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I wrote a response to the BBC's Five women who aren’t on Wikipedia but should be at meta:Talk:Wikimedia UK/Events/BBC 100 Women#Five women who aren’t on Wikipedia but should be—welcome to use it, if you're interested czar 18:32, 10 December 2016 (UTC)
{{ done}} - Pete Forsyth ( talk) 23:05, 21 December 2016 (UTC)
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published a story about me. The title is "A Wikipedia Woman of Letters" and it mentions the Visiting Scholars Program, The University of Pittsburgh, Women's Health topics on WP, Ryan of WikiEd. Unfortunately, there is no link to the story. I only have a jpg I scanned of the article. Let me know if anyone is interested. I'm guessing there might not be too many newspaper articles on women editors, but maybe that is not true. If you go to my user page: Bfpage, I have set up the option of receiving email. Let me know and I will send you the jpg. Best Regards,
See [1] Smallbones( smalltalk) 03:20, 19 December 2016 (UTC)
{{ done}} - Pete Forsyth ( talk) 22:59, 21 December 2016 (UTC)
I don't know what section of the Signpost this would go under (research? In the news?) but two reporters at Buzzfeed recently decided to use not just Wikipedia but Wikidata to see how 2016 stacked up against all other years since 1900 in regards to significant celebrity deaths (the verdict was that 1977, which as the authors admit anyone who was alive that year will indeed remember as the year we lost Elvis at 42, among others, was as bad as 1977 if not worse).
Their twin metric is:
This might be interesting because it's the first time I've seen a non-tech, non-academic news outlet use Wikidata for its research. Daniel Case ( talk) 06:47, 3 January 2017 (UTC)
Wikipedia information may have provoked spat with Indonesia One article referred to is Act of Free Choice. Hawkeye7 ( talk) 22:03, 7 January 2017 (UTC)
Hey Signpost editors. Community Resources has published a report on Meta detailing the outcomes from funded proposals of the first Inspire Campaign, focusing on reducing the gender gap in participation and coverage of women in Wikimedia projects. The report also contains recommendations on our next steps to increase gender diversity more broadly speaking. A blog post is also available, which provides a summary of the report. I JethroBT (WMF) ( talk) 00:38, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
{{ done}} Brief mention in News and Notes. Thanks! - Pete Forsyth ( talk) 16:59, 19 January 2017 (UTC)
Could the Signpost possibly do a report on the FA run on Wikipedia:WikiProject Birds. Jimfbleak brought up the fact that not enough articles are coming in at WP:FAC to keep up with WP:TFA, and encouraged participants in the project to try and get as many articles to FA status as possible. So far, the movement is working, with multiple bird articles at WP:FAC at a time. The number of nominations coming in per day is about 2 per day, which is much better. If anybody has anything to add to this, that would be great. Thanks! RileyBugz Yell at me | Edits 19:41, 15 January 2017 (UTC)
It'd be great if you could add a brief mention of Wikipedia talk:Twinkle#Celebrating 10 years of Twinkle in the next issue. Thanks, — This, that and the other (talk) 01:16, 22 January 2017 (UTC)
I think there's an interesting story to be told about the new and experienced editors building up the 2017 Women's March article city by city over the past days. Lots of new/unregistered editors getting involved, including calls for marchers to add their cities to the article. It's been great to see this happening since I got involved yesterday. Sam Walton ( talk) 17:02, 22 January 2017 (UTC)
If folks want to cover some of the outcomes from Wikipedia Day in the next edition, we have commons:Category:Wikipedia Day 2017 NYC videos of several interesting talks, including one with Katherine Maher and Tim Wu speaking on a "Post-Truth" panel. Art, documenting activism, multilingualism, and other areas are also covered. And I don't know if there is video from the other celebrations, but there are certainly photographs from many cities of Wikipedia Day around the globe.-- Pharos ( talk) 03:42, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
Niharika Kohli (of the WMF Community Tech team) wrote a new user script that adds a "Megawatch" link under the "More" menu on category pages. This lets you watch or unwatch all the pages within that category (although it is currently limited to 50 pages due to API limits). Kaldari ( talk) 00:37, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
Generosity Crowd-funding Campaign: NN3 MKII Starter Package for The Photographer.
The Photographer has taken many high quality photos for Wikipedia/Commons, including 86 Featured Pictures and 668 Quality Images. His contributions cover the architecture and culture of Brazil and Venezuela. Like many photographers he likes to take high-resolution photos by shooting lots of frames and stitching them together to create a panorama. However, this is very hard to achieve (particularly for interiors and buildings) without having parallax errors that spoil the stitching. The best way is to use a special panoramic head on a tripod. In addition to high-resolution photos, The Photographer also wants to create 180 × 360° panoramas which require a special viewer to appreciate them. Several photographers on Wikipedia/Commons are now creating such images and they are a great way to explore a scene as though one is really there. In order to photograph these 180 × 360° images, the campaign has a second goal to additionally buy an 8mm fisheye lens to add to the 35mm lens The Photographer already owns.
Please see the discussion about the Crowd-funding campaign on User talk:The Photographer#Generosity Crowdfunding Campaign and visit the Generosity Crowd-funding Campaign page to consider donating. -- Colin° Talk 12:06, 20 November 2016 (UTC)
There's a new project on the block called WikipediaP2P. It's a browser extension that allows browsing by connecting to peers instead of Wikimedia servers, thus reducing the load. It's an interesting idea which could be explored! ~★ nmaia d 13:59, 12 December 2016 (UTC)
I think much more should and could be written on Environment (endangered species, global warming and rise in sea-levels, gas emissions, legislation, research in new energy sources, biodiversity inventory, rescue plans, incentives to local communities to protect the environment around them... the list of topics is endless), with sub-categories. I don't see any highlights on Wikipedia about environmental issues as for instance about politics, economy, sports and other more "mundane" topics. As I am not an expert, any ideas/suggestions are more than welcome Melroross ( talk) —Preceding undated comment added 17:45, 8 December 2016
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! for February 18 had a "Bluff the Listener" game where the true story was a fan editing the article The Sherlocks so he could claim to be with the band. — Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 16:41, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
Wikipedia Peer Review is a service used by over time thousands of Wikipedians with hundreds of past reviews carried out. A number of changes have been made over the years including to layout and functionality and active reviews have increased from 10-20 to 30-50 presently.
We are cursed with being almost totally a very poorly supported bot (VeblenBot) which frequently fails, for months at a time, causing new reviews not to be listed and making the removal of old reviews much more difficult. We have tried in vain several times to elicit help on the village pump (Technical) and bot requests. I would be very grateful if the signpost could put out a request for someone to help support this very well-used service!
If you are interested, when this is solved I would be grateful if we could do a small article on the peer review process to attract more reviewers and make it more widely known.
