Comments

The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2012-09-03. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Featured content: Wikipedia's Seven Days of Terror (1,422 bytes · 💬)

Darn, the title made me think this was something completely different... Theo polisme 20:51, 4 September 2012 (UTC)
- WP:Request for Adminship? - Dank (push to talk) 21:00, 4 September 2012 (UTC)
  - Spot on as usual, Dank. [mind has been read] Theo polisme 21:17, 4 September 2012 (UTC)
    - Like — Crisco 1492 (talk) 23:41, 4 September 2012 (UTC)
Bad headline. Dumb. Thank you for listening to my opinion. GeorgeLouis (talk) 04:31, 5 September 2012 (UTC)
Just a note to the editors that in the listing of "Give Peace a Chance", Grey's Anatomy should be italicized. TRLIJC19 (talk • contribs) 03:05, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

News and notes: World's largest photo competition kicks off; WMF legal fees proposal (10,421 bytes · 💬)

While Wiki Loves Monuments is a great idea, the opportunity to improve outcomes by helping participants paying more attention to quality seem to have been missed again. If only people could stop chasing numbers, learn from past experience and be more targeted on quality. A quick look to some of the new images reveals stuff like: "Monument nr. 1", "Monument n.r 3", copyvio, watermarked copyvio. --ELEKHH^T 21:18, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

Het Elekhh,

There are two different points you tackle. Quite rightly, you point to copyright violations and non-monumental uploads. Of course you always get several of those, and you also get them through regular uploads. That is no big problem, and as you can see already, they are taken care of by the regular Wikimedia Commons deletion procedures. These 'bad photos' do not decrease the quality of the great and awesome photos I have also seen.

The second point you mention is quality. I guess you're partially referring to 'megapixel quality' which is perhaps not always the case. Personally, I'm happy with every decent photo. If we get a few crappy photos for every decent photo that is acceptable to me - as long as those crappy photos don't end up in the encyclopedia. I think that currently the filters we built in for that are pretty solid.

The question is primarily, what approach do you take. Do you want to prevent them to be uploaded in the first place then it would also mean that as a side effect you would probably stop several great images to be uploaded too. So I prefer to take the approach we have at Wikipedia too. Assume good faith, assume people will upload good pictures, and act in specific cases if proven otherwise. I hope that answers to your worries. effeietsanders 21:49, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, it doesn't. And I wasn't referring to megapixels. I was referring to badly exposed, blurred, wrong WB, poorly described, poorly composed, etc images. I am talking about the reticence of organisers to provide preliminary information about image quality, as they seem too afraid that would deter participation. This is the result of seeing success as number of uploads (BIG counters everywhere), and not number of useful uploads. I couldn't find any evaluation of the 2011 WLM in terms of usefulness. So is this news item focused on total number of uploads ("extraordinary 168,208 free images") as an indicator of success. But how many are actually used in articles? How many are featured quality? --ELEKHH^T 22:25, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

The old discussion about quality versus quantity. The contest awards best photos, isn't that enough? Of course you will get some bad photos, some very nice ones, and a lot of regular ones. I hope you can create a Wiki Loves Featured Pictures of Monuments contest, and get as many participants as Nupedia and Citizendium. And you forget that in places like India people don't have very good cameras. You can see bad photos in every Wikimedia Commons day, this is not an issue of WLM. Regards. emijrp (talk) 12:10, 5 September 2012 (UTC)

In case you misunderstood, the issue of WLM is simply asking for more photos, instead of more useful photos. The reticence to improve on this I find remarkable. Until then for me as a Wikipedia editor WLM makes at best no difference, as I haven't come yet across a single WLM image I could use in an article. Instead in categories of popular monuments is much harder to find the good images among the hundreds. Anyway, this is just repeating the discussion from last year. Seems that the consensus is that is all fine. --ELEKHH^T 23:59, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

I am very sorry to hear that you find all Wiki Loves Monuments pictures useless, but it looks to me that you haven't been looking too closely; see Commons:Wiki Loves Monuments 2011/Highlighted pictures for a list of 2011 Wiki Loves Monuments pictures that were highlighted by the Commons community (468 quality images + 18 valued images + 12 featured pictures isn't that bad, and I bet the list isn't complete). odder (talk) 08:18, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, I appreciate that finally somebody replies to some of the issues raised. But to set it clear I haven't stated that "all Wiki Loves Monuments pictures [are] useless", that's a misrepresentation. I haven't noticed the page which was relatively recently created (March 2012), and I think as far metrics goes,would have been relevant for the reader to know that about 500 images are outstanding in some way in terms of technical quality. I would be even more interested in the number of WLM2011 images in use. --ELEKHH^T 01:59, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

A quick count with the GLAMorous tool reports that of the 168,000 images uploaded as part of Wiki Loves Monuments 2011, 6,385 different images are used 8,962 times in the (main) namespace on all Wikimedia projects. For the English Wikipedia alone, 1,280 different images are used 1,580 times in total in the article namespace; but please remember that none of the countries participating last year use English as their official language, and the images are much more heavily used on the local Wikipedias than here (especially on the German, Dutch and French Wikipedias). Besides that, some Wikipedias have their lists of monuments located in other namespaces than the main one (Project, Wikiproject, etc.), so the total usage of the files might be higher. odder (talk) 21:18, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, that's an excellent tool! So that's a 0.8% usage rate for the English Wiki and 3.8% usage for all Wikimedia projects. I think that is consistent with the argument that there is scope for improvement. --ELEKHH^T 22:26, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

