User talk:Pigsonthewing/Archive 60

Latest comment: 9 years ago by Tutelary in topic Draft ANI
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WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 2

For this month's issue...

Making sense of a lot of data.

Work on our prototype will begin imminently. In the meantime, we have to understand what exactly we're working with. To this end, we generated a list of 71 WikiProjects, based on those brought up on our Stories page and those who had signed up for pilot testing. For those projects where people told stories, we coded statements within those stories to figure out what trends there were in these stories. This approach allowed us to figure out what Wikipedians thought of WikiProjects in a very organic way, with very little by way of a structure. (Compare this to a structured interview, where specific questions are asked and answered.) This analysis was done on 29 stories. Codes were generally classified as "benefits" (positive contributions made by a WikiProject to the editing experience) and "obstacles" (issues posed by WikiProjects, broadly speaking). Codes were generated as I went along, ensuring that codes were as close to the original data as possible. Duplicate appearances of a code for a given WikiProject were removed.

We found 52 "benefit" statements encoded and 34 "obstacle" statements. The most common benefit statement referring to the project's active discussion and participation, followed by statements referring to a project's capacity to guide editor activity, while the most common obstacles made reference to low participation and significant burdens on the part of the project maintainers and leaders. This gives us a sense of WikiProjects' big strength: they bring people together, and can be frustrating to editors when they fail to do so. Meanwhile, it is indeed very difficult to bring editors together on a common interest; in the absence of a highly motivated core of organizers, the technical infrastructure simply isn't there.

We wanted to pair this qualitative study with quantitative analysis of a WikiProject and its "universe" of pages, discussions, templates, and categories. To this end I wrote a script called ProjAnalysis which will, for a given WikiProject page (e.g. Wikipedia:WikiProject Star Trek) and WikiProject talk-page tag (e.g. Template:WikiProject Star Trek), will give you a list of usernames of people who edited within the WikiProject's space (the project page itself, its talk page, and subpages), and within the WikiProject's scope (the pages tagged by that WikiProject, excluding the WikiProject space pages). The output is an exhaustive list of usernames. We ran the script to analyze our test batch of WikiProjects for edits between March 1, 2014 and February 28, 2015, and we subjected them to further analysis to only include those who made 10+ edits to pages in the projects' scope, those who made 4+ edits to the projects' space, and those who made 10+ edits to pages in scope but not 4+ edits to pages in the projects' space. This latter metric gives us an idea of who is active in a certain subject area of Wikipedia, yet who isn't actively engaging on the WikiProject's pages. This information will help us prioritize WikiProjects for pilot testing, and the ProjAnalysis script in general may have future life as an application that can be used by Wikipedians to learn about who is in their community.

Complementing the above two studies are a design analysis, which summarizes the structure of the different WikiProject spaces in our test batch, and the comprehensive census of bots and tools used to maintain WikiProjects, which will be finished soon. With all of this information, we will have a game plan in place! We hope to begin working with specific WikiProjects soon.

As a couple of asides...

  • Database Reports has existed for several years on Wikipedia to the satisfaction of many, but many of the reports stopped running when the Toolserver was shut off in 2014. However, there is good news: the weekly New WikiProjects and WikiProjects by Changes reports are back, with potential future reports in the future.
  • WikiProject X has an outpost on Wikidata! Check it out. It's not widely publicized, but we are interested in using Wikidata as a potential repository for metadata about WikiProjects, especially for WikiProjects that exist on multiple Wikimedia projects and language editions.

That's all for now. Thank you for subscribing! If you have any questions or comments, please share them with us.

Harej (talk) 01:43, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 18 March 2015

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Wikidata weekly summary #150

Request

Please, can you remove the TfD banner from {{Infobox school}}? I only noticed that it's template-protected after I closed the discussion, but it'd be counterproductive to reopen it. Alakzi (talk) 17:28, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

@Alakzi:. Done. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:29, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

15:10, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Talk subpage /VIAF

Hi Andy. Thanks for the notice. (Maybe I did "thank" you automatically several hours ago. The system is unfamiliar to me and I was taken aback by the request for confirmation of "public" thanks.)