Thank you! -- Tom (LT) ( talk) 13:06, 30 December 2016 (UTC)
@ Pete Forsyth / other editors: A draft is available here: User:LT910001/sandbox/Peer review history and call for reviewers --Tom (LT) 23:07, 3 February 2017 (UTC)
Looks like the results of this now-closed RFC are being picked up in mainstream media eg [2]. Seems like one of the first times such an RS determination on a work with a legacy as large as the DM's has been considered here, so might be an interesting story. -- MASEM ( t) 00:42, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
I've reached out to the Mail for comment. If any of you have questions for them please run them through me, in the next ~12 hours so we have a chance at a comment prior to our own publication. - Pete Forsyth ( talk) 19:42, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
I don't know how often this happens to a Wikipedia news story, but this one made it into Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!.-- 3family6 ( Talk to me | See what I have done) 15:01, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
ArsTech article about the Paper itself. It's an interesting no-editor-named breakdown of where personal attacks and abusive comments originate, showing a surprisingly high fraction from established editors (>30%). -- MASEM ( t) 05:42, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
It's an article in BoingBoing by frustrated editor Andrea James: Watching Wikipedia's extinction event from a distance. But apparently there's more underneath the surface. On a Facebook discussion of this article, the editor who deleted the article in question has deleted thousands of articles, despite at least one mild reprimand from an admin telling them to not be so trigger happy. Perhaps a notice in The Signpost can wake up this human "robot" to the harm they are doing - or at least awaken the community to this person's abusive of privilege. - kosboot ( talk) 19:27, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
Please, if possible, have a look at http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/38982914/fan-of-the-sherlocks-edits-bands-wiki-to-get-backstage and consider whether it is worth making into a news story. I do appreciate that this page is really for submitting finished stories but I don't have such a thing. I just thought someone might want to take a look. Apologies if this is wildly inappropriate. Cheers DBaK ( talk) 23:16, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
If The Signpost is to only mention April's planned 420 collaboration just once, I'd prefer to wait until April to recruit Wikipedia editors closer to the campaign dates. However, this article might be worth mentioning in the "In the media" roundup. Thanks! (This campaign might receive a bit more coverage given its nature.) --- Another Believer ( Talk) 20:06, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
WikiFundi was launched at the recent Wiki Indaba held in Ghana. WikiFundi is an editing platform that presents an offline editable environment that provides a similar experience to editing Wikipedia online. WikiFundi provides the ability for teachers, wikipedian communities and NGOs to learn about editing Wikipedia and contributing knowledge when technology, access and electricity outages fail or are not available at all. It enables individuals, groups and communities to work on articles collaboratively. Once completed and when connected to the internet, these articles can be uploaded to Wikipedia.
WikiFundi will initially rollout in 16 countries across Africa via two programmes: the Digital Schools programme of the Orange Foundation and the Wiki In Africa project, Wikipack Africa. We, Florence Devouard and I, conceptualised WikiFundi as an effective answer to the challenges that were being experienced by Wikipedians across Africa through our work on Wiki Loves Africa, Wiki Loves Women and Kumusha Takes Wiki. We would be grateful if you would consider covering this launch and the potential impact WikiFundi could have on communities in more strained environments. Thanks! Isla Haddow ( talk) 18:56, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
This popped up on Slashdot, about WP:PJAA. Many an unhappy contributor shows up in the Slashdot commentary, apparently blaming notability rules and deletionism for editor disillusion. Chris Troutman ( talk) 02:44, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
User:MrFawwaz made the first edit of the year which was a minor edit to Radio Televisyen Malaysia. Good thing it wasn't vandalism :) -- Highly Я!d¡cüłoʉ$ chat? oops… 00:33, 8 January 2017 (UTC) Thanks for the suggestion, Highly Ridiculous. Obviously we missed the boat on reporting this at an appropriate time, but I appreciate the heads-up. - Pete Forsyth ( talk) 08:39, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
From my user talk, courtesy of Fences and windows: Special:PermaLink/765492526#People_using_books_that_copy_Wikipedia - Pete Forsyth ( talk) 22:51, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
[8] A statistical analysis of our RFA process and how it can help weed out "information manipulators", though finding that (for either intentional and unintentional reasons) that many admins post-RFA start to become these types of manipulators. eg: "...we document that a surprisingly large number of editors change their behavior and begin focusing more on a particular controversial topic once they are promoted to administrator status." -- MASEM ( t) 03:17, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
Finnish Wikipedia celebrates the 15th birthday of its existence.--Kulttuurinavigaattori 06:05, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
I think it may be worthwhile to advertise this discussion to a much wider audience: Wikipedia_talk:User_categories#Request_for_Comment_on_the_guidelines_regarding_.22joke.22_categories.. The outcome potentially changes a longstanding stance on the social networking aspect of the site, for better or for worse. VegaDark ( talk) 05:05, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
This article. " Russian Government Youth Group Wants to Make Wikipedia More Patriotic" reports the creation of something called "Virtual Front", a forthcoming attempt organized by the Russian State Duma Youth Parliament to mass-edit the Russian-language Wikipedia to make it "more patriotic". If this is real, it's not only Signpost-article-worthy, it's also something the Russian Wikipedia community and WMF should be aware of.
As a side-note, the article also mentions an initiative commissioned by Dmitry Medvedev to study the possibility of creating a state-approved Russian Wikipedia clone. -- The Anome ( talk) 10:14, 25 February 2017 (UTC)
Thank you both, Kaldari and The Anome. Let's be sure to include as an "in brief" on either News and Notes or In the Media. I'm trying to publish today, but way behind. If you have a moment to draft something up, that would be a big help; I'll do the best I can with it if not. - Pete Forsyth ( talk) 04:21, 26 February 2017 (UTC)
Vipul Naik sponsors Wikipedia editing. See https://vipulnaik.com/sponsored-wikipedia-editing/ and https://contractwork.vipulnaik.com/ and http://effective-altruism.com/ea/w5/looking_for_wikipedia_article_writers_topics/ ((( The Quixotic Potato))) ( talk) 16:43, 6 February 2017 (UTC) @ Peteforsyth: I hope you guys can interview Vipul Naik, I think his project is very interesting. ((( The Quixotic Potato))) ( talk) 16:48, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
I think you should write an opinion piece on kids' edits. I'd do it but I edit under an Ip and I can't create pages. 68.233.214.74 ( talk) 18:28, 10 March 2017 (UTC)
The part that bites the hardest:
Think of Intellipedia as a Wikipedia for spies. It works the same, except that there’s no anonymity for contributors, and nothing can ever be unsourced.
Way to go, WP:V czar 17:13, 11 March 2017 (UTC)
English Wikipedia is going to get "a task force of trusted editors to act as referees in matters related to conflict of interest and outing" posted 16 March 2017. Details are murky at this time. – Bri ( talk) 20:17, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
https://twitter.com/IanMac111/status/847034550102507522/photo/1
©Geni ( talk) 10:12, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
I hope to have all the details soon. Please {{ ping}} me if you have questions about this before I get back to you. Whatamidoing (WMF) ( talk) 07:06, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
Dear Signpost editors,
Would you consider writing an article about the discussion happening within the Wikipedia community here: Wikipedia_talk:Translation#Machine-translations?
