User talk:Uwappa

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Happy editing! I dream of horses (Contribs) Please notify me with &#123;&#123;U&#125;&#125; after replying off my talk page. Thank you. 02:03, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

COVID-19 pandemic in Australia
Can you tell me the source for this figure in your edit of "302" here? NSW health stats @ say 262 new cases to 8pm on 4 August. Regards, 220  of  ßorg 06:32, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Johns Hopkins data is it? I read that before too, Doh! 🤦🏻‍♂️ I think we need to add a citation to the chart, per WP:VERIFY. 220  of  ßorg 06:36, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * It is a bit if a quest:
 * https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
 * select Australia in the left pane
 * mouse over the chart in the right hand top corner. Tooltip pops up and shows 4/8/21: 302
 * Uwappa (talk) 06:48, 5 August 2021 (UTC)


 * D'oh again, I believe that's all Australia, I was looking at the NSW only figure! I think we have too many charts & graphs. Inthink there is also an equivalent graph on the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia (statistics) page. They're not easy to keep up to date & IIRC some weren't updated for several weeks, I then had to figure out how to do it from scratch. I've added some explanatory notes when I can. 220  of  ßorg 08:55, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * No probs. Yes it is all of AU. Extended the chart description. The chart should be easy to maintain. Just add
 * a date to the X values and
 * a number of cases to the Y values.
 * It takes only one Wikipedian to add this on a daily basis to keep the chart up to date. That should be doable. Uwappa (talk) 09:20, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

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FYI
There's a roundtable with the evaluation of the cabinet formation team tomorrow. Dajasj (talk) 18:18, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Watched it. Not much news. To be continued... Uwappa (talk) 20:31, 13 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Yeah there will be a debate! Dajasj (talk) 07:22, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

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Graphics, and Talk Page discussions
As you've made some perceptive contributions in the area of climate change (CC), I didn't want to discourage your enthusiasm. However, my experience is that the CC community of editors has high standards for content, including graphics, and it has been somewhat uncommon that self-developed, unconventional graphics overcome inertia and gain consensus.

Related: your posts on Talk Pages are often in the top 5-10 percentiles of verbosity and digressions/tangents/philosophizing, which has a negative effect on editors who are mostly time-constrained volunteers (example reaction: "this discussion is now almost hopelessly impenetrable"). Similarly, posting a half-desktop-screenful of conjecture about what another editor is "worried about" is personal, and does not advance the purpose of Talk Pages: to improve specific articles.

I hope you take this post as constructive suggestions. — RCraig09 (talk) 06:06, 31 January 2024 (UTC)


 * Yes, the English Wikipedia currently misses graphs such as
 * It amazes me that no current graph in the English Wikipedia targets these questions.
 * While the official WP:OI encourages Wikipedians to upload own images, it is an agonising slow process to overcome inertia. I do appreciate your contributions in successfully overcoming inertia for graphs such as [[File:20181204_Warming_stripes_(global,_WMO,_1850-2018)_-_Climate_Lab_Book_(Ed_Hawkins).svg|x30px]], 20171231_Climate_spiral_(HadCRUT4.6_1850-_)_2017_SCREENSHOT_-_Ed_Hawkins.png and Daily_Sea_Surface_Temperatures_60S-60N_1979-2023.png.
 * Please take a look at the history of Global_temperature_anomalies_with_20_year_average.png and see how your constructive suggestions have improved that graph. I hope to see more of such comments from you. Uwappa (talk) 09:42, 31 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Please take a look at the history of Global_temperature_anomalies_with_20_year_average.png and see how your constructive suggestions have improved that graph. I hope to see more of such comments from you. Uwappa (talk) 09:42, 31 January 2024 (UTC)


 * A gentle reminder that many editors have limited time, and that shortening your Talk Page posts to be less like exhaustively thorough essays, will ultimately get better results. — RCraig09 (talk) 18:17, 10 February 2024 (UTC)

