Wikipedia talk:Community portal/Archive 16

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Facts Contradicting

The amount of money films have grossed in the U.K. in 2012 on the page 2012 in film is different to the amount it says on the page List of Highest-grossing films in the United Kingdom — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mrpequalme (talk • contribs) 21:07, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

Uploading ?

Hi,

How can I upload a Creative Commons picture about G3A3 article?

That picture is belong to me.

May you help me?

Thanks

--Zinzinzibidi (talk) 19:50, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

Feedback on the change to this page

I use Community portal all the time because it's on the sidebar, but I use it only to get to the Village Pump and the Signpost. It's the fastest way I know of to get to either. The new change leaves the Village Pump accessible, but now I have to scroll down to get to the Signpost. If there's another way just as fast, I don't mind. Otherwise, I don't like the change. Ntsimp (talk) 19:15, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

It's just a test. The page is going to be shifting around for a few weeks, to see which layout works best. See the above discussion and WP:Community portal/Redesign 2012. DoctorKubla (talk) 20:54, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
Yep, I'm temporarily playing around with the elements on this page to see if I can improve usability, so thanks for the feedback :)
It is kind of weird, now that you mention it, that there's no link to the Village pump on the sidebar. In any case, in addition to simply hitting "Community bulletin board" in the table of contents, which will take you to that area of the page without having to scroll, you could also add this template to your userspace – it's the same template that generates the Community bulletin board here. Another idea: you can subscribe to the Signpost in a number of ways, including signing up to get new issues delivered to your talk page each week. Thanks for your patience, and hope these workarounds aren't too annoying. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 21:05, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
Comment – I have a suggestion if you're looking to lean out the page. Under the "Things to do" tab, I've always found the list of examples next to the task links to be unnecessary clutter. For example:
Copyedit: VisualCron, Telewizja Trwam, Shaidu, Rhona Martin, Per Nilsson (writer), More...
(The one exception may be the "Requested articles" entry.) I could live with just having a link to the project and a link to "suggest some articles". You could even turn it into a form with some pull-down subject matter options. Shrug. Regards, RJH (talk) 21:30, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
RJH's suggestion is a very good one - there is little possibility any of 5 random articles will be of interest to a given editor. Best encourage clicks through to the full list and more information on the task. — Pretzels Hii! 21:47, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
Agreed that the opentask template could stand a substantial redesign to minimize the clutter factor. This test will give us a good baseline, at least, because it's currently placing the task list in the most visible and clicked-on real estate on the page, not counting the sidebar – if people still don't use it, that's a good indication to hack at it or get rid of it altogether. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 22:26, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
You're right that a random article is unlikely to be relevant to a user's interest, at least that's what the initial research behind SuggestBot showed. Some of the tasks appear to me to be interest-independent though, e.g. wikify and merge. Maybe some other tasks are similarly independent too, but I'd be happy to hear thoughts on why I might be wrong about this. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 21:15, 8 August 2012 (UTC)
Yes, I've certainly seen anecdotally (and personally) that, under the right conditions, Wikipedians will happily gnome away at things like wikifying, copyediting, and DAB-solving without much concern for the topics of the articles they're editing :) I'm assembling a sample of all the suggested tasks that appeared this week and will compare them to actual clickthroughs, to see which tasks, if any, are more enticing than others. I'll keep this interest-dependence/independence thing in mind... Stay tuned! Maryana (WMF) (talk) 17:33, 9 August 2012 (UTC)
ETA: Okay, I took a look at a day's worth of data and wrote up the results here.
The tl;dr is: just by moving the task list up to the top, we nearly tripled the number of clicks those articles get (yay!). However, the bad news is that it's still the case that no one is successfully completing the tasks (i.e., editing the articles). Also of note is the fact that the first two topics ("add wikilinks," "copyedit") and the last two topics ("requested article," "requested image") got the most clicks.
My hypothesis on those last two is that redlinks draw people's eye, but otherwise it seems like people are still mainly looking/clicking on the top items and ignoring the rest of the list. I'd like to wait till a week's worth of data comes in (that'll be Tuesday), but after that what I'd love to try is a radically shorter task list (just 5 or 6 topics, max) with just the "easy" stuff on it. What do you think? I can mock something up in my sandbox in the next couple of days and drop you all the link. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 22:53, 10 August 2012 (UTC)
I'm really curious about what you find when extending the data gathering period. To me there are three very interesting research questions here:
1: How long does a task need to stay up until we see people also editing the page? FlBot and SuggestBot both updated the page once an hour, maybe that's too often? Could be that they simply don't acquire enough attention. Fairly easy to test with different update intervals, which we had last week after SuggestBot's trial ended, but we can also do it more scientifically by manipulating the update interval (hopefully our bot request gets approved soon).
Yes, it'd be interesting to optimize for this – my hunch is that every hour is too fast for now, but if we get more pageviews, it might not be.
2: Is there a social loafing effect in play? In Group Size and Incentives to Contribute: A Natural Experiment at Chinese Wikipedia, if I remember correctly, they find that a larger Wikipedia community leads to more social loafing. Could perhaps be tested with different kinds of message of call to action? Not sure exactly what the messages should say, but they could maybe point to different issues related to attention/work needed?
Ooh, fascinating... that paper actually seems to be arguing the opposite, that Chinese Wikipedians' contributions dropped by nearly 50% after their community shrank. I do think a more explicit call to action is vital here, because while experienced Wikipedians know what a backlog is and how to attack it, newer people may be overwhelmed by a shopping list with no instructions or invitation to edit.
3: What type of tasks leads to edits? We got some interesting results in this regard when we sent SuggestBot suggestions to newly registered users back in 2010, it might be that the Community Portal shows a similar characteristic. You're already thinking about that and it's also testable through swapping types of tasks. Related to this is of course the question of how long the task list should be, not sure how we could test that.
This I think is the crux of the matter. I'm wondering now what would happen if we shuffled the list around and put wikifying and copyediting in the middle. Is it the case that more people clicked on those tasks because they were at the top of the list, or that they clicked on them because they were more "interest-independent" and/or "easy" as compared to, say, merging or verifying?
My two cents... Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:46, 13 August 2012 (UTC)
My answers are in-line above :) I'm currently trapped in a three-day team training session until Thursday, so I may not have time to work on this until later in the week, but I'd like to go forward with two small iterative changes in the meantime: 1) re-order the list of tasks on the task list to test for any confounding effect of having something at the top/bottom and answer your third point to some extent, and 2) move the "general tasks" to the bottom and collaborations to the top, next to the opentask list. I'm seeing a lot of clicks on the current collaborations, which is surprising given how far down on the page they are. It would be interesting to see how many people click on the tasklist tasks versus the collaborations when they're side by side on the page – I think this will give us some insight on the social aspect in tasking (it could be the case, for instance, that many more people will click on the collaborations than on the open tasks because they assume a collaboration is social, in which case just adding some "social" language on the task list, something like "help other Wikipedians make these articles better in the following ways," could make it more effective). A/B testing knows all! Maryana (WMF) (talk) 16:26, 14 August 2012 (UTC)
  • Went ahead and made the change to the Opentask template, moving low-click tasks to the top and high-click tasks to the middle. Let's see if clicks are influenced in any way by task order... Maryana (WMF) (talk) 23:53, 15 August 2012 (UTC)
    Apologies if this suggestion has already been made; if it turns out that prominence = clicks, could we use the randomiser templates to just have it display differently each time? That way there's always a different setup (although it could get frustrating if users start using the portal for consistent navigation). Ironholds (talk) 13:49, 19 August 2012 (UTC)

