![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 190 | ← | Archive 192 | Archive 193 | Archive 194 | Archive 195 | Archive 196 | → | Archive 200 |
Korean is a swell language and all, but I'm at a bit of a loss why the Edit Count pages (Example) have the Korean words 일반 문서 (General Documents) instead of "Mainspace" or "Articles" or whatever the former English word was... It has been like this for six months or so, just thought I'd ask... Carrite ( talk) 23:47, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
Hello, Jimbo! What do you think about this way of competition in the battle for the number of articles? sv:Големо Градиште, sv:Golemo Gradiste, sv:Golemo Gradište.-- Soul Train ( talk) 12:16, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
Withdrawn by nominator... |
---|
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
|
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 190 | ← | Archive 192 | Archive 193 | Archive 194 | Archive 195 | Archive 196 | → | Archive 200 |
Is Wikipedia getting better? -- Bob K31416 ( talk) 15:43, 6 September 2015 (UTC)
Apparently it's not getting better. I have had many differences with Fram, but he is on the mark here. Peter Damian ( talk) 09:30, 7 September 2015 (UTC)
Using Jimbo's method, I pushed the random article button in the side menu 10 times. I only tried the 5 year part of Jimbo's time ranges of 1, 5, and 10 years, which would have been more thorough. Below are the links to the diffs from 5 years ago to now. In cases where the page was created less than 5 years ago, I gave the current version, which is essentially the diff from it's nonexistence 5 years ago to now.
1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Kim_Hee-sun&type=revision&diff=678916354&oldid=383599363
2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Dunleavy&type=revision&diff=652077569&oldid=369884357
3.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Iniquity_%28band%29&type=revision&diff=662721521&oldid=378161666
4.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Chamaemelum_nobile&type=revision&diff=672437156&oldid=380965667
5.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Walter_G._Alexander&type=revision&diff=679298867&oldid=372115853
6.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Uilenburg_%28Amsterdam%29&type=revision&diff=545941955&oldid=379618447
7.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Tadahito&oldid=536153308
8.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Niemi&type=revision&diff=540632279&oldid=372534500
9.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Simon_Petrie&oldid=655260314
10.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Eoxin_E4&oldid=670415197
-- Bob K31416 ( talk) 14:32, 7 September 2015 (UTC)
The wall of text by the editor who is not really here makes exactly one valid point. A sample size of 10 is not big enough to draw serious conclusions. Big deal, everybody knows that already. So the question arises "How could you make this method work to draw serious conclusions?"
So it is definitely possible to make this method work, with just a couple quibbles as is usual. I'd suggest doing it over time, say 25 article each week. Then you'd have a large enough sample size to draw conclusions every 3 months, and then 4 samples per year to see how things change over time. Anybody interested? Smallbones( smalltalk) 04:27, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
I went thru all of the 10 new articles nd my first impression was that they are quite a bit better that the previous ten. My second impression was that I must have been in a bad mood when I went thru the first 10. But still most below 100 page views a month, and pretty short. Definitely we need to do this in a systematic way. Smallbones( smalltalk) 00:18, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
|
Using data from September 30, 2010 [2] and September 9, 2015 [3], I constructed the following table of article count for each quality rating.
Quality | ||
---|---|---|
2010 | 2015 | |
![]() |
3,237 | 5,513 |
![]() |
1,626 | 1,988 |
![]() |
670 | 1,509 |
![]() |
9,772 | 24,620 |
B | 66,490 | 103,337 |
C | 71,602 | 207,091 |
Start | 631,690 | 1,316,024 |
Stub | 1,621,445 | 2,728,973 |
List | 54,967 | 178,726 |
Assessed | 2,461,499 | 4,567,781 |
Unassessed | 394,094 | 504,314 |
Total | 2,855,593 | 5,072,095 |
In the table, article counts for each quality category significantly increased over the last 5 years. --
Bob K31416 (
talk)
20:42, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
On the average over the last five years, there is a net gain of 10 articles per day in the group consisting of Good Articles and above. --
Bob K31416 (
talk)
05:13, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
Quality | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
2010 | % 2010 total | 2015 | % 2015 total | |
![]() |
3,237 | 0.11% | 5,513 | 0.11% |
![]() |
1,626 | 0.06% | 1,988 | 0.04% |
![]() |
670 | 0.02% | 1,509 | 0.03% |
![]() |
9,772 | 0.34% | 24,620 | 0.49% |
B | 66,490 | 2.33% | 103,337 | 2.04% |
C | 71,602 | 2.51% | 207,091 | 4.08% |
Start | 631,690 | 22.12% | 1,316,024 | 25.95% |
Stub | 1,621,445 | 56.78% | 2,728,973 | 53.80% |
List | 54,967 | 1.92% | 178,726 | 3.52% |
Assessed | 2,461,499 | 86.20% | 4,567,781 | 90.06% |
Unassessed | 394,094 | 13.80% | 504,314 | 9.94% |
Total | 2,855,593 | 100% | 5,072,095 | 100% |
I made a start earlier this year on this, using the methodology I mentioned above, i.e. take a standard reference work, in this case Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, randomly select articles from there, and compare with the corresponding WP article. See the small sample on the page I just linked to. The evidence to me seems compelling: WP compares very unfavourably to a traditionally produced, peer reviewed-by-specialists reference work. The objections I have received so far are mostly on the lines that my subject is a highly specialized one. Perhaps, but then educational content is educational content, no? Peter Damian ( talk) 18:40, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
See below for a table of changes over 10 years to the Action article. My view is that the changes are for the worse. The original article was clearly developed by a professional philosopher. The subsequent additions are confusing, and sometimes distort the flow of the original. For example,"Other events are less clearly defined as actions or not." in the original is a segue to the 'deciding to do ...' list. But the inserted "distractedly drumming ones fingers" is indeed a distraction.
03:55, 22 December 2005 | 11:32, 29 May 2015 |
An action, as philosophers use the term, is a certain kind of thing a person can do. | An action is something which is done by an agent. In common speech, the term action is often used interchangeably with the term behavior. In the philosophy of action, the behavioural sciences, and the social sciences, however, a distinction is made: behavior is defined as automatic and reflexive activity, while action is defined as intentional, purposive, conscious and subjectively meaningful activity[citation needed]. |
Throwing a baseball, which involves intention and coordinated bodily movement is an action. Catching a cold is not usually considered an action, because it is something which happens to a person, not something done by them.
|
Thus, throwing a ball is an instance of action; it involves an intention, a goal, and a bodily movement guided by the agent. On the other hand, catching a cold is not considered an action because it is something which happens to a person, not something done by one. |
Other events are less clearly defined as actions or not. | Other events are less clearly defined as actions or not. |
For instance, distractedly drumming ones fingers on the table seems to fall somewhere in the middle. | |
Deciding to do something might be considered an action by some, yet by others it is not an action if the decision is not carried out. | Deciding to do something might be considered a mental action by some. However, others[who?] think it is not an action unless the decision is carried out. |
Unsuccessfully trying to do something might also not be considered an action, since the intention was not completed. Believing, intending, and thinking might also be considered actions, yet because they refer to purely internal states, such a classification is not universally agreed upon. | Unsuccessfully trying to do something might also not be considered an action for similar reasons (for e.g. lack of bodily movement). It is contentious whether believing, intending, and thinking are actions since they are mental events. |
Some would prefer to define actions as involving bodily movement (see behaviorism). | Some would prefer to define actions as requiring bodily movement (see behaviorism). |
Even mere existence might be classified as an action by some. | |
The effects of actions might be considered actions, in certain situations. For example, poisoning a well is an action. | The side-effects of actions are considered by some to be part of the action; in an example from Anscombe's manuscript Intention, pumping water can also be an instance of poisoning the inhabitants. This introduces a moral dimension to the discussion (see also Moral agency). |
If the poisoned water resulted in a death, that death might be considered an action on the person who poisoned a well, whether classified as a single act or two acts. The classification of actions can become even less clear when the effect of the action is contrary to the intention, such as accidentally curing a person of an unknown disease while intending to kill them by poisoning the well. | If the poisoned water resulted in a death, that death might be considered part of the action of the agent that pumped the water. Whether a side-effect is considered part of an action is especially unclear in cases in which the agent isn't aware of the possible side effects. For example, an agent that accidentally cures a person by administering a poison he was intending to kill him with. |
A primary concern of philosophy of action is to demarcate actions from other similar phenomena. Other concerns include individuating actions from one another, explaining the relation between actions and their effects, and saying how an action is related the beliefs and desires which give rise to it, and the intentions with which it is performed (a subject called practical reason): | A primary concern of philosophy of action is to analyze the nature of actions and distinguish them from similar phenomena. Other concerns include individuating actions, explaining the relationship between actions and their effects, explaining how an action is related to the beliefs and desires which cause and/or justify it (see practical reason), as well as examining the nature of agency. |
Actions may or may not be considered to be caused by the reason for action (see determinism). If the reasons do not cause the actions, then they must explain action in some other sense. Actions are not usually considered to be done by inanimate objects, like the sun, which shines, but without intention. On the other hand, a human may still be considered to be acting without a specific intention. | A primary concern is the nature of free will and whether actions are determined by the mental states that precede them (see determinism). |
Some philosophers (e.g. Donald Davidson[1]) have argued that the mental states the agent invokes as justifying his action are physical states that cause the action. Problems have been raised for this view because the mental states seem to be reduce to mere physical causes. Their mental properties don't seem to be doing any work. If the reasons an agent cites as justifying his action, however, are not the cause of the action, they must explain the action in some other way or be causally impotent. | |
Action has been of concern to Western philosophers since Aristotle, who wrote about the subject in his Nicomachean Ethics. It is the theme of the Hindu epic Bhagavad Gita, in which the Sanskrit word karma epitomizes personal action. It has nearly always been bound up with Ethics, the study of what actions one ought to perform. Some of the most prominent comtemporary philosophers who have worked in it are Ludwig Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe, Donald Davidson, and Jennifer Hornsby. | |
Many branches of Buddhism reject the notion of agency in varying degrees. In these schools of thought there is action, but no agent. |
Peter Damian ( talk) 20:16, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
To me the important question is not whether Wikipedia is improving (because surely it is), but rather where the asymptote lies. Is Wikipedia approaching the level of a high-quality general encyclopedia? When it comes to academic topics, in my view the answer is no. In my own domain of neuroscience at least, we have a few high-quality articles but lots of crappy ones, and over the past five years the situation has hardly changed at all. For what it's worth, I don't view this as meaning that Wikipedia is a failure, just that it is not strong in all areas and not likely to be any time soon. Looie496 ( talk) 00:30, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
The inclusion of the table and graph above jogged my memory that there is another method currently in use on Wikipedia to judge "quality" and coverage in a specific area. I put "quality" in quotes because many people might think the measure doesn't go to the heart of the matter. Rather it measures things like "does a subject we know should have an article, actually have one?" "Does it have a photo?" "Is there more than one source cited?" "Does the talk page have the appropriate project tag?" Not the measure of quality a lot of people might like, but certainly some sort of quality indicator. This "Net Quality Rating" (NQR) Is calculated every week by bot for the entire project (US), by state and by county. It could even be calculated for individual articles, but AFAIK nobody does. By this measure project quality has increased from 33.3% in January 2014 to 44.2% as of yesterday.