Wikipedia talk:Authority control/VIAF is now on my watchlist. When underway and productive, perhaps there should be a cross-reference notice at Wikipedia talk:VIAF/errors (inactive but I posted this week) and Template talk:Authority control (active)? --P64 (talk) 22:17, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

Commons category template

Hi, this change appears to have broken a large number of links, at a guess 600, to Commons categories in articles. It strips out the qualifier which is needed to get the correct entry on Commons where no argument is specified for the template. I am unsure what you are trying to do so have not reverted for now. Keith D (talk) 13:48, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

He meant to hide the qualifier from the displayed text, which should be done like this (line 6): -->|{{{2|{{PAGENAMEBASE|{{{1|}}}}}}}}<!--. Alakzi (talk) 14:01, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
@Alakzi: That didn't work. Note that I only changed PAGENAME to PAGENAMEBASE; I'd be surrised if that casues the effect described. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:19, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
See the testcases. Is that what you wanted? Alakzi (talk) 16:37, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
Will check later; thanks. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:38, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
@Keith D: Sorry about that. When reporting bugs or other issues, please give an example or two. The point of the edit is that, when no argument is given, the value is supplied from Wikidata. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:19, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
Not a good idea to use wikidata as a source at the moment with the number of items that are incorrect either where the mapping of our wiki article to wikidata is incorrect or there is no equivalent and the nearest has been picked, usually by a BOT or the Commons entry on wikidata is wrong etc. Continual page moves make the situation worse. I have spent over a year trying to sort out the mess and barely scratched the surface as yet. Keith D (talk) 17:17, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
Again; please give examples. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:38, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost – Volume 11, Issue 12 – 25 March 2015

The Bugle: Issue CVIII, March 2015

 
Your Military History Newsletter

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 09:37, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

Aposematic genuses?

Hi, I think this should probably be not Category:Aposematic genuses but Category:Aposematic genera. See genus for plural. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:04, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

@Chiswick Chap: Thanks; I was just moving it as I got notification of your message. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:15, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #151

Next meetups in North England

Hello. Would you be interested in attending one of the next wikimeets in the north of England? They will take place in:

If you can make them, please sign up on the relevant wikimeet page!

If you want to receive future notifications about these wikimeets, then please add your name to the notification list (or remove it if you're already on the list and you don't want to receive future notifications!)

Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 20:39, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Stylesheet changes

I think I can see why we've got all of these infobox utility templates: nothing ever gets fixed in the stylesheet. Alakzi (talk) 23:46, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

@Alakzi: I can understand your frustration, I see the same in other areas, not just CSS. I have one change which passed an RfC about three years ago, but is stonewalled by a couple of editors. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 08:48, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

ACS meeting

Andy,

Yes - I do need an abstract, and the deadline is by tonight! I was hoping you'd hear whether you could come or not, and also, what you'd like to talk about! If you think it likely that you'll attend, please submit an abstract and we can withdraw it tomorrow if you have to cancel. (On March 31 the program goes over to ACS central office for printing, etc.) But I'm guessing that since you haven't heard yet, it's not looking good. Unfortunately, the system ACS has is very rigid, and I've been told that even symposium organisers can't add abstracts after the deadline. Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 17:54, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks! Enjoy your trip! Walkerma (talk) 22:19, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

15:19, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost, 1 April 2015

Talk back

 
Hello, Pigsonthewing. You have new messages at User talk:The Herald/Talkback.
Message added 05:41, 1 April 2015 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

DYK for Alex Chinneck

Coffee // have a cup // beans // 08:01, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 01 April 2015

Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Gare Habib Bourguiba Monastir, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Monastir. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

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What Do You Do When You Know Someone Is Notable But...

Hello Andy. I am Jeffery from Malaysia with questions related to something that happened over the course of the last two weeks.

My questions is,

Italic textWhat does a contributor do when he knows someone is notable but lacks two respected byline biographical articles about the subject and while there are sources for propositions made in the entry, these are print entries (books available at the national and other libraries, archival material, etc.) without online links?Italic text

I am a Malaysian, born in the former Crown Colony of Penang, interested in getting People, Events, Places etc., during the British Malayan era, some presence/space here on Wikipedia and have been working at this since 2006. I now live in Petaling Jaya, Selangor, and have been retired a number of years now. And while my career has been spent in business consultancy, my retirement has allowed me to indulge my interest in local history.

