Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2010-03-01

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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2010-03-01. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Features and admins: Approved this week (567 bytes · 💬)

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funny that there's so many bird pictures from different sources this week. They're lovely. -- phoebe / (talk to me) 01:56, 3 March 2010 (UTC) re

That article on the death of a G20 protestor should never have been featured. All of the refs need to be copyedited and some need to be checked line for line for accuracy. Ottre 09:57, 8 March 2010 (UTC)~

In the news: Idealizing the Star Spangled Banner, Curious Announcement, and more (3,963 bytes · 💬)

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When I first saw the name I thought User:Kevin Myers. Presumably not the same YellowMonkey (vote in the Southern Stars and White Ferns supermodel photo poll) 00:08, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

What is the matter with this Mr. Myers? Why pick on Wikipedia, instead of historians? —innotata (Talk • Contribs) 00:43, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

Definitely not the same person. He is always getting to trouble in the Irish media, so I wouldn't take his comments too seriously. —  Cargoking  talk  14:00, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

Just noticed this. I've been to Ireland, but I'm not the Irish columnist. I have a rather different interpretation of the outcome of the War of 1812 than Mr Myers the columnist, based on, I suspect, much more detailed knowledge of the conflict. But I'll pass over our differences in deference to his truly wonderful name. —Kevin Myers 14:26, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

Erm...The United States lost to Canada? At the time of the War of 1812 Canada was still a part of the British Empire. The U.S. failed in its objectives relating to Canada, but it lost the war with Britain, not Canada. – Joe N 21:30, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

i think the war was actually a 'draw' in any case, the Treaty of Ghent agreed that the two side would return to their pre-war territorial lines. Tom B (talk) 16:45, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

I like this idea. Then the Civil War was a draw. Maybe the South lost because they didn't burn Washington. Perhaps the South won if you look at the current makeup of Congress. How about World War II? Did pre-war Germany include Czechoslovakia? How about the borders of Vietnam? By the way, it is probably too late to surrender to Canada. - Komowkwa (talk) 19:45, 6 March 2010 (UTC)

Mr Myers does have a point, there is a connection between what Wikipidia says in this regard, and the nationality of the editors. If you read the lengthy Mediation cabal, the most fanatical editors supporting the US win are often more likely US. In the Cabal, I was the main person pushing for a Canadian/British win to be recognised, and I'm not from the US (I'm Australian). There are some Americans that see it as a loss for the US as there are some US historians who see the war as a loss, however Mr Myers definitely has a point. Deathlibrarian (talk) 12:59, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

I will also note that with the War of 1812 article, the opinion that the War of 1812 was won by the British was continously blocked from being included in the article, by mainly US editors. This was against Wikipedia policy WP:Undue Weight - which says that all significant opinions should be fairly represented in an article ( in this instance including the view that the British won the war). Eventually the mediation cabal corrected this. If you look at the article discussion page, there is still a warning by "the editors" that the conclusion that the war was a draw (and the British didn't win) is the prevailing viewpoint of the article. Deathlibrarian (talk) 13:15, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

News and notes: Usability, 15M articles, Vandalism research award, and more (1,667 bytes · 💬)

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• "...a call for participation on a project to detect online plagiarism and vandalism at Wikipedia" Does this mean we're going to see a rise in vandalism for research purposes? Wonderful. ALI ^{nom nom} 21:35, 3 March 2010 (UTC)
• "The Pan 2010 Lab has published a call for participation on a project to detect online plagiarism and vandalism at Wikipedia." - I think technological development in this area is an absolute necessity for the continued tenability of the project as a whole. Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations has compellingly demonstrated that plagiarism caught early is dealt with easily, while plagiarism caught late can result in a devastating sinkhole of lost contributions and lost productivity to thousands of articles. Props to Yahoo Research for promoting this. Dcoetzee 22:58, 3 March 2010 (UTC)
• Usability Project to become permanent – I hope this doesn't mean the Usability Beta becomes a permanent beta and thus is never installed as the default. R. S. Shaw (talk) 06:30, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

• from what I read in the link, it is 2 distinct tasks : "plagiarism detection" (at large, not dedicaced to wikipédia) ; and "Wikipedia vandalism detection". the Yahoo! Research award will go to the plagiarism detection project. DarkoNeko x 12:22, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Reference desk: Wikipedia Reference Desk quality analyzed (4,140 bytes · 💬)

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Cool. I will use the reference desk for what ever I need now! 70.171.224.249 (talk) 23:43, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

• The criteria for a "novice/experienced" user are extremely flawed. As a result, that aspect of the analysis is pretty much useless.--Rockfang (talk) 01:16, 3 March 2010 (UTC)
• Agree with Rockfang. Nearly 6 months editing/≈2000 edits, ≈342 on the Ref. Desk. [1] & I don't have a user page (yet). Novice? Almost a Journeyman Editor! --220.101.28.25 (talk) 06:01, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

• As great as that is, I certainly hope the 2010 RD regulars have been doing better than the 2007 ones. (average of four hours to answer?!) ALI ^{nom nom} 18:03, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

I think I read on the Ref Desk Talk page discussion of this paper that the author analyzed the first 10 questions on a specific day from each of 7 desks. This could create some sort of time zone effect affecting the speed of response, depending on when the date header rollover is w.r.t. when most editors are active.

But anyway, using that metric, and starting with the March 1 section headers (and without exhaustively going into how correct the answers are):

• The Computing desk scores 3 hours 30 minutes on average (though there is one question still unanswered that I didn't include). Six questions were answered in under 20 minutes, one in 85 minutes, and the two that pulled the average down took more than 12 hours each.
• The Humanities desk (disclaimer: I answered one of these, but long before thinking of this analysis) scores 3 hours 35 minutes on average (though again there is one question still unanswered). Only two questions were answered in under an hour.

Out of time to do any more but I think a four hour average is better than it first sounds. Best, WikiJedits (talk) 17:56, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

• I was surprised to see that this research paper by Shachaf is not online. I wonder why? Ottawahitech (talk) 20:10, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

• I wonder if they also analysed Q&A sites from the StackOverflow family. It seems to me their method of ranking answers would probably be the best way to avoid the time consuming task of choosing the best answer, as they mention. Also, I believe they'd have fared well, because of their smart karma system. --Waldir ^talk 08:04, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

• I suspect that in traditional library reference questions, we underperform, and in more expertise-related questions, we may overperform, due to the rather high level of talent and knowledge some of our reference desk regulars have displayed (over at math there are several people who are very clearly professional mathematicians fielding some fo the questions. Ray^Talk 15:13, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

• Same goes for the language desk; a traditional librarian is not likely to speak as many languages as all of our answerers put together do. -- Александр Дмитрий (Alexandr Dmitri) (talk) 19:46, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

Technology report: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News (1,351 bytes · 💬)

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Re: User-agent madness A useful step forward for us, in that if we are to combat unconstructive input, the more information we have, the better. Some might think this draconian, but my experience over the last 25 years of internet investigation informs that more information is better than less. Rodhullandemu 00:44, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

Chinese Mobile homepage not configured --Shizhao (talk) 03:47, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

On the next deploy, it will be. bugzilla:22670 —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:22, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

It should be noted that Wikimedia isn't running stable versions of MediaWiki. It's just that the code review processes for Wikimedia deployment and 1.16 release are more or less related. When we get a proper QA pipeline, the updates will be more frequent. 203.158.53.225 (talk) 15:01, 6 March 2010 (UTC)