The project is WP:NRHP which covers historic buildings and sites listed by the National Register of Historic Places (part of the US Park Service). In total there are 90,000+ sites listed. We have 66,000+ articles (60.9% of sites + county tables + misc). These articles make up well over 1% of the number of articles on en:Wikipedia, with many on other language versions as well (e.g. in German where I think they have county tables and articles on about half the sites). Go to Wikipedia:WikiProject National Register of Historic Places/Progress for all the numbers you'd ever want plus a couple more graphs. Go to the article history to see how this has progressed over the last few years.
As I've said, this type of quality measurement is not for everybody, but let me give you a subjective quality assessment for the whole project. There are only 3 or 4 sites on the web that even pretend to give access to info on a large portion of NRHP sites. NRHP focus - the federal government site, Wikipedia, and a few commercial sites. The commercial sites, just repackage a government database, summarize a small amount of government text without the help of humans, and update once or twice a year. Not really worth considering IMHO.
The government site has a very clumsy interface, is down much of the time, and if you are lucky will give you access to a bureaucratic, and jargon-filled academic form (the nomination) dated to the time the site was first listed. There's very little updating except for new listings, e.g. if a building burned down you may not be able to tell that from Focus for decades (literally). Most frustrating is that you'll find that for many states you have to go to state websites to get the nomination, but Focus won't even tell you that. The state website are often inferior to Focus. So if a general interest reader who knows the name and location of the site goes to Focus, I'll estimate the following: he or she will spend 15-60 minutes on the site, and get the bureaucratic nomination form about 25% of the time.
If the same general reader, who has a general knowledge of how to navigate in Wikipedia, searches here it will take him or her 15-60 seconds to find the site's article, 60% of the time they will find at least a couple of information-packed sentence about the site, and an infobox, sometimes with a direct link to the nomination form (!), sometimes they'll find much, much more. Also, even if the site doesn't have an article, summary info (100% of the time) and a photo (72% of the time) will be available in the county list. If the reader is not familiar with Wikipedia navigation it may take them 1- 5 minutes to find all this. In short, for the general reader, Wikipedia is head and shoulders better than anything on the internet or anywhere else, for finding information on NRHP sites. And yes, we are improving. More later. Smallbones( smalltalk) 17:51, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
National Register of Historic Places pages by quality and importance | ||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Importance→ Quality↓ | Top | High | Mid | Low | Related | ??? | Total | |
![]() |
1 | 23 | 10 | 45 | 3 | 0 | 82 | |
![]() |
3 | 82 | 62 | 349 | 8 | 0 | 504 | |
B | 10 | 228 | 132 | 845 | 42 | 1 | 1,266 | |
C | 10 | 393 | 268 | 2,447 | 95 | 2 | 3,228 | |
Start | 9 | 2,166 | 1,137 | 22,041 | 462 | 22 | 25,872 | |
Stub | 0 | 51 | 720 | 42,913 | 516 | 1 | 44,214 | |
Total (articles only) |
33 | 2,943 | 2,329 | 68,642 | 1,126 | 26 | 75,168 | |
![]() |
0 | 3 | 0 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 6 | |
List | 2 | 115 | 2,881 | 384 | 63 | 0 | 3,449 | |
Unassessed | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 2 | |
Total | 35 | 3,078 | 5,235 | 69,316 | 1,201 | 27 | 92,900 |
Quality | 100.00% |
---|---|
Importance | 99.97% |
Click here for a bot-updated list (i.e. not real-time) that also includes stats about Category-, Disambig-, File-, Redirect-, Template-, and NA-Class articles.
I don't dispute that Peter Damian is aware of topics where Wikipedia is not improving or even deteriorating, and Smallbones is aware of topics where quality is improving. But we all know that a significant proportion of content creators have particular areas of interest, and therefore progress or even regression is going to be very variable by topic according to the interests skills and POV of our currently active editing community. It could just be that each year we add another year to the tally of years that wikipedia covers pretty well, and everything else is a bit complex to measure. So when it comes to overall quality I would be inclined to look for indicators that cut across multiple topic areas. On the crudest scale, I patrol Wikipedia for certain easily confused words that a non lycanthropic spellchecker would regard as OK, public spelled without the l, possess without the final s and several others. I know that on that very specialised quality test Wikipedia is tending to improve, with occasional relapses when the bot writers I work with retire. But overall as I've got on top of particular words I've added more, to the chagrin of some sports fans who regard the shouty sweary guy on the touchline as interfering in the chain of command from the fans to the players, I recently secularised quite a few mangers to managers. Of course if a typo becomes rarer I don't know whether that means someone who used to make that typo has now learned the difference between calvary and cavalry, or they've just left; And for every additional typo that I now patrol there could be another gnome retiring. But in combination with the recent increases in the number of very active editors I think of these as positive indicators of quality.
Other possible indicators of quality would be to measure how the number of citations from Wikipedia articles to various reliable sources changes over time, or the proportion of articles with images, or the quality of those images. A few months ago I had a note from our Wikipedian in Residence in York that all the photos I'd taken when he'd shown me round the museum he is a resident at had now been replaced in all the articles that used them by studio quality images from the museum, a fair and neutral observer, i.e. pretty much anyone other than myself, would consider that a clear improvement in quality.
My own instinct would be to put this on its head, and think of the areas that we would like to prioritise for quality improvement and find ways to measure that. If the theory is true that people focus on the that which is measured then "percentage of citations that are to a reliable source" might be a good metric. If we could agree what reading age Wikipedia should be written for, then percentage of content that is understandable by someone of that reading age would be good. Perhaps we could hire some academics to do random checks each year and assess how we are progressing in terms of gender neutral coverage and language. Ϣere SpielChequers 12:42, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
As requested above, a third column added to show how the changes to Action_(philosophy) have left it for the worse. It follows a pattern I have commented on elsewhere, e.g. here. Articles are imported from public domain reference works or, as in the case of Action_(philosophy), are written by specialists. Then they are mangled by well-intentioned but incompetent amateurs.
Werespiel writes " a significant proportion of content creators have particular areas of interest, and therefore progress or even regression is going to be very variable by topic according to the interests skills and POV of our currently active editing community". Well true, but there is a pattern here. Areas of interest tend to reflect general areas of public interest. Example, I look up the Billboard top 100, and go for the first act I have never heard of, which is most of them, but the first is The Weeknd. Right, never heard of them, but I knew that there would be an article on them. Indeed, there has been an article since 29 March 2011, not long after the act become known. By contrast, articles of more academic interest tend to languish. I think we all know this. I am not saying that articles on pop culture shouldn't be there – they are a fantastically important barometer of modern culture and Wikipedia for that reason will be of interest to historians in the far distant future. I am just saying there is a pattern. In my area of specialism there is a need for accurate and balanced articles which are less complex than the Stanford Encyclopedia articles, and which are addressed to a general audience. That's what knowledge is about. How are we going to attract more editors who can help develop these?
The current WMF strategy of targeting the entire internet population is not a good one in my view. It simply attracts well-intentioned vandalism, if that makes sense.
03:55, 22 December 2005 | 11:32, 29 May 2015 | Comment |
An action, as philosophers use the term, is a certain kind of thing a person can do. | An action is something which is done by an agent.
|
The first definition is better. The second is clearly circular. The first at least classifies action as a species of the genus ‘things a person can do’. |
In common speech, the term action is often used interchangeably with the term behavior. In the philosophy of action, the behavioural sciences, and the social sciences, however, a distinction is made: behavior is defined as automatic and reflexive activity, while action is defined as intentional, purposive, conscious and subjectively meaningful activity[citation needed]. | I don’t know where this claimed distinction between ‘behaviour’ and ‘action’ is sourced from. Weirdly, the person who made the edit, ( 16:34, 8 December 2014) added the ‘citation needed’ tag at the same time. I don’t believe it is correct. The SEP article treats them as synonymous. They aren’t, but the difference is not between being ‘automatic and reflexive’, whatever that means. What is ‘subjectively meaningful activity’? The editor had a short contribution history, and clearly no one checked what they were doing. | |
Throwing a baseball, which involves intention and coordinated bodily movement is an action. Catching a cold is not usually considered an action, because it is something which happens to a person, not something done by them.
