The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2013-02-25. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.
Kaldari suggests that rather than take over Webcite, we should just give it some money. Strikes me as the sensible approach - David Gerard ( talk) 08:19, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-02-25/Featured content
With a couple of exceptions, these are all stories on paid editing/COI editing. It's clearly time to get site-wide rules on this and make precisely clear to everybody what's allowed and what's not allowed. And then enforce those rules. Otherwise we'll become as commercial as Facebook. Not even the PR folks want that - it's only good for them to post their stuff here if Wikipedia has some credibility. Smallbones( smalltalk) 06:09, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
As for Sarah Stierch's comments off-wiki, yeah! Wikipedia is stange and scary! To me, six years ago, not so much, since the wierdness and scaryness developed gradually during my participation, but newbie User:Thomas Craven discusses this topic well. His "Puzzleocracy" comment is part of it. We don't want people to think that we'll WP:BITE them if they trip over one of our complex guidelines, nerdy customs etc, but they do get barked at, partly by bots and partly by my fellow old-timers who are too darn eager to defend the gates from hordes of barbarians. Jim.henderson ( talk) 18:20, 2 March 2013 (UTC)
Though I'm really happy about the new administrators, and about the fact that we are getting more administrators faster, that we have in January and February passed as many administrators as a quarter of the entire year 2012 invites me to do the arithmatic myself (so, we have in two months done the same as a quarter in 2012, which is the equivalent of 3 months, so we're taking 33% less time to promote the same number of administrators, equivalent to promoting 50% more administrators). I have boldly changed this to "The four successful RfAs in January, combined with the three in February, make seven adminitrators promoted so far in 2013. In the first two months of 2012 we promoted only four adminitrators." This is far clearer to me. YMMV, feel free to revert. Martijn Hoekstra ( talk) 09:20, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
Re:Chapters Association elections
It is telling that Fæ, in his statement, has chosen to misrepresent the circumstances relating to his ban. Both Michaeldsuarez and I have posted requests for corrections. Since neither is able to post here, I will not comment further except to say that I would like to consider this episode closed, but Fæ seems to bring it up wherever and whenever he can. Delicious carbuncle ( talk) 17:34, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
Thank you for letting others know that the continuities between Wikipedia and past encyclopedias are numerous and significant. Regarding Wikipedia's uniqueness, can you open up any other encyclopedia or most other published works and personally verify each of its sentences? Regarding the statement "Even those responsible for a singly authored encyclopedia were relying on predecessors," Wikipedia does not just rely on predecessors. Among several unique aspects, Wikipedia articles are limited to what predecessors have written, e.g., no original research, and Wikipedia's line up to add it for free. In the history of encyclopedic production, has anyone else put as their number one rule that each contributor is to have little or no concern for oneself, especially with regard to fame, position, money, or view? As for which predecessors, there is the effort that coverage is to be independent of the subject. Has any other encyclopedic adopted as a premise that a worst source of information is the subject itself? Hey, let's build an encyclopedia where the publishing decisions of everyone but the subject itself can be used in the writing. Who in their right mind could conceive of something like that? Yet, here we are, imposing selflessness on ourselves and on the subject of an article to coalesce bits of information from around the world that have published since the beginning of the first printed word into articles that best capture what others are saying about a subject in a verifiable, unbiased way. -- Uzma Gamal ( talk) 10:24, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
It is good to see more research going on in this area, even if the article in question is behind a [[pay wall]. Looking at the list in the wikipedia entry for Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia I see no reference to the proposal for a Workers Encyclopedia which the Russian Machists ( Maxim Gorky, Alexander Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky came up with in 1908, and which Bogdanov tried to implement in 1919. Unfortunately, this project never really got of the ground, thanks to opposition from the Leninists, and unavailability of documentation, we cannot assess to what extent their proposal would have answered User:Uzma Gamal's question above. Likewise, Aksel Berg made a proposal for an on-line encyclopedia in his 1962 paper Cybernetics and Education. But this along with the associated educational reforms got lost when Brezhnev came to power in the USSR in 1964. I also feel that a discussion of these issues could usefully take place in the contect of Marshal McLuhan's Understanding Media. Another matter in which I am interested is this: what do Wikipedia editors understand by encyclopedia and to what extent do previous models inform their practice?
We have EPOV, it's called "the top ten hits on Google". EPOV with relevancy weighting is ideal NPOV.
Multiple POVs is a perennial proposal. But the reader demand does not appear to be there - David Gerard ( talk) 08:06, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
I'm trying to figure out how to say that stigmergy is essentially the same term as crowdsourcing in the context of these stories in a mildly negative way. Hmpf!? Josh Joaquin ( talk) 08:53, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
Sister cities are usually unsourced and incomplete. Despite this, they are surprisingly accurate.
By the way, Saint Peterburg's list of sister cities has evolved from an unsourced mess to an organized and fully sourced list. Kudos to the maintainers of the list. -- Enric Naval ( talk) 23:07, 1 March 2013 (UTC)
The CMU paper on mildly negative feedback is interesting -- in layman's terms, it seems to hearken back to the long-standing wiki principle of "always leave something to do" as a way to encourage others to contribute. Seems like something to keep in mind when reviewing articles and leaving newbie feedback.
Thanks for this month's research newsletter, all really interesting. -- phoebe / ( talk to me) 16:53, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
I would like to see the p-value for the 1.8% figure. Josh Joaquin ( talk) 07:35, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2013-02-25. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.
