Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2014-07-16

Comments

The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2014-07-16. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Featured content: The Island with the Golden Gun (291 bytes · 💬)

• Thanks for the commentary, especially about children's illustrations. :) Sumana Harihareswara 15:15, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

News and notes: Bot-created Wikipedia articles covered in the Wall Street Journal, push Cebuano over one million articles (5,947 bytes · 💬)

Printing

• While I recognize that the law has allowed companies to print and sell Wikipedia content, I am happy to see one of those businesses end. Beyond the fact that having a printed copy of Wikipedia content is pointless, the idea that someone is selling content that I created for free leaves a bad taste in my mouth. But don't fear, intrepid printing press, there's a sucker born every minute. Chris Troutman (talk) 21:20, 18 July 2014 (UTC)
  • I printed a copy of all the articles I have brought to GA as an example of what I have worked on. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 13:56, 19 July 2014 (UTC)
    • Wikipedia uses a CC-BY license, so it's legal to profit from Wikipedia articles. It's just a printing service, what's wrong with that? --NaBUru38 (talk) 18:16, 19 July 2014 (UTC)
      • Indeed. If you have a problem with someone potentially making money off content deliberately released without a commercial use restriction, you may want to find a different project. Ironholds (talk) 04:39, 20 July 2014 (UTC)
      • Of course, it looks like this company wasn't making much profit from the service, or they wouldn't be stopping it ;-) Anecdotally, many of the uses I've heard of have been "self-publishing" collections like Jim's. Andrew Gray (talk) 08:58, 20 July 2014 (UTC)
  • Wikipedia wasn't the only Wiki using the PediaPress service. For example, a printed travel guide from Wikivoyage might make a lot more sense than a printed set of encyclopedia articles. Powers ^T 21:01, 20 July 2014 (UTC)
    • To be fair, I believe Chris troutman was referring to companies like Books LLC or VDM Publishing, who suck up Wikipedia article, package them in a book, and print them whenever people shell out $55+ ... many of whom are not aware that they've just purchased something free to them on the Internet. "Do we now have to write in Amazon-books: “Attention! Books contains Wikipedia!”? --Alphascript Publishing. Having said that, it looks like Amazon and Google Books have pushed those types of books farther down in their search results. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 05:06, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Tweets from Congress

Could somebody create a Twitter feed showing all the Wikipedia edits from the headquarters of all the Fortune 500 companies? Smallbones_(smalltalk) 13:14, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

It would be a great idea. However, not all big companies have their own IP addresses. --NaBUru38 (talk) 18:17, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

There is also RuGovEdits (which caught some interesting stuff already). --Tgr (talk) 01:03, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

Bot-created articles

It's very sad to see this trend continuing, especially with species articles. These bots typically use non-specialist databases that simply list every species that has been described, regardless of whether they are currently considered valid. These articles are not maintained by anyone and gradually rot into outdated cruft. And because they are also commonly copied to other Wikipedias, the cruft spreads like a plague throughout the projects. Kaldari (talk) 17:42, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

I started an en.wikipedia article on Lsjbot. --agr (talk) 18:48, 23 July 2014 (UTC)

Quite so. Off Wikipedia, there are what appear to be "click bait" sites that generate similar webpages from the US GNIS database. So you google for "Obscure Lake", and the webpage that pops up...is click bait that tells you that it's in such-and-such a topographic map quadrant, which you knew already. After a few times, one recognizes them and avoids them like the plague. I worry about the cumulative effect of training our readers to think that 99 times out of 100, our article at a particular scientific name will be a waste of their clicks. I think the potential damage to our reputation far outweighs the supposed ability of this approach to "nucleate" articles, which it doesn't seem to do at any perceptible rate.

