Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-06-19/News and notes

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Low voter numbers in WMF elections

• Regarding the voter numbers in WMF elections, I don't vote because I don't have any idea of who the candidates are. And that I trust that whatever decision that will be made will be a good one. Skalman (talk) 20:45, 20 June 2013 (UTC)
  • You are wrong. ;) The decision will be a good one only if participated: the WMF board can't act in isolation. --Nemo 21:12, 20 June 2013 (UTC)
    • I agree with Nemo, with the added bit that we (the Signpost) did extensive profiles of all of the candidates: the Board, part 1 and 2, and the FDC. Please read them, get to know the candidates, and make your vote. :-) Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 21:18, 20 June 2013 (UTC)
• The WMF elections have low numbers of voters because only Wikipedia insiders actually care anymore about what goes on at the heights of the WMF. Intrigue and power-playing are the lifeblood of said insiders, and so they will try to participate in decisions of power to the greatest extent possible. This is why ArbCom has not made any landmark rulings protecting content builders, but has merely existed to ensure that business as usual continues without getting too far out of hand. Wer900 • talk 21:31, 20 June 2013 (UTC)
  • I hate to agree with such a cynical comment, but I think Wer900 is right in that most potential voters do not view the WMF as having any direct operational influence on the projects. Perhaps this is the result of years of the WMF ducking responsibility for such things as child protection. When I raised the idea that the WMF's terms of use be used to deal with allegations of hostile environment sexual harassment (made by no less than Jimmy Wales), nothing happened, despite the very clear wording of the terms. It seems like that particular piece of boilerplate is intended for some other purpose than actually being used to deal with problem users. Perhaps voters don't see the relevance of voting for people that keep themselves at arm's length from the projects they manage. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 21:46, 20 June 2013 (UTC)
    • Then why not vote in people who will change that? There are individual editors running this year who are not members of chapters or have been disengaged with actual editing for some time. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 22:47, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

• how was which language you speak calculated for the voters. If its just which wiki is your sul home wiki, I think that is rather inaccurate. I was under the impression in previous years the voter list showed which wiki you voted from, which doesnt seem the case this year, but I might be mistaken. Bawolff (talk) 23:57, 20 June 2013 (UTC)
  • By home wiki: it's the best indication we have, and I think not too bad. English is likely to have a higher proportion of second-language speakers, of course; but they still regard en.WP, and its wiki-culture, as their home, apparently. Tony (talk) 01:25, 21 June 2013 (UTC)
• I'm an Arab and I didn't vote. Well, I was going to vote and I actually opened the previous Signpost issues and started reading them. I got bored half way and decided to go back to content creation. Mohamed CJ (talk) 00:50, 21 June 2013 (UTC)
  • I'm struck by the cynicism. I'm wondering whether participation in WMF "democracy" is not happening in the Arab Wikimedia world? Why are the Arab-speaking chapters and the Arab-WP community not organising for a good candidate or two to stand next time, with a policy platform that means something to Arab-speakers? Tony (talk) 01:46, 21 June 2013 (UTC)
    • I can't answer these questions as I'm not an active user of the Arabic WP (probably less than 10 edits), but I think it has to do with the weakness of the Arabic language content on the web in general. Mohamed CJ (talk) 06:42, 21 June 2013 (UTC)
      • Maybe the WMF movement needs your knowledge and ideas to make the presence of Arabic on our sites stronger. Tony (talk) 07:36, 21 June 2013 (UTC)
        • @Tony1: I'm interested in helping by whatever I can (probably after I return from the wiki-break starting tomorrow). How do you think I can help best? Mohamed CJ (talk) 13:01, 21 June 2013 (UTC)
        • Mohamed, now you've put me on the spot! There are now opportunities for forming a WMF-affiliated user group, which could become eligible to use the trademark and apply for funding if it presented a well-developed case for project activity. In a small country such as yours, the demographics favour the occasional physical meet-up. But finding other like-minded Wikimedians is critical, and a user group could link Arabic-speaking Wikimedians across that huge east–west distance. A good start would be to get together online with a few people and list ways in which the coverage of the Arabic language and Arab culture could be expanded and deepened (even including photography on Commons). I think the WMF volunteer AffCom (Affiliations Committee) would be willing to offer logistical and procedural advice; certainly one of their missions is to facilitate the formation of good user groups. I'm advised that there are no chapters in the Arabic-speaking world. Tony (talk) 14:48, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

The Indonesian voters are partly helped by campaign via Indonesian Wikipedia Facebook Groups. I curious though, how accurate the language count of the voters, if, let's say, I'm voting from Meta? Bennylin (talk) 11:13, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

I tried to vote but gave up. Simply too difficult. Seems it is organised for programmers. Besides of that WMF and so on (local chapters etc) in my experience really does not connect to the average contributor. It does not mean WMF etc is irrelevant, but that for someone who want to have fun contributing to Wikipedia it is simply a step away from the fun. Best regards Ulflarsen (talk) 15:26, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

