did not consider me opposing again to be a good strategic move. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 11:39, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

That's not really a reasonable conclusion (it's an extremely bad faith and downright weird conclusion - James was trying to deceive, for what?). People who were discussing it on Wikipedia Weekly thought the same. The reasonable conclusion is that there was obviously tension, discussion got thrown around about the power to remove, and James decided he'd better do what Jimbo calls elsewhere on this page 'disagree and commit'. I've done very similar things in board rooms. It's a bit nauseating but a natural reaction to try to show that you're back on the team. II | (t - c) 08:03, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

It's perfectly reasonable conclusion. If someone says x and the natural interpretation of x is y, and if the speaker is aware that y is the natural interpretation, yet the speaker claims he didn't mean y at all, then the speaker is deceiving us. There is no other reasonable conclusion. Peter Damian (talk) 08:10, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Whether the statement was purely temporal or not is kind of irrelevant. James isn't a mind-reader. He didn't say that someone directly threatened to remove him for how he voted, nor can I imagine anyone saying something so blatantly wrong. But his position was (as evidenced by his removal), quite tenuous, so any statements about removing a board member could be viewed as a veiled threat. II | (t - c)

Well, no. "I supported its approval following pressure which included comments about potentially removing members of the Board." Does mean his support was pressured by potential removal, not by the merits of the grant (it also contains the strange lacuna, that James did not just 'support it' he moved the board to accept it - given that, it would be '[I moved the board to take board action] following pressure which included comments about potentially removing members of the Board') -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:15, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

On the points raised by others above, these miss the point IMO. James was supposedly dismissed from the board because the vast majority of trustees had lost trust in him. I am afraid that Jimmy's comments above rather support that version of events. A plausible narrative is that (1) James raised some valid concerns about the scope of the Knowledge Engine, (2) it was explained to him that these concerns were unfounded, (3) he persisted in grandstanding of which this later example is an instance; (3) people lost patience. It is difficult to explain the reaction of the other board members otherwise. Peter Damian (talk) 08:06, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Well, by my reading most of the people who commented on the topic found these concerns to be quite well-founded (employee survey basically showing 90% dissatisfaction, plus a grant application which was basically a search engine). I'm not sure how you could find otherwise. I know what I'm saying here is typical Wikipedia snideness, but I think it's a bit ironic that you would use the word grandstanding, given that you were notoriously banned for several years after grandstanding about FT2's interest in animals or some such nonsense. :) Yeah, Wikipedians have long memories... thanks for the good content work by the way. II | (t - c) 08:31, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Jimmy Wales' summary above of our email correspondence is far from complete, and is not an accurate representation of the overall discussion. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 01:22, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

Frankly this whole process of explanation by offering the minimum amount of information necessary is tiring and adds to the confusion, and I entirely agree with Sarah's comment here. I am looking at both James and Jimmy here. James: in what way is the summary of the correspondence 'far from complete', and how does it not accurately represent the overall discussion? Jimmy: during the 7–9 November meetings, did you say anything in front of James about removing board members? Peter Damian (talk) 15:44, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

I appreciate Jimmy's and James's answers to Peter's earlier questions, and I think an answer from both Jimmy and James to Peter's last two questions (immediately above) would help all of us to better understand the events leading up to James's dismissal. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 14:22, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

It would be a pity if this thread was archived with those two questions unanswered. HolidayInGibraltar (talk) 22:19, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

It's worth noting here that it's been over 10 weeks since User:Doc James asked Jimmy to release the email discussed above, about which Jimmy has said repeatedly that he's waiting to hear back from the other trustees before publishing. Is there a communications problem among the board members? --SB_Johnny | ^talk✌ 15:57, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

I recall how we were waiting to hear back from the Knight Foundation before publishing the Knowledge Engine grant paperwork. Does someone from The Signpost need to ask each trustee individually? Doc James is clearly saying "bring it on", so don't hold anything back on his account... he seems to be fine with revealing the "main reason" for his dismissal... wbm1058 (talk) 15:19, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Looks like he's busy scuttling something, but hopefully our constitutional monarch have time to answer soon. --SB_Johnny | ^talk✌ 03:27, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Jimbo, you quoted some passages of our mails above. Would you have any objection to my posting the complete exchange, so that the parts you quoted can be seen in context? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 01:09, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Role of the Founder

This whole conversation is getting icky. Perpetual talk of "Knowledge Engine" is standing the laws of perpetual motion on its head. I'll be bold: James is not getting back on the board. That's simply a truism. No need for handwringing. Same as Lila is not going to be brought back either. Many pieces are in flux so the pieces that aren't should stay until this stuff resolves. As a recommendation during the week that Andy Grove passed away, I suggest Jimbo continue his transition from God-King to Constitutional-Monarch to perhaps Chairman Emeritus of the board that Grove's mentor, Gordon Moore holds. The only reason I say this is when about the time you stopped blocking/banning people and took a step back, it appeared you had taken stock of yourself and said "I am the focal point and lightning rod for actions that I only considered tangential and rather uncontroversial." I read replies today that echo the same sentiment. You aren't shying away from being a board member but no one, not even Patricio, is being microscoped like this. We can play junior detective on the talk page for months and it will not resolve. Take a look at the boards founders chair and see how much influence you would lose in an "Emeritus Chair." There's not a single Intel Board Member or Executive that will ever refute Moore's Law even if he can't vote and can't fire people. Do you think you are the lightning rod and focal point for what's been happening over the last few months? If not, what's a better way to channel influence and mentor once a new ED is found? I'm not being cynical but I've been around the block enough times to see leaders that needed to transform their role to be effective. Leaders rarely lose their power or influence when they take a well-thought out step back from stage. Grove certainly didn't. Moore didn't either. --DHeyward (talk) 12:28, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Bad analogy; there is no one capable enough and positioned well enough to take the wheel of this starship. In fact, I think Jimbo Wales is obligated to take back more control until some of the more capable members of this community move into the structural administrative/leadership sphere. Nocturnalnow (talk) 20:55, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

I agree with you completely with "there is no one capable enough and positioned well enough to take the wheel of this starship.' but I view your quote as a past management failure due to ambiguous roles and ill-defined scope of ED and board members and this being opportunity to review the role Jimbo wants (there's no right or wrong answer here, just how to assess the state of that role and plan to realize it). WMF is big enough to hire organizational experts. Have an outside firm with experience in "churn" and "focus" that can help both WMF and Jimbo figure out what they want, what their vision is of the future and their role and how to map it. It's more than "Find new ED. Lather. Rinse. Repeat." There's nothing wrong if he wants to be ED and WMF makes the changes. But if he doesn't want to be ED and has a vision his goals for himself and the project, I think he and WMF would be wise in hiring organizational coaches that can help advise them in firewalling himself from the ED role and mapping out a plan to effectively implement his plan. Even little things like personally going to SF to reassure employees is compassionate yet it gives the impression that the most senior executive is subordinate to another individual because of a status that is observed but unstated. That makes Jimbo the de-facto "top executive" and the person with the title "ED" his assistant. It will be difficult to recruit and retain top talent as everyone "knows." The types of interrogatory/responses on this page that exist virtually nowhere else, are, in essence, an appeal to authority and responding can give the impression the authority is real. There is a mixed-message sent when one exchange is (paraphrased) "I am just one vote in a 10 person board" with SF visit (paraphrase) "I can personally assure you..." followed by (paraphrase) "The executive director resigned this week but I feel comfortable enough to speak in the ED's place." There's nothing nefarious there. It's quite the contrary. But it's a barrier to recruiting a top ED. --DHeyward (talk) 08:41, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

Why is it that when I hear WP likened to a starship, the first thing I think of is Spaceballs??? Carrite (talk) 02:43, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

:) yes, and the second thing is We built this city Nocturnalnow (talk) 05:48, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Super ironically, just noticed these lyrics:

Someone's always playing corporation games

Who cares, they're always changing corporation names

We just want to dance here, someone stole the stage

They call us irresponsible, write us off the page Nocturnalnow (talk) 05:56, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

http://i.imgur.com/EZZiWhP.jpg 75.166.21.87 (talk) 15:22, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

you put some effort into this layout/design, I think... thought provoking and humourous, to me anyway. Nocturnalnow (talk) 19:35, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

You are right about everything you just said, imo, including the mixed-message aspect.

Your suggestion "I think he and WMF would be wise in hiring organizational coaches that can help advise them..." is a great suggestion that I wholeheartedly endorse; I would only maybe add an amendment that perhaps they can first attempt to find these coaches in house (within the community)..that may not be possible, but it might be worth a try. There are a number of really smart people around here..we saw a lot of their clear thinking come out in the Arnnon RFC. If that is attempted, it maybe should be restricted to the people who have been around a long time and who have had admin/ArbCom positions so there will be a bit of history and comfort between the coaches and the WMF ( including Jimbo ). There would be advantages to simply hire professionals in this field, so that may be the best way to go. I am just throwing out another implementation possibility. Nocturnalnow (talk) 19:00, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

Jimbo is not just the de-facto "top executive", he is the de facto Chairman and CEO. With term limits, the chairmen-in-name seem like perpetual lame ducks. Are there any other members of the 10 person board who could individually meet with the employees in SF to discuss their future, without risking getting fired for doing so. In our wiki-world, Parliament mostly operates behind the scenes in secret, and the Prime Minister only makes rare public pronouncements. Prime minister press conferences and direct interaction with the public are even more rare. In contrast, Buckingham Palace is a beehive of public discussion and interaction. – wbm1058 (talk) 15:03, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

That's silly. There is barely a 'group of people', let alone a "world" - nothing Jimbo does affects most anyone in this group, unless someone really is a cultist. There is a relatively small corporation, with a board, an executive, and employees but it's not of moment to most people in "wikiworld", and it is a corporation that runs like a corporation, with a board, an executive, and employees. Alanscottwalker (talk) 15:29, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

I think we should have a Rfc to see how much community support there is for DHeyward's suggestion, specifically:

"WMF is big enough to hire organizational experts. Have an outside firm with experience in "churn" and "focus" that can help both WMF and Jimbo figure out what they want, what their vision is of the future and their role and how to map it....I think he and WMF would be wise in hiring organizational coaches that can help advise them"

Upon reflection, I think DHeyward's suggestion of hiring professionals to come in to do this is the simplest and best way to go about it. Perhaps DHeyward should begin the Rfc if he is in agreement with the Rfc approach. Nocturnalnow (talk) 15:30, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

No, it's just a suggestion. People can comment here if they have input. I'm an outsider to WMF so what I perceive and reality may not be the same. Jimbo hasn't commented and RfC's about things the community doesn't control, IMO, are not helpful. I would like WMF to have the strongest executive candidate possible and the most productive and talented staff possible. From an outsider position, the people in top positions that have left the organization under less than optimal conditions (in fact the history of rather ugly departures goes nearly all the way to the beginning). Some of it is the mob rule type of pressure and RfC's are a part of that. The proper way for my suggestion is to have it brought to the board and then implemented if they desire. Most corporate boards have sub-committees to determine all sorts of things and if they decide they need help in creating or improving their identity, they should make it happen. This isn't the "volunteer editor" identity, it's WMF and what WMF wants to be as well as Jimbo and what he wants. From the outside, it doesn't appear to be a healthy culture (e.g. the examples previously, ED leaving, board member removed, board member elect drops out, board turns over major appointment to employees where healthy boards would form executive search sub-committee's). --DHeyward (talk) 23:11, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

ok, I defer to what you say about best process. Nocturnalnow (talk) 03:58, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Rana Foroohar writes, in this week's Time, that only about 15% of capital flows in the US financial system go into the real economy; the rest just circulates in the high-finance microcosm, where it isn't invested in research, products, jobs or innovation. Some big players are worried; Warren Buffett, Larry Fink and Jamie Dimon met to talk about how to reform corporate governance. So, governance issues aren't limited to just the WMF, and, while it at least tries to invest in the right things, I'm concerned that if it considers itself not of moment to most people in "wikiworld" – volunteers who edit from all corners of the globe – it will continue to miss the target in terms of its investments. For us, the content is our "real economy". wbm1058 (talk) 18:33, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

I just wanted to comment on one aspect of this discussion, and that is the notion that I am in any way the "de facto" CEO or "de facto" chairman. There is no sense in which that is true, and I very much doubt that you would find anyone on the board or staff who would concur with that notion. It's very important that this myth be dispelled. Whatever problems we have, and we do have problems, they don't lie in that direction.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:35, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, that should save a lot of time, knowing that is the wrong direction. In what direction do the problems lie? If I, as a novice here, were to guess, I'd guess thoughtful, accurate and timely communication might be one of the directions, but what do you say? Nocturnalnow (talk) 14:57, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Of course I can't speak for how the board or staff view your role; I only know of your Internet presence. Perhaps Patricio did not replace Lila at that Austin conference because he isn't sufficiently competent in English, I don't know (though his user page says "This user has advanced knowledge of English" {en-3}). But look who appears to be in charge here, even in a Spanish-speaking venue: Jimmy Wales: “La calidad de la información de Wikipedia crece cada día” Note the two pictures. There's a reason that, at the US presidential debates, they put the leader in the polls at the center of the table, and those who are trailing out at the edges. This editing profile doesn't look like that of someone in charge of English Wikipedia either, though to be fair the Spanish profile is better. Maybe, like the former ED, I will find him on meta? No. I don't really know where to go for a wiki-discussion with him, other than to speak English on a Spanish talk page. I haven't seen him edit on this page. wbm1058 (talk) 17:08, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Jimmy, do you plan to ever comment on the other aspects of this discussion, like the suggestion of the WMF hiring a professional mediator, or the inquiry above into why it's taking so long to release the correspondence between you and James Heilman, or should we interpret your reply as yet another selective answer with the unspoken implication of "I'm not answering anything else, now shut up and go away"? --71.110.8.102 (talk) 23:16, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

inappropriate cats in the Commons

Dear Mr Wales - maybe you'd like to take a look at these images of categories in the Commons [15] [16] (see the very bottom of one of those images for the full effect) and then explain to me how you think this reflects on the WP project in general and the admin of the Commons in particular.

Let me paint you a little scenario - I've come across those cats, and some idiot has actually uploaded something horrible to the Commons and to that cat. So if I click on the cat wl to see what is included, I've then got the images in my cache AND my history will shown that I've clicked on the category so have gone looking for them, so I can hardly argue I came across them accidentally right?

Are there or are there not categories which are inappropriate for the Commons even if they currently include benign images? When are you and/or the WMF going to do something about it?

Of course, if you'd rather discuss this with the media when they find out, I can wait. JMWt (talk) 12:25, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

• Has anyone checked recently if you still get porn when you search for 'toothbrush' on commons? Or did someone fix that? Only in death does duty end (talk) 12:46, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

The widespread and unchecked function of the Commons as an archive of porn is one thing. But this is getting into something else altogether. JMWt (talk) 12:48, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

While as is well known I have concerns about the policing of commons, I'm not (yet) convinced that the mere existence of this category is a bad thing for this reason. We have an entry in Wikipedia on the topic of "child pornography" - which is a valid thing to have an encyclopedia article about of course, in the sense of educating the public about the history and various issues and so on. Someone might upload something inappropriate to that article, and it would be caught quickly and reverted and the revision deleted, etc. That's no argument for not having the article.

In terms of a discussion with the media, I don't worry about it as long as two things are present: 1) appropriate policies banning the appropriate things -we have this, and 2) reasonably speedy action in terms of policing. If someone does something horrible at Wikipedia and it is reverted within a few minutes (on a busy page) or even a few hours (on an obscure corner of the site), then the public will understand that it isn't our fault and that preventing it would be destructive to the great good that Wikipedia does.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:30, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

OK, I can believe that child pornography might include pictures of law enforcement involved in the same (though to me that's quite a stretch). But it is hard to make the same argument about categories called "child sex abuse" and "erotic images of children". But the fact that the images are benign at the moment is not an argument to keep the categories. It is pretty clear to me that any benign images should be recategorised in better cats and that I'm running an enormous risk to myself even looking in those cats to see if there are any inappropriate images to report for the reasons outlined above. JMWt (talk) 14:44, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

With respect to the media, I suspect almost nobody is going to "understand that it isn't our fault" when the categories are known to exist on the Commons by the admins there and the management of the WMF and yet nothing is done about it. JMWt (talk) 14:46, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Its just a 'General' category and as per your 2nd link, Commons has clarified why that category exists but your comments makes people think that Commons is somehow housing child pornography...we are NOT...Categories are created for every major topics in the world, and guess what, child Pornography is as big as it gets. If you come across "actual" Child Pornography in that category, then be my guest, go and complain to the media if you must.. WMF has strengthened its stance on this 2 years ago and have taken action in regards to people intentionally adding "CP" to Commons...Regardless of the category, Any time a questionable image is added to commons, its deleted and salted and the user reported to Su&Sa and action is taken almost immediately...The categories are there for a reason...There are 2 sides to child pornography, stop focusing on the wrong side. --Stemoc 15:01, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

You really don't have a clue how this looks from the outside do you. You are seriously sitting there and defending having a category for "erotic images of children". Wake up and smell the coffee - the only place there appears to be "two sides to child pornography" is inside the ratified atmosphere of the Commons. JMWt (talk) 15:13, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

So its not the category which is the problem, its you.... what next, we should delete the article on Child pornography because an article on that looks bad for an 'encyclopedia'? ..--Stemoc 15:40, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

You're repeating yourself nonresponsively, which is tiresome. Can you give an example of some not inappropriate content that justifies the existence of an "erotic images of children" category? --JBL (talk) 23:51, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Well, i went to commons and looked at the Category:Erotic images of children. It contains about 30 pictures, mostly "historic" drawings relating to sexual activities with children. Is this "inappropriate"? Tradedia^talk 12:13, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Help for illegal block

Mr. Jimmy Wales, plead to you for help which unfortunately is the only way to do that. My name is and I K.Velkov registered user bg.wikipedia.org with nicname "oficialniat" from 2012. https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B1%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BB:Oficialniat I'm not active editor but I use it almost daily because of my curiosity to Wikipedia. My account has been blocked against the rules to block an administrator in bg.wikipedia.org with nicname "Alice Seleznyov." I will explain briefly the case because bg.wikipedia.org no Arbitration Committee and dialogue or administrator of the case is impossible, because of their bias and abuse of their rights as such. On 01/01/2016, the article in the proposed deletion of "Alice Seleznyov" is not written by me, I just conscientiously and in good faith pointed requested of it for the article reliable sources here: https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%91%D0%BE%D1%85%D0%BE%D1%81_%D0%90%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%85%D0%B0%D0%BC%D1%8F%D0%BD I asked her if it was possible to remove the proposal to delete after changes / Y: SI and Y: FA / rules bg.wikipedia.org. Later threat made to me by her blocking and accordingly It made a request to administrators to unlock its behavior anger administrator "Alice Seleznyov" and it most bluntly, and I think wrongly blocked my account in her fictional pretext for personal attacks and systematic harassment of customers / what you mentioned in your request / here: https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A3%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%8F:%D0%97%D0%B0%D1%8F%D0%B2%D0%BA%D0%B8_%D0%BA%D1%8A%D0%BC_%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%BC%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B5 Since you are acting as a last resort you please look at the case in detail, to take a position on case and help me to unblock my account for that in advance thank you! I do not speak English and I apologize for bad translation. Sincerely: --Oficialniat (talk) 09:34, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Community engagement

• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Forum

Posts here, which include (IIRC) anyone trying to respond to the FoundationWiki, are routinely ignored. I have replied to a few myself, while I have been there asking questions, which I like to think are worthy of a response.

