The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2011-01-31. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

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Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-01-31/Features and admins

Could someone please fix the Williamsburg link? At the moment it leads to a dab page. I'd fix it myself but I have no idea which Williamsburg has a US Department of Defence in it. Cheers, Jenks24 (talk) 02:42, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

I pointed it to Williamsburg, OH. But note that the IP address points to Reynoldsburg, Ohio, not Williamsburg. Not sure if we should be correcting news stories in The Guardian but something is not right here. --rgpk (comment) 03:10, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Does it mean Williamsburg, Virginia? -- Ssilvers (talk) 04:34, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Gender Gap

It's telling that, when presented with pretty clear evidence that there's a 6/1 male-female ratio on this Wikipedia, the response of the community is to go "wWat gender gap? there's no gender gap! And if there is, it isn't a problem. Look, a female editor!". Just look at how Durova, one of Wikipedia's more important contributors, was driven away. Now imagine that happening, quietly, dozens of times every day. 203.219.241.110 (talk) 04:04, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

As I have noted before, although there are more male editors, the female ones tend to be very active and are disproportionately important in contributing and reviewing GA- and FA-class articles. -- Ssilvers (talk) 04:34, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

This may also be a result of the selection bias - e.g. casual female editors get driven away by the unwelcoming climate so only those who are most dedicated remain. - BanyanTree 05:56, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Or it might just be that dealing with vandalism and deletion debates are more appealing to blokes and the way to keep more of the women who start editing is to talk about article review in welcome messages. ϢereSpielChequers 10:49, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Or it may be that baseball cards have a more well-documented history than friendship bracelets, so it's easier to write an article on them. (Goes and does some research: 8,700 hits on google books for friendship bracelets, 121,000 for baseball cards.)It's very difficult to get an article beyond stub status without there being sources. Escapepea (talk) 20:05, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

What has gender to do with being an editor, in the sense that there is nothing loaded against or for a particular gender. Perhaps there are less women here as there are fewer pilots or sailors or presidents ...Yogesh Khandke (talk) 08:43, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

I reject the notion that Wikipedia has an "unwelcoming climate". If anything, the culture at Wikipedia is very friendly compared to other places. Those who translate the natural conflict that arises on a collaborative effort into there being an unwelcoming climate have unrealistic expectations of the world. Conflict is going to arise on a project like Wikipedia. I have noticed no gender discrimination on Wikipedia. If there are a dearth of female editors, it's because women themselves are not electing to become editors. The explanation for that could be as simple as women don't find the idea of Wikipedia as interesting as men. I find it somewhat offensive for people to imply that a "male-dominated culture" is responsible for the lack of women, implying in a way that the men are systematically excluding women. That is untrue. The Wikipedians mentioned in the article need to stop pointing fingers at the "male community" and blaming them for the lack of women and start asking women to contribute. Jason Quinn (talk) 15:51, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

(e/c) There's not just a gender gap, there's stereotyping. Who says female editors would choose to write about friendship bracelets?! I'm a long-term female editor and the majority of the two dozen articles I've written are on species and architecture. Oh, sorry, was I supposed to write about something "feminine"? Way to pigeon-hole and devalue all of the women in science and engineering contributing to WP now. Maedin\^talk 15:58, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Excellent point... for a girl! (that was a joke, btw) You are completely correct. The article does stereotype. One of the other things that bothered me about the New York Times article was when it used the smallness of the Mexican feminist writer's category to the largeness of the Simpson's category as evidence of some bias against women. As a long-time Wikipedian, that statement alone showed me that the author had developed nothing but a superficial understanding of this issue. Wikipedia does exhibit a very pronounced pop-culture bias, which is perhaps best illustrated by the Simpson's articles. To use the example that they did, proves to me that the author was unaware of the pop-culture bias. In my opinion, if someone cannot recognize that, their "insight" into a deeper issue such as the existence of a gender bias is kind of worthless to me. Jason Quinn (talk) 16:22, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