How to move a file from wiki commons to wikipedia?

Hello can anyone please tell how can I move or ask a file to be move here from wiki commons, it a signature file? Is it even possible? Thanks a lot. --RG9 22:16, 2 September 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Frog890 (talk • contribs)

Hey! I'm assuming you want to use a commons file on an English Wikipedia article? Commons files are usable by all of the WMF projects so you can type [[File:File name.jpg]] (or whatever file type it is) and it will use it in the article. Ryan Vesey 03:56, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks a lot, you are very kind. But what I meant is that if instead of its house being wiki commons, it could be Wikipedia? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Frog890 (talk • contribs) 01:35, 5 September 2012 (UTC)

If the file exists on Commons, then there's no reason to keep a redundant copy on this Wikipedia (and duplicates of Commons images are speedily deleted), as the Commons version can be used across all Wikipedia projects. --Mosmof (talk) 16:16, 5 September 2012 (UTC)
@Frog890: The only reasons someone would want a local version of a Commons file, to my knowledge, is if it has been deleted and you want to use it under the WP:NFCC (in which case you can ask a Commons admin to provide a copy) or if it is on a highly-visible page such as the Main Page and needs to be protected locally (and even then, you can usually just ask for the Commons version to be protected and for the blank local page to be protected instead of copying the image). Was one of these your reason or was there some other reason that I missed? --Philosopher Let us reason together. 17:30, 5 September 2012 (UTC)

Nominating Today's article for improvement for GA/FA

I understand that Good Articles are not written in a day, but looking at the number of people that must be contributing to this article, who no doubt have a lot of experience, might just as well be able to produce GA articles in short time! --HarshAJ (Talk)(Contribs) 16:35, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Layout of Community Portal

Wow, the Community Portal actually looks nice for a change. I definitely prefer this look over the "mountain of cruft in lots of boxes" look. Kaldari (talk) 18:02, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Yes! I spent some time on the page tonight and found it elegant and useful. --Ori.livneh (talk) 09:55, 15 September 2012 (UTC)
Thanks, d00ds :) It still has a long way to go, but it's getting there. Just judging from clicks, it looks like the new layout and spiffed-up task list is generating twice as much traffic on stuff to do. The Community bulletin board template really needs some tough love, though... Maryana (WMF) (talk) 21:14, 15 September 2012 (UTC)
[Comments on CBB moved below. —Quiddity (talk)]
I'd like to see the page split into two columns: the larger one for collaborations and open tasks, and a narrower one on the right for news and discussions. This would accomodate the Signpost and WP:CENT widgets well, plus the community bulletin board collapsed into a single column. — Pretzels Hii! 11:56, 16 September 2012 (UTC)
The Collaborations section is already 2 columns, and the OpenTasks is already 3 columns. It's fairly cramped at 1024x768 as it is... (The majority of the 'net-accessing world does not have a widescreen monitor yet) —Quiddity (talk) 16:03, 16 September 2012 (UTC)
  • I think the 2-column layout for the page that Pretzels suggests would be awesome down the road. The only reason I didn't do it immediately is because I don't know how to make it look nice :) But Quiddity is right that this would require paring down what's in each individual section. Which I don't especially mind, either, because I think the list of open tasks, among other things, is way too long. (Note the skewed distribution of clicks on articles occurring in that list.) I'm going to start measuring attempt and completion rates (e.g., of those clicks, how many went on to hit the edit button, and of those, how many actually saved an edit?) on tasks, which should make it even more clear what can safely get cut. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 21:53, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

