WikiEN-l July 2011

wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org

33 participants
20 discussions

Linkage bloat
by Carcharoth 11 Dec '11

11 Dec '11

Is there any chance for progress to be made on this? I recently ran into this problem again at a featured article candidate I was reviewing. It is has a very worthy 'National Historic Landmarks' set of templates at the bottom, but unfortunately this leads to massive template linkage bloat. Of the over 100 articles that link to this article, I estimate that only three links are from within the text of other articles - the rest are from the templates. If I had been able to see at a glance that this article was linked from two other articles, I would have been able to make a suggestion to link back to those articles, and maybe link from other articles. As it was, I was unable to do this and this caused some problems (which it is best not to go into here). So is there anyway to encourage or help with whatever needs to be done here? Carcharoth On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 4:10 AM, David Goodman <dggenwp(a)gmail.com> wrote: > agreed. The footer templates are the biggest source of linkage bloat. > the templates are useful, and we need some way of keeping track of > what should be in them when we add or delete articles, but they make > working with what links here for any practical purpose extremely > difficult. They'd be much more helpful if they were separated. > > On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 9:52 PM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com> wrote: >> On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 1:34 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: >>> On 07/02/11 10:56, Carcharoth wrote: >>>> On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 10:19 PM, Magnus Manske >>>> <magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com> wrote: >>>> >>>>> Many of these links are due to templates, which I can do little about. >>>> >>>> Can *anyone*, even in principle, do something about that? It really >>>> bugs me that the "what links here" function doesn't distinguish >>>> between links arising from templates (often not directly relevant) and >>>> links directly from the article wiki-text. If the answer is something >>>> to do with parsers, please do explain! >>> >>> Yes, it's possible. It was necessary to register links from templates >>> in the pagelinks table so that when a page is deleted or created, the >>> HTML caches can be updated so that the link colour will change. With a >>> schema change and some parser work, it would be possible to flag such >>> links so that they are optional in "what links here". >> >> That would be wonderful. It might even get me to create a bugzilla >> account to vote for a bug if there is one open on this...(of course, >> one problem is still that some templates are relevant to article >> content and some are not - the ones that generate distracting links >> are the navigational ones that tend to be at the bottom of pages, the >> footer templates - and I'm not sure if infobox links would count as >> template links or not - they are generated from parsing of a template >> parameter, but don't appear in the template itself, unlike the footer >> navboxes). >> >> [In case anyone is confused, an example is the massive footer >> templates that can lead to Nobel prize winners decades apart linking >> to each other, or diverse topics within a broad area linking to each >> other, though only through templates and not in the text. Oh, and some >> links appear in both footer templates, infoboxes, and the article >> 'text'. Not sure how that is handled.] >> >> Carcharoth >> >> _______________________________________________ >> WikiEN-l mailing list >> WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org >> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l >> > -- > David Goodman > > DGG at the enWP > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG > > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l >

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I like this
by James Farrar 20 Oct '11

20 Oct '11

"10:20, 29 April 2011 Jimbo Wales (talk | contribs) m (37,376 bytes) (moved Kate Middleton to Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge over redirect: Marriage to the Duke of Cambridge) (undo) " He must have had his finger on the button waiting for Beardie[*] to pronounce them man and wife... [*] I can call him that; my mother knows him reasonably well

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How to contact the author of a wiki page?
by Peng Yu 26 Aug '11

26 Aug '11

Hi, I have some questions regarding a wiki page, so I want to ask the authors of the page to get clarifications. Does anybody know how to find the authors and contact them, for example, for the following page? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta-binomial_distribution -- Regards, Peng

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Article Feedback - Ramp up to 10% of Articles
by Howie Fung 14 Aug '11

14 Aug '11

Everyone, Just wanted to pass along a note to let everyone know that earlier today, we ramped up the Article Feedback Tool to 10% of articles on the English Wikipedia. That brings the total to approximately 374K articles with the tool deployed. We'll be posting additional information on the Foundation blog soon, but I wanted to keep everyone in the loop regarding the ramp-up earlier today. Howie

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Slidershow: Proposal for a JavaScript-based feature to enhance some articles
by Timwi 02 Aug '11

02 Aug '11

Hello! A friend of mine wrote a piece of JavaScript that would allow editors to create a little widget inside an article that lets the user flick through a series of images (like an interactive slideshow). Would this be something that would be welcome to be added on Wikipedia? For example, if you had several maps of the world coloured according to data for various years, the user could flick through the years and see how the map changes. This has several advantages compared to existing solutions: 1. Animated GIFs cannot be controlled by the user, so the user cannot look at a particular frame for the amount of time that they want, and nor can they easily move backwards to an earlier frame. 2. Placing many of these images in a gallery or stacked vertically makes it quite hard to interpret a progression or to compare a specific part of the image. The solution we came up with would allow editors to place something like this in the article wikitext: <div class='slidershow' style='width: 300px'> ; Term One : [[Image:Image One.jpg|300px]] Description One ; Term Two : [[Image:Image Two.jpg|300px]] Description Two ; Term Three : [[Image:Image Three.jpg|300px]] Description Three </div> and the JavaScript would automatically trigger on the “slidershow” classname and turn this into an interactive widget. To demonstrate what the widget looks like, I uploaded it here: http://timwi.de/wiki/slider.htm This currently works fine in Firefox, Opera and Chrome. (If there’s demand, we can try to get it to work in IE too). You can use mouse clicks, drag-and-drop, or the mouse wheel to operate the slider and flick through the images. Would this be something that would be welcome to be added on Wikipedia? It would only need adding to [[MediaWiki:Common.js]] and the above wikitext would magically start working. If this is the wrong place to ask about this, please suggest where to ask instead. Thanks! Timwi

