Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous): Difference between revisions

If you've been here long enough, what was your first edit of the last decade? Mine was Special:Diff/337740563 on 04:54, 14 January 2010 (UTC) to Shakespeare's Spy. Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 17:07, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Some of us are pedantic enough to think that the new decade starts from 2021. The first year AD or CE was the year 1, not 0, so each new decade starts with the year ending in 1. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:43, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

ISO years, on the other hand, do have a year 0000. Eman235/talk 17:48, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Good point. In that case, my first edit of the decade is Special:Diff/407601857 on 04:27, 13 January 2011 (UTC) to Hana Kimi. Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 18:13, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Phil Bridger, https://xkcd.com/2249/ has some relevant commentary. Elizium23 (talk) 18:17, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Pedantry aside, rolling over to a new digit in the tens place is a lot more exciting than rolling over to 2021. I bought my "new" car with 7 miles already on the odometer (presumably from moving around the factory, dealer's lots, and test drives), but I'm going to celebrate when the odometer rolls over to 100,000 miles, not when it gets to 100,007. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 15:48, 7 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Phil Bridger Hear, hear! -- Necrothesp (talk) 15:19, 13 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

But, since you ask, my first edit of 2010 seems to be Special:Diff/335228202 to South East London Synagogue, an article that has been merged into New Cross since. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:54, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Rotideypoc41352: Not such a big deal, IMVHO. How about waiting a bit more for a new millenium...? CiaPan (talk) 17:59, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

To jokingly take your comment way too seriously: I can barely remember what I ate for breakfast yesterday, let alone my first edit a thousand years later. And as wonderful as Wikipedia is, I don't know about the longevity of its records or servers or technology. I mean, we're missing a veritable hoard of information about the twelfth millennium HE... Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 18:13, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Rotideypoc41352, my account is older than 10 years and I had ~70 edits before 2010, but my first one of last decade was removing vandalism from my longtime favorite Clarissa Explains It All. I never have been able to meet Melissa Joan Hart in person, but I did travel to LA to see her at Paley in 2011. Since those days, I've branched out quite a bit, and been quite prolific. I broke 40,000 edits a few weeks ago. Elizium23 (talk) 18:21, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Congratulations! And happy editing, Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 18:33, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• @Rotideypoc41352: - unless you were talking to very new editors, we've all got first edits in the last decade...though some of those first edits were made a bit later! 2012 for my first - amazingly a legitimate edit, fixing the number of member states in the UN (in the MUN article). I feel I bedded in quickly, as it only took 34 minutes and 3 more edits for me to make my first complaining edit about Wikipedia! Nosebagbear (talk) 12:02, 7 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Adding multiple sections to relatively short articles seems like one of the most abused acts of editing on Wikipedia. It adds virtually nothing other than clutter. There ought to be a guideline to only section an article when each of the individual sections would, by itself, be longer than a stub article (i.e. 10+ sentences). Praemonitus (talk) 20:21, 6 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• The closest I can find is MOS:LAYOUT#Headings and sections: Very short or very long sections and subsections in an article look cluttered and inhibit the flow of the prose. Short paragraphs and single sentences generally do not warrant their own subheading. -- RoySmith (talk) 21:44, 6 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• I'd hesitate to call this 'abuse' when applied to relatively un-developed articles. There's a case to be made for early-stage articles having a provisional structure added which might appear to be 'over-sectioning' but which represents an aspirational state for the article. In a number of WikiProjects, there are suggested article formats which serve as an aspirational guide for full articles; for instance Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Companies/Guidelines#Content Guidelines and Wikipedia:WikiProject Cities/US Guideline, the former a suggestion, the latter a consensus. Thoughts? --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 03:24, 7 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