Should not the Community Engagement folk be checking this page at least every day?

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 19:20, 4 April 2016 (UTC).

@Rich Farmbrough: In honesty, this is the first time I've heard of that page. I'm still somewhat new to the Foundation, but I'll do my best to answer questions and direct folks appropriately. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 20:09, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

I might have heard of this once, but forgot about it. Do you think this link should be added to "See also" at User:Jimbo Wales and to the "other help and discussion locations" at WP:Village pump? Wnt (talk) 21:54, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

I don't know. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:10, 4 April 2016 (UTC).

Thanks Jethro. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:10, 4 April 2016 (UTC).

All good, it seems. :-) --Jimbo Wales (talk) 22:18, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

On a similar note, most Board members appear to not be aware the Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard exists, or if they are they give no indication of it, which makes it a little unclear what the purpose of that page is. To their credit, Dariusz Jemielniak and Alice Wiegand appear to be the exceptions, but their replies seem to be personal and not official communications on behalf of the entire Board. I also note that Jimbo did not reply to my inquiry before it was archived. As Jimbo just checked in above, I hope he is working on a response. --71.110.8.102 (talk) 22:30, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Semantic web and Semantic Mediawiki

From an earlier discussion:

I wish Jimbo had embraced semantic Mediawiki, rather than shit-canning it because he found it too complicated for his tastes. Imagine a world where you could easily search for all cities in Germany south of the 50th latitude line with at least 45,000 people. That's what Wikipedia is not doing. - 64.94.31.206 (talk) 12:17, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

I'm afraid you have a mistaken understanding of history here. I had nothing to do with any decision to either "embrace" or "shit-can" semantic MediaWiki. Furthermore, to the extent that I had any influence on it, it was in the opposite direction - far from finding it "too complicated for my tastes" I thought it was incredibly worthy of further exploration. Per what Wikid77 proposes above, I think semantic markup in some form is incredibly interesting and valuable - moreso now than ever before.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:23, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Jimmy, you spoke on camera about eight years ago, at which time you said about semantic web:

• "For a long time, I used to say about semantic web that it sounded neat, but I don't understand it."
• "Every time I would try to start learning something about semantic web, I would end up reading these sort of very long, dry abstract theoretical policy documents that I felt were unrealistic and didn't tell me what I'm supposed to do."
• "I'm a little skeptical of a lot of things in this area. There are a lot of people working on ... semantic search, and for right now I haven't seen anything particularly useful about that. ...I've talked to some people at Google who share that sentiment."
• "Keyword-based searching where the machine doesn't even attempt to understand what the document is about actually works pretty well. Having the ability for a machine to read a document and understand it in some vague sense doesn't seem to be particularly helpful for most of the real problems we face in search."
• "At least for right now ... I just don't see anything."

So, while you may not have shit-canned Semantic Mediawiki, you were certainly not saying in 2008 that semantic web was "incredibly worthy of further exploration" or that it was "incredibly interesting and valuable", were you? No, you were saying that you didn't understand it, that you felt documentation about it was unrealistic, that you were skeptical about a lot of things about it, that you hadn't seen anything particularly useful, and that it didn't seem particularly helpful. These are not words used by someone to describe their incredible interest in exploring something. - 2600:1002:B016:A71A:882:660A:9ADE:5B3B (talk) 12:12, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

What an interesting snapshot of my thinking at a point in time... about something other than semantic mediawiki. Also worth noting that nothing in that discussion is about semantic mediawiki, which is not mentioned, but the semantic web in general. I would say that in terms of subsequent technical developments, my skepticism has proven to be valid. Remember that at that time, there was a lot of hype in the press about the web becoming radically semantic. I didn't see that happening and I was right.

Semantic mediawiki, on the other hand, was and is as a concept something entirely different and very interesting.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 22:03, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

He is not entirely negative about it, in that talk. "And I think a lot of the ideas around the Symantec web are beginning to come to fruition. You know, we have people-- lots of people doing things like tagging photos at Flikr or adding articles to categories at Wikipedia. "

I did get into some of the ideas behind the semantic web about the time of that talk. Looking as COinS and Dublin Core metadata. When you read the specifications of these sorts of things they can make you head spin, there are 55 different verbs define in Dublin Core. This stuff get techie very quickly. For 2008 Jimmys summary was pretty accurate.

Now things are a little different. Google certainly make very good use of tagging of photos and extracting nearby text but the category system on wikipedia is pretty inconsistent with all sort of omissions and duplications with a pretty mammoth backlog of Wikipedia:Categories for discussion awaiting closure.--Salix alba (talk): 12:39, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Precisely right. The ideas behind semantic mediawiki were and are exciting. Finding ways to move from abstract specifications to actual implementation is always a challenge, and UI problems of doing sophisticated things with complex categorizations remains very difficult. But I think the ideas behind semantic mediawiki remain exciting today.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 22:12, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Given your apparent long-held excitement over Semantic Mediawiki, could you please point to the last time (prior to the current week) where you spoke or wrote with any enthusiasm about Semantic Mediawiki? Surely someone so excited by the software extension should be able to recall some time in history when it was discussed favorably! - 2601:42:C104:28F0:3C28:691:4FBC:8E1A (talk) 02:02, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

I haven't spoken about Semantic Mediawiki in a long time. So? I haven't talked about any mediawiki extensions in a long time. I like it, I support it, and I would like to see further development. If your objective is to gain my support for it, you've got it. If your objective is some kind of "gotcha" then *yawn*. Do something more interesting with your time - and mine.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 02:28, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Semantic Mediawiki was proposed and initially developed in late 2005. If it was going to "work" on Wikipedia, the time to support it and be enthusiastic about its utility would have been 2006 to 2008, when Wikipedia articles were still embryonic enough that introduction of RDF schema could become more "routine" with ordinary editors. Jimmy wanted to be told where to hammer the nail, because "he is a carpenter, not an architect". In this case, the architects were Markus Krötzsch, Denny Vrandečić, and Max Völkel, and they asked for carpenters as early as Wikimania 2005. - 2600:1002:B016:A71A:882:660A:9ADE:5B3B (talk) 12:46, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Actually, I think the time to get excited about it is now - when we are finally in a state where actual use cases look valuable and interesting. Investing Foundation resources in the latest hype isn't generally going to be the sensible way forward - but adopting solid technical ideas when the time is right is a great thing to do. A couple of years ago, it might have been "gamification" and I can tell you all my skepticism about that in general - but at the same time I think there are a lot of useful ideas that came from that body of work (that was unfortunately overhyped) that we should now begin to consider.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 22:12, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

What does this have to do with Knowledge Engine? If one goal of KE is to answer questions like "What is the population of Berlin?", that seems silly to me. Sure, someone typing the question into our search box, just gets a list of results rather than a specific answer to the question. But how many are so challenged that they can't figure out that the answer is easily found by examining the Berlin infobox? On the other hand, the question what are the ten cites in the world whose population is the closest to Berlin's? is much more challenging to answer from a technical standpoint. Does the WMF have the expertise to pull something like that off? wbm1058 (talk) 14:13, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

I think we do have the expertise to pull something like that off, or we can invest to get there pretty easily. But my random opinion isn't how we should make decisions - and isn't how we make decisions. What I hope to see is *investment* in thinking about it, actually working through what could be accomplished on a limited budget. That's a task for people working full-time on a full-scale analysis, not something we can pull together in a quick conversation here. :-)--Jimbo Wales (talk) 22:12, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

• 
  Citogenesis is already a problem.
• 
  But for-profit companies who repackage community content to sell ads love Wikidata so much, maybe they would give the Foundation a huge grant to make the project sites less human readable.

What could possibly go wrong? EllenCT (talk) 14:34, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

I'm unaware of any companies wanting to give us a grant to do anything like that, and obviously I don't think the desires of such companies should be our primary, nor even a major, motivation for our software decisions. At the same time, working out how to better distribute our work to - for example - geographically based apps - is a really good idea. I was just playing with a new app I heard about the other day called "Flyover Country" - it'd be great if we had tools to make more things like that possible for more people. Is it hard to do? What would it cost? What would be achievable by a small organization? All of those things are worthy of serious analysis.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 22:12, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

It's no secret that Google has brought more and more of what are essentially Wikipedia infobox templates into their top page results for their searches on both desktop and mobile, from Wikipedia and Wikidata. The resulting traditional Foundation fundraising from small donors has gone from exponential for the prior history of Foundation fundraising until decreasing very substantially for the first time ever last year. Google very likely picked up a large portion of that surprising change in ad revenue. If there are any reasons that Wikidata didn't cause that, I'd like to read them.

To answer your questions, wikitext already has all the features people want out of the semantic web. Our geotagging has been easily machine readable since 2007. Have you tried Wikipedia Disaster Monitor? (source, paper1, paper2, slide deck.) It's fully geocoded and uses all languages' wikipedias to monitor twenty categories of events in real time. The people who built it are actually using the semantic features of Wikipedia and building tools so anyone can. They are certainly not using anything like the "semantic web," RDF, "Semantic MediaWiki," nor any non-human readable coding extensions (which are diametrically opposed to the goals of the Visual Editor, I might add) but they do work for Google's AdWords team. If the Board of Trustees isn't aware of that, I hope you will please bring it to their attention. EllenCT (talk) 03:21, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

I'm finding it hard to parse what this discussion is actually about, probably because it was started by someone with an axe to grind. Regardless, it's worth pointing out that Wikidata Query Service is capable of answering many of the questions raised here (e.g. "What is the population of Berlin?") using the data contained in Wikidata. Wikidata Query Service is a SPARQL endpoint, so whilst it's very interesting for technical people to build tools on top of, it's not so useful to your typical reader or editor. In that line, there's https://askplatyp.us askplatyp.us, a demo made by some students which is capable of answering queries entered in prose using Wikidata. For example, What is the population of Berlin? Hopefully this information is helpful. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 03:57, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Any idea why wbm1058's example doesn't work? EllenCT (talk) 04:45, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes I think it is very much in alpha state. I've tried several different combinations to try and get a list of german cities. Most just give 42 which seems to be the "don't know" answer. However cities in germany gave Florida as an answer. WolframAlpha does a petty good good job cities with population close to berlin.--Salix alba (talk): 06:48, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

The usual corporate response to this need would be for the WMF to buy the WolframAlpha knowledge engine, or poach its best and brightest employees (assuming they don't have an unspoken non-compete agreement with them). wbm1058 (talk) 12:22, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

The answer to my question can be found at List of cities proper by population. Just takes a little more searching effort to find it. wbm1058 (talk) 12:22, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Rank City Image Population Definition Total area (km²) Population density (/km²) Country 68 Yokohama 3,680,267 Municipality City 437.38 8,414 Japan 69 Busan 3,590,101 Municipality City 766.12 4,686 South Korea 70 Hangzhou 3,560,391 Sub-provincial City 728.19 4,889 China 71 Xiamen 3,531,347 Sub-provincial City 1,699 2,078 China 72 Quanzhou 3,520,846 Prefecture-level City 1,062 3,315 China 73 Berlin 3,517,424 City State 891.75 3,944 Germany 74 Rawalpindi 3,510,000 City District 127 27,638 Pakistan 75 Jeddah 3,456,259 Municipality City 1,765 1,958 Saudi Arabia 76 Durban 3,442,361 Municipality City 2,291.31 1,502 South Africa 77 Hyderabad 3,429,471 City District 114 30,083 Pakistan 78 Kabul 3,414,100 Municipality City 275 12,415 Afghanistan References

That's really nifty (it is!)... but now what if you wanted to narrow that list to cities that are at least 30 latitude degrees from the equator, or cities that have a mean July temperature of at least 24 degrees celsius, or both of those modifiers combined? You can't do that on the fly with a man-made wiki list, but you could easily construct such a query with Semantic Mediawiki, if only it had been implemented by the WMF and backed by the community. - 2001:558:1400:10:20A4:C9FB:E724:D1B7 (talk) 16:32, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

How do you know it would be easy if it hasn't been implemented? Why not just use ordinary query builders with Quarry instead? Why do you want to modify MediaWiki to do that? Have readers actually asked for anything even vaguely like either possibility? EllenCT (talk) 18:14, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

I dunno... any genie in a bottle smart enough to answer questions like this, I'd have a hard time trusting not to lie to me. If a program can give answers like this, it would have to also give a step-by-step explanation of how it deduced them. Wnt (talk) 03:09, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Be careful what you wish for.[17][18][19][20][21] EllenCT (talk) 04:32, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Yeeeike! But if a human wants to explain how he came up with a list of figures, he has to explain where that list came from, not where he went to school and how his brain works, and I'd demand the same from the machine. But I should also add ... in a way that can be understood. Wnt (talk) 10:33, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

What is the status of meta:Grants:IEG/StrepHit: Wikidata Statements Validation via References? EllenCT (talk) 14:23, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Faking credentials

User Essjay famously pretended to be a tenured professor of theology at a private university in the eastern United States. Nine years ago this caused a major upheaval at Wikipedia. At the time, you said "I regard it as a pseudonym [m.e.] and I don't really have a problem with it." Later in 2010, interviewed for the film Truth in Numbers? (15:00 in), you said "Even to this day [m.e.] I defend it. This is a young man who made a mistake. In the grand scheme of things what he did was pretty minor [m.e.]. Having a pseudonym, and - sort of - fleshing it out with some traits [my emph] - that's really no big deal [my emph], I mean, that's part of online life. "

We have a similar situation this week. See current ANI discussion. A long-standing editor, who represents the Foundation in Nigeria, has (apparently falsely) claimed to be a lecturer at Adekunle Ajasin University, and a biochemist by occupation. A number of users are saying, as you said of EssJay, that this is no big deal, or words to that effect. In the current case, one user compares it to saying they are an astronaut, another has no particular issue with it (although finds it problematic in certain situations). The culprit himself says it is no different from representing yourself as a 'vampire or a goat'.

Now I think it is a big deal, and that fabricating an online identity is quite different from fabricating credentials. I think this is an issue for the Arbitration Committee, and today I will make some enquiries about that, but in the first place I would like to understand your view. Has it changed from 2007-10? Or is it still no big deal? I also seek the community's views on this. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Peter Damian (talk • contribs) 09:14, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Jimmy's thoughts

I don't know the facts directly, so I can only comment based on the general principles. I think faking credentials - in the sense of printing up or photoshopping them or lying about them over an extended period of time - is a big deal. I think a young person being foolish and coming online and making up some stuff to make themselves look important is bad - but I'm not so authoritarian or moralist in my personality that I'd excoriate them. It's not great, but it's not necessarily a big deal. I feel the same about a lot of juvenile indiscretions - not good, but let's be realistic, people are going to do things they shouldn't. In most cases, they should apologize and we should accept their apologies.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 02:52, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Thank you. I guess you are saying that it's wrong to fake or photoshop any official records such as a diploma and submit them as credentials, but it's OK to lie about them on your Wikipedia user page. Thanks for your reply. Peter Damian (talk) 18:36, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Did you even read what I wrote? I did not say it is OK. In fact, I said the exact opposite: I said that it is bad and a big deal. You surely must understand why I get so exasperated with you when you clearly have a good talent to read closely, but you also seem to do so in a selective manner.

What I am saying is pretty clear. There's a sliding scale here, as with virtually all moral wrongs. With different factors, how harshly we judge things will reasonably vary. Lying on a user profile page is clearly "lying over an extended period of time" and therefore pretty serious. Less serious would be someone who says it in passing in a conversation - that's still NOT OK (I say this in all caps so that you can't possibly misrepresent my position again). Other mitigating factors can be youth, newness to the community, emotional upset at that moment, etc. We should also consider behavior after the lie is caught - is there an apology, an explanation, etc.? At the end of the day, taking into account a wide range of factors is what mature moral judgment is about. Not every wrong deserves permanent excoriation and reputational damage. Forgiveness, when appropriate, is a virtue.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 18:59, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, it was not clear that 'lying about them over an extended period of time' meant doing this on a user page. Now understood. I agree that there can be mitigating circumstances. Peter Damian (talk) 19:03, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

PS you are almost the only person who actually answered the question, and thanks for that. Most people below did not say whether it was OK, or whether a big deal, but passed to questions like whether it was possible to verify credentials. Others said that it didn't matter because credentials don't matter. I think they meant that credentials don't matter to them, but of course the question is whether credentials matter to other people, or to people in general. I think for most people, seeing and believing that someone is an actual rocket scientist, or a fields medal winner, influences how they interact with that person. A further confusion is between 'identity' and 'credential'. A credential is something intended to engender trust or authority. An identity is just an identity. I think you agree with that. Peter Damian (talk) 19:10, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Ok, apology accepted. In terms of those other questions, I will have a stab at them because they seem to be of interest as well.

1. Is it possible to verify credentials? I think that it is, to a reasonable degree of certainty rather than to an abstract standard of perfection, and for some people more easily than others. I just looked at a favorite Wikiproject of mine and selected a user from there whom I don't personally know: User:Shellnut. He makes a number of statements about his background by way of explanation of his interest in shells and his expertise. Some of it would be pretty hard to verify - that he is a former PhD student but changed plans and became a lawyer instead. The law degree could probably be verified easily enough in public databases, but isn't relevant - the unfinished PhD is a bit hard. That he wrote and sells a shell management software application is readily verifiable by clicking. That he is editor of The Festivus is likely easily verified by visiting their website to see who the editor is. Of course the skeptic might say that the user known as Shellnut could be simply impersonating the real David Berschauer but remember that I said "to a reasonable degree of certainty rather than to an abstract standard of perception". That someone would go so far as to fabricate all those details begins to feel significantly less likely than that he very simply is who he says he is.

   Clearly in some other cases, the verification is even easier. University professors with a position generally have a web page and a public email address, and a simple email from that email address saying "Yeah, this is me" is pretty good.