WP:CBB

The Template:Announcements/Community bulletin board has always been somewhat lacking in clarity, and has varied in levels of quality/use/maintenance over the years. I'll do a major trimming now. But, What are our options for the future?
We could Merge the "Notices" parts of it into Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom/WikiProject desk (Because I think we want to keep the {{Signpost-subscription}} template here? And it's always good to get more people to read/contribute to that...)
There's some overlap with WP:Goings-on, but that page is very sparse, and should itself be merged somewhere, I suspect.
The RfC-section listing overlaps with the Dashboard subsection WP:Dashboard/Requests for comment... (However that full template (and the page itself) is quite overwhelming... I'm not sure whether we'd want to retain or merge-away the list here)
So, I guess my complete suggestion would be: 1) Merge the Notices to The Signpost, 2) Replace the entire CBB section with just the Signpost template, and a very short list of annotated-links on the left (Dashboard, News, Meetups, plus the {{Wikipediasister-list}}).
(We can remove Milestones and InTheMedia because they are both found via WP:News. The Mailing lists are about as widely used as IRC nowadays afaik, so that can safely be removed from the CP, too. WP:CENT is included in Dashboard.)
Thoughts, or other ideas? —Quiddity (talk) 23:25, 15 September 2012 (UTC)
For the CBB-replacement-idea, I'm wondering if this would work: (example in collapsed section. Feel free to tweak/improve (add crucial links, fix annotations/titles, etc) in the spirit of the layout)
Extended content

News and other community areas

The Signpost
25 April 2024
 
  • Dashboard - coordinating the various discussions taking place throughout Wikipedia
  • Meetups - regional gatherings of people
  • News - multiple sources of news about Wikipedia


Here is a list of the main community pages of Wikipedia's sister projects.
All of these projects are multilingual and open-content.
Meta-Wiki – Coordination of all Wikimedia projects.
Wiktionary – A collaborative multilingual dictionary.
Wikinews – News stories written by readers.
Wikibooks – A collection of collaborative non-fiction books.
Wikiquote – A compendium of referenced quotations.
Wikisource – A repository for free source texts.
Wikispecies – A directory of species.
Wikiversity – Where teachers learn, and learners teach.
Wikivoyage – A world-wide travel guide.
Wikidata – A free knowledge base that can be read and
edited by humans and machines alike.
Commons – Repository for free images and other media files.
This would just need to be combined with new instructions pointing editors of new WikiProjects towards Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom/WikiProject desk. Thoughts? Other ideas for overhauling this 1/3 of the page? —Quiddity (talk) 07:31, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
I asked at Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom/WikiProject desk#WP:CBB merge to Sidebar here and got support for the idea (of merging the CBB's notices/wikiprojects/portals news, to there, for centrality). Does anyone object, or have better ideas, or can I just implement this? —Quiddity (talk) 20:40, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

looks awesome to me! Ironholds (talk) 09:58, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, Done. —Quiddity (talk) 01:13, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

Funnel tracking

Update on some of the redesign/research on the Community portal: starting this week, we're going to be measuring the funnel of task attempts and completions on the open task list. Funnel analysis is something a lot of websites do to measure how successful they are at converting people from passive pageviewers to active buyers of widgets, etc. To date, no one has ever attempted this kind of analysis on Wikipedia, so this should be an extremely informative exercise, giving us invaluable information on how many people are dropping off in the contribution cycle after they "accept" a task (and, implicitly, what's causing them the most grief). Like all the previous research, the tracking will rely on anonymized tokens; no personally identifying information will be collected.

And while we're covering the quantitative front, I'd really appreciate any feedback those of you who are watching the page can give me! I've heard a few positive things so far, but I'm really curious to know what the rest of you Community portal lurkers are thinking – is this page starting to look more useful and actionable for you? What's missing and/or how could it be better? Thanks! Maryana (WMF) (talk) 20:30, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

It looks good to me! How far does this funnel analysis go? Like, I'd be really interested to see what being "collaboration of the day" does to an article's edit rate, and whether it brings good or bad contributions. Actually I could probably measure this myself (and am tempted to. Curse you, holidays.) Ironholds (talk) 20:35, 1 October 2012 (UTC)
We're just looking at users who click on any of the tasks in the open task section for now, to see if they then go on to attempt and save an edit, come back to the CP, and/or try another task. The collaboration coding would actually be really useful, and you should totally do it... after you return from your "holiday" (doesn't count if you're still on the computer!) :-P Maryana (WMF) (talk) 21:16, 1 October 2012 (UTC)
I can do it on my holiday! It's relaxation. Ironholds (talk) 05:06, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
My tentative conclusion is "we probably don't have enough sets of data to make it reliable, but things don't look good" :(. Ironholds (talk) 06:48, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
"Expect the worst, but hope for the best". I'd expect 95–99% curious clicking, without any editing at all. What are the numbers saying? —Quiddity (talk) 07:14, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
Very, very tentative results (that is, I've still not calculated a bit of the data, and I need to tie it all together); there's no particular increase in pageviews that is specific to the time spent as TAFI, there's not a substantial increase in edits or number of editors participating, and when there is an increase it's normally the people involved in the TAFI project rather than people who have stumbled upon the article and gone "neat!". I'd caution that, as said, I've still got some stuff to add and the actual calculations to do - and there are only 3 datapoints to draw off, if we include data for the weeks both preceding and following TAFI status. Ironholds (talk) 07:26, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
  • Okay, so, quick-and-dirty analysis, with the following caveat: there's not much data, both in terms of data for each individual page and in terms of the number of pages. To measure 28 days before, the TAFI period and the 7 after, I could only use 3 articles at the moment...and measuring more than 7 days after would seriously reduce that. To break it down:
  1. Page views are, weirdly, not particularly impacted by the status as TAFI, despite the hits that the portal gets. Which is really fucking weird. It went up on one, the others it stayed stable.
  2. Edits by both experienced and new users go up substantially, but with one exception tend to drop just as dramatically when the article is no longer so prominent.
  3. There's a similar boost in editor numbers to that found with edit numbers.
  4. Generally-speaking, experienced editors tend to get more of a boost out of the prominence than newbs.

