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Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2010-11-15

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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2010-11-15. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Arbitration report: No cases this week; Amendments filed on Climate Change and Date Delinking; Motion passed on EEML (819 bytes · 💬)

'Tis a boring week. ResMar 02:47, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

This is the type of boredom I can get behind!  ;-) -- Ssilvers (talk) 06:15, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
It's Climate Change fallout, it's making everyone behave for once >:) ResMar 21:48, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Dispatches: A guide to the Good Article Review Process (2,388 bytes · 💬)

Not a coincidence. More a project to encourage more reviews to the growing backlog, in light of the milestone...ResMar 21:46, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
  • I don't see anything in the good article nominating guidelines that says an article can only be nominated by someone "who has been involved in creating [the] article". Where did that requirement come from? Powers T 16:41, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
Very rarely do people nominate articles they themselves didn't write. ResMar 21:46, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
Oh, I know; I tried it once and got excoriated for it. I just thought that since this article mentioned it that maybe it was written down somewhere and I just didn't notice. Powers T 03:35, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
  • I'm a litle surprised to discover that there is no consideration of copyright violations in the text. Bovlb (talk) 20:04, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
    I think that falls under WP:COMMONSENSE. The GA criteria don't need to spell out every last possible way that an article could fail. SnottyWong chat 23:34, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Features and admins: Of lakes and mountains (1,637 bytes · 💬)

...And also several times more massive![citation needed] ResMar 21:44, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

I'm not surprised. Is this apparently flattish shape a fixed ratio with tallness, I wonder? I mean, because we're looking at just the very top, and most of it is under water, it's to be expected? Tony (talk) 08:37, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
 
Stylised cross-section of Mauna Kea
If you're asking whether the mountain has the same (lack of) steepness underwater, I believe the answer is no (see e.g. the cross-section at left). The lava cools down more quickly underwater and hence forms a steeper slope. --Avenue (talk) 13:44, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
Or if you're just wondering whether all volcanoes get less steep towards the top, stratovolcanoes like Mount Damavand show that's not the case. --Avenue (talk) 13:56, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
Ah, thanks. I was wondering about both of those issues. Tony (talk) 14:26, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

In the news: How big can Wikipedia pictures get?; fundraising season (4,566 bytes · 💬)

To answer this question is quite simple, I do not use it. I think that Wikipedia is a waste of time and it is all fake. It has not been proofed and anyone can put whatever they want on that website. Just because it is there does not mean that it is true. Kids are using this for their homework and book reports, using false information and then getting punished for it in the form of their grades. If it were up to me, I would ban Wikipedia and make everyone used it pay a fine to their community and their teachers for the time they wasted reading whatever the student gave to them.

— aspen

That's not very nice! :P Allmightyduck  What did I do wrong? 00:19, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Good students know how to use Wikipedia properly (I do all the time), it's the lazy ones that screw up. Grsz11 00:34, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
Point out one instance where WP is wrong if "it is all fake". ~ QwerpQwertus Talk ツ 01:27, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
Much to my teachers discomfort, I use Wikipedia quite frequently...if they disallow it, I just use the wiki's references to get pretty much exactly the same information, and come out with an end result exactly the same. I've found it's mostly the old-fashioned teachers or the harder classes (AP Language & Composition comes to mind) that tend to ban it from use, but even then the best reason they can give for why is something along the lines of "The information isn't credible." Ks0stm (T•C•G) 03:54, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Consider the source, consider the time, consider the situation. Recently the US had another election, characterised yet again by the worst in assertions and inferences. Sprinkle the above with a few different words, like Democrats, big government, evolution or Fox News, and you can see this kid is a budding politician, simply parroting the common mode they see on TV and heard in the home. The kid obviously has much to fear from being here - they would definitely get in trouble with the 'adults' if they started to compare realities. Shenme (talk) 05:32, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Here's a quotation that caught my eye: "Wikipedia is just a bad excuse for Google or Dictionary.com, they want to be like other search engines, but the truth is that they will never be as good as any of the other search engines that have factual information that is very much true and that is verified by reputable indivudials." I'm worried if this kid thinks the information one finds on Google is "factual" and what's on Wikipedia isn't. Powers T 16:33, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
The sad thing is some of my professors believe exactly that. :( --Fabrictramp | talk to me 21:02, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

Why is there the head of a man hiding on the left-most edge of the "biggest picture on Wikipedia?" Magog the Ogre (talk) 05:30, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

As mentioned in the page, find "... having been stitched together from around 56 photographs ..." Shenme (talk) 05:32, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

A rather large oversight in the stitching process. Magog the Ogre (talk) 05:37, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

News and notes: Fundraisers start for Wikipedia and Citizendium; controversial content and leadership (11,293 bytes · 💬)