Best, Daniel.inform ( talk) 12:36, 3 April 2017 (UTC)
I cannot access the Scientific Advances paper directly [10] but here is The Verge's article on it [11]. Basically describing research on page views on our aircrash disaster articles, showing that older airline crash articles gain interest after a similar crash occurs, even if there are no direct wikilinks connecting the two. From this, they conclude that the "collective memory" of Wikipedia's readers is around 45 years. -- MASEM ( t) 18:17, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
Slashdot comments on
this story in the Guardian which discusses
this article in PLOS One entitled "Even good bots fight: The case of Wikipedia". From the abstract: "We find that, although Wikipedia bots are intended to support the encyclopedia, they often undo each other’s edits and these sterile “fights” may sometimes continue for years."
Perhaps it's news to the read-only community that bots edit here.
タチコマ robot,
RussBot,
Xqbot, and
DarknessBot are discussed, among others.
Chris Troutman (
talk)
04:13, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
Automated Wikipedia Edit-Bots Have Been Fighting Each Other For A Decade Hawkeye7 ( talk) 05:59, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
@ Peteforsyth: My first op-ed for the Signpost: User:Kaldari/Lead sentences have cancer. Kaldari ( talk) 03:57, 26 March 2017 (UTC)
Kaldari, finally reading this after an extended absence. I like it a lot! However, two issues with the headline/cancer theme: (1) I had complaints over Guy Macon's op-ed that the cancer metaphor was gratuitously triggering for a WMF employee who had endured the ravages of cancer, and would prefer to avoid exacerbating that issue one way or another; (2) I don't understand the connection to Guy's piece, and I'm confident that some of our less attentive readers would have even less idea what you're talking about with the mention of it at the end. Can you modify the piece to remove the references to his op-ed? (Or, if there is a worthwhile connection, help me to see what it is, and adjust to make it clearer to the general reader?) - Pete Forsyth ( talk) 04:30, 8 May 2017 (UTC)
I have written a tool to transfer files to Commons. Is this something that could be mentioned in the upcoming technology report? Thanks, FASTILY 07:03, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
We have passed the 5,000 mark for featured articles. See Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates#5K. While there isn't a clear "5000th article" as such, Waiting (2015 film), Phantasmagoria (video game) and Resident Evil 5 tipped us over from 4999 to 5002. Surely worth a mention! Josh Milburn ( talk) 16:21, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
The Core Contest is running will be over six weeks from 00:01 UTC 15 May to 23:59 UTC 30 June 2017. Once again, ₤250 of amazon vouchers are up for grabs. The contest focusses on improving Wikipedia's core material, with rewards for improving the worst eyesores. Casliber ( talk · contribs) will be joined by Megalibrarygirl ( talk · contribs) and Katherine (WMF) ( talk · contribs) in judging the contributions. Cas Liber ( talk · contribs) 14:04, 9 May 2017 (UTC)
Would Signpost be willing to mention the upcoming "420" collaboration, which is an effort to create and improve cannabis-related content during the second half of April (and especially on April 20)? Invitations are being sent to dozens on WikiProjects, and the campaign has already received some coverage by cannabis media outlets. Thanks for your consideration! --- Another Believer ( Talk) 15:20, 3 April 2017 (UTC)
Does anyone know if an issue will be published in April? Just curious. --- Another Believer ( Talk) 17:59, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
Never mind, the campaign has come and gone, unless someone wants to mention as a completed inaugural effort. --- Another Believer ( Talk) 20:33, 9 May 2017 (UTC)
Hello all,
The scientific publisher PLOS has just published a relevant blog post promoting the fact that their ' Topic Page' publishing format has been extended from PLOS Computation Biology to PLOS Genetics.
This allows academics who wouldn't otherwise consider writing for Wikipedia to be able to contribute in a format that is more familiar to them, and provides the academic brownie points needed for their careers. It looks as though 2017 is shaping up to be very successful for such ventures, see also:
It might be worth covering in some form or another. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo) talk 07:42, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
Unless I'm mistaken, the last issue of the Signpost was February 27, 2017. Is it just too hard to produce it without more staff? - kosboot ( talk) 16:22, 16 April 2017 (UTC)
I just came across, via Slashdot, a report in VICE News about China creating it's own (State run of course) competitor to Wikipedia called the Chinese Encyclopaedia, also apparently referred to by at least one official as the 'Great Wall of Culture'. At least 20,000 people have been recruited by to create and run this new online encyclopedia, including scholars from universities and research institutes who will contribute articles in more than 100 disciplines. This is intended to produce a knowledge base with more than 300,000 entries, each of which will be about 1,000 words long.
Here's an excerpt from the Vice article:
“The Chinese Encyclopaedia is not a book, but a Great Wall of culture,” Yang Muzhi, the editor-in-chief of the project and the chairman of the Book and Periodicals Distribution Association of China, said. He added that China was under pressure from the international community to produce an encyclopedia that will “guide and lead the public and society.”
The need for an online reference encyclopedia is in part a result of the Chinese government blocking access to Wikipedia. Chinese internet companies like Baidu and Qihoo 360 operate their own online encyclopedias, but none are capable of matching Wikipedia in terms of scale and breadth of information.
The aim of the new version of the Chinese encyclopedia is to showcase China’s latest science and technology developments, promote historical heritage, increase cultural soft power, and strengthen the core values of socialism, according to Yang, who stressed that the goal isn’t to mimic Wikipedia: “We have the biggest, most high-quality author team in the world. Our goal is not to catch up, but overtake.”At over 720 million users, China has the world’s largest internet population by a large margin, but it also has some of the world’s most restrictive internet laws.
This is going to be interesting, perhaps even in the Chinese sense of the word, so to speak.
Ceannlann gorm (
talk)
09:09, 2 May 2017 (UTC)
vi:User:Lê Thy, until recently a Vietnamese Wikipedia administrator, passed away this weekend. [12] – Minh Nguyễn 💬 18:08, 14 May 2017 (UTC)
Hey everyone! Aaron Halfaker's ( User:EpochFail) Reddit AMA is starting in about 30 minutes, and if the Signpost gets going again, it could be a fun thing to cover. He's focusing on artificial intelligence on Wikipedia and how we're working to counteract vandalism. We'd love to have your questions. Join us! Ed Erhart (WMF) ( talk) 20:37, 1 June 2017 (UTC)
The Rick Riordan task force of WikiProject Novels is hosting its first Edit-A-Thon to increase project visibility and member participation. In honor of his July birthday, the event will focus on pages related author/illustrator John Rocco. The event will last until the first day of August, when the most helpful contributor will be featured on RRTF's forums. More information can be found here on the talk page, also a good place for questions and comments. We welcome outside input and participation! -- 2ReinreB2 ( talk) 03:51, 3 June 2017 (UTC)
OTRS Commons-permission is used for permissions related to Images on Commons. Currently we have a backlog of ~700 messages and 73 days. This means that many people emailing permissions for their images will not be looked at for 2.5 months. Any delay over a 15 days is problematic because images without permission are mass deleted in 15 days. This slows the process even further as you need admins to undelete images, and you usually loose info about which article was image added to. Another side effect is that once you contact back the clients, they often angry (because they sent by that time 5 more desperate emails about their images being deleted), or unresponsive if you need further clarifications. This affects all the projects and we could use some more OTRS volunteers experienced with image licensing. -- Jarekt ( talk) 19:26, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
See Talk:Calibri and the article itself. The article has been full protected for a week over edit-warring about the date of release and the relevance of this date to an ongoing corruption case in Pakistan. Nthep ( talk) 16:32, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
This last few days, a huge shitstorm arose in the fr.wp community, making up for a good part of the 'Bistro' (Village Pump) discussion for the last days. At the center of it, the management of the French chapter, with several resignation on the board, conflicts of interest, members expelled, and so on. A detailled timeline is available, and several high profile wikimedians, such as former chairwoman Anthere are leading the efforts to clean up this mess. The Twitter #wmfrgate is widely used to discuss those issues. Defunes43 ( talk) 19:27, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
It has been a couple of years since I broke the story about the EN community - Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-08-26/In focus no longer being in decline. Despite that there is still a meme out there of the community being in decline, I've bumped into two editors in the last 24 hours who weren't aware that the 2007-2014 decline ended over two years ago. Since the story was originally broken in the signpost it seems appropriate to update it here - so would you like an update? Ϣere SpielChequers 12:12, 16 July 2017 (UTC)
Hello Signpost!