It's incredibly early days, and I wouldn't draw anything from this, to be frank: 3 datasets is not exactly a peer-reviewed study. I'll keep monitoring and doing the same evaluation of future things in the hope of producing something more tangible, though (and I'll stick the R code and dataset out when I do so, so people can double- and triple- check). Ironholds (talk) 21:36, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Plus the page contents change every 1-3 hours, which must make things a lot more complicated. I wonder if we could slip a static section into that template for a few days (or freeze a section, perhaps one in the left column as those seem the most potentially noob-friendly). Assuming that would help you. —Quiddity (talk) 22:31, 3 October 2012 (UTC)
Actually, I was talking about the "TAFI" article, not the open tasks :). Ironholds (talk) 22:48, 3 October 2012 (UTC)
>.< I knew that. >.>
(are you still meant to be on holiday? -.- )
Whilst I'm here, a nudge for anyone to reply to my question up at #WP:CBB, pls'n'thnx. —Quiddity (talk) 03:08, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
This is holiday! I checked with HR; they tell me as long as I write R in my underwear it doesn't count as work ;p. Ironholds (talk) 09:59, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
  • Awesome! I'm glad these collaborations are getting some love. One thing I noticed in the click data that might help boost the pageview and new editor numbers is that far more people are clicking on the image associated with the article than the article itself. Given that these are mostly anons, I kinda doubt they're that interested in file metadata – I think they just expect the image to take them to the article.
  • So, another thing I'm picking up in the data is that there are significantly fewer clicks per pageview on the Community portal now than when the task list was at the top of the page. This makes sense: people tend to click more on the first thing they find on the page, and the task list offers many more things to click on than the collaboration of the day. Given that we're currently testing task completions, though, I'd like to move the task list back up to the top temporarily, so we have enough visibility on it to get some statistically meaningful results in a week or two. It can easily be moved back down if the edit numbers on collaborations start to drop. Any objections? Maryana (WMF) (talk) 19:59, 10 October 2012 (UTC)
    Sounds good to me! We're now up to four sets of data for TAFI evaluation, and the fourth correlates with the first 3; not much more can be learnt with things as they are without a loooong-ass study (TAFI changes so infrequently and is so new more datasets are hard to come by). It'd be interesting to find out what happens to the numbers in future collaborations when it drops down.
    We can now actually link images to a page - maybe we should try that as a discrete change (after we've switched things around, to make it distinguishable). Another thing that might be good in the future: a possible hypothesis for the disproportionate view-to-edit ratio is we're not giving people discrete tasks to do. It'd be interesting to see, in the future, what happens if instead of featuring TAFI or all the open tasks, we feature one specific task. Something small, which a clear tutorial can be made for, like referencing or categorisation. It's a specific "go to one of these pages, do this" thing. At the moment we've only seen "go to this page, do I dunno" or "go to one of these pages, do one of those things". Ironholds (talk) 23:17, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Weird

the NOTOC magic word doesn't appear to be working on this page. Anyone know why? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ironholds (talk • contribs) 13:50, 4 October 2012‎

It's working. The "Contents" box is created by hand-crafted formatting in the first ten lines of the wikitext. If you take out both of the NOTOCs (there's one at the top, one near the end) and then "Preview", you'll see two tables of contents, the hand-crafted one and the system-generated one. -- John of Reading (talk) 15:25, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
Aha. Is it worth having the hand-crafted one? Ironholds (talk) 16:06, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
The system-generated one is no good, because it includes the top-level "Welcome!" heading. I think it is worthwhile having the hand-crafted version, because a casual visitor won't necessarily bother to scroll down past the first screenful of text, so won't realise there are "Help out" and "News" sections. -- John of Reading (talk) 16:17, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
The handcrafted TOC is (or was) to avoid all the subheaders that would have been included. See this demo. Some sort of TOC is useful (as content exists below the fold), but feel free to change its style/content.
Relatedly, the scattered comments in the code that say "3 line spacing of h2 is important for subsection edit links to work correctly, PLEASE DO NOT FIX" were to make things work properly in the previous design, where there were sub-areas that we wanted to have [edit] links and some where we didn't. 'Tis tricky because of the way we had things transcluded, and the software's mechanism for automagically linking (or mislinking...) to the corresponding section number). Basically: Those comments and tricks can probably be removed (replace them with a __NOEDITSECTION__ instead, as there's only a lone [edit] link on the page, in the TAFI section, now, which we don't need). —Quiddity (talk) 00:52, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

Portal icon

Somebady know how I can change the icon of a portal? --Kasper2006 (talk) 11:35, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Please ask technical questions about Wikipedia at WP:Help desk. (But, give more detail when you ask there. Examples will help people understand what exactly you want to change.) —Quiddity (talk) 20:18, 8 October 2012 (UTC)
To change the icons displayed by templates such as {{Portal}} and {{Related portals2}}, see Template:Portal#Image. -- John of Reading (talk) 21:30, 8 October 2012 (UTC)
Thanks, I solved it with a suggestion had in IRC...it was like said John of Reading. ;-) --Kasper2006 (talk) 22:54, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Book Creator?

