Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-11-04/News and notes

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• Superprotect: Most welcome news as a sign that the WMF "gets it". All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 18:31, 7 November 2015 (UTC).
  
• The issue in German Wikipedia that caused the introduction of Superprotect is often described somewhat inaccurately - sadly, this Signpost article isn't an exception. The administrator on the German Wikipedia disabled the Media Viewer completely for the German WP, without an opt-in option, which isn't what the local consensus was. The outcome of de:Wikipedia:Meinungsbilder/Medienbetrachter was that the Media Viewer should be disabled per default, but with an option to enable it for those who wish to use it. I'm sure that the admin acted with the best of intentions, believing that entirely disabling MV (probably given technical limitations that made an opt-in option not feasible) was closer to the community consensus than just leaving it enabled, but the community actually wasn't pleased. It wasn't what we wanted. So, a large part of the community disagreed with the WMF enforcing the Media Viewer as well as with the admin who disabled it wholly. Consequently, the admin was recalled and not re-elected. That doesn't mean people welcomed Superprotect, quite the contrary - but we were protesting against Superprotect and at the same time not agreeing with the admin action that caused it. Most, I think, believe that this was a matter that we could have resolved locally. Gestumblindi (talk) 18:43, 7 November 2015 (UTC)
  • Thanks, Gestumblindi. Edited. Andreas JN466 20:42, 7 November 2015 (UTC)
    • Thanks as well, Andreas! :-) For the convenience of readers: This was about the original, now edited phrasing "implementing local consensus". Gestumblindi (talk) 20:48, 7 November 2015 (UTC)
      • It was already correct before. It said before “implementing local consensus to disable” and that IS and WAS true. It was consensus to disable it. You CAN argue about the way, about side-affects or completeness, but not about the fact itself. --DaB. (talk) 11:54, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
        • @DaB.: You know that local consensus was "disable by default, with opt-in". That's very different from just "disable", and you have seen how the community responded... You can't just assume that people who voted for "disable with opt-in" accept disabling the feature entirely as an "incomplete" step towards their goal. Gestumblindi (talk) 19:32, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
• Hosting only costs the foundation $2 million? Do they get a lot of donations from tech companies? That figure seems very low just for the English Wikipedia alone, never mind all the hundreds of other Wikimedia projects! Cynical (talk) 20:29, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

Page view stats: Technical note

Note that a technical note has just been added to the Wikimedia Foundation page view stats, which reads as follows:

“ Nov 6, 2015: Data in this report, from May 2015 onwards, are now based on the new pageview definition. In the old situation spider/crawler traffic (from search engines) wasn't filtered (a known issue, we needed hadoop to make this possible). Those requests made up almost 20% of total page 'views' on Wikipedia, and even much more on sister projects (details will follow) Obviously the top table row, with year-over-year changes, doesn't make sense until the new pageview definition will have been in effect for at least a year. That feature is now temporarily disabled.

Also, the new data stream does exclude housekeeping traffic (mainly used for fundraising banners). As usage grew these so called HideBanner requests became far more numerous even than actual traffic on smaller Wikimedia projects (not on Wikipedia). We will update the reports soon, to make the impact of this 'pollution' visible, which affected much of 2014 and first four months of 2015.

Thanks for your patience.

”

While the decline in page views started well before May this year, this adjustment means it is less severe than the Foundation's figures and graphs show. 20:38, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

Donations processing expenses?

Why 2.6M??? Nergaal (talk) 21:48, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

Credit card processing fees? 2.5/75.8 = ~3%, which feels about right. --PresN 00:46, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

Of note, while donations increased 45%, the cost of processing them increased 65%. The reason is not immediately apparent. I do recall some discussion about expanding the number of payment options for countries that had certain limitations, but do not know if this is related. Risker (talk) 02:00, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

Control expenses now!

The chart shows support+revenue, expenses, and net assets all rising exponentially with a growth rate much greater than the economy as a whole. This cannot and will not continue. Inevitably, donations will level off (or go down) in the not too distant future. If expenses continue to grow rapidly when that happens, then we will quickly go into the red and then go bust. The time to start limiting expenses is now before support levels off. JRSpriggs (talk) 13:15, 9 November 2015 (UTC)