Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-06-03/News and notes

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• Blue? I don't see any blue names in the ranking chart, but I do see green ones. I've double checked my settings and looked from three different devices, and it looks green on all of them, not blue. Incidentally, red and green are the colours most difficult for colour-blind individuals to differentiate. Risker (talk) 18:59, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

Risker, thanks, and fixed. I completely forgot about red–green when bumbling about with the colours. Tony (talk) 08:19, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

• Mooted? Please be careful using words that have very different or even nearly-opposite meanings in different parts of the English-speaking world. In some countries such as England, "moot" typically means "open for discussion/presented as an idea." In other countries, "moot" typically means "unimportant" or "reduced it unimportance." davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 19:30, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

Good point. The use of 'moot' as a verb meaning 'to reduce or remove the practical significance of'[1] is an obscure use that I wasn't aware of until I looked it up in a dictionary, though the adjectival meaning of 'insignificant' is well known. (I guess it is OK to edit the article to use a better word: I don't think we should expect all Signpost authors to be familiar with obscure ambiguities around the world.) --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 12:34, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

• My suggestion for solving the "diversity problem," so-called, would be for Jan-Bart to take a wikibreak and resign his seat in favor of a female from outside of Europe and North America, preferably one older than 50 years old. Don't put "diversity" on the community-elected seats, put that on the board for its appointed 5 seats. The gender/age/ethnicity of those can be directly controlled. The last discretionary appointee was Guy Kawasaki, a North American male. Money where mouth is, and all that. —Tim Davenport /// Carrite (talk) 21:37, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

  Both Jan-Bart and Stu are stepping down at the end of their term this December, as noted two years ago when they were reappointed. And in fact the last two appointees fit the demographic you mention. – SJ + 00:18, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

  Concern trolling aside, I agree any solution to address this issue should apply to the entire board, not just the community seats. There's no reason the composition of the board can't be rearranged to have seats, either additional ones or re-purposed existing ones, designated for a specific continent, for example. Gamaliel (talk) 00:30, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

  Whether or not Carrite's suggestion was genuine, it is an eminently sensible way of achieving greater diversity, is guaranteed to achieve its aim, and can be implemented now if it's thought to be that important, without needing to change voting procedures and wait 2 years for the next election. I also agree with Carrite's suggestion that age diversity is important and should be taken into account along with gender and ethnicity.--greenrd (talk) 10:56, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

• I'm looking at the Facebook conversation and going "what the heck?" at some of the comments. "If you look at the voting counts, the election was, once again, dominated by major languages and projects. At this point, I seriously think the Board needs to do something in order to give more incentive to people outside of the U.S. and Europe to actually participate in our movement's politics." So the biggest projects should be disenfranchised? The English-language Wikipedia proportion of votes (30.64%) was actually less than the proportion of their eligible voters (35.38%). --NeilN ^{talk to me} 00:07, 7 June 2015 (UTC)
  • I've tired of pointing out that if you don't read English, you're in the gutter on Meta election pages: relying on the availability of volunteer translators is not going to work. Is it a comfortable moral construct that "if x language community can't supply a volunteer translator, that's their fault"? WMF elections are surely a high priority for contracted translation into targeted languages. For designing a system, even on a trial basis, I'd like to see an editor survey of English-language reading ability among the non-English-language communities, particularly outside Europe.

    What proportion of Japanese Wikipedians can struggle through an English-language candidate statement, and the instructions? Only two-point-something percent of their elegible editors voted. Isn't the apparently insular Japanese community one of the elephants in our living room? If we can get the data <cough>, we'll know whether to prioritise—for example, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, and Russian, over German and French, where a much larger proportion of eligible voters might have enough English. Don't we have stats from an editor survey some years back that show what proportion from each language group also read or edit en.WP? That would be a start, but new and better data are needed if this is to be a truly international body. I have to say that I'd rather spend money on good translation to make the movement more cohesive and more democratic through language accessibility than on some of the rather expensive offline activities I see being put to grantmaking that can make only a tenuous case for impact. Tony (talk) 03:22, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

  If chapters / user groups (I am not very clear on the distinction) think that hiring translators is important, they can apply for funds / use their existing funds to do this. I don't see why the foundation has to be held responsible if relevant chapters / user groups exist and don't make an effort.--greenrd (talk) 10:59, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

  I actually doubt that these chapters or user groups exist for every "relevant" language. And I think that if WMF wants diversity of candidates/voters/trustees it in fact is indeed their responsibility not to make that only hardly possible. → «« Man77 »» 11:31, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

  Surely all of these chapters of ours could handle doing translations...? If the WMF asked. ResMar 16:57, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