The Book Creator isn't really a Book Creator is it? I think it needs to be like I'm creating a book not some all about fact gizmo thats goin to either provoke people or bore them to death. Is there a way to upgrade Book Creator so I can actually write a book or does it have to be this way? If so I want emails and people commenting about this and if not I still want emails and comments on this. Chaos Is Perfection Confusion Is Dominance 16:07, 6 November 2012 (UTC)Chaos Is Perfection Confusion is DominanceChaos Is Perfection Confusion Is Dominance 16:07, 6 November 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by PredatorJ228 (talk • contribs)

The book creator is designed to help people create books from Wikipedia articles. To write your own book from scratch, I suggest you use a word processor! -- John of Reading (talk) 08:19, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

My Article

Hey I've made a new article called Masterpieces Of Terror And The Unknown. I would appreciate it if users as well as experienced users would look over it. I would also be especially pleased if any admin would publish it or accept it or whatever you do on Wiki to get it up as an approved article. If you do, please notify me. Thank You. CHAOS IS PERFECTION CONFUSION IS DOMINANCE 19:33, 7 November 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by QuickFireSnyp (talk • contribs)

Hmm. The deletion log tells me that your article Masterpieces Of Terror And The Unknown was deleted after you blanked it. Your draft article Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Masterpieces of Terror And The Unknown was rejected because it had no text in it. Do you have another copy of your text? If you do, I suggest you edit your draft article, paste the text it, save, and then click the link marked "When you are ready to submit, click here". -- John of Reading (talk) 08:16, 8 November 2012 (UTC)
    :Yeah I did it over again it should be up now.

CHAOS IS PERFECTION CONFUSION IS DOMINANCE 16:58, 8 November 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by QuickFireSnyp (talk • contribs)

Trim this template?

Heatmap of clicks on the list by task type

Based on what I'm seeing in the data, it appears that some sections of the opentask list are much more appealing to users than others. Check out the image to the right: that's the opentask template with percentages of clicks going to each task type. As you can see, the top two task types, wikifying and copyediting, get a fourth of all total clicks on the list.

Part of this might have to do with length/order: the current list is so long that it looks like people are just skipping over the middle sections and looking only at the top and bottom. I'd like to propose cutting a few of the task types for a tighter and more useful list. Take a look at this proposed new opentask, based on the most popular task types by clicks and edits.

Thoughts? (Also posted on the opentask template talk page. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 18:43, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

I would remove the orphan task ("Add links to these at related articles") and replace it with the expand task. Few people are going to expand articles significantly, but even one or two makes a big difference, and the orphan task is conceptually complex for newbies to understand, since it's not an action on the linked page. I would also put "Fix spelling and grammar" on the far left, since people read left-right and we know that it's already popular. Other than that, and some smaller tweaks, I think it's a very good idea to have a shorter list. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 20:22, 14 November 2012 (UTC)
 Done – agreed, and now the task types look much more clear and distinct, too. Having two kinds of tasks that involve adding links was pretty confusing, even to somebody like me who's been staring at that thing for ages now. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 21:13, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Opentask -- selection criteria for pages

At the moment the list of open tasks is populated simply by selecting pages at random. This is the way FlBot used to do it, so when I wanted to get SuggestBot ready to take over the job I adopted that strategy since it would take the least amount of effort to implement.

Over the past few weeks I have been working on a new version which will use several different selection strategies, to test if any of them have significantly better chances of resulting in task selection and completion. It will first select a fairly large number of pages at random from a given category (there's currently 15 such categories in the list of open tasks). Then it orders them according to some criteria and selects a set of pages such that no page is chosen twice. Currently the criteria I have implemented are:

  1. Maximum popularity
  2. High quality
  3. Low quality
  4. Highest popularity combined with low quality
  5. Random

Popularity is calculated by grabbing the last 14 days of view data from stats.grok.se and calculating a daily average. Quality is calculated by a classification model we've developed as part of a SuggestBot experiment we've been running for a while. For simplicity we use a Low/Medium/High scale, but that could change. The fourth criteria selects the page where there's the largest discrepancy between the predicted quality and the current readership of the page, thus suggesting the Wikipedia would gain the most from seeing it improve. Random is pseudo-random, as always.

The current five were chosen because the list of open tasks has five pages in each category at the moment and these criteria should hopefully provide an interesting and diverse mix of pages. If there are other criteria you think should be considered, feel free to mention them and we'll see what can be done. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 19:15, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Thoughts on the options:
  1. Max popularity alone might actually be a negative, since popular, large articles are often much more challenging to edit.
  2. High quality alone obviously not a good idea when looking for articles to improve.
  3. Low quality might be okay, but it's not as good as...
  4. Highest popularity combined with low quality. Obviously interesting candidates for improvement. I say this is our best option.
One quick question: does low quality include a size measurement? We might want to try and optimize for articles that aren't too long as well, if that's not the case. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 20:06, 14 November 2012 (UTC)
I think Morten is proposing a test of different combinations of these, which makes sense to me. I'm happy to track the clickthrough and editing rates; if we set up the experiment reasonably (e.g., when looking at popularity, make sure to control for length), we should be able to get some really interesting data about what kinds of criteria inspire editors to accept a task, attempt a task, and complete a task.
I do agree with Steven that article size is a potential confound for all of these tests, though. It's mostly new editors who are using this task list – in the last slice of data I checked, a third of the users who successfully completed an edit to one of the suggested articles here were making their very first edit to Wikipedia! To them, really huge articles may be daunting, full of scary template markup, and so long that it's easy to get lost and never find the save button. And even experienced editors might be demoralized at the sight of something like this :) Could Suggestbot enforce a maximum byte count? I would say somewhere around 20-30k bytes should be the cutoff, which is about the size of this article, but we could play around with it, too. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 20:28, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

MediaWiki translation - buryat

Hello! I have transleted everything here, and I want it, to appear in Buryat Wiki. Now you have there at the side:

  • Нюур хуудаһан
  • Community portal
  • Current events
  • Recent changes
  • Random page
  • Help
  • Donate

I want it to be (and it must be):

  • Нюур хуудаһан
  • Хурал
  • Һонин мэдээн
  • Сайтдахи хубилалтанууд
  • Үгүүлэл
  • Асууха
  • Donate

What I have to do? Can somebody help me? Thank you!--Gubin (talk) 09:35, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

From a glance at bxr: it appears as if you've succeeded already.
For future technical assistance, you're best off asking questions at Wikipedia:Help desk.
See also meta:Wikimedia Embassy where you might want to list yourself. —Quiddity (talk) 23:42, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Where did the "Make More Neutral" section go?

