User talk:John Cummings/Archive 10

December events with WIR
--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 18:43, 25 November 2019 (UTC) via MassMessaging

This Month in GLAM: November 2019
About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 14:04, 10 December 2019 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: December 2019
About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 16:24, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

February with Women in Red
--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 19:31, 28 January 2020 (UTC) via MassMessaging

This Month in GLAM: January 2020
About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 19:29, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: February 2020
About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 02:02, 10 March 2020 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: March 2020
About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 08:24, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Module:Is rtl
Module:Is rtl has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the module's entry on the Templates for discussion page. * Pppery * it has begun... 13:56, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

Nomination for merging of Template:WikiProject COVID-19/header
Template:WikiProject COVID-19/header has been nominated for merging with Template:WikiProject COVID-19 tabs. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 18:42, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

Discussion of Arbitration for Pixel 3
John Cummings: There's discussion of deleting the section on arbitration that you wrote a couple of years ago. The discussion is at Talk:Pixel 3. I'd value your participation in the discussion. Thanks. Numbersinstitute (talk) 20:35, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: April 2020
About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 15:49, 11 May 2020 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: May 2020
About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 17:21, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: June 2020
About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 15:57, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

Louise Richardson page
Hi John! I know you had some interest in the Louise Richardson article before. I've posted some further edit request suggestions on the article talk page if you were interested! Liz McCarthy (talk) 14:47, 31 July 2020 (UTC)

Editathons, page creation, and draft publication
Hi! It's not 100% clear, but it looks like you probably run editathons from time to time.

I've looked through a bunch of your own work on Wikipedia, and it looks good.

If you run editathons too, this is excellent! Some percentage of editathon participants may end up becoming long-lasting contributors who hang around for years.

At any editathon, some participants might create good pages; others might create pages which aren't so good. It's fine to let them create problematic pages. But, if you publish the problematic pages directly to mainspace, this may not be ideal.

When reviewing participants' drafts, if I could offer you some suggestions, I would encourage you to please keep in mind:


 * Non-notable awards. When contributing to biographical articles, new Wikipedians sometimes mention awards which should probably not be mentioned. Please see WP:ORGAWARDS.
 * Yagazie Emezi, for example, includes a problematic "Awards and grants" section.
 * This old "Liette Vasseur" draft which you published was even more problematic.
 * Notability. If your editathon participants create pages, it would be best if you could please make sure the subjects are notable before you publish them. Why? Let me explain. New pages by editathon participants can contain mistakes: here's an example from a page which you published. It can take a long time for those mistakes to be corrected: here's an edit where the aforementioned example edit was corrected. Sometimes, a mistakes might never be corrected at all. If your editathon participants write only about notable individuals, mistakes are more likely to be quickly found and corrected.
 * AfC. If you suspect that a draft is probably not OK, I encourage you to send it through the standard Articles for Creation process instead of publishing it to mainspace yourself. If you do so, the AfC team can check for all of the issues I've mentioned above. AfC review often takes weeks, but it's a useful service. After an AfC draft is reviewed, Wikipedia can automatically email the draft's creator.

I've never been to an editathon, but I suspect that recommended editathon procedures have evolved over the years. Here some additional suggestions. I've quoted them from How to run an edit-a-thon, and bolded some bits.


 * "Demonstrate using the Article Wizard and Articles for Creation to confirm that a new article is appropriate before publishing."
 * "Creating acceptable new pages is an advanced activity unsuitable for brand new editors. Encourage improving existing mainspace pages as the best way for new users to learn. It is usually better to expand an existing topic until it's ready to become a spinout page, than to create a dubious stub. Data clearly shows pages created by new users get deleted at a much higher rate than pages created by users with as few as 10 edits over 4 days. Don't set new users up for disappointment as their new page gets speedy tagged or sent to WP:AfD."

Again, if you run editathons, this is excellent of you, and I thank you for your service, and I hope that you will continue. I hope that the above wall of suggestions did not offend you in any way, and in fact made you happy. :)

If you have time, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. Do you think that the suggestions above are both good and practically doable? Also, did my message to you offend you even slightly?