Last month I drafted an entry for the recently deceased Prof. Dr. Satwant Singh Dhaliwal, former Dean of the Faculty of Science but my experience with editors who came to look at and review my piece, has left me wondering how I might ever make another contribution since we really do not have sources with online links for the sources we quote - sometimes finding even print references, like archival material etc. is difficult with so much destroyed by the Japanese during WWII, and in many cases there are no two respected byline articles on the subjects biography. I have asked questions and attempted to understand how to make the Dhaliwal entry work, but have come away, each time, feeling goal-posts have shifted between one conversation and another. It has been difficult to get direct answers to direct questions.

On one occasions I noticed an editor had removed a passage mentioning Dhaliwal receiving his Order of the Defender of the Realm KMN from Malaysia's Yang di-Pertuan Agong King. I asked why and was given to understand that an entry was no place for this. I brought up Albert Einstein's entry and was told that that was different because it was a Nobel Prize. I then gave several examples of other entries that had non-Nobel Prize awards shown, like Malaysia's first Prime Minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman - the editor proceeded to remove the awards/honours of all those. I then stayed up, overnight, compiling a long list that included Eisenhower, Michael Jackson, Sir Paul McCartney, Ronald Reagan etc., etc., some of whom were themselves Nobel Prize winners but all of whom also had non-Nobel Prize awards listed, and asked if those non-Nobel Prize awards would also be removed - if Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman's were removed, why not also the others - but got no direct response to that.

I first came across info about Dhaliwal while doing my own research relating to a book I am working on about the disturbances in Perak 1861-1875, including the period of the murder of J. W. W. Birch. The two had nothing to do with each other, but in the course of my research online I came across the title of a website entry that sounded interested to me because it had to do with the University of Malaya - I have long been thinking about writing about the history of the University of Malaya which began with Raffles College that came about through donations from members of the public at that time. The Sikh who almost became Vice-Chancellor of UM! was an intriguing title and reading the article, I thought this was someone who might merit an entry here on Wikipedia.

I traced the author, Harmandar Singh, a columnist of The Star (Malaysia) for ten years and before that, writing under the same pen name, Sledgehammer, with the The Straits Times. Harmandar, as I soon found out, also published a trade magazine, Marketing (Malaysia), serving the Malaysian marketing fraternity. I asked the author for more info about Dhaliwal and was given a copy each of typewritten Curriculum Vitae and Biography, a copy of the obituary ad, and a photograph of the same Asia Samachar article, edited down and inserted in the print edition of The Star. I asked for more, but there was no more.

I then did some searches. It was difficult because apparently there are more (in instances, many more) than one Dhaliwal, SS Dhaliwal or Dhaliwal SS, and I had to cross-reference what I read in snippets with what was in Harmandar's article. and found there was very little that I could read in completeness but what little there was suggested this Dhaliwal was the same one in Harmandar's article, and he had been contributing a great deal, in many related areas (Zoology, Agriculture, Pest Control, Medicine - especially Cancer research,etc.) for a very long time, writing papers, providing translations of scientific terms from English to Malay (as he did with his book on Zoology etc., which terms found their way into school textbooks), presented at scientific conferences and was deemed suitable enough to represent Malaysia at several Pacific Science Congress meetings. These are examples of the searches I did, after which I needed to go through each item listed, one by one, and check to see (a) whether this was my Dhaliwal and (b) if it yielded any clues as to his notability or contribution.

  1. Google Book Search for "Satwant Singh Dhaliwal"
  2. Google Book Search for "SS Dhaliwal
  3. [https://www.google.com/search?num=100&newwindow=1&safe=off&rlz=1C1CHLW_enMY514MY514&biw=1366&bih=681&tbm=bks&q=%22Dhaliwal+SS%22&oq=%22Dhaliwal+SS%22&gs_l=serp.3...44621.46567.0.47868.11.11.0.0.0.0.77.609.11.11.0.msedr...0...1c.1.64.serp..7.4.236.622fBwGERno Google Book Search for "Dhaliwal SS"
  4. Google Scholar Search for "Satwant Singh Dhaliwal"
  5. Google Scholar Search for "SS Dhaliwal
  6. Google Scholar Search for "Dhaliwal SS

I was able to piece together a not comprehensive, but considerable list of the papers he authored or co-authored.

