Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2013-03-11

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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2013-03-11. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Arbitration report: Doncram case closes; arbitrator resigns (1,421 bytes · 💬)

Ed. note: this talk page was cleared after publication, per our usual practice. The comments made prior to publication are available here. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 07:23, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

AUSC community rep terms were extended. --Surturz (talk) 10:40, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Is there a diff for that? —Neotarf (talk) 02:01, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

Yes: here. --Surturz (talk) 03:02, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll take a look at it for next week. —Neotarf (talk) 10:56, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

2nd arbitrator resigns

A second arbitrator has also resigned at Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard#Coren's resignation for those that are following these things. 64.40.54.27 (talk) 12:59, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

Featured content: Batman, three birds and a Mercedes (1,212 bytes · 💬)

Now that this feature has a new managing editor, is there any chance we can return to having all WP:FPs printed?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 13:34, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

I don't think that's a good idea. Makes sense if we've got three of them in a week (which, by my definition, is a bad week for FP), but it's a terrible idea for a week when we've got 14 FPs. 7 a week is about average, and that'd still be a lot for this page. Sven Manguard Wha? 05:27, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

What's a 'grand tourer' (the BMW car)? Can we have a link or another synonym in a bracket please? The photo info says 'roadster'. 86.133.214.126 (talk) 16:37, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

From the editor: Signpost–Wikizine merger; new writers (2,129 bytes · 💬)

Mergers are good, bringing critical mass or readers and editors to one place. I never had time to read Wikizine, I am glad it may be visible now in a place I actually frequent. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 11:14, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Is the Discussion Report a dead feature?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 13:35, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Hi, it's been a biweekly feature for some time now, but the regular writer was sick this week. The most important discussions are always viewable at WP:CENT. :-) Regards, Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 18:52, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

• For the past 26 months a newsletter about GLAM is published just like the Signpost, send like the Signpost, etc. That newsletter is This Month in GLAM and can be found at outreach:GLAM/Newsletter, at Wikipedia:GLAM/Newsletter and at your local talk page. Also send by e-mail, twitter, and blog. In some way it sounds strange to start a second special report about GLAM, while we already do that for more than two years. Greetings - Romaine (talk) 22:02, 14 March 2013 (UTC)
  • Hi. We are planning to complement the GLAM newsletter through highlighting some of the bigger stories; we won't have comprehensive, country-specific coverage, like you do. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 07:34, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

Saddened by the departure of Crisco... Best wishes for his study. Semangat! Bennylin (talk)

News and notes: Finance committee updates (2,071 bytes · 💬)

I think a more accurate title for this article would have been "Grants committee updates". Also, I would like to point out that the IEG aggregate scores and comments were aggregated and posted by a WMF employee based on the input from committee members. The aggregation wasn't done by the Committee itself unless you consider a WMF employee to be a part of the Committee. --Pine^✉ 03:31, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

I've changed the latter concern. Thank you for your comments! Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 08:29, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

That's still not right. WMF both aggregated and published the scores. Look at the page history of Meta:Grants:IEG/Committee/Workroom/Review/Scores. --Pine^✉ 18:35, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

Ah, yes - my apologies. Is it fixed to your satisfaction now? :-) Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 20:16, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

Unfortunately not. The sentence "The WMF published aggregated results in early March, in which it examined a wide thematic range of applications" is still inaccurate. The Committee, not WMF, did the evaluations. WMF aggregated the evaluations and published the aggregated scores and comments. --Pine^✉ 02:18, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

Technology report: Article Feedback reversal: watershed moment?; plus code review one year on (8,114 bytes · 💬)

Ed. note: this talk page was cleared after publication, per our usual practice. Comments made before publication are available here. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 07:26, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Article Feedback tool

It's good to see that the WMF has listened to the feedback it received about this tool through the RFC. This was a worthwhile experiment, but IMO it didn't work and it's good that it's going to be changed to opt-in. Nick-D (talk) 07:22, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

LUA templates

Whilst there are over 80 templates in Category:Lua-based templates, it should be noted that about 20 of these are sandboxes of their parent templates, plus one or two user sandboxes, leaving about 60 legitimate templates. An optimist on the run!   08:17, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification. - Jarry1250 ^{[Vacation needed]} 14:09, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