  • Ha Ha! 1474 hits/sec and we didn't even break a sweat.. thanks for comin' out guys! -- œ™ 00:32, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Impressive round-up chaps, keep up the industrious work! Skomorokh 00:58, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Citizendium

  • Let Citizendium hang. Honestly, while Jimbo wasn't ideal in his behavior towards Larry, Larry has outright attempted to sink Wikipedia, and shamelessly promoted his project it its place, among other highly unethical actions. From a purely market perspective, if Citizendium cannot support itself, it doesn't deserve to exist. Harsh, but that's how a competitive market works. If Wikipedia has 99% of the market share, and therefore 99% of the funding, it has no obligation to bail out the competitor that has the other 1%, with Wikipedia funding, at no cost ever to Citizendium, especially if Citizendium plays dirty. Let Citizendium hang. Sven Manguard Talk 06:32, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
Information is NOT just a product like you treat it in economics. If Citizendium has ways to create free information in a way that is more effective and leads to higher quality than Wikipedia (and it probably does), we have the moral obligation to rescue it. The fight between our founders should have nothing to do with this. We are not talking about a hostile take-over here, but about a way to reach/accomplish our own values, goals and policies. Woodwalkertalk 08:22, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
I'm not impressed by Citizendium, which disappoints me because I initially favored their methods. However, in practice I've found the articles there are often worse than the ones here. For example, if you compare our George III to theirs, ours is better. I see no provable increase in quality as a result of their editing model. DrKiernan (talk) 10:46, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
I'd like to see some hard data before extending a hand or sitting back and laughing. What would it actually cost us to host them? If nothing else, I think the goodwill alone might help with the brain drain we've been suffering lately. bahamut0013wordsdeeds 12:50, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
Citizendium was a great idea a few years ago but it really just has not panned out. It needed a lot more promotion to be able to work. It's basically a dead site that nobody uses (and why would they, their articles are a joke). Having a fund drive for it is like having a funds drive for Montgomery Ward. They also have pretty much the ugliest website ever. I can't stand reading their articles because the layout is so hideous. - Burpelson AFB ✈ 13:55, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
They designed their site so it would be the anti-wikipedia. They even went so far as to using PostgreSQL rather than MySQL for their database. I agree with you on their design. It's a hideous cluttered layout. Sanger shouldn't take all the blame for this though - it was a group decision by the few individuals remaining over there to do it. Czobserver (talk) 07:56, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
It is way too early to write off Citizendium, but it would be far better for the Foundation to pay for three to five years of its very meager expenses than it would be to try to merge projects so different and between which there is so much obvious animosity. The way this years Jimbo-stare-fest fundraiser is going so well, it's easily affordable. Ginger Conspiracy (talk) 16:20, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

There's noting wrong with us helping Citizendium in principle, however I see trouble in the future if the assistance was ever withdrawn "WP finishes off CZ" and they have not much that we don't in terms of approved content (see Wikipedia:WikiProject Citizendium Porting), and significant problems with special interest groups owning articles last I looked. Also about 1/3 of their approved articles are by one editor who is no longer active in either project. If they simply cut their hosting costs to what is needed they should be able to keep going more or less indefinitely. Rich Farmbrough, 17:21, 16 November 2010 (UTC).

There's nothing wrong with Citizendium in principle. It's an attempt to fix a major problem on Wikipedia, which is the gap between the quality of different articles. Look at Volcano as compared to Tropical cyclone, for instance. There's an obvious gap in quality there. Most Wikipedia articles are either patchwork efforts that don't stand out in quality or well-written, singular efforts. Individual editors and groups make large dents in their chosen areas, but overall with the rapidly increasing number of articles, quality simply cannot keep up; try playing with Special:Random, for instance, to see what I mean. The average quality of Wikipedia is, sorry to say, very low.

However, in practice, it's a disaster. For the one part, the project tries to directly compete with Wikipedia, and given our great size, that's very difficult (Google's Knol does a better job circumnavigating us, by purposely avoiding being a set-and-stack encyclopedia). Secondly, it attempts to fix the quality problem by forcing the writership to conform to professional standards. They will, but at a great cost—experienced writers without degrees in a particular subject, like me, cannot hope to achieve much there, but can on Wikipedia. Third, the project was and continues to be (intellectually) led by that character, Larry Sanger. Comments along the lines of "won't touch with a ten-foot pole" and "We're not that desperate" don't help his case, and neither does trying to storm down Wikipedia with such acts as the FBI scene and the whole escapade on Jimbo's talk page a while back.

