Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-06-07/News and notes

Pending changes trial
How does one get reviewer rights?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 23:43, 9 June 2010 (UTC)


 * You apply at Requests for permissions/Reviewer. -- John Broughton  (♫♫) 18:22, 15 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Are admins going to be expected to manage this system? If so then I would like to know where I can do further research, and perhaps so test edits, to get a feel for this ahead of time. TomStar81 (Talk) 02:20, 10 June 2010 (UTC)
 * You can try it out on the demonstration wiki. Reach Out to the Truth 02:54, 10 June 2010 (UTC)
 * And to answer your question, no, admins aren't going to manage the system; it will be up to editors who have reviewer status (see above) to take care of unreviewed edits. Many, if not most of the reviewers won't be admins.  -- John Broughton  (♫♫) 18:22, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

Foundation hires
I must say if Wikipedia started advertising I would consider going somewhere else. It seems that currently fiances are okay so hopefully this will never happen. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:29, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

British Museum
About : I do think that the existence of the article Wikipedian in Residence is a fact that might interest Signpost readers, many of whom are Wikipedians. However, rereading the previous wording I understand Liam's concern that it might give the wrong impression that he had created that article himself. Hopefully the new wording avoids that misunderstanding. Regards, HaeB (talk) 14:18, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Interwiki links
To me, the problem is not that some of those links are hidden (I'm surprised the controversy is over the language links rather than the Toolbox ones, though), but rather that every time my session times out I've got to re-expand the dang list. I don't mind doing it once, but I use "What links here" quite frequently and don't care to have the list hidden by default. Powers T 17:17, 9 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Good point about the Toolbox. I too was surprised to see that this didn't play a role in the debate - while I understand the arguments of both sides about interlanguage links, I puzzles me why the UX team apparently thinks that someone viewing a user page is unlikely to be interested in that user's contributions. Regards, HaeB (talk) 22:49, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

(ec) It's hard not to see how the handling of this unwanted change to the default skin as a symptom of an increasingly top-down approach to the Wikimedia communities -- which is directly against the process which has made Wikipedia & related projects so successful. I don't like where that is taking us. -- llywrch (talk) 17:21, 9 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Further proof that this should never have made it past the drawing board. Whats worse is that our visitors and anons have no way of undoing this change, which rather leaves them holding the short end of the New Wikipedia stick. TomStar81 (Talk) 02:20, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

It's odd to me. Seems like a solution in need of a problem. Why not just make it a setting under preferences so that an editor can choose based on his or her frequency of use? I personally almost never use them, but sometimes, if I see that FA star, I might check it out to see how it compares to the English article.  bahamut0013  words deeds 18:21, 9 June 2010 (UTC)
 * It already is an option - Special:Preferences > Appearance > last item is "Enable collapsible left navigation menu". Turn it off there. :) -- Quiddity (talk) 18:53, 9 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I thought I'd looked for that before. Powers T 19:01, 9 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Though it would be nice to be able to enable the collapsibility for interwiki only, and not for the Toolbox. Powers T 19:02, 9 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Splendid. But now they take up more room than when they're each manually expanded. I could probably fix that with some custom CSS if I knew what I was doing... I guess I'll just dump the Print/export section to free up space. Reach Out to the Truth 23:07, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

"Of Monobook and Vector users, 0.95% and 0.28% clicked on the language links " This does immediately show that Vector decreases the number of interwiki clicks by about 3/4 - in other words makes them less usable. If a limited list of languages is displayed, then it needs to be content driven, or at least content drivable - articles about Farsi should display the Farsi link. Certainly weight should be given to displaying FAs in other languages, especially where the home language article is not featured. Rich Farmbrough, 08:52, 10 June 2010 (UTC).

A small addendum: Following Erik Möller's proposal cited at the end of the story, a page has now been set up on meta to "capture ideas on how the User Experience Team and the Wikipedia Community can collaboratively approach Product Development": meta:Product Development Process Ideas.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 11:04, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

I would like to add that it shouldn't be all about the click-through ratio. Sometimes just hovering the cursor over an inter-language link (to see where it leads) is all that's needed. This kind of use is not represented by the click-through ratio at all.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); June 10, 2010; 14:38 (UTC)

Chapter-selected seats
As phoebe has a byline in this part, I want to note that the little update on Chapter-selected board seats has not been written by her. (She does take conflict of interest concerns quite seriously.)

Regards, HaeB (talk) 04:15, 9 June 2010 (UTC)