|
Thus, throwing a ball is an instance of action; it involves an intention, a goal, and a bodily movement guided by the agent. On the other hand, catching a cold is not considered an action because it is something which happens to a person, not something done by one. | |
Other events are less clearly defined as actions or not. | Other events are less clearly defined as actions or not. | |
For instance, distractedly drumming ones fingers on the table seems to fall somewhere in the middle. | As pointed out above, this is not helpful, and disturbs the transition to the list that immediately follows. | |
Deciding to do something might be considered an action by some, yet by others it is not an action if the decision is not carried out. | Deciding to do something might be considered a mental action by some. However, others[who?] think it is not an action unless the decision is carried out. | Clearly a citation is still needed. |
Unsuccessfully trying to do something might also not be considered an action, since the intention was not completed. Believing, intending, and thinking might also be considered actions, yet because they refer to purely internal states, such a classification is not universally agreed upon. | Unsuccessfully trying to do something might also not be considered an action for similar reasons (for e.g. lack of bodily movement). It is contentious whether believing, intending, and thinking are actions since they are mental events. | |
Some would prefer to define actions as involving bodily movement (see behaviorism). | Some would prefer to define actions as requiring bodily movement (see behaviorism). | |
Even mere existence might be classified as an action by some. | This got removed at some point. Clearly a citation was needed. | |
The effects of actions might be considered actions, in certain situations. For example, poisoning a well is an action. | The side-effects of actions are considered by some to be part of the action; in an example from Anscombe's manuscript Intention, pumping water can also be an instance of poisoning the inhabitants. This introduces a moral dimension to the discussion (see also Moral agency). | ‘Anscombe’s manuscript Intention’ is clumsy. There is no proper citation. Again, this disrupts the neat flow of the original. |
If the poisoned water resulted in a death, that death might be considered an action on the person who poisoned a well, whether classified as a single act or two acts. The classification of actions can become even less clear when the effect of the action is contrary to the intention, such as accidentally curing a person of an unknown disease while intending to kill them by poisoning the well. | If the poisoned water resulted in a death, that death might be considered part of the action of the agent that pumped the water. Whether a side-effect is considered part of an action is especially unclear in cases in which the agent isn't aware of the possible side effects. For example, an agent that accidentally cures a person by administering a poison he was intending to kill him with. | The original is more elegantly and clearly written. The last sentence of the later version lacks a main verb (and so is not in fact a sentence). |
A primary concern of philosophy of action is to demarcate actions from other similar phenomena. Other concerns include individuating actions from one another, explaining the relation between actions and their effects, and saying how an action is related the beliefs and desires which give rise to it, and the intentions with which it is performed (a subject called practical reason): | A primary concern of philosophy of action is to analyze the nature of actions and distinguish them from similar phenomena. Other concerns include individuating actions, explaining the relationship between actions and their effects, explaining how an action is related to the beliefs and desires which cause and/or justify it (see practical reason), as well as examining the nature of agency. | The later version omits the important ‘demarcate’. |
Actions may or may not be considered to be caused by the reason for action (see determinism). | A primary concern is the nature of free will and whether actions are determined by the mental states that precede them (see determinism). | |
If the reasons do not cause the actions, then they must explain action in some other sense. | Inexplicably deleted. | |
Actions are not usually considered to be done by inanimate objects, like the sun, which shines, but without intention. On the other hand, a human may still be considered to be acting without a specific intention. | Inexplicably deleted. | |
Some philosophers (e.g. Donald Davidson[1]) have argued that the mental states the agent invokes as justifying his action are physical states that cause the action. Problems have been raised for this view because the mental states seem to be reduce to mere physical causes. Their mental properties don't seem to be doing any work. If the reasons an agent cites as justifying his action, however, are not the cause of the action, they must explain the action in some other way or be causally impotent. | Clumsily written. | |
Action has been of concern to Western philosophers since Aristotle, who wrote about the subject in his Nicomachean Ethics. It is the theme of the Hindu epic Bhagavad Gita, in which the Sanskrit word karma epitomizes personal action. It has nearly always been bound up with Ethics, the study of what actions one ought to perform. Some of the most prominent comtemporary philosophers who have worked in it are Ludwig Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe, Donald Davidson, and Jennifer Hornsby. | Inexplicably deleted. | |
Many branches of Buddhism reject the notion of agency in varying degrees. In these schools of thought there is action, but no agent. | Inexplicably deleted. |
Peter Damian ( talk) 09:07, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
The Wikimedia foundation was awarded five out of five stars in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's 2015 Who Has Your Back? report.
More details here. -- Guy Macon ( talk) 18:52, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
Hello, I have noticed when I went to one article, it shown an IP address (I.e., 75.107.21.141, and geolocated to Snead, FL), but however, CentralAuth didn't say it was registered. I am uncertain If I have accidentally clicked on the submit button on an article's edit page, because I registered in 2013 and I just noticed it today, so the IP should have been hidden. Racer -Ωmegα 20:23, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
What's gotten better and what's gotten worse about the English Wikipedia since I started editing in 2006 (with uncharacteristic brevity):
Thoughts welcome from JW and others. Newyorkbrad ( talk) 15:47, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
Is the increased number of articles necessarily a positive? Personally I think it would be better to see higher quality articles than an excess of stubs or poorly sourced current events (via blogs and op-eds that shouldn't be dictating how an encyclopedia article is written). WP:NOTNEWS is a joke of a policy when we have a front page with an "In the News" section. Instead of looking at how events will be viewed 10 years from now, we've become no better than the mainstream media in trying to get the information out as fast as possible so we can cite our favorite Huffington Post blogger for their "expert" analysis. Muscat Hoe ( talk) 21:18, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
"if they're neutrally written, properly formatted, and reflect that reliable source, then why not?"like that is how most currently non-notable articles are now written. Such is not the case nor is it likely ever to be as long as there is self-promotion in the world. Please come up with a way to get all of those newly notable articles to comply with our policies before saying we should open the floodgates and drown the editors who try to keep Wikipedia from turning into a promotional libel fest. Until then strong GNG is all we have. Jbh Talk 11:59, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
Deletion is not cleanup if the topic passes notability. We do not have enough editors to clean up what we have and what comes in every day. Promotion is, arguably, not as bad as the BLP issues though. Every one of those must be watched and kept clean.
Just for one example think of the problems if every local politician running for election had a BLP here. Local elections are nasty enough when they just have the local paper to print malicious things and that is when there is an editorial gatekeeper who is subject to whatever the local libel laws are. What happens to the level of potential harm to people when those claims are given a world stage that is the first search result and there are no such constraints except volunteer editors and the suggestion to 'clean up' every article on every local candidate. Now we can just delete them, maybe 30 min for a good BEFORE vs initial clean up which will at best give a perma-stub and the hours or time to monitor the article and deal with the probable reinsertion of the BLP violating material.
Keeping BLP violations out of the encyclopedia is, as I understand it, a pretty big deal and it is not better to have an article that is 'only a little malicious and disparaging'. Nothing is definitely better in that case. I would also argue nothing is also better than an article filled with a bunch of false claims because there are no reliable sources to verify them. Since that is likely what will be in the encyclopedia after the initial new page patrol unless someone happens on the article by chance or some time sucking drama ends up at a noticeboard. Ideals are great, they tell us where we should aim but ideals not tempered with a good dose of practicality is Utopian and that has, to date, never worked out well. Jbh Talk 12:45, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Mrs. Wilkes' Dining Room is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.
The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mrs. Wilkes' Dining Room until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.
Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. sovereign° sentinel (contribs) 18:47, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
They ignore it though!♦ Dr. Blofeld 11:24, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
Hello, I have noticed when I went to one article, it shown an IP address (I.e., 75.107.21.141, and geolocated to Snead, FL), but however, CentralAuth didn't say it was registered. I am uncertain If I have accidentally clicked on the submit button on an article's edit page, because I registered in 2013 and I just noticed it today, so the IP should have been hidden. Racer -Ωmegα 20:23, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
I'd like to interrupt the above self-flagellation by pointing out the goal of Wikipedia -- making all human knowledge relevant to the general reader available totally free -- no fees, no ads, no restrictive licenses -- with total perfection using a labor force of mostly anonymous volunteers is just a bit ambitious, and we shouldn't despair if we don't quite make it. I'll be the first to acknowledge that mainspace could be improved and a lot of what goes on in the Wikipedia:: namespace is, uh, messy but if you go back say thirty-five years or so the notion of something like Wikipedia would be absurd or 24th century science fiction. As a volunteer project, this should be fun, so let's try to keep our perspective. Part of this should include having a little more faith in our readers to filter the quality of a given article. I know the only reason I even peeked at Wikipedia around 2005 or so is I heard or read some media interview with some guy talking about how Wikipedia is a tertiary source and readers shouldn't believe it without checking the references. That made a lot of sense then, and it should make sense now. NE Ent 21:41, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
In my patrol log it says some of my edits got autopatrolled by myself. But I cannot do that, for I am just an autoconfirmed user. Krett12 ( talk) 04:30, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
Users are invited to participate in planning and discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)/Archive 50#5 millionth article celebration: community press release, video, open letter, and site banner. -- Pine ✉ 07:00, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
Useful cut and paste:
<div>As of {{CURRENTDAYNAME}}, {{CURRENTDAY2}} {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{CURRENTYEAR}}, {{CURRENTTIME}} (UTC), The English Wikipedia has {{NUMBEROF|USERS|en|N}} registered users, {{NUMBEROF|ACTIVEUSERS|en|N}} active editors, and {{NUMBEROF|ADMINS|en|N}} administrators. Together we have made {{NUMBEROF|EDITS|en|N}} edits, created {{NUMBEROF|PAGES|en|N}} pages of all kinds and created {{NUMBEROF|ARTICLES|en|N}} articles.</div>
Which puts the following on the page:
..and it autoupdates when you reload the page and the numbers have changed. -- Guy Macon ( talk) 08:36, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
Yes it's a big figure but you only have to hit random article a few times to know that the general quality isn't great. The sourcing is getting better but 85% of articles at least are deficient. Why boast about 5 million pages when after 14 years we only have 30,000 articles of assessed quality to shout for?♦ Dr. Blofeld 10:09, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
Yes, the 30,000 figure is by no means exactly accurate because there are in all honesty articles which should never have passed GA status in there or are badly in need of sourcing improvement to reach current standards. Then of course there are articles which are easily good article standard or close and nobody has taken the time to promote them yet. There's a lot more than 30,000 which are decent, useful articles, but what I meant was that is what has been officially assessed including both FA, GA and lists. 5 million is a remarkable figure, but it's a poor reflection of what are actually articles as it includes thousands of disambiguation pages, undeveloped stubs or unsourced material which is barely legible. So yes, we can say "Oh look we've created 5 million articles", but let's not get too carried away..♦ Dr. Blofeld 11:09, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
Is the number of 'articles created' being reported the number that have not been deleted or is it just a raw number of 'pages created'? Does it include redirects? If so how many actual articles, not redirects or deleted pages, exist now? Jbh Talk 13:10, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
The Wikimedia foundation was awarded five out of five stars in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's 2015 Who Has Your Back? report.
More details here. -- Guy Macon ( talk) 18:52, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
I think there are at least two worlds of Wikipedia regarding the question posed in a previous section, "Is Wikipedia getting better?". One is the reader's world, where the content of the encyclopedia is the consideration. This is the world that has been discussed in a previous section. Another is the world of the editors, where the editing environment is important.