In terms of the general idea, Ceyockey, I agree - I can see aspirational sectioning as a benefit. Obviously that could be taken overboard, but anyone who saw it would already be entitled to fix and merge them even now. This Guideline can only help in two ways - either it "authorises" editors to fix articles that breach it, or it discourages editors from making the mistake in the first place. The former is already done, and the latter won't occur because editors who make that style of mistake aren't au fait with MOS. Nosebagbear (talk) 11:57, 7 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

There's no empirical evidence to support this that I can find. There are a multitude of stub articles on Wikipedia that have been sectioned up and tagged for improvement, but haven't expanded significantly in many years. Praemonitus (talk) 20:14, 7 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It's up to you, as the proposer here, to provide empirical evidence that this is "one of the most abused acts of editing on Wikipedia". Why is this a problem that we need to be concerned about? I certainly can't see any evidence at all for this being a problem that should come anywhere other than near the bottom of our priorities. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:35, 7 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

After clicking Random article five times, I came to this: Rangamati Sadar Upazila. This sort of layout is not at all uncommon, and I expect it will look like this five years from now. Praemonitus (talk) 16:29, 8 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

That doesn't answer the request. Why is this a problem we need to be concerned about? Not just evidence that it occurs but that it is a problem in and of itself that we should attempt to discourage even more? Do you personally want to perform the outreach to tell people who make articles like this? (This is a volunteer project.) --Izno (talk) 16:36, 8 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Within the framework of a research project, we are investigating the Requests for Adminship (RfA) process on English Wikipedia. We are especially interested in learning how English Wikipedia determines who are qualified administrators. We want to understand the strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia’s voting processes and identify factors that could distort these processes. Ideally our study helps to determine how the process can be further improved. To this end, we have already evaluated the thousands of English Wikipedia elections on RfAs held between 2004 and 2014. We would like to discuss our results with Wikipedians and discover answers to our unanswered questions.

Therefore, we are currently looking for interviewees. I talked with User:LZia_(WMF) and asked for advice on how to communicate with enwiki community about our need for interviews and she suggested I reach out to you via this Village Pump. Ideally, you will have already participated in a Wikipedia vote and/or are considering voting yourself. It would be great if we could have a short conversation by phone / Skype / Zoom, of around 30-45 minutes. To thank you for your participation, we can offer you 85 US-Dollars (or €75). We are happy to transfer the money to you or if you prefer to the Wikimedia foundation.

This interview will be used to provide background information for the evaluation of the quantitative data that we have already collected. We plan to publish our results both in scientific journals and publicly online for any interested professionals.

Data protection: If you agree, we would like to record the interview. This data will only be available to the project team. If any quotes from the interview are used in publications, they will be pseudonymized.

The research team is composed of Helge Klapper (Erasmus University), Linus Dahlander (ESMT) and myself, Henning Piezunka (INSEAD). If you are interested, please contact me via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:EmailUser/Henningpiezunka. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Henningpiezunka (talk • contribs) 10:08, 8 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• @LZia (WMF): - could you confirm that this is a genuine request? Nosebagbear (talk) 10:25, 8 January 2020 (UTC).[reply]

As a follow-up, I reached out to one of the researchers via their university contact, who has confirmed the research is occurring. Nosebagbear (talk)

