User talk:AmandaNP/Archives/2014/January

Latest comment: 11 years ago by EdwardsBot in topic The Signpost: 22 January 2014


The Signpost: 01 January 2014

In fact, the majority are relatively evenly split between three themes: people of interest, television, and websites.
In 2013, the arbitration committee closed 10 cases, 9 amendment requests, and 26 clarification requests.
On New Year's Day, an article by Tim Sampson published in The Daily Dot and republished shortly after on Mashable covered the currently ongoing medical disclaimer RfC.
Dariusz Jemielniak's book is the newest about Wikipedia, published in Poland in 2013 and with an English edition forthcoming in 2014.
This was the year in which one journalist described the flagship site, Wikipedia, as "wickedly seductive". It was the year Wikipedia's replacement value was estimated at $6.6bn, its market value at "tens of billions of dollars", and its consumer benefit "hundreds of billions of dollars". But it was also the year in which one commentator forecast the decline of Wikipedia—that the project is in trouble from its shrinking volunteer workforce, skewed coverage, "crushing bureaucracy" and 90 percent male community.
Current discussions on the English Wikipedia and around the Wikimedia movement include...
The year 2013 has come and gone, adding 50 new WikiProject Reports to our long list of projects we've had the privilege to meet. Last year saw the continuation of our Babel series, featuring WikiProjects from other languages of Wikipedia. We also expanded our selection of special reports, offering readers a growing collection of helpful tips and tools as they participate in WikiProjects.
Over the past year 1181 pieces of featured content were promoted. The most active of the featured content programs was featured picture candidates (FPC), which promoted an average of 46 pictures a month. This was followed by featured article candidates (FAC; 32.5 a month). Coming in third was featured list candidates (FLC; 18 a month).
2013 saw a lot of changes to MediaWiki software and Wikimedia infrastructure.

Sock investigation

Please see Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Ali Mohammad Khilji.

Notifying you due to your prior investigation of related case.

Thank you for your time,

Cirt (talk) 17:14, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

Roccodrift SPI

Came up negative according to you -- MastCell dropped in and says he intends to block Roccodrift as a "duck" sock anyways - but there was no such evidence provided, and I found minimal overlap between Belchfire and Roccodrift at all, and no sign that they would use exotic measures which MrX says are trivial to do - thus no evidence other than MC knowing he must be a sock of someone. If the criterion for blocking as a sock is simply finding an admin to say "it is a sock" after a CU occurred and others demurred on such a finding, SPI is pretty useless. Cheers. Collect (talk) 13:31, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Collect, I never said it was negative. I said I saw no sleepers, and as I usually put, but neglected this time is "No immediate sleepers". CU is not magic pixie dust, and it's not 100% conclusive. It is only a tool that can assist with finding socks. Now there is also a second admin who has came in and concurred with MastCell's assessment. As I checkuser, I try and remain as an objective party and only wear one hat at a time, except in stupidly obvious cases, or time sensitive cases, and therefore will not be commenting on the case. You are welcome to get a third opinion though. -- DQ (ʞlɐʇ) 00:10, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 08 January 2014

Public Domain Day—January 1, 2014—gives me an opportunity to reflect on this important asset, mandated by the Constitution of the United States.
The various maladies that befall humanity got some well-known faces this week: the death of the well-liked actor James Avery topped the list, but Michael Schumacher, who is in a coma after a skiing accident, also drew attention.
MediaWiki developers will be meeting in San Francisco on January 23–24 for an Architecture Summit.
On 8 January, the Wikimedia Foundation notified the Wikimedia-l mailing list that Sarah Stierch, a popular Wikimedian and the Foundation's Program Evaluation Community Coordinator, was no longer an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, as a result of being paid to create articles on the English Wikipedia.
At the very start of the new year, 2014's WikiCup—an annual competition which has been held on Wikipedia in various forms since 2007—began.
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Television.
Twelve articles, three lists, seven pictures, and a portal were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia in the last two weeks.

