Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-08-30/News and notes

News and notes

Most linked websites on Wikipedia, New York Wiki-Conference, and more

Most linked websites on the English Wikipedia

On his Inkdroid blog, Library of Congress coder Ed Summers published a list of the most heavily linked websites on Wikipedia. (Summers recently started Linkypedia, a tool analyzing external links on the English Wikipedia to a given web site, providing more information than MediaWiki's own external link search function – see Signpost story.) The number-one host, not surprisingly, is the Wikipedia toolserver, with 3,169,993 links; this is followed by Google.com, with 2,117,967 links.

To generate more meaningful results, a mainspace-only chart was then generated. The most frequently linked host in the article namespace is the website of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, with over 400,000 links, followed by the digital object identifier database at dx.doi.org, the Internet Movie Database and books.google.com.

Summers also provided lists of the most linked hosts in the .edu and .gov domains, and of the 100 most frequently linked top-level domains (the three country domains of non-English language countries that are linked most often are .de, .fr and .jp).

In a related endeavour, researcher Finn Årup Nielsen compiled a list of the most frequently linked news sites, based on the usage of the {{cite news}} template.

Most frequently linked hosts in the article namespace
Most frequently linked .gov hosts in the article namespace
Most frequently linked .edu hosts in the article namespace
Most frequently linked top-level domains in the article namespace

Wiki-Conference NYC

Last weekend, Wikipedians/Wikimedians gathered at the two-day Wiki-Conference NYC at New York University. The event comprised various panels, open-space discussions, and five-minute lightning talks. Two keynote presentations were made, by author (and NYU lecturer) Clay Shirky and by the Wikimedia Foundation's Executive Director Sue Gardner. Shirky's presentation was mostly based on topics from his recent book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (the book's review in next week's Signpost will mention a few more details from his talk). Some of his statements were taken up by Sue Gardner on the next day, who spoke on the "Role of the Wikimedia Foundation in Supporting and Building the Movement". She started by showing slides that she normally uses to introduce non-Wikimedian audiences to Wikipedia and Wikimedia, and explained why she highlights certain aspects which audiences often misunderstand or don't know about. She then presented some new PR videos based on interviews with Wikimedia volunteers, produced at last month's Wikimania Conference. The audience found the videos to be well-made, although there was some concern whether the age of the interviewed persons was representative of the community as a whole. A low quality recording of Shirky's keynote is available, along with several audio recordings and slides from the talks. Better quality recordings from the live video stream might become available later.

Briefly

Fly me to San Francisco: The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for experienced Wikipedia editors to spend three days in San Francisco at the end of September (the Foundation pays airline fare, hotel, and other living expenses), to determine how to help the Wikipedia community (and other Foundation projects) to create more how-to screencasts. You don't have to have experience creating screencasts to be considered. (Although the deadline is August 30, submissions a day or two late may be considered – email ahead; application information).
WMF Chief Rep in India: The Wikimedia Foundation announced a job opening for the Foundation's chief representative in India. The responsibilities will include fostering advisers and friends of Wikimedia India, introducing Wikimedia to large universities, building relationships with open-software groups in India, and encouraging software development to support the growth of Indic-language projects.
Already photographed: "De Schoolmeester" windmill, one of 50,000 national monuments in the Netherlands
A logo used to celebrate the 100,000th article milestone on the Farsi (Persian) Wikipedia
Two WMF committees launched: On 25 August 2010, the Foundation launched its Research Committee (see previous coverage in The Signpost). The Committee was established "to help organize policies, practices and priorities around Wikimedia-related research", and is currently in the development phase. A second committee – the Wikimedia Foundation 2010–2011 Audit committee – has been formed to oversee financial and accounting issues for the Board of Trustees. It consists of Board member Stu West, Matt Bisanz, Ad Huikeshoven, Renata Stasaityte, Michael Snow and ex officio observing members Ting Chen and Sue Gardner.
Sue Gardner's report: The Executive Director's report to the Board of Trustees of the WMF for February and March 2010 has been published. Apart from events already covered by The Signpost, it records:
- preparations for the Foundation's public policy initiative;
- a meeting between Foundation staff members and managers of Google (at the time of the company's $2 million donation to Wikimedia – see Signpost coverage), after which Google designated a liaison contact for future WMF inquiries; and
- the visit of a delegation from the "Chinese State Department" to the Foundation's offices in March.
Dutch photo hunt: Wikimedia Nederland is organizing a photo scavenger hunt, "Wiki loves monuments", in September. Prizes, including an iPad and an Android smartphone, will be awarded for sharing photos of national monuments. As explained in an English-language post on the Foundation blog, the event has been prepared on the Dutch Wikipedia with extensive lists of the 50,000 rijksmonuments (12,000 of which already have photos), sorted by municipality, with assistance from the government office responsible for national monuments.
Farsi milestone: The Persian Wikipedia recently celebrated the creation of its 100,000th article (a threshold reached by the Slovene Wikipedia earlier this month). In a congratulatory message, Jimbo Wales called it an "important achievement ... I am very eager to visit Iran although of course the difficult political disagreements between our countries makes that difficult. But I am sure it will happen someday soon!"