Is the Wikipedia editing environment getting better? -- Bob K31416 ( talk) 21:05, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
I would like to comment on the extent to which those holding preconceived biases are unwilling to rationally survey the reliable sources as opposed to accusing others of misconduct. I have been accused of misrepresenting a body of literature as conclusive simply because I was unaware of an inconclusive reliable source from several years ago. I hope as a community we are able to grow into a nurturing, caring, polite group instead of remaining bogged down in accusatory urges. EllenCT ( talk) 13:16, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
Some things are definitely better. Edits save faster, the wikilove feature means that lots of people now thank me for fixing typos where once I wondered if anyone noticed; I can upload fifty photos on commons more easily than I used to be able to upload ten. Vandalfighting bots and edit filters have reduced the amount of vandalism that requires manual intervention. But not everything is positive. The tension between the WMF and the rest of the community in the last four years or so seems far worse than it did before. There are also tensions within the volunteer community. Template bombing has replaced much of the collaboration. Revert unsourced has largely replaced <citation needed>. Spam is rising, possibly in proportion to our audience size. There is a growing wikigeneration gulf between the admins and those who started editing in the last four or five years. Ϣere SpielChequers 14:16, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
Since most drama comes when people are discussing whether the sourcing is adequate and there is more than enough drama dealing with that. My guess is after engaging repeatedly on WP:RS most editors are likely to be disinclined to engage in extensive conversation when there are no sources. Jbh Talk 18:26, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
However, most of the time unsourced material is not added by well established editors familiar with the topic area or by drive by subject matter experts. Most of the time it is added by POV pushers or new/inexperienced editors. Both of which might have something good to contribute. That is why you should engage them on a talk page to explain why you just reverted your edit. Or, if you are lazy, you can probably get a 80-90% 'right call' rate by simply reverting unsourced additions and that is my guess of why it happens so frequently. Jbh Talk 00:57, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
I made a rough attempt at determining the frequency of bad behavior in the English Wikipedia, using WP:ANI history. I looked at how long it took to accumulate 5000 edits at ANI recently and compared it to the time it took to accumulate 5000 edits at ANI 5 years ago, indexing it for the number of editors in the English Wikipedia then and now (i.e. dividing by the number of editors then and now.) The indexed edit rate at ANI looks roughly the same, suggesting that the amount of bad behavior by editors in the English Wikipedia is roughly the same today as it was 5 years ago. -- Bob K31416 ( talk) 00:49, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
So far the discussion suggests that some editors leave Wikipedia because of the conflicts, etc. Is it possible that even more editors, including good editors, are retained because without the conflicts, etc., they would get bored and leave? -- Bob K31416 ( talk) 23:54, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
Anthonyhcole ( talk · contribs · email) 17:20, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
I only just heard about Ballotpedia from Larry. It uses Mediawiki but is the opposite of the wiki concept, namely it vets editors and all submissions are carefully reviewed. I was fascinated by the editor test. I wonder how many editors here could pass it. It tests a mixture of wiki knowledge (e.g. templates) and simple grammar (what is a comma splice). I don't think it would go down well here! Peter Damian ( talk) 14:06, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
Jimbo suggested a new section to discuss the issue of block quoting more extensively.
I'll start by linking a discussion I started in 2012 Wikipedia_talk:Citing_sources/Archive_32#Use_of_quote_parameter_in_footnote_-_a_proposal_to_provide_better_guidance
Unfortunately, it stalled, but I started with what I immodestly think is a decent summary of background and issues.-- S Philbrick (Talk) 20:08, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
A point also worth mentioning is that the Wikipedia rules for usage of materials subject to copyright are more conservative than might be allowed by strict application of copyright law. This is deliberate. The borderline between acceptable usage and non-acceptable usage is gray. If we simply instruct editors to follow the law, we will find some editors pushing close to the limits and we will find ourselves defending lawsuits. Even if we win them all, we lose. Our goal isn't to be in a position to win lawsuits, it is to be so clearly not in violation that copyright owners are not even tempted to sue.
It is almost certain the case that we could allow longer quotes than we currently do and still be within the law, but if we opt to allow longer quotes I would want legal advice from the Foundation to help ensure that we are not creating a legal risk.
It is also my personal opinion that material used within a hidden quote, not visible to the ordinary reader unless they know where to look, might be viewed differently, from a legal perspective, then the exact same amount of material prominent in an article. Not everyone agrees with my position, so I wouldn't push it unless we got legal support for it, but if we got legal support, we might justify longer quotes in certain situations.
As always, input from our copyright expert would be helpful. @ Moonriddengirl:.-- S Philbrick (Talk) 20:24, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
John Carter - Example of hidden quote. The first ref is the usual, the second contains the hidden material, which is not viewable by the casual reader - edit to see it.
References
The New York House of Refuge was the first juvenile reformatory in the nation. It was the product of a philanthropic association, originally called the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, organized in 1816. During its early years, the Society was dominated by Quaker merchants and influential political leaders, such as Cadwallader Colden and Stephen Allen. In 1820 and 1821, the Society conducted an extensive survey of United States prisons and then appointed a committee to study the returns. The committee's report criticized the prevailing spirit of revenge in the treatment of prisoners and deplored the imprisonment of individuals regardless of age or the severity of crime. Following adoption of the report in 1824, the Society reorganized for the purpose of establishing a reformatory. ...
This was the occasional misuse of a useful feature. Obviously, well integrated text is preferable to block quotes when it gives us the freedom to express the same facts in our own editable, non fair use requiring way. However, there are many instances, e.g. polemic political statements, where a source may be notable and eloquent, making its position absolutely clear in a way that readers want to know, but Wikipedia, trying to rephrase it to meet our style, would make a terrible butchered rehash of every sentence into which personal bias easily introduces itself. "My opponent is a thief, a braggart, and a vagabond, not worthy of your vote" ==> "Bloggs questioned his opponent's respect for private property, suggested he embellished on the truth, and harped on his transient residences in the years preceding the election, calling on voters to find more worthy options." (I exaggerate in this in that we aren't debating a quote this short, but very much the same thing can happen with longer text) And then it becomes a political WP:OR fight - was he saying the opponent is accused of disrespecting private property because of his tax policy, or that he is dishonest because of his parliamentary tactics? Should we omit the text altogether, hiding it behind some platitude that "Bloggs denounced his opponent harshly" that then is accused of making Bloggs sound extreme without giving his side of the story? No, we should always give the subject of an article his say - a chance to be heard in his own words justifying his opinions the way he did. Sometimes this is really embarrassing to him and his friends want it cut out, sometimes it is embarrassing to his opponents and their friends want it cut out, but either way there's nothing like the horse's mouth. Wnt ( talk) 18:50, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
In his "discussion of issue" text, Sphilbrick mentions three possible determinants for whether the length of block quoted text is appropriate:
There is merit in both (1) and (2) IMO, but (3) seems to be somewhat of an irrelevance. From a potential copyright infringement basis I don't think it would matter whether the infringement occurred in the body of the text or in a footnote or cited reference. If the quoted text is not too long relative to the length of the article - and satisfies (1) above - and is also not too long relative to the length of its source - and thus satisfies (2) above - then it should not matter where it appears in the article, in the main body of the text or as part of a footnote or cited reference. The tricky bit, of course, is determining the correct threshold for what is or is not "too long" in cases (1) and (2), but that is what any effort in this area should focus on better defining / clarifying. Case (3) is just a distraction. — not really here discuss 19:38, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
Jimbo says the sample should be weighted to popularity. I agree. Why don't we make it simpler still and start with the article with most page views and work down? Each version should be assessed using the methods that reviewer assistants to the editorial boards of journals use to assess suitability. Then compare assessments.
The gorilla is not the weak content highlighted by Smallbones, it's the reason for it. People register for Facebook because it's personal to them. Similarly, they register for Twitter for the ability to message their friends. Wikipedia is not personal - it's altruistic. That's why the registration model doesn't work. Larry Sanger is a big supporter of registration to write an article and it's the cornerstone of Citizendum. Check "recent changes" in Citizendum and they are few and far between, and mostly by the same person.
The hook for Wikipedia is "The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". But when people visit the site and try to write about something that interests them and they are knowledgeable about they find they can't. Or rather, they can but then have to wait about six months while the journal decides whether to publish. Get serious, folks. This is not the way to do it. Of course there need to be safeguards. Every worthwhile enterprise gets vandalised. But we have pending changes to get over that. So let people start articles within pending changes which will switch off as soon as the text is edited by an autoconfirmed editor (i.e. vetted). See discussion and explanation at en:User talk:Jimbo Wales/Archive 193#New paid editing scandal - How many more will there be until we take serious action?. This kills two birds with one stone - marking Articles for Creation historical also ends the ability of sockpuppets to dangle the prospect of immediate publication in front of people in return for money. 109.159.90.194 ( talk) 10:11, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
Nice to see Google being good.
Given the value we're adding to Google (and the page-/banner-views their "knowledge graph" is taking from us), perhaps they could be induced to run banners for us and match donations to Wikipedia dollar-for-dollar. -- Anthonyhcole ( talk · contribs · email) 13:35, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
vox have released a piece concerning mostly edit warring with commentary by Andrew Lih. It is more of a reflection of Wikipedia culture than Wikipedia itself, as relatively few people contribute to the site compared to those who use it. -- Rubbish computer 19:14, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
A little birdie chirped your name. Drmies ( talk) 15:02, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
Your input, or, for that matter, damn near anyone working for the foundation, would be welcome at WP:ANI#Telstra, Australia IP vandalism. John Carter ( talk) 15:36, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
If there must be a risk of news coverage let it be for Wikipedia blocking Australian IP editors to protect an editor from death/rape threats not about how it took two weeks to get the WMF engaged and how the problem is still on going. The first is arguably good press that focuses on the WMF the second is bad press that focuses on the victim and has a much greater chance of them being outed. Outing being the the worst possible outcome. Jbh Talk 13:04, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
I do not know where you get your distopian panopticon from my comments so I have no response to it. If you want to expand on that subject please do so on my talk page where I would be happy to discuss it. Jbh Talk 14:33, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
I'm in Australia and a Telstra subscriber. I'd support hard blocking all Telstra IPs if Telstra doesn't act soon and responsibly on this. That would oblige all Wikipedia editors who are Telstra customers to switch, if they have the option, to another provider. -- Anthonyhcole ( talk · contribs · email) 13:45, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
.....and right on track, just after the WP:ANI thread is archived here...they are back.... as
The following discussion was wiped from ANI so I am transcluding it here.
Please investigate whether User:Rikster2 and User:Bagumba are the same user. If not, please investigate whether they have formed a gang of persistent keyboard warriors for enforcing strict and strongly subjective editing styles in Wikipedia by reverting other editors' good faith edits and randomly hand out controversial bans to those who made a protest. 120.16.105.67 ( talk) 03:36, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
Wikipedia is now full of persistent keyboard warriors and unjustified admins. I got banned today for no valid reasons. I would like to report the following two users in my talk page for being subjective and abusive.
