Wikipediocracy

Scott5114

Lastly, i met a guy on fiverr selling DO-FOLLOW links from wikipedia; i repeat, DOFOLLOW. Do some people have the priority to do so, or there is any secret code for that? He's probably pulling a fast one. As far as I know there's no way to set a dofollow link in Wikipedia, since all it would do is ...

Scott5114

From the https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/StrepHit:_Wikidata_Statements_Validation_via_References,'get your money' page: StrepHit (pronounced "strep hit", means "Statement? repherence it!")[1] is a Natural Language Processing pipeline that harvests structured data from raw text and produc...

Scott5114

OpenStreetMap isn't a WMF project, but it has some of the hallmarks of one, specifically the fact that there's obsessives that will fight you at every turn if you so dare happen to step on their "turf". Although that's often quite literal since edits are tied to geographical areas. OSM also made the...

Scott5114

sparkzilla wrote:I guess it fills time while you're waiting for your ADHD meds refill.

Nice ad hominem. It would work even better if I actually had ADHD, but then you'd be making fun of someone for having a disability, which is terribly classy.

Scott5114

List_of_state_highways_in_Maryland_shorter_than_one_mile_(2%E2%80%93699) That's some quality content right there. The purpose of these lists is to specifically de-emphasize minor highways and try to persuade someone that would dump time into them that a perfunctory description is enough and to redi...

Scott5114

The Rockland County Scenario is flexible enough to allow for expansion of the route articles on a case-by-case basis. If some poor misguided soul has invested their life's work in getting a bannered route article to FA and protecting it from crazy whackaloons, that article can be left independent, ...

Scott5114

Remember, the WMF already tried an "article feedback" system. If I recall, maybe one out of 200 readers used it, and that's when it was being actively promoted. Once they switched off the pop-ups or display prompts, usage dropped to about one in 1000. Then they unplugged the "feature" altogether. T...

Scott5114

Similar story: the Oklahoma City metro took a beating from severe storms last night. There were several tornadoes, some places got 7" of rain, and extensive flash flooding all over the city. Several interstates were shut down due to debris and overturned cars. (In a more ridiculous turn of events, a...

Scott5114

Of course, that supposes that a reasonable amount of FAs and GAs are of subject matters worth spending money to polish. The case can be made for a sizable chunk of them, to be sure, and I'd even argue that some of the borderline-crufty stuff like the more major video game titles and roads might make...

Scott5114

the (non-WMF) developer seems to be working on correcting it. Good thing he's non-WMF or else he'd just make it worse. I felt the need to note that he's non-WMF because his status as a volunteer means that the trouble he can cause is somewhat limited. A bot has a bug that causes errant deletions, n...

Scott5114

Eh, it's a bug that happened because a library choked on a difficult-to-parse page title (specifically, one starting with "Category:Wikipedia:..." which is an edge case that theoretically shouldn't appear). The results are amusing, but there was little lasting harm, and the (non-WMF) developer seems...

Scott5114

Functionally, you can just wait the ninety days (or however long it is) for the checkuser information to expire, create a new account, and as long as you don't jump right in doing the exact thing you were doing before, nobody would be the wiser. Trying to run for admin might be pushing it because th...

Scott5114

Box turtle In Pennsylvania, the eastern box turtle made it through one house of the legislature, but failed to win final naming in 2009. The image springs to mind of a turtle slowly crawling its way across the floor of the Pennsylvania legislature, successfully making its way through the chamber un...

Scott5114

Naturally. Of course, Google's goal is to establish an algorithm that solves the problem of "given an arbitrary search term, how do we find a page related to that term that the user will find useful?" They may have found "frequently-changing content" is a good sign in the majority of cases. It just ...

Scott5114

Oh, I'm sure that they probably do, but this is the advice that someone gets when they search for information on how to improve their website's search rankings, so I'm sure lots of people are trying it. And if they're right—that Google does give a bonus to frequently-changing content—that explains p...

Scott5114

An interesting trend has arisen thanks to a change to Google's PageRank algorithm a couple of years back. Most SEO experts say that the easiest way to bolster a site's ranking in search results these days is to run a blog with germane content—Google seems to like sites that post lots of new content ...

