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Meta:Babel/Archives/2013-04

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Wiki's application had been the well known application in the world which allow us to understand things effectively. But when we talk on topic like making people educated as in college or university, it would be a tough job for any site. I had always wanted to understand everything better, though I find it hard to navigate the favorable article on the topic, indeed it provide the link to another article if particular topic is unknown but the main problem is, how to get the destiny which is unknown to user them self. You would need an ideal navigation and user interface to unknowns. As I have been through such problem, I always like to suggest for the development of thing so called timeline, perhaps Wikiline! It would be a map in understanding the topic matter, rather than searching some random stuff in the topic people could actually read the topic more effectively. Everything had developed Itself with reference to time, Science, technology, society, politics, economics and so-on. Now articles describing the topic is linked by a timeline interface. This interface would allow us to navigate through time, like first come Galileo experiment then Newton and so on. It allow the user to see the reason for the development and let them understand and develop their perspective on the topic more accurately and effectively.In the interface I visualize this application as the Microsoft encarta's timeline with timeline on different topic selectable by the simple roll out. Though it would be very vast in every topic. Books, Musics, Movies e.t.c are arranged in author, Band or singer, or director, actor/actress e.t.c's biography arranged in timeline of About Personalities, Filtered according to the contribution place. Wiki, should also embed the Audio, Video, flash etc files to the articles. On lecture, Movies, Books, Songs etc. Posting it as an expectation to such well navigator of article, It would be my honor, to contribute to wiki society for any interface and conceptual problems.

-Ronit Ramdam
Of course! But for now, 1)a thorough use of the search engine features, and 2)clicking through the (diff'ed) sequence of a page history (if you're on a fast network), is enlightening enough for your prototype.
A category page is like your "topic". It has a history too, but its pages section is riddled with new and deleted, miscategorized and recategorized, pages that don't make for the solid history that could educate the public, like an "encarta" could. The history page sequence of a category page would show its subcategory section is riddled with category pagename moves and renames. The categories frame is likewise confusing. But you know what, in the future, you know, where ideals happen, a computer could generate notable events for your "wikiline" in a kind of programmable "hindsight" report whose criterion are simply that if the title is stable in time, (else if etc.), there is probably something to it that is worth looking into. But the end result will require creative intelligence, such as now available in people like yourself, to create them by hand. Cpiral (talk) 19:17, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

Minang Wikipedia

Hi, why still now Minang Wikipedia didn't have in the List of Wikipedias? I think it should had in a list because Minang Wikipedia was released since 7 February ago.--法尔汉 Aplikasi 08:33, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

Feel free to add it. πr2 (t • c) 04:05, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

List of active users

Hello. I don't know if this is the right place for this so if it isn't, please point me to it. However I found a dead special page on every wiki I've tried. It is Tools -> Special pages -> Statistics -> List active users. The wikis I've tried is commons, en.wikipedia, sv.wikipedia, sv.wikibooks and this one (meta). - Averater (talk) 09:28, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

Yes, ^demon killed it. You can join the discussion at mailarchive:mediawiki-l/2013-April/040964.html. --Nemo 09:30, 7 April 2013 (UTC)
bugzilla:41078. πr2 (t • c) 16:34, 9 April 2013 (UTC)
Thank you both. - That explains it. - Averater (talk) 17:34, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Zero configuration namespace coming to meta near you

Hi, I am a new employee (and a very long time volunteer developer), working on Wikipedia Zero. My current project is to make adding new telecoms very easy and painless process, and to do that I would like to create a new meta namespace specifically for that purpose. We plan to have hundreds of telecom companies participate in this program, and we need to be able to scale easily, as well as to provide very comprehensive editing, visualization, and error detection capabilities. For complete details and complexities, please read Zero Architecture RFC. The new zero namespace will replace this two pages.

Having a separate namespace will allow us to:

  • Store all configuration as a JSON text, easily parsable by other programs
  • Perform exhaustive settings validation when saving, preventing accidental mistakes, verifying that IP ranges do not conflict with each other.
  • Have explicit permissions for telcos to edit just these pages, with a possibility of even more granular per/user control.
  • Eventually attach a form editor to simplify the process even further.
  • Rely on meta's proximity to the rest of production environment for stability and high availability.

Update: Per Thehelpfulone suggestion, we will need a new security group as well (zeroadmin) that will have write access to this namespace. At first it should only be the engineers involved in the Zero project, and once all the validation code has been implemented, it can be extended to more people, including Telcos.