/info/en/?search=User_talk:120.16.88.202
Cheers. 202.72.165.105 ( talk) 02:53, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
I !voted at an AfD. The sole person who is insisting that the article of his be kept is not\w nominating a slew of articles for deletion on quite tenuous grounds. Several of mine are nominated/ proposed for immediate deletion. One of mine is on a person who is head of a major corporation now, but who had been a UN Assistant Secretary-General (not a US politics issue there) but also held political office - so I am quite absolutely barred from commenting at the AfD even though the AfD is a blatant and absolute retaliation for my position at an AfD. This post is absolutely unrelated to "US Politics broadly construed" but is directly related at blatant misuse of the deletion tools of Wikipedia. Is my post here a violation of anything rational? Collect ( talk) 18:24, 24 October 2015 (UTC) Also note - the nominator of the slew of articles at AfD does not notify those who wrote any of the articles - I fear he might be in violation of policy by not notifying when he used the name of the person starting the articles as his main rationale for bringing them to AfD -- I mean - how can anyone rationally say the first black postal carrier in the US is "not notable"? Cheers. Collect ( talk) 18:27, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
@ Collect - If there is someone stalking your articles in retaliation for an AfD vote, this is probably a matter for AN/I, not Jimbotalk. Also, links to the AfD debates would help. Carrite ( talk) 19:04, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 190 | ← | Archive 192 | Archive 193 | Archive 194 | Archive 195 | Archive 196 | → | Archive 200 |
Korean is a swell language and all, but I'm at a bit of a loss why the Edit Count pages (Example) have the Korean words 일반 문서 (General Documents) instead of "Mainspace" or "Articles" or whatever the former English word was... It has been like this for six months or so, just thought I'd ask... Carrite ( talk) 23:47, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
Hello, Jimbo! What do you think about this way of competition in the battle for the number of articles? sv:Големо Градиште, sv:Golemo Gradiste, sv:Golemo Gradište.-- Soul Train ( talk) 12:16, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
Withdrawn by nominator... |
---|
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
|
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 190 | ← | Archive 192 | Archive 193 | Archive 194 | Archive 195 | Archive 196 | → | Archive 200 |
Is Wikipedia getting better? -- Bob K31416 ( talk) 15:43, 6 September 2015 (UTC)
Apparently it's not getting better. I have had many differences with Fram, but he is on the mark here. Peter Damian ( talk) 09:30, 7 September 2015 (UTC)
Using Jimbo's method, I pushed the random article button in the side menu 10 times. I only tried the 5 year part of Jimbo's time ranges of 1, 5, and 10 years, which would have been more thorough. Below are the links to the diffs from 5 years ago to now. In cases where the page was created less than 5 years ago, I gave the current version, which is essentially the diff from it's nonexistence 5 years ago to now.
1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Kim_Hee-sun&type=revision&diff=678916354&oldid=383599363
2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Dunleavy&type=revision&diff=652077569&oldid=369884357
3.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Iniquity_%28band%29&type=revision&diff=662721521&oldid=378161666
4.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Chamaemelum_nobile&type=revision&diff=672437156&oldid=380965667
5.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Walter_G._Alexander&type=revision&diff=679298867&oldid=372115853
6.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Uilenburg_%28Amsterdam%29&type=revision&diff=545941955&oldid=379618447
7.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Tadahito&oldid=536153308
8.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Niemi&type=revision&diff=540632279&oldid=372534500
9.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Simon_Petrie&oldid=655260314
10.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Eoxin_E4&oldid=670415197
-- Bob K31416 ( talk) 14:32, 7 September 2015 (UTC)
The wall of text by the editor who is not really here makes exactly one valid point. A sample size of 10 is not big enough to draw serious conclusions. Big deal, everybody knows that already. So the question arises "How could you make this method work to draw serious conclusions?"
So it is definitely possible to make this method work, with just a couple quibbles as is usual. I'd suggest doing it over time, say 25 article each week. Then you'd have a large enough sample size to draw conclusions every 3 months, and then 4 samples per year to see how things change over time. Anybody interested? Smallbones( smalltalk) 04:27, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
I went thru all of the 10 new articles nd my first impression was that they are quite a bit better that the previous ten. My second impression was that I must have been in a bad mood when I went thru the first 10. But still most below 100 page views a month, and pretty short. Definitely we need to do this in a systematic way. Smallbones( smalltalk) 00:18, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
|
Using data from September 30, 2010 [2] and September 9, 2015 [3], I constructed the following table of article count for each quality rating.
Quality | ||
---|---|---|
2010 | 2015 | |
![]() |
3,237 | 5,513 |
![]() |
1,626 | 1,988 |
![]() |
670 | 1,509 |
![]() |
9,772 | 24,620 |
B | 66,490 | 103,337 |
C | 71,602 | 207,091 |
Start | 631,690 | 1,316,024 |
Stub | 1,621,445 | 2,728,973 |
List | 54,967 | 178,726 |
Assessed | 2,461,499 | 4,567,781 |
Unassessed | 394,094 | 504,314 |
Total | 2,855,593 | 5,072,095 |
In the table, article counts for each quality category significantly increased over the last 5 years. --
Bob K31416 (
talk)
20:42, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
On the average over the last five years, there is a net gain of 10 articles per day in the group consisting of Good Articles and above. --
Bob K31416 (
talk)
05:13, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
Quality | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
2010 | % 2010 total | 2015 | % 2015 total | |
![]() |
3,237 | 0.11% | 5,513 | 0.11% |
![]() |
1,626 | 0.06% | 1,988 | 0.04% |
![]() |
670 | 0.02% | 1,509 | 0.03% |
![]() |
9,772 | 0.34% | 24,620 | 0.49% |
B | 66,490 | 2.33% | 103,337 | 2.04% |
C | 71,602 | 2.51% | 207,091 | 4.08% |
Start | 631,690 | 22.12% | 1,316,024 | 25.95% |
Stub | 1,621,445 | 56.78% | 2,728,973 | 53.80% |
List | 54,967 | 1.92% | 178,726 | 3.52% |
Assessed | 2,461,499 | 86.20% | 4,567,781 | 90.06% |
Unassessed | 394,094 | 13.80% | 504,314 | 9.94% |
Total | 2,855,593 | 100% | 5,072,095 | 100% |
I made a start earlier this year on this, using the methodology I mentioned above, i.e. take a standard reference work, in this case Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, randomly select articles from there, and compare with the corresponding WP article. See the small sample on the page I just linked to. The evidence to me seems compelling: WP compares very unfavourably to a traditionally produced, peer reviewed-by-specialists reference work. The objections I have received so far are mostly on the lines that my subject is a highly specialized one. Perhaps, but then educational content is educational content, no? Peter Damian ( talk) 18:40, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
See below for a table of changes over 10 years to the Action article. My view is that the changes are for the worse. The original article was clearly developed by a professional philosopher. The subsequent additions are confusing, and sometimes distort the flow of the original. For example,"Other events are less clearly defined as actions or not." in the original is a segue to the 'deciding to do ...' list. But the inserted "distractedly drumming ones fingers" is indeed a distraction.
03:55, 22 December 2005 | 11:32, 29 May 2015 |
An action, as philosophers use the term, is a certain kind of thing a person can do. | An action is something which is done by an agent. In common speech, the term action is often used interchangeably with the term behavior. In the philosophy of action, the behavioural sciences, and the social sciences, however, a distinction is made: behavior is defined as automatic and reflexive activity, while action is defined as intentional, purposive, conscious and subjectively meaningful activity[citation needed]. |
Throwing a baseball, which involves intention and coordinated bodily movement is an action. Catching a cold is not usually considered an action, because it is something which happens to a person, not something done by them.
|
Thus, throwing a ball is an instance of action; it involves an intention, a goal, and a bodily movement guided by the agent. On the other hand, catching a cold is not considered an action because it is something which happens to a person, not something done by one. |
Other events are less clearly defined as actions or not. | Other events are less clearly defined as actions or not. |
For instance, distractedly drumming ones fingers on the table seems to fall somewhere in the middle. | |
Deciding to do something might be considered an action by some, yet by others it is not an action if the decision is not carried out. | Deciding to do something might be considered a mental action by some. However, others[who?] think it is not an action unless the decision is carried out. |
Unsuccessfully trying to do something might also not be considered an action, since the intention was not completed. Believing, intending, and thinking might also be considered actions, yet because they refer to purely internal states, such a classification is not universally agreed upon. | Unsuccessfully trying to do something might also not be considered an action for similar reasons (for e.g. lack of bodily movement). It is contentious whether believing, intending, and thinking are actions since they are mental events. |
Some would prefer to define actions as involving bodily movement (see behaviorism). | Some would prefer to define actions as requiring bodily movement (see behaviorism). |
Even mere existence might be classified as an action by some. | |
The effects of actions might be considered actions, in certain situations. For example, poisoning a well is an action. | The side-effects of actions are considered by some to be part of the action; in an example from Anscombe's manuscript Intention, pumping water can also be an instance of poisoning the inhabitants. This introduces a moral dimension to the discussion (see also Moral agency). |
If the poisoned water resulted in a death, that death might be considered an action on the person who poisoned a well, whether classified as a single act or two acts. The classification of actions can become even less clear when the effect of the action is contrary to the intention, such as accidentally curing a person of an unknown disease while intending to kill them by poisoning the well. | If the poisoned water resulted in a death, that death might be considered part of the action of the agent that pumped the water. Whether a side-effect is considered part of an action is especially unclear in cases in which the agent isn't aware of the possible side effects. For example, an agent that accidentally cures a person by administering a poison he was intending to kill him with. |
A primary concern of philosophy of action is to demarcate actions from other similar phenomena. Other concerns include individuating actions from one another, explaining the relation between actions and their effects, and saying how an action is related the beliefs and desires which give rise to it, and the intentions with which it is performed (a subject called practical reason): | A primary concern of philosophy of action is to analyze the nature of actions and distinguish them from similar phenomena. Other concerns include individuating actions, explaining the relationship between actions and their effects, explaining how an action is related to the beliefs and desires which cause and/or justify it (see practical reason), as well as examining the nature of agency. |
Actions may or may not be considered to be caused by the reason for action (see determinism). If the reasons do not cause the actions, then they must explain action in some other sense. Actions are not usually considered to be done by inanimate objects, like the sun, which shines, but without intention. On the other hand, a human may still be considered to be acting without a specific intention. | A primary concern is the nature of free will and whether actions are determined by the mental states that precede them (see determinism). |
Some philosophers (e.g. Donald Davidson[1]) have argued that the mental states the agent invokes as justifying his action are physical states that cause the action. Problems have been raised for this view because the mental states seem to be reduce to mere physical causes. Their mental properties don't seem to be doing any work. If the reasons an agent cites as justifying his action, however, are not the cause of the action, they must explain the action in some other way or be causally impotent. | |
Action has been of concern to Western philosophers since Aristotle, who wrote about the subject in his Nicomachean Ethics. It is the theme of the Hindu epic Bhagavad Gita, in which the Sanskrit word karma epitomizes personal action. It has nearly always been bound up with Ethics, the study of what actions one ought to perform. Some of the most prominent comtemporary philosophers who have worked in it are Ludwig Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe, Donald Davidson, and Jennifer Hornsby. | |
Many branches of Buddhism reject the notion of agency in varying degrees. In these schools of thought there is action, but no agent. |
Peter Damian ( talk) 20:16, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
To me the important question is not whether Wikipedia is improving (because surely it is), but rather where the asymptote lies. Is Wikipedia approaching the level of a high-quality general encyclopedia? When it comes to academic topics, in my view the answer is no. In my own domain of neuroscience at least, we have a few high-quality articles but lots of crappy ones, and over the past five years the situation has hardly changed at all. For what it's worth, I don't view this as meaning that Wikipedia is a failure, just that it is not strong in all areas and not likely to be any time soon. Looie496 ( talk) 00:30, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
The inclusion of the table and graph above jogged my memory that there is another method currently in use on Wikipedia to judge "quality" and coverage in a specific area. I put "quality" in quotes because many people might think the measure doesn't go to the heart of the matter. Rather it measures things like "does a subject we know should have an article, actually have one?" "Does it have a photo?" "Is there more than one source cited?" "Does the talk page have the appropriate project tag?" Not the measure of quality a lot of people might like, but certainly some sort of quality indicator. This "Net Quality Rating" (NQR) Is calculated every week by bot for the entire project (US), by state and by county. It could even be calculated for individual articles, but AFAIK nobody does. By this measure project quality has increased from 33.3% in January 2014 to 44.2% as of yesterday.