   Just as a word of caution: Faking source email addresses is not very difficult. Cheers, Pgallert (talk) 06:26, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

   No, it is damned near impossible in this use case. Let's use you as a test case. :) Your user page says "I teach computer networking at Namibia University of Science and Technology in Windhoek." A quick google finds me your official email address and confirms that fact well enough. I could email you and say "Hey, this is Jimmy from Wikipedia. Just confirming that the Pgallert at Wikipedia isn't an imposter." That'd be kind of a weird thing to do right now, because we don't generally confirm identities like that, but suppose we had a culture of doing that and publicly "vouching"? And software to support it. So that someone could go to a page with facts about you and each one would have one or more "vouchings". "Verified by email confirmation to official address at University" this one might say. "Know him personally from the university" another might say.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:15, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

2. Do credentials matter? I think that they sometimes can, but I'm also someone who cautions against "credentialism". I remember a certain competing encyclopedia project to this one which attempted to emphasize credentials which ended up in the embarrassing (in my view) position of an entry on homeopathy written by someone who was unquestionably a highly qualified advocate of homeopathy. I wouldn't accuse the proprietors of that project of being blind credentialists, but it's an example of a bad place where excessive faith in credentials can land you. Even so, especially in some areas and some positions, credentials of a group of people do give a good reassurance that isn't groundless. I like to see a Wikiproject like Wikipedia:WikiProject Gastropods this one where a significant number of the participants are actually professionally qualified in the field. I'm assured that they are looking after and helpful to those whose knowledge comes in an amateur fashion.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:38, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

To be clear (and perhaps now you are misunderstanding me!) my question is not whether credentials matter in the sense of ‘are a good thing’ but rather, whether they impact people’s behaviour and interaction with one another. The turning point of the EssJay case was when he was found to have ‘used it in content disputes’. But behaviour can be influenced without credentials being used like that. As long as they are visible on a user page, they have the potential to influence. We should ask whether that is a good thing. I would say that either users should be forbidden from displaying them, or at the very least they should be prepared to defend them. (Which is not the same thing as having to defend them). Peter Damian (talk) 18:23, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

I think we agree. I think they do impact people's behavior and interaction with one another. People can rely on them more heavily or less heavily and that would impact our evaluation of a particular situation. For example, someone might come and lie and say they have a PhD in Organic Chemistry and then edit exclusively on the history of the Beatles. That's not relying on the lie nearly as directly as if they claimed to have a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University and talked about specializing in the ideas of the Beatles during their turn to eastern religious thought. It's still a lie, and it would still potentially influence people's behavior. I doubt whether forbidding people from adding them is the right answer, but I also think that if someone makes a claim to a credential or expertise, it opens up the valid point that they should be willing to back it up. I would go a step further and say that people ought to be proactively seeking to give basic assurances. Most people do, actually, in a small scale way, by disclosing their real name and university affiliation. As discussed elsewhere in this thread, someone *might* do that as an imposter, of course, but could also be quickly found out if any alarm bells were raised.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:20, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

• Case study #1. Inside of a mainspace article, someone writes that he is an eminent biochemist and a researcher, also a member of the canadian society for biochemistry and molecular biology, USA, and this becomes quoted and repeated across the internet over an extended period of time. What is your opinion about the case ? Pldx1 (talk) 20:42, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

I'm always skeptical of partially blinded examples - if it's a real example, I'd like to see the example so that I have the full context. Since you mention this as being in a mainspace article, I already think it a bit unseemly for someone to use such prose to describe themselves, even if it is all true. If it isn't true, then it's particularly bad. And it is worse that it is inserted into a mainspace article than if it is on a user talk page (although for clarity, I don't think that's ok either). If I'm being asked to judge a person morally, I'd need a lot more context. Was this someone young and foolish who now regrets it? Was it posted for a short period of time and then removed by that person? Was it relied upon in a content dispute? Was it relied upon to gain material benefits of some kind (as opposed to just being a lark)?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:24, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Jimmy, this is an attempt to play a gotcha game with you; the above is from the autobiography Wikicology wrote with one of his sock accounts. The whole saga has already been documented above. ‑ Iridescent 15:42, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

The matter is currently at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case#Wikicology, so ArbCom can consider more facts than have been detailed here. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 15:49, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Dear User:Iridescent. Are you suggesting that Jimbo Wales, or any other reader of this page, is not aware of how to Google search a whole sentence ? It's one click distance to find the newspapers that reproduce this assertion. And since these articles are about the Owo City State, and have a WP-like appearence, it becomes immediate to examine the Owo article. Nigerian academics have'nt access to deleted pages at en:wp. And probably wouldn't care. But they have access to Nigerian press. And probably care. Pldx1 (talk) 18:49, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Pldx1,aka Trickster, maybe you should care about what you do instead of speculating about what other people probably care about. Nocturnalnow (talk) 04:08, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

Community thoughts

• This is why we're supposed to be anonymous editors, and it shouldn't matter whether i'm a janitor or a PhD in biochemistry when i edit. Besides, there are some janitors who are far smarter than some PhD's so that metric isn't even reliable anyway. So what's the big deal? Just tell the user "It doesn't matter who you are. It matters whether the things you say make sense and whether you have reliable sources." SageRad (talk) 09:40, 2 April 2016 (UTC)
  • @SageRad: Can you clarify whether (a) you think editors shouldn't mention credentials at all on their user page, for the reasons you suggest or (b) it's perfectly OK, even if the credentials are falsified? Peter Damian (talk) 11:15, 2 April 2016 (UTC)
• This person seems to have fabricated a biography for Wikipedia (now deleted, see the thread at Wikipediocracy). There should be an ArbCom case if this is not met with a ban at AN/I and this person should be out the fucking door, end of story. Lying about oneself is bad enough. PUBLISHING LIES about oneself is quite another. That the bio failed to meet GNG and was deleted is neither here nor there. Carrite (talk) 14:11, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

I note further that according to the AN/I thread this individual made FOURTEEN attempts at putting a COI autobiography up on WP. Carrite (talk) 15:06, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

• The COI self-advertising and legal threats issues here are totally different from Essjay. Besides, as the article explains, Jimbo changed his mind after the first comment quoted above, saying Essjay's inaccurate credentials had been used in disputes improperly. The only thing that I can say in this editor's favor is that you can be an "academic" and a "biochemist" without publishing or being a professor; for example, a lab tech might be hired straight from an undergraduate biochemistry degree, and would qualify. I don't know what he wrote in the article though, because it's deleted. I'd be less concerned with whether an ad is right than that it is here to begin with. Wnt (talk) 14:23, 2 April 2016 (UTC)
  • Note The statement from Jimmy that I quoted was from 2010, three years after the Essjay incident. Peter Damian (talk) 14:57, 2 April 2016 (UTC)
    • I'll take your word for it; duly struck. I should work on my skimming comprehension. Wnt (talk) 17:59, 2 April 2016 (UTC)
• (ec) All of us are anonymous. Whatever we say about ourselves is unverified, and we should keep that in mind when interacting with them. Without grossly violating a user's privacy (see WP:OUTING), there is no way to tell if what they say about themselves is actually true. And it doesn't matter anyhow; presumably they are not quoting themselves as Reliable Sources! The only "falsification" that matters to us at en.wiki is if someone falsely claims a Wikipedia identity; when someone falsely identified themselves as an administrator, they are very quickly slapped down. In the case you are talking about, if he misrepresented himself to the WMF, that is an issue for the WMF to deal with. I can't imagine it being a case for Arbcom. (I gather that you weren't able to get much support at the ANI discussion and so you are WP:Forum shopping your issue here. Like most forum shopping, it does not appear likely to give you a different result.) --MelanieN (talk) 14:25, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

• You gather wrong. There has been little discussion, in that ANI thread, about the impact of misrepresenting one's academic or professional standing on Wikipedia. And I don't think Peter is looking for a result here. He appears to be looking for an intelligent discussion about the issue. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 15:56, 2 April 2016 (UTC)
• "All of us are anonymous"? What does that even mean, MelanieN? - 2601:42:C104:28F0:1CD2:7F01:B895:818 (talk) 03:38, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

• It means that we all are operating from behind the anonymity of a computer screen. Even if we register with a user name, even if we give information about ourselves, there is no way for anyone else to know if what we say is true or not. On my user page I describe myself as a woman from San Diego, but the rest of you have no way of knowing if that is true; I could be a guy in Florida or a kid in Hawaii. If I claim to be a doctor or a politician or a librarian or a retired Navy SEAL, it is just that: a claim. And if someone says "Aha, MelanieN, I have checked you out; you are not really a retired Navy SEAL, in fact you are a secretary in a real estate firm, here's the proof" - they are the ones in the wrong and subject to sanctions, not me. --MelanieN (talk) 07:22, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Melanie, I apologize for taking this thread further off topic, but are you saying that if a Wikipedian edits with their real name as their user name, and they attend a WMF-sponsored edit-a-thon, and they present an official form of identification, and six or seven other Wikipedians can verify that they appear to be who they say they are, that they are still "anonymous", because there's a 1% chance that the photo ID is a fake? Seems to stretch the limits of "assume bad faith". - 71.230.8.193 (talk) 13:21, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

• Melanie, what does this have to do with faking credentials? Peter Damian (talk) 09:48, 3 April 2016 (UTC)
• There's a difference between assuming a persona for fun or for personal safety and using that persona for personal gain. While I agree with that going around debunking editors' cover stories can be wrongful, any wrongfulness in revealing that someone has been using the aspects of his or her cover story for gain does not necessarily mean we ignore the wrongfulness that was revealed. The sort of exclusionary doctrine this suggests appears to be imported from 4th Amendment jurisprudence, when really the analogy is only tenuous. —/Mendaliv/^2¢/_Δ's/ 10:20, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Peter, your complaint about this person is "A long-standing editor, who represents the Foundation in Nigeria, has (apparently falsely) claimed to be a lecturer at Adekunle Ajasin University, and a biochemist by occupation." You add "Now I think it is a big deal, and that fabricating an online identity is quite different from fabricating credentials." I totally don't see any difference. In your mind, it would be OK for me to fake being a Navy SEAL, but not OK for me to fake being a professor? That seems like a distinction that exists only in your mind. On the other hand, this is from Wikipedia policy: "Editors are warned, however, that the community has rejected the idea that editors should "investigate" each other. Posting such information on Wikipedia violates this policy."
Mendaliv, you make a distinction about using a false persona for personal gain. I don't see any evidence, here or at the ANI, that the subject has gained any financial reward for his (allegedly) exaggerated claims about himself. --MelanieN (talk) 13:23, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

"the community has rejected the idea that editors should "investigate" each other." Horseshit. See WP:SOCKPUPPET. The WP:DUCK test is used to "investigate" editors all the time. If he quacks like an {{expert}}, then he must be an expert? It seems this guy has been involved in several WMF grant applications. When donors' money is on the line, there should be this level of scrutiny, from the WMF, before money is handed out. I have no confidence that he hasn't personally benefited from receiving grant money. wbm1058 (talk) 15:21, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

• Avoiding the two specific cases, but talking about the issue in general; It is difficult to challenge asserted credentials without outing people. We currently have three options for those who assert credentials here:

1. Out yourself fully such as an academic I know one editor whose userpage and university bio linked to each other.
2. Assert credentials but leave them unverified.
3. Don't assert credentials on wiki

The second option is risky, and I'm aware of one incident where an academic chose not to out themselves when their credentials were challenged. I think it would be helpful if the WMF and or chapters were to offer a verification service for editors. ϢereSpielChequers 14:37, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

A 4th option would be: Ask a known expert to evaluate the responses of someone claiming credentials, as perhaps an easy method to debunk someone who should know more about the subject matter or places, such as, "What color are the trees in Nairobi in November?" or similar, based on quick replies (not researched for days/weeks). Someone really aware could answer questions of the expert very quickly. -Wikid77 (talk) 16:54, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

• I would also like to hear from Davidcannon, who proposed Wikicology for adminship with these words:

" Wikicology is a lecturer at Adekunle Ajasin University in Nigeria. He focuses primarily on Nigeria-related topics, but also contributes to numerous topics, such as Medicine, Biochemistry, Molecular biology, Governments Politics, History, Culture, Business and other encyclopedic subjects" according to his user page — a claim I have checked, and find to be true."

Did you not check and say you did? Are you just really bad at verification of evidence? Did you attempt to intentionally deceive the community — and if so, why? We do need an explanation about you failure to perform verification and as to the degree of your involvement in this false identity scam. Carrite (talk) 15:03, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

I think that statement means that Davidcannon checked Wikicology's claim that they had contributed to all these areas on WP (verifying which wouldn't have been difficult and arguably part of due diligence in nominating). I wouldn't read too much into this.-- Elmidae (talk) 16:31, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

• On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. And nobody cares for most of the time. However, a person should not claim to possess academic qualifications that they do not have, as it is bound to lead to exposure and controversy in the long run.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 15:19, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

It's beginning to look like the editor does have the qualifications he claims - his claimed academic and professional standing appears to have been exaggerated. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 16:04, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

By credentials I mean claims about employment and occupation. I don't dispute that qualifications are also credentials. Peter Damian (talk) 16:30, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

• Credentialism sucks. Its as simple as that. Just look at all the bullshit "honorary" degrees floating around and all the crooks calling themselves "doctor" (of whatever) and fraudulent online "colleges" issuing degrees for $100. I think ignore all credentials might be a good policy as well as a disclaimer for our readers. As said above "It doesn't matter who you are. It matters whether the things you say make sense and whether you have reliable sources." should perhaps in someway be formalized into Wikipedia's official description. Nocturnalnow (talk) 16:09, 2 April 2016 (UTC)
  • What is the {{Expert needed}} template for? Peter Damian (talk) 16:32, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

The template does seem like a good thing for improving content; and maybe not a problem because "expert" is pretty general and can be satisfied with AGF, I think, as well as how reasonable the expert's contribution seems to be. Nocturnalnow (talk) 18:52, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Its pretty hard to verify credentials online, and in general I'm not sure we should try to attempt it. As an example, I've identified myself to the WMF a couple of times. I think I faxed them my drivers license and passport. But do they really know who I am? A faxed drivers license could very easily be faked. Credentials, such as degrees, are even harder to verify. So the general solution is probably going to be "ignore all claims of credentials". Sure, I've seen several editors who claim to have PhDs, and in general I believe them - you "can tell" if you've seen enough of them - but I would never take such an online claim at face value if it involved something important.

There is one situation were I think we should verify claims. Paid editors need to declare that they are representing companies or people. If we didn't have this, then we'd never be able to keep up with all the ads people insert in Wikipedia. But there is always a chance of a Joe-job, e.g. a firm's competitor could hire somebody to say that they were hired by XYZ company to embarrass XYZ. So for paid editors claims, it does make sense to have them verified. I'll suggest that for every paid editor declaration we need to have a verifiable statement (e.g. with telephone and other contact info) sent to OTRS from the employer. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 16:47, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

The problem is that people generally don't ignore all claims of credentials. I suspect this is why the many glaring errors in Wikicology's edits were not spotted. If he is writing about poison gases and people see he is a professional biochemist, they are likely to assume it is OK. As I first did, when someone pointed me to one of his articles (an article that on further investigation turned out to be a crock). It's one thing to make false claims in an article about theology. I don't think anyone will die as a result. But making up symptoms? That seems dangerous to me. Peter Damian (talk) 16:52, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Sounds like a case for Doc James

Smallbones_(smalltalk) 17:16, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

"Credentials, such as degrees, are even harder to verify." Is this true? I'm admittedly not an expert on the topic, but I thought universities generally will verify a degree on request. For instance, a quick Web search found National Student Clearinghouse, which appears to allow you to verify degrees from many U.S. institutions, as well as some other credentials like professional certifications. I do understand that due to privacy laws verifying will usually require the consent of the awardee. --71.110.8.102 (talk) 20:04, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Well, I'm an expert on the topic, and I say... EEng 22:21, 2 April 2016 (UTC) Get the joke? And seriously: even assuming you can get Institution I to verify that Person P earned Degree D (which in fact you can generally do), how do we know that User:IamJohnSmith really is John Smith?

Exceptions include addresses for "verified Facebook" accounts and the like, and most *.edu addresses for faculty members. Collect (talk) 22:42, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Oops, forgot. Right you are. EEng 00:01, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

• I'm surprised that people say that how one presents themselves on Wikipedia, whether or not it is fabricated is of no importance. Of course, we are mostly anonymous individuals but it's clear when someone says they are an academic or a lawyer or a physician (or any occupational position indicating advanced training), their opinion is taken more seriously than User:JustARegularEditor. I think people calling themselves Dr. or Prof. in their username are being deceptive if the names are not accurate unless it's clearly a nickname (like Doctor Feelgood). I seen people take other's user page self-description at face value and not have any skepticism about whether they are who they claim to be.

As for meaningless credentials, the ones that get me are "best-selling author" (on what list?) or "award winning". These I see in biographies more than Wikipedia user pages but if you scratch the surface, they often turn out not to be very notable achievements. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 23:17, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

• Should credentials matter (whether academic or not)? Not really (although credentialed editors provide expert insight). Should editors flash phony credentials? Definitely not. Fake credentials are a cheap yet effective way to gain credibility; excluding caution by editors over the Essjay drama, many would trust an editor with recognizable credentials more than your average editor. When editors claiming phony credentials enter content disputes and other drama over the accuracy of content, their non-expert bad-faith manipulative opinion (e.g. one who claims that they'll hang their degree on "Learn X in Y<168 hours" for a programming topic) is more likely to prevail to the detriment of our readers. Esquivalience ^t 02:23, 3 April 2016 (UTC)
• I see that in addition to the active ANI thread and this discussion, there is also now an active request at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case#Wikicology. How many different venues is he going to be dragged before, all at the same time? --MelanieN (talk) 13:33, 3 April 2016 (UTC)
• WP:TOU policy already forbids ". . .misrepresenting your affiliation with any individual or entity, or using the username of another user with the intent to deceive . . ." So, for employment history that includes employer, "affiliation" would apply (although perhaps there will be an "intent to deceive" question). For academic study, it would seem to apply only if the person states the institution of study (but perhaps "affiliation" does not stretch that far). At any rate, generally, especially academic and job credentials that are unverified, no one should take any stock in. I don't when it is generally irrelevant (see eg., WP:NOR - don't tell me you know 'the truth' about content, show me) in specific contexts it will be relevant (see eg., WP:COI) but it is not generally so. Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:02, 3 April 2016 (UTC)
• Forget about the fakers - the same protocols (if followed) can be ignored for an academic, based on their expertise, despite their COI of having a book/article for $s on that topic, while paid PR reps can COI disclose on Talk Pages & then allowably edit the article after a lack of response, & an ER doctor can become the be-all & end all of everything medical (even psychiatry) despite not having the relevant qualifications for those specialties. Yep, the system is seriously fucked up. AnonNep (talk) 17:56, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

You think this system is messed up? Most every other system involving more than 1 human makes this one look like a swiss clock. Nocturnalnow (talk) 20:20, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Hate like hell to drop-in a shameless plug for a much needed and very worthy project, but...how hard is it to see that WP:Project Accuracy is designed to lay the foundation to eliminate issues just like this one? A credentialed editorial board - identified with accreditation on a WP page - reviewing our finest articles for promotion (with a level of protection) and acknowledged as such with the project's gold seal. If we can get enough community support for it, we will waste far less time on the drama boards, and will care a whole lot less about who edited the article and got it to the stage of promotion. The fact that our articles are moving in the direction of being reviewed and approved by a recognized, qualified (identified) editorial review board is like introducing a vaccine during an epidemic - it will eventually save the project from a killer disease. Just saying. ^{Atsme📞📧} 20:31, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Here here. However, as with copyright investigations, I fear that fact-checking queues would be endlessly backlogged without some incentive to clear them. Give the community some funding for this. To firewall the WMF from liability for content, have the community evaluate the performance of the copyright investigators and fact checkers, and give the community the power to set pay rates and to fire underperformers. Would something like this be workable? Certainly a better use of funds than throwing small parties that do next to nothing to actually develop content. We need to give those looking for money the right incentives! wbm1058 (talk) 21:43, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