So why did UK drop the ball and is not participating in the contest? They even have a WMF local chapter... --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 16:04, 5 September 2012 (UTC)

Mebbe they thought they had contributed enough & took a break this year? (ISTR the British Isles have extensive articles on local sites & landmarks.) Some countries that should have been encouraged to participate include Greece, Turkey, & Egypt -- & to combat the chronic issue of systemic bias Japan, Korea, China, Eritrea, Ethiopia, & Peru. -- llywrch (talk) 16:32, 5 September 2012 (UTC)

I would like to stress that the international team encouraged a lot of countries from the very start. I personally would have loved to have Egypt on board – however, if you remember the political situation this summer, there were more basic problems than building and motivating a Wikipedia community and converting monuments lists there. We also have to appreciate that despite of a small or missing local community (which is one of the main reason for not taking part for some countries), some communities might have different priorities and need to choose their project engagement economically in terms of human resources. --elya (talk) 17:24, 5 September 2012 (UTC)

- The main reason for no UK participation is that existing coverage of "monuments" in the UK is already very strong for a number of reasons (e.g. Geograph), making it far more difficult to determine a competition metric. Many Geograph uploads are still uncategorised, additionally. - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 21:33, 5 September 2012 (UTC)
  - Sorry, but this isn't right. The main reason for the UK not participating is that there hasn't been enough involvement and interest from the local volunteers (also involved with Wikimedia UK), which is a basic requirement for a Wiki Loves Monuments competition. Organising a contest like that requires a lot of effort and time, and you cannot do that without local involvement; see FAQ for more information on that. odder (talk) 08:10, 7 September 2012 (UTC)
    - I believe the reason Australia is not yet involved is at least partly related to the complexity and unreliability of monument listing. Tony (talk) 08:15, 7 September 2012 (UTC)
    - Hmm, it's interesting; I generated that overview by rereading the WMUK-l posts relating to WLM, but now I come to looking at the notes of the meeting I can accept there was some desire (but not the manpower) to overcome that and related issues. I'd contend, though, that already having reasonable coverage already was a significant demotivating factor, although you are probably better placed to know than me. - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 18:47, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

Op-ed: Dispute resolution – where we're at, what we're doing well, and what needs fixing (2,530 bytes · 💬)

Hi, peanut gallery here: Unless there is a normalised version of that graph, it will be not very useful, as the absolute values cannot be compared between categories. Also, its not fair to make comparisons akin to: "1 in 3 people thought apple was aweome, but 2 in 3 people thought orange was OK." 46.115.17.33 (talk) 17:14, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

Fixed - thanks. Szhang (WMF) (talk) 18:17, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

On my monitor the words on the image(when zoomed in) are not readable without a magnifying glass. Regards, Sun Creator^(talk) 12:43, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

Here ya go. Rich Farmbrough, 20:30, 4 September 2012 (UTC).

I've uploaded a higher resolution graph - I hope this helps. Steven Zhang ^{Help resolve disputes!} 05:22, 5 September 2012 (UTC)

I can't agree anymore that the biggest problem with resolving disputes is that I have no idea where to go. If I had a dispute I would've clicked around on blue links for "are you in the right place", if not here's five other places you might want to check out. Ugh. Dan653 (talk) 02:49, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Well, yes, but we need to think from the perspective of someone that's not too familiar with the system. Steven Zhang ^{Help resolve disputes!} 00:57, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

I just had a great outcome that solved all my problems, so it works at least some of the time. MathewTownsend (talk) 00:37, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

Those who "win" a dispute tend to rate the resolution process more favorably than those who lose. It is extremely difficult for most people to separate their opinion of the quality of a process from their opinion of the result.—Finell 21:10, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

Technology report: Time for a MediaWiki Foundation? (2,505 bytes · 💬)

WikiMedia Foundation / MediaWiki Foundation – please avoid naming distinct things with names that differ only in the arbitrary order of the syllables! As with <includeonly> / <onlyinclude>, it is needlessly confusing to remember the different meanings attributable to such similar terms. (Though I suppose it is too late to rename either WikiMedia or MediaWiki.) — Richardguk (talk) 13:49, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

I was thinking the same thing. If MediaWiki gets a foundation then it should not be called "MediaWiki Foundation". I suppose it is not too late to rename MediaWiki if need be - the name has only been used for about 10 years and I think the projected life of the software is longer than 10 more years, so posterity has more stake in this than the current users. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:16, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

Yeah. This reminds me of back in my noob days when I had no idea what the difference between MediaWiki and Wikimedia was. Hmm, how about something like Wikisoft or Librewiki (yeah, I know, it's the best I've got)? --Nathan2055^{talk - contribs} 22:12, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

How about they just throw in another word? "MediaWiki Development Foundation" has a nice ring to it, and the word "development" will alleviate confusion. Sven Manguard Wha? 03:50, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

This is a completely needless committee whose actions are handled effectively enough by the Wikimedia Foundation. If it need be, just make this a subcommittee of the existing WMF, rather than a completely autonomous WMF, or whatever it will be named. Wer900 • ^{talk • coordinationconsensus defined} 22:39, 4 September 2012 (UTC)