I have written a short description of our discovery of dates in Wikipedia.
It can be found here.
/info/en/?search=Wikipedia:Dates_in_Wikipedia
We believe this may interest Academics in the field of history and others.
We are even offering our large amount of data up to anybody who may find it useful.
We believe this may be a good candidates for coverage in The Signpost.
If that may be the case, I can expand on the article we already have and hopefully make a solid contribution to your fine publication.
Sincerely yours,
Jeffrey Roehl
jroehl2@yahoo.com
Jroehl ( talk) 14:07, 20 July 2017 (UTC)
Hi Signpost, I started the English language Wikipedia related podcast WikiJabber ( https://wikijabber.org, meta:WikiJabber). It has the same concept as my German language podcast WikiStammtisch (https:wikistammtisch.de, de:Wikipedia:WikiStammtisch): I talk with one or sometimes some people about Wikipedia, Life and all the rest. I would appriciate, if some people would join WikiJabber and if a lot of people would start to listen to it. -- Sebastian Wallroth ( talk) 09:49, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
Something for news and notes a report on an error in Wikipedia Ϣere SpielChequers 15:05, 8 September 2017 (UTC)
ACTRIAL goes live on 14 September. It would be good if a article could be written about it— RADICAL SODA(FORCE)TM 05:34, 12 September 2017 (UTC)
Thanks @ Forceradical and Kaldari:. I've put a short piece in the next issue's News and notes. I don't think we need much more until we get some results in from the trial. - Evad37 [ talk 02:46, 18 September 2017 (UTC)
Kaldari ( talk) 20:00, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
Greetings, Tonight at Roule Cheese I found external link to an interesting wiki.
Wondering if this would make for interesting article or news for Signpost? Regards, — JoeHebda • ( talk) 04:04, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
Vice Motherboard wrote a piece about the cabal that writes the encyclopedia. Chris Troutman ( talk) 21:11, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
The Paris Review's approach to its history. |
Very striking article coming out of Longreads regarding a literary magazine called The Paris Review. Their editor was recently fired for extremely 2017 reasons, which brought back into public attention via a widely-shared Twitter thread (which became this article) the fact that the magazine seems to have spent twelve years doing its best to totally airbrush out the existence of an editor, Brigid Hughes, who ran it for about a year (and who was, funnily enough, female).
This included deleting all mention of her from the Wikipedia article in a February 2011 edit. What that article didn't mention (I'm not sure anyone else has publicly mentioned it yet, either) is that that edit comes from an IP address registered to the magazine, which an edit made from the same IP address the previous year was happy to disclose. (The same campaign apparently involved bullying NPR into publishing a fawning apology for suggesting that the magazine's current format wasn't its founder's original vision for it.)
I don't know much about literary magazines and still less about this one, but I was amazed you could just wipe an editor's existence out of history. How do you get away with that one? Blythwood ( talk) 22:08, 23 December 2017 (UTC)
{{ done}} Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-01-16/In the media - Evad37 [ talk 16:12, 16 January 2018 (UTC)
We, as the compilers of the WP:Top 25 Report, have written a special report detailing the fifty most read articles of 2017 on en.wikipedia.org. It is located at the above link, and has been written as a joint project between seven different editors. Given the Signpost's support for the Report over the year, I feel that it would be apt that a special feature, or an article, be prepared on this specialised, larger than regular report. It is of interest to the reader-base, and I am suggesting it based on a discussion with Jimbo here. I think that it would be very well suited to the Signpost, and would greatly encourage and appreciate its coverage on these grounds. Stormy clouds ( talk) 19:45, 3 January 2018 (UTC)
{{ done}} Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-01-16/Traffic report - Evad37 [ talk 16:11, 16 January 2018 (UTC)
Controversial appointee by UK government said to have edited his own article 200 times: https://politicalscrapbook.net/2013/09/toby-young-has-edited-his-own-wikipedia-page-200-times-in-six-years/ -- A bit iffy ( talk) 22:29, 3 January 2018 (UTC)
{{ done}} Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-01-16/In the media - Evad37 [ talk 16:10, 16 January 2018 (UTC)
Government web address used to add 'Lucifer' to Peter Dutton's name. The joys of AussieParlEdits. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:03, 30 November 2017 (UTC)
The first ever content made in space specifically for Wikipedia was uploaded to Commons today, and is used on Paolo Nespoli. See Close encounters of the Wikipedia kind for how this happened. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:10, 29 November 2017 (UTC)
See here. ― Justin (koavf)❤ T☮ C☺ M☯ 08:52, 23 January 2018 (UTC)
Wikimedia Blog post! Wiki Loves Monuments will be coming on approx Thursday. Ed Erhart (WMF) ( talk) 19:54, 11 December 2017 (UTC)
Not sure this is appropriate for the Signpost, but if so: Wikipedia is often referred to as having "sister projects." We should really aim for gender-neutral language, so it might be a good idea to retire "sister projects" in favor of something like "allied projects." Just putting this out there might elevate people's sensitivity to how they use language. - kosboot ( talk) 20:00, 13 December 2017 (UTC)
wmfblog:2017/12/14/wiki-loves-monuments-international-winners/ Ed Erhart (WMF) ( talk) 15:40, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
Another blog post. :-) Ed Erhart (WMF) ( talk) 15:41, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
Hey, maybe something about the m:2017 Community Wishlist Survey, which the Community Tech team will work to address next year? The results are now in: m:2017 Community Wishlist Survey/Results. The top ten are:
I probably won't be around much for a couple of weeks after tomorrow, but ping User:DannyH (WMF) if you've got any questions or want comments and he'll be happy to give those. / Johan (WMF) ( talk) 20:01, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
I want to be a news reporter,and will earn wages if required — Preceding unsigned comment added by Austin patrick ( talk • contribs) 18:37, 19 December 2017 (UTC)
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I wrote a response to the BBC's Five women who aren’t on Wikipedia but should be at meta:Talk:Wikimedia UK/Events/BBC 100 Women#Five women who aren’t on Wikipedia but should be—welcome to use it, if you're interested czar 18:32, 10 December 2016 (UTC)
{{ done}} - Pete Forsyth ( talk) 23:05, 21 December 2016 (UTC)
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published a story about me. The title is "A Wikipedia Woman of Letters" and it mentions the Visiting Scholars Program, The University of Pittsburgh, Women's Health topics on WP, Ryan of WikiEd. Unfortunately, there is no link to the story. I only have a jpg I scanned of the article. Let me know if anyone is interested. I'm guessing there might not be too many newspaper articles on women editors, but maybe that is not true. If you go to my user page: Bfpage, I have set up the option of receiving email. Let me know and I will send you the jpg. Best Regards,
See [1] Smallbones( smalltalk) 03:20, 19 December 2016 (UTC)
{{ done}} - Pete Forsyth ( talk) 22:59, 21 December 2016 (UTC)
I don't know what section of the Signpost this would go under (research? In the news?) but two reporters at Buzzfeed recently decided to use not just Wikipedia but Wikidata to see how 2016 stacked up against all other years since 1900 in regards to significant celebrity deaths (the verdict was that 1977, which as the authors admit anyone who was alive that year will indeed remember as the year we lost Elvis at 42, among others, was as bad as 1977 if not worse).
