Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-07-30/Recent research

Why does the number of Wikipedia readers rise while the number of editors doesn't?"
If Standford University wanted to know "Why does the number of Wikipedia readers rise while the number of editors doesn't?" all they had to do was look at the nuclear power industry. Our site is like the power station, with the editors as the fuel rods and the guidelines, policies, bureaucracy, etc, as the control rods. Our problem on site is the the editors are increasingly frustrated by the control rods, which seem to sink further into the reactor each year and as a result of the control rod insertion more and more editors are experiencing the difficulty of having to work harder to get the article material heated to acceptable levels. Those at the top of the reactor have already experienced a total retardation of the nuclear fission process, while those at the bottom are unable or unwilling to pick up the slack. Despite this disturbing trend it does not effect the readers, who are outside the reactor's water loop and thus interact with the articles only in the heat exchanger, and as long as there is sufficient energy to boil the water - or in this case, to be more precise, maintain the articles and add new ones (even at a reduced rate) - the readers in the power loop will continue to power the machine that keeps Wikipedia moving. TomStar81 (Talk) 14:28, 31 July 2012 (UTC)


 * TomStar81, I liked your analogy a lot but I wonder how many readers without training in nuclear engineering will be able to understand you. :-) Respectfully, Hispalois (talk) 00:53, 1 August 2012 (UTC)


 * To be fair to that analogy how often do the average people understand scatter plots and technical diagrams and so forth. All I've done is recycle that 'keep people in the dark about the true interpretation of the results' mentality to the site by giving my own analogy. I will concede a point though that there are people out there who would be unable to interpret this analogy without a little help, so allow me to enlighten anyone who needs a little help with the interpretation of my analogy: open File:PressurizedWaterReactor.gif and observe the process. Wikipedia editors are playing for the red team, while the readers are playing for the blue team. The whole process can be researched by reading our articles on nuclear power and nuclear fission. At the same time, the readers can help our improvement of the articles in question by providing feedback as to the ease of understanding the articles and where the article's need to be improved. TomStar81 (Talk) 06:33, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Why would anyone expect any correlation between the number of Wikipedia readers and editors, or their respective rates of change? Individuals read Wikipedia to obtain information. Individuals edit Wikipedia for a wide variety of reasons. There is no causal relationship between the numbers of readers and editors, and therefore no reason to expect numerical correlation.—Finell 19:24, 1 August 2012 (UTC)
 * I agree with polite Hispalois: I like the TomStar81 analogy too. I just wanted to point out that even if a reader hasn't got much training in "nuclear engineering" they can always check the "nuclear fuel" article on wikipedia in order to see what are wiki-editors compared with. But what about a  rod ? He could find something about it but on wiktionary, please check it out:  rod . Reading between the lines, though, I smiled after the hidden phallic symbol that there is behind a "rod". Is wikipedia still a male world? Well... if you take a deeper look at the hyperlinked article on what is a "phallic symbol" in psychoanalysis... you will discover that "Women, not having the phallus, are seen to "be" the phallus". At least according to Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). Have a nice weekend. Maurice Carbonaro (talk) 21:32, 4 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Without going so far as to read the paper, I'm still boggling at "The first model makes the assumption that editors act as predators and articles have the role of prey". Sometimes it feels the other way round.  Still, most carnivores would love to be able to create their own prey, I'm sure. Johnbod (talk) 01:12, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

bug
It looks like something's broken in the mediawiki handling of English->Thai interwiki links, because the wikicode
 * featured articles on the Thai Wikipedia

disappears entirely, causing the fuzzy logic paragraph in this article to have this mangled phrase:


 * to discern the (88 at the time of the study) from non-featured articles

-R. S. Shaw (talk) 21:30, 31 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Sonia has added the missing colon. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 00:05, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Thai Featured Article study and overfitting
There are only 91 featured articles in the Thai wikipedia, 88 of which used by the study. I'm not sure that's really a good enough sample size to get good results. (Okay, sure, there are 75,000 Thai WP articles total, which is a good sample set, but they picked only 100 "normal" articles.) The fact that their algorithm caught *all* the FAs makes me a bit suspicious too - it's easy to make a model catch everything with lots of specific hacks, but it's not clear if you get a good model going forward - overfitting. (Think of weird edge case FAs in English WP promoted in 2007 with cleanup tags in the middle of a FAR - it'd be weird for a non-overfit / non-super-generous model to mark it as featured, so some error rate is "good.") If they'd had, say, 400 featured articles to play with, and fed 300 of them into the corpus + 10K non-featured articles, and then had to guess on the remaining 100 FAs mixed in with a different 10K normal articles, then the results might have been interesting. As it stands, alas. I'd also want to see a very low rate of false positives ideally since so many "normal" articles are easy to rule out just on basis of, say, footnote count; an algorithm that could tell the difference between articles with lots of footnotes because they're radioactively controversial recent events vs. ones with lots of footnotes because they're featured.

Obligatory Nate Silver link: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/models-can-be-superficial-in-politics-too/. (Nice & simple overfitting explanation with examples, although presidential elections have an even tinier sample size.) SnowFire (talk) 17:58, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

Admin, emotion, women..what?
That has got to be one of the oddest paragraphs I have read about anything gender gap related in a long time. How does linking to policy make one emotional? I'm confused by that. I also don't understand - do more women link to policy as compared to what male editors? I find that hard to believe, but, I'm a staunch anti-link to policy supporter when working with new editors, at least. It's research like this that makes me often wonder what use it is to us (anymore?). I also understand if some women might have to find ways to defend "ourselves" by having policy as a back up, but...even then, I don't see that in the areas of Wikipedia where I hang out. I'm assuming "gender aware" means women recruiting women or...? And I don't know why that is news, it's old news :) SarahStierch (talk) 17:24, 6 August 2012 (UTC)