I was confident that Dhaliwal was someone who could have an entry and, as I was going over to Singapore for my father's 80th birthday, took the opportunity to spend some time at the National Library there to see what I could get from the newspapers. With information from Singapore's Straits Times, and some books, and filling in the gap with the CV, Bio and Harmandar's article - I did point out to Harmandar that his point about Codebreakers was incorrect and that Dhaliwal did not work on Codebreakers but that Dhaliwal's correspondence with Prof. H Gruneberg (or HG as Dhaliwal calls him in their correspondence) is preserved in the digital archives of Codebreakers - I began my short piece on Dhaliwal, hoping to improve on it over time.

Which brings me back to my question - I've given up on Dhaliwal which was not a nice experience for me, over which I got worked up etc. - which has bearing on whether I continue to contribute to Wikipedia in future.

In many cases information is scant, but I try my best to find it and do not write any claim or proposition that cannot be substantiated via print resources - published books, national daily newspapers and archival materials - which in almost all cases have no online links to digitized copies (I remember more than 5 yrs ago the guys at the national archives, Arkib Negara Malaysia, said they were going to digitize, but here we are today and still all you can do is some basic searches through their online catalogue.

I am sorry if this has taken up too much of your time, and thank you in advance if you have chosen to go through this.

jefferyseow (talk) 01:12, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

@Jefferyseow: If you have an unresolvable disagreement with another editor, please follow the steps at WP:DR. For more general help, please use WP:Teahouse. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 06:46, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #152

Cite tweet discussion

Hi Andy. Please note that various changes to {{Cite tweet}}, which you created, are being discussed at Help talk:Citation Style 1 § Adding retweet parameter to cite tweet and twitter status (see also the changes I've made in the sandbox, and the new testcases page) - Evad37 [talk] 04:57, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

15:42, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: March 2015

 




Headlines


Read this edition in fullSingle-page

To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

The Signpost: 08 April 2015

Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Mahdia, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Monastir. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

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A new reference tool

Hello Books & Bytes subscribers. There is a new Visual Editor reference feature in development called Citoid. It is designed to "auto-fill" references using a URL or DOI. We would really appreciate you testing whether TWL partners' references work in Citoid. Sharing your results will help the developers fix bugs and improve the system. If you have a few minutes, please visit the testing page for simple instructions on how to try this new tool. Regards, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:48, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #153

Nomination for deletion of Template:Cite tweet

 Template:Cite tweet has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. kelapstick(bainuu) 23:52, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

16:41, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Template:Infobox New York City Subway station

I'm wondering why you moved Template:Infobox NYCS to Template:Infobox New York City Subway station. For the sake of brevity, I think it should be moved back.

Also, this infobox applies to Staten Island Railway stations as well, so Template:Infobox NYC rapid transit station may also be an appropriate title. Epic Genius (talk) 02:19, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

It's standard to expand acronyms in template names, for clarity. The short form is still available for use, as a redirect. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 08:21, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

Authority control

Greetings to the mothership at Burlington House. Template:Authority control needs to be ported properly to Meta. Then I will mark my entry at the global user page there. – Kaihsu (talk) 19:31, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

@Kaihsu: I have repeated my earlier request for such an import. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:40, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 15 April 2015

Draft ANI

User:Tutelary/DraftANI Given that you commented on the initial discussion, would you mind telling me if I mischaracterized some things, went on some sort of tangent, or that some things I mentioned are unsupported? I've been to ANI before and generally, it can get hectic so it's essential to have all the ducks in a row. Tutelary (talk) 17:51, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

@Tutelary: Looks, OK, except that "you really, really need to take a break and calm down" was the comment for the talk page block; the initial block was "User seems to have gone off the deep end again, see edits at talk page and AN". Protecting the talk page entirely seems unwarranted. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:07, 18 April 2015 (UTC)
I attempted to address your comments. Tutelary (talk) 18:34, 18 April 2015 (UTC)