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Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2011-03-07

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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2011-03-07. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Arbitration report: New case opened after interim desysop last week; three pending cases (1,582 bytes · 💬)

Ugh. While I've never met him, from the evidence I've seen so far, Rodhullandemu clearly deserves getting desysoped. On the other hand, Elen's assertion that ArbCom went nanny state on Rodhullandemu is also correct, and deserves condemnation. This is an ugly affair all around, but then again, most things involving ArbCom meet that description. Sven Manguard Wha? 18:04, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

Actually, whenever ArbCom decides to remove any kind of administrator privileges, be it admin, checkuser, oversight, or whatever, it's probably best that they don't publicly give a specific reason. They should just announce it with something like, "The Committee has removed user:so-and-so's administrative privileges. The committee will have no further comment on the matter." Then, the Committee members should studiously ignore all the resulting Henny Penny drama that results. A desysopped editor is, usually, still allowed to participate in Wikipedia as an editor, which is supposed to be the default status for all of us. If the committee would do this every time, eventually people would come to react with shrugs whenver it takes place, because it will no longer be a big deal. Cla68 (talk) 05:25, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Deletion controversy: Deletion of article about website angers gaming community (26,582 bytes · 💬)

  • What can Wikipedia do "to avoid such contentious interactions and controversial deletion discussions"? The process itself and the outcome indicate to me that we have things about right. The nomination was appropriate given the state of the article at the time of nomination. The AfD close was inappropriate, and our Deletion Review process quickly picked that up and overturned the decision. The net result is a better article, and people involved have learned a little more. We cannot expect people to make the right decision all the time - all we can hope is that people learn, and that we pick up and correct mistakes. Can we stop people getting passionate about topics they are interested in? No. That's life. We have policies and guidelines for conducting ourselves, and mostly we conduct ourselves in an admirable fashion. I am proud of the assume good faith and civility attitudes we have and our collaborative ethos. As a new form of society, we are doing very well. Yes, it is appropriate to question ourselves now and again, but let's not turn a success story into a negative media story tinged with inappropriate melodramatic language. Will Wikipedia attract attention from blogs and forums in future? Yes. It is the nature of the internet. Did we do anything here that suggests we need to make changes? Absolutely not. We did the right thing and for the right reasons. Let's give ourselves a pat on the back, not a mediatastic attempt to whip up a scandal where there is none. SilkTork *YES! 15:57, 8 March 2011 (UTC)
    • If WP:BEFORE had been followed, this would not have happened. The current state of an article does not justify its deletion in most cases (copyvio, promotion, and attack being notable exceptions), since if it can be fixed, it should be fixed rather than deleted. OMM was clearly fixable. I'm not a gamer and had never heard of the site, but I was quickly able to find multiple Wired references once it arrived at DRV. This was a high profile black eye for Wikipedia, and even more evidence that WP:BEFORE should be followed at every turn. Jclemens (talk) 16:38, 8 March 2011 (UTC)
      • I whole heartedly agree. People nominate articles all the time without bothering to check for significant coverage. Some habitually and without any repercussion, which leads to these sorts of disasters. If there were repercussions given for repeatedly listing articles for deletion without following WP:BEFORE people would follow it. Since that's unlikely to happen we'll continue to get "Looks non-notable, guess I'll nominate it." I realize this may not be a perfect case of what I'm trying to say, but it does bring the point up. --Teancum (talk) 17:09, 8 March 2011 (UTC)
        • To be fair, WP:BEFORE on this particular topic wouldn't help much ; given the general amount of effort we'd expect someone to perform, trying to see if there are sources for OMM isn't easy. They existed, but required a bit more effort. That said, before AFD there should have been talk page discussion, which may have prevented the whole mess. --MASEM (t) 00:26, 9 March 2011 (UTC)
        • Also, in a sort of ironic cycle, if this AFD didn't occur, we wouldn't have the big article from Rock Paper Shotgun with quotes from industry leaders to establish the importance of OMM to the gaming community. A lovely Catch-22 situation there. --MASEM (t) 00:28, 9 March 2011 (UTC)
          • Indeed, I found that to be an interesting turn of events, and kind of a case of "life imitates art" in the sense that a deletion on here on notability grounds led to creation of the third-party coverage in reliable sources that we were looking for and couldn't find. Very strange, but now we have a Wikipedia article where the notability is established. SchuminWeb (Talk) 00:47, 11 March 2011 (UTC)
            • I find this argument to be disingenuous. Sources "that we were looking for and couldn't find"? There were enough sources to establish notability prior to the discussion; the fact that you couldn't find them is a function of you not looking very hard. The implication that there weren't good sources before, and that only during the deletion controversy did people start creating them, is not true and only serves to whitewash what was wrong with the initial deletion. Ken Arromdee (talk) 20:06, 13 March 2011 (UTC)
      • I agree with JClemens. This isn't a case of the system working. It's a case of the system failing loudly enough that people intervened to stop it. I don't think deletionism and the general robotic application of policy is likely to go away (all rule based systems attract such behaviour and people obsessed by them), but this provides a good test case for what policy should be put in place so its robotic application works better. So, I propose this for consideration by the more experienced. Firstly, a mandatory nomination period of a month would be better than seven days (thus widening the field from wikiregulars somewhat. Some people just don't come by that often and they shouldn't have to). Second, some enhancement of WP:BEFORE and WP:PROD should clarify the role of nominator and administrator such that the nominator takes it upon him or herself to demonstrate in exhaustive detail that every attempt has been made to fix the article, including sourcing outside expertise on the subject. The admin's job at this stage is to assess that this task has been done completely. Failure to show proper thoroughness by the nominator means the article stands. Then I suspect for proper due process it's probably necessary to send the case to a second admin for assessemnt at the end of the month to see if the article still warrants deletion. Basically if you think an article that does not fit speedy deletion criteria should be deleted you are taking over responsibility for its improvement first and foremost. If you don't want to do that, don't nominate. There's a few things in there that would need defining, but that's the core of it. MuJoCh (talk) 23:12, 19 March 2011 (UTC)
  • I think Walker's comment and suggestion on the matter rings true, but not necessarily of all Wikipedians. Some of the language used on that AfD by Wikipedians seemed to discourage rather than encourage new users to take the reins and help us fix the article (as I'm sure many would have done who are not often on the battlefield of AfD). Of course, this does not absolve the new users or bloggers and such of guilt for doing their own to ratchet the hostility level up. --Izno (talk) 16:32, 8 March 2011 (UTC)
  • I think SchuminWeb should have avoided the whole conflict of interest here and let someone else nominate it. If there is as much back history here as the article above suggests, his nominating of the article was inappropriate at best. 67.2.41.226 (talk) 18:29, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