The project is WP:NRHP which covers historic buildings and sites listed by the National Register of Historic Places (part of the US Park Service). In total there are 90,000+ sites listed. We have 66,000+ articles (60.9% of sites + county tables + misc). These articles make up well over 1% of the number of articles on en:Wikipedia, with many on other language versions as well (e.g. in German where I think they have county tables and articles on about half the sites). Go to Wikipedia:WikiProject National Register of Historic Places/Progress for all the numbers you'd ever want plus a couple more graphs. Go to the article history to see how this has progressed over the last few years.
As I've said, this type of quality measurement is not for everybody, but let me give you a subjective quality assessment for the whole project. There are only 3 or 4 sites on the web that even pretend to give access to info on a large portion of NRHP sites. NRHP focus - the federal government site, Wikipedia, and a few commercial sites. The commercial sites, just repackage a government database, summarize a small amount of government text without the help of humans, and update once or twice a year. Not really worth considering IMHO.
The government site has a very clumsy interface, is down much of the time, and if you are lucky will give you access to a bureaucratic, and jargon-filled academic form (the nomination) dated to the time the site was first listed. There's very little updating except for new listings, e.g. if a building burned down you may not be able to tell that from Focus for decades (literally). Most frustrating is that you'll find that for many states you have to go to state websites to get the nomination, but Focus won't even tell you that. The state website are often inferior to Focus. So if a general interest reader who knows the name and location of the site goes to Focus, I'll estimate the following: he or she will spend 15-60 minutes on the site, and get the bureaucratic nomination form about 25% of the time.
If the same general reader, who has a general knowledge of how to navigate in Wikipedia, searches here it will take him or her 15-60 seconds to find the site's article, 60% of the time they will find at least a couple of information-packed sentence about the site, and an infobox, sometimes with a direct link to the nomination form (!), sometimes they'll find much, much more. Also, even if the site doesn't have an article, summary info (100% of the time) and a photo (72% of the time) will be available in the county list. If the reader is not familiar with Wikipedia navigation it may take them 1- 5 minutes to find all this. In short, for the general reader, Wikipedia is head and shoulders better than anything on the internet or anywhere else, for finding information on NRHP sites. And yes, we are improving. More later. Smallbones( smalltalk) 17:51, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
National Register of Historic Places pages by quality and importance | ||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Importance→ Quality↓ | Top | High | Mid | Low | Related | ??? | Total | |
![]() |
1 | 23 | 10 | 45 | 3 | 0 | 82 | |
![]() |
3 | 82 | 62 | 349 | 8 | 0 | 504 | |
B | 10 | 228 | 132 | 845 | 42 | 1 | 1,266 | |
C | 10 | 393 | 268 | 2,447 | 95 | 2 | 3,228 | |
Start | 9 | 2,166 | 1,137 | 22,041 | 462 | 22 | 25,872 | |
Stub | 0 | 51 | 720 | 42,913 | 516 | 1 | 44,214 | |
Total (articles only) |
33 | 2,943 | 2,329 | 68,642 | 1,126 | 26 | 75,168 | |
![]() |
0 | 3 | 0 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 6 | |
List | 2 | 115 | 2,881 | 384 | 63 | 0 | 3,449 | |
Unassessed | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 2 | |
Total | 35 | 3,078 | 5,235 | 69,316 | 1,201 | 27 | 92,900 |
Quality | 100.00% |
---|---|
Importance | 99.97% |
Click here for a bot-updated list (i.e. not real-time) that also includes stats about Category-, Disambig-, File-, Redirect-, Template-, and NA-Class articles.
I don't dispute that Peter Damian is aware of topics where Wikipedia is not improving or even deteriorating, and Smallbones is aware of topics where quality is improving. But we all know that a significant proportion of content creators have particular areas of interest, and therefore progress or even regression is going to be very variable by topic according to the interests skills and POV of our currently active editing community. It could just be that each year we add another year to the tally of years that wikipedia covers pretty well, and everything else is a bit complex to measure. So when it comes to overall quality I would be inclined to look for indicators that cut across multiple topic areas. On the crudest scale, I patrol Wikipedia for certain easily confused words that a non lycanthropic spellchecker would regard as OK, public spelled without the l, possess without the final s and several others. I know that on that very specialised quality test Wikipedia is tending to improve, with occasional relapses when the bot writers I work with retire. But overall as I've got on top of particular words I've added more, to the chagrin of some sports fans who regard the shouty sweary guy on the touchline as interfering in the chain of command from the fans to the players, I recently secularised quite a few mangers to managers. Of course if a typo becomes rarer I don't know whether that means someone who used to make that typo has now learned the difference between calvary and cavalry, or they've just left; And for every additional typo that I now patrol there could be another gnome retiring. But in combination with the recent increases in the number of very active editors I think of these as positive indicators of quality.
Other possible indicators of quality would be to measure how the number of citations from Wikipedia articles to various reliable sources changes over time, or the proportion of articles with images, or the quality of those images. A few months ago I had a note from our Wikipedian in Residence in York that all the photos I'd taken when he'd shown me round the museum he is a resident at had now been replaced in all the articles that used them by studio quality images from the museum, a fair and neutral observer, i.e. pretty much anyone other than myself, would consider that a clear improvement in quality.
My own instinct would be to put this on its head, and think of the areas that we would like to prioritise for quality improvement and find ways to measure that. If the theory is true that people focus on the that which is measured then "percentage of citations that are to a reliable source" might be a good metric. If we could agree what reading age Wikipedia should be written for, then percentage of content that is understandable by someone of that reading age would be good. Perhaps we could hire some academics to do random checks each year and assess how we are progressing in terms of gender neutral coverage and language. Ϣere SpielChequers 12:42, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
As requested above, a third column added to show how the changes to Action_(philosophy) have left it for the worse. It follows a pattern I have commented on elsewhere, e.g. here. Articles are imported from public domain reference works or, as in the case of Action_(philosophy), are written by specialists. Then they are mangled by well-intentioned but incompetent amateurs.
Werespiel writes " a significant proportion of content creators have particular areas of interest, and therefore progress or even regression is going to be very variable by topic according to the interests skills and POV of our currently active editing community". Well true, but there is a pattern here. Areas of interest tend to reflect general areas of public interest. Example, I look up the Billboard top 100, and go for the first act I have never heard of, which is most of them, but the first is The Weeknd. Right, never heard of them, but I knew that there would be an article on them. Indeed, there has been an article since 29 March 2011, not long after the act become known. By contrast, articles of more academic interest tend to languish. I think we all know this. I am not saying that articles on pop culture shouldn't be there – they are a fantastically important barometer of modern culture and Wikipedia for that reason will be of interest to historians in the far distant future. I am just saying there is a pattern. In my area of specialism there is a need for accurate and balanced articles which are less complex than the Stanford Encyclopedia articles, and which are addressed to a general audience. That's what knowledge is about. How are we going to attract more editors who can help develop these?
The current WMF strategy of targeting the entire internet population is not a good one in my view. It simply attracts well-intentioned vandalism, if that makes sense.
03:55, 22 December 2005 | 11:32, 29 May 2015 | Comment |
An action, as philosophers use the term, is a certain kind of thing a person can do. | An action is something which is done by an agent.
|
The first definition is better. The second is clearly circular. The first at least classifies action as a species of the genus ‘things a person can do’. |
In common speech, the term action is often used interchangeably with the term behavior. In the philosophy of action, the behavioural sciences, and the social sciences, however, a distinction is made: behavior is defined as automatic and reflexive activity, while action is defined as intentional, purposive, conscious and subjectively meaningful activity[citation needed]. | I don’t know where this claimed distinction between ‘behaviour’ and ‘action’ is sourced from. Weirdly, the person who made the edit, ( 16:34, 8 December 2014) added the ‘citation needed’ tag at the same time. I don’t believe it is correct. The SEP article treats them as synonymous. They aren’t, but the difference is not between being ‘automatic and reflexive’, whatever that means. What is ‘subjectively meaningful activity’? The editor had a short contribution history, and clearly no one checked what they were doing. | |
Throwing a baseball, which involves intention and coordinated bodily movement is an action. Catching a cold is not usually considered an action, because it is something which happens to a person, not something done by them.
