Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2012/March

Survey invitation
flag The Wikimedia Foundation would like to invite you to take part in a brief survey.

With this survey, the Foundation hopes to figure out which resources Wikimedians want and need (some may require funding), and how to prioritize them. Not all Foundation programs will be on here (core operations are specifically excluded) – just resources that individual contributors or Wikimedia-affiliated organizations such as chapters might ask for.

The goal here is to identify what YOU (or groups, such as chapters or clubs) might be interested in, ranking the options by preference. We have not included on this list things like “keep the servers running”, because they’re not a responsibility of individual contributors or volunteer organizations. This survey is intended to tell us what funding priorities contributors agree and disagree on.

To read more about the survey, and to take part, please visit the survey page. You may select the language in which to take the survey with the pull-down menu at the top.

This invitation is being sent only to those projects where the survey has been translated in full or in majority into your language. It is, however, open to any contributor from any project. Please feel free to share the link with other Wikimedians and to invite their participation.

If you have any questions for me, please address them to my talk page, since I won’t be able to keep an eye at every point where I place the notice.

Thank you! Slaporte (WMF) (talk) 22:31, 5 March 2012 (UTC)
 * It's good to see this being put out, especially to projects such as Wikinews that could do with every bit of help we can get.
 * I've a "shopping list" :P And, I'm going to list the points, as I see them, in order of priority for the Wikinews project community. Then I'll go do the survey. I would urge everyone on Wikinews to take into account the below points, and to complete the survey. The Other Place will be over-represented on the survey so the more voices pushing for our specific needs the better.
 * A total rewrite of EzPR (rats! need to create that page), the reviewing gadget, to make it a server-side tool. Important to us would be inclusion of the review notification feature and the proposed 'userspacing gadget' concept. This has applications outside of Wikinews' specific requirements, and I can well-imagine Wikipedia gleefully embracing a tool to help with GA/FA reviews; or, the German Wikipedia using it in conjunction with their implementation of Flagged Revisions.
 * Credential Verification, and identity cards. I will flesh out the current issues on a sub-page of my talk, but suffice to say after discussion with WM UK this has to be pointed at the Foundation as part of their responsibilities towards helping us contribute. I last touched on this issue here, but spoke to Jon Davis of WM UK last week. Since there is a need to cover more than just the UK, and we keep seeing Commoners wanting credentials for photography planned for use on Wikipedia, it has to be pushed up to the WMF.
 * My last point is something I can happily describe as more of a "wishlist item", but I'll bet quite a few beady-eyed reviewers could see the use. It's another gadget thing &mdash; an electronic grammar-nazi; it would probably require the WMF negotiate with a 3rd party to maintain their strict privacy policy rules, but just think how much easier it would be if there was far less passive voice in submitted copy. Plus, if we could define additional rules for a WMF-run AtD grammar checking service, large chunks of the style guide could be built-into it.
 * Now, off to fill in Slaporte's survey, and to point him back at this page. If anyone else has bright ideas please share here, as well as on the survey. --Brian McNeil / talk 00:41, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

I'm........
......mildly annoyed right now. For anyone who might feign interest, please visit my comment at: Category talk:Campaign for "santorum" neologism. Bddpaux (talk) 22:37, 14 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I dunno....got my knickers in a twist over something really quite small.....it's passed. Bddpaux (talk) 00:23, 15 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Ha! It happens to us all, occasionally. Blood Red Sandman  (Talk)   (Contribs) 13:17, 15 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Politics is dirty, in Santorum's case, ... Well, we probably shouldn't go there. :P --Brian McNeil / talk 13:37, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

Original
Should the following be considered original reporting: The first was based almost completely on a press release and past articles, while the second was based entirely on speech transcripts and election statistics.--William S. Saturn (talk) 23:09, 15 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Rocky Anderson announces he will seek Americans Elect nomination
 * Super Tuesday 2012: Mitt Romney wins six of ten GOP contests

New Wikimedia Shop feedback/help requested
Hey all,

Some of you may already know that we've opened a shop at http://shop.wikimedia.org to sell Wikimedia Merchandise. We're now entering our "Community Launch" allowing us to hopefully get as much feedback from the community about the store, it's products and everything else involved. For those that are interested we've set up an FAQ/information page, feedback page and design page. We also have a 10% discount up for at least the next 2 weeks (CLAUNCH or 'Wikimedia Community Launch' in the discount box at checkout) and a $10 maximum shipping fee world wide for most orders.

However the big thing I wanted to ask you about was Wikinews gear. Right now everything on there is Wikipedia related but we want to make sure we have merch from all of the projects as well. So far we have a couple things on order:
 * Stickers from all of the projects
 * 1" buttons (or 'badges' ) from all of the projects
 * Are in the design and digital mockup phase of lapel pins for all of the projects to both go independently and as a set. Right now we're getting mockups to see how they look and to see if we want to go with the Pewter look that we have right now for the globe (this new set will have an interlocked v W for the wikipedia piece) or the full color enamel look like This Strike Command pin.

We want to have more though both soon and in the future and I wanted to know what you thought. One of my thoughts for something early on was a series similar to the I Edit Wikipedia shirts (we have two versions right now) on the shop for each project. If we did something like that should we just use Edit or adjust the verb for wikinews? Other ideas for products? Jalexander (talk)
 * I would like to give input on this, but am restricted to accessing the Internet in the local library (my laptop died). Please do not simply replace Wikipedia with Wikinews in creating merchandise. As it says in WN:NOT, "Wikinews is like no other Wikimedia project", so I would hope something could be done to have merchandise 'like no other Wikimedia project'. --Brian McNeil / talk 11:24, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

Viewing statistics
Hi everyone! Just curious if there is something similar to grok.se that will allow me to examine how many hits, etc., that stories have had? Thanks! Sarah (talk) 17:41, 25 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I use the popular pages at Wikinews (bottom right) that is also an RSS feed (click on more). I've put that feed on my own user page just to glance at to see what people are reading. Crtew (talk) 17:47, 25 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I have been tracking that. I just wasn't sure if there was something that gave an overall view of hits for the day, etc, for one page. Sarah (talk) 17:52, 25 March 2012 (UTC)
 * grok.se can be used to get stats on a page on any sister project, but you have to know how to assemble the url by hand. (I suppose one could put together a template to do this, though without the ability to input the parameter from a dialog box, such a template would seem to be of rather limited use.)  Here, for example, are the March stats for an extraordinarily successful piece by Blood Red Sandman from a few months ago.
 * http://stats.grok.se/en.n/201203/%27Fascinating%27%20and%20%27provocative%27%20research%20examines%20genetic%20elements%20of%20bipolar,%20schizophrenia
 * --Pi zero (talk) 18:06, 25 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks Pi. I bookmarked the example you gave me and I'll just manipulate the URL. Would be awesome to have a template for it, but, I'm extremely incapable of skills like that (I'm great at breaking templates, though ;-) ). Sarah (talk) 18:12, 25 March 2012 (UTC)
 * If you check the history tab for the article in question, there should be a link somewhere near the top that takes you to the stats page for that particular article. It updates every 24 hours or so. Blood Red Sandman  (Talk)   (Contribs) 18:15, 25 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I'd never even noticed that. Cool!  --Pi zero (talk) 18:37, 25 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Ha! I'm glad I asked about this, I didn't notice it either. Thanks guys! Sarah (talk) 18:40, 25 March 2012 (UTC)