The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2011-12-19. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

I wonder if the increasing intensity of ArbCom cases and onsite disputes are what contributed to the reduction in interest... Stifle (talk) 09:16, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

It's a crappy job that tends toward burnout. The job is actually to deal with the thorniest and stupidest issues on the entire encyclopedia. Think of it as taking one's turn in the barrel - David Gerard (talk) 13:12, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

They could make things a lot easier for themselves by insisting on succinctness, getting rid of the so-called workshop page, and conflating the "principles" section of each judgement down to one or two votes. WRT the text, which has been altered, SecurePoll did not make "expressing an opinion on each candidate mandatory": SecurePoll has always provided for default "neutral" and (this year) "no vote" buttons. The instructions explicitly say that this default will have no effect on the voting tally. Tony (talk) 14:02, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

No kidding. They've got these enormous processes and then they slow those down and drag those out. Muhammed Images is about a one week case, exactly three well-placed topic bans and a little menacing growling and it's resolved. Now watch them take four months to fail to fix the problem. WAAAAAAY too much personal politics... Carrite (talk) 02:15, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Wow, half of the elected candidates got under 50% support, and the other half were not much above that watermark. How's that for consensus? ASCIIn2Bme (talk) 23:13, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

The news article should have clarified what it meant by 'percent of support' . The eight successful candidates all individually got more supports than opposes, so in common sense terms they all got above 50% support. The pie charts seem to be using 'all votes cast' as the denominator (i.e. total number of boxes checked by all voters combined), and to use that to compute 'percent of support' seems unusual. For a more understandable summary, see the 'percentage' column in Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2011#Results. EdJohnston (talk) 00:40, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

Agreed: ArbCom needs reformation. ResMar 05:34, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

Not raised at all was the use of LimeSurvey poll software that has recently been declared by various members of the WMF staff as having security issues, and should not be used for Wikipedia/Foundation surveys. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:24, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Not to nitpick or anything, but you could have noted that "foreign character" meant foreign alphabetical characters, not characters originated from non-English speaking parts of the world. I freaked out there for a minute since I assumed that we were discussing characters in film, tv, cartoons, anime, etc. TomStar81 (Talk) 05:39, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

It's loooong. ResMar 04:10, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

And a good read. Nice to see so many promotions. Tony (talk) 08:33, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

• Thanks Tony. Next week might be even longer; I count 20 pieces of new featured content so far. Crisco 1492 (talk) 13:32, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

Well, even if we don't get Wysiwyg, at least Wikipedia is easier to use than Facebook! (ducking for cover) :-) -- Ssilvers (talk) 04:26, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Facebook is easy to use, what are you talking about o_O. ResMar 04:59, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

It's no secret that I'm a critic of Jimbo, his cult of personality, and his willingness to both manipulate to further his own agenda but also deny the existence/effect of said cult of personality. I don't think that his intention was to whip up an international media frenzy when he started the thread on his talk page, but then removing that discussion without archiving it, after it had been covered by the international media... for god's sake that's a poor move. On a website that prided itself on a publicly viewable history for every change that is made, burying the conversation both looks improper and is rather ineffective. Sven Manguard Wha? 05:29, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Wales has a long history of failing to practice what he preaches. This has sometimes hurt Wikipedia, but he continues to do it anyway. What more can be said? -- llywrch (talk) 17:07, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

I had been warned and blocked for vandalism wayyyy back in 2008 before I became very active (before I made an account), all because I couldn't do the wikimarkup correctly.Jasper Deng (talk) 06:11, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

That image is an easy target for photo manipulation by the likes of 4chan. I'm sure you know what I'm hinting at. S_peakF_ree ^(talk)_(contribs) 02:53, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

Heil if I know :-) -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 01:56, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Concerning SOPA, it appears that as the Italian Wikipedia goes, so does Scribd. Story here. -- llywrch (talk) 16:53, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

• Per "as measured by a new quality metric developed for the project" where would I find this quality metric? Thanks --Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:56, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

See here and here, or indeed (for context) the early coverage in the Signpost itself. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 11:33, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

• I have just updated the "Brief news" ArticleFeedback item to be more up-to-date. I hope nobody minds (we only published 6 hours ago). - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 10:40, 21 December 2011 (UTC)
• What about the milestone of the Dutch Wikipedia hitting over 1 million articles, isn't that newsworthy? Or was it mentioned last week or something? Aranea Mortem ^{(talk to me)} 12:58, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

I wouldn't call this a milestone in the sense of 'something praiseworthy achieved' (disclaimer: my personal opinion). In October 100k 'articles' were added to Dutch Wikipedia by bots, end November there were 870k 'articles', now 1M ?! Nearly all of this is done by bots. These new 'articles' are mostly really taxonomy stubs, an infobox and one or two sentences (which repeat texts from the info box). With 8.3 million species above bacteria level, we can expect a lot more. On Dutch Wikipedia there are about 200 'articles' about snakeflies, and similarly for hundreds of other genuses. In the English Wikipedia most snakeflies are not even mentioned on genus or family level. Could this mass import of low notability facts even have repercussions to our Google rating? At very least the connection between article counts and human efforts spent is getting more and more shady. I'm not sure where this will bring us. If any verifiable fact merits an article, we can expect 100M 'articles' about known stars some time later. Someone suggested to replace these 'articles' by lists and add 200k redirects instead. Erik Zachte (talk) 17:05, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