Their twin metric is:
This might be interesting because it's the first time I've seen a non-tech, non-academic news outlet use Wikidata for its research. Daniel Case ( talk) 06:47, 3 January 2017 (UTC)
Wikipedia information may have provoked spat with Indonesia One article referred to is Act of Free Choice. Hawkeye7 ( talk) 22:03, 7 January 2017 (UTC)
Hey Signpost editors. Community Resources has published a report on Meta detailing the outcomes from funded proposals of the first Inspire Campaign, focusing on reducing the gender gap in participation and coverage of women in Wikimedia projects. The report also contains recommendations on our next steps to increase gender diversity more broadly speaking. A blog post is also available, which provides a summary of the report. I JethroBT (WMF) ( talk) 00:38, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
{{ done}} Brief mention in News and Notes. Thanks! - Pete Forsyth ( talk) 16:59, 19 January 2017 (UTC)
Could the Signpost possibly do a report on the FA run on Wikipedia:WikiProject Birds. Jimfbleak brought up the fact that not enough articles are coming in at WP:FAC to keep up with WP:TFA, and encouraged participants in the project to try and get as many articles to FA status as possible. So far, the movement is working, with multiple bird articles at WP:FAC at a time. The number of nominations coming in per day is about 2 per day, which is much better. If anybody has anything to add to this, that would be great. Thanks! RileyBugz Yell at me | Edits 19:41, 15 January 2017 (UTC)
It'd be great if you could add a brief mention of Wikipedia talk:Twinkle#Celebrating 10 years of Twinkle in the next issue. Thanks, — This, that and the other (talk) 01:16, 22 January 2017 (UTC)
I think there's an interesting story to be told about the new and experienced editors building up the 2017 Women's March article city by city over the past days. Lots of new/unregistered editors getting involved, including calls for marchers to add their cities to the article. It's been great to see this happening since I got involved yesterday. Sam Walton ( talk) 17:02, 22 January 2017 (UTC)
If folks want to cover some of the outcomes from Wikipedia Day in the next edition, we have commons:Category:Wikipedia Day 2017 NYC videos of several interesting talks, including one with Katherine Maher and Tim Wu speaking on a "Post-Truth" panel. Art, documenting activism, multilingualism, and other areas are also covered. And I don't know if there is video from the other celebrations, but there are certainly photographs from many cities of Wikipedia Day around the globe.-- Pharos ( talk) 03:42, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
Niharika Kohli (of the WMF Community Tech team) wrote a new user script that adds a "Megawatch" link under the "More" menu on category pages. This lets you watch or unwatch all the pages within that category (although it is currently limited to 50 pages due to API limits). Kaldari ( talk) 00:37, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
Generosity Crowd-funding Campaign: NN3 MKII Starter Package for The Photographer.
The Photographer has taken many high quality photos for Wikipedia/Commons, including 86 Featured Pictures and 668 Quality Images. His contributions cover the architecture and culture of Brazil and Venezuela. Like many photographers he likes to take high-resolution photos by shooting lots of frames and stitching them together to create a panorama. However, this is very hard to achieve (particularly for interiors and buildings) without having parallax errors that spoil the stitching. The best way is to use a special panoramic head on a tripod. In addition to high-resolution photos, The Photographer also wants to create 180 × 360° panoramas which require a special viewer to appreciate them. Several photographers on Wikipedia/Commons are now creating such images and they are a great way to explore a scene as though one is really there. In order to photograph these 180 × 360° images, the campaign has a second goal to additionally buy an 8mm fisheye lens to add to the 35mm lens The Photographer already owns.
Please see the discussion about the Crowd-funding campaign on User talk:The Photographer#Generosity Crowdfunding Campaign and visit the Generosity Crowd-funding Campaign page to consider donating. -- Colin° Talk 12:06, 20 November 2016 (UTC)
There's a new project on the block called WikipediaP2P. It's a browser extension that allows browsing by connecting to peers instead of Wikimedia servers, thus reducing the load. It's an interesting idea which could be explored! ~★ nmaia d 13:59, 12 December 2016 (UTC)
I think much more should and could be written on Environment (endangered species, global warming and rise in sea-levels, gas emissions, legislation, research in new energy sources, biodiversity inventory, rescue plans, incentives to local communities to protect the environment around them... the list of topics is endless), with sub-categories. I don't see any highlights on Wikipedia about environmental issues as for instance about politics, economy, sports and other more "mundane" topics. As I am not an expert, any ideas/suggestions are more than welcome Melroross ( talk) —Preceding undated comment added 17:45, 8 December 2016
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! for February 18 had a "Bluff the Listener" game where the true story was a fan editing the article The Sherlocks so he could claim to be with the band. — Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 16:41, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
Wikipedia Peer Review is a service used by over time thousands of Wikipedians with hundreds of past reviews carried out. A number of changes have been made over the years including to layout and functionality and active reviews have increased from 10-20 to 30-50 presently.
We are cursed with being almost totally a very poorly supported bot (VeblenBot) which frequently fails, for months at a time, causing new reviews not to be listed and making the removal of old reviews much more difficult. We have tried in vain several times to elicit help on the village pump (Technical) and bot requests. I would be very grateful if the signpost could put out a request for someone to help support this very well-used service!
If you are interested, when this is solved I would be grateful if we could do a small article on the peer review process to attract more reviewers and make it more widely known.
