Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Video games/Newsletter/20170102/Feature


 * I can appreciate the amount of work that went into compiling this but wanted to make a quick comment on the problems with this metric. "Articles created" perhaps worked when our task was to expand the encyclopedia, include more concepts, create stubs for others to expand, and that gold rush mentality could be seen as beneficial for the encyclopedia. But apart from new events and the stuff that has been buried in undigitized books, we've outgrown the rush and have a greater need for quality content. There is a wide rift between unsourced, fancruft-filled articles and those with even minimal breadth and referencing ("good articles"). Undiscriminating readers look at the former and see, rightly, an untrustworthy encyclopedia. If we want this to change, we need to avoid creating these endless cruft magnets when the sourcing doesn't exist for us to do justice to a topic. To wit, look at the "high scorers" of this list. I have redirected dozens of GVnayR articles, and if the still-incomplete copyright investigation into his uploads is an indication, there are plenty more left. The articles are predominantly about Japanese games pulled from unreliable lists without any hope of sourcing, many without a single extant review. Coin has had similar issues mass-creating articles on shovelware smartphone and edutainment games. Admins, including myself, went through his contributions removing Reception sections that were direct copyvio of the Metacritic blurbs without discrimination to the encyclopedic purpose of the articles. Many of his original articles are yet to be cleaned up. (Look for instance at the many individual Disney's Animated Storybook articles, most of each directly copy each other, are sourced to press releases, and cite unreliable review sources: They should be merged. Many articles adding to top "counts" here should be merged.) And so I'm on this list too and I'm not beyond reproach, but I traffic more in redirects. Sometimes I'll throw up a new article with a sentence or two of description and several bare URLs for content verification, but that is because there is some acceptance of Wikipedia, in its barest form, as a bibliography that points readers to read more about a topic, especially when it would be difficult or impossible for lay searchers to find those sources on their own. But I don't prize articles created or edit count as a valid metric of contribution, as it more often is an indication of cleanup work generated for others. On the whole, I consider my work to be of a fairly high quality... I ask of each of my edits what would be best for the encyclopedia, specifically its readers. Would I rather read through a page of unsourced garbage, or would I rather have seen a sourced sentence in a well-written article? (The answer is not always so clear, but trends towards the latter.) The academic literature on editor motivation says that most editors are animated by altruism—the idea that they're helping. If we need a measure, let's use one that considers how much editor efforts actually help the project's aims. czar  01:24, 28 January 2017 (UTC)
 * 's just jelly that he's only tied for #4 instead of #1 :P But no, really, I completely agree. It's interesting to see who's created the most articles (though I'm shocked I'm even as high as I am at #47, and almost all of those are the result of merging stubs together), but it shouldn't be taken as a one-to-one correlation with producing valuable content. Writing 1-paragraph stubs is easy; rewriting a whole article to take it to GA is hard. We need both, of course, but I'd like to see more celebration of the GA+ content creators, or the Stub -> C article improvers. (Full disclosure: as of a year ago I was, like #1 in GAs and #2 in FAs in the project, so I'm not exactly unbiased here). -- Pres N  03:09, 28 January 2017 (UTC)
 * A bigger issue to me is the fact that the leaderboard may misleadingly suggest that it represents article-creation stats for all WP:VG articles. There are prolific content editors like User:Frecklefoot whose article creation stats are found primarily in the 2002-2008 period during which time no WP:VG/NAA reports were made. Frecklefoot currently appears as #56 on the list whereas a true measure of his total article creations would place him much higher. As far as the weakness of "article creation" as a metric, I'm not sure I completely agree. Article creation is a growth metric, not a quality metric. Setting aside the concern that a false equivalence might be made between creation and quality content, I think the stats paint a fairly accurate picture of which of the NAA-listed editors have been primarily responsible for affirmative notability determinations. The other side of the story—a deletion leaderboard, for example—would be fascinating in its own right as an equally bold/intimidating but necessary kind of engagement with the encyclopedia and as a negative growth metric (as long as the false equivalence is not made between deletion and harm). -Thibbs (talk) 21:30, 3 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Nice work! Re Larry Sanger, I was very surprised to see him come up as I imagine you were, even though most of the articles he's actually written from scratch (as far as I