Kind regards, —Unforgettableid (talk) 20:33, 5 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Hi


 * Yes you're correct I've run quite a few editathons over the years (although not at the moment obviously). To explain my thinking, I mainly run editathons with UN agencies, mostly around the gender gap on English Wikipedia supported by work populating Wikidata with women not covered on Wikipedia. I think that the main underlying issue is that Wikipedia's policies and processes are set up for equality rather than equity which does not reflect or interact with reality very well and so will not get us to 'the sum of all human knowledge'. I think this is partially happened because of the historic demographics of majority male western Wikipedia contributors who made up the rules to begin with based on the idea of a meritocracy. To break it down a bit:
 * I'm aware of the notability requirements in Wikipedia but there issues especially around biographies of women with systematic bias in the media leading to under representation of women (e.g only 1/5th of experts interviewed in the media are women). There's also an issue with the over representation of biographies of women being nominated for deletion which is leading to this emphasis on awards etc in articles to establish notability.
 * I think that whilst some of the articles people publish in editathons are not perfect this is ok, it shows them that Wikipedia is a collaborative process and that others will improve the article over time and the process introduces them to other contributors. It also gives the participants a real sense of achievement being able to have something on Wikipedia at the end of the workshop and really helps with retention (which at best guess by WMF is around 1% which is really not ideal).
 * I agree that creating new biographies is a harder task for new people, but in my experience this is generally why they come to workshops, it what people want to learn to contribute to Wikipedia for. They most often come wanting to write about someone they have an emotional connection to, a personal hero, a professor who taught them at university, someone they read the book of etc. I think part of the issue with new users contributions being sent to AfD is that AfD is pretty broken and contributors over-report to AfD without trying to improve the articles themselves first, especially for articles by new users which may have technical issues (but don't detract from the importance of the topic).
 * I'm really not happy with recommending or using AfC for pretty much anything, its a great idea in theory but has a whole bunch of issues that I don't really know how to address or work around. There's a huge time delay, it rejects articles that are totally fine (I've especially had issues with AfC with biographies of women being rejected) and also the tone of the messages given which tend to be blunt/rude etc, this is pretty normalised on Wikipedia but is really off putting for new contributors and not something I want to subject them or myself to.


 * If you'd like to be involved any any editathons I'm running in future you'd be more than welcome, also Women in Red run a lot as well and I'm sure would be very happy to receive any improvements you could add to women's biographies etc.


 * Best


 * John Cummings (talk) 16:21, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Hi John,
 * Indeed, systematic bias in reliable secondary sources, multiplied by systematic bias among Wikipedians, could lead to even more systematic bias on Wikipedia.
 * Unfortunately, Wikipedia is overrun with biographical puff pieces written by paid editors. These exhaust the patience of new pages patrollers and the AfC team, who therefore don't always assume good motives when reviewing biographies by brand-new users. And we're sometimes too exhausted with the deluge of paid puff pieces that we delete rather than fixing.
 * If you wish, you could add an AfC comment to each editathon-participant AfC. This comment would state that the article is written by an editathon participant. This might or might not help increase the chances that we'll assume good faith. I dunno for sure.
 * The huge AfC time delay is a problem — perhaps especially so for editathon participants.
 * I wonder if AfC could somehow try to provide priority service for editathon participants — with the goal of accepting or declining a draft within two hours, if possible.
 * I wonder if the newbie mistake of over-inflating the size of the "Awards" section might make a biography even more likely to be deleted.
 * I assume mean you're unhappy with the tone of the canned AfC decline explanations. Understandable. In theory, it'd be useful to invent a set of extra-nice comments to use on editathon participants. In practice, editathons are uncommon enough that this would be unlikely to happen.
 * Kind regards, —Unforgettableid (talk) 17:10, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Kind regards, —Unforgettableid (talk) 17:10, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Kind regards, —Unforgettableid (talk) 17:10, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: July 2020
About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 05:40, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

2020-08 no-go zones
Hello,

I saw Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 303, then added https://bridge.georgetown.edu/research/factsheet-no-go-zone-conspiracy-theory/ to the wikidata item and to my draft. Thank you. Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 20:01, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Stone Mountain
Hello John, I reverted your edit at Stone Mountain. I think this editorial opinion, expressed by the SPLC might fit under the "controversy" section of the article, but only as an expressed opinion of the source, rather than a statement in the voice of Wikipedia. Cheers! Gulbenk (talk) 14:27, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

September Women in Red edithons
--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 17:51, 29 August 2020 (UTC) via MassMessaging