Thank you! -- Tom (LT) ( talk) 13:06, 30 December 2016 (UTC)
@ Pete Forsyth / other editors: A draft is available here: User:LT910001/sandbox/Peer review history and call for reviewers --Tom (LT) 23:07, 3 February 2017 (UTC)
Looks like the results of this now-closed RFC are being picked up in mainstream media eg [2]. Seems like one of the first times such an RS determination on a work with a legacy as large as the DM's has been considered here, so might be an interesting story. -- MASEM ( t) 00:42, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
I've reached out to the Mail for comment. If any of you have questions for them please run them through me, in the next ~12 hours so we have a chance at a comment prior to our own publication. - Pete Forsyth ( talk) 19:42, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
I don't know how often this happens to a Wikipedia news story, but this one made it into Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!.-- 3family6 ( Talk to me | See what I have done) 15:01, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
ArsTech article about the Paper itself. It's an interesting no-editor-named breakdown of where personal attacks and abusive comments originate, showing a surprisingly high fraction from established editors (>30%). -- MASEM ( t) 05:42, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
It's an article in BoingBoing by frustrated editor Andrea James: Watching Wikipedia's extinction event from a distance. But apparently there's more underneath the surface. On a Facebook discussion of this article, the editor who deleted the article in question has deleted thousands of articles, despite at least one mild reprimand from an admin telling them to not be so trigger happy. Perhaps a notice in The Signpost can wake up this human "robot" to the harm they are doing - or at least awaken the community to this person's abusive of privilege. - kosboot ( talk) 19:27, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
Please, if possible, have a look at http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/38982914/fan-of-the-sherlocks-edits-bands-wiki-to-get-backstage and consider whether it is worth making into a news story. I do appreciate that this page is really for submitting finished stories but I don't have such a thing. I just thought someone might want to take a look. Apologies if this is wildly inappropriate. Cheers DBaK ( talk) 23:16, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
If The Signpost is to only mention April's planned 420 collaboration just once, I'd prefer to wait until April to recruit Wikipedia editors closer to the campaign dates. However, this article might be worth mentioning in the "In the media" roundup. Thanks! (This campaign might receive a bit more coverage given its nature.) --- Another Believer ( Talk) 20:06, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
WikiFundi was launched at the recent Wiki Indaba held in Ghana. WikiFundi is an editing platform that presents an offline editable environment that provides a similar experience to editing Wikipedia online. WikiFundi provides the ability for teachers, wikipedian communities and NGOs to learn about editing Wikipedia and contributing knowledge when technology, access and electricity outages fail or are not available at all. It enables individuals, groups and communities to work on articles collaboratively. Once completed and when connected to the internet, these articles can be uploaded to Wikipedia.
WikiFundi will initially rollout in 16 countries across Africa via two programmes: the Digital Schools programme of the Orange Foundation and the Wiki In Africa project, Wikipack Africa. We, Florence Devouard and I, conceptualised WikiFundi as an effective answer to the challenges that were being experienced by Wikipedians across Africa through our work on Wiki Loves Africa, Wiki Loves Women and Kumusha Takes Wiki. We would be grateful if you would consider covering this launch and the potential impact WikiFundi could have on communities in more strained environments. Thanks! Isla Haddow ( talk) 18:56, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
This popped up on Slashdot, about WP:PJAA. Many an unhappy contributor shows up in the Slashdot commentary, apparently blaming notability rules and deletionism for editor disillusion. Chris Troutman ( talk) 02:44, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
User:MrFawwaz made the first edit of the year which was a minor edit to Radio Televisyen Malaysia. Good thing it wasn't vandalism :) -- Highly Я!d¡cüłoʉ$ chat? oops… 00:33, 8 January 2017 (UTC) Thanks for the suggestion, Highly Ridiculous. Obviously we missed the boat on reporting this at an appropriate time, but I appreciate the heads-up. - Pete Forsyth ( talk) 08:39, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
From my user talk, courtesy of Fences and windows: Special:PermaLink/765492526#People_using_books_that_copy_Wikipedia - Pete Forsyth ( talk) 22:51, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
[8] A statistical analysis of our RFA process and how it can help weed out "information manipulators", though finding that (for either intentional and unintentional reasons) that many admins post-RFA start to become these types of manipulators. eg: "...we document that a surprisingly large number of editors change their behavior and begin focusing more on a particular controversial topic once they are promoted to administrator status." -- MASEM ( t) 03:17, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
Finnish Wikipedia celebrates the 15th birthday of its existence.--Kulttuurinavigaattori 06:05, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
I think it may be worthwhile to advertise this discussion to a much wider audience: Wikipedia_talk:User_categories#Request_for_Comment_on_the_guidelines_regarding_.22joke.22_categories.. The outcome potentially changes a longstanding stance on the social networking aspect of the site, for better or for worse. VegaDark ( talk) 05:05, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
This article. " Russian Government Youth Group Wants to Make Wikipedia More Patriotic" reports the creation of something called "Virtual Front", a forthcoming attempt organized by the Russian State Duma Youth Parliament to mass-edit the Russian-language Wikipedia to make it "more patriotic". If this is real, it's not only Signpost-article-worthy, it's also something the Russian Wikipedia community and WMF should be aware of.
As a side-note, the article also mentions an initiative commissioned by Dmitry Medvedev to study the possibility of creating a state-approved Russian Wikipedia clone. -- The Anome ( talk) 10:14, 25 February 2017 (UTC)
Thank you both, Kaldari and The Anome. Let's be sure to include as an "in brief" on either News and Notes or In the Media. I'm trying to publish today, but way behind. If you have a moment to draft something up, that would be a big help; I'll do the best I can with it if not. - Pete Forsyth ( talk) 04:21, 26 February 2017 (UTC)
Vipul Naik sponsors Wikipedia editing. See https://vipulnaik.com/sponsored-wikipedia-editing/ and https://contractwork.vipulnaik.com/ and http://effective-altruism.com/ea/w5/looking_for_wikipedia_article_writers_topics/ ((( The Quixotic Potato))) ( talk) 16:43, 6 February 2017 (UTC) @ Peteforsyth: I hope you guys can interview Vipul Naik, I think his project is very interesting. ((( The Quixotic Potato))) ( talk) 16:48, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
I think you should write an opinion piece on kids' edits. I'd do it but I edit under an Ip and I can't create pages. 68.233.214.74 ( talk) 18:28, 10 March 2017 (UTC)
The part that bites the hardest:
Think of Intellipedia as a Wikipedia for spies. It works the same, except that there’s no anonymity for contributors, and nothing can ever be unsourced.
Way to go, WP:V czar 17:13, 11 March 2017 (UTC)
English Wikipedia is going to get "a task force of trusted editors to act as referees in matters related to conflict of interest and outing" posted 16 March 2017. Details are murky at this time. – Bri ( talk) 20:17, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
https://twitter.com/IanMac111/status/847034550102507522/photo/1
©Geni ( talk) 10:12, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
I hope to have all the details soon. Please {{ ping}} me if you have questions about this before I get back to you. Whatamidoing (WMF) ( talk) 07:06, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
Dear Signpost editors,
Would you consider writing an article about the discussion happening within the Wikipedia community here: Wikipedia_talk:Translation#Machine-translations?