know) have been about philosophy. I guess I'll give you his creation of the Worms series article, even though he did just split it off the "Worms" page. But the Lysator credit is not due at all. According to the relevant database dump, the page was written by Pinkunicorn, a member of the club. Graham 87 09:24, 4 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Very interesting. I was relying heavily on NostalgiaWiki for the earliest dates, but the Aug 2001 backup diff log you linked shows 8 earlier edits going back to 10 May 2001. I wonder why that data is missing from NostalgiaWiki. I'll have to re-check all of the 2001 NAAs up through August in light of this. Good thing there's only 50 of them. I guess the next 144 (Sept-Dec 2001) would be checked against the Jan 2002 backup. Thanks again for your help, Graham87! -Thibbs (talk) 15:12, 4 February 2017 (UTC)
 * No worries. Those edits aren't in the Nostalgia Wikipedia because UseModWiki, the software that Wikipedia used back then, deleted old edits when a new one was made. The August 2001 dump that I linked was uncovered after a lot of digging around, and is just a copy of UseModWiki's log files. The January 2002 database dump is just a copy of the Nostalgia Wikipedia dump in UseModWiki's format, which isn't useful for our purposes. While I have your attention, could you tell me which articles were created by Conversion script or [User:0|]] on your list? I'd like to see if I could uncover the original first edit (especially for Conversion script entries) through the Nostalgia Wikipedia or otherwise. Graham 87 10:39, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Ah, that explains why everything matches so nicely between the Jan 2002 dump and NostalgiaWiki :) . I sort of got that impression as well in looking over the files, but I was hoping something could be gleaned about the origins of the articles by comparing the "keep" files (.kp) with the "page" files (.db). Do you know what the difference is between them? -Thibbs (talk) 14:00, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
 * As far as I can tell from a quick glance, the keep files contain the history while the DB pages don't. Graham 87 15:08, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Regarding which articles were created by Conversion script in my list, I'm not exactly sure what you mean. At the first NAA page I have listed here, I'm announcing 10 articles with 4 different usernames (none of them being "User:Conversion script"). And if you look at the article histories of these 10 articles (while allowing the redirects to do their work) then you find that Wikipedia assigns a new set of "first edit" usernames (none of them being "User:Conversion script"). But if you look at the non-redirected versions of those articles (i.e. the non-redirected links I've made from the NAA list) then you do find some examples like this where Wikipedia attributes the first edit to "User:Conversion script". In the NAA list I give credit to User:Neeklamy; in the redirected version ("Mr. Driller" with a period) credit is given to User:Takosuke~enwiki; and in the non-redirected version ("Mr Driller" without a period) credit is given to User:Conversion script. Are you looking for examples like that? I'll draw up a table later today that shows all mismatches between the original editors I've found in the dump and the original editors as listed by Wikipedia. Any help restoring the article histories to their proper origins would be very much appreciated!! -Thibbs (talk) 14:00, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes, I'm looking for examples like that ... mostly where I can help is where the Nostalgia Wikipedia has an earlier edit at the title than the English Wikipedia does. I've fixed the Mr Driller example. Graham 87 15:08, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Cheers! Here are a few more: Heretic II, Machinima, and Lionhead Studios. I've started a table of these mismatches below. I'll update it when I go through all of the October, November, and December NAAs. -Thibbs (talk) 03:19, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks very much! I'll take a look at those (and the table) in the next few days, when I get time. Graham 87 15:26, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
 * I've gone through the table. The only ones I could fix at the moment were those attributed to Conversion script, but that may change. The table will still be useful if/when it does. The entries for later in 2001 will be very interesting. Graham 87 12:09, 7 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Oh, while I remember, the reason for the discrepancy with the Team17/Team 17 page is that it was deleted in January 2004 because it was a copyright violation. Graham 87 14:09, 7 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Also, you might find the history of New topics interesting. Graham 87 10:49, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
 * I'd run across that in the past, but haven't made much use of it yet. I started a list of 2002 edits from a different direction, but then the number of new articles and the responsibilities of real life overwhelmed me. I'll have to tackle the 2002-2006 period at a more measured pace, but thanks for reminding me about that page! -Thibbs (talk) 14:00, 5 February 2017 (UTC)