So you will pay people to check the work of the people who work for free. Fact checking is very dull work and is subject to debate, as we see in the presidential campaign. Possibly it would be a better idea to use the money to get people to write, directly. At least start reimbursing reasonable expenses for books and subscriptions. You'll need the same books and subscriptions for the editorial board to factcheck anyway. Basically, you'll need to give them access to everything that the writer had. The writer, of course, may no longer be active, and finding copies may be an adventure in itself for the board. This could be expensive. Again, it seems more logical to make the same resources available to the writers in the first place. And, of course, the gold seal of approval only applies to one version of an article: six hours later subtle vandalism or just plain mistakes could be there ...--Wehwalt (talk) 18:21, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Well, we already have The Wikipedia Library which affords access to various journals, etc., and there are book grants available. Besides, the off-Wiki academic/expert/practitioners that will form the pool we will draw from for the relative editorial review board (topic based selections) will already have access to books/information they need. With regards to the reviewed articles, think beyond FA promotion and liken it to published works in a medical/scientific/trade journal that have been peer reviewed and also undergo review by an editorial review board prior to publication. Such a level of reliability will not need two versions rather it will need protection of a level that may be a bit inconvenient as far as instantaneous publishing but we won't be sacrificing the anyone can edit policy. Over time, it will substantially reduce disruption resulting from WP:Recentism, tabloid journalism, vandalism, incompetence and so many other types of editing that chips away at the project's credibility. BTW, some of the points you've made have already been discussed at length here and are still being discussed here. ^{Atsme📞📧} 20:53, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

I am involved with The Wikipedia Library as George Mason University's visiting scholar, and I think produce more FAs than all other visiting scholars combined (or in the ballpark) but that access, while very useful, only goes so far. Thank you for the information and the link. I think you underestimate the cost, the difficulty in finding experts (and the number needed) and getting them to agree and then actually perform in a timely manner, and overestimate the willingness of FA writers to go towards the brave new world of another, untested process that would reduce twelve years of FAC to a lesser process. I personally would have some resistance to a process where others are paid for reviewing work for which I am not, not even my expenses. But I'm just me. Suggest you run such things by WT:FAC and see what people think. I do not monitor meta and similar due to lack of time and interest. --Wehwalt (talk) 02:43, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

• Coming back to Peter's original question... If it turns out that someone has been exagerating (or blatanly lying about) their credentials, titles, real-life accomplishments, sizes of strategic body parts, or whatever... then what? Should the communitity take action? Of course not. The community is going to simply lose trust, every next action of the editor will be scrutinised, questioned, undone, twisted, reverted and what have you. That will probably happen all by itself, and Wikipedia will no longer be a fun place. If it does not happen all by itself, and nobody really cares, then yes, they get away with it, but no harm will be done anyway. So, I guess that ultimately it is no big deal. - DVdm (talk) 22:07, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

There should be some mechanism for the Foundation, or OTRS, or someone to officially certify an editor's asserted credentials. Then we will know which credentials we should assume in good faith, and which credentials we should scrutinise, question, or take with a grain of salt, i.e. any asserted credentials which have not been officially certified. If officially certified credentials later turn out to be fakes or forgeries, then we should take action. wbm1058 (talk) 23:26, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

I always take claims of credentials from a new editor with a grain of salt. Make that a bucket. Actually, I just shrug these claims away. Our policies are designed to make sure that the quality and the value of an edit can be judged from the edit itself. On the other hand, an editor's credibility can perfectly (and perhaps only) be judged from a significant history of good edits. Credentials are often claimed by new editors when their contributions get rejected per original research, unsourced, or (only primary) sourced by their own academic work. There's a ton of academics with big, real, relevant credentials out there, but blocked/banned because at some point they insisted that credentials are more important than our basic policies. By design, they are not. So, no, I don't think there should be such a mechanism, and there probably never will be one—at least not for the bulk of regular editors or administrators. I think that attempts to install such mechanisms are a waste of time. - DVdm (talk) 08:21, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

So, getting back to the incident that triggered this thread, the problem is that the WMF did not take the guy's claims with a grain of salt. If they had taken the time to scrutinize his edit history, then they would have seen that he shouldn't have gotten his hands on a penny of WMF grant money. wbm1058 (talk) 13:54, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Are you making that up, or do you have any evidence that his academic or job history was the reason any grant was given? Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:27, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

No, I don't really know anything much about the thought process that goes into grant decisions. Maybe his asserted credentials were not considered. Clearly his edit history was not seriously considered. This begs the question of what actually was considered, and why the grants were awarded? wbm1058 (talk) 14:39, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Indeed. Though, loose speculation about such individual matters is probably against policy. One could ask the grant's people why they provide sandwiches, etc, for editing sessions, do you honestly think there is a perfect editor vetting process? On the other hand, there is an auto-patrolled vetting process, which English Wikipedia administrators vouch for and this editor got that, so maybe his editing is not all horror. Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:54, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Peter Damian did a great service, I think, by bringing up this matter. Grant monies must be especially well protected because much of it is money given in trust to WMF by individuals who may not have much money in the first place. Whatever the grant decision process is, this event shows it needs improvement.Nocturnalnow (talk) 02:35, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

• I have my own wiki page, so my credentials are not in doubt. Count Iblis (talk) 20:32, 8 April 2016 (UTC)
• So do I Peter Damian (talk) 11:43, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

Requests for source material

I propose that there be a new entity (a Wikipedia page or a Wikipedia namespace or a Wikipedia WikiProject or a Wikimedia project or something else) where editors can list articles needing sources, and where journalists and webmasters and scholars can read what is listed and provide links to the needed source material (perhaps also producing it). The new entity can also include, for each article listed, specific information about the details required in the source material. Although I have had this idea for probably several years now, I am prompted to mention it at this time because I am having some difficulty in finding suitable source material for the article Journey to the Safest Place on Earth. (Please see also User talk:Garagepunk66#Journey to the Safest Place on Earth.)
—Wavelength (talk) 22:34, 6 April 2016 (UTC) and 22:39, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

WP:REX? Choess (talk) 23:52, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Thank you, but that page appears to be for requesting specific articles and books and other publications. My proposal is about requesting material with specific information but with no specification of articles or books or other publications. In the article mentioned above, I cited three different sources, but all three of them omit the names of the authors and the dates of the articles. Also, the second one now denies access. WP:REX does not appear to be intended as a place for requesting information about that film, information which might be found at webpages not yet identified, information accompanied by author-and-date information.

—Wavelength (talk) 00:18, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

What? You don't have an underground lair full of minions working their way through Category:Articles lacking sources?!? And you call yourself a wikipedian? EllenCT (talk) 04:57, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Category:Articles lacking sources from December 2009 is my favorite subcat. EllenCT (talk) 05:13, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Here is another example. I am interested in finding reports either for or against the hypothesis that left-handedness is correlated with concavity of the right cheek (more than the left cheek), because of the right cheek being supported by the right hand while the left hand is writing; and vice versa. If no research has been done on this hypothesis, then the new entity would be a convenient place for me to post an expression of my interest, for possible action by interested researchers. After the research has been adequately done, then the researcher(s) can produce an article about it (in compliance with Wikipedia requirements for sources) and secondary sources can do likewise. Next, they can post one or more comments with one or more links below my expression of interest.—Wavelength (talk) 19:00, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

I would always consider asking at wp:Reference_desk, where many people have answered numerous questions about extremely obscure subjects, and they do not seem to mind the effort, just pick a relevant topic category. -Wikid77 (talk) 16:39, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

That is a good idea. You can also try a commercial search engine on the pertinent terms to try to find where the most applicable active forums are. EllenCT (talk) 17:59, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

I have posted a question about this hypothesis at Wikipedia:Reference desk/Science.

—Wavelength (talk) 18:49, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

Updated demographic statistics on Wikipedia editors

Does anyone know if there is a reasonably up-to-date source regarding demographic statistics on regular English Wikipedia editors? I mean statistical information regarding various parameters such as age, gender, level of education, occupation, native language, etc. The Wikipedia article itself does contain a table with this kind of info in Wikipedia#Community section (namely this table [22]). However, the info there is based on a survey from April 2009, so it is 7 years old. It'd be interesting to see more up-to-date information if it is available... Nsk92 (talk) 00:54, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Grossly and criminally disgracefully understudied... Median age is in the middle to late 30s, 85% male, give or take. College educated. Carrite (talk) 03:54, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Carrite, if you are going to use such outrageous language as "criminally" then please leave my talk page and don't come back. It is totally unhelpful. Who should be arrested and what crime have they committed? Obviously, no one and none. Being a jackass does not build an encyclopedia, it builds a culture of hostility. Stop it.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 04:07, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Honestly, I think "criminally" in a non-literal sense is not that uncommon an English usage. Compare definition 4. Wnt (talk) 11:26, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

@JW. I didn't realize you were such a literalist. Apologies for the use of such confusing hyperbole. Carrite (talk) 13:47, 8 April 2016 (UTC) P.S. No need to whisper, Wnt, it is a common use of the word. Carrite (talk) 13:50, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Grossly understudied - we can all agree on that. But why so? IMHO because it's a political topic around here, especially the % women, but probably also because of a few quarrels involving US vs. UK vs. the rest of the world, young and old, liberal and conservative, etc. But rationally, all parties should agree knowing the demographics should allow us to improve the encyclopedia. So why doesn't the WMF go ahead and just do it?

Perhaps, because of the political implications. The main holdup here IMHO is that people want to get this exactly right, do everything in the very best possible way. I'll suggest that there is no best possible way, that there are many cheap and fast good ways, that we should just go ahead and do it. If somebody complains that the survey was biased against xxx (the complaint will almost certainly happen) then we should just go ahead and make a few corrections and do it again. The biggest problem IMHO is that the "best possible way" to many people's way of thinking is to do a census or population study, i.e. try to get data on everybody. That is impossible and trying it will certainly bias the data - and it's also expensive and slow.

We need a random sample of the population. 1000-1600 responses of randomly sampled editors should do it. It's not that hard. Let's just do it. Results could be ready in a month. Jimmy, any chance that you could make this happen via the WMF? Smallbones_(smalltalk) 20:21, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Such studies have been done in the past and will be done in the future. I apologize for not knowing how to point you to the results. I strongly support thorough investigation into the demographics of active Wikipedians, but also in studying what their motivations are, and what the reasons are that people leave the community, etc.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 04:08, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Findings from 2009 study

Perhaps folks can help provide the needed links. It is worthwhile to include the graph of the 2009 study. The fine print show that there were nearly 44,000 respondents. I say that's too many! 1,000 - 2,000 would do just as well. It's too many to do on a regular basis. Also it is not just the English language editors - I'm not against surveying non-English language editors, but if we get the methods down for en:Wiki we can then go on to other Wikis. Doing everything at once ends up doing almost nothing at all for 7 years.

Note that the presented results could be recorded from a survey of 5 questions. If these are the most important questions - and I think they are - then we should not fool ourselves that we need a long survey instrument. Keep it spectacularly short! I'm not against up to 10 short questions, but the additional questions should be well thought out before including them.

The WMF can do such a survey. Say sample the editor after every 2,000 edits for a week (that's probably too many) and tell them "we've got 5 very quick questions - can you help us get a handle on en:Wikipedia's demographics?"

We shouldn't combine this with any other study. e.g. we got demographics info with the harassment study (attempted census). But folks who want to answer a survey on harassment are likely not typical of the overall population of editors.

All we need is the commitment to do this, and to do it soon. Does anybody out there know a reason why it shouldn't be done soon? Smallbones_(smalltalk) 16:56, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

You should talk to the research team at Wikimedia, I think they'll find this very interesting and they'll be able to tell you what their current research efforts include!--Jimbo Wales (talk) 18:06, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Agreed, we need to measure how it's changed. Some type of wiki survey, perhaps? ThePlatypusofDoom (talk) 20:07, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

I've contacted a few people but don't expect to hear from them until after the weekend. Meanwhile, does anybody have links to more recent surveys? Smallbones_(smalltalk) 19:20, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

Make small donor fundraising great again

Source: https://frdata.wikimedia.org/yeardata-day-vs-ytdsum.csv

Is there a plan to make sure large grant donors don't even matter, e.g., for anything other than the non-program endowment? Should there be? EllenCT (talk) 15:21, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

The revenue from small donors is highly correlated with page views on desktop. The ongoing switch from desktop to mobile is having a material impact. Yes, the fundraising team is aware of the issues and working on solutions, but there is very likely no magic bullet. Among the things that are happening, to good effect, is enhancement and optimization of the email campaign to existing donors. Personally, I am confident that mobile payment solutions will continue to improve thus changing the current poor revenue situation for us on mobile.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:44, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Is that an actual long term trend?

page views web requests	"non-mobile" (e.g. desktop and laptop) browsers	mobile/tablet browsers	mobile apps
June 2013	171 billion	50 billion	3 billion
June 2014	139 billion	92 billion	2 billion
June 2015	155 billion	101 billion	2 billion

Does anyone want to sample the other months to see if desktops stopped decreasing when, for example, the Microsoft Surface hit the market? I could see how that might cause problems for an ontology that wants things to be "non-mobile" (meaning laptops and desktops) or tablets, but apparently not both. This is why you want to let your CTO candidates take questions from the community, by the way. EllenCT (talk) 22:10, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

The Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book were released on October 26, 2015. Why does https://browser-reports.wmflabs.org/ not have category totals? I used that source for this next graph, which apparently uses very different definitions:

Whether or not the page views in the first graph are probably just HTTP requests, which means there is one for a page and one for all the images on that page (I guess) does the long term trend does suggest an actual decrease in desktop browser page views? EllenCT (talk) 16:12, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

I was curious as to how desktop and mobile traffic relate as well. Someone else can hopefully point to a better resource, but this chart from http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyAllProjects.htm seemed helpful. Ckoerner (talk) 20:53, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Pageviews in phones with desktop-view setting

I try to keep my mobile phone set to "desktop-view" (but poor menu-design promotes unclick of the setting), and I see the regular desktop/laptop pages and edit-screen interface, but using the phone's ultra-slow "touch-SCREAM" (touch-screen) interface with dreadful tiny touch-keys and zillions of typos at auto-spell correction. I suspect many users would use desktop-view once they know to get the full-page articles and edit-screens (and videos), rather than the limited mobile-phone "m." webpages. This is the mobile-desktop crowd. -Wikid77 (talk) 17:08, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Maybe the Foundation could look for editors who seem to be doing well with their mobile devices and send researchers out to videotape their techniques. EllenCT (talk) 18:04, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

I've written a (short) FA using a mobile device as an exercise, but it's not an experience I'd care to repeat. That's using desktop view; as per virtually everyone else who's ever commented on it, I find mobile view bad to the point of unusable for reading (hey, we've got a version of the site with enormous fonts, which loses most of the formatting and with key information missing altogether on all but the most basic of articles, and we're so proud of it we're going to constantly reset your device to use it no matter how often you try to disable it!), and completely unusable for editing. ‑ Iridescent 20:33, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

Who can test whether mobile users give as much (in donations and contributions) as desktop users when you make desktop mode the default for them? EllenCT (talk) 14:59, 10 April 2016 (U TC)

Hey Jimbo.

An edit that wasn't supposed to be reverted from my edit, the user said it was unessary on your user page but I think that revert needs to be reverted. It was nesscary. (Sorry 'bout spelling.) DatNuttyWikipedian (talk) 02:08, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Wikimania Esino Lario

Hello and sorry if this question is already answered somewhere. Otherwise do you have any plans to visit Italy this year? --Neolexx (talk) 20:37, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Given that you've just linked to a page which lists Jimmy as speaking in Esino Lario at 10:30 on 24 July, I'm not sure what more you're expecting him to add… ‑ Iridescent 20:24, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

24 June. Shame on me, I honestly and somehow (don't ask me how) missed it in the programm but now I see it. So thanks to him he didn't add anything about my manual reading abilities... :-) --Neolexx (talk) 21:23, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

Just confirming: I'll be at Wikimania, as always. I'm also likely to be in Italy for a conference or two - I usually am.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:20, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Mobile apps

Why are there even mobile apps instead of a geometry responsive web site, anyway? How many developers work on that less than a percent of page views? EllenCT (talk) 18:40, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

• That sounds like a horse and buggy manufacturer saying "Why invest in internal combustion engines when they are less than a percent of miles driven?" Obviously there are valid reasons to consider the relative investment in mobile web versus mobile apps, but your analysis is pretty simplistic. In terms of revenue, one reason (again, just a factor, not overwhelming) is that mobile apps generally have very easy internal payment/donation systems attached (in-app purchases) whereas mobile websites do not. There's a huge amount to be said about this, and I'm not taking any big position, I'm just saying - this is a sophisticated choice. (And not one that I'm personally involved with analyzing for Wikipedia, by the way.)--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:03, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

What is our revenue strategy for pure voice I/O at geometry 0x0? EllenCT (talk) 22:10, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Apps do seem optimal to pull in revenue/resellable data. But if you think that makes them a good thing, then you should say the same about spam email. Wnt (talk) 12:40, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

• @EllenCT: Your question about the apps is overly simplistic. Have you tried the apps? I think they offer a much nicer experience than the mobile website, and they were significantly easier to make than the mobile website was for a variety of reasons, some technological and some cultural. Many features and design patterns that were pioneered in the apps have been adopted as beta features or production features on other platforms, such as using imagery and metadata in search forms, which both statistical analysis and usability studies have shown has a significant impact on a user's ability to find what they're searching for. From the technical side, the API-driven nature of the apps has pushed the boundaries of our API development, which promotes re-use of our content beyond just the apps. I think our apps have a definite place in our platforms given that they have million of people using them. And regarding that comic you posted, a modal window has never been used to promote the apps, and there are no plans to do so; my opinion is that disrupting a reader's experience in such a manner is not worth the potential reward of getting people to use the apps. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 20:39, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

@Deskana (WMF): But if we look at the above table we see 98% of mobile users are not using the app. Do these users get a good experience? Do you have better data about this? --Salix alba (talk): 21:19, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

@Salix alba: My point was that number of page views is not the only metric with which one can evaluate the rewards from investing in a particular platform. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 21:30, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

I have not tried the apps. Can they zoom? Do you have a link for them? EllenCT (talk) 22:10, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

You can find the apps in the Android play store and the Apple app store. They are significantly different from each other at the moment, as the iOS (Apple) version has just been refreshed in a major way with some really interesting ideas.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 01:49, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

I received a Samsung Galaxy Tab as a Christmas gift (Ok...someone loves me. ;) ) so I checked out the apps on the tablet and I have to tell you, the experience was not fun. Is it possible that the numbers of people using them is just because...wait for it....that is all there is? Perhaps I am just not understanding the basics of the discussion but I have to tell you, Wikipedia apps are not easy to use unless all you want to do is read....and even that is no great joy. As far as I am concerned, Wikipedia is far behind on apps. Smart TVs and tablets make it essential that we stay ahead of this curve and in my opinion...this is an issue we are falling behind on. Now...how stupid did I just come across? No...that's OK.....I'll find my way out. ;) --Mark Miller (talk) 03:25, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

If you have a chance, check out the direction of the iOS app. I agree with you that we need to invest in this, by the way. Good progress has been made, in my opinion, with the direction of the iOS app.