"Public Health" call to action

I wanted to be upset about this, but I read the paper and it's not bad really. The title is misleading. It's not really "promoting" any kind of "public health" system, it's just talking about adding medical knowledge to Wikipedia. They could have picked a less political sounding title. Gigs (talk) 14:34, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

I don't think "public health" means what you think it means. Powers ^T 22:28, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Oh I'm well familiar with the healthist movement to attempt to control everyone's lives in the name of "public health". Gigs (talk) 16:17, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Regardless of the existence of such a movement, that's not what "public health" usually refers to. It's primarily educational and statistical rather than addressing the controversial economic and labor issues you highlight. The title was perfectly accurate. Powers ^T 16:28, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

As most of the authors are not American we where unaware of this local political meaning. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:21, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

It's not an American political term anyway. Gigs seems to have it confused with the "public option". Or single-payer health care. Powers ^T 23:59, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

Qwiki

At first glance I'm a bit uneasy about Qwiki's license compliance - it seems that they take wikipedia CC-BY-SA text & images and package them into a proprietary flash file, replacing links with qwiki links and adding an automated audio recording, and then claim that this usage is a "collection" of material and therefore that only the text is available under a creative commons license but the actual "qwiki's" are copyrighted to their company tivoizing the creative commons content. To me what they are doing seems much closer to adapting or modifying wikipedia content (which would trigger the share-alike clause in the license and license every qwiki that incorporates wikipedia content under a creative commons license. An interesting license question to look at, certainly becuase if there is not sufficient "newness" in what qwiki is don'g to creative a derivative work, then what are they claiming copyright on (random thoughts not a considered opinion). Ajbpearce (talk) 13:51, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

Good thoughts, and worth examining, regardless of whatever conclusions anyone comes to. My own current brainstormed reply on the topic is that a Wikimedia analog of any good pedagogical repackaging concept like Qwiki should always be built soon after the concept proves viable. A (seems-to-me-related) example: Youtube was the first on the scene to successfully bring crowdsourced video clips to the masses in a DIY read/write format; but Wikicommons was soon extended to become a Wikimedia alternative (regardless of the fact that Youtube remains the top instance and largest draw in most people's minds). Youtube is welcome to retain the commercial kingpin position, but the important thing is that someone who wants to share a video has an option to do it through a Wikimedia site, and that site is popular enough not to be obscure, so there's a decent chance of having thousands of viewers click on it. I see the same thing for Qwiki. Additionally, I realize that some obstacles exist: (1) Some repackaging tools take money to build, and Wikimedia tends to be low on capital—but there are some potential ways to address that through endowments; and (2) at some point the "Wikimedia analog" idea could run into a patent roadblock; but my answer to that, off the top of my head, is that Wikimedia should say to the patent holder, "Either you make some room for us in this sphere (i.e., come to a decent patent licensing agreement), or we pull out the knives on enforcing our content licensing terms, in which case your business may be SOL for using the crowdsourced content that it relies on." I.e., "Win-win or nothing, you pick; we won't accept win-lose." I don't know, this is all off the top of my head. — ¾-10 16:27, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

I find it kinda weird that the information about Czech Wikipedia was not added to the "Czech Wikipedia" page in the first place. Priorities, guys... Lorem Ip (talk) 01:46, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, everyone has different ones, you know. And it's a lot easier to report about a news item than it is to incorporate the facts in that item into running text. Powers ^T 22:01, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I know; e.g., for some, the priority is to read wikipedia and bitch about how sad it is. As for "a lot easier", the only thing "a lot easier" is simply mention the fact, rather than to detail it. But just the same, the "easy text" may be even more easily cut-and-pasted to a more important place (here I assume that creation of encyclopedia is declared to be of utmost importance for the project). No disrespect to the writer of the signpost page; they did a part of job by digging the facts, and I intentionally wrote in passive voice "was not added". The unpleasantly surprizing (for my tastes) part was that nobody else cared about wikipedia's own history to be well-documented by wikipedia. Lorem Ip (talk) 22:55, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Well, not to be flippant, but {{sofixit}}. I'd start with a note on the article's talk page. Powers ^T 23:45, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Well, that's what I actually did first thing after reading Signpost; I added the reference in question into the article, and only then proceeded with bitching. Lorem Ip (talk) 17:03, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