Scott5114

Wikipediocracy members find subject boring that other people find interesting As I said above, I find roads very interesting, it's just that the Wikipedia articles about them aren't very interesting. By analogy, I find people very interesting, but I don't find phone directories very interesting. Un...

Scott5114

Wikipediocracy members find subject boring that other people find interesting: film at eleven!

Scott5114

Part of the problem with recruiting elders is that the computer literacy is not always there. Seniors are seen at a disadvantage compared to teenagers because teenagers have always had computers around them. Teens are viewed as much more low-hanging fruit than retirees, who might have to be taught ...

Scott5114

I always figured that Wikipedia's tendency to superfluously point out straightforward acronyms to be more irritating than informative, but your mileage may vary, I guess. I figure TBS = "The Beer Store" in an article titled that is obvious enough.

Scott5114

Got it. The list of MediaWiki disasters, small and large, is ever-growing. (To be "charitable", you should bear in mind that open-source software projects of any size/scope always have similar problems. I remember what Linux's KDE desktop and applications were like when they were first "brought out...

Scott5114

Part of the problem with recruiting elders is that the computer literacy is not always there. Seniors are seen at a disadvantage compared to teenagers because teenagers have always had computers around them. Teens are viewed as much more low-hanging fruit than retirees, who might have to be taught h...

Scott5114

It's my understanding that the reference desk was created as a way to siphon off these types of inquiries from the more "important" boards. It was most likely reasoned that telling innocent knowledge-seekers who have no idea what they're doing to pound sand is bad PR. Of course, now, it perpetuates ...

Scott5114

The most recently designated Interstate, Interstate 2, passes through McAllen. Obviously there was a surge in interest where thousands of locals joined USRD... In addition to the Mexico theory, which seems to be fairly credible, there is also the possibility of McAllen's position in the midst of a h...

Scott5114

Even if RFC/U were able to actually provide binding solutions... how often, at least in recent times, have you actually seen one provide an outcome that ended up with a net benefit to the project, without the need for an ANI or ArbCom discussion at the end of it? This. I've participated in an RFC/U...

Scott5114

See, that's the weird thing about Wikidata. What's there seems to work fairly well—I haven't ran into any showstopping bugs of the type that plague the Visual Editor that I can remember. It's just that there's not a lot of software there . So it's nice that they're apparently taking the time to make...

Scott5114

Part of what is hampering Wikidata's usefulness is extreme slowness in getting the software resembling anything complete. The project is two years old and it still doesn't support numerical data with a unit qualifier (i.e. you can store the integer "5" but not "5 miles"). And you can't query pages, ...

Scott5114

Funny how quickly this turned into a Rschen-bash-fest when this thread is about featured articles. Rschen has several but his FAs are not even close to constituting the majority of the road FAs. Of 64 U.S. road FAs, Rschen is responsible for seven. He doesn't even have the most road FAs. For all Wik...

Scott5114

I've been working on Wikipedia for nine years now. None of my accounts would reveal that. The study is flawed, at least in that small respect. I would imagine the study assumed a 1:1 ratio between Wikipedia users and user accounts, i.e. everyone sticks with one account until they retire. Obviously,...

Scott5114

List of rock formations that resemble human beings They are just a random list of rock formations that look like humans, some of which are red links. Let's not forget Breast-shaped hill . A breast-shaped hill is a mountain in the shape of a female breast. Such anthropomorphic geographic features ar...

Scott5114

I am not sure of the specifics, but there was some sort of outage affecting whatever server handles the page view statistics. I would imagine that you're seeing a by-product of that outage.

Scott5114

A lot of these are so that an admin is not collateral damage due to another administrator's actions. The IP block exemption is probably there so that if there is someone else in your school/company/neighborhood/building that is vandalizing and they get blocked, the admin does not get blocked as well...

Scott5114

Problem is, WMF already has community liaisons, and we've seen how good of a job that they do. Since this is WMF, these new "customer relations" people would probably be hired from the admin pool they're supposed to be overlooking. Bam, instant regulatory capture.