I voted last year but not this time simply because I found it such hard work. Its like the voting system has been designed for some theoretical 'ideal' rather than what would engage voters. 146.90.180.38 (talk) 21:54, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

I agree. I'm a veteran editor and member of a Wikimedia chapter, but found the voting process to be confusing. I gave up on it on my first attempt, but ploughed through it on my second attempt. The quality of the candidates seems high, and it's a shame that the voting system doesn't encourage participation. Nick-D (talk) 01:21, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

I didn't made it on my first attempt too. The problem was: it's on wmf site, the first thing (well, almost) that I noticed was that I was not logged in. Then after I ignored that and tried to vote anyway, lo and behold, it said that I wasn't logged in. I decided to gave it a second chance after several days (I reckon very few people would do second chances) assuming that the first was a glitch and hopefully didn't happen again, and I successfully voted. Have it been tested on non-programmers yet? For wikis that didn't have any representation among the candidates, it felt like I was voting for UNICEF board members: interesting, but would never connect personally. Not that far from steward elections. Bennylin (talk) 17:16, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

All you have to do is select whether you support, oppose, or are neutral on the candidates, right? How do you all above think that the WMF can improve the interface? Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 01:28, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

I'd suggest a 'flatter' structure to the website, and separate votes on each category with the explanatory material more clearly displayed - I found that I had to dig around for information about what it was I was voting for. Nick-D (talk) 10:18, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

I left a note on a few of the Wikipedia pages, e.g. Arabic Wikipedia. There are now five votes from ar.wp. ;-( John Vandenberg ^(chat) 06:47, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

I'm not interested on the elections. The WMF did not supply any reason why to vote. So who cares? Many don't, neither do I. Matthiasb (talk) 21:16, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

I agree. I abstained from voting mainly due to my unfamiliarity of the candidates, and the voting interface, though I doubt it is possible to simply, is simply too difficult to decide. I cared about this election, but couldn't bear to vote someone that I have never heard of. --Hydriz (talk) 03:21, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

It's really interesting what happened to the Arab language. It has enough very active and active editors and more than enough readers according to statistic provided by wikimedia server. Compares to Javanese language Wikipedia who struggle with adding editors and still creeping up on readership. Both have similarity: their increase (probably) caused by project based effort. It shows that project, regardless additional editors to article number result - don't make community. 110.138.45.11 (talk) 05:45, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

A million articles... With a bot

I must say I find it hard to understand why so many people are vehemently opposed to bot-generated stubs. I myself am very much in favor of bots doing the tedious work of creating stub articles for individual species in invertebrate zoology and botany. I do understand the inevitable Immediatist versus Eventualist disagreement on Wikipedia, but still... I am amazed that in Wikipedia (of all places!) so many people intensely dislike the idea of bots creating these helpful little stubs. Once stubs are in place it is extremely easy for relative newcomers to add images or other useful pieces of information. It is a big nuisance to have to create your own stub every time you want to add an image of a species that is not represented, and I think many people who are not very experienced may be put off by that necessity. I know that some people loathe stubs, but until we ban humans from creating stubs (which are much more likely to be error-prone and much harder to fix), I don't see why we should say it is terrible to let bots create them. Invertzoo (talk) 00:06, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

I'm with Invertzoo on this matter. I think such stubs are useful. Like seed crystals. It seems to me that regardless of their being sketchy on a social/statistical/competitive_ego level (i.e. to pump up stats to achieve 'milestone' recognition) the use of such stub creating bots still has a practical benefit in seeding encyclopedic articles. I'd like to encourage folks to give consideration to how much 'keeping score' and 'viewing things as a competitive game' may be influencing some peoples attitudes. Their initial emotional responses. Would this issue be any where near as contentious if weight hadn't been given to a numerical milestone in the first place?

Technology progresses and automation is part of that. I'm not writing this with a stick in the mud, nor on papyrus w/ a reed pen, nor on vellum w/ a quill, nor on paper with a typewriter. It seems sensible to me to take advange of software based tools in a software based environment. Subject to human consideration and oversight. A consideration might be to flag such stubs for review or automatic deletion if there's no growth within some period of time, say 6, 12, 18 months or whatever and to have them posted into an organized category so that folks who specialize in the relevant fields may easily access them. Feed, facilitate, and foster them instead of damning their diminutiveness. --Kevjonesin (talk) 04:27, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

I am torn with Lsj's style of editing, especially after bearing witness to what it has done to the Cebuano and Waray-Waray Wikipedias, where his bot was first deployed. On the one hand, yes, bots do help increase the coverage of a given Wikipedia, but it does no good if they stay as stubs forever ("permastubs"). The Cebuano and Waray-Waray Wikipedias are beset with the problem of having tens of thousands of stubs on virtually everything, but no editors to expand the content. We can't presume that editors will just magically jump in and edit: what if they don't?