Here is how it was explained to me in an impromptu demo at the WMF - except that this is my own words and so any clumsiness is mine. One major issue with mobile apps is not merely hoping that people go to the command line of the Internet (Google search box) and type something that leads to us, but rather to realize that apps are unfortunately silos with the major way that people get to them being the app itself pushing something interesting to the user. Apps that succeed tantalize us during those bored moments with tidbits that we might find interesting. So the concept of the iOS app is not just "replicate the mobile website in a native app" (a reasonable first thing to do) but rather to be an answer to the question "What would bring people to the app every day?" So it's about pushing out the photo of the date, news of the day, etc as notifications. It's about customizing a feed based on what the user did before. Were you looking at World War II articles yesterday? Hey, here's a good one for today! Not all of this is fully realized in the current version, and certainly not yet anything close to optimized. But it's a very interesting path to take and I'm excited to see what comes next.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 03:55, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Would someone care to explain to me why this matters? The last time I looked (about 10 minutes ago) meta:Vision said: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. That doesn't require an app. That doesn't require a method of pushing content to users. Wikipedia's contribution to that vision is to build a freely available encyclopedia. The mobile site could do that much better, in my opinion, if development didn't have two mobile platforms to maintain, not to mention iOS and Android variants. Building a freely available encyclopedia is irrelevant to "pushing" content at readers, or tracking what they read. Provided they have (uncensored) Internet access, anybody can go to Wikipedia in their browser and if they wish, edit it.

The pragmatic reasons for building an app that I can think of are as follows:

1. Some people expect there to be an app: so? If you want to read about something, you don't need an app.
2. Somebody else might make an app: how is this different to Wikiwand on desktop?
3. It's easier to make donations through an app: how cynical.
4. Building an app is easier than a mobile web interface: given that we would hope for cross-platform accessibility, we need a mobile site for non-support mobile OSes.

By the way, I did download the app to my iOS device to have a look. I can't say I'm impressed. For one thing, the featured article image on the front page has a three-click attribution path. BethNaught (talk) 20:58, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

What's more, the iOS Wikipedia app appears to use the Commons Picture of the Day rather than Wikipedia's featured picture. Bringing other projects under the Wikipedia branding is deceptive and denies other projects their due recognition. BethNaught (talk) 21:10, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

I don't agree with pretty much anything you've said, and I particularly note that your negative attitude is not consistent with "Assume Good Faith". Please step back and take another look at things.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:58, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

I think you have become used to me being perpetually negative about Flow and therefore read such motives into my above comments. That's wrong, but I can't blame you. In truth, I am genuinely puzzled as to why "pushing" content at readers is an important part of our vision. I legitimately asked for someone to explain that. It seems obvious to me that if developer effort is not split, quality will improve, and hence to be worthwhile an app must have particular value to the mission; I am asking for reasons why it does.

As for my comments about the app, they are specific problems I see with it and I am still concerned by them. I shan't bother repeating them for rhetoric as they can be read above. BethNaught (talk) 16:21, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

You are right that I've come to expect negativity from you, as well as baseless and rude allegations against the WMF staff like the one above of the app being "deceptive" or that interest in financial matters is "cynical". I encourage you to reconsider your rhetoric and attitude as it isn't really persuading anyone.

As to the specific question of "push" I don't really even understand what you are asking. Our vision is a free encyclopedia for every single person on the planet in their own language. Achieving that vision requires a lot of precursors, including being a very popular and widely used and well-funded operation to achieve that vision. There are some widely known and well understand facts about the direction that the Internet has been heading, including the rise of the app ecosystem on mobile, and the use cases of mobile are different from the use cases on the desktop. Staying up to date with how people actually want to use our work is important - why are you so negative about it? We know that on mobile people like apps that push interesting content to them - this is a popular feature elsewhere and is very likely to be a popular feature here. One way to use an encyclopedia is "when I have an idea I want to know more about I go to google and search for it and then I often end up reading about it at Wikipedia". Another way is "They send me stuff every day that I find interesting and that is based on things I've found interesting in the past or things that other people who are similar to me have found interesting". Insisting in your rude manner that anything other than the first pattern is somehow inconsistent with our vision is puzzling to say the least.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:44, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

I never said "pushing" was inconsistent with the mission, I questioned its importance. TheDJ has made some helpful comments about apps below; I'll drop this issue, since he has actually convinced me that the apps are a useful thing to make. As for "deceptive”: that was perhaps a bad word. I didn't intend it to mean deliberately deceptive, but don't you agree that it is (unintentionally) misleading to brand a Commons featured content process as Wikipedia? Perhaps if Commons were named, it might gain more awareness and more contributors too.

I could expound on why I'm so jaded with the WMF, but I know what your reaction will be so I won't. BethNaught (talk) 09:40, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

"That doesn't require an app."... Indeed. Like writing an encyclopedia didn't require the web. An overly simplistic argument. As someone who writes both mobile websites and mobile apps for a living, you have no idea how big the difference is. Most consumers don't either. If you question consumers, at most they give very vague impressions. Yet from pure experience, I know that the difference is huge in long term retention, if you do it right. This is a road we need to keep open, explore, tweak and improve. Not solely, but definitely included. What people seem to keep thinking is that writing a mobile web version of Wikipedia is easy. It's not. We are a legacy system of 15 years old. There is nothing more complicated than retrofitting the modern web on top of that. Mobile web is only easy if you throw out the old stuff. But that will never happen, because we have a community that relies on all that old stuff (Which is why WikiWand CAN do it, because they don't have a community to care about). People don't appreciate the apps and the mobile version, because they see them as limited forms of the desktop website, but instead they are platform optimized versions of Wikipedia that are driving technical changes behind the scene of the entire technical stack, at a sustainable, steady and mostly unnoticeable pace. Ever so slightly, these 3 'platforms' are merging and moving us forward. It's the only way to do it, without aggressively changing desktop. Is either of the platforms ideal ? no, and it will be a long time before any of them is, and that is just fine, as long as we are making progress. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:54, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

How is the experience disabling JavaScript and CSS on your platforms? EllenCT (talk) 17:57, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

You are gonna have to be a bit more specific with the question, i can interpret it in too many ways. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:39, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

On the platforms you use, when you turn off JavaScript and CSS, such as a blind person might with a low-end screenreader, or a mobile user without hands free, or a telephone call, can you still edit Project wikis? EllenCT (talk) 13:51, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

What does that have to do with this discussion ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:40, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

How could it not? EllenCT (talk) 17:44, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

I think there are reasons for the skeptical tone here, including a fundamental mismatch in philosophy. For example, the Wikipedia app on the iOS App Store is presently Rated 4+, which according to App Store (iOS) means it "Contains no objectionable material", and in particular, does not contain mild or infrequent occurrences of cartoon, fantasy or realistic violence, and mild or infrequent mature, suggestive, or horror-themed content which may not be suitable for children under the age of 9, and definitely does not contain frequent or intense cartoon, fantasy or realistic violence, mild or infrequent mature or suggestive themes, mild or infrequent bad language, and simulated gambling, and certainly frequent and intense offensive language, excessive cartoon, fantasy, or realistic violence, frequent and intense mature, horror, suggestive themes, sexual content, nudity, alcohol, and drugs is right out. Now you don't need Google self-driving AI to predict a collision here! True, Apple obviously wants to turn a blind eye since Wikipedia is highly valued, but at some point the philosophical contamination inherent in any rating scheme is bound to take the upper hand. Then either you're letting Apple censors directly dictate to individual editors which things they can and cannot tell people in a "Rated 9+" article about the Holocaust, or you're going to be throwing that nice shiny Apple app in the trash, and presumably not telling the community why since they apparently demand a nondisclosure agreement about rejection letters.

The situation is confusing, because we are accustomed from the 1990s of an idea that civilization is rising and technology advances. Today, the fragmentation of software into proprietary silos, the domination by corrupt middlemen, the lack of privacy and security, and the compromises to function made to allow this to happen, put us into a situation where civilization and technology are steadily declining. For example, Facebook simply is not as good as an old fashioned webring of user built sites, Twitter is not as good as old fashioned chatrooms; they are just more marketable and more prosecutable. And so we have the old conflict between those who want us to be ahead of the technology curve and those who think we should be most accessible, but now the techies naturally want as little to change as possible, while the low-tech low-expectations crowd pushes for revised software. This can be confusing. But I think it would make sense for Wikipedia to anticipate reduced readership and money flow as it retreats to its original user base. Wnt (talk) 16:22, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

I really don't get why people are actively opposed to a Wikipedia app. Personally I'd never use an app for content that I could get through a web browser. But other people do use apps for that, so why not present our content in a way that suits their preference? It's not like the Foundation is going broke (far from it!) and can't afford to explore new avenues for content distribution. Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 02:26, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

@SBHB, as I understand it the primary argument isn't against the principle of apps per se, but the direction in which WMF want to take the apps, in which the app will serve up articles based on guesses about what it thinks you'll like based on previous articles read, rather than the existing "search results and blue links" setup where readers only see what they look for. Even companies the size of Amazon and Google have trouble getting this kind of algorithm to work properly even with billion-dollar budgets, as anyone who's had Natural Harvest turn up in their Amazon "You May Also Like" can testify; if the WMF really want to go down this road it will likely be a huge timesink and moneypit, with little to show at the end of it. If you go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures and check "Related pages", at the bottom of each Wikipedia article you'll see the "next installment of this article" that the app will serve up, if you want to get an idea of how the future is going to look. ‑ Iridescent 02:37, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

@Iridescent: Yeah, this looks bad. The problem appears to be that the computer people, in general, seem to have the unalterable mindset that they write the articles. Instead of user editing they want "user configurability", and even that is deprecated. So the WMF wants to have a gadget that automagically picks out three articles to push at readers for click bait (especially written with mobile readers in mind because they contribute more money). The documentation says Jkatz (WMF) thinks that even giving editors the power to alter which links are chosen is a bad idea!^[23] But they also come with images automagically extracted from the article. And they use whatever the first image is. Only that might be Fair Use, and that isn't allowed, so now the thing automatically tells if it's Fair Use and then serves the second image, which might be the wrong person for a BLP, or something totally random, etc. [24]

You can't fix arrogant. Sometimes you just have to recognize your husband has kicked you to the curb in favor of a sex bot. Yeah, there was a right way to do this: start an RFC and make the case for a prettier supplemental See Also section with image links but a restricted number of entries, that users can check a box to display or not. You could write up a template for it. Editors could go through and update the pages. If they find a rabbi's page ends with the first picture from foreskin, they can debate on his page whether that is appropriate per BLP and so forth, rather than saying that Foreskin can't be a good article because the machines will put it after random articles. The problem is, nobody puts writing a template on a resume. Nobody gets hired to work for a company where they sell ads and customer data based on their ability to give the readers exactly what they want. I feel like computer science has become a dismal science, an inherently untrustworthy science, sort of like how people think of artificial colors and flavors for foods. Wnt (talk) 13:21, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

@Wnt, indeed. As a practical test, I've just tried looking at a few randomly-chosen articles written by myself (and consequently, articles where I know enough about the topic to judge appropriateness) with "Related articles" enabled to see what the first suggestion is. For Alice Ayres it suggests Harriet Tubman, presumably purely on the grounds that both were 19th-century women as they have nothing apparently in common; for Aylesbury duck it suggests Bird, and while ducks are indeed birds I would expect most of our readers to already be aware of the fact; for Hellingly Hospital Railway it suggests Royal Tunbridge Wells, presumably purely on the grounds that both the hospital and the town were served by Cuckoo Line trains as I can't see any other possible link; for Tarrare it suggests Napoleon, and while both were indeed French one was a carnival geek who ate live animals and the other was an emperor and I doubt they had much in common; for Norwich Market it suggests Joseph Priestley, and I can't even begin to work out what it thinks the connection is there.

These aren't just problems that affect low-traffic articles where the software doesn't have enough connections to build up a correct pattern of incoming links; there are equally whacky 'related links' on ultra-core topics like Technology, Crime, Female and China (and if anyone from the WMF cares to defend the "related links" at Ugly, White people or Idiot—or "War: see also Germany"—the explanation ought to be entertaining).

What the apps' advocates fail to recognize is that this kind of thing is actively negative rather than just background clutter; every false-positive just reinforces the "Wikipedia is full of errors and can't be taken seriously" belief we've spent a decade trying to debunk. Although I imagine Lila Tretikov is just delighted at the fact that her "see also" is Knowledge Engine (Wikimedia Foundation). ‑ Iridescent 16:34, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

AI researchers say the community doesn't argue enough

At the end of page 9 here Wikipedia is called "very unbalanced" because we spend so much time talking about things other than "claims or evidence". I have mixed feelings about this. When the alien archeologists mount the hard drives from the rubble, the record will show that I, for one, did my part. EllenCT (talk) 14:04, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Wow, that isn't at all what it says.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:24, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

I misread you as saying that isn't all that it says, sorry. "A much larger data set is currently being developed at IBM Research [Hafia], starting from plain text in Wikipedia pages. The purpose of this corpus is to collect context-dependent claims and evidence facts (i.e., premises), which are relevant to a given topic. The data set currently covers 33 topics, for a total of 315 Wikipedia articles. The data set is large but also very unbalanced, as it contains about 2,000 argumentative entities (claims or evidence) over about 40,000 sentences, and is therefore an extremely challenging benchmark." (emphasis added.) EllenCT (talk) 20:41, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

So, as I said, what you said is said isn't what it said at all. That a "corpus" (for the purpose of research into machine learning) is "challenging" because it is "unbalanced" (in the sense that the type of statement they are looking for doesn't occur as often as it would in some other texts, does not imply that Wikipedia is "unbalanced" for it's purposes.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:23, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

I would not call the community unbalanced just because we supposedly produce only 5% as many claims as sentences. Maybe the AI researchers' sense of balance is dizzy. However, just like some large companies would prefer that the Projects have a lesser proportion of human-readable material, whether they are entirely conscious of it or not, other large companies known for different achievements would no doubt prefer that our human foibles and proclivities not interfere with the smooth operation of their chatbots. I don't know if you remember when IBM Watson was trying for good article status, but there still is self-contradictory information coming from IBM pertaining to whether it performs diagnostic functions, which is kind of a big deal, especially in medicine. Remember the controversy over the Electronic cigarette article? As editors we have a huge responsibility over peoples' lives and livelihoods. Just because some big corporations want to use our work for profit doesn't mean we should become dependent on them financially, or that we should become dependent on their advice, or that their sites and chatbots won't be more awesome if we argue just as much as we think will attain superior outcomes as measured by the success of the mission. Otherwise collective action is just stupid. I suspect that the argument mining software is leaving many diamonds in the 38,000 sentence rough. EllenCT (talk) 20:49, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

How does "arguments and evidence" appearing only as input to the "policing agent" in the economic model on Table on page 6 here make you feel? I can think of a few other nodes there that need to be upgraded with arguments and evidence. EllenCT (talk) 14:48, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

I think you are confusing the suitability of text for natural language learning vs quality of text from a human point of view. Humans don't speak like a textbook declaring only facts, we have all sorts of elements to the conversation that are more nuanced. This can be a challenge when trying to teach AIs to learn from human text. HighInBC 14:52, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

So would you agree, then, that the WP:NOTHOWTO prohibition of procedural information is therefore deplorable and should be abolished? EllenCT (talk) 17:50, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Wow, I must have missed a few logical steps there. How did we get from a to q? No I don't agree, though that is better discussed at WT:NOT. HighInBC 18:42, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Why do you not see the connection between "don't speak like a textbook declaring only facts" and including procedural information in addition to semantic and episodic facts? EllenCT (talk) 19:49, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

The community is a lot less intelligent than its members. The problem is that the community is in charge, which is why it is pointless to argue too much. It is the opposite of the brain where the individual brain cells are a lot dumber than the system they implement. This also explains why we have such a difficult time dealing with issues such as climate change. Society as a whole has a mind of its own, it has a rudimentary brain implemented by the interactions between all the people. So, our society has "decided" to use energy in a way that most of its members know is going to cause problems, but it is then very difficult to change this. Count Iblis (talk) 18:43, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

With renewables under grid parity presenting the largest global deflation risk this decade, the few who figured out solar cells, wind turbines, and household geothermal (which is a real thing now) are prevailing over everyone who sent money to fossil fuel producers by using their product without hedging contracts reversing the effects of their demand. Society may or may not choose to reward those who saved everyone else, althogh supposedly things like patents and money are supposed to. Who will save us from the billionaires who pay for advocacy that inequality should increase? Or the middle manager who thinks a degree from an institution researching ways to increase class sizes is a valid sign of credence? EllenCT (talk) 19:49, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

We knew in the early 1980s what we had to do to prevent problems. The reason that 30 years later things are starting to move in the right direction has a lot more to do with reacting to the facts on the ground. It's a bit like being told for decades to lose weight, ignore that advice, suffer a heart attack and only then start to adopt a healthier life style. Count Iblis (talk) 20:07, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Can a Socratic method chatbot be trained to reproduce the Epiphany (feeling)#Process? EllenCT (talk) 00:57, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

The Wikipedia community clearly argues enough, if not more than enough. Where we mess up is in deciding which issues are worth arguing about. Newyorkbrad (talk) 01:23, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Certainly we can improve with regards to what exactly is arguing. User:Newyorkbrad argues it is more than enough but is it more than enough arguing about arguments or are we arguing just to argue? Wikipedia Law Review is accepting spplications. --DHeyward (talk) 01:57, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

I think it is often the latter. Some editors extend and continue arguments even though other participants have moved on, decided on a different outcome and quit the conversation. It becomes not a matter of which editor(s) has the most persuasive argument/sources but who lasts the longest (see WP:REHASH). I applaud editors who continue in these debates (in good faith) because they can get damn exhausting. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:06, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

I was only half serious. It's somewhat entertaining that WP culture can foster and generate an arguments about what arguing entails. :) --DHeyward (talk) 20:33, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

WP:REHASH is an essay. WP:CCC is a policy. EllenCT (talk) 04:47, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Is this use of the logo okay?

