Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2010-06-07

Comments

The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2010-06-07. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Arbitration report: The Report on Lengthy Litigation (359 bytes · 💬)

Just as I thought I would be hearing the Arbitration report saying there is no cases in progress. "no news is good news". SYSS Mouse (talk) 01:09, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Features and admins: Approved this week (2,743 bytes · 💬)

New design

I have re-designed the presentation and structure of this page. I hope it is to everyone's liking. I tried to remove some of the repeated skeleton language, and implement a cleaner and slimmer design. Feedback, good, bad or ugly is requested and appreciated. Suggestions on the content itself are also requested and appreciated, as continued from last week's note.

I would like to thank all the editors who provided feedback in response to my note last week, and in particular Tony1. ÷seresin 08:37, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

The images are overlapping the side bar. It may just be me, though. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 15:48, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Nice work, seresin! Tony (talk) 17:42, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Looks good to me. :) — Pretzels ^Hii! 10:46, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

I think the parts about the new admins/bureaucrats and the part about what FAs were on the main page last week need to be defined a little better. If "The following" at the first part of the sentence about the FAs from last week could be bolded, I think it would be easier to recognize right away that the two pieces aren't connected. Other than that, it looks great! Wilhelmina Will (talk) 18:52, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

White space: There's a large gap above the 12 pictures at the bottom, if the browser window is any narrower than 1200px. So 1024x768 and 1152x864 have problems. Perhaps we could put the 12 promoted pictures into 3 columns, instead of 4?

Headers: I agree with Wilhelmina - the top two sections need headers, or something. Perhaps "Promotion report" and "This week's TFAs" (to match the sidebar's TFP header)?

TFP background: Could we use some sort of neutral gray, instead of the "background color = #CC9" we currently have?

TFP captions: The captions and righthand edge of the images are getting cut off.

Hopethathelps. -- Quiddity (talk) 19:31, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

I don't have any problems viewing it. Looks good! - BanyanTree 11:13, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

I've taken a screenshot (File:Signpost-whitespace-tfp.jpg) to show the problems explained above. I'll have a go at fixing some of these, later, unless somebody else gets there first... -- Quiddity (talk) 19:21, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

Free Travel-Shirts: "Free Travel-Shirts" signed by Jimmy Wales and others purchasable (1,101 bytes · 💬)

The adjectival form of "purchase" is "purchasable". It's a rotten word anyway, but you could at least spell it correctly! DuncanHill (talk) 11:14, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

• It is indeed a rotten word, so I swapped it for "up for sale"! — Pretzels ^Hii! 14:58, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Sorry for not being a native English speaker; my dictionary mentioned both to me. Thanks for having refined it now. Kind regards, —DerHexer (Talk) 14:05, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

• Meh, tons of t-shirts available at CafePress -- œ^™ 16:09, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

From the team: Changes to the Signpost (1,986 bytes · 💬)

For he's a jolly good fellow..., come on folks, join in with me here, one more time with feeling! – ukexpat (talk) 18:13, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

I would join in, but my singing voice is awful, even here on this text-only medium! However, I certainly will raise a glass to ragesoss! -- PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 22:09, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

A new role

Thanks again for the warm goodbye I've received. I really, really appreciate it. I couldn't say more until the official announcement, but I will be working as online facilitator for the Foundation's Public Policy Initiative, helping coordinate the wave of university assignments that we have coming up. So it's a chance to get even more involved in aspects of Wikipedia that I care a lot about. It would be too much of a conflict of interest to keep editing the Signpost, but I think it's in good hands, as this week issue attests.--ragesoss (talk) 18:33, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Have fun. The signpost will certainly be a different place without you. —fetch·comms 19:15, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

Shame to see you step down, good sir! Best of luck. Akirn (talk) 01:32, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

In the news: Cancer coverage, cognitive surplus, Wikipedia monarchy, and more (1,561 bytes · 💬)

The readability of Wikipedia does not take into account the wiki links. Thus this is not that accurate of a comparison.Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:59, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

Another point, I would rather read something written for adults (Wikipedia) than for 15-year-olds, although we often write less clearly than we could. Maybe if we get Simple up to speed that will help too. Rich Farmbrough, 10:22, 10 June 2010 (UTC).

On the other hand if being unreadable means people get their medical advice from a doctor rather than wikipedia I'm not going to worry too much.©Geni 17:07, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Here's the abstract for the study; full paper should be at J Clin Oncol 28:15s, 2010 (suppl; abstr 6058). Jodi.a.schneider (talk) 21:21, 15 July 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, but the abstract was already linked under "abstract" in the next sentence. I agree though that it was a maybe a bit unwise to label the link to the press release as "study".

