User talk:Maias
This page has archives. Sections older than 31 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III when more than 4 sections are present. |
Books & Bytes New Years Double Issue
[edit]Volume 1 Issue 3, December/January 2013
(Sign up for monthly delivery)
Happy New Year, and welcome to a special double issue of Books & Bytes. We've included a retrospective on the changes and progress TWL has seen over the last year, the results of the survey TWL participants completed in December, some of our plans for the future, a second interview with a Wiki Love Libraries coordinator, and more. Here's to 2014 being a year of expansion and innovation for TWL!
The Wikipedia Library completed the first 6 months of its Individual Engagement grant last week. Here's where we are and what we've done:
- Increased access to sources: 1500 editors signed up for 3700 free accounts, individually worth over $500,000, with usage increases of 400-600%
- Deep networking: Built relationships with Credo, HighBeam, Questia, JSTOR, Cochrane, LexisNexis, EBSCO, New York Times, and OCLC
- New pilot projects: Started the Wikipedia Visiting Scholar project to empower university-affiliated Wikipedia researchers
- Developed community: Created portal connecting 250 newsletter recipients, 30 library members, 3 volunteer coordinators, and 2 part-time contractors
- Tech scoped: Spec'd out a reference tool for linking to full-text sources and established a basis for OAuth integration
- Broad outreach: Wrote a feature article for Library Journal's The Digital Shift; presenting at the American Library Association annual meeting
GOCE February blitz wrapup
[edit]Guild of Copy Editors Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Blitzes/February 2014 wrap-up
Participation: Out of seven people who signed up for this blitz, all copy-edited at least one article. Thanks to all who participated! Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here. Progress report: During the seven-day blitz, we removed 16 articles from the requests queue. Hope to see you at the March drive! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators Jonesey95, Miniapolis and Baffle gab1978. To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list. Newsletter delivered by
|
November 2019 Tree of Life Newsletter
[edit]![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/Tree_of_life_by_Haeckel.jpg/100px-Tree_of_life_by_Haeckel.jpg)
- November 2019—Issue 008
- Tree of Life
- Welcome to the Tree of Life newsletter!
|
News at a Glance |
|
Class is in Session in the Tree of Life |
In an interesting turn of events, this month's guest column is by my alter-ego, Elysia (Wiki Ed): *Puts on Wiki Education hat* Hi everyone, I'm Elysia and I work for Wiki Education. You may know me as Enwebb. I got a request last month to let you know how Wiki Education is intersecting with the Tree of Life subprojects. As one of Wiki Education's major goals is to improve topics related to the sciences, leading to our Communicating Science initiative, we end up supporting quite a few in the biological sciences. Here are the TOL-related courses active this term: What is the impact of student editors in Tree of Life? ![]() Altogether, these 16 courses have 347 student participants. As the end of the semester hasn't come yet, these numbers are still growing, but these students have:
Some of our best student work this semester (of any kind, not just biodiversity) has come from Agelaia's Behavioural Ecology course—you may remember this as the course that created WikiProject Diptera. The students have several Good Article nominations, including Dryomyza anilis, Anastrepha ludens, Aedes taeniorhynchus, Drosophila silvestris, Drosophila subobscura, and Ceratitis capitata. And while long-term participation from students is low, there's always the chance that we'll discover a Wikipedian. I had never edited before my Wikipedia assignment in 2017 and I'm still here nearly 20,000 edits later! After I poked around in the beginning of the semester, I had the realization that not many people write Wikipedia, and very few of those have a special interest in bats. If I didn't stick around to write the content, there was no guarantee that it would ever get done. Why are species articles suitable for students? Writing about taxonomic groups is a great fit for students, as it keeps them away from areas where new editors traditionally struggle. The notability policy is generous towards taxa, and there is little danger of a student's work getting removed for lack of notability; this is to be expected when students write biographies. Students may struggle with encyclopedic tone for biographies and stray towards promotional writing, but this is much less common when writing about a shrew or algae! Additionally, we're never going to run out of species to write about. Students have a bounty of stubs and redlinks to pick from. Creating a new article or expanding an existing one also takes a fairly predictable structure, with plenty of articles that students can model after. Don't students just create messes for volunteers to clean up? Our sincere hope is that, no, they don't, and we take several steps to try to minimize the burden on volunteer labor. With automatic plagiarism detection, alerts when students edit a Good or Featured Article, and notifications when students edit an article subject to discretionary sanctions, we try to stay ahead of problems as much as possible. We also review all student work at the end of each term. Ian, Shalor, and I are always happy to receive pings alerting us to student issues that need to be addressed. |
November DYKs |
|
You are receiving this because you added your name to the subscribers list of the WikiProject Tree of Life. If you no longer wish to receive the newsletter, please remove your name.