On the topic of readability
In response to our conversation on the talk page of climate change scenario, I wanted to comment further but felt it might fit better here than there:
 * 1) I know you keep mentioning the inverted pyramid style but I don't know if it's highly applicable to an encyclopedia. It's more for a story, news article, blog post or alike, isn't it? I think the guidance about summary style might be more relevant for us: WP:SUMMARY.
 * 2) It's true that many Wikipedians in the Climate Change WikiProject have a very academic writing style, but there are also some who do put an emphasis on readability (like you and me), for example User:Femke. I often get told I use too much jargon, so I need to do better!
 * 3) We have two great tools at our disposal now: one is the Wikipedia readability tool that lights up difficult sentences in red. And one is Chat-GPT where you can use prompts such as: "simplify this sentence XXX". Or "Write the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article on xxx". Or "What is a good first sentence for a Wikipedia article on xxx".
 * 4) In general, we need a mixture of editors: some who focus on content, some who focus on readability, some who focus on charts, images and so forth.
 * 5) By the way, in the project that I am working on, we have given readability quite a high weighting in our quality scoring system (20 out of 100).
 * 6) Looking forward to further discussions and collaborative editing with you. :-) EMsmile (talk) 20:44, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

Thank you. I've changed your list into an numbered list, so you can match my reaction:


 * 1) Yes, I think the inverted pyramid is unknown, underrated, but the way to go for any online text. In a way, WP articles already have this structure, with the lead up front. I think the inverted pyramid should be applied to paragraphs too. Please have a look at Jakob Nielsen's https://www.nngroup.com/articles/inverted-pyramids-in-cyberspace/ It's bloody old, from the mid 90's but still valid. In short: People do not read, they scan. That applied to me too when reading WP. I scan and only start reading when something interesting catches my eye. This scanning is a sloppy process. People miss things, just like I missed the word 'mitigation' when it was not hyperlinked. So I think the inverted pyramid should be applied to paragraphs. People will scan the first few words and continue reading if the paragraph offers what they were looking for, or... skip to the next paragraph. I fear that people scan current 'academic' paragraphs too, read the first few words, get disinterested by details and miss the interesting part because they already hopped on to the next paragraph, only to have the same experience over and over again. Their conclusion: WP is full of irrelevant details, it's boring and fails to describe high level stuff.
 * 2) Again, see Nielsen, 1997: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/ Those old results still hold. There is theory available to tailor writing for online usage. I fear this decades old theory is not yet mainstream at universities. Students still learn to write for paper, get rewarded for doing so, that is what they learn to do. So they are unconscious incompetent when they face the big bad world. I fear that fresh graduates are clueless and as WP editors will fiercely resist a writing style that deviates from what they've been rewarded for at their university.
 * 3) I think you are just seeing low hanging fruit at the moment. What I am suggesting is to start at the other end: Know how to write readable text from the start. There is science available that offers way more theory about this subject than Jakob Nielsen does. It's been decades since I studied that theory but I still have the books. It is based on Russian psychology, where humans are goal driven creatures. That is way different from American psychology which treats people as objects that react to stimuli. I have not seen any of this theory in the English language. The translation of the science name would be "function psychology", the science that deals with human-thing interaction. It solves problems like, from hard to easy:    Помогите, я не понимаю этот текст!     Help, ek verstaan ​​nie hierdie teks nie! Hilfe, ich verstehe diesen Text nicht! The theory explains how to design things that suit humans, including text, in short: Humans function in a 5 step loop: observe -> interpret -> learn -> think -> act -> observe -> interpret -> learn -> think -> act -> observe -> ... It is like a spiral that goes round and round in circles, but also up and up to higher levels. There is theory available to make all 5 steps easy for humans in 3 dimensions: distance, quantity and structure. So it's 15 chapters in total. The Russian text was hard because it was way too small print (hard to observe) and also hard to interpret as you probably struggled to interpret some Russian characters and Russian is probably not one of your foreign language skills anyway. You probably did get 'текст' right as those characters happen to be similar to roman alphabet. The characters in Afrikaans were small, yet big enough to observe, familiar alphabet and you probably even managed to interpret some or even all of the words. The German was a joke, you had no problem at all, you probably still remember it and it made you think, what to do with this? Hopefully it even triggered an immediate action, made you smile. Those were 5 successful steps: observe, interpret, learn, think and act. Well designed text is easy to read, easy to interpret, easy to keep in short term memory so info is available for thinking about the next action towards the goal. I still have the old books available and am willing to share the bit of theory that is about writing easy texts for humans.
 * 4) Fully agree. This matches the Aboriginal way of thinking that I value so much. You need different people in your group to survive the hard life in the desert. Aborigines celebrate their differences. See the westernised version in "Dream team" at page 14 of the dragon dreaming PDF. I like to apply function psychology, design charts and texts that suit the human eye, memory, brain. In the English speaking world this seems a skill that is mainly used for advertising and designing addictive mobile apps. At WP, function psychology seems unknown, unheard of, not valued.
 * 5) g'd on ya mate!
 * 6) Same enthusiasm here! Working on WP can be fun once you find the right people to cooperate with. This is a rare joy for me. At WP I often have the feeling to be "Einer, der in der Wildnis weint", so I've scaled down my WP activities. I have the impression you are someone who has the brain power to understand and value the theory of function psychology and could even get happy and exited when you realise how it can be applied to writing texts that are ridiculously suitable for humans. I would love to share the bit about writing texts, but be warned: the theory is weird, the books are like from another world, your brain will refuse it at first. And you'll be shocked when you see your first test results, they will pale Nielsen's. There is a problem to bypass though: no books, no theory available in English and... I am not sure if it is possible to order the books. Still, would you be interested in the theory? Wäre es in Ordnung, wenn ich auf meiner deutschen Diskussionsseite über eine Möglichkeit schreibe, das Sprachproblem zu umgehen? I would love to see you apply the theory to WP texts and be amazed when you see how those new texts score in your automated tools. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Uwappa (talk • contribs)