I don't think the effort that is made to create Wikipedia in local or minor languages is worth it. The value that is placed upon having a native language version is overemphasised. How knowledge is conveyed is infinitely less important than what knowledge is conveyed. The foundation should stop wasting money on developing local language Wikipedias for now. - Shiftchange (talk) 11:24, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

Sure, let them Bantu learn to speak a civilized language; e.g., Chinese, if they hate French. Lorem Ip (talk) 02:49, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Considering that most languages have a very limited distribution and that the number of languages has been declining for centuries (see Our planet's languages are dying) would that be so bad? - Shiftchange (talk) 11:28, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

I don't think wikimedia spends more than 0.01% of resources in dying languages compared to efforts in fighting vandals in English. Lorem Ip (talk) 22:00, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks. - Considering the impending deployment of 1.17, many weeks, instead of many months might actually be true for once ;). Bawolff (talk) 02:14, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Indeed, we haven't had a proper watershed in a while. Of course, because of the new (okay, so not that new) split system some were going live immediately and others after months, so I figured it always averaged to weeks anyway :P - Jarry1250 ^{[Who? Discuss.]} 17:11, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

This page has been mentioned by multiple media organizations: Fister, Barbara (3 February 2011). "Women and Wikipedia". Library Babel Fish. Reagle, Joseph (2 January 2013). ""Free as in sexist?" Free culture and the gender gap". First Monday. 18 (1): 4291.

• Nice work Headbomb!

  What rankings are Herbert Mayer and Jacob Jaffe on the list? Perhaps we should consider recreating those articles. NW (Talk) 01:47, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• Herbert Mayer has a fame of 4.3 mD (ranking 1916th, tied with 33 people) and Jacob Jaffe has 0.7 mD (ranking 4794th, tied with 244 people). Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 02:48, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• So has anyone started a pool to see when articles on Mayer & Jaffe will be re-created, seeing how we have an arguably objective measure of their notability? -- llywrch (talk) 06:27, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• I started a discussion thread about Jaffe at So where did Wikipedia go wrong?. -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 13:41, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

• Lewis Carroll was also a professional, though not I believe an important, mathmetician, which is presumably what he is doing on this list in the first place. Julia Kristeva is also not famous as a scientist, though her work touches on psychological areas. Johnbod (talk) 02:14, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• Under "Fame, article quality, and other trends on Wikipedia" (permanent link here), the subsection "Numbers" says "the SHoF contains 5,631 entries ... of these, 1828 are living, 3808 are dead." 5631 ≠ 1828 + 3808.—Wavelength (talk) 04:06, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• Right you are, I'll recrunch the numbers. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 04:09, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• This is MegaBullshit Idiocy. Dewey? Give me a break! Edison (talk) 05:00, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• I must confess that I didn't recognise 2 of the top 10 men and Dewey was one of them. Is this US-centricity? S a g a C i t y (talk) 11:02, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• I wouldn't ascribe this directly to US-centricity - although I doubt I'm the only one surprised that Isaac Newton didn't make the list -- or other notable older scientific figures like Galileo, Plato or Aristotle. (Moreover most Americians, if asked to identify John Dewey, probably could do little better than guess he invented the Dewey Decimal System -- which was the work of another man.) But a glance at the John Dewey article offers an possible answer: he has been the target of much vitriol by American conservatives. (Damn that man for working towards te goal of offering the average American a useful & liberal education!) -- llywrch (talk) 18:53, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• There appears to be a high degree of correlation between "fame" and controversy. I think Newton and Galileo might not rank in the top ten because controversy over Newton's primacy and Galileo's polemics had died down well before the advent of the Google era, even if they did fall within the two century timeframe of the project, which they do not. ~ Ningauble (talk) 19:51, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• Ah. I missed that small detail about the "two century timeframe". I'm standing by the rest of my comment, though. -- llywrch (talk) 20:21, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• Melvil Dewey lived from December 10, 1851 to December 26, 1931 and John Dewey lived from October 20, 1859 to June 1, 1952. Did the last name of the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System somehow help boost the culturomic darwins of John Dewey's name within ngrams.googlelabs.com? -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 11:41, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