First they came for the Jews, then the communists. Watch it. They'll be going after Pokemon, next.TCO (talk) 17:11, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

  • As the DRV nominator (and otherwise making sure this didn't descend into attacks against Schumin), my biggest issue was the rationale for closing the AFD as absolute "delete". Notability, as fickle an issue as it is, should be carefully handled and favoring no consensus retention but allowing for appropriate review down the road when there is no clear answer. At worst, a redirect was completely in line to Erik Wolpaw's page. That's what made this an unusual case, and unfortunately not readily apparently under the Schumin accusations and the external input to the discussion. --MASEM (t) 17:11, 8 March 2011 (UTC)
  • Garbage in, garbage out. - Burpelson AFB ✈ 17:12, 8 March 2011 (UTC)
  • WP:BEGIN. It is the immortal battle between good and evil. Inclusionists versus deleletionists. See: {{User AWWDMBJAWGCAWAIFDSPBATDMTD}}. This kneejerk "we know better than you" disrespect in some parts of the MediaWiki community extends to some staff at Wikia. Wikia lost nearly all the admins and editors of its largest wiki (in monthly pageviews). 10% of Wikia's pageviews. Talk about stupidity and shooting yourself in the foot. I am referring to the fork of WoWWiki (World of Warcraft wiki) to Wowpedia. Wikipedia only hurts donations by similar rudeness and lack of cooperation. --Timeshifter (talk) 18:48, 8 March 2011 (UTC)
For more info: http://www.wowwiki.com/Forum:Should_WoWWiki_leave_Wikia%3F --Timeshifter (talk) 04:01, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