Regards, HaeB (talk) 14:26, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

News and notes: "Pending changes" trial, Chief hires, British Museum prizes, Interwiki debate, and more (7,335 bytes · 💬)

Pending changes trial

How does one get reviewer rights?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 23:43, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

You apply at Wikipedia:Requests for permissions/Reviewer. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:22, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

Are admins going to be expected to manage this system? If so then I would like to know where I can do further research, and perhaps so test edits, to get a feel for this ahead of time. TomStar81 (Talk) 02:20, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

You can try it out on the demonstration wiki. Reach Out to the Truth 02:54, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

And to answer your question, no, admins aren't going to manage the system; it will be up to editors who have reviewer status (see above) to take care of unreviewed edits. Many, if not most of the reviewers won't be admins. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:22, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

Foundation hires

I must say if Wikipedia started advertising I would consider going somewhere else. It seems that currently fiances are okay so hopefully this will never happen. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:29, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

British Museum

About [1]: I do think that the existence of the article Wikipedian in Residence is a fact that might interest Signpost readers, many of whom are Wikipedians. However, rereading the previous wording I understand Liam's concern that it might give the wrong impression that he had created that article himself. Hopefully the new wording avoids that misunderstanding. Regards, HaeB (talk) 14:18, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Interwiki links

To me, the problem is not that some of those links are hidden (I'm surprised the controversy is over the language links rather than the Toolbox ones, though), but rather that every time my session times out I've got to re-expand the dang list. I don't mind doing it once, but I use "What links here" quite frequently and don't care to have the list hidden by default. Powers ^T 17:17, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Good point about the Toolbox. I too was surprised to see that this didn't play a role in the debate - while I understand the arguments of both sides about interlanguage links, I puzzles me why the UX team apparently thinks that someone viewing a user page is unlikely to be interested in that user's contributions. Regards, HaeB (talk) 22:49, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

(ec) It's hard not to see how the handling of this unwanted change to the default skin as a symptom of an increasingly top-down approach to the Wikimedia communities -- which is directly against the process which has made Wikipedia & related projects so successful. I don't like where that is taking us. -- llywrch (talk) 17:21, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Further proof that this should never have made it past the drawing board. Whats worse is that our visitors and anons have no way of undoing this change, which rather leaves them holding the short end of the New Wikipedia stick. TomStar81 (Talk) 02:20, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

It's odd to me. Seems like a solution in need of a problem. Why not just make it a setting under preferences so that an editor can choose based on his or her frequency of use? I personally almost never use them, but sometimes, if I see that FA star, I might check it out to see how it compares to the English article. bahamut0013^words_deeds 18:21, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

It already is an option - Special:Preferences > Appearance > last item is "Enable collapsible left navigation menu". Turn it off there. :) -- Quiddity (talk) 18:53, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, I thought I'd looked for that before. Powers ^T 19:01, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Though it would be nice to be able to enable the collapsibility for interwiki only, and not for the Toolbox. Powers ^T 19:02, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Splendid. But now they take up more room than when they're each manually expanded. I could probably fix that with some custom CSS if I knew what I was doing... I guess I'll just dump the Print/export section to free up space. Reach Out to the Truth 23:07, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

"Of Monobook and Vector users, 0.95% and 0.28% clicked on the language links " This does immediately show that Vector decreases the number of interwiki clicks by about 3/4 - in other words makes them less usable. If a limited list of languages is displayed, then it needs to be content driven, or at least content drivable - articles about Farsi should display the Farsi link. Certainly weight should be given to displaying FAs in other languages, especially where the home language article is not featured. Rich Farmbrough, 08:52, 10 June 2010 (UTC).

A small addendum: Following Erik Möller's proposal cited at the end of the story, a page has now been set up on meta to "capture ideas on how the User Experience Team and the Wikipedia Community can collaboratively approach Product Development": meta:Product Development Process Ideas.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 11:04, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

I would like to add that it shouldn't be all about the click-through ratio. Sometimes just hovering the cursor over an inter-language link (to see where it leads) is all that's needed. This kind of use is not represented by the click-through ratio at all.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); June 10, 2010; 14:38 (UTC)

Chapter-selected seats

As phoebe has a byline in this part, I want to note that the little update on Chapter-selected board seats has not been written by her. (She does take conflict of interest concerns quite seriously.)

Regards, HaeB (talk) 04:15, 9 June 2010 (UTC)