This page 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.

Hi Jayen. I seem to remember that you contribute to the German Wikipedia and thus I presume know German quite well. My colleagues across the pond sent me a recent report coming out of Germany analyzing covert PR participation on Wikipedia. I would love to know what it says, but machine translation is painfully unreadable. I shared it on the Talk page of COI editing on Wikipedia here and I thought I would just bring it to your attention, under the hopes that you may add it to the article, report on it for the Signpost, or just do anything that will give us English-speakers a way to see what it says ;-) CorporateM ( Talk) 16:22, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Hi CorporateM, I've been aware of that study (and as I said over on Ed's talk I mentioned it briefly in the In the Media section of the Signpost two weeks ago), but I haven't had time to read it yet, and read all the conversations that went on in the German Wikipedia about it. I still plan to do so, but it may take me another week or two to get there. Best, Andreas JN 466 11:12, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Awesome. I had checked the Signpost before dropping you/Ed a note, but I must have missed it. I haven't seen any kind of professional, sophisticated analysis done before, except for the PRSA surveys, which were more POV-pushing/advocacy-oriented against the Bright Line. I wanted to blog about it, but I don't think I can with how unreadable the machine-translated version was. When/if you get a chance to read it, I'd love if you could drop me a line and give me some idea of what it says. You'd also be welcome to guest-blog it on my blog if your heart desired, so us ethnocentric, lazy Americans that don't learn dual-languages can access the information. CorporateM ( Talk) 14:58, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, CorporateM, that's great. I'll get back to you in due course. Andreas JN 466 21:32, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Hi. I just tried to open a discussion about the WMF having an endowment fund at WP:VPM#Should WMF have enough cash reserves to live forever off the interest? and was told it's not appropriate to discuss that topic there. Have you noticed that kind of thing on meta's water cooler or de's village pump/water cooler? Just curious to know if it's an idiosyncrasy of this place. -- Anthonyhcole ( talk · contribs · email) 00:13, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Meta is probably a better place . I don't think de:WP would discuss it locally either. By the way, the maths are not favourable. I believe the Foundation has assets in the region of $45m (see graph). If you assume an interest rate of 5% (which I think will be hard to get given present rates), that would generate an income of $2.25m per annum, and they are spending more than 15 times that a year (and spending is on the up and up ...). Best, Andreas JN 466 21:51, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. Sorry for the delay in responding. After posting the above I headed into the bush, and the cottage we're staying in doesn't have the promised wifi. -- Anthonyhcole ( talk · contribs · email) 05:40, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

		The Signpost Barnstar
		For this week's excellent "In the news" article in the Signpost -- Pine ✉ 19:50, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

Thank you very much, Pine. -- Andreas JN 466 20:02, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

	The Original Barnstar
	Hello Jayen. This is Niren. Please contact me at toelkes@outlook.com. Thanks. Oldseeker ( talk) 21:30, 23 February 2014 (UTC)