As a definite outsider who was drawn here by an outside site only because of my long interest in the subject matter, but now having digested and figured out how Wikipedia apparently functions, perhaps I could offer some insight. This is a secular, messed up place, unfriendly to newcomers not versed in your ways. Please do not be defensive or perceive this to be an insult, long time contributors may not remember their first edit or certainly their first edit being on such a contentious subject. Wikipedia to outsiders is billed as the online encyclopedia anyone can edit, therefore we think we have that privilege. Whoa! I'm a "meat puppet"? You know what a meat puppet is. I didn't. Sounds offensive though, so my first response is "Fuck You!". Hey, great start! Then I see the infighting, the standing-your-ground, no matter what further sources are brought forth mentality, random checks of Wikipedians with large edit counts revealing very little actual addition of new material, just removal of material undesirable to them(for whatever reason, policy or not), and you start to realise you want no part of this nonsense, let alone financially contribute. Do you want to know what the average person thinks, regardless of layers of policy? WHY delete anything, no matter how obscure? I dont care what the answer is so dont bother answering. Thats what we think, I can only imagine the disheartened feeling someone would get pouring over an article, for hours, full of reliable facts over a band or local artist or something "less notable" to you, but important to them, gone three minutes after it was created. No thanks! I would never contribute here, financially or editorially. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.179.120.19 (talk • contribs)