Best, Daniel.inform ( talk) 12:36, 3 April 2017 (UTC)
I cannot access the Scientific Advances paper directly [10] but here is The Verge's article on it [11]. Basically describing research on page views on our aircrash disaster articles, showing that older airline crash articles gain interest after a similar crash occurs, even if there are no direct wikilinks connecting the two. From this, they conclude that the "collective memory" of Wikipedia's readers is around 45 years. -- MASEM ( t) 18:17, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
Slashdot comments on
this story in the Guardian which discusses
this article in PLOS One entitled "Even good bots fight: The case of Wikipedia". From the abstract: "We find that, although Wikipedia bots are intended to support the encyclopedia, they often undo each other’s edits and these sterile “fights” may sometimes continue for years."
Perhaps it's news to the read-only community that bots edit here.
タチコマ robot,
RussBot,
Xqbot, and
DarknessBot are discussed, among others.
Chris Troutman (
talk)
04:13, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
Automated Wikipedia Edit-Bots Have Been Fighting Each Other For A Decade Hawkeye7 ( talk) 05:59, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
@ Peteforsyth: My first op-ed for the Signpost: User:Kaldari/Lead sentences have cancer. Kaldari ( talk) 03:57, 26 March 2017 (UTC)
Kaldari, finally reading this after an extended absence. I like it a lot! However, two issues with the headline/cancer theme: (1) I had complaints over Guy Macon's op-ed that the cancer metaphor was gratuitously triggering for a WMF employee who had endured the ravages of cancer, and would prefer to avoid exacerbating that issue one way or another; (2) I don't understand the connection to Guy's piece, and I'm confident that some of our less attentive readers would have even less idea what you're talking about with the mention of it at the end. Can you modify the piece to remove the references to his op-ed? (Or, if there is a worthwhile connection, help me to see what it is, and adjust to make it clearer to the general reader?) - Pete Forsyth ( talk) 04:30, 8 May 2017 (UTC)
I have written a tool to transfer files to Commons. Is this something that could be mentioned in the upcoming technology report? Thanks, FASTILY 07:03, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
We have passed the 5,000 mark for featured articles. See Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates#5K. While there isn't a clear "5000th article" as such, Waiting (2015 film), Phantasmagoria (video game) and Resident Evil 5 tipped us over from 4999 to 5002. Surely worth a mention! Josh Milburn ( talk) 16:21, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
The Core Contest is running will be over six weeks from 00:01 UTC 15 May to 23:59 UTC 30 June 2017. Once again, ₤250 of amazon vouchers are up for grabs. The contest focusses on improving Wikipedia's core material, with rewards for improving the worst eyesores. Casliber ( talk · contribs) will be joined by Megalibrarygirl ( talk · contribs) and Katherine (WMF) ( talk · contribs) in judging the contributions. Cas Liber ( talk · contribs) 14:04, 9 May 2017 (UTC)
Would Signpost be willing to mention the upcoming "420" collaboration, which is an effort to create and improve cannabis-related content during the second half of April (and especially on April 20)? Invitations are being sent to dozens on WikiProjects, and the campaign has already received some coverage by cannabis media outlets. Thanks for your consideration! --- Another Believer ( Talk) 15:20, 3 April 2017 (UTC)
Does anyone know if an issue will be published in April? Just curious. --- Another Believer ( Talk) 17:59, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
Never mind, the campaign has come and gone, unless someone wants to mention as a completed inaugural effort. --- Another Believer ( Talk) 20:33, 9 May 2017 (UTC)
Hello all,
The scientific publisher PLOS has just published a relevant blog post promoting the fact that their ' Topic Page' publishing format has been extended from PLOS Computation Biology to PLOS Genetics.
This allows academics who wouldn't otherwise consider writing for Wikipedia to be able to contribute in a format that is more familiar to them, and provides the academic brownie points needed for their careers. It looks as though 2017 is shaping up to be very successful for such ventures, see also:
It might be worth covering in some form or another. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo) talk 07:42, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
Unless I'm mistaken, the last issue of the Signpost was February 27, 2017. Is it just too hard to produce it without more staff? - kosboot ( talk) 16:22, 16 April 2017 (UTC)
I just came across, via Slashdot, a report in VICE News about China creating it's own (State run of course) competitor to Wikipedia called the Chinese Encyclopaedia, also apparently referred to by at least one official as the 'Great Wall of Culture'. At least 20,000 people have been recruited by to create and run this new online encyclopedia, including scholars from universities and research institutes who will contribute articles in more than 100 disciplines. This is intended to produce a knowledge base with more than 300,000 entries, each of which will be about 1,000 words long.
Here's an excerpt from the Vice article:
“The Chinese Encyclopaedia is not a book, but a Great Wall of culture,” Yang Muzhi, the editor-in-chief of the project and the chairman of the Book and Periodicals Distribution Association of China, said. He added that China was under pressure from the international community to produce an encyclopedia that will “guide and lead the public and society.”
The need for an online reference encyclopedia is in part a result of the Chinese government blocking access to Wikipedia. Chinese internet companies like Baidu and Qihoo 360 operate their own online encyclopedias, but none are capable of matching Wikipedia in terms of scale and breadth of information.
The aim of the new version of the Chinese encyclopedia is to showcase China’s latest science and technology developments, promote historical heritage, increase cultural soft power, and strengthen the core values of socialism, according to Yang, who stressed that the goal isn’t to mimic Wikipedia: “We have the biggest, most high-quality author team in the world. Our goal is not to catch up, but overtake.”At over 720 million users, China has the world’s largest internet population by a large margin, but it also has some of the world’s most restrictive internet laws.
This is going to be interesting, perhaps even in the Chinese sense of the word, so to speak.
Ceannlann gorm (
talk)
09:09, 2 May 2017 (UTC)
vi:User:Lê Thy, until recently a Vietnamese Wikipedia administrator, passed away this weekend. [12] – Minh Nguyễn 💬 18:08, 14 May 2017 (UTC)
Hey everyone! Aaron Halfaker's ( User:EpochFail) Reddit AMA is starting in about 30 minutes, and if the Signpost gets going again, it could be a fun thing to cover. He's focusing on artificial intelligence on Wikipedia and how we're working to counteract vandalism. We'd love to have your questions. Join us! Ed Erhart (WMF) ( talk) 20:37, 1 June 2017 (UTC)
The Rick Riordan task force of WikiProject Novels is hosting its first Edit-A-Thon to increase project visibility and member participation. In honor of his July birthday, the event will focus on pages related author/illustrator John Rocco. The event will last until the first day of August, when the most helpful contributor will be featured on RRTF's forums. More information can be found here on the talk page, also a good place for questions and comments. We welcome outside input and participation! -- 2ReinreB2 ( talk) 03:51, 3 June 2017 (UTC)
OTRS Commons-permission is used for permissions related to Images on Commons. Currently we have a backlog of ~700 messages and 73 days. This means that many people emailing permissions for their images will not be looked at for 2.5 months. Any delay over a 15 days is problematic because images without permission are mass deleted in 15 days. This slows the process even further as you need admins to undelete images, and you usually loose info about which article was image added to. Another side effect is that once you contact back the clients, they often angry (because they sent by that time 5 more desperate emails about their images being deleted), or unresponsive if you need further clarifications. This affects all the projects and we could use some more OTRS volunteers experienced with image licensing. -- Jarekt ( talk) 19:26, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
See Talk:Calibri and the article itself. The article has been full protected for a week over edit-warring about the date of release and the relevance of this date to an ongoing corruption case in Pakistan. Nthep ( talk) 16:32, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
This last few days, a huge shitstorm arose in the fr.wp community, making up for a good part of the 'Bistro' (Village Pump) discussion for the last days. At the center of it, the management of the French chapter, with several resignation on the board, conflicts of interest, members expelled, and so on. A detailled timeline is available, and several high profile wikimedians, such as former chairwoman Anthere are leading the efforts to clean up this mess. The Twitter #wmfrgate is widely used to discuss those issues. Defunes43 ( talk) 19:27, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
It has been a couple of years since I broke the story about the EN community - Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-08-26/In focus no longer being in decline. Despite that there is still a meme out there of the community being in decline, I've bumped into two editors in the last 24 hours who weren't aware that the 2007-2014 decline ended over two years ago. Since the story was originally broken in the signpost it seems appropriate to update it here - so would you like an update? Ϣere SpielChequers 12:12, 16 July 2017 (UTC)
Hello Signpost!