Mac Pro GAR

Mac Pro, an article that you or your project may be interested in, has been nominated for a community good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Someone not using his real name (talk) 23:02, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

A decline at AFC

I know this is ancient history, but some of these old declines are just coming to light as a result of CSD G13 reviews. Just in case you are still declining articles on the same basis, I would like to point out to you that the comment in this decline is completely incorrect. Non-English sources are perfectly acceptable for both verification and establishing notability, see WP:NONENG. Your decline merely resulted in an article being posted to mainspace without any sources at all, ie, an even worse article. SpinningSpark 20:27, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Ya...at four years ago almost, I can say I didn't know that many policies on WP and I'm well aware of the current policy. I apologize for the even worse article making it out to the mainspace, but I'm completely not involved in AFC at this time, and have been out of it for a darn long time. -- DQ on the road (ʞlɐʇ) 21:10, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

CU block of Unfitlouie

I see you blocked Unfitlouie (talk · contribs) after running a CU. There's an SPI open about him: Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Notabede. Can you comment there about Notabede (talk · contribs)? If my block was in error, I should unblock him. Toddst1 (talk) 20:51, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

With the case closed, I'll just comment here. As I remember, I found 4 socks on that check, and these are the same people. The had been blocked several times for edit warring over a few accounts, but again it's all off of memory. I don't see any issue (though I haven't looked into it) with your block. -- DQ on the road (ʞlɐʇ) 21:15, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

Something's up with DeltaQuadBot

Ahoy there DeltaQuad.

I don't know if you're aware of this but apparently your bot seems to have shut down on it's duty at WP:UAA/BOT? There's a discussion about it at the bot owners noticeboard.

Y'all take care now. MM (Report findings) (Past espionage) 02:19, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 15 January 2014

Wikimedia Germany, the largest national affiliate, has authored an extensive critique of the Funds Dissemination Committee's process for issuing funding recommendations for the various large organizations in the movement.
The proposed schedule for the MediaWiki Archicture Summit has been published. The two main plenary sessions will be about HTML templating, and Service-oriented architecture.
It is heavily ironic that two decades after the World Wide Web was started — largely to make it easier to share scholarly research — most of our past and present research publications are still hidden behind paywalls for private profit. The bitter twist is that the vast majority of this research is publicly funded, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide each year.
Wikipedia's recent decline in readership, possibly due to Google's Knowledge Graph. ... Judith Newman in the New York Times asks "What Does Judith Newman Have to Do to Get a Page?"
We now can get a far more accurate picture of which short surges in popularity are likely natural and which are not.
This week, we studied human social behavior with the folks at WikiProject Sociology.

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A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 22:08, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 22 January 2014

A particularly esoteric anthology of speculative fiction, filled with imaginary Wikipedia entries from, as the introduction puts it, "the many Wikipedias across the Multiverse."
The Wikimedia Foundation's Director of Community Advocacy's application of pending changes level two on the article Conventional PCI—an action taken under its rarely used office actions policy—has escalated to the Arbitration Committee after an editor upgraded it to full protection.
Fifteen articles, nine lists, twenty pictures, and one topic were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia over the last two weeks.
On 15 January, Wikipedia turned thirteen years old. In that time, this site has grown from a small site that was known to only a select few to one of the most popular websites on the internet. At the same time, recent data suggests that there is a power curve among users, where the comparative few who are writing most of Wikipedia have most of the edits. The result of this is that there is going to be bias in what is created, and how we deal with it as Wikipedians is indicative of the future of the site. Furthermore, this brings up what we have to do in order to combat this bias, as there are many ideas, but the question is whether they will work or not.
This week we're interviewing Brion Vibber about the then-upcoming Architecture Summit. Brion is a long time Wikipedian, the first employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, and currently the lead software architect working with the mobile team.
An article in USA Today announced that a European-funded project called RoboEarth that is designed to give robots a mechanism by which to access information to dispense.
While the 71st Golden Globe Awards, held on 12 January, had an impact on the top 25, their presence was largely absent from the Top 10. With the exception of Best Actor winner Leonardo DiCaprio, the only Golden Globe entrants in the Top 10 are films that would have been there anyway.