Scott5114

Further, with the growth of WikiData and LUA, there are more technical barriers between the readers who may catch an error and the ability to correct it. I don't think that Lua is a technical barrier. Actually, I think it removes a technical barrier; the Parserfunctions that preceded it are a much ...

Scott5114

[There's a lot of research and writing and revising and defending. If someone isn't interested in what they are writing about, none of that effort feels justified and they lose interest. If you remove something like roads from the gamut of article subjects, you're more likely to lose the road edito...

Scott5114

Don't see why that's worthy of ridicule. Oh, sorry. I didn't mean to ridicule you. I just found it funny that your only alternative to someone writing unwanted articles about roads in Bumfuck, Arizona was that they need to write articles about roads somewhere else instead. They could always, you kn...

Scott5114

In any event, there's little reason to not cover these, other than a desire to focus editor effort on more important roads. Heh. You're not really a "big-picture" kind of guy, are you? Unless it's a picture like this, I guess: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/La_city_hwys.jpg :ny...

Scott5114

Apologies in advance if this is incoherent or rambling, since I'm currently battling a cold... The compulsive need to have an article on each numbered highway in every state has lead to some very strange articles: Wyoming Highway 74 is a 0.13 mile-long portion of Bridge Street that crossed the North...

Scott5114

Clever of them to make the Winter talk page a Flow page, thus making it basically impossible to conduct a discussion about it.

Scott5114

My personal problem with the copyright cadre is that sometimes they will even delete clearly acceptable content just because the uploader neglected to jump through one of their many hoops. I am bad about putting the copyright information in the file description—usually in the form of the string "CC-...

Scott5114

The essence of wiki software is conflict. The software attracts people who are willing to fight to display their knowledge and their sense of truth, so any community that sprigs from it is, by design, combative. However, the software allows malicious people a lot of power, by allowing then not just...

Scott5114

...we can either choose to select one jargon term and use it consistently or use whatever the particular state's official jargon is. Many times the agency jargon is further obfuscated because it depends on the methods by which the agency inventories its routes, which can become extremely arcane. No...

Scott5114

Part of the problem here is that in the United States, the majority of transportation work happens at the state level. That means that each state transportation agency tends to develop its own terminology for some things. Concurrency is a particularly visible example of this; various state transpor...

Scott5114

Indeed, the roadsters themselves glory in the uselessness of their articles . To my knowledge, the user essay you have linked to was written by a user who does not actively write road articles. Rather, from the tone of the essay, he comes across as being against their existence. Another problem is ...

Scott5114

You know, there's always this tired accusation of USRD being a "cabal" or a "walled garden" floating around here, but I never really see any evidence spelled out that we have done anything outright harmful. Sure, we draft and enforce standards to make our articles consistent—but don't editors of tra...

Scott5114

Take a penny, leave a penny (sometimes Give a penny, take a penny or penny tray) refers to a type of tray, dish or cup often found in gas stations, convenience stores, and other small stores in North America, meant for convenience in cash transactions. The phrase should not be confused with 'Spend ...

Scott5114

One thing that the article doesn't explain is why was it built? Also how does it fit into the surrounding infrastructure, and how has its presence affected the surrounding area since it was built? This is not surprising as the bulk of the sources of the article from news reports from Tulsa World th...

Scott5114

So, Scott5114, When would you call it moving beyond a hobby and into a fetish? This is going to vary from person to person, depending on what they consider a "fetish". I don't think that "fetish" is a good word to use in this context, however, because it connotes a sexual element to the interest, w...

Scott5114

(...snip for new topic) You like to gripe about Wikipedia covering roads...like I've said before, roads are a major part of 21st-century infrastructure, and represent the end result of investments of billions of dollars by society. Roads can affect how cities grow, can displace residents, can be the...

Scott5114

(Edited copy of post to start new topic) ... I don't really understand how someone liking Pokemon or whatever else is really relevant to how they do business on Wikipedia, especially if they don't edit on the topic. (How dare someone like a TV show!) Stuff like this just makes Wikipediocracy look li...

Search found 136 matches