What would make much more sense, although I doubt we have the technical means to do it at this time, would be the ability to create these on demand. When someone has a little bit of information or a picture of a species they want to add, they could trigger the bot, and it would spit out a stub for them to edit. That would be much more useful then filling small Wikipedias with grey goo. Choess (talk) 02:45, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

We do have this technical ability (or, at least, we're pretty close). There's a discussion here about how to do it from Wikidata; the results would be crude but probably good enough to tell you (in your local language) "this is a type of bat, it lives in Venezuela, here's a photo" on demand. Andrew Gray (talk) 21:08, 25 July 2014 (UTC)

Special report: $10 million lawsuit against Wikipedia editors withdrawn, but plaintiff intends to refile (3,408 bytes · 💬)

• I think it's worth noting (to quote from an official Wikimedia blog posting) exactly what the lawsuit was about, since this plays a large part in WMF being willing to defend them:

However, the specific statements Mr. Barry apparently finds objectionable are on the article’s talk page, rather than in the article itself. The editors included in the lawsuit were named because of their involvement in discussions focused on maintaining the quality of the article, specifically addressing whether certain contentious material was well-sourced enough to be included, and whether inclusion of the material would conform with Wikipedia’s policies on biographies of living persons.

The point I want to make is that the those who put controversial information into articles shouldn't assume that the WMF will automatically defend them if they are sued; that's why it's so important to follow rules such as WP:BLP. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:48, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

• That's an important point. I would hope that they would also defend any lawsuit of a contributor for adding material from a reliable source -- or what a reasonable person would consider one. (Not adding links to the relevant rules; everyone ought to know what those rules are.) -- llywrch (talk) 17:11, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

• Thanks for posting this. The article uses the word "discussion," suggesting the talk page, but it doesn't emphasize it. That's fine, but I was wondering exactly this^ as I was reading. Makes a big difference. --MattMauler (talk) 14:10, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

• I am pleased to see WikiMedia Foundation doing the right thing in this case. It sends a strong and positive message to the volunteer community. Carrite (talk) 13:12, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

• This should serve as a warning to all those who think our biographical notability standards should allow us to have articles on hundreds of thousands of low-profile professional athletes and professors. Gigs (talk) 19:04, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

• This article makes me feel proud of the way the Wikimedia Foundation protects volunteer editors who do their work in good faith. It also reminds me of the fact that I have never donated money to support the Foundation, even though necessities like legal defense—not to mention servers and bandwidth—cost real money, and that money's gotta come from somewhere, and it's not coming from advertising. Therefore, the next thing I'm going to do after posting this comment is to become a financial contributor to the Foundation. Viva la Wiki! — Jaydiem (talk) 15:13, 23 July 2014 (UTC)

Traffic report: World Cup dominates for another week (2,314 bytes · 💬)

Amazon looks like manipulation (bots etc). See Amazon.com_controversies, a "main article" link in Amazon.com. If there were really that many people going to Amazon.com, some of it would bleed over to Amazon.com_controversies because some readers would click through as they read the article. But there is no corresponding traffic spike. -- GreenC 22:11, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

• It may be manipulation but I did not feel it was certain enough to exclude. Your observation is an interesting hypothesis. Unfortunately the Amazon.com_controversies page has such a small average viewcount (about 225 views a day) that very few readers seem to be clicking through to that page. Typical bot exclusions are easier to deduce because we'll see a huge view spike on 1-2 days during a week, and much much lower viewcounts on the other days of the week, with no steady rise or fall around the high. That excluded Because the Internet from this week's list, for example. Also on the pro-bot-theory side, however, is the fact that the Amazon.com article on the French, German, and Spanish wikipedias (the only ones I checked) don't show the same variation in recent viewcounts as the English one. In comparison, the Indonesian wikipedia article on the Indonesian presidential election also showed a jump in views around that election similar to our article.--Milowent • ^hasspoken 05:23, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

• Indonesian presidential election: results are due 22 July, not 20 July. (1, 2) — Crisco 1492 (talk) 06:34, 19 July 2014 (UTC)