Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-06-07/News and notes

News and notes

headline

By HaeB and J.delanoy

"Pending Changes" (formerly Flagged Protection) trial to begin on June 14

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/198354

Foundation hires two new chief officers

[1] foundation:Press_releases/June_2010_Wikimedia_Foundation_appoints_new_CCO_and_CGDO_QandA

British Museum gives "backstage pass" to Wikipedians

A British Museum staff member shows a Dürer print block to Wikimedians

Photo of a battle axe, taken during the "Backstage Pass" tour

Last week, User:Witty lama began his five week stay at the British Museum as "Wikipedian in Residence (see earlier Signpost coverage). Around 40 Wikimedians joined him last Friday for a "Backstage Pass" event, consisting of private tours of some of the museum's public and non-public areas, followed by discussions and on-wiki collaboration with the staff. The New York Times covered the event at length, explaining that the British Museum's motivation to collaborate with Wikipedia is "to help ensure that the museum’s expertise and notable artifacts are reflected in that digital reference’s pages". The article noted that museums and Wikipedia have as their common interest "educating the public: one has the artifacts and expertise, and the other has the online audience", but also mentioned possible conflicts, recalling the legal threats issued last year by the National Portrait Gallery against a Commons user who had uploaded high-resolution scans of public domain images from their collection (see Signpost coverage. As remarked last week by Mike Godwin, the NPG "did not press any legal challenge" subsequently.) Among the results of the tour are photos and newly created articles about the British Museum's artefacts, including several DYK nominations, and also the article Wikipedian in Residence.

Hiding of interlanguage links debated

heated discussion on Foundation-l [2]

usability:Opinion Language Links http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-June/058934.html

Briefly

• In an essay titled Wiki-hacking: Opening up the academy with Wikipedia, Wikipedians Adrianne Wadewitz, Anne Ellen Geller and Jon Beasley-Murray examine the relationship between Wikipedia and academic teaching. All three are scholars at U.S. universities who have worked with their students on Wikipedia assignments (see also the 2008 Signpost interview about Beasley-Murray's "Murder Madness and Mayhem" project). The essay was written in the context of a roundtable titled "2010 A New Frontier: Teaching with Wikipedia" at the 2010 "Writing Across the Curriculum" conference last month.
• Voting on the finalists for the Picture of the Year 2009 contest on Wikimedia Commons is open until 11 June, 23:59 (UTC).

Subheading

• In an article titled Does the Internet Make You Smarter?, Clay Shirky, writing for the Wall Street Journal, mentions Wikipedia as an example of what can be accomplished when even a small amount of humanity's collective "cognitive surplus" is used to create, rather than merely consume, information: "Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching [television] ads. It only takes a fractional shift in the direction of participation to create remarkable new educational resources." Shirky, a member óf the Wikimedia Foundations's advisory board, had first published this observation in a 2008 speech titled Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. It also features in his upcoming book "Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age".

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Pending changes trial

How does one get reviewer rights?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 23:43, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

You apply at Wikipedia:Requests for permissions/Reviewer. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:22, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

Are admins going to be expected to manage this system? If so then I would like to know where I can do further research, and perhaps so test edits, to get a feel for this ahead of time. TomStar81 (Talk) 02:20, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

You can try it out on the demonstration wiki. Reach Out to the Truth 02:54, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

And to answer your question, no, admins aren't going to manage the system; it will be up to editors who have reviewer status (see above) to take care of unreviewed edits. Many, if not most of the reviewers won't be admins. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:22, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

Foundation hires

I must say if Wikipedia started advertising I would consider going somewhere else. It seems that currently fiances are okay so hopefully this will never happen. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:29, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

British Museum

About [3]: I do think that the existence of the article Wikipedian in Residence is a fact that might interest Signpost readers, many of whom are Wikipedians. However, rereading the previous wording I understand Liam's concern that it might give the wrong impression that he had created that article himself. Hopefully the new wording avoids that misunderstanding. Regards, HaeB (talk) 14:18, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Interwiki links

To me, the problem is not that some of those links are hidden (I'm surprised the controversy is over the language links rather than the Toolbox ones, though), but rather that every time my session times out I've got to re-expand the dang list. I don't mind doing it once, but I use "What links here" quite frequently and don't care to have the list hidden by default. Powers ^T 17:17, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Good point about the Toolbox. I too was surprised to see that this didn't play a role in the debate - while I understand the arguments of both sides about interlanguage links, I puzzles me why the UX team apparently thinks that someone viewing a user page is unlikely to be interested in that user's contributions. Regards, HaeB (talk) 22:49, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

(ec) It's hard not to see how the handling of this unwanted change to the default skin as a symptom of an increasingly top-down approach to the Wikimedia communities -- which is directly against the process which has made Wikipedia & related projects so successful. I don't like where that is taking us. -- llywrch (talk) 17:21, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Further proof that this should never have made it past the drawing board. Whats worse is that our visitors and anons have no way of undoing this change, which rather leaves them holding the short end of the New Wikipedia stick. TomStar81 (Talk) 02:20, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

It's odd to me. Seems like a solution in need of a problem. Why not just make it a setting under preferences so that an editor can choose based on his or her frequency of use? I personally almost never use them, but sometimes, if I see that FA star, I might check it out to see how it compares to the English article. bahamut0013^words_deeds 18:21, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

It already is an option - Special:Preferences > Appearance > last item is "Enable collapsible left navigation menu". Turn it off there. :) -- Quiddity (talk) 18:53, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, I thought I'd looked for that before. Powers ^T 19:01, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Though it would be nice to be able to enable the collapsibility for interwiki only, and not for the Toolbox. Powers ^T 19:02, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Splendid. But now they take up more room than when they're each manually expanded. I could probably fix that with some custom CSS if I knew what I was doing... I guess I'll just dump the Print/export section to free up space. Reach Out to the Truth 23:07, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

"Of Monobook and Vector users, 0.95% and 0.28% clicked on the language links " This does immediately show that Vector decreases the number of interwiki clicks by about 3/4 - in other words makes them less usable. If a limited list of languages is displayed, then it needs to be content driven, or at least content drivable - articles about Farsi should display the Farsi link. Certainly weight should be given to displaying FAs in other languages, especially where the home language article is not featured. Rich Farmbrough, 08:52, 10 June 2010 (UTC).

A small addendum: Following Erik Möller's proposal cited at the end of the story, a page has now been set up on meta to "capture ideas on how the User Experience Team and the Wikipedia Community can collaboratively approach Product Development": meta:Product Development Process Ideas.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 11:04, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

I would like to add that it shouldn't be all about the click-through ratio. Sometimes just hovering the cursor over an inter-language link (to see where it leads) is all that's needed. This kind of use is not represented by the click-through ratio at all.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); June 10, 2010; 14:38 (UTC)

Chapter-selected seats

As phoebe has a byline in this part, I want to note that the little update on Chapter-selected board seats has not been written by her. (She does take conflict of interest concerns quite seriously.)

Regards, HaeB (talk) 04:15, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

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