@Nosebagbear: I can confirm that I have talked with User:Henningpiezunka about their research at a very high level, and I indeed recommended that they directly reach out to enwiki community and seek for input/participation given that the focus of their study is enwiki. For further clarity given that I'm writing this message with my WMF account: I'd like to point out that this is not a WMF Research collaboration, a WMF project or a project WMF has vetted. I provided general advice to User:Henningpiezunka in terms of interacting with you all and what I understand as the correct course of action in a case like this. I leave the decision to participate and at what level to you all as a community. If there is anything I can do to support you in your decision making, please don't hesitate to reach out. And as always: thank you for your support of research on the Wikimedia projects. --LZia (WMF) (talk) 16:45, 8 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Henningpiezunka, good luck with your research, please check the histories of interviewees as those most motivated to participate may fall outside mainstream Wikipedia views. A good litmus test would be: generally agreeing with the consensus on RFA decisions with not more than 10% of arguments going against the consensus. Guy (help!) 14:29, 12 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I'd suggest also posting on WT:RFA. Galobtter (pingó mió) 14:53, 12 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure if this is the right place (I am not a regular contributor to the English Wikipedia), but as the original article was deleted and the discussion archived: Concerning South Front: This article was deleted in 2017 for notability-reasons. However, as the website has a clear bias and is being used in a range of citations (e.g. [1][2][3][4][5]) not citing this bias: what might be the best way to inform readers that the sources have this bias? Or is this not an issue? Hardscarf (talk) 10:45, 11 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Hardscarf: According to [6] that is a known source of fake news and should be blacklisted. If it's on the blacklist, the software should be blocking it I think. Maybe ask at WP:RSN about what to do with these citations? RudolfRed (talk) 19:57, 11 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Any idea which of the three ISBN numbers listed on PDF page 5 is the correct one for this book?

• ISBN 0-203-04107-0 Master e-book ISBN
• ISBN 0-203-19965-0 (Adobe eReader Format)
• ISBN 0-415-00240-0 (Print Edition)

Gun Powder Ma (talk) 00:26, 12 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Any. Ruslik_Zero 15:46, 13 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, any. A book can have separate ISBN numbers for the hardback, the paperback and the e-book version. That's what's happening here. -- Derek Ross | Talk 19:11, 13 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I finally caught up on a Wikipedia readership survey, which you can listen to in the second half of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIko_V1k09s (The first half is about the re-use of Wikipedia's contents, with a shoutout during the questions at the end to the United Nations for re-using some content while getting the attribution/licensing correct.) See mw:Wikimedia Research/Showcase for more information and links to previous content.

Age: Most readers are under the age of 25. This survey was taken at a time when many countries were not in school, so this is pretty much a year-round baseline.

Language: Every other person reading your article is not a native speaker of English. User:Dank, I'm not sure that this should be considered at all when you're looking for WP:Brilliant Prose, but it's something that other editors, such as User:Doc James, may want to take into account for other purposes.

Identity: As for who reads what, everyone reads about religion, geography, and people, but people read about people who are like them – men read about men, women read about women, youth read about youth, etc. This means that when we don't have content on ________ people, then those readers don't find what they want. Women read about medicine, biology, and television shows more than men. Men read about sports, technology (the article about YouTube was given as an example), and military subjects more than women. (They didn't get enough numbers to make any similar statements readers who identified in other ways.)

If you want more information, please see mw:Wikimedia Research/Showcase#November 2019. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:54, 13 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

We have the following guideline Wikipedia:Make technical articles understandable. IMO our goal should be to use easier to understand language without making our content wrong. Over the last decade we have decreased the reading level of the leads of our most read medical articles from grade 15.7 to grade 12.7.[7] So it can be done. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 11:03, 14 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The purpose of a lead is of course to provide an accessible summary of the article but is also to engage the reader and want to make them read the article. The latter is being sacrificed in order to meet computer generated "readability scores". Like trying to make your web page appear first on Google, there are ways of making a sentence have a low score that does not guarantee the text is readable or that anyone would want to read it. In the medical domain, this American obsession of mathematical reading models has resulted in removing words our readers need to know or might want to learn, and replacing them with baby words. The result can be haphazard.

For example, Chlortalidone is a "water pill" or "water tablet" (a Diuretic). Neither this article nor the diuretic article mention "water pill" even though most lay websites do. It is used to treat edema which is swelling caused by fluid buildup in your body. If you are on it for this purpose, your doctor will have mentioned "fluid retention" and "edema" yet these are not words in our lead. The word "swelling" is wikilinked to edema but why would someone click on a wikilink for a common word? Swelling happens for all sorts of reasons that aren't treated by diuretics. Our reader is told this swelling is "due to heart failure, liver failure, and nephrotic syndrome, diabetes insipidus, and renal tubular acidosis." Woa those last three just blew the reading scale away. We aren't told which bit of the body is swelling (e.g. your lower limbs) so it could be one's nose for all we know. If our reader's gran was told they have "fluid retention" or "edema" then the lead of this article will not make it obvious that this is why they are on that pill.