 * Great to see somebody else passionate about readability here. One key element of readability is text and paragraph length. The more you write, the more difficult it is to parse, even if individual ideas and text is easy. Did you know, among the myriad of policies and guidelines on Wikipedia, there is none on readability (if you don't count WP:Make technical articles understandable, which only deals with technical articles. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 18:02, 21 March 2024 (UTC)


 * Yes! That is the dimension 'quantity'. More text means:
 * more to observe. Ideally text can be read with just one eye fixation, no need to move the eyes to next words or lines. Traffic signs are a good example, e.g. CL road sign PG-3a.svg
 * more to interpret. That is especially true for text in foreign languages. Pity the verbose native speaker who uses a lot of words in an attempt to be clear to a foreigner. Example: CL road sign PG-3a.svg versus Taiwan_road_sign_Art025.3.png
 * more to remember, the human short term memory is limited.
 * more to think about. The human may try to split the process which burdens the memory even more. Or simply think about just one thing and forget to process the rest. Or even worse: suffer overload and do nothing at all. An example: Singapore_road_sign_-_Informatory_-_No_through_road.svg versus Remote_areas_ahead.jpg
 * more actions to take. Preferably the number of actions is just one, like a click on a hyperlink.
 * So I am a great fan of 'less is more', especially for text in leads. Chop text down to the core!
 * And yes, fully agree! I think WP should have guidelines for writing easy-to-read texts. And that is where the theory comes in. What makes a text easy to read? Uwappa (talk) 18:58, 21 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Ah, there is a lot of text to read here... I'll ponder over it and digest it! Just a quick reaction to So I am a great fan of 'less is more', especially for text in leads. Chop text down to the core!: I disagree about making leads too short. In my opinion, around 500 words is a great target for the lead of most of our climate change articles. And the most important paragraph of the lead is the first one of course. If the lead is too short then it usually is not doing a good job at summarising the article (unless the article itself is super short, of course). There is some guidance on lead length here MOS:LEADLENGTH. (my own preference of 500 words is a bit above the suggested maximum of 400 words; OK, I might have to adjust my preferred length down a bit). EMsmile (talk) 22:28, 21 March 2024 (UTC)
 * In addition to WP:technical I found only little bits of theory and it is scattered:
 * Readability
 * Plain_language
 * Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
 * Chunking_(writing)
 * WP Manual of Style Lead section
 * WP Manual of Style Lists
 * Help:How_to_write_a_readable_article
 * User:Tony1/Redundancy exercises: removing fluff from your writing
 * Readability could describe the 3 improvements from Nielsen's Nebraska example:
 * concise text
 * scannable layout
 * objective language
 * MOS:PROSE could favour a scannable layout with less words and objective language. The given example looks similar to Nielsen's but... oddly favours the prose. Uwappa (talk) 17:21, 24 March 2024 (UTC)