December 2019 Tree of Life Newsletter
[edit]![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/Tree_of_life_by_Haeckel.jpg/100px-Tree_of_life_by_Haeckel.jpg)
- December 2019—Issue 009
- Tree of Life
- Welcome to the Tree of Life newsletter!
|
|
News at a Glance |
|
Editor Spotlight: Plantdrew |
We're joined this month by long-time editor Plantdrew, who's currently engaged in streamlining the taxonomic structure of Wikipedia articles via the automated taxobox system. How did you become a Wikipedian? What are your particular interests (besides the obvious of "plants")?
What projects are keeping you busy around the 'pedia at present?
What's your favorite plant?
What's your background like? How did you come to have a special interest in biology?
What's something that would surprised TOL editors about your life off-wiki?
Anything else you'd like us to know?
|
December DYKs |
|
You are receiving this because you added your name to the subscribers list of the WikiProject Tree of Life. If you no longer wish to receive the newsletter, please remove your name.
January 2020 Tree of Life Newsletter
[edit]![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/Tree_of_life_by_Haeckel.jpg/100px-Tree_of_life_by_Haeckel.jpg)
- January 2020—Issue 010
- Tree of Life
- Welcome to the Tree of Life newsletter!
|
|
News at a Glance |
|
Vital Articles | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The vital articles project on English Wikipedia began in 2004 when an editor transferred a list from Meta-Wiki: List of articles every Wikipedia should have. The first incarnation of the list became what is now level 3. As of 2019, there are 5 levels of vital articles:
Each level is inclusive of all previous levels, meaning that the 1,000 Level 3 articles include those listed on Levels 2 and 1. Below is an overview of the distribution of vital articles, and the quality of the articles. While the ultimate goal of the vital articles project is to have Featured-class articles, I also considered Good Articles to be "complete" for the purposes of this list. Animals (1,148 designated out of projected 2,400)
Plants, fungi, and other organisms (510 designated out of projected 1,200)
Many articles have yet to be designated for Tree of Life taxonomic groups, with 1,942 outstanding articles to be added. Anyone can add vital articles to the list! Restructuring may be necessary, as the only viruses included as of yet are under the category "Health". The majority of vital articles needing improvement are level 5, but here are some outstanding articles from the other levels:
· Abiogenesis
· Sexual dimorphism |
January DYKs |
|
You are receiving this because you added your name to the subscribers list of the WikiProject Tree of Life. If you no longer wish to receive the newsletter, please remove your name.
February 2020 Tree of Life Newsletter
[edit]![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/Tree_of_life_by_Haeckel.jpg/100px-Tree_of_life_by_Haeckel.jpg)
- February 2020—Issue 011
- Tree of Life
- Welcome to the Tree of Life newsletter!
|
|
News at a Glance |
|
The spread of coronavirus across Wikipedia | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
With the outbreak of a novel coronavirus dominating news coverage, Wikipedia content related to the virus has seen much higher interest. Tree of Life content of particular interest to readers has included viruses, bats, pangolins, and masked palm civets. Viruses saw the most dramatic growth in readership: Coronavirus, which was the 105th most popular virus article in December 2019 with about 400 views per day, averaged over a quarter million views each day of January 2020. Total monthly viewership of the top-10 virus articles ballooned from about 1.5 million to nearly 20 million.