Are you looking to "Make America Great Again" and would you accept a nomination? Does this mean WMF endorses a "Trump/Wales" ticket? Does this mean anyone can put stuff over WMF trademarked images like that? --DHeyward (talk) 06:58, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

It was done as an April Fool "joke" and has been nominated for deletion. Since it appears to violate the WMF's terms of use for the logo, it should be deleted anyway.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 07:34, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

The opinion of a respected Wikipedian who is also a lawyer might be very helpful at this point. Paging Brad... EdChem (talk) 11:12, 10 April 2016 (UTC) Added clarification: I mean on the legal issue raised in the deletion discussion. EdChem (talk) 15:03, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

I find Donald Trump so horrifying that my usual ease with bad jokes is tough to maintain in this case.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:22, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Deletion request is leaning towards keep though, care to vote? I wonder if someone slaps a WP:COI warning to your talk if you do... God I love wiki drama. Darwinian Ape ^talk 14:55, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Although perhaps not as deliberately offensive as the Pricasso video, some people on Commons are having difficulty understanding why Commons should not be used for this sort of thing. I would urge the WMF to delete this image as an office action due to the trademark and WP:BLP issues involved.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 16:06, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

It is incomprehensible to me that Commons can host a picture of Jimbo that some guy painted with his dick while this mild humorous topical reference would be considered unacceptable there. Gamaliel (talk) 16:28, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

As I've said, there are BLP issues for Trump and Jimbo here. Also, Jimbo's wishes on the matter should be respected.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 16:40, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

See Satire#Legal_status, and maybe also Satire#Censorship_and_criticism_of_satire. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 17:24, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

It might be satire if it was even remotely funny. Laugh, I thought I'd never start. This is similar to fake accounts on Twitter which claim to represent another person's views.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 17:54, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

It is incomprehensible to me that a sitting Administrator and Arb would make a WP:OTHERSTUFF argument with respect to deletion. Carrite (talk) 18:57, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

 No Mexican editors
  allowed anymore

class=notpageimage|

(this image is intended as humor)

Perhaps the logo could be made more humorous, if people really want Commons to store such images, but I would emphasize how words can be overlaid onto the plain logo without creating another prank image in Commons. -Wikid77 (talk) 18:37, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Of course, if we really want to preserve this lame and childish effort at April 1 humor, the way to do it is with a fair use-parody rationale, a KEEP LOCAL template, and telling Commons to get bent... Carrite (talk) 19:06, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

That could be done, but it would still have to meet the trademark requirements. Commons isn't the problem, other than "keep" and WP doesn't have deletion control.. To meet requirements the text box has to be outside the globe and they recommend putting "Satire" on the image. Over the globe violates the CC-by-SA agreement which respects trademark restrictions. WMF restricts a number of things as noted in the "registered" template that must accompany the image. Right now, it's extremely problematic because it's hosted on a WMF site, no disclaimer and integrated into the logo. It sets a bad precedent for enforcing cease and desist letters if all anyone does is modify the text and make it appear WMF endorses it (like the next one did). --DHeyward (talk) 20:02, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

The rationale for Fair Use as a parody would mean that no argument was being made that this was CC-by-SA compliant. And there should be no problem with that if the rationale were phrased appropriately. Carrite (talk) 13:49, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Clearly, Donald Trump loves Wikipedia. Count Iblis (talk) 19:58, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

@DHeyward:. The simple answer is "NO". The Commons does not allow "Fair Use" images, period. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 20:18, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

@Gamaliel: I think that all of the Pricasso material, including the video "making of", is a notable and educational contribution from an artist who is article-worthy, and we should have all of it on Commons. (I mean, have you ever seen anything like it? Then it's educational!) Having some editor put stuff like the "no mexicans allowed anymore" in the box at right, on the other hand, is simply a Wikipedian violating BLP - after all, Trump only wants them to be using different IP addresses :) (Also, to be clear, video of any notable politician saying the same thing would not be a BLP violation) But having Wikipedians ragging on Trump on their own behalf in an unrepresentative way, without attempt to provide sources or even to be accurate, is not good for our sense of neutrality. Now this being politics I don't see it as something to get particularly worked up about, everybody has an opinion etc., but it is at least formally outside of policy, unlike Pricasso video. Wnt (talk) 02:31, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

• This file should be deleted for obvious reasons. If it were here on WP-En I would probably deep-six it immediately, but I have little desire to get involved with the discussion on Commons. No opinion on the legal issue (with apologies to EdChem above, this is not an area I specialize in), but I recommend that the Office be brought into the discussion. For my part, I would find it perfectly in order for the Office to delete the image summarily, whether or not they feel a legal issue is involved, just on general principles. I had thought the Pricasso nonsense vis-à-vis JW was deleted long ago, and if not, it certainly should be, but let's not start that discussion upon again here. Newyorkbrad (talk) 21:24, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Commons has a trademark policy which says "Commons hosts many images of trademarks, and as long as the images do not violate any copyright, they are OK here. That applies even though certain commercial use of this material may be trademark infringement." The image is okay on copyright grounds because of the license, so that seems to say the image is okay for commons.

That being said, this should obviously be deleted from Commons under IAR, except that Commons doesn't have IAR as far as I know. Ken Arromdee (talk) 08:43, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Archived hypothesis

Mobile users offered the standard desktop experience by default may contribute and donate more than mobile site or mobile app users. Who can test this? EllenCT (talk) 21:16, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Not me. This isn't really the best venue for offering ideas to the fundraising team - but I'm not sure where is. This actually isn't going to be something that needs to be tested, I would imagine - some people are on the desktop experience on mobile already and some are on the mobile site. I really doubt it makes a material difference, and I'm pretty sure they will have studied this already.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:29, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

You yourself said the transition to mobile was associated with a decline in donations, and your other talk page stalkers suggest that the mobile site and apps are unsuitable for editing contributions. If this has been studied, let's see what was found. If not, for what actual reason shouldn't it be? EllenCT (talk) 21:43, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

As I say, this isn't the best venue. If you want to get things done, you should talk to the team directly.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 06:41, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Thank you. meta:Talk:Fundraising#Please measure effect of providing desktop interface to mobile users. EllenCT (talk) 16:11, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Do you want one Edit tab, or two? It's your choice

How to switch between editing environments

Click the [[ ]] to switch to the wikitext editor.

Click the pencil icon to switch to the visual editor.

The editing interface will be changed soon. When that happens, editors who currently see two editing tabs – "Edit" and "Edit source" – will start seeing one edit tab instead. The single edit tab has been popular at other Wikipedias. When this is deployed here, you may be offered the opportunity to choose your preferred appearance and behavior the next time you click the Edit button. You will also be able to change your settings in the Editing section of Special:Preferences.

You can choose one or two edit tabs. If you chose one edit tab, then you can switch between the two editing environments by clicking the buttons in the toolbar (shown in the screenshots). See Help:VisualEditor/User guide#Switching between the visual and wikitext editors for more information and screenshots.

There is more information about this interface change at mw:VisualEditor/Single edit tab. If you have questions, suggestions, or problems to report, then please leave a note at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback.

Whatamidoing (WMF) 19:22, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): is there any way to access the Visual Editor's URL-to-citation-wikitext feature ("citoid"?) without using the Visual Editor? EllenCT (talk) 21:44, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

EllenCT, officailly, it's not available at this time, but this is definitely planned for the future. (I understand that the guts of the wikitext editor need to be re-written, and that will be part of this.)

The important bit about "officially" is that when it's officially done, it will work everywhere, and there will be a dev team to deal with any bugs. But "unofficially", if memory serves, someone wrote a user script to make the citoid service work in the wikitext editor a while ago, at least here at the English Wikipedia. User:Salix alba, was that you? Is it still working? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:46, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes I do have a script which sometimes works User:Salix alba/Citoid. The citoid server sometimes changes its api/returned results which breaks my script. Currently it's broken, but I'll try and fix it.--Salix alba (talk): 09:52, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

I think there is nothing I can do to fix it at the moment. The citoid server is not setting an Access-Control-Allow-Origin header which means scripts from en.wikipedia.org can't access the data due to Cross-origin resource sharing restrictions. --Salix alba (talk): 10:19, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Working now. Something was odd with my jquery, if I use data param in the jquery request it causes cross site errors, if I manually generate the url it works, odd.--Salix alba (talk): 11:07, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Thank you all so much. EllenCT (talk) 16:12, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

On principle

I would ask that you support my redaction of a date and statistics-filled baseball article that has existed, since 2005, without a single source, and that has been tagged a such, for near a half decade. This material, per Ch. Lipson's Doing Honest Work, is plagiarism, pure and simple, as it takes material from a source or sources without any attribution, and therefore offers as Wikipedia original content the intellectual property and/or intellectual work of others. The violations to our policies are clear. The matter and violations are egregious. The article is high profile because of a current PBS run of the Jackie Robinson story. It is time we begin to hold editors to compliance to the key policies of the encyclopedia. Please see Dixie Walker. Cheers, Le Prof Leprof 7272 (talk) 03:04, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Dates and statistics are not subject to copyright. If you claim that actual passages are copied rather than just dates and statistics, you really ought to give examples. Ken Arromdee (talk) 08:33, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

But our concerns about plagiarism reach further than just not breaking the law. The right thing to do is to give attribution, whether the law requires it in a particular case or not.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:42, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Adding cite footnotes: OK, that article, "Dixie Walker" (baseball star from B'ham, AL) was reduced to one short paragraph, but we have re-added about 1/4 of the text back into the page (from old version: 31403) plus citing 5 sources, as footnote cites. Most of the remainder should be easier to re-add based on expanding from those 5 source cites. -Wikid77 (talk) 23:22, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

SecurePoll at Persian Wikipedia

Hello Jimbo,

The Persian Wikipedia community decided to hold the ArbCom elections using secret ballots 6 months ago. We formed an investigation committee to select the most suitable voting method for our community. The committee has not reached a decision yet but leans towards Schulze method which was being used for the Wikimedia Board elections until 2011.

At first, we filed a bug at Phabricator to configure SecurePoll for Persian Wikipedia locally. User:Jalexander-WMF showed up and claimed the task but told us that we had better to hold the elections on votewiki. We decided to give it shot and see if the office really takes us serious, coordinates with us, makes the PGP key to deposit in a safe, etc. Unfortunately, our suspicion proved to be true. We sent James Alexander several mails regarding this issue. We posted on his talk page. Despite initial promises, he didn't reply back and simply ignored us.

Persian Wikipedia is a promising project. It has about half a million articles and is already larger than any Middle Eastern projects including Arabic, Turkish, and Hebrew. All of these achievements have been accomplished without any Chapter help. Now we want to hold our elections using SecurePoll and we expect the Wikimedia Foundation to support us or at least talk to us frankly.

Thank you, 4nn1l2 (talk) 19:46, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Hi @4nn1l2:, Jimmy is, sadly, not really going to be able to help you on this. I'm sorry for the delays in trying to get this set up for you to test on. Other work has clouded it and made it difficult to get together but that's not ok and it's all my fault that it got lost in the mess SecurePoll is not entirely set up for your expected use case but I'm still hopeful we can get it to work and we want to help with that as much as possible. I'll followup by email. Jalexander--WMF 21:28, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

@Jalexander-WMF: Thanks for the quick reply; what is the best way to set up a realistic timeline that we can all stay honest to? huji—TALK 06:03, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

@Huji: For this particular case probably Phabricator which has a tendency to remind well. So much of my work is dealing with crises that I'm still finding the best way to ensure that these longer term things don't get lost in the cracks. I've already created some tasks for this in our internal task manager as well to make sure I keep on top of it. The aim is to have all of you created on VoteWiki, a test election set up, and voteWiki set to default to Farsi (making it easier to run an election on it) by Thursday morning pacific (the patch to do the last bit should get pushed out at 8am). Jalexander--WMF 07:28, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 14 April 2016

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Excessive citations from my book Wormwood Star.

Marjorie Cameron (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) Dear Jimbo Wales,

I'm writing to you on the suggestion of one of your Wikipedia editors, with whom I'm currently in dispute with. It centers on what I consider the excessive use of citations from Wormwood Star, my biography of the American artist Marjorie Cameron for her Wikipedia page.

Though I welcome the contributions from the Wikipedia editors, close to 110 citations have now been plundered from my book for that page, which is a huge amount to draw from just one source, and they include many intimate personal details/revelations/spoilers. As a result, I have a serious concern that the sharing of these contents freely online will have a detrimental effect on the sales of this book, which I rely on as an income stream.

I brought this matter up for discussion with two of the editors involved, and asked if a reasonable and fair balance could be struck, and have suggested some of the most intimate revelations that could be left off of Cameron's page, so that someone who has actually purchased the book could enjoy them. Unfortunately, they are currently unwilling to heed my suggestions, though one of the editors has suggested I contact you about this. I do appreciate how busy you must be, but if you could look into this matter for me I would be most grateful. Regards, Spencer Kansa, author of Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron. 88.145.18.67 (talk) 21:29, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

• The talk-page is: "Talk:Marjorie_Cameron#Excessive citations from Wormwood Star.". That page, "Marjorie Cameron" has over 102 cites from the book by "Kansa 2011" but not 100 direct quotations, and so there is not an obvious copyvio problem, unless the related text at each cite could be considered a "close paraphrase" of text in the book Wormwood Star, as a reason to condense the text and remove excessive detail and cut cites. Perhaps discuss other options on the talk-page there. -Wikid77 (talk) 22:34, 11 April 2016, revised Wikid77 (talk) 11:57, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

I haven't reviewed this in any detail, but 110 citations from a single book doesn't strike me as normal or wise. I doubt if it would make sense for a judgment to be made that "some of the most intimate revelations" be left out to help with book purchases, but it strikes me as a poor approach to a biography to cite so heavily from one book. Per what Wiki77 said above, I'd personally be concerned that so many cites could suggest a "close paraphrase" - worthy of investigation.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 01:55, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for taking the time to review the foregoing matter, and craft an opinion. It is important when you choose to do such, still. Cheers. Le Prof Leprof 7272 (talk) 03:08, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Jimbo has indeed helped craft an opinion about other article details for many years. In a murder case where a suspect drank juice at the scene, one source noted it was fruit juice which could appear in luminol tests as if blood stains, and Jimbo advised omitting details listed in only one source unless there was a crucial reason. That strategy could be used in the article, to omit details not widely noted as significant, and avoid what I call "wp:Source scraping" as scouring a source for all minor details. -Wikid77 (talk) 11:57, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

@88.145.18.67: There is something very alarming about the sort of belief you express in that discussion, "The fact that the film Wormwood Star was shot in Edward James house should not be included, neither should her time in Joshua Tree with Burt Shonberg and George Van Tassel -- all of these are details meant only for the book and not general information that should be shared publically." When you wrote your biography, I assume you cited some other sources. Did you really check with the authors of every book you cited information from to see whether each detail you mentioned was "public" or something that only those who bought those books would be allowed to know? The problem is, if Wikipedia editors couldn't just cite information when we read it - in our own words, that is - then how could we have a decent article about any topic at all? I'm sure the CRC Handbook could make the same kind of complaint every time we list the melting point of a chemical. Jimbo Wales is right that relying too heavily on one source is problematic, but this is a concern rooted in Wikipedia's own standard, WP:BLP - quite frankly, editors need a broader range of sources to know whether your biography is fair or not. In general, if editors only have one source for salacious detail about someone's life, there is too much risk that they will end up reprinting a hatchet job about someone sooner or later. Besides, I think your concern is misplaced - you've written a key work about some fascinatingly bizarre American history with tie-ins to everything from Scientology to the Manhattan Project, but almost nobody knows about it. For every reader Wikipedia costs you, I bet it is bringing you three more. Wnt (talk) 09:58, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

As for losing money- bollocks! That would have stopped bringing in what big bucks it was going to four years ago. "lol," etc. _Fortuna ^{Imperatrix Mundi} 10:44, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Well, Imperatrix Mund, as you are the author of several published books on which you worked for years and which you depend on for income (I assume you must be, or you wouldn't have made your observation -- only a cad would have done that), your opinion is noted. 18:40, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Nice Ad Hominem. I refer you to Cory Doctorow, who has sold far more books than you ever will and who pretty much shares the opinion of Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi above. Cory Doctorow's literary works are released under Creative Commons licenses.[25] Perhaps you may wish to reconsider your business model.[26]. I'm just saying. --Guy Macon (talk) 22:29, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Guy, I like your opinion but I think you should be more compassionate about it. Cory Doctorow's article basically tells authors to suck it. While I think Kansa's fears about Wikipedia per se may be misplaced, there is no doubt that authors are feeling the squeeze from the vast torrent of free content against which they compete for your and my eyeballs. Unlike something from Springer, which can hold results of the only publicly funded experiment ever done on a question for ransom, the book Kansa wrote is not really a must read - nobody has to know what happened in a particular house in the 1950s, no matter how exciting he makes the story sound. Why pay money for the book when you can watch ISIS videos or debate Gamergate for free? And even if you really really want the book, the first place to look is still Pirate Bay. So yeah, he's feeling the crunch, I absolutely believe it. And he doesn't deserve to, because he really did put in a lot of work and talent to write the book. The problem is, copyright itself is broken; it's an approximation that worked fairly well when books were really expensive to print and now has no connection to reality. And you can run around trying to expand it by telling people they can't say what another source says, by demanding a right to spy on private communications, by increasing penalties higher and higher, but none of it is going to work. What we need to talk about instead is directing an income surtax to fund independent funding organizations, chosen independently by each taxpayer, which reward quality writers, among whom Kansa should clearly make the cut. And ending copyright. That way Kansa makes at least as much as he would have otherwise, and we all have the right to click on the manuscript and just plain read it. Wnt (talk) 14:02, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

March 11 meeting in London

Purportedly, you were slated to give a talk at a London meeting whose subject was the UN Commission of Inquiry on human rights in North Korea. It is said that you did not attend. Was there an interesting story behind that, or just something mundane? - 2001:558:1400:10:48DF:CED:D421:2122 (talk) 17:55, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Entirely mundane. We (Jimmy Wales Foundation) were invited to participate, and Orit responded that I was keen to participate, but that "However, he feels that currently he is not yet proficient enough about the subject in order to feel comfortable to speak about it. He would like to attend the session to learn from others who have more experience working on the North Korea issue. Mr. Wales is happy to have a brief but more ceremonial speaking role, inspiring people about the topic and giving a sense of hope that technology will eventually have an impact, if you would find that in any way useful." They liked the idea, and made a specific request "If he is happy to do so, I'm envisaging a 10-minute slot around 3.30 on the day." Our response was that "Mr. Wales would be happy to give a short speech about the role technology can play in improving human rights. However, he is unable to confirm his participation on that date at the moment due to constant changes on his schedule." They responded "Wonderful. Many thanks for your help. With regards to deadline, if Mr Wales can confirm no later than the day before the conference (March 10th), then that would be fine." Unfortunately, as the date approached it was not possible for me to attend, and we notified them accordingly.

North Korea is an interest of mine and in particular the difficult question of how to effectively get information to the North Korean people. We are part of a coalition led by the Human Rights Foundation and Orit participated in an event aimed at pressuring the South Korean government to pass the North Korean Human Rights Act [27][28][29]. I am proud that the effort was successful: [30]. (To be clear I claim no credit for the good work of the many heavily involved activists who worked on that.)

