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Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2011-05-16

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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2011-05-16. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Arbitration report: Motions - hyphens and dashes dispute (6,671 bytes · 💬)

I found it incredibly ironic that the title of this article does not comply with MOS:DASH. Jenks24 (talk) 02:06, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Shhhhh!!! [Looks around nervously] -- llywrch (talk) 05:26, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
Is it possible to give the gist of what each arbitration is about? Best regards, -- Ssilvers (talk) 02:38, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
Did that for a while last year because some people preferred reading it each week, but stopped it this year because some people did not. Can't always be sure about what readers more strongly prefer on this point, but at minimum, there should be a snapshot in week 1 of each case (example from two weeks ago) and/or the week in which the case is closed (example from one week ago). Still, noting the suggestion/request. Ncmvocalist (talk) 10:31, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
  Like What Jenks said. Killiondude (talk) 05:41, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
ArbCom be damned, I fixed the dash. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 20:52, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

... Hyphens and dashes. Hyphens and dashes. This reached arbitration. My horrified empathy to the arbitrators. - David Gerard (talk) 07:28, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I previously thought that the biggest waste of arbitrator time went to a January 2008 request for arbitration about Sorcerer's Stone vs. Philosopher's Stone, but it certainly has a new contender in this Hyphens and dashes business. AGK [•] 11:08, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
Actually it is simple proof that the more De minimis a topic is, the more rabid become those pushing the issue. IMO, no one should care a whit about typographical "standards" on Wikipedia to this extent. Collect (talk) 12:04, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
"The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved" --The Law of Triviality, in C. Northcote Parkinson, "Parkinson's Law", 1958, Chapter 6. -- Alarics (talk) 19:37, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
Oh crap. Really? This made it to arbitration? --Rockstonetalk to me! 13:19, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
Contrary to the end-of-the-world pronouncements above, maintaining a consistent style across the encyclopedia is a laudable goal, one which is complicated by trying to devise standards by consensus rather than by fiat. Such disagreements are inevitable. Powers T 20:55, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
Agreed. I feel like editors that paint with a wide brush and say this sort of thing is a waste of time really disrespect the editors that care about such things. The Wikipedia would be an ugly mess without people who care about consistency. If ultimately an issue is unimportant, it's perfectly okay for a guideline to say more than one way is acceptable. Jason Quinn (talk) 21:27, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
The sky's not going to fall if we use wrong hyphen or dash. And I agree with AGK, this case clearly tops of biggest waste of time in arbitration case category OhanaUnitedTalk page 06:42, 19 May 2011 (UTC)
I won't deny that the disagreement that led to the case was more heated than it ought to have been, but that doesn't mean the objective of maintaining our house style should fall by the wayside. Powers T 12:19, 19 May 2011 (UTC)
These arguments might carry more weight if there were any serious attempt to maintain consistency (within each article, at least) over things that people might actually notice, such as the presentation of references in footnotes, which in the great majority of WP articles are a total mess. By comparison, the difference between a hyphen and a dash seems preposterously unimportant. -- Alarics (talk) 14:51, 19 May 2011 (UTC)
Everyone pays attention to different things. To some readers, using the correct punctuation mark greatly enhances readability (at least in certain cases), while the exact format of a reference is insignificant. Powers T 20:29, 19 May 2011 (UTC)
If you can't read an article because it has the wrong kind of hyphen in it you need to seek professional help. I seriously doubt any of our actual readers are troubled by this, it's just a small group of editors who can't see how absurd this is and how foolish it seems to everyone else. This should have it's own special section at WP:LAME as the lamest dispute in the history of Wikipedia. Beeblebrox (talk) 16:25, 22 May 2011 (UTC)
Please try not to make straw man arguments. I merely said that using the correct punctuation enhances readability, which I had thought to be self-evident. No one has claimed that an article becomes unintelligible if a hyphen is used where a dash is more appropriate. But in many contexts, using the longer dashes instead of simple hyphens can make a passage easier and quicker to read. For example, many people would have to read this very sentence twice-over-I hope you can see why. Powers T 17:47, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Features and admins: The best of the week (2,320 bytes · 💬)

To anyone wondering how a topic with only 3/13 articles featured is a "featured topic"- it's not. It's a Good Topic, as less than 50% of the articles are featured. --PresN 01:45, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

OK, fixed. I was just too bleary-eyed when doing this page to realise I'd chosen the wrong one, which had already been mistakenly omitted last week. I must say, I just cannot work out how to tell featured from good topics in the templates on the nomination page: what confused me was the bronze star against the top-billed article. An associated issue is that no distinction is made between the component featured and good articles and featured and good lists; they're all treated as FAs. What's the secret to both? Tony (talk) 14:26, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
Well, like what PresN said, if a topic has articles that are 50% featured, its a featured topic. Less than 50%, it a good topic. Probably be a good idea to look at the talk page to really see if its good or featured. GamerPro64 16:08, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
This page requires a huge amount of hum-drum work each week. I'm putting in a request that closers specify whether a new FT is featured or good, so I don't have to use a calculator on each template. This job needs to be as streamlined as possible. :-) Tony (talk) 16:12, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Am I the only one to find it ironic that Sarek, right after being re-confirmed, has been blocked by another admin? --Orange Mike | Talk 17:14, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Heh, it certainly raised my eyebrow.. -- Ϫ 12:57, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

