User talk:XDanielx/Archives/February 2009

Wikipedia Signpost, January 31, 2009
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Delievered by SoxBot II (talk) at 22:20, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

Outline of Knowledge / Geography WikiProject Collaboration: Country outlines
As you probably remember, last spring we started work on the "Geography and places" branch of Wikipedia's Outline of knowledge. (WikiProject Lists of basic topics has been renamed to WikiProject Outline of knowledge). The geography branch is in the form of a set of outline pages including one for every present-day nation or state in the world. That's 247 pages! This has been a huge undertaking, involving dozens of editors using advanced wiki-tools.

These pages have come a long way, and it won't be long before the whole set is complete enough to be moved to article space into the encyclopedia for the benefit of all. But there's still a lot of work left, and we could use all the help we can get!

While some editors prefer to work on one country at a time, most of our team members take on a particular entry and complete it across all the pages. This has come to be our standard type of task. To facilitate this process, we apply tools such as AutoWikiBrowser, Linky, and WikEd, all of which can be used to process a large number of pages in various (direct or indirect) ways.

In case you are interested in what we've been up to, here's a progress report:

Lately, development has been slow but continuous:

On our recruiting initiative, Penubag has done a fantastic job on the images for the awards we'll be using for our project's collaborations and contests. We now have 3 awards: a medal, a trophy, and a race ribbon. They all look tight. The trophy needs a small adjustment, but other than that, all 3 award images are complete and ready to use to create awards with.

Spartaz has warned us of (threatened to take) G4 (speedy delete) action if we run a competition that resembles the previously deleted Awards Center page. So whatever we do, any contests we run must differ substantially from the methods used there.

One type of competition I've been exploring is "edit racing". I'm in the process of working the bugs out of this concept - the first race didn't work as expected - you see, because we only had an award for first place, so the opponent didn't think it worthwhile to continue once it was clear who the winner would be. And since editors are in different time zones and usually need to start the race at different times, we need to base winning on personal start times - he who completes his assigned edits in the least time (rather than first), wins. And last but not least is quality control. What good is racing if the participants' edits are ripe with errors? So I'll be exploring possibilities such as using a referee (assigned to oversee a particular race), having participants watching each other for errors to knock them back, etc. I'm not sure yet.

Rich Farmbrough has been applying his bot expertise to filling in blanks in the country outlines (the population and area entries). I'm amazed at the number of edits he pumps out each day on a myriad of projects - ours makes up but a small time slice of his activity, and yet he has saved us many hours of manual work. Perhaps we should look into how he gets so much done. :)

Zlerman has chosen to work on specific outlines, and has taken on Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. He also has been keen on noticing and reporting design issues pertaining to the whole set of country outlines. Keep up the good work!

Highfields is in charge of capitals, adding them to all the outlines. He is also our first race winner. Check out the award on his user pages.

In case you didn't know, this project has expanded to include work on any and all sets of pages represented on the country outlines. Once the set of country outlines go live (in article space), traffic will likely increase for all the links included on them. The quality and usefulness of those pages will reflect heavily on the country outlines. The outlines, which are essentially lists of links, are only as good as the links they present, and therefore we've branched out to solve the biggest problems with those as well. So far, we've taken on:
 * The creation of disambiguation pages for country adjectivals ("German", "French", "Taiwanese", etc.) We're about half done with these.
 * Wikifying the CIA World Factbook statistics on the "demographics of" country pages. We've been renaming those sections to provide a key string that AWB can use for targetting (for skipping and filtering).  Once that's done, we'll be able to break the clean-up down into simple AWB search/replace tasks, because we'll be able to target just those pages that include the CIA stuff.
 * We've also been renaming the "Cuisine of" articles to their adjectival forms ("Chinese cuisine", "Italian cuisine", etc.), for consistency and because the adjective-based terms are generally the most commonly-used names for those cuisine types.

Blackadam2 and Thehelpfulone have been helping out with the "demographics of" pages mentioned above.

And we have a couple speed addicts (addicted to wiki-velocity, not drugs)...

Both Robert Skyhawk and Thehelpfulone prefer (and excel at) simple AWB search/replaces. Robert hasn't actually joined our team yet, but he has been helping out quite a bit from the sidelines (via the WP:AWB/Tasks page. Unfortunately, there has recently been a non-AWB chore that has been holding things up on the AWB front - an edit to all the headings which had to be reverted before too many new edits were made, because any new edits would make the reversion more difficult.  The headings have been restored, so now the way is clear for AWB operations, and there are many search/replace tasks in the queue.  AWB assignments have started again!

There's a similar bottleneck on the "Demographics of" pages (the "keying" mentioned above), but that's almost cleared too. :)

With my internet access somewhat crippled as of late, I've been finding it difficult to keep up with you guys. However, I expect to be accessing a Linky-capable workstation on a faster server (I'm on it right now, as you can probably tell from my contributions list for the past couple of days), and so I should really pick up speed. Feels goooooood. :)

Recruiting has been a bit slow (but steady), due in part to my crippled access, and because we've been waiting for the images for the awards to be completed. I expect the team to grow more rapidly as the bottlenecks are removed.

Well that's what's been happenin', and here's what's in the pipeline...

We've got a long list of entries that need to be completed across all the outlines and related page sets. If you would like to dive in with advanced wiki-tools to process this whole set of pages on one or more tasks, drop me a note!

As for me, I'm about to begin work on a set of lists that corresponds to all the standard links on the country outlines, and these will be presented on the Topic outline of countries which will be organized exactly like the country outlines. Aside from being an extremely useful navigation aid, it will allow editors to easily see the state of country coverage on Wikipedia - each list will be one link-set, and each list can be used with our wiki-tools to process the pages listed. I'll provide you with a link once I get up to speed on this.

In the meantime, keep in touch!

Cheers,

The Transhumanist 00:52, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia Signpost, February 8, 2009
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Delivered by §hepBot  ( Disable )  at 23:27, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia Signpost &mdash; February 16, 2009


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Delivered by §hepBot  ( Disable )  at 08:31, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia Signpost &mdash; February 23, 2009
This week, the Wikipedia Signpost published volume 5, issue 8, which includes these articles:


 * Philosophers analyze Wikipedia as a knowledge source
 * An automated article monitoring system for WikiProjects
 * News and notes: Wikimania, usability, picture contest, milestones
 * Wikipedia in the news: Lessons for Brits, patent citations
 * Dispatches: Hundredth Featured sound approaches
 * Wikiproject report: WikiProject Islam
 * Discussion Reports And Miscellaneous Articulations
 * Features and admins: Approved this week
 * Technology report: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
 * Arbitration report: The Report on Lengthy Litigation

The kinks are still being worked out in a new design for these Signpost deliveries, and we apologize for the plain format for this week.

Delivered by §hepBot  ( Disable )  at 22:31, 24 February 2009 (UTC)