Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-06-27/News and notes

Wiki-Love was pretty cool 6 years ago when it was WP:Esperanza. Night Ranger (talk) 01:10, 28 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I liked the Esperanza idea more. / ƒETCH COMMS  /  02:00, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

What's the meaning of the "green blob" in the language committee logo? I stared at it for 5 mins and couldn't deduce any meaning out of it. OhanaUnitedTalk page 02:19, 28 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Rosetta Stone is my guess. WikiCopter 02:26, 28 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, the description of the image says Rosetta Stone.  Sumsum2010 · T · C  03:24, 28 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Maybe some lines of text on the blob would help ... — Cheers, Jack Lee  –talk– 04:53, 29 June 2011 (UTC)


 * "While the leaks so far do not appear to have revealed any particularly controversial actions of ArbCom" *blinks* Um...alright, if you say so. I understand that the Signpost probably wouldn't want to comment on the controversial actions, since that means they would be commenting badly about Arbcom and such, but still, there's more than enough stuff in there that can be deemed "controversial". Silver  seren C 04:28, 28 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I personally find ArbCom to be a load of horse pork. I find all administrator things boring in general, but ArbCom is a whole new level of tedium. My advice is just to backpedal away from these sorts of things. If you don't get it, horse pork is a contradiction Res Mar 17:24, 28 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree with Resident Mario that ArbCom can be a whole new level of tedium sometimes, and I'm on the darn thing. Newyorkbrad (talk) 03:25, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

I work in an area of engineering that is especially prone to industrial espionage (electronic toys) and we use the following method as an anti-leak countermeasure; every so often, we send out multiple versions of a particular email with slightly different wording. Sometimes just a few recipients get a variation, sometimes half of them do (with a different split each time). That way, if an account is compromised, the content of the leaked emails contains a hard-to-obfuscate signature identifying which account is leaky. Has anyone at Wikipedia considered using such a system? --Guy Macon (talk) 04:50, 28 June 2011 (UTC)
 * That's a good system if you want to identify employees who leak stuff broadcast to them, but within one committee you have the slight awkwardness of deciding who gets to be monitor and who gets to be monitored. You also need a completely different design for the archives as everyone who has access has access to the same archive, and we don't want to shift to a broadcast system as we don't want each of these arbs having their own archive on their own kit. But as we need to shift to a different system in order to delete stuff it would be good if we could introduce something like this as well.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers  19:28, 28 June 2011 (UTC)
 * This would require some back-end programming of the archive system, so it might not be feasible - if I was in charge of making it happen it I would ask the developers and follow their advice. As for who does the monitoring, in the toy industry we usually choose someone with good analytical and technical skills who doesn't know the members of the mailing list or care about the issues they deal with.  Using that as a guideline, everyone on the arbcom mailing list - including Jimbo - would be monitored. Another thing that we find to be helpful is to do penetration testing; while some might assume that a mailing list leak implies malfeasance or carelessness on the part of a list member, it could just as easily be true that someone used a brute-force password guessing program with a large dictionary or installed a keylogger on their PC.  A good security consultant will identify any weak passwords and find any malware.  All this is a bit of a pain, but less so than having confidential information leak out. Guy Macon (talk) 15:19, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Citizendium

 * Citizendium is not Wikipedia. I fail to see why the Signpost insists on reporting on it.  S ven M anguard   Wha?  04:55, 28 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Seriously, I don't know why anyone still talks about them. That project has been dead in the water for years. - Burpelson AFB ✈ 17:29, 28 June 2011 (UTC)
 * My thoughts exactly. Res Mar 22:28, 28 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I can understand why Citizendium gets attention on The Signpost: Sanger was a founder of Wikipedia, & C. is his current project. However, it is becoming ever more clear that C. is a failed project, & despite his continuing efforts to show he is still relevant Sanger is becoming ever more marginalized. I agree with everyone else that The Signpost would benefit from dropping its coverage of both unless something undeniably newsworthy happens. Such as either Sanger or someone associated with C. wins an award -- or is indicted for committing a felony. -- llywrch (talk) 02:50, 29 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Citizendium is family. It's the most famous fork of Wikipedia, even if it's done nothing of wide note in a long time. Marginal, though (and I'm saying that as the person who suggested this news item). Their previously raised funds run out in September, we'll see if they have sufficient interest amongst themselves (if the common "let's fund our hobby" model is sufficient) or the lights go out - David Gerard (talk) 08:01, 29 June 2011 (UTC)