As a wikipedian and a reader of some of the blogs who picked up this story, one of the things I was most surprised by was the universally low esteem that long term wikipedia editors and particularly administrators are held in by the internet active community. Universally the most common comment found within the gaming community was a belief that wikipedia was ruled by a clique of people more interested in exercising "power" and control rather than developing encyclopaedic content. Truth or fiction this is a significant problem. At best, it reflects a real communication and transparency problem in how wikipedia operates and a poor understanding of its principles by even the most "net-savvy" individuals. At worst it suggests that behaviour of longterm wikipedia contributors in general that is driving away a significant number of potential editors and undermining the structural foundations of the community. Whether this is a perceived or real problem does not really matter, because it suggests that regardless, we need to do much better if we are to continue to attract new and commited editors. Ajbpearce (talk) 21:24, 8 March 2011 (UTC)
142.179.120.19 wrote: "Do you want to know what the average person thinks, regardless of layers of policy? WHY delete anything, no matter how obscure?" - Supposedly Wikia was the place to go for articles on all things, but Wikia is also a straitjacket. Especially in its formatting limitations, and lack of private wikis. And without integrated watchlists the wiki farms like Wikia are not the community that Wikipedia is with millions of editors able to edit anything and have it all on one watchlist. --Timeshifter (talk) 00:11, 9 March 2011 (UTC)
  • Unfortunately much gets deleted that shouldn't, with all of our deletion mechanisms. And the old old justification, whispered at best, that if something was important it would be recreated, is now moot - as the system defends itself vigorously against re-creation, and the trivially encyclopedic articles are long since created. That is why careful thoughtful closes, that follow the development of the arguments, changing facts over time, reasoning rather than !votes is needed to evaluate consensus. And no consensus means keep. A no-consensus keep is a good result, it's not a failure on behalf of the closer to reach a decision, if it's an accurate reading. And shame on those who try to make a merge and redirect keep a back-door delete by just redirecting. Rich Farmbrough, 23:05, 8 March 2011 (UTC).
  • Looking at that deletion discussion, i can see why the article got deleted. A couple of obnoxious SPA's insulting people and generally missing the point does nothing to help your case. Amazingly, Beschizza seems surprised that these snarky individuals (who have added nothing else to Wikipedia) arent respected. Bonewah (talk) 23:55, 8 March 2011 (UTC)
  • I think that is an extremely disingenuous reading of the deletion discussion. While insults were certainly flung about, many genuine cites and arguments were dismissed out of hand. Wikipedia guidelines were cited as if they were law, and other guidelines are ignored and even kept out of the discussion entirely. When experienced editors "contribute" to a discussion by trying to hammer down newcomers with endless Wikipedia shorthand instead of argument, while willingly disregarding guidelines that they should be aware of it does a disservice to the ideals of this project overall. Gutsby (talk) 00:15, 9 March 2011 (UTC)
  • I didnt say the discussion was all bad, only that the obnoxious behavior of a few can really hurt. And I think your description of the deletion argument is disingenuous. What arguments do you think were dismissed 'out of hand'? What experienced editors do you think hammered down newcomers? I hasten to note that both Peridon and MelanieN were both fairly tolerant to people who seemed eager to heap abuse on them, hardly the disservice you claim. Bonewah (talk) 00:40, 9 March 2011 (UTC)
  • What arguments? Schumin and HalfShadow both had Portal of Evil COIs and were both uninterested in hearing any evidence contradicting the deletion. "Given that your edits show you to be nothing more than a single-purpose account/meatpuppet, I feel no compelling urge to explain myself to you. HalfShadow" And here's Schumin's victory lap after the deletion went through. He then went on an edit spree of deleting mentions of Erik and/or Chet from other articles. MelanieN's behavior was fine, but her ideas about notability did not appear to jive with either wikipedia's or reality's. Peridon was rather nice, and I don't say that just because he logged a keep vote. A few others chimed in to dismiss everyone as meatpuppets/SPAs as well. Most of the actual reference content dredged up during the discussion came from the so-called meatpuppets like myself. Entropy Stew (talk) 17:58, 9 March 2011 (UTC)
  • As I have said many times before, Wikipedia's 'notability' procedures are unbalanced. We define things as worthy of inclusion not by measures of how frequently our users seek information on them (e.g. page view statistics) but rather by whether certain limited information sources (e.g. major news organizations) cover them extensively AND users have provided evidence of that coverage. This is just wrong. It inherently excludes whole topics which those 'approved sources' do not typically cover... no matter how widespread their influence (as in this case). It is also applied very unequally. Elements of popular culture without extensive independent sourcing are vigorously hunted down and eliminated while other topics (e.g. lifeforms, historical battles, human settlements) are treated as having 'inherent notability' even if few sources establishing this are provided or can be found. The only way to avoid these problems in the future is to change our 'notability' standards to reflect things which are actually notable to users... rather than things which an arbitrarily selected group of sources have covered. If thousands of people read our article on something every month it is obviously 'notable'. --CBD 19:53, 9 March 2011 (UTC)
    • WP's purpose is to be an educational work. That means that there some education value to the topic being present, and notability established a minimum baseline for that. If we were instead look to popularity, we'd basically become a site people go to for entertainment rather than education. This is not to say that some things that are popular that also have intrinsic value to a specific field, but because of the sourcing of that area (whether at that time or due to the like), it may be difficult to show notability objectively through reliable sources. This is why notability is a guideline and common sense exceptions need to be made, and thus why it would never be policy. --MASEM (t) 20:24, 9 March 2011 (UTC)
      • WP is neither about education or entertainment, but the provision of information What people do with the information it is their concern entirely. ("educational" is a criterion for Commons, but they have special reasons.) If they use a particular book or video or web forum or product for whatever purpose, they will (or at least ought to) want information about it. If the subject is significant enough that this is a substantial want, and good sources of information are available for original writing and updating, and WP is a suitable technical medium for disseminating it, and NPOV editors are available &willing, there is no reason to exclude a topic. I agree with Masem that this is a point to what we call "notability",as setting a minimum level for all of these factors. Whether or not we should devote an article to the topic is another matter. As the world thinks that being in an encyclopedia is a measure of importance or significance, and as the encyclopedia they have in mind for this increasingly is ours, we need to take this into consideration. Popularity is indeed a reason for judging something worth including, & if significant popularity, notable enough for a separate article. The quality of the sources we need depends on what sources are acceptable for discussions of the subject in the real world. that we have rigid rules for them across all subjects is an error. It was well intentioned years ago, to permit the removal of rumor and nonsense, but its turned into a straight-jacket. DGG ( talk ) 23:38, 9 March 2011 (UTC)
        • I think the problem is precisely that Wikipedia has grown so much that many editors have little to contribute because every book they have ever read and every film they have ever seen is already covered. So because they cannot add anything of value, they become managers / policemen who concentrate on deleting material they do not like, sometimes under the thinnest of pretenses. This trend has not gone unnoticed by the rest of the Web and has brought some disillusionment with the project. When Wikipedia started, the lofty goal was to eventually include all human knowledge, with a separate article for every star, species, chemical substance, human alive or dead, and so on. Notability requirements were only meant to channel editing towards the standard encyclopedia topics first, to make sure they were covered adequately before branching out further. I don't think the process was meant to blossom into this grotesque management overhead of deletion reviews, reviews of reviews, polls and discussions about reviews, etc. The Wikipedia bureaucracy has grown to such Kafka-esque proportions and yet is so curiously ineffective against actual problems such as large-scale copyright infringements that are more important that having or nor having an article about an obscure topic. --Morn (talk) 01:36, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
        • We need to remember the mission: The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally. We cannot deny the goal of WP is educational content, but can recognize that what educational content is can be skewed. The article under discussion here is a good example of that: to anyone outside of gaming, OMM may look like yet another default website from the early days of the web, fallen into disuse, but the video game culture recognizes it as having an influence on game design and criticism; e.g. its educational to any student of video games. It, unfortunately, took the fact that its notability was challenged to bring out its clear value. --MASEM (t) 01:38, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
          • Little late here, but anyway...It's a problem that would have been much more easily fixed if many of the other websites and gaming news pages from the period still existed. But they don't (of course there's plenty who try to argue being talked about doesn't bestow notability in itself). This fact about internet life, particularly felt around the dotcom collapse, presents a problem for this area of Wikipedia policy. It's something that makes articles in the area of gaming and internet culture a battleground (somewhat exacerbated if you ask me by a great many editors apparently feeling the internet deserves no respect as a source at all and policy seemingly backing them up on this often enough). Constructing a great educational edifice to weather the storms of the 'net will be a waste if everything lost outside suddenly makes much that's inside invalid, if you see what I mean. There will be these cultural blackholes created by disasters and shifts in media in future. It would be a shame if WP has nothing to say about them, or worse deleted what it had to say because some ultimately pointless officiousness held sway. MuJoCh (talk) 22:08, 19 March 2011 (UTC)