We can deal with necessary hard words by explaining them in-text e.g., "edema (swelling due to fluid retention)" or "swelling due to fluid retention (edema)" or other techniques of in-context usage and clever writing. This way, the reader not only understands the article topic, but learns important necessary words that their doctors are using. But, no, we can't mention "edema" because that's on some list of hard words and we can't put a clause in parenthesis because that increases sentence complexity scores.

A short sentence doesn't necessarily mean good writing. We have a short sentence in the lead paragraph: "It is taken by mouth." which is just terrible terrible unengaging prose. I good writer would have avoided that. Merely inserting the word "tablet" into one of the sentences would have sufficiently clued up the reader about where to stick it. -- Colin°^Talk 13:50, 14 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Very interesting that Bangladesh, with half the population and a 73% literacy rate should make up a larger portion of en.wiki readers than the US. Also a lot of interesting results for Hebrew that stand out from other languages markedly. Also, given that south Asia has such a large percentage of English readers, I would have like to see them spun off from the global population as Africa was. GMG^talk 11:48, 14 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  @GreenMeansGo: Where is that stat on Bangladesh's readership stated, specifically? --Yair rand (talk) 19:22, 14 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  @Yair rand: On this page, specifically this graphic at the bottom. GMG^talk 19:50, 14 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  @GreenMeansGo: It absolutely does not say that! This (not very clearly explained) table is about the % of US/Bangladeshi readers of Wikipedia looking at en:wp. One of the interesting things the survey does seem to show is that only about 75% of American views are of en:wp (no doubt Spanish is the main other language), vs c. 90%+ of those from India & maybe 83% of those from Bangladesh. Also that the Dutch look more at the English Wikipedia than the Dutch one. Johnbod (talk) 17:55, 15 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  @Johnbod: Oooohkay. The "ratio of views" is the ratio of views from that country that are views of en.wiki as opposed to other language projects, not the other way round. Yes, that's quite a confusing presentation there. GMG^talk 18:13, 15 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Hi Whatamidoing, can you direct us to where we can find the most information as it pertains to the readership of the English Wikipedia? I've found this, but it doesn't say much, and this (which says that 76 percent identified as male in the recent survey). Where does it show that half our readers are not native English speakers? SarahSV ^(talk) 00:26, 15 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  @SlimVirgin: I believe that's a reference to this graphic but I think it's a misinterpretation, assuming I understand the metrics correctly. It should probably be that about a third of our readers speak English as a second language. Somewhat less than a third speak English as a first language but are multi-lingual. GMG^talk 00:58, 15 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  GreenMeansGo, thanks for the link. The first thing I wonder is whether that's about the English Wikipedia. Second thing is why English is split between two groups ("English World" and "English Africa"). Here it says "English World" is only US and India, so has it left out Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the United Kingdom? SarahSV ^(talk) 02:43, 15 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  The other thing I wonder is why the WMF would rely on a small survey of a few hundred people for this information. They have access to the locations of our readers, so they can tell us what percentage of English Wikipedia pageviews are from Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and United States. Most people in those countries have English as a first language, so that figure alone would give us a good idea. SarahSV ^(talk) 03:33, 15 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  @SlimVirgin: That doesn't seem quite right. English World had some 6k responses, but India and the US were the only countries where there were more than 500. But I'm not really sure why they picked "more than 500" as a meaningful metric to report. It seems fairly arbitrary. I would have much rather they link us to a spreadsheet of the full tallies for those who were interested. GMG^talk 11:09, 15 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  SarahSV, what I know is what was said during the research presentation, which is linked in the first sentence of my post. I encourage you to watch the presentation if you haven't. