User talk:Eloquence/State of the Wiki: February 26, 2005

Article Location
Eloquence, wouldn't it be a lot easier to move this page to State of the Wiki, as this page is already used as a community page? I just thought it's current location is a bit odd. -- Redge (Talk) 13:26, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure what you mean with "this page is already used as a community page". I like these to be essentially Erik's reports, with some personal bias here and there, not necessarily a boring NPOV account of what happened. I don't think that would be appropriate in the Wikinews: namespace.--Eloquence 06:01, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * I did not get the impression that they are to biased, and besides, as they pertain to wikinews and aren't news items, NPOV may not be necessary. But if you'd like it to keep it a more personal report, I won't argue. -- Redge (Talk) 13:10, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Larry Sanger editor of Wikipedia?
Eloquence, you write that Larry Sanger was the editor of Wikipedia however Wikipedia says that Larry Sanger "resigned as editor-in-chief of Nupedia and as "chief organizer" of Wikipedia (he never claimed an official title) shortly thereafter." —Christiaan 15:14, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * Good point. In practice, the distinction was often difficult to see -- he made many editorial calls, though his influence was clearly more subdued than on Nupedia.--Eloquence 23:10, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Simon says...
The editors Weblog has also disected his comments, there a little more positive towards the whole idea - worth a read. CGorman 16:04, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Back to the beta logo?
I noticed that Wikinews went back to the "Beta" logo today. (Perhaps as a side effect of the restore from the power outage?)

You may have to purge and refresh to see it. (I usually purge to make the latest weather map appear, so perhaps that's why I'm noticing this while no one else has pointed it out yet?)

If you are going to update the logo back to the globe, perhaps this would be a good opportunity to use a more polished version:



By the way, I was amused to see that someone named "NoClip" made a "Breaking News" logo out of this - it's on the front page right now. It looks kind of goofy, but I appreciate the sentiment.

Cheers,

&mdash; DV 21:50, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * For what it's worth the logo is still new one for me (even after clearing my cache). But I support changing to the "polished" version, nevertheless. -- IlyaHaykinson 21:59, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * I've been seeing both logos, unpredictably. Weird. Pingswept 22:05, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Clarifying some points
You wrote that "the New York Times could take any Wikinews story and make it the basis of their own reporting without giving us any credit" but appear not to be considering moral rights, which probably apply to anything they may use from a non-US Wikinews source (including non-US persons writing in the English language version). It's also required by journalist ethics standards and the New York Times, in particular, is unlikely to want another ethics problem in the lght of its recent history of ethics problems.

This doesn't really matter, of course, since getting a neutral source of news distributed is the key goal of the project and whether there is attribution or not, that's still happening.

Wikinews itself seems pretty bad at attributing authors, so it's perhaps unsurprising that those reusing the content don't do so either. How often are the authors of stories on Wikinews attributed in connection with the story they wrote? Perhaps fixing this problem at home is the first part of the solution?

When it comes to "automatic building of indexing pages another. The latter is currently stalled (http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1411) because of concerns about the scalability of the current implementation", you've understated just how bad it is. It's written in a way which makes it a denial of service attack on the database servers. For every view of a page using it, it retrieves every article in each category, sorts them and then displays only the first few. When there are going to be hundreds of thousands or millions of articles in a category, that doesn't work, it kills the database servers instead. To be viable and display a page in less than minutes or hours, it needs to be caching the results somewhere, so each view doesn't generate heavy database load but instead generates a simple cached page view (like the special repots) which can be updated every few minutes. It also needs to use a database query which makes sense (that is, one using an index to select the most recent few articles in the category). Jamesday 19:55, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * I checked the stories in the left column as far back as 2 March. None attributed the author(s) of the story. Hardly surprising that reusers don't credit the authors when Wikinews itself doesn't. Jamesday 19:58, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * I don't understand this point. On a wiki, there is no single author. Articles are edited by numerous contributors. The History page shows the names of those authors. Is the suggestion that the contents of the History page should somehow appear on the Article page for each story? This would be impossible to maintain - it would constantly be out of date as additional editors made changes. (Not to mention that some editors might clash over the issue of which name was listed first.)


 * If I am misunderstanding you and you are referring to the Sources section listing the external sites which each article is based upon, very few articles last very long without a list of sources, so I would be surprised if you managed to find a large number of articles which didn't cite their sources.


 * I apologize that I am not understanding the issue you are pointing out concerning attribution. &mdash; DV 09:56, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Article namespace figures
Article namespace of German Wikinews is containing many pages listing articles by date in an attempt to replace the rather useless category listings by name. So the article count is very much lower there. Today I counted over 900 pages in the namespace, of which at least 300 are not articles, see the local news directory for an example. Also the 2005 directory has been placed in the article namespace. At Pressestammtisch it was noted recently that such pages might perhaps be replaced by automatically generated lists. -- Thoken 11:34, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)