I agree with Erik Z. This is surface journalism, whereas something more probing about the size/threshold-related progress of the WPs is required. Tony (talk) 17:21, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Style point: Administrators aren't "promoted," they're "elected." Use of this word implies an Overseers-and-Plantation Hands division of the project. In reality, the tool box additions relate to quality control and rule enforcement work, which is independent of content creation. New administrators are merely those voted as being trustworthy to have access to these specific tools to be used in specific applications of their Wikipedia work. They aren't "promoted." Carrite (talk) 18:55, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

I agree "promotion" is the wrong word.

I'm not convinced "elected" is the right word.

I don't think Overseers-and-Plantation Hands is the right metaphor apply to the word "promotion". I see promotion as a corporate term, which we also want to avoid, but I don't see it as relating to a plantation organization.--SPhilbrick(Talk) 23:14, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Glad you didn't mention Dutch Wikipedia reaching 1,000,000 articles as in my view it's not much to be proud of with a few 100.000s of them being bot created stubs from the "animal project" with "facts" like "animal x is a species belonging to the family y and was discovered in {{{1}}} by z". Then again I don't care much about milestones, I only count my own (all handcrafted) articles and take a small bit of pride in the fact that none of the ones I created here have been deleted yet so that must mean that they at least are of value to some people. S_peakF_ree ^(talk)_(contribs) 02:36, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

Honestly? I was unaware that this milestone had been reached at all when compiling the report =) Tee hee, ResMar 05:18, 22 December 2011 (UTC).

If you are looking for a detailed report / feedback on the Webfonts deployment, please read mail to India list that we had sent. We have moved forward after this and have already seen improvement with WMF (Mazeland and team) communicating more and I hope such a thing will not happen in future deployments. Srikanth (Logic) 04:44, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the link. - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 10:53, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

• It's good that we're finally at the point in WYSIWYG where the community is able to play with it in a sandbox. This is a good sign for Wikipedia's future, and will do more for editor retention than charging clumsily into India, Brazil, and U.S. colleges ever will. I wonder how much sooner we'd have the visual editor functional if even half of the time and money spent on those other failed efforts was spent on this? Sven Manguard Wha? 05:25, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

WMF takes flak ...  ??? — billinghurst sDrewth 05:34, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Feel free to make minor grammatical corrections yourself. Our copyeditors are human, they miss things from time to time. Sven Manguard Wha? 05:47, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

That's not a mistake, that's British usage. Just like "Liverpool are playing well this year" or "the Orchestra are often blamed for the current Ukulele revival which is sweeping the globe". Angr (talk) 07:55, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Okay, to clarify, I wrote "WMF take...", which was then corrected to "WMF takes..." by Tony. Per BBC guidelines, one is not "right" or "wrong", but they have different nuances. Here, I think you could defend both options. - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 10:56, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

• WYSIWYG? - finally! Bulwersator (talk) 07:53, 21 December 2011 (UTC)
• "Whole wikitext-template structures could also be phased out as part of the transition process." Unless I'm misreading that, that's major step in itself, with massive implications. Where can we learn more about, and discuss, this proposal? What about the metadata currently emitted by our templates? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:43, 21 December 2011 (UTC)
  • I believe the main complaint it with templates that emit HTML output that is unbalanced (i.e. templates which cannot 'stand alone'). This includes templates such as {{s-start}}, which presumably would be merged with {{s-end}} to create a single overarching template. I dare say the effect on microformats would be negligible. - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 15:58, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Only issue is that while it may be true about the retaining secure login there is an issue in that there is NOT a current security certificate and that is not going to be resolved at this time. — billinghurst sDrewth 12:27, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

Newbies will no longer have problem with editing. Nice work done, WMF! Dipankan ^{In the woods?} 15:48, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

My talk page has a discussion of my statement that economics has the highest mean intelligence-quotent of disciplines in the social sciences.  Kiefer.Wolfowitz 11:03, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Hah. I didn't know I was going to be quoted verbatim on the books bit. Maybe I should have said something more pleasant. ;) Protonk (talk) 22:03, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

We always appreciate honest and candid responses. -Mabeenot (talk) 22:10, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

• Category:Economic history is surely one of the poorest areas of the encyclopedia, full of truly dire efforts like Economic history of Europe (don't even look at the stub-class Economic history of the world, never mind Economy of Medieval Islamic world). Economy of Egypt starts in 1990. I'm normally very sceptical about student class-assignment projects, but in areas like this, how much harm can they do? Johnbod (talk) 15:53, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

• Very interesting interview, impressed by the depth of the answers. Gonna read some economics articles now. :) Nageh (talk) 00:29, 27 December 2011 (UTC)