For me, I will always emphasize quality over quantity on smaller-language projects. I would prefer a Wikipedia which has thousands of well-written articles, compared to a Wikipedia which has hundreds of thousands of permastubs. --Sky Harbor ^(talk) 06:58, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

It's a pity that ceb.wp and war.wp will always be remembered as sv.wp's experiment sandbox. Bennylin (talk) 17:18, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

I'm also with Invertzoo on this. User:Polbot used to create species articles (scroll to bot function #6) from a database back in 2007. So don't call kettle black on this one, because we were there in the past. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 06:54, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for that, Ohana—I wasn't aware of any similar bots on en.wp beyond the early rambot. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 07:01, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

English Wikipedia is also pretty heavy on current and former bot-created stubs, by Rambot, Polbot and others. Even though there are a lot of well-developed bird articles, most were started by Polbot. They helped us by adding useful information, saving human editors time, and providing an invitation to edit the articles. The German Wikipedia just has its own philosophy on stubs, human or bot written. English and Swedish Wikipedia use them as one step to gradually, incrementally building up content, while they want a more finished product. I don't care whether bots inflate counts, since using them is productive, if you don't have such strict standards. —innotata 14:16, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Without wishing to join the debate here, let me just add a few pertinent facts:

• @Kevjonesin: The bot-created articles are already flagged and organized in special categories, just as you wish: sv:Kategori:Robotskapade artiklar, ceb:Kategoriya:Paghimo ni bot, war:Kaarangay:Himo hin bot. Looking at the first test run, creating around 8,000 articles about bird species in February 2012, the majority have by now been checked and de-flagged by other editors on svwp.
• @Bennylin, @Sky Harbor: It is not accurate to call ceb.wp and war.wp "sv.wp's experiment sandbox", nor are these where my bot was first deployed. The experimenting and development was done initially on svwp, with the finished code ported to the other languages only after full-scale production was already underway on svwp. In the case of war.wp, this was done at the express request of one of its sysops. Ceb.wp was my own idea; it is my wife's native language, and I wanted to contribute to it the best I could without being a fluent speaker.

Lsj (talk) 16:27, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

I am aware that JinJian made a request for bot-generated stubs after he generated his own set of stubs which pushed the Waray-Waray Wikipedia up to 100,000 articles, and I am aware that your wife is Cebuana (yes, I've been following both the Cebuano and Waray-Waray cases for some time now), but the question still stands: what guarantee do we have that increasing article counts in this manner will generate the editorship necessary to update them? Wikimedia Philippines for one is slowly starting to establish a user group for Waray-Waray speakers (of which JinJian is the only Wikipedian in that group so far), and we're hoping to attract more editors, but in the absence of that, the likelihood of the two Wikipedias being full of permastubs is more probable. This is why editors on the Tagalog Wikipedia have opposed the mass generation of stubs: we feel that it is not in our best interest to dilute the quality of the encyclopedia for the sake of increasing article counts, and to this day we're still feeling the effects of having so many stubs which can't possibly be updated.

I am happy that you helped the Swedish Wikipedia get to one million articles using your bot, but at least the Swedish Wikipedia has a sustainable community that can work toward expanding those stubs. That cannot be said for the Cebuano and Waray-Waray Wikipedias, which at most have only one active editor each. --Sky Harbor ^(talk) 16:50, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

So I do my best to recruit more editors in Cebu, see e.g. here :) You do have a valid concern, but frankly, I don't believe the bot articles are lowering the average article quality on cebwp, a lot of the manually created stubs are worse. Compare e.g. hand-written ceb:Mananap (animal) with any of the bot-created articles. Cebwp and warwp both lack critical mass today, without enough articles to attract a solid reader base from which to recruit editors, and not enough editors to create that article base. My hope is that bot creation can help to break out of that vicious circle. Possibly that's a vain hope, but hand-writing isn't getting them off the ground either. Lsj (talk) 20:16, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

The bot won my contribution time

As someone who often tries to add photos of plants or animals that I know almost nothing about (having simply copied their binomial from a label), I completely agree with Invertzoo. I would really prefer not to have to look up all the bits and pieces to make a stub if they can be scripted from a database. If the stub is already there, I can even add a picture to another language wiki. I guess that's why sv:Gudeoconcha sophiae ceb:Gudeoconcha sophiae war:Gudeoconcha sophiae, and sv:Epiglypta howinsulae ceb:Epiglypta howinsulae war:Epiglypta howinsulae have illustrated articles about Gudeoconcha sophiae and Epiglypta howinsulae, species which live(d) solely on an English speaking Island, while the English Wikipedia does not! (Undoubtedly User:Invertzoo, a Gastropod expert, will help me rectify this, but that's not the point.) --99of9 (talk) 10:23, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

