Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-09-30/News and notes

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• There's currently no link to the results of that "safety and comfort" survey. Those results appear to be at m:Community Safety/Reports/Wave 2/enwiki. Also, I find myself curious about the results as it doesn't measure why people feel unsafe. For example, the UCOC might make some feel safer while making others fear future Frammings. Anomie⚔ 13:52, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Indeed. Thanks for the results link. Have now linked to m:Community_Safety/Reports (this has the other languages as well). Best, Andreas JN466 14:38, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

For 16% of editors to feel “unsafe” on Wikipedia, whatever they mean by the term, is a disgrace. I think we need admins to focus more on enforcing collegiality and shutting down trolls. Maybe also emphasize in the newbie tutorials that WP is unlike other social media which allow (and encourage) personal attacks. --Chetvorno^TALK 18:15, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

• From the WMF's appeal for a "sound logo":

  the number of active voice assistant users has grown from 544.1 million in 2015 to 2.6 billion in 2021.

  Those are some pretty implausible numbers, unless (a) that's actually the number of active voice assistant uses per year, or (b) they're counting any person who uses any text-to-speech technology, even just a single time, during a given year as one of those yearly "users" of the technology. It's pretty hard to avoid some machine, somewhere, speaking something at you at some point, but whether that makes you an "active voice assistant user" in the eyes of anyone but the marketing department is, to say the least, debatable.

...But there's no way for me to know, because the stats they apparently draw from are locked behind an accountwall that requires a "company email address", and won't take my GMail address for registration. So I'll just call bullshit by default, on those preposterously inflated statistics. FeRDNYC (talk) 17:09, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Those figures seem somewhat odd indeed. Two striking things about the data this refers to is

1) that the study refers to consumer virtual digital assistants rather than voice digital assistants, and the source given by Statista explicitly mentions chatbots as an example, and

2) that the underlying data that is supposed to document an increase in users between 2015 and 2021 has according to Statista actually been surveyed between 2015 and 2016, with the remaining numbers being forecasts (see side panel on the Statista website)... Felix QW (talk) 15:25, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

@Felix QW: Yeah, I think there are some more telling reports than the one WMF linked to, even right there at Statista. (Which sounds like a numbers-obsessed splinter group of the Sandinistas; are we sure they're not based out of Nicaragua?)

• There's this one, "Number of digital voice assistants in use worldwide from 2019 to 2024 (in billions)*": In 2020, there will be 4.2 billion digital voice assistants being used in devices around the world. Forecasts suggest that by 2024, the number of digital voice assistants will reach 8.4 billion units – a number higher than the world’s population. Which strongly implies that 2.6b number WMF quoted was for the actual assistants, not assistant users.
• Or "Number of monthly unique users of virtual digital assistants in the United States, as of December 2016, by application", the only part of which I can see is: Between June and December [2016], the number of Americans using Amazon's Alexa personal assistant more than tripled, rising from 600,000 to 2.6 million monthly unique users.

That second one sounds much more realistic. And it's also three orders of magnitude smaller than then nutso numbers from the WMF post. (Though I don't know what their 2016–2021 trending would look like. I see that in various other, more recent reports, they've adjusted post-2020 forecasts downward precipitously, #BecauseCOVID.) FeRDNYC (talk) 05:57, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

• re 111111111: way before 2,222,222,222 will will see 1,234,567,890. :-) And then 1313131313 ;-)).23:41, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
  • 1,234,567,890 is currently due in April 2024 or thereabouts. Nudge me at the time and I'll see if I can get another quote from that server kitty. ϢereSpielChequers 18:37, 14 November 2022 (UTC)
• "Investing in Skills and Leadership Development" – what a weird way to phrase something. It's not clear whether it's [[Skills and Leadership] Development]] or [[Skills] and [Leadership Development]] at first glance. Nardog (talk) 01:26, 5 October 2022 (UTC)