In the news: Education minister's speech copied from Wikipedia; Jimmy Wales interviewed; brief news (4,024 bytes · 💬)

Nature

"3% of scientists edited their Wikipedia article" does not follow from a poll - such polls are not necessarily representative. It is likely they reached a particularly online-intensive subset. -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 01:38, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Wait a minute, isn't this a WP:COI issue? (my emphasis) "Darren Logan, a geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, is an administrator on Wikipedia — a position that gives him additional editing powers. He agrees that editing Wikipedia can be a very influential way of getting a point across, even within the scientific community. One article he has written, on major urinary proteins, included references to his scientific work and introduced terminology that others later used to describe his work" -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 01:43, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

The true figure may be higher, if we count the spirit as well as the strict letter of the wording. I'm aware of cases where a prof has had one of his staff or family members edit the article. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 02:03, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

How do we count "scientists"? I know of plenty of (for instance) people who work in other professions who have discovered and named many species of plants - are they scientists? Same proably goes in astronomy and a few other disciplines too...Casliber (talk · contribs) 02:47, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
I think you need an ology.  Chzz  ►  04:23, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
Hopefully, most of the scientists who edit Wikipedia aren't doing so because they are insecure about the legacy of their work or the work of their colleagues, because it might influence some of them to act in a way that is contrary to Wikipedia's spirit of collaboration, cooperation, and compromise. By the way, the interviewer's follow-up question to Wales on the super-injunctions was very astute. Cla68 (talk) 00:16, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
Perhaps the item in the Signpost would be clearer if it included Jimmy's statement (from the print version): "But if they appeared in say the New York Times or a French newspaper he would run them, 'without question'." . DGG ( talk ) 22:45, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
I agree with Boris that the true % of academics editing their bios is considerably higher than 3%, (I'd say 10 to 20%) but this is only sometimes problematic. When it is, the edits are equally likely to be too brief & modest, than to be too expansive and self-promoting. In general, the academics usually do a better job of it themselves than their university's PR staff, and often better than scientifically naïve unrelated users. DGG ( talk ) 19:58, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
True. Perhaps we could clarify what edits are acceptable or even encouraged, such as published research? On a related subject, I've worked on articles about authors, and if any of them would have been interested in listing the works with the date, publisher, year and ISBN number, I wouldn't have complained. Some things are necessary and noncontroversial. Flatterworld (talk) 03:45, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

News and notes: Geographical distribution of Wikipedia edits; Sue Gardner interviewed; brief news (316 bytes · 💬)

Yeay. Given my previous comments on the sp report on the matter, thank you for adding this one in this week "news and notes" :) [1]. Anthere (talk) 07:48, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Technology report: Berlin Hackathon; April Engineering Report; brief news (1,043 bytes · 💬)

I wonder if the Embedly "tie-up" is a good idea. There don't seem to be any instructions on the Embedly website interface advising users of images how to comply with attribution requirements of Creative Commons licences. — Cheers, JackLee –talk– 07:51, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

This was raised somewhere; unfortunately, I can't find it now. But I gather it is being considered, anyhow. - Jarry1250 [Weasel? Discuss.] 09:32, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
Well, that's good to hear. — Cheers, JackLee –talk– 09:54, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

WikiProject report: Back to Life: Reviving WikiProjects (3,928 bytes · 💬)

Great to see this on reviving WikiProjects. Well written too - well done! Rd232 talk 00:57, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I'd like to thank you for writing and maintaining several sections of the WikiProject Guide, including the sections on inactive projects and bots. They were very helpful while writing this article. -Mabeenot (talk) 01:31, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
  • I've noticed a drop in WikiProject activity recently. I think project members are at first keen to do a certain task or tasks and when they are done, or the bits a specific member is interested in being done is complete then members drop away. Finally you are left with things to do that no one is interested in doing and it all stops. I would think projects would be productive if they are task focused rather then subject focused. The copy editors WikiProject is a good example of a task based project. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 03:15, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
    • This is a good point, but what other "tasks" could be specified? Having groups like WikiProject Article writing is too broad. Guoguo12--Talk--  03:49, 19 May 2011 (UTC)
      • Not everyone feels the need to 'write'. Infoboxes could be a project - creating the appropriate one for articles which don't have one and/or updating and/or finding additional parameters. Is there a bot which creates the links for all sister projects, such as Wikiquotes and Wikisource? If not, that could be a project. Another project could focus on External links to connect to ongoing coverage such as Worldcat id, C-SPAN, Charlie Rose, Guardian topics, NYT topics. We have templates for these, but we still have articles linking to a single article, or nothing at all. There are also various 'transparency' links for politicians, such as Follow the Money for US state politicians. Flatterworld (talk) 03:12, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
—Wavelength (talk) 06:32, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
  • This is well written and helpful. I've always thought that Wikipedia would be even more successful if its editors were more connected and engaged in more collaboration and discussion. WikiProjects are the perfect engines for such interaction, especially if collaboration and discussion could be accomplished at multiple levels (i.e., between users, between WikiProject task forces, between WikiProjects, etc.). Personally, I think we have too many narrow-coverage WikiProjects to accomplish this goal of interconnection. Merging and creating Task Forces within broad-coverage (but not too broad) WikiProjects is the answer. Guoguo12--Talk--  03:49, 19 May 2011 (UTC)


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