I don't see this particular page section on the Community Portal, and I haven't seen any announcements or updates explaining why.

Could someone please inform me why it is no longer on the Community Portal Page?

Arcane21 (talk) 15:28, 21 November 2012 (UTC)Arcane21

There was this discussion on this talk page about trimming the list of categories down from 15. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:50, 21 November 2012 (UTC)
(smacks forehead) Should've looked a little farther up this page before making this post, now I understand what you mean. Thanks Nettrom. Arcane21 (talk) 17:22, 21 November 2012 (UTC)Arcane21

The 2012 Arbitration Committee Election is closing today

The 2012 Arbitration Committee Election is closing today (in about 8 hours). Until then, users may review the election page to learn more about the election and determine if they are eligible to vote.

Voters are encouraged to review the candidate statements prior to voting. Voter are also encouraged to review the candidate guide. Voters can review questions asked of each candidate, which are linked at the bottom of their statement, and participate in discussion regarding the candidates.

Voters can cast their ballot by visiting Special:SecurePoll/vote/259.

Voters can ask questions regarding the election at this page.

For the Electoral Commission. MBisanz talk 15:12, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

French Probate

Looking on how to get information on a cousin who has died in France? Also looking for the French equivalent of the United Kingdom Treasury Department "Bona Vacantia"?

Joegush (talk) 13:17, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Someone may be able to help if you post at the reference desk. -- John of Reading (talk) 14:46, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Question: Advertising in Picture Descriptions allowed?

Is adevertising within picture descriptions allowed on wikipedia commons?
Background of this question is advertising like this (see "Author" there). The foto has been made during a project of the german wikipedia called "Wikipedia im Landtag".

See also the same question on wp commons.

--Arcy (talk) 08:01, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Time in Spain

Hi, I created about 3 weeks ago the article Time in Spain, I recognize that my English level is a bit poor, I need someone who understands Spanish (for comprehend the meanings) being a native of English which he could make a revision and correct some bad expressions, bad gramatical and bad use of words. Don't change meanings or phrases, no censure, only correct English. I don't know if this is the correct space for this solicitude. Thanks! - tot-futbol (talk) 22 January 2013 23:39

Hi there, this is "Aven" Zhang. I've tried to help with the grammar. I also tried to preserve the meaning while I was at it. I'd appreciate and I'm sure tot-futbol would appreciate it if an experienced editor looked over my work. TY, Avenzhang (talk) 23:55, 28 January 2013 (UTC) - "Aven" Zhang

Hello "Aven" Zhang, I'm very happy with your valuable contribution in the grammar of this article. I appreciate the time spent in it and I offer my help for any question about Spain, the Spanish language or Catalonia and the Catalan language. Greetings from Reus and Amunt València! hehe :-P -- tot-futbol (talk) 19:28, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Question on ambiguous articles

Hi, I'm a bit new here. Just saw that there exist 2 pages for sandsurfing and sandboarding and the former is not been well maintained. http://www.dubaisandboarding.com/ mentions that Sandboarding and sandsurfing are the same thing and so do several other websites. What is the traditional method to tackle such a problem? Do I discuss this somewhere or take down the former page and add an alias to the latter? Thanks much. Stylistica (talk) 17:57, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Edit: Is there a template that I could use? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Stylistica (talk • contribs) 17:58, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Daniel — Preceding unsigned comment added by RulerofKnowledge (talk • contribs) 17:19, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

Citation

There should be a button that says "cite this" so that it is easier to, you know, cite things. Just a thought Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.84.190.56 (talk) 00:38, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

Learning How to Use Wikipedia

Hi All,

I created my wikipedia account/page few weeks ago im wanting to add some new features to it has anyone got any links to tutorial and guides for this?

--Syedaqibalihassan (talk) 14:43, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

disambig pages

Should the title be changed to PAGENAME (Disabembigation)?
~Curiouscrab (talk) 03:49, 6 March 2013 (UTC) i should become succsefull man in my life so i think ori cannot be f

Make new page

The page of the band SISTEM is really broken, and when you type in their name, it brings you to the page about their success in the Eurovision. Their page does not really help either, and it would be nice to have a Romanian work on this. Help please?

Here is a link to their webpage: http://www.sistem.com.ro/

Daniel — Preceding unsigned comment added by RulerofKnowledge (talk • contribs) 17:19, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

Community portal beautification

I'm not really a fan of the recent community portal beautification. The icons are huge and look rather random (they have completely different graphical styles). Also, why do they have to have boxes around them? If the boxitis is cured and some more consistent icons can be found (perhaps at The Noun Project), I wouldn't be opposed to a layout like this, but I think we should revert back to the previous style in the meantime. Kaldari (talk) 22:41, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