![]() From October 2019 – December 2019, the top ten most popular bat articles fluctuated among 16 different articles, with the December viewership of those 10 articles at 209,280. For January 2020, three articles broke into the top-10 that were not among the 16 articles of the prior three months: Bat as food, Horseshoe bat, and Bat-borne virus. Viewership of the top-10 bat articles spiked nearly 300% to 617,067 in January. While bats have been implicated as a possible natural reservoir of SARS-CoV-2, an intermediate host may be the bridge between bats and humans. Pangolins have been hypothesized as the intermediate host for the virus, causing a large spike in typical page views of 2-3k each day up to more than 60k in a day. Masked palm civets, the intermediate host of SARS, saw a modest yet noticeable spike in page views as well, from 100 to 300 views per day to as many as 5k views per day. With an increase in viewers came an increase in editors. In an interview, longtime virus editor Awkwafaba identified the influx of editors as the biggest challenge in editing content related to the coronavirus. They noted that these newcomers include "novices who make honest mistakes and get tossed about a bit in the mad activity" as well as "experienced editors who know nothing about viruses and are good researchers, yet aren't familiar with the policies of WP:ToL or WP:Viruses." Disruption also increased, with extended confirmed protection (also known as the 30/500 rule, which prevents editors with fewer than 30 days tenure and 500 edits from making edits and is typically used on a very small subset of Wikipedia articles) temporarily applied to Coronavirus and still active on Template:2019–20 coronavirus outbreak data. New editors apparently seeking to correct misinformation continuously edited the article Bat as food to remove content related to China: Videos of Chinese people eating bat soup were misrepresented to be current or filmed in China, when at least one such video was several years old and filmed in Palau. However, reliable sources confirm that bats are eaten in China, especially Southern China, so these well-meaning edits were mostly removed. Another level of complexity was added by the fluctuating terminology of the virus. Over a dozen moves and merges were requested within WikiProject Viruses. To give you an idea of the musical chairs happening with article titles, here are the move histories of two articles: Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2
Awkwafaba noted that "the main authorities, WHO and ICTV, don't really have a process for speedily naming a virus or disease." Additionally, they have different criteria for naming. They said, "I remember in a move discussion from the article then called Wuhan coronavirus that a virus name cannot have a geographical location in it, but this is a WHO disease naming guideline, and not an ICTV virus naming rule. ICTV may have renamed Four Corners virus to Sin Nombre orthohantavirus but there are still plenty of official virus species names that don't abide by WHO guidelines." |
February DYKs |
|
You are receiving this because you added your name to the subscribers list of the WikiProject Tree of Life. If you no longer wish to receive the newsletter, please remove your name.
March 2020 Tree of Life Newsletter
[edit]![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/Tree_of_life_by_Haeckel.jpg/100px-Tree_of_life_by_Haeckel.jpg)
- March 2020—Issue 012
- Tree of Life
- Welcome to the Tree of Life newsletter!
|
|
News at a glance |
|
A new WikiProject responding to the pandemic | ||
The newest Tree of Life WikiProject is about a taxon that is dominating the headlines, Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, and its many effects. We interviewed Another Believer, the founder of WikiProject COVID-19. This interview has been edited for length. Find the full interview here.
Number of participants of WikiProject Covid-19
Thank you to Another Believer for your time, both in this interview and in this project. Interested readers can join WikiProject COVID-19. And please stay safe and healthy out there. --Awkwafaba |
March DYKs |
|
You are receiving this because you added your name to the subscribers list of the WikiProject Tree of Life. If you no longer wish to receive the newsletter, please remove your name.
Guild of Copy Editors 2023 Annual Report
[edit]Guild of Copy Editors 2023 Annual Report
Our 2023 Annual Report is now ready for review.
Highlights:
– Your Guild coordinators:
Dhtwiki, Miniapolis and Wracking.
To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
|