  • One thing that I discussed when interviewed for this article that didn't make the final article was about policy matters. Specifically, about what makes an AFD "official" (like for an official game in baseball) in the case of low participation after having exhausted the number of relists. My thoughts on this are worth repeating here because policy likely needs to be fleshed out in this area. The reason that the second Old Man Murray AFD occurred was because the closing admin for the first AFD, seeing a discussion that had only one delete !vote (and no other comments) after two relistings, judged the discussion to be insufficient for a full close, and instead treated the discussion as an expired PROD, which was almost immediately challenged, which led to the article's restoration and a speedy renomination at AFD. This seems to be an area where policy needs to be clarified and made more explicit. WP:QUORUM, part of the deletion process, states what to do in the absence of any !votes, but from what I can tell, policy is kind of unclear on how to handle discussions with low participation where the allowed number of relists has been exhausted. On User talk:SchuminWeb/Archive 28#Old Man Murray, User:Ron Ritzman indicated what common practice was with AFDs with only a single !vote. However, I could not find any documentation in policy for this common practice. As far as I can tell, there is no guidance on how much participation is required before an AFD can be considered "official" for purposes of a close. In the case of Old Man Murray, one !vote was not enough to make an "official" AFD, but an ANI discussion about Portal of Evil's deletion (at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive671#Articles for deletion / Portal of Evil) determined that the discussion in that case, also with only one !vote (though not relisted), was "official", and the process ended there. I would like to see some discussion about what standard practice should be for low-participation AFDs, and then document it in policy. SchuminWeb (Talk) 00:40, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

Features and admins: The best of the week (1,249 bytes · 💬)

Just a note for the next edition, it's conceivable that we'll hit 2000 featured lists. We're at 1995 at the moment, and last week's number of promotions was lower than usual. —WFC— 14:58, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

You don't show all the FP's?  :( TCO (talk) 23:14, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

The window is from Saturday to Friday, end midnight UTC. Did we miss any? Tony (talk) 07:53, 9 March 2011 (UTC)
You discuss seven FPs in text, but only show four of them as images.