|
Thus, throwing a ball is an instance of action; it involves an intention, a goal, and a bodily movement guided by the agent. On the other hand, catching a cold is not considered an action because it is something which happens to a person, not something done by one. | |
Other events are less clearly defined as actions or not. | Other events are less clearly defined as actions or not. | |
For instance, distractedly drumming ones fingers on the table seems to fall somewhere in the middle. | As pointed out above, this is not helpful, and disturbs the transition to the list that immediately follows. | |
Deciding to do something might be considered an action by some, yet by others it is not an action if the decision is not carried out. | Deciding to do something might be considered a mental action by some. However, others[who?] think it is not an action unless the decision is carried out. | Clearly a citation is still needed. |
Unsuccessfully trying to do something might also not be considered an action, since the intention was not completed. Believing, intending, and thinking might also be considered actions, yet because they refer to purely internal states, such a classification is not universally agreed upon. | Unsuccessfully trying to do something might also not be considered an action for similar reasons (for e.g. lack of bodily movement). It is contentious whether believing, intending, and thinking are actions since they are mental events. | |
Some would prefer to define actions as involving bodily movement (see behaviorism). | Some would prefer to define actions as requiring bodily movement (see behaviorism). | |
Even mere existence might be classified as an action by some. | This got removed at some point. Clearly a citation was needed. | |
The effects of actions might be considered actions, in certain situations. For example, poisoning a well is an action. | The side-effects of actions are considered by some to be part of the action; in an example from Anscombe's manuscript Intention, pumping water can also be an instance of poisoning the inhabitants. This introduces a moral dimension to the discussion (see also Moral agency). | ‘Anscombe’s manuscript Intention’ is clumsy. There is no proper citation. Again, this disrupts the neat flow of the original. |
If the poisoned water resulted in a death, that death might be considered an action on the person who poisoned a well, whether classified as a single act or two acts. The classification of actions can become even less clear when the effect of the action is contrary to the intention, such as accidentally curing a person of an unknown disease while intending to kill them by poisoning the well. | If the poisoned water resulted in a death, that death might be considered part of the action of the agent that pumped the water. Whether a side-effect is considered part of an action is especially unclear in cases in which the agent isn't aware of the possible side effects. For example, an agent that accidentally cures a person by administering a poison he was intending to kill him with. | The original is more elegantly and clearly written. The last sentence of the later version lacks a main verb (and so is not in fact a sentence). |
A primary concern of philosophy of action is to demarcate actions from other similar phenomena. Other concerns include individuating actions from one another, explaining the relation between actions and their effects, and saying how an action is related the beliefs and desires which give rise to it, and the intentions with which it is performed (a subject called practical reason): | A primary concern of philosophy of action is to analyze the nature of actions and distinguish them from similar phenomena. Other concerns include individuating actions, explaining the relationship between actions and their effects, explaining how an action is related to the beliefs and desires which cause and/or justify it (see practical reason), as well as examining the nature of agency. | The later version omits the important ‘demarcate’. |
Actions may or may not be considered to be caused by the reason for action (see determinism). | A primary concern is the nature of free will and whether actions are determined by the mental states that precede them (see determinism). | |
If the reasons do not cause the actions, then they must explain action in some other sense. | Inexplicably deleted. | |
Actions are not usually considered to be done by inanimate objects, like the sun, which shines, but without intention. On the other hand, a human may still be considered to be acting without a specific intention. | Inexplicably deleted. | |
Some philosophers (e.g. Donald Davidson[1]) have argued that the mental states the agent invokes as justifying his action are physical states that cause the action. Problems have been raised for this view because the mental states seem to be reduce to mere physical causes. Their mental properties don't seem to be doing any work. If the reasons an agent cites as justifying his action, however, are not the cause of the action, they must explain the action in some other way or be causally impotent. | Clumsily written. | |
Action has been of concern to Western philosophers since Aristotle, who wrote about the subject in his Nicomachean Ethics. It is the theme of the Hindu epic Bhagavad Gita, in which the Sanskrit word karma epitomizes personal action. It has nearly always been bound up with Ethics, the study of what actions one ought to perform. Some of the most prominent comtemporary philosophers who have worked in it are Ludwig Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe, Donald Davidson, and Jennifer Hornsby. | Inexplicably deleted. | |
Many branches of Buddhism reject the notion of agency in varying degrees. In these schools of thought there is action, but no agent. | Inexplicably deleted. |
Peter Damian ( talk) 09:07, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
The Wikimedia foundation was awarded five out of five stars in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's 2015 Who Has Your Back? report.
More details here. -- Guy Macon ( talk) 18:52, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
Hello, I have noticed when I went to one article, it shown an IP address (I.e., 75.107.21.141, and geolocated to Snead, FL), but however, CentralAuth didn't say it was registered. I am uncertain If I have accidentally clicked on the submit button on an article's edit page, because I registered in 2013 and I just noticed it today, so the IP should have been hidden. Racer -Ωmegα 20:23, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
What's gotten better and what's gotten worse about the English Wikipedia since I started editing in 2006 (with uncharacteristic brevity):
Thoughts welcome from JW and others. Newyorkbrad ( talk) 15:47, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
Is the increased number of articles necessarily a positive? Personally I think it would be better to see higher quality articles than an excess of stubs or poorly sourced current events (via blogs and op-eds that shouldn't be dictating how an encyclopedia article is written). WP:NOTNEWS is a joke of a policy when we have a front page with an "In the News" section. Instead of looking at how events will be viewed 10 years from now, we've become no better than the mainstream media in trying to get the information out as fast as possible so we can cite our favorite Huffington Post blogger for their "expert" analysis. Muscat Hoe ( talk) 21:18, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
"if they're neutrally written, properly formatted, and reflect that reliable source, then why not?"like that is how most currently non-notable articles are now written. Such is not the case nor is it likely ever to be as long as there is self-promotion in the world. Please come up with a way to get all of those newly notable articles to comply with our policies before saying we should open the floodgates and drown the editors who try to keep Wikipedia from turning into a promotional libel fest. Until then strong GNG is all we have. Jbh Talk 11:59, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
Deletion is not cleanup if the topic passes notability. We do not have enough editors to clean up what we have and what comes in every day. Promotion is, arguably, not as bad as the BLP issues though. Every one of those must be watched and kept clean.
Just for one example think of the problems if every local politician running for election had a BLP here. Local elections are nasty enough when they just have the local paper to print malicious things and that is when there is an editorial gatekeeper who is subject to whatever the local libel laws are. What happens to the level of potential harm to people when those claims are given a world stage that is the first search result and there are no such constraints except volunteer editors and the suggestion to 'clean up' every article on every local candidate. Now we can just delete them, maybe 30 min for a good BEFORE vs initial clean up which will at best give a perma-stub and the hours or time to monitor the article and deal with the probable reinsertion of the BLP violating material.
Keeping BLP violations out of the encyclopedia is, as I understand it, a pretty big deal and it is not better to have an article that is 'only a little malicious and disparaging'. Nothing is definitely better in that case. I would also argue nothing is also better than an article filled with a bunch of false claims because there are no reliable sources to verify them. Since that is likely what will be in the encyclopedia after the initial new page patrol unless someone happens on the article by chance or some time sucking drama ends up at a noticeboard. Ideals are great, they tell us where we should aim but ideals not tempered with a good dose of practicality is Utopian and that has, to date, never worked out well. Jbh Talk 12:45, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Mrs. Wilkes' Dining Room is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.
The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mrs. Wilkes' Dining Room until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.
Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. sovereign° sentinel (contribs) 18:47, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
They ignore it though!♦ Dr. Blofeld 11:24, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
Hello, I have noticed when I went to one article, it shown an IP address (I.e., 75.107.21.141, and geolocated to Snead, FL), but however, CentralAuth didn't say it was registered. I am uncertain If I have accidentally clicked on the submit button on an article's edit page, because I registered in 2013 and I just noticed it today, so the IP should have been hidden. Racer -Ωmegα 20:23, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
I'd like to interrupt the above self-flagellation by pointing out the goal of Wikipedia -- making all human knowledge relevant to the general reader available totally free -- no fees, no ads, no restrictive licenses -- with total perfection using a labor force of mostly anonymous volunteers is just a bit ambitious, and we shouldn't despair if we don't quite make it. I'll be the first to acknowledge that mainspace could be improved and a lot of what goes on in the Wikipedia:: namespace is, uh, messy but if you go back say thirty-five years or so the notion of something like Wikipedia would be absurd or 24th century science fiction. As a volunteer project, this should be fun, so let's try to keep our perspective. Part of this should include having a little more faith in our readers to filter the quality of a given article. I know the only reason I even peeked at Wikipedia around 2005 or so is I heard or read some media interview with some guy talking about how Wikipedia is a tertiary source and readers shouldn't believe it without checking the references. That made a lot of sense then, and it should make sense now. NE Ent 21:41, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
In my patrol log it says some of my edits got autopatrolled by myself. But I cannot do that, for I am just an autoconfirmed user. Krett12 ( talk) 04:30, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
Users are invited to participate in planning and discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)/Archive 50#5 millionth article celebration: community press release, video, open letter, and site banner. -- Pine ✉ 07:00, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
Useful cut and paste:
<div>As of {{CURRENTDAYNAME}}, {{CURRENTDAY2}} {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{CURRENTYEAR}}, {{CURRENTTIME}} (UTC), The English Wikipedia has {{NUMBEROF|USERS|en|N}} registered users, {{NUMBEROF|ACTIVEUSERS|en|N}} active editors, and {{NUMBEROF|ADMINS|en|N}} administrators. Together we have made {{NUMBEROF|EDITS|en|N}} edits, created {{NUMBEROF|PAGES|en|N}} pages of all kinds and created {{NUMBEROF|ARTICLES|en|N}} articles.</div>
Which puts the following on the page:
..and it autoupdates when you reload the page and the numbers have changed. -- Guy Macon ( talk) 08:36, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
Yes it's a big figure but you only have to hit random article a few times to know that the general quality isn't great. The sourcing is getting better but 85% of articles at least are deficient. Why boast about 5 million pages when after 14 years we only have 30,000 articles of assessed quality to shout for?♦ Dr. Blofeld 10:09, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
Yes, the 30,000 figure is by no means exactly accurate because there are in all honesty articles which should never have passed GA status in there or are badly in need of sourcing improvement to reach current standards. Then of course there are articles which are easily good article standard or close and nobody has taken the time to promote them yet. There's a lot more than 30,000 which are decent, useful articles, but what I meant was that is what has been officially assessed including both FA, GA and lists. 5 million is a remarkable figure, but it's a poor reflection of what are actually articles as it includes thousands of disambiguation pages, undeveloped stubs or unsourced material which is barely legible. So yes, we can say "Oh look we've created 5 million articles", but let's not get too carried away..♦ Dr. Blofeld 11:09, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
Is the number of 'articles created' being reported the number that have not been deleted or is it just a raw number of 'pages created'? Does it include redirects? If so how many actual articles, not redirects or deleted pages, exist now? Jbh Talk 13:10, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
The Wikimedia foundation was awarded five out of five stars in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's 2015 Who Has Your Back? report.
More details here. -- Guy Macon ( talk) 18:52, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
I think there are at least two worlds of Wikipedia regarding the question posed in a previous section, "Is Wikipedia getting better?". One is the reader's world, where the content of the encyclopedia is the consideration. This is the world that has been discussed in a previous section. Another is the world of the editors, where the editing environment is important.