  • Support I also think we should change it to the way it was until we have some better icons. --Ushau97 talk contribs 09:43, 15 March 2013 (UTC)
  • Comment – Well I'm sorry you don't like it, but my impression of the previous layout was that it seemed uninviting to newcomers. Hence I introduced an approach similar to that used on the Village Pump. Do you also find that layout objectionable? If so, perhaps it should be brought up there for wider discussion. Praemonitus (talk) 02:55, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
  • Support smaller icons. Perhaps use size "45px" (rather than 84px) in each icon, such as [[File:QA icon clr.svg|link=Wikipedia:Help desk|45px]], shown at right. I think a compromise could be found, to allow a brighter page, but more restrained in overall impact. I suggest to temporarily keep the current icons (smaller), until replaced one-by-one with better images. Many users have smaller, hand-held devices which do not need large images for all cases. -Wikid77 (talk) 06:51, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
  • Comment. If the icons are people's only complaint, it ought to be realized that that is merely a cosmetic issue. It can be solved merely by uploaded new icons from somebody who cared enough to improve them. Part of why Wikipedia is so successful is because people can make such incremental improvements. If the new way is better but we'd revert because of the look of the icons, it's throwing out the baby with the bath water. If you wish to argue for reversion to the old way, I think it's best to focus on whether the new way is less useable or not. Jason Quinn (talk) 18:10, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
  • Oppose Great change to have some icons instead of only words. Much easier for a newcomer to quickly see where to find which help. The different styles don't bother me at all, on the contrary, the colours go well together. Lova Falk talk 07:16, 20 March 2013 (UTC)
  • Leave the changes made and seek better graphics. I have updated the peace dove on DR so I replaced that here as well, and replaced the coffee cup with the editor retention graphic. I suppose that actually could just be the teahouse logo but that has such different feel than almost any "icon". It is more of an elaborate logo and doesn't translate well in a small thumbnail.--Amadscientist (talk) 21:15, 24 March 2013 (UTC)
    • I updated the images as best I could.--Amadscientist (talk) 09:11, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Additional icon and link

I am going to boldly add the WikiProjects under "interact".--Amadscientist (talk) 09:11, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

I am going to boldly add the Barnstars page.--Amadscientist (talk) 09:19, 2 April 2013 (UTC)
Those were beneficial additions. Thanks. Praemonitus (talk) 21:52, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

Editor retention module for community portal

I'd like to propose an "Editor retention" section for the community portal to go under "Today's articles For Improvement" To give a small space for Project Editor retention. I propose to use it for editor retention related issues such as linking new users to discussions, tool makers, content creators like files, images and templates as well as notable Wikipedians and their ideas.--Amadscientist (talk) 05:46, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

  • Support Good idea. --Ushau97 talk 10:49, 4 April 2013 (UTC)
  • Go ahead and do it – be bold and implement it. If it is usefully informative, nobody will delete it. Announcements are what the Community portal is for, including new announcement sections. Let us see it. The Transhumanist 05:16, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

There's now a section on the page waiting for you. Feel free to change it to whatever you have in mind. The Transhumanist 05:32, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

Thank you! I'm on it now!--Amadscientist (talk) 19:09, 30 April 2013 (UTC)
Looks like a very nice fit with the scope of the page. The Editor of the week is an especially nice touch. Thank you. The Transhumanist 11:00, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

Navbar - utterly replaced - new one needs watchlisting

Please watchlist Template:Header navbar community - It seems someone decided to change the previous standard, Template:WP nav pages (header bar), by just creating a new navbar and swapping all uses. That's certainly one way to avoid discussion/argument...! Le sigh. –Quiddity (talk) 21:05, 12 May 2013 (UTC)

Random article navigation

Returning to the previous, random article, would actually be nice. Also, an area specific for site discussion seems to be mysteriously absent. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.185.218.56 (talk) 15:05, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Edit request on 14 May 2013

Since the article points out that efficient fMRI experiments can be generated using MLS or m-sequences, I would indicate that the m-sequence approach has been in use for a much longer period both in clinical electrophysiology (beginning with the work of Eric Sutter in the late 1980s)and analysis of single cell physiology (beginning with Jonathan Victor in the early 1990s).


Sutter EE (1987) A practical non-stochastic approach to nonlinear time domain analysis. In: Advanced methods of physiological systems modeling (Marmarelis VZ, ed), pp 303–315. Los Angeles: University of Southern California.

Sutter, E.E. (1991) The fast m-transform: a fast computation of cross-correlation with binary m-sequences. SIAM J. Comput. 20, 686-694.

H.A. Baseler, E.E. Sutter, S.A. Klein and T. Carney. The topography of visual evoked response properties across the visual field. Electroencephalography and clinical Neurophysiology, 90 (1994) 65-81 65


Victor, J.D. (1992) Nonlinear systems analysis in vision: overview of kernel methods. In Nonlinear Vision: Determination of Neural Receptive Fields, Function, and Networks, ed. R. Pinter and B. Nabet. Cleveland, CRC Press. pp. 1-37.

Ethan A. Benardete and Jonathan D. Victor. An extension of the m-sequence technique for the analysis of multi-input nonlinear systems. In Advanced Methods of Physiological Systems Modeling, Volume III, ed. V. Z. Marmarelis. New York, Plenum. pp. 87-110 (1994)


157.182.216.2 (talk) 19:51, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Not done: this is the talk page for discussing improvements to the page Wikipedia:Community portal/Archive 16. Please make your request at the talk page for the article concerned. —KuyaBriBriTalk 19:53, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Thanks!

Thanks a lot for all your good work with wikipedia! It's truly an amazing contribution to the online community --Gsoler (talk) 09:43, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

Join in! The deepest pleasure is in helping it along, in whatever ways we can. –Quiddity (talk) 21:24, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

Forced page width too wide, requires annoying horizontal scrolling

The community portal page is "too wide" when it loads for me in Chrome. Requires annoying horizontal scrolling. I may try to reduce the forced width a bit. — ¾-10 23:09, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Edit request on 27 June 2013

"Editor – a visual way of editing, similar to word-processing software – will"

Please replace the dashes with hyphens. "Editor, a visual...software, will" 2001:18E8:2:1020:50AA:A703:992F:5826 (talk) 14:13, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

Not done: First off, you're asking for commas, not hyphens. That aside, per MOS:DASH spaced en dashes are acceptable in pairs for parenthetical phrasing. --ElHef (Meep?) 18:33, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

Add three sections to the help out section of the portal

I think that, "create articles" , "globalize" and "keep recent events in historical perspective" should be added to the help out section of the portal, as uncreated notable articles and articles having systemic bias are worthy of being noticed as articles without unsourced statements are. And {{Recent changes article requests}} should be transcluded to the newly created section "create articles", as in the past the template was transluded to the portal, but now it is not (copied from Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 104 with minor modifications).--RekishiEJ (talk) 17:19, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

Buttons

Whoever added the pretty buttons to the bulletin board section; thanks! It's very helpful and makes navigation a lot easier. Ironholds (talk) 18:02, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

Reorganising the community portal

So, I was looking at the community portal today - particularly the structure of it - and I'd like to propose a rearrangement. Specifically, I'd like to move the "help out" section so that it sits either above "general notices" or immediately below it. Here's my thinking.

