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Wikidata weekly summary #141

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 21:00, 17 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for contributing to Misplaced Pages!

Sunshine!
Hello Harej! Bananasoldier (talk) has given you a bit of sunshine to brighten your day! Sunshine promotes WikiLove and hopefully it has made your day better. Spread the sunshine by adding {{subst:User:Meaghan/Sunshine}} to someone else's talk page, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend. In addition, you can spread the sunshine to anyone who visits your userpage and/or talk page by adding {{User:Meaghan/Sunshine icon}}. Happy editing! Bananasoldier (talk) 23:00, 17 January 2015 (UTC)


Good luck with Project X

I'm really hoping your efforts to revitalize this component of the project are successful, particularly because I hope it will improve with editor retention. I'm not seeing many signs others are perceiving the same thing in general, but I've sometimes of late been feeling like a can hear the slighest creaking from this place in terms of stability -- not just in small (but more common) technical hiccups, but even on content-side, and in procedural areas, everything feels "undermanned" at present; seems like everywhere has a backlog or just generally not enough hands to go around. If your efforts can do something to reverse that trend, the effort will worth that alone, even putting aside the other kinds of value your grant statement speaks to. But the challenge as I see it is that by the time an editor comes to a WikiProject, they've already passed a certain threshold of interest in (and knowledge of) the project and thus are amongst those who are (at least marginally) more likely to be retained anyway, at least for a time.

What we really need is a way to keep the countless people who decide to make just a few test edits, who have just discovered talk space but aren't sure how welcome their thoughts are going to be. How you recruit new editors with knowledge of a key area into a WikiProject even as they are just learning the basics of policy and process, I'm not sure. And great pains would need to be taken so that newer editors in WikiProject understood the limits to what a WikiProject can do and don't get too WP:OWN about things (ArbCom will not thank any project for bringing that kind of mess to their workload again, I daresay). But the truth is, we don't have that many community spaces where large numbers of editors can coordinate, and many of those we do have are for administrative purposes more connected with behavioural problems and grievances than anything. WikiProjects could really fill that void, if more tightly (and and maybe uniformly) coordinated. I know there's always some concern of making the project too familiar, or personal, or social, or what-have-you and some of those concerns I completely endorse, while others are clearly farcical, histrionic or just reflect impractical thinking. But one thing that's for certain is that this project has accomplished as much as it has in good part because of a sense of community and if we fail to maintain that sentiment, we're going to see real consequences to our manpower and the way things get done here. WikiProjects can straddle the divide of making people feel engaged and connected to their fellow editors while keeping us all focused on the task of building the encyclopedia, I think, but very few have come even close to realizing that potential.

But I'm droning on and should probably save this for the project. I did have one practical notion along the lines touched upon by the second talk thread. It would require a certain non-trivial amount of effort to galvanize the community to support and implement this, mind you, but why not a new class of editor privileges (let's call them "coordinator privileges") that would allow certain editors to do things like a) send out mass messages to those who have already joined a WikiProject announcing events, projects and important discussions (through an interface, template, bot or such, rather than requiring them to manually message each person, or b) allow them to see a list of all new editors who have contributed a certain number of edits to articles which have that have a given projects template on their talk page, so they can invite them to participate in the relevant project? And though it's arguably silly, just the mere fact that coordinators have been invested with specific tools (which they would have to be vetted for, of course, same as admins, bureaus, and other with special privileges) might give projects more of a feeling of legitimacy. Though again, I can't stress enough how important it will be to educate members that they are there to advise and help one-another, not generate their independent rules for content to apply on top of policy; the more prestige WikiProjects get, the more explicit we will have to make that line. It's already in policy itself, but needs to somehow be codified into the way the projects themselves operate, in order to avoid run-ins with the larger community of editors as they go about forming local consensus.

Anyway, that's enough dumping upon your talk page. It's all rather long-winded way of saying best of luck and that whatever little support I can give, I will! Snow talk 06:43, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

Thank you, Snow Rise! I do hope WikiProjects can help make people feel like they are a part of the community while also encouraging encyclopedic contributions (or even the occasional copyedit!). It's feeling like you're part of a community that makes people want to stick around for the long term, or so I've found in my experience and observations. As for your ideas, I think they can be done without creating new classes of editors. I'm entertaining the idea of "WikiProject hosts"—dedicated people who are interested in volunteering for maintenance work. The mass message sender privilege can be made available for WikiProject hosts if they want. As for WikiProjects asserting that their guidelines are equal to Misplaced Pages-wide policies and guidelines when they're not, I am going to be working on that too, though I caution I cannot stop existing projects from doing this. But in any case, I do hope that something great comes from this project. Harej (talk) 03:21, 20 January 2015 (UTC)
To be honest, I had never realized that massmessage rights were given out as individual privileges; that does simplify things quite a bit. Still, with apparently only 32 such (non-admin) users having these privileges at present, this would be a significant upscale and the process for requesting these rights seems to fall on one person at present (User:Cenarium), if I am reading the page history correctly, so you might want to give them an early head's up once you've begun to flesh things out. I suppose one could also use the system that's in place for RfC's; contributors to a given project could sign up to receive bot notices on a certain number of randomly selected discussions per month. But then you need someone to develop and maintain the bots.
And yeah, as to the issue of project overreach, I know one user can only do so much on such a broad issue, but my thinking is that Project X might end up having some influence on small changes towards uniformity in projects, and if we can get every active project to include a caution regarding WP:Advice pages somewhere on its front or talk page, that alone could make a significant difference. And actually WP:Advice pages itself should probably be augmented and promoted to its own guideline page to reflect the importance of the distinction between giving advice and trying to create ad-hoc topical policy outside the proper process. Snow talk 04:23, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

A beer for you!

wiping the NYC mayoral slate clean! Valleyforge1991 (talk) 03:53, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #142

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 11:09, 25 January 2015 (UTC)

Saturday February 7 in NYC: Black Life Matters Editathon

Saturday February 7 in NYC: Black Life Matters Editathon

You are invited to join us at New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture for our upcoming editathon, a part of the Black WikiHistory Month campaign (which also includes events in Brooklyn and Westchester!).

12:00pm - 5:00 pm at NYPL Schomburg Center, 515 Malcolm X Boulevard (Lenox Avenue), by W 135th St

The Misplaced Pages training and editathon will take place in the Aaron Douglas Reading Room of the Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, with a reception following in the Langston Hughes lobby on the first floor of the building at 5:00pm.

We hope to see you there!--Pharos (talk) 06:03, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)

Misplaced Pages:Meetup/DC/January 2015

Hi. Misplaced Pages:Meetup/DC/January 2015 looks pretty sad currently... could you ping the mailing list and maybe send out another talk page message? My suspicion is that people have forgotten that this meetup is happening. --MZMcBride (talk) 03:36, 29 January 2015 (UTC)