This makes perfect sense. I do wish that WMF projects would lose their sense of base-10 thresholds as some kind of competition; it really detracts from the quality of articles as the more important benchmark of success. Tony (talk) 10:42, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

If the base-10 competition inspired the bot to write stubs for me to add to, then I'm not that unhappy with it. But I'm all for celebrating quality as well as quantity. Do you have a way of benchmarking quality across wikipedias? (Even within en-wiki - do we celebrate e.g. base-10 FA/GA/FL/FT/FP moments?)--99of9 (talk) 11:57, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

I like the idea of bots doing the grunt work and preparing an easy to improve stub for us squishier types of contributors. Starting an article from nothing can be intimidating for people, not to mention hard if you want to do it well, with all the categories, info boxes etc. Also, I find it heartening to see smaller wikipedias expanding this way. I didn't notice if the bots were using information from the English wikipedia to help with the work, but one of the reasons I contribute to the English wikipedia is my hope that some of this great collection of people's good will can one day find its way to Slovene wikipedia as well. --U5K0'sTalk_{Make WikiLove not WikiWar} 18:30, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Raschka's comments: wording/grammar mess

The following needs someone who actually knows what it's supposed to mean to fix it:

Raschka told the Signpost that these articles were stubs a impart little useful information to readers—he asks, "who could be helped [these] fragment[s] of data?"

Should it be "were stubs that impart" or "were stubs and impart" or something like that? And the direct quote is [fixed from the original] but winds up still making no sense. Should it be "helped [by these]"? DMacks (talk) 00:44, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Fixed, thanks! I tried to make two sentences into one and then forgot to fix the grammar. :-) Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 00:51, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick fix! DMacks (talk) 05:18, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Where voters come from

I noticed the statistics regarding where the voters come from. It does skew the numbers greatly that all links to the SecurePoll page in the Signpost article and the meta page explaining where to vote, are to the English Wikipedia version. If a great number of people have an account there, I wouldn't be surprised if many of them didn't bother changing the URL to their home wiki. -Svavar Kjarrval (talk) 01:07, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

An account is not enough, they also have to be active enough to be eligible on the wiki where they open Special:SecurePoll; for most users that's only their home wiki, though e.g. I may be eligible on a dozen wiki. The Meta pages link either to Meta or to a local page, only the English version should link here. --Nemo 08:17, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Language	Voters	Very active Wikipedians
English	592	3321
German	221	982
Italian	157	445
French	153	795
Spanish	82	542
Polish	48	245
Chinese	41	299
Other	310	ru 658 ja 346 pt 201 nl 249 sv 114

Now this table is more representative. I mean, if you take enough time to read the candidates' opinions, then I guess very voters have less than 100 edits a month. (source: stats.wikimedia.org)

The number of English-language voters doesn't seem that high to me. --NaBUru38 (talk) 01:14, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

Pric-o-pedia

The portrait of Jimmy Wales is hilarious and skillful. I have no idea why anyone would vote to delete the portrait, and the image is a flattering likeness of Wales, so I can't imagine why he objected to it if, indeed, he did. -- Ssilvers (talk) 21:54, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

For what it's worth, he considered it to be Hostile environment sexual harassment. You may or may not agree, but such concerns are surely worth taking seriously. The arguments to delete the picture were mostly based on the assumption that it was created in order to harass or humiliate a living person; in the end, however, Commons decided to keep it. Robofish (talk) 21:18, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

pl wiki and sv wiki

"By the same metric, the Polish are twice the size of the Swedish." Userbase = active editors?

Compare sv an pl wiki. Stub ratio = 0.4135 for sv wiki and 0.5067 for pl wiki; depth = 18 for both of them. Pl wiki has more stubs! Long pages: in pl wiki and in sv wiki. Number of edits = 37486690 in pl wiki and only 23063785 in sv wiki. More users = more edits =/= more larger articles. 1 bot = thousands of stub-creators. Sławek Borewicz (talk) 22:40, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Something else. Bot activity article creation: 16% in pl wiki and 47% in sv wiki. Compare with stub ratio. Sławek Borewicz (talk) 22:50, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

• It is sad that bots are creating these short articles. Today I clicked on the Random Article link 10 times, and 3 of the articles were created by bots. It is also a pity how they tested it; I clicked the Random Article link on the Cebuano Wikipedia repeatedly, and it took about twenty clicks to get to an article created by a human. And also, these bots could mistake unreliable sources as reliable, which would make things bad. Citrusbowler (talk) (contribs) (email me) 15:43, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

I needed 25 26 (Sorry, ceb:Burg was also created by a bot) --Metrónomo (talk) 01:38, 5 July 2013 (UTC)