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:57, 15 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  Hi Whatamidoing, thanks. The only thing I can find about this on that video (here) is Isaac (WMF) saying "So English Wikipedia, almost half of the readers did not list English as one of their native languages." I've been trying to find out more about this kind of thing for some time, so I'd very much like to see some of the data. How the respondents were selected would make a difference, which pages the survey notices were on, etc. Not including a lot of the English-speaking world is something I'd like to see explained, because surely that would make a difference too. As GreenMeansGo says, cutting off the responses at 500 seems arbitrary. SarahSV ^(talk) 17:32, 15 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Hi -- thanks all for engaging. I'll try to respond to some of the questions from the thread. Regarding which countries the data represents: we randomly sample readers in a given language edition via the QuickSurveys tool, which randomly samples readers (browsers technically) and shows them a link to the survey in Wikipedia articles. The data you see in the graphs is from the full set of respondents from a language. The countries you see listed at the 500-response threshold are those that we could release specific data for (we haven't gotten to that point yet but let me know if this would be valuable). We don't release data on countries that had fewer than 500 responses for privacy reasons -- this was a threshold used in prior surveys. It is difficult to draw robust conclusions from fewer than 500 responses as well. For both English and French, we upsampled readers in Africa so we report results that are both representative of the entire language edition ("World") and just the results from readers in Africa as well ("Africa"). Regarding reader language: we specifically asked the survey respondents to provide their native languages (or mother tongues). We don't assert any order -- if the respondent listed "English" while taking the English survey, they would be considered a native speaker. If they did not, they are considered a non-native speaker. We then also divide between people who list only one native language ("Monolingual" though I can see how that would be confusing as these people very well may be fluent in other languages, just not native speakers) and people who list more than one native language ("Multilingual"). Thanks! --Isaac (WMF) (talk) 19:58, 15 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Isaac, thank you for the detailed response; it's very much appreciated. Do you have a link to the survey, i.e. the questions as the readers saw them? SarahSV ^(talk) 20:21, 15 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • Thanks SarahSV, the English-language questions are here. We have not uploaded the text from other languages yet but we worked closely with volunteers in each language to do those translations as closely as possible. --Isaac (WMF) (talk) 21:31, 15 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Modern art books for free/Guggenheim [8]
• Paris Musees released digital artworks [9]
• Art Institute of Chicago released digital images [10]
• Metropolitan Museum of Art art works in public domain[11]
• Getty Museum artworks: virtual library to download [12]
• New York Public Library: released artworks, images, books. [13]

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Littleolive oil (talk • contribs) 16:16, 14 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

(crosspost from WP:AN)

A massive (the largest ever) Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigation, Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations/Dr. Blofeld, was recently opened. The usual 3 people at CCI won't be able to complete it themselves, so I am asking everyone who has the time to help clean it up. No copyright knowledge is required, and instructions + further information can be found at User:Money emoji/Dr. Blofeld CCI cleanup. I will also be listing this at WP:CENT, as the last time a large scale CCI cleanup effort was conducted (Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations/Darius Dhlomo), it was listed there. A big thanks to all who sign up, 💴Money💶💵emoji💷^{Talk💸Help out at CCI!} 02:34, 15 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

This article was tagged for updating in 2017 and is not only hopelessly out of date, but reflects the fake news of yesteryear. I have proposed to scrap it quite some time ago, but this was simply rejected and it is still standing there in all its ugly and biased glory. Never mind that the euro has the support of over 2/3 of Greeks today. Wikipedia is supposed to be reliable and neutral, not a collection of failed anti-European rhetoric, no matter how many Brexiteers want it otherwise. When will Wikipedia realize that this undermines its own credibility? Jcwf (talk) 20:18, 16 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]