--Yurik (talk) 05:13, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Have you considered merging this to the Schema namespace, possibly changing the name if necessary? Creating a new namespace for every new application/extension is not particularly neat. --Nemo 06:32, 9 April 2013 (UTC)
I have considered it, but it does not solve most of the goals - schema has a very different fundamental structure, requires very different validation, visualization, and editing tools. This makes sharing a namespace much bigger problem than what it would solve. And I don't think we add namespaces for each extension, only the very few that require highly flexible and rapidly changeable wiki-based configuration systems, especially the ones where many people may be involved in changing it. --Yurik (talk) 16:29, 9 April 2013 (UTC)
Will the namespace be called "Zero" or something similar? What's its namespace number? πr2 (t • c) 16:35, 9 April 2013 (UTC)
I found the answer to the former question on MediaWiki.org. πr2 (t • c) 16:51, 9 April 2013 (UTC)
See here. --Yurik (talk) 17:09, 9 April 2013 (UTC)
See also Gerrit change. Thehelpfulone 21:50, 9 April 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for posting here, Yurik. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 00:33, 10 April 2013 (UTC)
Namespaces "Zero" & "Zero talk" added. --Ori.livneh (talk) 05:30, 10 April 2013 (UTC)
Thanks Ori, and here's the first zero page. We will be using it until for all internal testing until we are ready to make them all. Zero:250-99. --Yurik (talk) 05:47, 10 April 2013 (UTC)
How are you coming up with the names for the pages? Thehelpfulone 07:56, 10 April 2013 (UTC)
w:Mobile country code and mcc-mnc site. --Yurik (talk) 08:24, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

Should WMF post our fundraising AB testing retrospective on Meta?

The Wikimedia Foundation fundraising team is working on a big report on past AB tests of fundraising banners. The report will look closely at up to 100 tests performed in past fundraisers, demonstrating how we think we got the statistics right or wrong in each one. We'll be asking for comment and assistance from anyone interested in AB testing -- not only from the Wikimedia community. Each test will have many graphs. The finished report could include as many as one thousand graphs and 100 different pages. We will also be posting data sets to go with each test. We have a new reporting server where those datasets can be stored.

Is Meta an appropriate place to post that kind of report and host discussion with people inside and outside of the Wikimedia community? Zackexley (talk) 18:20, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

Yes, it seems like the most appropriate wiki for what you want to achieve I think. Thehelpfulone 18:23, 10 April 2013 (UTC)
What about having lots of people come comment and discuss here who aren't from the WM community? For example, people who will chronically forget to sign their posts! Zackexley (talk) 18:37, 10 April 2013 (UTC)
That's not really a problem, unless it will flood the RecentChanges for a long period of time. We have Foundation wiki feedback and the massive English Wikipedia anti-SOPA blackout/Congress data. I don't think anyone would have any complaints about hosting this on Meta. Will the graphs/images be uploaded to Meta-Wiki or Commons? πr2 (t • c) 18:39, 10 April 2013 (UTC)
I propose a new namespace</irony>. --MF-W 18:49, 10 April 2013 (UTC)
The value of the graphs (both currently and into the future, as they become historical or not) is important to consider. If they're mostly valueless graphs, they probably don't need to be uploaded here (or on Commons), you could probably just link to a folder of the images on a server. (It's even possible to display the images inline without uploading them to a Wikimedia wiki using an obscure MediaWiki feature. That is, you could put the images in a folder on sillyserver.wikimedia.org and then link to them or display them inline here. It's something to consider.) That said, if the images/graphs are going to be valuable longer term, Meta-Wiki is a fine place to put them.
The same is true of text as it is with images. Meta-Wiki doesn't need 1,000 useless subpages. But it could always expand to host/house 1,000 valuable and neat subpages.
There's no issue with "outsiders" posting here at Meta-Wiki. If it gets bad enough, we'll get a SineBot, of course. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 00:25, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

Meta_talk:Babylon#Weird

Please see discussion over there. I am not sure if I am the only one experiencing this issues. -- MarcoAurelio (talk) 18:08, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

New RfC

Please see Requests_for_comment/Activity_levels_of_advanced_administrative_rights_holders. PiRSquared17 (talk) 17:58, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

New RfC: Requests for comment/Interproject links interface. PiRSquared17 (talk) 01:46, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

Mobile CentralNotice Banner (on en.m.wp.o)

The mobile team in conjunction with the fundraising team is going to test out the new integration between the MobileFrontEnd and CentralNotice extensions. We will be doing this the next week (Apr 22-28th). What we will be putting up is a banner recommending users try out the new commons app (Banner). Specifically this banner will be targeted at logged in alpha/beta mobile users of en.m.wikipedia.org browsing in english and having a handset that we identify as an android device. If you have any problems please report them to Help_talk:CentralNotice/Mobile. Mwalker (WMF) (talk) 22:22, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

Meta:FAQ

Does anyone want to contribute to this page? I hope it's useful. PiRSquared17 (talk) 16:57, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

We need "Meta:For Wikipedians"

I think that it would be useful if Meta developed a page as some of the sister projects have done that expresses the point and value of this site for Wikipedians. Often we see Wikipedians come here expecting it to be like the wikipedias (inherently rule-based) and we don't do well to explain our point of difference, the purpose, the benefits that we bring. Some examples of pages that I see we could look to for ideas are

Whether this becomes a redirect for "Meta:For sister projects]] may be worth the conversation. — billinghurst sDrewth 11:19, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

Draft created, based on the Wikinews one. PiRSquared17 (talk) 17:05, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
I think part of the process of being a Wikipedian who metamorphoses into a beautiful Wikimedian is discovering these things on his own! Back in my day... Killiondude (talk) 02:51, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