I intend to attend some future events of EAHRNK.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 23:04, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for responding with detail, kindness, and introspection. - 2601:42:C104:28F0:D5F0:9E2E:81A9:9941 (talk) 00:39, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Updating related pages: Looks like we need to update page "Censorship in North Korea" for more details about their computer access, and who and how they get unlimited Internet (beyond ballooning flashdrives over the border). -Wikid77 (talk) 23:36, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Indeed. I'm not a big fan of the ballooning flashdrives except as something very much like "political art" - it's a good stunt to raise awareness, but I am not convinced that it helps. In terms of real access, I get conflicting reports even from 'experts' - this may have to do with some of the experts being escapees whose knowledge is now outdated.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 23:54, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes, it has been suggested that smuggling pen-drives into this county might help. [31]. Surly we can afford a drone (Sergey Brin might support this) to drop all our old pen-drives on NK with a Korean version of Wikipedia. Also, what about all our old unwanted smart-phones (probable made just south of their border by Samsung). Imagine, each one floating down on a little parachute (with the the WP logo printed on it) and all ready configured to accesses a helium balloon cell-phone base station moored in Southern Korea. It would also help North Korea's balance of trade deficit because tourists would then flock there to avoid Mobile phones data roaming charges. Its a win-win. We get rid of our obsolete stuff (with a clear conscience) and they get Wikipedia.If Kim Jong-un objects, we could impose a Danegeld type ransom upon him. Either he donates billions to the WMF or we bomb him with Wikipedia. --Aspro (talk) 00:15, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

This HTTP page in The Telegraph, from back in 23 Dec 2014, "Internet in North Korea: everything you need to know" covers much of what has been noted commonly in the U.S. reports, about North Korea's intranet (1,024 IPs) "Kwangmyong (intranet)" or one nationwide fiber-optic Internet cable from China, or cell-phone access near the borders. I think in restricted nations, changes are typically very slow. Ancient Egypt would adapt and discuss new techniques in multiple newer languages, because the Egyptian hieroglyphic language stayed standard for 1,600 years with few new words. -Wikid77 (talk) 00:26, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

WMF ought to be much more effective in this cause. As I and others have suggested, WMF should promote a project for open engineering and defensive publication. In this instance, we should have a place where a preexisting community of volunteer inventors can look at the problem of getting information past North Korean censors and propose a solution that is not encumbered by patents.

To give an example of what I'm thinking of, above and in the Jerusalem Online source people mentioned using balloons to drop pamphlets or flash drives. People may dismiss this since balloons are hard to control. But are they? The idea of a altimeter on a chip is long since patented (yet another missed opportunity for free culture). In theory, just as with hot air ballooning, a small balloon could release helium to descend, or drop water ballast to ascend, for some finite number of course corrections. If it has a GPS sensor to tell where it is and a radio receiver to pick up detailed information about wind direction at various heights broadcast on shortwave or something, then it might be able to navigate just as in hot air ballooning to a very precise position to drop its supplies. (GPS is kind of iffy since the North Koreans have jammed it lately and might appreciate an excuse to do it again; ideally it would have a small camera and navigate by sight, and upload its video to its creators after it drifts out of NK airspace...) Just creating a forum and encouraging people to have bull sessions over such ideas ought to tick off the NK regime to no end. Paranoia is their profession, and it gives them more work. :) Wnt (talk) 12:40, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

While I am in theory interested in the kinds of ideas that you are talking about, I don't think the WMF is well situated to directly get involved in such things. There are good people working on it and doing a good job. Indeed, as I have understood the situation, the best way that I can help such efforts is to learn as much as I can from the people who are working on it, and when they have a clear idea, I can reach out to people I know who would be interested in funding the actual work.

But keep in mind that while the idea of dropping things from the sky may sound quite romantic, there are some real problems with it, and there may be much better avenues. One of the ways the Korean economy keeps running at all is through a significant degree of "under the table" black market trade (smuggling) across the border with China. Truckloads of goods come in and out all the time. Some reports from some experts I have met (not all concur, by the way, but it is hard to tell who actually knows anything so I'm left with a lot of question marks) say that the elites (and the children of the elites) are the only ones with computers that could read a flash drive anyway, and they have access to the black market as well. I have not come to any conclusions, but some critics of the balloon drop concept say that it's just not the best way in, that there are easier and cheaper and more reliable ways.

Keep in mind that on the black market, people don't care about copyright. The biggest "sneaker net" (shared flash drive) content is South Korean movies and television shows. If we can make sure that Wikipedia is included in the channels that movies and tv shows go in, then if people (students) find it useful, it will get shared.

I'd like to re-iterate what I said to the folks at the conference - I'm in learning mode. I don't have the answers here.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:42, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

I absolutely agree the WMF can't directly get involved in smuggling to North Korea; I just wish we had a pool of editors at some site like "invent.wikimedia.com" with an ongoing mission to encourage people to brainstorm and post their inventions to make them publicly available. Such folks would always be into some mischief or other, and mischief loves the North Korean royal family. Wnt (talk) 15:13, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Remember to order and set up your VPN before traveling to North Korea. TA for CTA101 (talk) 21:25, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Raif Badawi case

Since you did a video on Raif Badawi in June last year, would you be willing to comment again on this case at some time in the future? Currently, there seem to be no major developments or protests, but this can of course change at any time. A member of the German Bundestag held a speech on it in January, and in December last year his wife was awarded a prize for human rights by the European Parliament on his behalf. There is also the possibility that he could be sentenced to death in the future, though there are currently no indications that such a retrial will take place... --Laber□^T 01:12, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes I will.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 10:44, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

CIA/DHS investment in scraping Wikipedia/Wikidata

The Intercept just published a story that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's investment arm, In-Q-Tel, has invested in Dataminr, a product that scrapes data from a wide range of sources, including in their little graphic "Wikipedia & Freebase". (Freebase has become defunct and Google said they were helping transfer its contents to Wikidata). The Intercept also cites a contract for a Department of Homeland Security site-license for Dataminr for 50 users at $5,000 a user.

Looking around, I see that "Wikipedia & Freebase" come up as opportunities for low-paid freelancers [32] and powering sites like Richestcelebrities.org.[33] This data doesn't really prove that there is anything more nefarious than some spies reading the same little blurbs. However, The Intercept quotes Lee Rowland of the ACLU, "When you have private companies deciding which algorithms get you a so-called threat score, or make you a person of interest, there’s obviously room for targeting people based on viewpoints or even unlawfully targeting people based on race or religion." You have always favored more caution about BLPs than some of us, and when I see people potentially being "targeted" by officials for hostile interactions over citation-free mechanical extracts from Wikipedia, I have to admit you may have had a point. Wnt (talk) 11:22, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Happy tax day!. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 13:54, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Editor with child pornography conviction still able to edit on most WMF projects

SB Johnny and Laberkiste If you want to take complete responsibility for the content of a post of a banned troll, please sign it yourself and then you can be banned for trolling as well. As far as I'm concerned the banned user can use the page User talk:Jimbo Wales/Unprotected for any comments he has. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 02:03, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

But, what can they actually do to protect young adults? I totally agree that they should enjoy protection too, as especially in our modern society they can be easily manipulated, but I think it is difficult to do so, because there are no laws, and in Wikipedia, no policies on that. --Laber□^T 22:41, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

If he's out of jail and presumably under some form of probation system and editing WMF projects doesn't violate his probation, there is no problem here. In fact, you can well imagine that someone convicted for this could be given some form of occupation therapy, editing a WMF project could have been suggested as a useful therapy. Count Iblis (talk) 05:12, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

It is a routine attempt to mention something that Jimbo probably knows about already. Not sure about the "therapy" argument as the editor concerned seem to be mainly interested in having his own Wikipedia article even though it failed WP:GNG and was a copyvio, and uploading images to Commons with dubious public domain tags.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 07:58, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

Progress in economics by speaking about education?

Jimbo, I don't know if it is or isn't presumptuous, but I was sincere when I wrote this:

I can't stop imagining a world in which you give a Davos speech on the flawed roots of trickle down, so all the billionaires who would have been even more wealthy in purchasing power terms if they hadn't spent so much lobbying for greed can all go outside and burn Okun and Rand effigies in the snow, and then come back inside and pull the strings to get back to whatever [34] would look like if [35] had fewer inflection points. Maybe you can condense it all down to an elevator pitch. I would even go so far as to suggest that the solution is such a win-win that the blue line on this graph need not decrease for the green line to continue increasing past all time highs.

I had been trying to ask you about the effects of finance industry size[36][37] and college administrations[38][39] on the cost of formal education, because it has become the largest and fastest growing component of median family spending.

However, given that you are a sought-after speaker on developments in contemporary education, but not economics, I wonder if it would be better if you were to speak on the extent to which all recent postsecondary education subsidies have been reflected in tuition increases? EllenCT (talk) 07:09, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Jimbo seems to avoid finance questions here, perhaps because there could be many very time-consuming details. For years, WP had lacked articles about general business subjects (MBO, "Management by Objectives", management by the numbers, Management by wandering around), but of course had many thousands of corporate pages. I checked for loan origination topics, as for commercial loans or mortgage loans with the "Federal calendar" or Actual/365 (actual-day except leap day) or Actual/366 (including leap). However, the various econ pages could be updated: macroeconomics, Trickle-down economics, Reaganomics, Voodoo economics, supply-side, tuition increases, lottery funding of education (etc.), and then post questions at the related talk-pages. -Wikid77 (talk) 16:31, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Those are some of my favorite subjects. Because of what were at least in part well-intentioned errors by e.g. Art Okun and Ayn Rand, my ability to edit on the crux of that topic area is affected by what Jimbo says on wiki and in public. If our positions were reversed, I would expect Jimbo to bring this to my attention with solutions, as is my intent here in accordance with what we ask of editors involved in such situations.

Is there a deeper connection to the optimal order of general educational instruction? When income inequality affects postsecondary education, it does so in a way that directly harms its meritocratic aspects, e.g. by tuition increases and subtle elitism. In primary education, we require certain subjects to be learned prior to teaching others, partly to make prior topics of instruction useful for learning subsequent topics, and partly because we want to provide the most useful and applicable skills to the largest number of students. In postsecondary instruction, sometimes those who are unable to grasp certain concepts are precluded from progressing further. What does that mean when any subject of instruction can be offered as an article in an encyclopedia striving for sufficient quality to provide self-directed learning without regard to their current prerequisite skill set? Do postsecondary education credentials become non-meritocratic participation awards for having sufficient money, connections, and patience with a corrupt and outmoded but successfully self-perpetuating bureaucracy? And if so, is there a good reason to require such credentials of those who are allowed access to jobs and thereby additional wealth? Do wealthy people perform better labor? Certainly being well-connected can help salespeople, but does that suggest that the real economy is performing a market function, or simply propping up an inefficient cadre? Should we be rewarding people for secret handshakes, meaningful glances, and Jim Crow discrimination? No! We must restore the meritocracy, and we will. Jimbo can help in a way that will make that goal orders of magnitude easier. EllenCT (talk) 11:35, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Funding the tertiary education sector is a tricky business. It might not be so bad if people took the attitude of Frederick Elder, who after the University of Oklahoma burned down said, "What do you need to keep classes going? Two yards of blackboard and a box of chalk."

If educational institutions see students as customers to be bilked for as much money as possible (and more as alumni) these problems will not go away.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 19:39, 4 April 2016 (UTC).

That is why I am suggesting that when someone asks Jimbo about education, that he hold off on simply reiterating the inherent values and reciting the growing pains of general online searchable encyclopedias, and instead depend more on critiques such as Lucca, David O.; Nadauld, Taylor; Shen, Karen (March 2016). "Credit Supply and the Rise in College Tuition: Evidence from the Expansion in Federal Student Aid Programs" (PDF). newyorkfed.org. Staff Report No. 733. Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Retrieved 5 April 2016. and Gordon, Grey; Hedlund, Aaron (September 28, 2015). "Accounting for the Rise in College Tuition" (PDF). Working Paper No. 21967. National Bureau of Economic Research. doi:10.3386/w21967. Retrieved 5 April 2016. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help), which is a chapter in this book. EllenCT (talk) 11:35, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

I just browsed those papers - quite interesting. I'm still unlikely to speak outside my area of expertise, but I'm also a little confused. If you posit in your mind a dreadful "trickle down" person, wouldn't they enthusiastically embrace these results? After all, these papers seem to show that a major factor of the increase in the cost of a University education is government subsidy of that form of education. At least one conclusion someone might draw from this is that reducing subsidies would cause prices to fall, so wouldn't prevent nearly as many people from getting a college degree as we might have otherwise thought.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 22:20, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Absolutely. I was trying to explain with the Asher Edelman, Ron Paul, Nick Hanauer, and Paul Ryan quotes that the political parties have drifted so far to the right of the actual demographic center that the so-called political spectrum has folded in on itself and collapsed. That is exactly why this is an opportunity for you. The people with expertise on the issue are almost entirely all in on the scam. Our tradition is to afford no extra respect for subject matter experts, and upholding that tradition for a few speeches off-wiki would serve everyone well at this juncture.

And maybe I'm wrong to call supply side proponents trickle downers. Wealth has trickled down, it just skipped over the working class in the industrialized world and left them behind. It's not a fundamental error of ideology, just a matter of tuning nations' tax and transfer incidence to obtain optimal growth. Do you remember when growth topped 5.3% in 1983-85 after the Reagan tax cuts? I don't, but Reagan's Joint Economic Committe Director James K. Galbraith sure does. ("When you dare to do big things, big results should be expected.")

In any case, when subsidies aren't being siphoned to bloat the finance sector and postsecondary institutional administrations, "the state receives a $4.5 net return for every dollar it invests to get students through college." Don't take that on faith, just look at how much more college graduates pay in income tax. EllenCT (talk) 05:05, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

@EllenCT: Unfortunately this is Mickey Mouse economics. The study takes the income of graduates and compares it with non-graduates, and assumes that the difference is entirely due to college.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 23:19, 12 April 2016 (UTC).
23:19, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

What are the other factors of the difference, and which studies have controlled for them? EllenCT (talk) 14:22, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

@Rich Farmbrough: are there reliable sources in agreement with your critique? [40] and [41] suggest that even if there are other factors involved, they are closely associated enough with going to college that when they exist without college attendance or graduation, they are negligible. EllenCT (talk) 15:33, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

@EllenCT: The first ref is an article about the second.

Here is my reasoning, the cohort that is selected for college is the most able. The most able would have the best results in the workplace. Now it is an article of faith that they "do better still" with a college education. All I suggest as that it is an open question how much better.

Interestingly two time-series graphed in the Pew article support looking at this more closely. While education levels have "risen dramatically" average income has remained "relatively flat".

A third graph suggests that the effect of the increase tertiary education is to enrich those who achieve it at the expense of those who don't.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 23:16, 15 April 2016 (UTC).

@Rich Farmbrough: do you think the government should be reducing subsidies? If the third graph is true, and the whole system is zero sum, then should everyone have the opportunity to attend tertiary education so that the effect, whether it be meritorious or not, does not increase inequality? EllenCT (talk) 11:47, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

The nature of government education subsidies has changed over the years. Direct subsidies to public colleges have been shrinking, so tuition becomes an increasing percentage of their overall revenue. I'd guess that the colleges would generally be indifferent as to whether their funding comes directly from the state or indirectly via subsidized loans. Seems to me that the big winners in this are the education finance industry, with the students the big losers. We need a political revolution to change that. The high water mark for student-friendly funding was the 1960s, when the children of the WW II GI Bill vets were getting their college educations. Their antiwar campus protests freaked out the upper classes, who feared that there was too much democracy, so they set out to reverse course by lobbying for cuts in direct public college funding. This necessitated more and easier student loans so the colleges wouldn't have to cut tuition and programs. That's my understanding of the issue, though this isn't an area of expertise for me either. Unfortunately the pendulum isn't likely to flip back in the other direction without trauma of some sort to trigger the flip. wbm1058 (talk) 01:30, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

I agree with that, except I'd quibble that the "political revolution" required to correct the tuition finance situation has already occurred, and only political gridlock -- that Jimbo could blow open himself, by addressing the issue publically -- stands in the way of the needed reforms. The education finance industry (and their university administration bedfellows) are so obviously bloated and abusive that even the rigged plutocracy of the austerity-crazed bipartisan border that tries to pass itself off as centrist is poised to crack down on it. They just need a slight push which Jimbo could supply regardless of whether he has the confidence to try. EllenCT (talk) 04:24, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

One can only hope that The Signpost scoop that he will be the running mate of Donald Trump University is dead wrong. We can only hope that our next president will bring "change we can believe in". You're so right about "almost entirely all in on the scam", so many that the field of potential Democratic VP candidates is very slim. The New York primary is going to be HUUGGGGE! Go for it, Jimbo! wbm1058 (talk) 11:42, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

I am feeling 😃 😊 😐 😒 about this editor.

EllenCT (talk) 15:39, 6 April 2016 (UTC) selected EllenCT (talk) 13:09, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

There are two significant issues that I see in the finances of the American tertiary education system, from my distant vantage-point.

One is that the independence of the institutions is affected by receiving federal (and in some cases state) funds.

The other is the confusion between education and running a business, that I mentioned above.

I believe that there is huge scope for cutting the cost to students in the US by innovating - free (as in speech) textbooks would be a start, and perhaps something Jimmy could speak to.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 13:47, 6 April 2016 (UTC).

The independence of medical schools, for example, is also affected by the research grants they receive from Big Pharma. They have to get funds from somewhere, and the best way to keep them independent is a good, competitive mix of funding from both public and private sources.