• As covered in this 31 January 2011 issue of The Signpost, the New York Times prints an article to announce to the world "Wikipedia's gender gap" merely by selecting a few Wikipedia articles purportedly on "topics more likely to be followed by boys" and "topics more likely to be followed by girls" (which itself has bias, scope, author age, and target audience problems) and eyeball compares them to draw a predetermined conclusion.[1] In contrast, as covered in the same 31 January 2011 issue of The Signpost, the Signpost publishes "Building a pantheon of scientists from Wikipedia and Google Books," an objective analysis based on analytical thought that publishes its support for the conclusions drawn by the article. The New York Times continues to be held out as THE reliable source of reliable sources, whereas The Signpost is held very low on the totem pole when it comes to usage in Wikipedia articles. What's wrong with that picture? Headbomb and The Signpost, congratulations on another outstanding job. -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 11:05, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• Also 90% of the top ten men are dead, only 60% of the top ten women. That's a significant difference. Rich Farmbrough, 13:59, 1 February 2011 (UTC).
  

• Interesting to compare surnames only (unigram) for Newton,Asimov,Einstein,Darwin (Newton scores far higher), and contrast those results to bigram data Isaac Newton,Isaac Asimov,Albert Einstein,Charles Darwin where Newton looses top spot to Darwin,who in turn looses it to Einstein. Rich Farmbrough, 14:19, 1 February 2011 (UTC).
  

• For surnames only, I think in general Newton and Darwin are more common in uses other that the scientists' names; especially for Newton, many results found from the periods at bottom are not related to Sir Isaac. With the bigrams you misspelled Newton's first name and probably noticed how common typos or misreadings are instead (at least in the link above): here's the real link. —innotata 14:48, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• Thanks thought I had fixed that typo - I have now. Rich Farmbrough, 14:59, 1 February 2011 (UTC).
  

• Haidar Abbas Rizvi's birth year was reported incorrectly in this article, listing both his Science and Wikipedia birth years as 1967. I changed it to 1969, the correct value. And while I was looking into it, I determined that the 1967 date was actually vandalism that had been left in the article for over five months. Oops. I've fixed it, but it's probably a good idea to check the other articles on this list for vandalism. In particular we should be looking at those who are alive (according to either Wikipedia or Science), died recently, or have discrepancies in birth or death dates. Reach Out to the Truth 22:00, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• Bizarrely the SHOF list is missing Mary Anning. I would have expected her to make the top 10 list of of women scientists. I left a comment at their website about her being missed. She should easily qualify as a search for her name at Google books returns more than 9000 results.

• She was born in 1799, and this list covers people born from 1800 onwards. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 16:49, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

• And again Miss Anning is denied her due by the scientific establishment. -- 15.252.0.76 (talk) 18:46, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

• Culturomics "least likely to succeed" word of 2010? By creating a mechanism for others to stroke the egos of both Google (who can give grants) and Wikipedia (who can boost fame) at the same time and to 'scientifically' validate what these two giants do, I think that that culturomics soon will be on the lips of everyone. In researching the term, Google books shows "culturomic" being used in 2008 as in "genomic-proteomic-culturomic enterprise". I think the first two relate to enterprises/organisms based on hereditary (genomic enterprise) and an enterprises based on proteins (proteomic enteprise). In that context, does anyone has a guess as to what culturomic enterprise might be? -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 11:41, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

• Michael Grzimek: Science has probably confounded the birth and death dates of Michael Grzimek with that of his father Bernhard Grzimek. --Longbow4u (talk) 18:13, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-01-31/WikiProject report