Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-02-25/Recent research

Great article! I especially enjoyed reading the one about the university students :) -Newyorkadam (talk) 04:50, 27 February 2015 (UTC)Newyorkadam


 * What? No "Notes" section to accompany "References"? I read somewhere that they're to be found in most articles. - Dravecky (talk) 07:06, 27 February 2015 (UTC)


 * I've only seen them in a few articles.


 * When I was a university student we didn't have Wikipedia, or even the Internet as it exists today. How DID we do research? I can't even imagine it.— Vchimpanzee  •  talk  •  contributions  •  21:23, 27 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Based on reading thousands of Wikipedia articles, & the experiences of me & my friends as a student, I can tell you no one really teaches students how to perform research for a paper. At least not in an systematic, orderly way. And by "no one", I mean no school system in any country. (And if college professors are so up tight about a bunch of nobodies writing what has become a major reference work, maybe these goofs ought to put more effort into teaching their students how to perform research. After all, Wikipedia is written by the product of the educational systems they are part of.) -- llywrch (talk) 08:46, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

I doubt that the aforementioned Finkbeiner test is an objective test to be reckoned with. Considering that the science is still dominated by men, indicating that a particular scientist is a woman is important. Interestingly enough, the test was conceived by a woman who apparently is not happy to be called a woman and proposes to erase such mentions from historical annals, which is puzzling. Brandmeistertalk  09:56, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

Loved the students' (correct) response too.

The geo-data by Oliver Keyes mentioned is not accessible at the moment, seems the account has used up its data allocation. It would be nice to be able to see the stuff somewhere else? Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:45, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
 * yep: too much love from Twitter users! I'm going to spawn up a new instance with higher usage limits as soon as I get some bandwidth. Ironholds (talk) 21:08, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
 * IT LIVES! if you want to steal some maps for a longer report, feel free! I've got another release (this one covering user agents) in the next few days. Ironholds (talk) 14:11, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

1. I would love to see computer algorithm values for article quality! We already have a readability of Wikipedia link, but this sounds more like a utility value? The project "grades" seem rarely changed, and too broad to be of much use.

2. The "student vandalism project" was always going to fail - they tried making really blatant edits. The problem is more generally with "partial wrongful edits" where the edit does not instantly jump out on a watchlist as being horrid -- but more subtle in tone. The teacher should have simply told them to modify refs to make them lead to completely different topics -- which would be a far better test of how we actually find problematic editors IMHO. Ref changes do not get caught as well as they ought. Collect (talk) 13:51, 27 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Template:Sfn ... I'd like to see that thing locked in a cage while some freak from ISIS brings on the torch. Seriously, in the 90s they sold dongled software for multiple hundreds of dollars that was easier to reverse engineer than a Sfn footnote.  More than once I've resorted to just copying the plain text from the article as output and fuhgeddaboutit. Wnt (talk) 14:00, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
 * As Wikipedia has found out to its chagrin, making bogus edits (and indeed entire wars) up about ancient history is much more difficult to police. I can easily imagine Bogus edits consisting of altering the birthdates of various Asian nomadic tribal chiefs would be shrugged of. :(

Clubot passed the Turing test. :) Oiyarbepsy (talk) 15:52, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
 * About the study of gender bias in wikipedia: I would like to suggest for a wikipedia researcher to conduct gender bias comparison of wikipedia and other 'pedias, as well as various collections kinda "1000 Mostest Influentialest..." books and lists (eg Forbes). This would hopefully shed some light whether wikipedia is so  misogynistic or the whole our society is/was. Another item of inquiry is to compare EB1911 with modern edition. Still another, investigate how M/F ratio changes with the time  where subjects of bios lived. For starters, just count the numbers of male/female bios. I am sure other comparisons of M/F ratio  can be done.  -M.Altenmann >t 04:52, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I think Magnus, Max Klein and Andrew Gray have been doing a lot of work with these sort of questions. Ironholds (talk) 11:44, 2 March 2015 (UTC)