Hungarian camp: 16 Wikipedians from Wikimedia Hungary and the neighboring Serbia took part in the first multi-day Wikipedia camp. Based in the small town of Nagykanizsa, the four-day trip centered on sharing editor experiences. Editors expressed their hope that it may become an annual event.
French report: Wikimedia France has released their chapter report for April to June. There have already been 9,000 visits to their main site and 2,600 visits to their blog within the period, as well as 20,000 monthly visits to their search portal.
Expanded Portuguese user-rights: The Portuguese Wikipedia has implemented a new user-right for page eliminators. Members of the usergroup can delete pages from Articles for Deletion, Speedy Deletion, and other deletion pages. The group was created to compensate for a dire administrator drought on the wiki, which currently has just 40 active administrators.

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Editor note: Spelling mistake. Zomg. ResMar 15:26, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It seems like bad timing to add the Fly me to San Francisco bit when the deadline is the day after the signpost report is made.--Rockfang (talk) 23:26, 31 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The Portuguese Wikipedia wouldn't be in such a dire need of administrators if they didn't have such a stringent inactivity policy: even if an admin is actively making edits, they will lose the rights if they don't perform 50 or more administrative actions (deletions, blocks, etc) in the past 180 days. --Waldir ^talk 07:28, 1 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, such a significant quota for using your tools CAN'T be good for making sure tools are used responsibly. Yoshi348 (talk) 18:08, 1 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed, many admins started performing administrative actions only to keep their user rights. I feel sad that I was one of the original proposers of the inactivity policy, but at the time it was about people who made no edits whatsoever in 6 months, or something. Ironically, that proposal was rejected. The new one, I believe, gained traction after many older editors grew disillusioned with the project as several newer editors started trolling the administrators, requiring votes for bold changes and then piling oppose votes, etc. These new editors used the absence/indifference of many respected older editors to drag the community into a rushed decision. But of course, this is my POV as one of the desysopped admins, so take this with a grain of salt. If you can read Portuguese, the main discussion is here. Note, however, how the "consensus" was declared with 23 support votes against 20 oppose ones. --Waldir ^talk 21:38, 3 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The graphs look like medical swabs about to be examined under the microscope. Tony (talk) 10:17, 1 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Right, there was no time to find a better layout solution. I thought about using scrollbars, but wasn't sure how it would look like in other browsers:

Regards, HaeB (talk) 10:53, 1 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm going to say it's a good idea you didn't try that, because it pukes all over the place on IE8 here at work. The images are full size with useless scrollbars of what's supposed to be the display height on the side. It'll probably coverup this comment, too. Yoshi348 (talk) 18:08, 1 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

What is edwardbetts.com and why are there 160,000 external links to it? Ginger Conspiracy (talk) 02:23, 3 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This question was discussed on the Wiki-research mailing list, see e.g. Edward Betts' comment here: It is linked on Template:Orphan.