TCO (talk) 08:01, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

TCO, it's a great map, but we can't possibly show all. We will endeavour to show a map in the future. I removed it from here. Link is above for readers who wish to see it. Tony (talk) 08:12, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

In the news: "Truth in Numbers?" interview; 94% women; Google algorithm update; brief news (3,419 bytes · 💬)

Needs moar spellcheck. Nathan T 14:19, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

How to achieve a 94% female contributor ratio on a wiki

A little analysis of three Wikia wikis (the top 100 editors):

All three using MediaWiki and cool interfaces. All three big wikis. All three using the same toolbar and rich text editor. Explanation?

Two different Wikimedia communities (users >= 10 edits):

Both use MediaWiki and the same toolbar. No rich text editor. Explanation to the 29 >> 12?

I have read some blog posts about gender gap, and the proposed reasons are not clear and not verified. I'm trying to compile some numbers here. Comments are welcome. Regards. emijrp (talk) 14:48, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

It funny this comes up time and time again. I was active in the first and second waves of BBSing in the 1980s, and ended up working for a company that made a Mac-based BBS. The main Toronto BBS using it had a ratio of about 45% women, when most BBSs of the era were 5% or less. Network effects had a major part to play in this, but so did the GUI. Maury Markowitz (talk) 15:05, 8 March 2011 (UTC)
I could care less about this place being near stag, but I LOVE the proposals to improve the GUI. Edit view is a mess. Talk methods are a mess. And WAY too much acceptance of this from the techies and Wiki veterans. But it is holding the project back. Realio trulio.TCO (talk) 17:50, 8 March 2011 (UTC)
I would love some sort of threaded talk mechanism, but don't know whether it would limit our accessibility to those with slow connections. Danger (talk) 14:32, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
The UI really is daunting for many newbies, whether male or female, and deterring well-intentioned editors is a serious problem. The average vandal doesn't really care about mastery of markup, so an unfriendly UI even affects our signal:noise ratio. bobrayner (talk) 12:45, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Wait, all the cool girls secretly wanted to date me? Dammit! Powers T 01:41, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

It's a very well kept secret, Lieutenant. Danger (talk) 14:32, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
Well the secret's out now.. Watch out cool girls! Here we come! -- Ϫ 04:13, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

News and notes: Foundation looking for "storyteller" and research fellows; new GLAM newsletter; brief news (4,558 bytes · 💬)

  • Just wanted to say that Meta:Wikimedia Fellowships isn't just a page describing the program... it's an open proposals process, where volunteers can get support for projects that support the movement. The Foundation has strategic goals, but we really do need your ideas and energy for improving Wikipedia. Steven Walling at work 17:30, 8 March 2011 (UTC)
    • If you want people's ideas, you really need to do a better job listening to them. See my comment below for my reason why I see volunteering to help the WMF fundraisers is an utter waste of time. Sven Manguard Wha? 21:46, 9 March 2011 (UTC)
      • Sven, you cannot perpetually blame everyone at the Foundation for one mistake, or suppose that because one wrong action occurred that we aren't paying attention to what's going on. I completely understand why you might be frustrated about the banners, but that was months ago, I never worked on the fundraiser, and the fellowships process has nothing to do with that. Steven Walling at work 07:14, 11 March 2011 (UTC)
  • I can add a little more info about the summer research fellowships. We have had a position listed on the jobs page for a while that is a catch-all for all research-oriented fellowships in the Community Department. What we're trying to do in the Community Department is catch as many extraordinarily qualified Wikimedian and/or academic researchers as they are available. In the department, we have been evolving three slightly overlapping summer research opportunities for which that job listing applies: the History Project team, a small quantitative research team and a small qualitative research team. Ideally, the three teams will support each other, especially the qual and quant teams. What I'm trying to do here is leverage available PhD candidates who are already studying Wikimedia projects to do a bunch of useful work over the summer. There are a ton of them, and as it turns out, many want summer jobs. I'm hoping this will allow us to produce some great work over the summer in collaboration with community members and for presentation to the community. Although these projects have been designed with PhD candidates in mind, that shouldn't stop others from applying. That goes for the catch-all Research Fellowship year round too. In fact, I just changed Masters/PhD from a requirement to a plus. (But I don't think anyone should ever let a traditional requirement in a job listing prevent them from applying for a job they know they can do.) We will be screening candidates for all these positions with research tasks. As for these positions being "well-paid," keep in mind that it was an academic tweeting to grad students, who are used to very low pay. Zackexley (talk) 19:19, 8 March 2011 (UTC)
  • Hmm, want donation banners to be more effective? I've got a great idea! Next year don't stick a thumb in the eye of the community by neglecting to use even a single one of the banners proposed on meta! Yeah, way to go WMF, ignoring the volunteers is always the solid choice. I'm sure none of the dedicated and creative people that participated at that page were alienated at all by that one. Sven Manguard Wha? 21:44, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