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Rating the English wikipedia
by Fences&Windows 31 Jul '11

31 Jul '11

Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2011 03:16:12 +0000 From: Ian Woollard <ian.woollard(a)gmail.com> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Rating the English wikipedia >This encyclopedia has been rated as C-Class on the project's quality scale. >This encyclopedia has been checked against the following criteria for >B-Class status: <snip> >2. Coverage and accuracy: criterion not met (currently 3.5 million >of an estimated 4.4 million articles) <snip> You think there are only 4.4 million possible topics? Based on what criteria? Stevertigo also thought this in the essay Wikipedia:Concept limit, which I tagged as [citation needed]. There are probably tens of millions of potentially notable topics, if not hundreds of millions. However, we're better at deleting new articles than writing them and writing a new article that will survive these days requires more detailed research than in years gone by.

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Wikimedia Research Newsletter launched
by Dario Taraborelli 27 Jul '11

27 Jul '11

(* cross-posting *) We are glad to announce the inaugural issue of the Wikimedia Research Newsletter [1], a new monthly survey of recent scholarly research about Wikimedia projects. This is a joint project of the Signpost [2] and the Wikimedia Research Committee [3] and follows the publication of two research updates in the Signpost, see also last month's announcement on this list [4]. The first issue (which is simultaneously posted as a section of the Signpost and as a stand-alone article in the Wikimedia Research Index) includes 5 "in depth" reviews of papers published over the last few months and a number of shorter notes for a total of 15 publications, covering both peer-reviewed research and results published in research blogs. It also includes a report from the Wikipedia research workshop at OKCon 2011 and highlights from the Wikimedia Summer of Research program. The following is the TOC of issue #1: • 1 Edit wars and conflict metrics • 2 The anatomy of a Wikipedia talk page • 3 Wikipedians as "Janitors of Knowledge" • 4 Use of Wikipedia among law students: a survey • 5 Miscellaneous • 6 Wikipedia research at OKCon 2011 • 7 Wikimedia Summer of Research • 7.1 How New English Wikipedians Ask for Help • 7.2 Who Edits Trending Articles on the English Wikipedia • 7.3 The Workload of New Page Patrollers & Vandalfighters • 8 References We are planning to make the newsletter easy to syndicate and subscribe to. If you wish your research to be featured, a CFP or event you organized to be highlighted, or just join the team of contributors, head over to this page to find out how: [5] We hope to make this newsletter a favorite reading for our research community and we look forward to your feedback and contributions. Dario Taraborelli, Tilman Bayer (HaeB) on behalf of the WRN contributors [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2011-07-25 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost [3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Committee [4] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wiki-research-l/2011-June/001552.html [5] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter -- Dario Taraborelli, PhD Senior Research Analyst Wikimedia Foundation http://wikimediafoundation.org http://nitens.org/taraborelli

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Re: [WikiEN-l] (no subject)
by Tony Sidaway 26 Jul '11

26 Jul '11

I don't hold any exciting powers on my Wikipedia account, but in any case its password is (apparently) unhacked. I'm still investigating how my gmail account was compromised.

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(no subject)
by Tony Sidaway 25 Jul '11

25 Jul '11

http://nudesportz.com/google.php

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Millions for salaries, not one cent for defense
by Gwern Branwen 21 Jul '11

21 Jul '11

> 'This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling 33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and which should be available to everyone at no cost, but most have previously only been made available at high prices through paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR. Limited access to the documents here is typically sold for $19 USD per article, though some of the older ones are available as cheaply as $8. Purchasing access to this collection one article at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. > > ...When I received these documents I had grand plans of uploading them to Wikipedia's sister site for reference works, Wikisource - where they could be tightly interlinked with Wikipedia, providing interesting historical context to the encyclopedia articles. For example, Uranus was discovered in 1781 by William Herschel; why not take a look at the paper where he originally disclosed his discovery? (Or one of the several follow on publications about its satellites, or the dozens of other papers he authored?) > > But I soon found the reality of the situation to be less than appealing: publishing the documents freely was likely to bring frivolous litigation from the publishers. As in many other cases, I could expect them to claim that their slavish reproduction - scanning the documents - created a new copyright interest. Or that distributing the documents complete with the trivial watermarks they added constituted unlawful copying of that mark. They might even pursue strawman criminal charges claiming that whoever obtained the files must have violated some kind of anti-hacking laws. > > In my discreet inquiry, I was unable to find anyone willing to cover the potentially unbounded legal costs I risked, even though the only unlawful action here is the fraudulent misuse of copyright by JSTOR and the Royal Society to withhold access from the public to that which is legally and morally everyone's property.' --User:Gmaxwell, http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosophical_Transacti… > 'We're projecting today that 2010-11 revenue will have increased 49% from 2009-10 actuals, to $23.8 million. Spending is projected to have increased 103% from 2009-10 actuals, to $18.5 million. This means we added $5.3 million to the reserve, for a projected end-of-year total of $19.5 million which represents 8.3 months of reserves at the 2011-12 spending level. > > ...We started the year with an ambitious plan to grow the Wikimedia Foundation staff 82% from 50 to 91 and a decision to, if necessary, sacrifice speed for quality (“hiring well rather than hiring quickly”). We expect to end the year with staff of 78, representing an increase over 2009-10 of 56%.' http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/37/2011-12_Wikimedia_Fou… -- gwern http://www.gwern.net

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WikiEN-l July 2011