"It is on Meta™" and organizing things

Apparently, Meta is a mess. I believe Manuel (User:80686) has brought up concerns about how hard it is to locate anything on Meta. [1]. He's started a chapters portal here. I thought with the recent clean-up and Pir's efforts, the categorization system was.....better than before. Can we do something to improve these pages? a clean-up drive or something? There were suggestions for opening up a new chapters: namespace on Meta a while ago, maybe something like that can be reconsidered again? Theo10011 (talk) 16:04, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

We have an Iberocoop namespace, a chapters one makes about as much sense. However, I think we can accomplish this instead by using subpages (like Special:PrefixIndex/Wikimedia Australia) and categorization. I'll see what I can do. It would be much easier if other people helped overhaul Meta. PiRSquared17 (talk) 16:51, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
I agree, we also have done a lot of clean up - we deleted all the old Help: namespaces in various languages last year, and have done a lot of categorisation work. I've been liberal in deleting old pages too (such as when I cleaned up all the OTRS pages on Meta). I'm happy to delete pages, but chapter people should help out too with the tidy up as they're mostly knowledgeable about which pages should be kept, which should be deleted and what goes where. If we did have a new namespace it would probably need to be called something else to include Thematic organisations etc too. Thehelpfulone 16:58, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
Maybe "Affiliates" or "Organisations" namespace then? Not sure if it's worth it though. PiRSquared17 (talk) 17:00, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
I know I should have helped out more with the overhaul, we all should have. I'm also not affiliated with any chapter, so most of my free time goes to following up on the lists and adding comments on existing discussions on Meta. Anyway, I'd still be very interested in restarting the discussion about a chapters/affiliates namespace - it makes more sense than an Iberocoop namespace, considering how much chapter stuff is already here. THO you can always ask the chapter people to help directly(don't know if they will). I'd like to have more thoughts on the namespace suggestion. Meta isn't only about chapters either, though I think some people get lost in that impression. Anyway, Thanks for all the great work PiR and THO! Theo10011 (talk) 17:09, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
I know I'll regret this, but feel free to forward any tedious cleanup requests to Meta:Please do it for me, I'm lazy. PiRSquared17 (talk) 17:16, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
And this is why you are awesome. But I'm not the one asking for help or even a cleanup. My thought was that even after a lot of work by a few people here, the impression doesn't seem to be shifting. Maybe a larger structural change is needed so it has a more measurable impact? Theo10011 (talk) 17:22, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
Did we really categorise that many pages? Stats? :) I categorised a few thousands in 2010 I believe, but there's always more to do. Most cleanup nowadays should be related to translation work.
I doubt the specific case is about how Meta is messy, but rather a quite natural effect of morphing expectations. A normal organization deals with legal and procedural requirements and typically fills some well-defined forms; Wikimedia's bureaucracy is just impossible. A chapter has to deal with internal processes (legal and formal, but also defined ad hoc for internal purposes and social e.g. depending on the members); then the WMF invents a new thing every other month that "you're not forced, or maybe yes, but in any case if you don't you're SO evil", and may be anything in an infinite amount of manifestations; then there is the pressure of the chapters' peers; then the meta/global community and all the communities with their expectations (why didn't you tell us this, where is that information, are you seriously not reading this, oh you gotta be kidding you're not doing this and that while you're doing that and this) etc. etc. And the boundaries between what belongs to a group or another are not pre-defined, either, which is why we needed to introduce the concept (so much abused) of a "movement" in the first place.
Meta is just the main place, the container, where this chaotic system coagulates and shows itself, it has no faults in itself. On the other hand, the visionary goal of the Meta:MetaProject to Overhaul Meta has always been and still is to find a way to show to the external world what the Wikimedia movements really is and values in all its complexity, and at the same time to find a way to bring it all together. We're still very far from that, and I doubt we're going in that direction at all (see for instance how little discussion on WMF matters there is, or how WMF software projects are discussed on en.wiki rather than Meta), but that's the purpose of this wiki. Maybe we'll find a solution in a decade (or two) more! The goal was set only 5 years ago or so by Anthere. ;-) --Nemo 18:19, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
I don't see much that's actionable in this thread. What, specifically, is messy or disorganized? --MZMcBride (talk) 23:37, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
P.S. You'll be happy to know, after six months of debate, discussion, and deliberation, we've concluded that Meta is not a registered trademark.

Wikimedia Foundation elections 2013/Post mortem

What's this?!? --Ricordisamoa 20:29, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Something like a feedback page for when the elections are over. See the linked "post mortems" from 2009 and 2011 as examples. --MF-W 20:37, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
wikt:post mortem. --Nemo 20:39, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
«19:19,27 April 2013 Gaggysingh type of disease is in a particular part of body,the type of dietary suplement should be given.»?!? --Ricordisamoa 20:54, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
Do you know what that means? PiRSquared17 (talk) 20:57, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
No way! --Ricordisamoa 21:06, 27 April 2013 (UTC)