Whoa! New skin!

Er, somehow I totally missed the announcement that there would be changes taking effect today, including moving the "edit" tags left. BTW, the edit tag for "Lead" section is taking me to the first section of the body instead. Are they working on this bug? -- Ssilvers (talk) 20:19, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

The lead edit link is a gadget, so the bug would have to be fixed by whoever maintains the gadget. Not everyone is going to see this change though, so it might be tricky. Reach Out to the Truth 22:18, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

Technology report: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News (3,061 bytes · 💬)

Dear Lord... Please tell me WYSIWYG will not be the default. If it is I it will basically turn us into WikiaPedia. 184.168.192.27 (talk) 03:29, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

My concern is that "rich text editor" (as in, avoiding wiki markup when bolding some text) has very little to do with the most serious editing problems for novices: templates, footnotes, and tables. For these three things (and to a much lesser extent the text for categories and images), what is shown in the editing window bears very little resemblance, in almost all cases, to what is visible to the reader. A really good editing interface would move the text for templates, tables, and footnotes out of the main editing window (regardless of how that text is physically stored in the database); for tables, there should be a separate WYSIWYG editor (as is the case in a number of wikis that don't use MediaWiki software). -- John Broughton (♫♫) 05:48, 9 March 2011 (UTC)
I don't know / can't remember if you've been party to the discussions on the various mailing lists, John, but I'm pretty sure tables, references, templates are what everyone's been thinking about here. Not just bold and italics, you'll be relieved to know. - Jarry1250 [Who? Discuss.] 21:08, 11 March 2011 (UTC)
Dear Lord... Please tell me that people complaining that "OMG! We shouldn't allow people not as L33T as me to edit Wikipedia" will not derail the process of making wikimarkup simpler. Witty Lama 02:27, 11 March 2011 (UTC)
I'm with Liam (Witty Lama) on this one: although I don't think that easier editing will boost the number of new editors a lot, I'm convinced it's worth a go. (I try not to let my own views creep into the articles, but it is hard: please call me up on any perceived biases.) - Jarry1250 [Who? Discuss.] 21:08, 11 March 2011 (UTC)
Witty, I don't think 27 is trying to derail it, but there are concerns that WYSIWYG would encourage edits not to improve the encyclopedia and other projects, but to increase unsourced non-encyclopedic edits from people who refuse to read other articles, instruction pages, policy pages, etc.. We just don't want wp to turn into post-September Usenet. Make it easier to edit sure (as an option?), especially if it's a barrier to good content being added, but also be prepared to undo do it if it causes an avalanche of crap which the bots and patrollers can't handle. -- Jeandré, 2011-03-13t22:32z

WikiProject report: Talking with WikiProject Feminism (437 bytes · 💬)

Good report

For people new to these interviews you might remind them they will be quoted verbatim in case they want to be precise in their language. (Not that I'm taking back anything I said. ;-) CarolMooreDC (talk) 16:56, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

That's a lesson best learned the hard way. Never trust a reporter.  ;) TCO (talk) 17:20, 8 March 2011 (UTC)


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