  Probably. I, however, doubt that it is their job to translate what WMF wants to have translated. But yes, most of them probably could handle that. This however fails to cover languages as unimportant as Japanese and Turkish. → «« Man77 »» 22:17, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

  • Concerning the Facebook thread, I'm disappointed that this walled garden was used as a forum to discuss Wikipedia; trying to access the thread, I find I need a FB account. I don't have a FB account for the simple reason I have enough online time sinks to deal with. Something I hope folks remember in the future. -- llywrch (talk) 23:07, 7 June 2015 (UTC)
• I'm very concerned by the results of the election. Denny and Dariusz don't want the the terms of use to forbid paid editing. James and Dariusz don't think that increasing the number of editors in the "global south" should be a priority, James doesn't think that it should be a priority to reduce gender gap. And neither thinks that Wikimedia should advocate for freedom of information. (Source) --NaBUru38 (talk) 23:32, 7 June 2015 (UTC)
  • NaBUru, it's an order of priorities; it doesn't necessarily mean that a candidate disagrees with pursuing a priority just because others might crowd in further up the list. Tony (talk) 02:26, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

I, for one, am quite satisfied with the results of the election. ResMar 12:51, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

James and Dariusz said that their top priorities are providing more engineering resources to improve user experience. I think that the Foundation should have as first priority to develop the community. I'm very concerned that the elected members of the Board are more worried about the website design. --NaBUru38 (talk) 21:27, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

And that matches what I most want to see from the our community advocates. ResMar 02:29, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

• Please flip your graphs so they're not completely counterintuitive. Also, now that we have multiple graph extensions, there's no reason for these graphs to be un-editable images. —Swpb^talk 13:30, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

I've fixed the first one; hopefully someone else can do the second. —Swpb^talk 14:55, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

Some improvements in the table, and the first graph I like, except it's now the opposite of the vertical arrangement of the second graph. I see no how-to guide for this "multiple graph extension". Tony (talk) 15:53, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

The syntax is here: mediawikiwiki:Extension:EasyTimeline/syntax. The second graph may be better arranged horizontally. There's also mediawikiwiki:Extension:Graph, but it's beta. —Swpb^talk 17:21, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

My impatience won out, and I did the second graph. —Swpb^talk 18:44, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

@Swpb: We're recruiting a data viz person at the Signpost right now. The problem with the Graphs extensions is that it's a full suite graphing utility that's hard to use directly and is very complicated, so we would love to have someone experienced with them or willing to learn them to help us out with our data visualizations. ResMar 20:47, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

@Resident Mario: Thanks for the offer. I really don't know EasyTimeline that well; my work above is very kludgey. I know you guys at Signpost are often shorthanded, and I'd love to help out when I can, but I can't responsibly commit to a regular role. —Swpb^talk 19:23, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

If you're interested in the graph extension, I recommend reading https://github.com/trifacta/vega/wiki/Tutorial . Bawolff (talk) 05:45, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, Bawolff. I've read a little and bookmarked it. Strikes me that to get it out to editors more widely, a video tutorial, tightly produced with animation and voice-over (and subtitles into other languages), would be a good spending of donors' funds by WMF tech. The Youtube file currently available is a start, but at 52 minutes' duration is far too big a chunk for most users; I also wanted something that gets straight to process after a brief intro explaining, in 20 seconds, the advantages of interactivity and editability onwiki. Worth chopping into two to four shorter, digestible, specifically themed tutorials, don't you think, aimed at Wikimedians who know the basics of spreadsheets? Tony (talk) 08:27, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

@Tony1: Well you could say that about quite a few things related to mediawiki :). But yes, a video tutorial might be nice (I don't honestly expect anyone to make one, but it would be nice). I expect that the tutorial I linked to would be mostly useful for people who are programmers, and our target audience is not just people who know how to program (And even then, I know how to program, but the section on data transforms is still a pretty big mystery to me). Bawolff (talk) 22:20, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

@Swpb: You did that with EasyTimeline!?! I'd assumed you did it with the new Extension:Graph extension that has been enabled on-wiki. This extension enables an extensive visualization grammar called Vega, and I'm super enthusiastic about finding someone who can do Vega graphs for us, even if I don't have the time to learn to do it myself. You can see examples of the capacities of the grammar here. In the long-term this grammar will rarely be used naked: just today I ported over one Lua wrapper template, from the German Wikipedia in this case, which makes doing this much simpler. Yurik suggested on my talk page that a bot that centralizes all of the graph templates either to Mediawiki or to Meta would be the best long-term solution. I have some ideas about data you can start building visualizations of using just this template, but stuff like force graphs or tree maps would also be lovely to see. ResMar 23:01, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

llywrch You and I are in the same boat my friend. Tharthan (talk) 01:34, 16 June 2015 (UTC)