Code review

I can understand why you focus on the first review rather than on the final result (rejection or merge), but I'm not so sure of this WMF vs. non-WMF distinction, because I think the point should rather be how good we are at bringing flesh blood. We'd need a third line for non staff (please try to include WMDE in staff), non-mediawiki patches: non-WMF staff teams may skew the numbers, as well as core volunteer developers (whose patches' quality is probably, on average, better than the WMF's, given the higher and longer MediaWiki experience they often have, although more are being added lately). As for the merges, the number of open commits is still increasing (as far as I can see), and 80 % of them are non-WMF. --Nemo 09:24, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Historically, the staff vs. non-staff distinction has been the one that has been the one most prominent in arguments in various fora, which is why I focus on it . The argument that a few volunteer developers have networked sufficiently to improve their review times to the level of staff has been put before (e.g. by Amgine) and I will look into testing it for next week.

The number of open commits is not a particularly useful measure under Gerrit, because if you've got a review, it's up to you to do something. At the moment, we have no idle timeout, and there is no reason to have one. - Jarry1250 ^{[Vacation needed]} 14:09, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

You're right on everything except that your analysis doesn't measure staff vs. non-staff but rather WMF vs. non-WMF, which is similar but not equivalent. For open commits, the figure above doesn't change if you consider only open commits without reviews (which is probably the recommended measure, see mw:Gerrit/Navigation#Commits_lists). --Nemo 14:32, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

I would also be interested in open commits. While I do not have a full knowledge how code review works, I am having a patch submitted myself which hasnt got a final review for almost a month...--Kozuch (talk) 10:48, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

MoodBar

"the outcomes can only be demoralising from a developer standpoint" -- I wouldn't assume that. In fact, I would definitely ask folks on the Product and Engineering teams what their opinion was before speaking for them. Some of us do love MoodBar and the Feedback Dashboard (I helped start the response team) but part of being professionals in software development is that you can't be afraid to kill your babies, if you catch my drift. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 18:24, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Yes, "outcomes": I was including AFTv5 in that (not sure if you noted that). I think it's inferable enough from various developer comments that undeploying AFTv5 was demoralising. Not necessarily very demoralising – as you say, being a professional means having to accept the odd reversal – but demoralising nonetheless, especially on AFTv5 where it was never really deployed in the first place. Disappointing, you know. That said, I welcome contrary comments which can be posted here or sent privately to me via my username @gmail.com . I will do my best to run them next week. Thanks, - Jarry1250 ^{[Vacation needed]} 14:09, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

I have to say i do not find the writing in this piece to be the type of objective reporting expected of a news source. There seem to be several opinions, such as the moodbar "filling an even more obvious need", a statement which the authors did not even bother to explain, and obvious speculation about the possible motives of the community in rejecting these features. I went back and re read that secion trying to figure out if you were just quoting someone as it seemed more like a bunch of opinions there in the last paragraph. Beeblebrox (talk) 00:20, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

I'm sorry you don't like the style, Beeblebrox. To answer your specific points, of course there is an amount of speculation about motives: this is completely typical of any news outlet. People care about motivations, and yet they can only ever be inferred from what people say and do (in this case the AFTv5 RFC) and I'm happy to take corrections. And yup, I did get some analysis in there in the last paragraph, but phrased overtly as such. To expand upon the need point, it's been long established that new users have historically been under-supported and lack communications pathways. Or do you disagree? - Jarry1250 ^{[Vacation needed]} 19:05, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

AFT on request

So I take it from this we can place AFT on certain articles on an opt-in basis... is there a page with more detail on how to do this somewhere? -- phoebe / (talk to me) 03:25, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

The first link to the EE mailing list may be of assistance. - Jarry1250 ^{[Vacation needed]} 14:09, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

To answer this question for the lazy, including me :) -- the newsletter says: "Going forward, editors who wish to enable AFT5 on articles they watch can simply add 'Category:Article_Feedback_5' to these articles -- and the feedback form will automatically appear at the bottom of these pages." -- phoebe / (talk to me) 19:05, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

AFT question

Will there be automatic anti-spam, anti-abuse measures on opt-in articles containing AFT? --74.202.39.3 (talk) 22:18, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

AFT from watchlist

I used to be able to see all the feedback from all my watchlisted articles using a link off my watchlist to Special:ArticleFeedbackv5Watchlist. But that doesn't seem to work anymore. Is it gone forever? --99of9 (talk) 06:15, 20 March 2013 (UTC)