Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-10-29/In the media

Latest comment: 9 years ago by Vchimpanzee in topic Discuss this story

Discuss this story

  • Both the third and fourth sentences of the article in the New York Times, a US newspaper, mention the World Health Organization (WHO) website as well as that of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the national public health institute of the US. The Signpost story does not mention the WHO website at all. The current Ebola epidemic has caused at least 4,922 deaths, of which one has been in the US. Qwfp (talk) 20:41, 31 October 2014 (UTC)Reply
    • Qwfp, while it is true that the New York Times (NYT) does discuss WHO, the summary that I wrote concentrated on comparing page views for the CDC & Wikipedia. The NYT did not report any page counts for the WHO. I was also writing late at night to ensure I made Wednesday's deadline. If I had more time, I may have written a fuller account.
I have the utmost respect for the WHO. Until recently, I was a part-time reference librarian at a university with a nursing school. When nursing students came to me for international statistics for their epidemiology papers, I always gave them a Google query, like this one for Ebola statistics: (site:who.org OR site:int) -site:wipo.int ebola statistic*. Of course, who.int always was prominent, with a few other international sites appearing further down in the results. In case you were wondering, the "-site:wipo.int" excludes the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), since pages from that source pretty much only refer to drug patents.
While the summary may have come off as North American-centric, I do not think that page views of en.wikipedia are exclusively from that region. The 840,000,000 English speakers (first & second language) is more than double than the combined population of Canada & the U.S.
In the future, I will try to remember the international reach of Wikipedia & include that perspective when appropriate. I also invite you to look at anything that I have written before publication in Signpost. I find that my imperfect work benefits greatly from the polishing of other editors.
Thanks, Peaceray (talk) 05:52, 2 November 2014 (UTC)Reply
  • Regarding your story "Biography of teenage footballer becomes viral sensation", now the article has been deleted after discussion and overwhelming consensus at that. So viral no more? Newspapers still may mention him, but when you go to see what they are all talking about in Wikipedia, there will be no trace but this sad page: page 1. By the way all history on the page has been removed as well. So you can't go back and see the earlier history at least. But at least we've got his photo in Signpost... werldwayd (talk) 00:40, 2 November 2014 (UTC)Reply
  • Is anyone else seeing a lot of white space? I tried to fix it but then the politician ended up in the section on the footballer and the footballer got moved to another section.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 21:25, 3 November 2014 (UTC)Reply