Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-05-30/Technology report

"office action"? "legal request"???? Is that all the explanation we will get for the deletion of those images? -- Orange Mike  &#x007C;   Talk  19:21, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * The logged onwiki deletions are "child porn" and "kiddie porn image". The files were both deleted in June 2006. Does that help? - Jarry1250 [Weasel? Discuss.] 21:08, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

Downtime for the maintenance was well below a full hour. Also, planned maintenance does not count against the targeted downtime, as the targeted downtime is for unscheduled downtime (this is normal). That said, there have been a number of other outages that have put us past the 99.999% target, or even the 99.99% target. --Ryan Lane (WMF) (talk) 21:43, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks for clarifying Ryan. I'd never have guessed that was standard practice. Does the Foundation have a target for limiting scheduled downtime too, do you know? - Jarry1250 [Weasel? Discuss.] 21:45, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I don't believe we have any targets listed for this. Obviously the ops team would like to have no scheduled downtime, and we rarely do.--Ryan Lane (WMF) (talk) 22:07, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

"In 2010, however, only 30% of the world had any access at all to the so-called "World Wide Web", even when the high rates of availability found in the developed world are allowed to skew the data" — what is that supposed to mean? It's the nature of an average to take both areas with high(er) and lower availability of Internet/WWW access into account. Areas with higher-than-average penetration rates aren't "skewing the data" any more than areas with a lower-than-average penetration rate are. Perhaps a "pure" average is not a good metric here, though. -- Schneelocke (talk) 12:28, 1 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Skewness refers to the spread of data. Here, a small number of advanced economies with very high penetration rates drag up the mean, but would not have touched the median. 30% is the mean average, which is not altogether appropriate here, as (I think) you acknowledge. The "even when" was a warning that 30% is not a useful metric for some uses because it hides the fact that some countries have very high rates but most have very low rates. - Jarry1250 [Weasel? Discuss.] 13:09, 1 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I read that as a statement of percentile threshold, not an average of anything. Perhaps they calculated it using a population weighted mean of availability rates by country, which would be an informative statistic, but then calling it an average would only characterize the method of derivation, not the nature of what the statistic purports to represent. The fraction of people who had access is not the same kind of thing as the mean amount of access each person had. ~ Ningauble (talk) 18:47, 1 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Well, it's my average: I took the sum of internet users and divided it by the size of the population. 30% of all the people in the world accessed the internet in 2010, that's the important point. - Jarry1250 [Weasel? Discuss.] 21:20, 1 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, that is the important point. It is not what is termed an "average", or measure of central tendency. If you calculated it yourself based on statistics in the cited source, it is a little misleading to cite that as the source of your conclusion. (Sorry if this seems like nitpicking. Unclear statistical writing is a pet peeve of mine because it is so widespread, even among professional writers. I highly recommend the book linked in my previous edit summary for all journalists (and encyclopedists) who use or report statistics. Despite the tongue-in-cheek title, it is very illuminating about what ought to be common sense but is commonly done wrong.) ~ Ningauble (talk) 17:11, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * To be fai, I don't even know why I used the word "average" in the first place...! Plain old "30% of the world" is more pithy anyway :P - Jarry1250 [Weasel? Discuss.] 18:01, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

More direct citations would be more useful. To dig up *where* in the Factbook this could be found would take a bit of searching. "In 2010, however, only 30% of the world had any access at all to the so-called "World Wide Web", even when the high rates of availability found in the developed world are allowed to skew the data (source: CIA World Factbook)."Jodi.a.schneider (talk) 17:48, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Country listing, under "World". - Jarry1250 [Weasel? Discuss.] 18:03, 23 June 2011 (UTC)