Kaldari suggests that rather than take over Webcite, we should just give it some money. Strikes me as the sensible approach - David Gerard ( talk) 08:19, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-02-25/Featured content
With a couple of exceptions, these are all stories on paid editing/COI editing. It's clearly time to get site-wide rules on this and make precisely clear to everybody what's allowed and what's not allowed. And then enforce those rules. Otherwise we'll become as commercial as Facebook. Not even the PR folks want that - it's only good for them to post their stuff here if Wikipedia has some credibility. Smallbones( smalltalk) 06:09, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
As for Sarah Stierch's comments off-wiki, yeah! Wikipedia is stange and scary! To me, six years ago, not so much, since the wierdness and scaryness developed gradually during my participation, but newbie User:Thomas Craven discusses this topic well. His "Puzzleocracy" comment is part of it. We don't want people to think that we'll WP:BITE them if they trip over one of our complex guidelines, nerdy customs etc, but they do get barked at, partly by bots and partly by my fellow old-timers who are too darn eager to defend the gates from hordes of barbarians. Jim.henderson ( talk) 18:20, 2 March 2013 (UTC)
Though I'm really happy about the new administrators, and about the fact that we are getting more administrators faster, that we have in January and February passed as many administrators as a quarter of the entire year 2012 invites me to do the arithmatic myself (so, we have in two months done the same as a quarter in 2012, which is the equivalent of 3 months, so we're taking 33% less time to promote the same number of administrators, equivalent to promoting 50% more administrators). I have boldly changed this to "The four successful RfAs in January, combined with the three in February, make seven adminitrators promoted so far in 2013. In the first two months of 2012 we promoted only four adminitrators." This is far clearer to me. YMMV, feel free to revert. Martijn Hoekstra ( talk) 09:20, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
Re:Chapters Association elections
It is telling that Fæ, in his statement, has chosen to misrepresent the circumstances relating to his ban. Both Michaeldsuarez and I have posted requests for corrections. Since neither is able to post here, I will not comment further except to say that I would like to consider this episode closed, but Fæ seems to bring it up wherever and whenever he can. Delicious carbuncle ( talk) 17:34, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
Thank you for letting others know that the continuities between Wikipedia and past encyclopedias are numerous and significant. Regarding Wikipedia's uniqueness, can you open up any other encyclopedia or most other published works and personally verify each of its sentences? Regarding the statement "Even those responsible for a singly authored encyclopedia were relying on predecessors," Wikipedia does not just rely on predecessors. Among several unique aspects, Wikipedia articles are limited to what predecessors have written, e.g., no original research, and Wikipedia's line up to add it for free. In the history of encyclopedic production, has anyone else put as their number one rule that each contributor is to have little or no concern for oneself, especially with regard to fame, position, money, or view? As for which predecessors, there is the effort that coverage is to be independent of the subject. Has any other encyclopedic adopted as a premise that a worst source of information is the subject itself? Hey, let's build an encyclopedia where the publishing decisions of everyone but the subject itself can be used in the writing. Who in their right mind could conceive of something like that? Yet, here we are, imposing selflessness on ourselves and on the subject of an article to coalesce bits of information from around the world that have published since the beginning of the first printed word into articles that best capture what others are saying about a subject in a verifiable, unbiased way. -- Uzma Gamal ( talk) 10:24, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
It is good to see more research going on in this area, even if the article in question is behind a [[pay wall]. Looking at the list in the wikipedia entry for Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia I see no reference to the proposal for a Workers Encyclopedia which the Russian Machists ( Maxim Gorky, Alexander Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky came up with in 1908, and which Bogdanov tried to implement in 1919. Unfortunately, this project never really got of the ground, thanks to opposition from the Leninists, and unavailability of documentation, we cannot assess to what extent their proposal would have answered User:Uzma Gamal's question above. Likewise, Aksel Berg made a proposal for an on-line encyclopedia in his 1962 paper Cybernetics and Education. But this along with the associated educational reforms got lost when Brezhnev came to power in the USSR in 1964. I also feel that a discussion of these issues could usefully take place in the contect of Marshal McLuhan's Understanding Media. Another matter in which I am interested is this: what do Wikipedia editors understand by encyclopedia and to what extent do previous models inform their practice?
We have EPOV, it's called "the top ten hits on Google". EPOV with relevancy weighting is ideal NPOV.
Multiple POVs is a perennial proposal. But the reader demand does not appear to be there - David Gerard ( talk) 08:06, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
I'm trying to figure out how to say that stigmergy is essentially the same term as crowdsourcing in the context of these stories in a mildly negative way. Hmpf!? Josh Joaquin ( talk) 08:53, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
Sister cities are usually unsourced and incomplete. Despite this, they are surprisingly accurate.
By the way, Saint Peterburg's list of sister cities has evolved from an unsourced mess to an organized and fully sourced list. Kudos to the maintainers of the list. -- Enric Naval ( talk) 23:07, 1 March 2013 (UTC)
The CMU paper on mildly negative feedback is interesting -- in layman's terms, it seems to hearken back to the long-standing wiki principle of "always leave something to do" as a way to encourage others to contribute. Seems like something to keep in mind when reviewing articles and leaving newbie feedback.
Thanks for this month's research newsletter, all really interesting. -- phoebe / ( talk to me) 16:53, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
I would like to see the p-value for the 1.8% figure. Josh Joaquin ( talk) 07:35, 28 February 2013 (UTC)