Textbooks are a natural monopoly in dire need of some reasonable regulation. Students have no choice but to buy the books their professors specify. wbm1058 (talk) 14:50, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Getting the details right is not trivial: "Take Scotland's recent experience as an example. When the Scottish National Party took power in 2007, it eliminated tuition fees at public universities. As The Economist reported in October, though, getting rid of fees did not markedly increase access for graduates of public secondary schools or low-income students. Critics of the policy have pointed out that funding free tuition for all instead of, say, targeted need-based grants, provides a windfall to the affluent at the expense of the working class. One study found that the free tuition plan essentially redistributed 20 million pounds from poor students to rich ones." EllenCT (talk) 19:25, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Does the solution involve the proportion spent on instructors? Per student? Per instructor? More sources: right, left, centrist, bipartisan, subject matter expert. EllenCT (talk) 18:32, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Big state colleges are increasingly dominated by wealthy students "public universities are actively luring these (wealthier out-of-state) students at the expense of those in their state, as they cope with cuts to state funding"... "Because the state contributes a smaller and smaller proportion of UW-Madison’s operating budget, the university administration naturally considers alternative ways of raising revenues, and the many wealthy applicants offer a quick, attractive alternative". As I was saying. The elites don't want too many educated people who can see past their spin, and thus might orchestrate a political revolution. wbm1058 (talk) 13:04, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

"Assuming that super-rich investors earn a relatively modest 3% a year on their $21tn, taxing that vast wall of money at 30% would generate a very useful $189bn a year – more than rich economies spend on aid to the rest of the world." Stewart, Heather (21 July 2012). "Wealth doesn't trickle down – it just floods offshore, research reveals". Tax avoidance: The Observer. No. Business. The Guardian. theguardian.com. Retrieved 10 April 2016. EllenCT (talk) 21:09, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

When the states start increasing public higher-education subsidies again, they should mandate that the funds go directly towards teaching-professors and other core programs, and limit the amount for administration and research-professors whose work primarily benefits private companies too cheap to pay for their own R&D (I don't know how much of a problem that might be, but watch out for it). wbm1058 (talk) 13:27, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

What if the problem of poverty is that it's profitable to other people, such as college presidents? Income inequality is real and extremely deleterious. EllenCT (talk) 02:39, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Imo, Critical Thinking is important to learn and practice especially as a developing child and adolescent. It can be encouraged in school, e.g. essays, or discouraged, e.g. multiple choice and Rote learning. The three Rs, basic science, and objective world history are also crucial. All aspects of democratic societies are almost entirely determined by the critical thinking abilities and knowledge level of the voters. Post high school education is available to those who want it bad enough. The quality consistency of the grade school and high school education is a huge problem in the USA and not nearly as much so in the other advanced societies. The adult illiteracy level was 50% in L.A. as recently as 2004, according to NPR. So, its a real mess. Nocturnalnow (talk) 03:49, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

The projects are known for their high-quality critical thinking. What would [42] look like if [43] had fewer inflection points? EllenCT (talk) 13:06, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

What do you mean by "projects"? Nocturnalnow (talk) 15:38, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Foundation Projects like Wikipedia and Wiktionary have their talk pages used as examples of arguments by IBM. Remember the Monty Python skit where an argument required payment? EllenCT (talk) 17:47, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

I see what you mean. I think both [44]and[45] are results of predatory and dependency mentalities, both of which thrive in societies where selfishness is widespread. Ironically, Switzerland itself might be a good model with its cantons and referendum based society and I think they see money more as a tool instead of an extension of self. But, I think they are having a lot of social anxieties nowadays too, especially in dealing with the EU and Schengen rules. Nocturnalnow (talk) 02:53, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes, by many measures the European countries have the best welfare schemes, and surprisingly (especially to many supply-siders) a strong social safety net can increase the proportion of startup businesses because reducing the risk of failure from bankruptcy without medical care as we have in the US, to merely having to depend on welfare, stimulates enterprenurism very substantially. This is the kind of unintuitive irony that the global transfer incidence imposes on us. In the US, we prefer to deal with falures using a patchwork of regulation, courts, and executive sanction, which is actually pretty close to a command economy in practice. I continue to believe that Jimbo has a nearly ideal pulpit to address these issues in the context of education (as in that last ProPublica link) in a way that authorities will likely see as neutral, authoritative, and persuasive. EllenCT (talk) 15:59, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

@Nocturnalnow: here is a concrete proposal for an economic solution: "One aspect in the discussions on inequality that I find strangely absent is broader ownership of capital. If one of the drivers of inequality are capital incomes (and 'allied' incomes like those of top management), this is because they are heavily concentrated. 'Deconcentration' of capital incomes, that is much wider ownership, particularly of equities, is then a solution. But it is seldom mentioned," by the producer of that global observed transfer incidence graph, Branko Milanovic.

Here that is quoted in a book about "social wealth funds," which is presumably some kind of market-based approach, but The Economist says there are caveats. What do you think? EllenCT (talk) 16:33, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

I think the Economist is right at this time. Worker ownership is great when we have sustainable and non debt-dependent businesses which are being managed with very long term vision, but right now we are in a wild west type business environment full of scams, accounting misrepresentations, and businesses set up to borrow and then go bankrupt. How can an honest business selling widgets compete with a fly by night business that gets government insured loans, pays the owners huge salaries, sells the widgets at less than cost and just keep borrowing more and more and paying the owners more and more until finally they go broke....how can an honest business sell their widgets when the crooked widget maker is selling the widgets at 30 % less? How can any labor intensive business succeed long term when it has competition in China or Bangladesh where labor costs are 1/10th the price. The other big issue is the possibility that the company will be taken over by crooks, e.g.Enron was a good example in the caveat scenario. So, for manufactured goods and dot.com businesses, employees are very exposed to getting screwed; e.g. Nortel and Blackberry. Or they might luck out. Its just plain gambling. The businesses where employee ownership works best are local and necessity based; e.g. organic food close to a big city where there are lots of smart people who want to buy and eat "local"...at least that's my opinion. Nocturnalnow (talk) 20:24, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Do you think the minimum proportion of excess labor extracted by employers required to be returned to labor should depend on the prevailing inequality? If so, by what measure(s)? EllenCT (talk) 14:22, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Jimbo, do you agree that the disagreement is not due to anyone's fundamental error of ideology, but a question of tuning nations' tax and transfer incidence to obtain optimal measures such as maximizing years of productive life? EllenCT (talk) 14:29, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

In other words, supply- and demand-side concerns are both equally valid, but the incidence shown at [46] should be flattened by international agreement? EllenCT (talk) 21:46, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

I have neither the expertise nor interest to express any public opinion on such matters at the present time.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:56, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Are you willing to help do something to resolve the editorial impasse at Talk:Economic growth#Evisceration of secondary literature in favor of primary sources? I don't want to ask at WP:RSN about Volunteer Marek's use of literature review sections of primary sources as secondary sources just to bow to your suggestion that the secondary source you did find was representative until we resolve the underlying issue. EllenCT (talk) 09:50, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

Charlie Smith

A pointy question was removed earlier; however, I'd also be interested in the rationale for what seems to be a change of heart about Charlie Smith and the China campaign. - Frugal fisherman (talk) 17:15, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

not visible

sir i want to upload about myself how to do that...i have written about me but its not visible to all.. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jubinmitra (talk • contribs) 10:20, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

I urge you to read Wikipedia:Autobiography - short summary -> don't.--S Philbrick(Talk) 18:43, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

Guestbook

Has anyone noted how I became no. 302 from 300 in the list. Someone disrupted it... :-)-The Herald (Benison) • ^{the joy of the LORD}_{my strength} 04:14, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

No one has noted this because no one cares...... –Davey2010^Talk 04:25, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

Guestbooks still exist?!?--S Philbrick(Talk) 18:44, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

This doesn't look like it's anything to do with Jimbo - if you look at the history, someone else appears to have unilaterally plonked it into Jimmy's userspace. Looking at the history, he has precisely zero edits to it; I rather doubt he's even aware it exists. ‑ Iridescent 18:57, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes, many guestbooks exist.—Wavelength (talk) 19:03, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

The top three signatures are out of sequence. Two of them were posted after you added yours. Etamni | ✉ | ✓  14:43, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Thank you

I just wanted to say thank you for giving thousands of us editors and millions of them there readers the opportunity to partake in the spread of common knowledge. No ifs and buts, it has done the world a lot of good. Sometimes a thankyou can mean a lot, so I hope you take it that way, I've no axe to grind or petition to raise, it's just a nice day and I should be thankful. Si Trew (talk) 07:56, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

ditto. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 17:52, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Same, hands down best website out there is Wikipedia, it literally has everything Sheepythemouse (talk) 22:41, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

Except that, literally, it is lacking in millions of pieces of verifiable, sourced information. Why do people so frequently feel the need to exaggerate the scope and quality of Wikipedia? - Frugal fisherman (talk) 23:05, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Toxic users

Dear Mr. Wales, I want to thank you for expressing the opinion that has been documented in the included photo. I only wish that various Wikipedias would follow such policy.

Recently I decided to return to actively participate in a Wikipedia (I will not name the language) after a long break, as a sort of therapeutic thing to do. Unfortunately, it turned out that the toxicity there has spread very widely.

In that Wikipedia, there is a rule that has been written in such a way that it is open for interpretation. For some reason, I was singled out by some people who interpreted the rule in the strictest possible way, and I was reprimanded for adhering to a completely valid interpretation of that rule, while others who have been interpreting the rule in a similar way as I did, had been allowed to follow that interpretation for a long time, possibly even for several years.

In the discussion that followed, I was mocked, ridiculed and derided by several users, including more than one admin. Whatever I said, and whatever I tried to offer as a solution was only met with belittlement, mocking and bullying.

So, it turned out that the Wikipedia in question has turned so toxic that there are toxic members even among the admins. Thus my self-prescribed therapy ended up very badly, leaving me feeling worse than I was before. So I decided that rather than stay there, I would not participate, or offer pro bono my professional skills as a translator and writer/editor to a Wikipedia where the atmosphere was so toxic, and where I was singled out to be belittled, mocked and bullied.

Even though English is not my native language, I have professional knowledge of English. So I decided that I would take a look and see if the atmosphere here in English Wikipedia wouldn't be so toxic, and if my participation would be appreciated here.

—Ylva Carennah (talk) 17:16, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Those who complain about incivility are usually those who instigate it in the first place; either that or they get turned on by creating arguments or seeing dramah at the boards. Tell me, what was the point in starting this thread other than to turn this into the same laborious lynch mob orgy which it will inevitably become? Cassianto^Talk 17:42, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) It looks like this and this are the discussion. Apparently the Finnish Wikipedia requires people make their signatures "include the plain form of their username", and she was being called out for putting "Ylva" in front, which she said "includes" it... pretty picayune, really. I remember in the past calling for a rule like that here, at least for administrators, because User:JzG was signing admin posts as "Guy" and I feared the new users he was warning didn't understand how to contact him. It looks like he since has been purged over something or other but I'm not aware of any username rule like that ever having been enacted here. Wnt (talk) 17:54, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Not purged, just decided not to have a user page. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 23:44, 17 April 2016 (UTC).

Transcription:

Annoying User, Good Content

• There are some users who have a reputation for creating good content AND for being incredibly toxic personalities

• This is a tough one but my view is very simple: most of these editors cost more than they are worth and should be encouraged to leave (perhaps to write on their own websites under a free license?)

--Guy Macon (talk) 17:57, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

By the way, are you familiar with inline CSS styling? Like, you could try Ylva Carennah, or Ylva Carennah - I doubt they can complain much then! Wnt (talk) 18:10, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

That might work, but of course if people really want to complain, they can complain about anything. I'm guessing that Jimmy doesn't read Finnish, so it could be awfully difficult for him to intervene on the Finnish Wikipedia matter.

So what can we do for Ylva? I'll suggest making her welcome here and suggest things that she might work on here. One thing that has kinda bothered me is that we have a translation effort on now. That's fine as far as it goes - but it mainly seems to go one way, e.g. translate English articles into Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Bulgarian etc. Since Ylva has such beautiful English, I'll suggest that she translate Finnish articles into English. Bulgarians, Latvian, and maybe even Estonians might find it easier to then translate those Finnish-origin articles into their own languages. (I'm guessing not too many Bulgarians read Finnish compared to the number who read English). Of course there are likely other things that Ylva might want to work on, so other suggestions are welcome. Welcome, Ylva!

Smallbones_(smalltalk) 20:41, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

@Smallbones: The problem with saying "they can complain about anything" is that it dismisses the opinions of other editors, which isn't properly collaborative. There actually is a policy there, and there's a discussion up on those pages now, and if she can make a small concession to end things on a positive note, that's the best thing to do. If we don't want to become the "toxic users" everybody complains about, we all have to look carefully for what concessions we would make freely, what compromises we would make grudgingly, and what injustices we would denounce but not let stop us completely from productive participations. The lifespan of this or any project is finite; its errors accumulate and weigh it down. The question is, as in life, can we do something productive with it during that lifespan? I would suggest this name issue is something that can be resolved reasonably. Wnt (talk) 21:30, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, of course you are right. To the best of my knowledge, I don't know any Finnish editors, except Ylva now, and I shouldn't be criticizing them. OTOH - taking a break or trying something new might help Ylva. Let's please welcome her here. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 21:36, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for your constructive suggestion in your earlier comment, and for welcoming me here. Since I'm a professional translator, with experience of not only translating from English into Finnish, but also from Finnish into English, translating articles from Finnish into English could very easily be one of the ways in which I could contribute. I'd just need to know which articles are in the need of translation, and get a couple of pointers to the appropriate help pages dealing with the conventions here in English Wikipedia when translating an article from another language, e.g. should it be marked as a translated article with some kind of template or classification, and other similar matters dealing with the procedures considered necessary when creating pages, and linking them to other language variants. After all, I'm almost certain that translating pages from Finnish would in the vast majority of cases require performing all those things. As I'm pretty computer savvy, having worked also in the IT field, I wouldn't be needing too much guidance, as long as I have pointers to the help pages dealing with the necessary matters. Naturally I'm interested in contributing also in other ways, but if there's need for translation from Finnish into English, I could easily start with that. —Ylva Carennah (talk) 22:53, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

See Category:Wikipedia articles needing translation.—Wavelength (talk) 23:05, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Or better still: See Category:Articles needing translation from Finnish Wikipedia All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 00:15, 18 April 2016 (UTC).

Those are articles that have already been started in English. You might want to start from the other side - look at the Finnish articles that especially interest you (perhaps e.g. in the categories of Finnish women, art museums, artists, composers, writers, historic monuments) and see if there are English language articles (see other languages in the left hand column) and create complete new articles. In some areas, like Finnish cities and towns I'm sure the Finnish article is better than the English language article, so you can make additions to them. If you have translation work coming up, say related to hydroelectrical power, you might want to warm up by translating related Finnish articles into English.

I'd guess our rules are pretty similar to the Finnish Wikipedia's (hopefully not too similar!). We might be pretty picky about footnotes and citations. Finnish-language references are certainly allowed, but the majority of our readers will be more comfortable if there is an English-language ref to complement those refs. I think there is usually a one line acknowledgement at the bottom of the article, maybe

'This article contains material translated from the Finnish Wikipedia.

Start small and work up to larger articles and you won't go far wrong with our rules and requirements. Good luck. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 02:48, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

The Wikipedia page about translating articles to English is at Wikipedia:Translation. Graham87 10:36, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Helping Canadian First Nations

@Jimbo:, I initiated contact with our Prime Minister's office today after seeing this most recent awful example of epidemic despondency among our First Nations youth. I am thinking that if they could become engaged as Wikipedia editors that could give their lives more meaning and fun. They might also want to expand the encyclopedia's content concerning the 634 tribes/bands. I am sure lots of the youth in more isolated bands/locations do not have personal internet access and I am going to suggest that some of the enormous amount of money our new Liberal government just budgeted for First Nations be used to provide I-phones to each of the youth and establish high speed access in all locations. Even if they just use them for games, Facebook, and communicating with people outside of Canada, it could help relieve the boredom and absence of a future that many are living with. Ideally, some will want to get engaged as active editors. I do not know how far I will get with this, but would it be ok if I suggested to someone in Justin Trudeau's office that they could contact you to discuss wiki possibilities for these youth? Nocturnalnow (talk) 02:58, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes, that would be fine. I was just in Canada yesterday and looked into how our recognized regional language versions of Wikipedia are doing - the answer is that there are only a few small projects. I'm sure that lack of Internet access is a major reason for that. If this is an issue that you'd like to take up further, and I apologize for not knowing how involved you've been with it in the past, there are a lot of people in chapters around the world who could likely advise on what has worked (or not worked) in their areas to assist with connectivity and/or participation in smaller or more economically depressed areas.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:10, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Wikimedia Argentina and Wikimedia Finland immediately come to mind, they've done outreach work with minority languages in their countries. Keegan (talk) 21:41, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Update: The communication between the PM's office and M.P.'s office and myself is underway concerning internet access and providing iPhones to the people in the most vulnerable demographic. I am still working on nailing down a primary contact person in the P.M.'s office. I will also be contacting our Canada, Argentina and Finland chapters regarding outreach. I hope to have some good news soon. Nocturnalnow (talk) 15:11, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Suicide is a major issue for young men all over the world. This does look like a very positive idea for allowing rapid and inexpensive engagement. I am quite ignorant of the variety of phones available, but was under the impression that iAnything was the most expensive. It might also be worth noting that with a wi-fi signal, all the Internet services can be accessed on a mobile. This may be a considerably more cost-effective solution for some areas, compared with erecting masts and towers. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 23:33, 15 April 2016 (UTC).

@Jimbo:, you likely are not needed on this at this time because I just discovered that it appears the problem is not so much technical: [47][48], so I am hoping that more constructive internet engagement will help. So, now I am going to focus on outreach through our chapters to hopefully stir up interest in wiki projects within the vulnerable demographic and establish ongoing contacts within the community leadership. This may take some time so feel free to close this thread and I(we) will report when there is something firm happening. Nocturnalnow (talk) 19:52, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

It's just getting worse

Unbelievably, 5 more children attempted suicide 2 days ago (must watch video), and there are only about 2,000 people in this indigenous Cree community. Ironically, cyber-bullying is identified in the video as one problem. 1 good thing, the local M.P. is on the same track as we are:

"We are hoping to find a way to get the page turned so we can start to build something positive with the young," Angus said Saturday in an email.

Our own article shows little editing by the members of the community, especially about the attempted suicide epidemic, which presents a great opportunity to motivate the children and other youth to get into Wikipedia editing, perhaps initially, First Nations articles editing. Obviously, I can not go slow on this now, after Friday's news, so I'll be calling M.P. Charlie Angus tomorrow (I had only contacted my own M.P. before) as well as the Attawapiskat First Nation Chief, Bruce Shisheesh as well as contacting our chapters in Canada, Argentina and Finland to, working together, design a Wikipedia Editing promotion plan for these children and youth. Nocturnalnow (talk) 15:22, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

ok, I feel like we are off the ground.

1: I left this message on the talk pages of the most active editors at the Canada, Argentina and Finland chapters articles

"topic: Attawapiskat First Nation

Re: Wikipedia Outreach: Please see this topic on Jimbo's talk page. I am contacting our chapters in Canada, Argentina and Finland for us all to work together to reach out to the vulnerable youth at Attawapiskat First Nation to promote Wikipedia editing and other wiki projects. I am very good on the phone so that is where I can be of most use. Right now I have a vision, subject to change should you having different ideas, of 1 or more of us using email and/or telephone and or Skype to communicate directly with individuals, groups, and local teachers promoting and illustrating how much fun and education the youth can have through Wiki editing. Please communicate back to me via my talk page as time is of the essence I think." Nocturnalnow (talk) 15:58, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

2:I spoke with Felicia at M.P. Charlie Angus's office, Charlie is on site at Attawapiskat but she will make sure he calls me tomorrow.

3:No one is answering the phone at Attawapiskat First Nation but I saw their financial statements on their website and so I phoned their accounting firm and 1 of their partners should be getting back to me with contact info for the Chief. I did this before calling Angus from whom I can get that info also.

4:I have yet to phone any school teachers and may wait to hear back from the chapters before doing that.

I will likely move all of this somewhere else, not sure where yet, when I get time as it will be too much for your talk page. Nocturnalnow (talk) 15:58, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

I copied and pasted this topic to my talk page and will continue it there. Nocturnalnow (talk) 23:46, 18 April 2016 (UTC)