I have written a short description of our discovery of dates in Wikipedia.
It can be found here.
/info/en/?search=Wikipedia:Dates_in_Wikipedia
We believe this may interest Academics in the field of history and others.
We are even offering our large amount of data up to anybody who may find it useful.
We believe this may be a good candidates for coverage in The Signpost.
If that may be the case, I can expand on the article we already have and hopefully make a solid contribution to your fine publication.
Sincerely yours,
Jeffrey Roehl
jroehl2@yahoo.com
Jroehl ( talk) 14:07, 20 July 2017 (UTC)
Hi Signpost, I started the English language Wikipedia related podcast WikiJabber ( https://wikijabber.org, meta:WikiJabber). It has the same concept as my German language podcast WikiStammtisch (https:wikistammtisch.de, de:Wikipedia:WikiStammtisch): I talk with one or sometimes some people about Wikipedia, Life and all the rest. I would appriciate, if some people would join WikiJabber and if a lot of people would start to listen to it. -- Sebastian Wallroth ( talk) 09:49, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
Something for news and notes a report on an error in Wikipedia Ϣere SpielChequers 15:05, 8 September 2017 (UTC)
ACTRIAL goes live on 14 September. It would be good if a article could be written about it— RADICAL SODA(FORCE)TM 05:34, 12 September 2017 (UTC)
Thanks @ Forceradical and Kaldari:. I've put a short piece in the next issue's News and notes. I don't think we need much more until we get some results in from the trial. - Evad37 [ talk 02:46, 18 September 2017 (UTC)
Kaldari ( talk) 20:00, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
Greetings, Tonight at Roule Cheese I found external link to an interesting wiki.
Wondering if this would make for interesting article or news for Signpost? Regards, — JoeHebda • ( talk) 04:04, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
Vice Motherboard wrote a piece about the cabal that writes the encyclopedia. Chris Troutman ( talk) 21:11, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
The Paris Review's approach to its history. |
Very striking article coming out of Longreads regarding a literary magazine called The Paris Review. Their editor was recently fired for extremely 2017 reasons, which brought back into public attention via a widely-shared Twitter thread (which became this article) the fact that the magazine seems to have spent twelve years doing its best to totally airbrush out the existence of an editor, Brigid Hughes, who ran it for about a year (and who was, funnily enough, female).
This included deleting all mention of her from the Wikipedia article in a February 2011 edit. What that article didn't mention (I'm not sure anyone else has publicly mentioned it yet, either) is that that edit comes from an IP address registered to the magazine, which an edit made from the same IP address the previous year was happy to disclose. (The same campaign apparently involved bullying NPR into publishing a fawning apology for suggesting that the magazine's current format wasn't its founder's original vision for it.)
I don't know much about literary magazines and still less about this one, but I was amazed you could just wipe an editor's existence out of history. How do you get away with that one? Blythwood ( talk) 22:08, 23 December 2017 (UTC)
{{ done}} Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-01-16/In the media - Evad37 [ talk 16:12, 16 January 2018 (UTC)
We, as the compilers of the WP:Top 25 Report, have written a special report detailing the fifty most read articles of 2017 on en.wikipedia.org. It is located at the above link, and has been written as a joint project between seven different editors. Given the Signpost's support for the Report over the year, I feel that it would be apt that a special feature, or an article, be prepared on this specialised, larger than regular report. It is of interest to the reader-base, and I am suggesting it based on a discussion with Jimbo here. I think that it would be very well suited to the Signpost, and would greatly encourage and appreciate its coverage on these grounds. Stormy clouds ( talk) 19:45, 3 January 2018 (UTC)
{{ done}} Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-01-16/Traffic report - Evad37 [ talk 16:11, 16 January 2018 (UTC)
Controversial appointee by UK government said to have edited his own article 200 times: https://politicalscrapbook.net/2013/09/toby-young-has-edited-his-own-wikipedia-page-200-times-in-six-years/ -- A bit iffy ( talk) 22:29, 3 January 2018 (UTC)
{{ done}} Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-01-16/In the media - Evad37 [ talk 16:10, 16 January 2018 (UTC)
Government web address used to add 'Lucifer' to Peter Dutton's name. The joys of AussieParlEdits. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:03, 30 November 2017 (UTC)
The first ever content made in space specifically for Wikipedia was uploaded to Commons today, and is used on Paolo Nespoli. See Close encounters of the Wikipedia kind for how this happened. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:10, 29 November 2017 (UTC)
See here. ― Justin (koavf)❤ T☮ C☺ M☯ 08:52, 23 January 2018 (UTC)
Wikimedia Blog post! Wiki Loves Monuments will be coming on approx Thursday. Ed Erhart (WMF) ( talk) 19:54, 11 December 2017 (UTC)
Not sure this is appropriate for the Signpost, but if so: Wikipedia is often referred to as having "sister projects." We should really aim for gender-neutral language, so it might be a good idea to retire "sister projects" in favor of something like "allied projects." Just putting this out there might elevate people's sensitivity to how they use language. - kosboot ( talk) 20:00, 13 December 2017 (UTC)
wmfblog:2017/12/14/wiki-loves-monuments-international-winners/ Ed Erhart (WMF) ( talk) 15:40, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
Another blog post. :-) Ed Erhart (WMF) ( talk) 15:41, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
Hey, maybe something about the m:2017 Community Wishlist Survey, which the Community Tech team will work to address next year? The results are now in: m:2017 Community Wishlist Survey/Results. The top ten are:
I probably won't be around much for a couple of weeks after tomorrow, but ping User:DannyH (WMF) if you've got any questions or want comments and he'll be happy to give those. / Johan (WMF) ( talk) 20:01, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
I want to be a news reporter,and will earn wages if required — Preceding unsigned comment added by Austin patrick ( talk • contribs) 18:37, 19 December 2017 (UTC)