 * OK, to explain what made me write up David's suggestion for this Signpost issue: There is, or have been, various aspects of Citizendium that make its development newsworthy for Wikipedians/Signpost readers. One is the competitor aspect, which was dominant in 2006/07 (OMG Wikipedia is doomed because its co-founder used his supreme insights about online communities to create a superior project), but it has become quite clear that Citizendium is unlikely to draw many readers or writers away from Wikipedia. Another one is the "family" aspect (what is our former chief organizer doing now?). A third aspect, which I advocated in a talk about Citizendium at Wikimania 2009 and consider the most relevant, is the unique value that Citizendium has as a testing ground for various perennial proposals that have been suggested countless times for Wikipedia, but are considered too disruptive to test out here. These include enforcing real names, special authority for "expert" editors, approved (stable) article version, and since last year, the charter, which is another interesting departure from Wikipedia "any policy is editable"/IAR culture. I believe that Citizendium's successes or, so far mostly, failures with these hold valuable insights for Wikipedians that are difficult to come by elsewhere, and that's why it is worth following them as a Wikipedian.
 * The present news is an update on how one of these innovations, the attempt to base the project on a stable "constitution", is turning out in practice (btw: diff of the changes), and also interesting in light of the expectations last year that it would enable the project to continue without its founder. The number of votes mentioned gives an idea of the size of the active community. I realize that not all readers are aware of the same amount of context, and that not all goings-on at Citizendium are worth reporting here.
 * Regards, HaeB (talk) 12:58, 30 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I understand your point. However, as the notice currently reads it sounds like episode 245 of a soap opera which has been repeating its material for some time. Or even less favorably, like a paragraph on one of the countless Trotskyite splinter groups which spend more time arguing over political purity than actually doing anything. A more in-depth article & discussion on events which support HaeB's justification might prevent the criticism I & others raised. (And if an event doesn't deserve that much attention, then Signpost is probably better off without it.) As for the "testing ground for various perennial proposals" argument, why not offer some updates about Wikinfo, which is perhaps the oldest fork of Wikipedia still in existence? (IIRC, it was created back in 2004.) I had a peak at it a few months back, & was surprised not only to find it still in existence, but with a determined handful of members working away. And with far more articles than Citizendium ever produced. -- llywrch (talk) 03:25, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

WikiLove
It may have been worth mentioning the relatively high amount of media attention that the WikiLove extension received, e.g., , ,. Reagrds, HaeB (talk) 06:02, 28 June 2011 (UTC)
 * There's a more complete list here. Kaldari (talk) 06:12, 28 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Regarding orthography of American Sign Language, see one person's proposal. No such orthography has gained widespread adoption, but I think it's an intriguing concept. Dcoetzee 11:02, 28 June 2011 (UTC)
 * If Wikimedia had better video software, you could have a video-only sign language Wiki, perhaps? At least it could function like spoken articles, but perhaps you could set up a set of standard video of sin language words and string them together to get the equivalent of computer voice-rendered text. Rmhermen (talk) 16:21, 29 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Please disambiguate Copyright Act... --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; talk 16:01, 28 June 2011 (UTC)


 * What are you talking about with WikiLove being on the prototype wiki? It is on the english wiki and is as a script.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.249.130.76 (talk) 16:16, 28 June 2011 (UTC)
 * The official extension is on the prototype wiki. The script is older. / ƒETCH COMMS  /  17:39, 28 June 2011 (UTC)


 * This probably isn't the right place for to make this comment, but 'Wikilove' is an awful and highly unprofessional name for a permanent feature. What's the matter with something like 'compliment'? Nick-D (talk) 05:54, 3 July 2011 (UTC)
 * It's not brilliant, but I quite like it. The Cavalry (Message me) 10:52, 3 July 2011 (UTC)