The purpose of the community portal is to provide a hub of useful tasks for users to contribute to. These are, broadly speaking, divided into two types of task; direct contributions, by fixing problems with articles, and indirect contributions, by participating in discussions about articles (or about users, or about areas of articles, or about...etc, etc). At the moment, the portal is structured to give priority to indirect contributions: to discussions. This is laudable, because having more commentary and more diverse views in decisions is something that benefits the consensus process. But at the same time, we know that meta-contributions like talkpage discussions and policy tend to mostly be of interest to power users.

We know from the 2012 redesign that most people who go to the community portal are anonymous rather than registered - and the majority of registered users have made <1,000 edits. In other words, they're probably not power users, and so discussions probably aren't their area of interest. This is, I appreciate, very broad-strokes, and there are going to be exceptions in both directions: power users looking for open tasks (disclaimer: I'm one of them) and relative newcomers looking for discussions. But from what we know, they're just that: exceptions.

Accordingly I'd like to have a discussion about moving the open tasks section further up to the top. I figure we'll have a natter here, and either WP:BOLDly move it if people are in agreement, leave it if people hate the idea, or start an RfC if more feedback is needed. Whatever works :). Ironholds (talk) 18:23, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

  • Strongly agree with the proposal. –Quiddity (talk) 19:25, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

CBB, TOTD, Navbar

Tangentially to the thread above: I'm frustrated The Transhumanist:

- all without discussion.

I believe all 3 of those changes should be discussed (possibly in a new thread(s)?), and I specifically suggest reverting them. –Quiddity (talk) 19:00, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

I'd suggest we split off a different discussion for different tweaks. Maybe 2013 will be the Year of UI Redesigns :). Ironholds (talk) 19:07, 17 August 2013 (UTC)
Split. –Quiddity (talk) 19:25, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

Questions and ideas

I found this place yesterday. It leaves me with lots of questions. Why does this page get so much traffic? And why did I find it so outdated yesterday? Does the community really use this (that's more rhetorical) or is it just up here for newbies? I have a few ideas for improvement. Let's remove the link to the dispute resolution page and replace it with one to Wikipedia:Adopt-a-user/Adoptee's Area/Adopters. Also, barnstars aren't inherently interactive. Newbies might not know how to use a talk page yet. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 13:23, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

See the 2 threads directly above, for similar ideas. –Quiddity (talk) 07:38, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

Motto of the day

Today's motto…

Nominate one today!

I have two questions:

  • The daily motto is transcluded on 800+ (user)pages; is it notable enough to include on the community portal?
  • The project has recently been experiencing low levels of activity (with basically 2 users doing the vast majority of contributions, and although we got a head start over the summer it's becoming increasingly difficult to keep up); would it be appropriate to include a note in the "Projects seeking help/WikiProjects and Task Forces" section?

Also, please feel free to nominate or review a motto anytime at Wikipedia:Motto of the day/Nominations/In review! Cheers ~ benzband (talk) 16:02, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

I have gone ahead and added it. benzband (talk) 13:25, 15 December 2013 (UTC)
Nicely done. It's a good fit. The Transhumanist 16:15, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

"Remove unsourced material" subheading needs to be renamed

The subheading "Remove unsourced material" must be renamed as it gives the false impression that unsourced material must be removed when this is not the case. It seems as if the articles shown under this heading are taken from those tagged with a {{Original research}} tag. Changing the heading to "Solve original research problems" would be more accurate while also encouraging editors to fix problems instead of just removing them (see WP:PRESERVE and Wikipedia:Improve the junk). Jason Quinn (talk) 23:22, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

 Done Given no discussion, I've gone ahead and made a change to the section heading. I ultimately used "Fix original research issues" as the new section heading. Jason Quinn (talk) 00:46, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 15 March 2014

Hello,

I would like to post my page in Wikipedia. please approve.

Thanks and regards

E.Somasundaram.

Elumalai Somasundaram (talk) 18:16, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

 Not done - As it says in big letters at the top of the page "This page is only for the discussion/improvement of the community portal. If you have general questions about how to use or edit Wikipedia, visit the Help desk."
In your particular case please see WP:Article wizard and do not put your Phone No or e-mail address on any page- Arjayay (talk) 19:27, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

Lyndsey Turner (stage director)

I am requesting this page to be unprotected and reinstated. Ms Turner is a notable theatrical director. She won the best director award at the 2014 Critics' Circle Theatre Awards, which is one of the top awards in the industry alongside the Olivier and the Evening Standard Awards. Link for her award is here: [5]. She is the only award-winning director in the last 30 years who's been denied her own page. I strongly believe that she is notable and deserving of reinstatement. Thanks. Peripatetic (talk) 22:05, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

@Peripatetic: you want Wikipedia:Deletion Review. --Ironholds (talk) 22:11, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 26 March 2014

Jwright8285 (talk) 19:42, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

Not done: it's not clear what changes you want made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 19:51, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 4 April 2014

Prudhvirockz (talk) 10:06, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

Copy paste of an entire article removed

 Not done As it says in the big red box at the top of this page:-

::This page is only for the discussion/improvement of the community portal

If you want to discuss changes to an article please do that on the talk page of the relevant article - Thanks - Arjayay (talk) 10:24, 4 April 2014 (UTC)
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