So, I'd say that if we have the techs to do this easily, then if we can get Sanger to get out of his aggressive mentality, then why not. Sorry for the editorial, but I had to put my opinion out on, er, e-paper. ResMar 22:08, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

  • I'd be against helping out Citizendium - hell, if Sanger can only give his baby $250 (I'm sure he's got a hell of a lot more than that in his bank available for him to give), then why should we help them? They need $9000 a year for their hosting? Well, going by the figures above, then they should be able to get the money to keep going from donations. If they can't, sorry, that's the way the world works - the only way I could see it getting help from the WMF was for it to become a WMF project, and no way will Sanger allow that! I see no real advantage in helping them, and plenty of reasons for not doing so -- PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 23:15, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
As noted on the CZ forums, Wikipedia is already supporting Citizendium in another way, by being "the number 1 site linking to CZ" (according to Alexa). And this is an important way of helping them, because Citizendium is not only lacking contributors and money, but also inbound links.
My personal view, which I advocated in a talk at last year's Wikimania, is that exactly because of their different approach, Citizendium has great value for Wikipedia, as a long-term experiment testing several fundamental policy changes in the real world (things that thousands of people have been discussing over and over without actually trying them out, like introducing stable expert-approved versions of articles). A value that would easily justify a Foundation grant over a few thousand dollars. However, as I hope the Signpost article has indicated, that hosting suggestion wasn't much more than an idea, with important details not yet being thought through.
Regards, HaeB (talk) 13:22, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
Wikipedia's David Gerard has apparently been banned indefinitely from citizendium after criticising one of its members. One assumes it was Larry Sanger. See here. Czobserver (talk) 06:49, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
It wasn't. See [1].—Thomas Larsen 07:44, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
Yes, I've been banned from a project I last made an edit to nearly three years ago. Well, I guess that'll tell me what-for. Not to mention its valuable signaling power to properly dissuade others from writing about CZ on RationalWiki and give Citizens confidence their constabulary are doing useful things and that their money is being spent wisely - David Gerard (talk) 12:54, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
Just set up (as Thomas Larsen notes): RationalWiki:What is going on at Citizendium? And discussion - David Gerard (talk) 12:54, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
  • CZ can go to hell. We have no reason to help them, and even if we did Sanger would never let that happen. ----Divebomb is not British 18:36, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Technology report: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News (2,252 bytes · 💬)

  • A quick test of the Microsoft add-in doesn't do much for me. In the Word document I used italics, underlining, bold face, and colored text at various points in a sentence. When I went to "save as" for the MediaWiki converter, it saved it as a text file of wikimarkup. Okay, that's not too bad. The not-so-good part was when I viewed the newly created file's contents it showed that only the standard wikimarkup for bolding and italics was saved. No spans were used for color, no underlining. Meh. Killiondude (talk) 07:48, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
    • When converting a Word document for the purpose of it becoming an article, omission of spans and underlining would actually be a feature, not a bug, since those things are typically only used in articles - if ever - in templates. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 14:06, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
      • Did you reverse the order of articles and templates? I can see your point. However, it's not a "Wikipedia article converter according to WP:MOS" -- it's a generalized wiki thing. I tested a bit more after posting here and it can center content, create bullets and numbered lists, so there's a bit more functionality than I expected. I suppose the omissions are forgivable seeing as they've only just released it and there's likely to be *some* missing things in it. Killiondude (talk) 17:43, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
    • Press release by Microsoft, from today: http://wikieducator.org/Microsoft_Launches_Open_Source_Filter_for_Mediawiki Regards, HaeB (talk) 10:30, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

WikiProject report: Sizzling: WikiProject Bacon (2,219 bytes · 💬)

Thank you

Many thanks to Mabeenot (talk · contribs) for the effort into putting this interview together, as well as to those who responded. Much appreciated. ;) Cheers, -- Cirt (talk) 23:43, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

  • This is making me hungry... -- œ™ 00:55, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
Hungry for ... writing about bacon? :P -- Cirt (talk) 00:57, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
Bacon doughnut? Wow. Chevymontecarlo 06:07, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Bacon is the ultimate meat candy! Love the bacon, Eat the bacon, Be the bacon! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.220.106.173 (talk) 08:07, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

One might expect Wikipedia:WikiProject Bacon to be newer than Wikipedia:WikiProject Chocolate, which does not exist at this time.
—Wavelength (talk) 16:26, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
Bacon is one of those random narrow-scope projects with a couple of die-heart members. Kind of like me and WP:SEAMOUNT, for example. Most people don't even know what a seamount is for Pete's sake >:|. ...Bacon... ResMar 21:43, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
Call me pessimistic but c'mon, this is just an Internet meme getting turned into a Wikiproject. If it results in a few better articles great, but my guess is that it will quickly die out after producing more wiki-cruft than high-quality edits. Jason Quinn (talk) 19:30, 17 November 2010 (UTC)


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