Is the Wikipedia editing environment getting better? -- Bob K31416 ( talk) 21:05, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
I would like to comment on the extent to which those holding preconceived biases are unwilling to rationally survey the reliable sources as opposed to accusing others of misconduct. I have been accused of misrepresenting a body of literature as conclusive simply because I was unaware of an inconclusive reliable source from several years ago. I hope as a community we are able to grow into a nurturing, caring, polite group instead of remaining bogged down in accusatory urges. EllenCT ( talk) 13:16, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
Some things are definitely better. Edits save faster, the wikilove feature means that lots of people now thank me for fixing typos where once I wondered if anyone noticed; I can upload fifty photos on commons more easily than I used to be able to upload ten. Vandalfighting bots and edit filters have reduced the amount of vandalism that requires manual intervention. But not everything is positive. The tension between the WMF and the rest of the community in the last four years or so seems far worse than it did before. There are also tensions within the volunteer community. Template bombing has replaced much of the collaboration. Revert unsourced has largely replaced <citation needed>. Spam is rising, possibly in proportion to our audience size. There is a growing wikigeneration gulf between the admins and those who started editing in the last four or five years. Ϣere SpielChequers 14:16, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
Since most drama comes when people are discussing whether the sourcing is adequate and there is more than enough drama dealing with that. My guess is after engaging repeatedly on WP:RS most editors are likely to be disinclined to engage in extensive conversation when there are no sources. Jbh Talk 18:26, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
However, most of the time unsourced material is not added by well established editors familiar with the topic area or by drive by subject matter experts. Most of the time it is added by POV pushers or new/inexperienced editors. Both of which might have something good to contribute. That is why you should engage them on a talk page to explain why you just reverted your edit. Or, if you are lazy, you can probably get a 80-90% 'right call' rate by simply reverting unsourced additions and that is my guess of why it happens so frequently. Jbh Talk 00:57, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
I made a rough attempt at determining the frequency of bad behavior in the English Wikipedia, using WP:ANI history. I looked at how long it took to accumulate 5000 edits at ANI recently and compared it to the time it took to accumulate 5000 edits at ANI 5 years ago, indexing it for the number of editors in the English Wikipedia then and now (i.e. dividing by the number of editors then and now.) The indexed edit rate at ANI looks roughly the same, suggesting that the amount of bad behavior by editors in the English Wikipedia is roughly the same today as it was 5 years ago. -- Bob K31416 ( talk) 00:49, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
So far the discussion suggests that some editors leave Wikipedia because of the conflicts, etc. Is it possible that even more editors, including good editors, are retained because without the conflicts, etc., they would get bored and leave? -- Bob K31416 ( talk) 23:54, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
Anthonyhcole ( talk · contribs · email) 17:20, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
I only just heard about Ballotpedia from Larry. It uses Mediawiki but is the opposite of the wiki concept, namely it vets editors and all submissions are carefully reviewed. I was fascinated by the editor test. I wonder how many editors here could pass it. It tests a mixture of wiki knowledge (e.g. templates) and simple grammar (what is a comma splice). I don't think it would go down well here! Peter Damian ( talk) 14:06, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
Jimbo suggested a new section to discuss the issue of block quoting more extensively.
I'll start by linking a discussion I started in 2012 Wikipedia_talk:Citing_sources/Archive_32#Use_of_quote_parameter_in_footnote_-_a_proposal_to_provide_better_guidance
Unfortunately, it stalled, but I started with what I immodestly think is a decent summary of background and issues.-- S Philbrick (Talk) 20:08, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
A point also worth mentioning is that the Wikipedia rules for usage of materials subject to copyright are more conservative than might be allowed by strict application of copyright law. This is deliberate. The borderline between acceptable usage and non-acceptable usage is gray. If we simply instruct editors to follow the law, we will find some editors pushing close to the limits and we will find ourselves defending lawsuits. Even if we win them all, we lose. Our goal isn't to be in a position to win lawsuits, it is to be so clearly not in violation that copyright owners are not even tempted to sue.
It is almost certain the case that we could allow longer quotes than we currently do and still be within the law, but if we opt to allow longer quotes I would want legal advice from the Foundation to help ensure that we are not creating a legal risk.
It is also my personal opinion that material used within a hidden quote, not visible to the ordinary reader unless they know where to look, might be viewed differently, from a legal perspective, then the exact same amount of material prominent in an article. Not everyone agrees with my position, so I wouldn't push it unless we got legal support for it, but if we got legal support, we might justify longer quotes in certain situations.
As always, input from our copyright expert would be helpful. @ Moonriddengirl:.-- S Philbrick (Talk) 20:24, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
John Carter - Example of hidden quote. The first ref is the usual, the second contains the hidden material, which is not viewable by the casual reader - edit to see it.
References
The New York House of Refuge was the first juvenile reformatory in the nation. It was the product of a philanthropic association, originally called the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, organized in 1816. During its early years, the Society was dominated by Quaker merchants and influential political leaders, such as Cadwallader Colden and Stephen Allen. In 1820 and 1821, the Society conducted an extensive survey of United States prisons and then appointed a committee to study the returns. The committee's report criticized the prevailing spirit of revenge in the treatment of prisoners and deplored the imprisonment of individuals regardless of age or the severity of crime. Following adoption of the report in 1824, the Society reorganized for the purpose of establishing a reformatory. ...
This was the occasional misuse of a useful feature. Obviously, well integrated text is preferable to block quotes when it gives us the freedom to express the same facts in our own editable, non fair use requiring way. However, there are many instances, e.g. polemic political statements, where a source may be notable and eloquent, making its position absolutely clear in a way that readers want to know, but Wikipedia, trying to rephrase it to meet our style, would make a terrible butchered rehash of every sentence into which personal bias easily introduces itself. "My opponent is a thief, a braggart, and a vagabond, not worthy of your vote" ==> "Bloggs questioned his opponent's respect for private property, suggested he embellished on the truth, and harped on his transient residences in the years preceding the election, calling on voters to find more worthy options." (I exaggerate in this in that we aren't debating a quote this short, but very much the same thing can happen with longer text) And then it becomes a political WP:OR fight - was he saying the opponent is accused of disrespecting private property because of his tax policy, or that he is dishonest because of his parliamentary tactics? Should we omit the text altogether, hiding it behind some platitude that "Bloggs denounced his opponent harshly" that then is accused of making Bloggs sound extreme without giving his side of the story? No, we should always give the subject of an article his say - a chance to be heard in his own words justifying his opinions the way he did. Sometimes this is really embarrassing to him and his friends want it cut out, sometimes it is embarrassing to his opponents and their friends want it cut out, but either way there's nothing like the horse's mouth. Wnt ( talk) 18:50, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
In his "discussion of issue" text, Sphilbrick mentions three possible determinants for whether the length of block quoted text is appropriate:
There is merit in both (1) and (2) IMO, but (3) seems to be somewhat of an irrelevance. From a potential copyright infringement basis I don't think it would matter whether the infringement occurred in the body of the text or in a footnote or cited reference. If the quoted text is not too long relative to the length of the article - and satisfies (1) above - and is also not too long relative to the length of its source - and thus satisfies (2) above - then it should not matter where it appears in the article, in the main body of the text or as part of a footnote or cited reference. The tricky bit, of course, is determining the correct threshold for what is or is not "too long" in cases (1) and (2), but that is what any effort in this area should focus on better defining / clarifying. Case (3) is just a distraction. — not really here discuss 19:38, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
Jimbo says the sample should be weighted to popularity. I agree. Why don't we make it simpler still and start with the article with most page views and work down? Each version should be assessed using the methods that reviewer assistants to the editorial boards of journals use to assess suitability. Then compare assessments.
The gorilla is not the weak content highlighted by Smallbones, it's the reason for it. People register for Facebook because it's personal to them. Similarly, they register for Twitter for the ability to message their friends. Wikipedia is not personal - it's altruistic. That's why the registration model doesn't work. Larry Sanger is a big supporter of registration to write an article and it's the cornerstone of Citizendum. Check "recent changes" in Citizendum and they are few and far between, and mostly by the same person.
The hook for Wikipedia is "The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". But when people visit the site and try to write about something that interests them and they are knowledgeable about they find they can't. Or rather, they can but then have to wait about six months while the journal decides whether to publish. Get serious, folks. This is not the way to do it. Of course there need to be safeguards. Every worthwhile enterprise gets vandalised. But we have pending changes to get over that. So let people start articles within pending changes which will switch off as soon as the text is edited by an autoconfirmed editor (i.e. vetted). See discussion and explanation at en:User talk:Jimbo Wales/Archive 193#New paid editing scandal - How many more will there be until we take serious action?. This kills two birds with one stone - marking Articles for Creation historical also ends the ability of sockpuppets to dangle the prospect of immediate publication in front of people in return for money. 109.159.90.194 ( talk) 10:11, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
Nice to see Google being good.
Given the value we're adding to Google (and the page-/banner-views their "knowledge graph" is taking from us), perhaps they could be induced to run banners for us and match donations to Wikipedia dollar-for-dollar. -- Anthonyhcole ( talk · contribs · email) 13:35, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
vox have released a piece concerning mostly edit warring with commentary by Andrew Lih. It is more of a reflection of Wikipedia culture than Wikipedia itself, as relatively few people contribute to the site compared to those who use it. -- Rubbish computer 19:14, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
A little birdie chirped your name. Drmies ( talk) 15:02, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
Your input, or, for that matter, damn near anyone working for the foundation, would be welcome at WP:ANI#Telstra, Australia IP vandalism. John Carter ( talk) 15:36, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
If there must be a risk of news coverage let it be for Wikipedia blocking Australian IP editors to protect an editor from death/rape threats not about how it took two weeks to get the WMF engaged and how the problem is still on going. The first is arguably good press that focuses on the WMF the second is bad press that focuses on the victim and has a much greater chance of them being outed. Outing being the the worst possible outcome. Jbh Talk 13:04, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
I do not know where you get your distopian panopticon from my comments so I have no response to it. If you want to expand on that subject please do so on my talk page where I would be happy to discuss it. Jbh Talk 14:33, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
I'm in Australia and a Telstra subscriber. I'd support hard blocking all Telstra IPs if Telstra doesn't act soon and responsibly on this. That would oblige all Wikipedia editors who are Telstra customers to switch, if they have the option, to another provider. -- Anthonyhcole ( talk · contribs · email) 13:45, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
.....and right on track, just after the WP:ANI thread is archived here...they are back.... as
The following discussion was wiped from ANI so I am transcluding it here.
Please investigate whether User:Rikster2 and User:Bagumba are the same user. If not, please investigate whether they have formed a gang of persistent keyboard warriors for enforcing strict and strongly subjective editing styles in Wikipedia by reverting other editors' good faith edits and randomly hand out controversial bans to those who made a protest. 120.16.105.67 ( talk) 03:36, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
Wikipedia is now full of persistent keyboard warriors and unjustified admins. I got banned today for no valid reasons. I would like to report the following two users in my talk page for being subjective and abusive.
/info/en/?search=User_talk:120.16.88.202
Cheers. 202.72.165.105 ( talk) 02:53, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
I !voted at an AfD. The sole person who is insisting that the article of his be kept is not\w nominating a slew of articles for deletion on quite tenuous grounds. Several of mine are nominated/ proposed for immediate deletion. One of mine is on a person who is head of a major corporation now, but who had been a UN Assistant Secretary-General (not a US politics issue there) but also held political office - so I am quite absolutely barred from commenting at the AfD even though the AfD is a blatant and absolute retaliation for my position at an AfD. This post is absolutely unrelated to "US Politics broadly construed" but is directly related at blatant misuse of the deletion tools of Wikipedia. Is my post here a violation of anything rational? Collect ( talk) 18:24, 24 October 2015 (UTC) Also note - the nominator of the slew of articles at AfD does not notify those who wrote any of the articles - I fear he might be in violation of policy by not notifying when he used the name of the person starting the articles as his main rationale for bringing them to AfD -- I mean - how can anyone rationally say the first black postal carrier in the US is "not notable"? Cheers. Collect ( talk) 18:27, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
@ Collect - If there is someone stalking your articles in retaliation for an AfD vote, this is probably a matter for AN/I, not Jimbotalk. Also, links to the AfD debates would help. Carrite ( talk) 19:04, 24 October 2015 (UTC)