Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-07-31/News and notes

News and notes

Another newspaper for Wikipedia; Wikimania 2018 ends; changes at NPR

Wikimania 2018

This year's annual conference was held this week in Cape Town, South Africa. It came and went and, as always for the attendees, it wasn't long enough. Claimed by the organisers to have been a success, The Signpost hopes to make a report on the event in next month's issue.

Still something wrong with The Signpost's own advertising?

Is one The Signpost not enough? A relatively new user asks at Wikipedia's Teahouse this week how they can start their own Wikipedia newspaper. It not only begs the question 'Are we doing enough to get The Signpost noticed?' but also raises the issue of why, after all these years, Wikipedia still does not have a 'Thank you for registering' page which not only offers some new basic information, but also places a short automated message on the user's talk page with some brief tips and where to get help.

New Page Review

Waiting list for new users gets longer again

Once down to around 350, the number of articles in the New Pages Feed (NPP) rises sharply again following the recent backlog elimination drive. A discussion is taking place at NPR Coordinators on whether an election should be held to install official process coordinators. Following the February 2017 election, the successful candidates did not take up their posts. For anyone who might not be aware, NPR is a major core function and Wikipedia's only firewall against unwanted new articles—the project needs many more skilled and truly active reviewers.

Brief notes

Sro23 has a new T-shirt.

New user-groups: The Affiliations Committee has announced the approval of new Wikimedia movement affiliates: the User Group Uganda and the Slovakia User Group are recognised for a one-year renewable period.
New administrators: The Signpost welcomes one new administrator to our English encyclopedia this month. Sro23, whose RfA voting closed with 277/4/0, is a Sockpuppets Investigations clerk and has been editing Wikipedia since May 2015.
Returned admin tools: After having voluntarily relinquished their admin rights in January, a request for the return of the tools by Ymblanter was granted following a very lengthy discussion on the Bureaucrats' Noticeboard involving many comments from the community.
New newsletter: The Timeless skin (reviewed in a previous issue of The Signpost) has a new newsletter. You can read and subscribe to it here.
Spell check: Wikipedia:Typo Team/moss has collected statistics on misspellings, a list of articles containing a word not found in the dictionary, and instructions for volunteers to fix them.

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I wonder if we couldn't do something like automatically sign up users to receive the Signpost when they hit 100 edits or something like that. --Izno (talk) 03:19, 1 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I support auto signup for The Signpost as Izno suggests. I think adding The Signpost to lists of nuts&bolts tutorials, policies, and essays could be an enthusiasm builder to fuel the climb to competency. A leg-up into institutional memory. Perhaps a special Signpost collection of articles picked from previous issues could open the user talk page for each newly registered editor. — Neonorange (Phil) 04:28, 1 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
An alternative might be for a bot to deliver the most-recent copy of the Signpost, and then point users to the place where they can sign up if they are interested. --Izno (talk) 04:34, 1 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thegooduser - How is the rival newspaper coming along? If the Signpost faces new journalistic pressures, we may need to diversify our barnstars - WikiPulitzers, anyone? Stormy clouds (talk) 20:15, 1 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Stormy clouds Have not started it yet, but willThegooduser Let's Chat 🍁 22:42, 1 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

We can't even get enough users for 1 paper, I don't know if Wikipedia can handle 2! — pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 22:55, 1 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
When anyone even makes one edit, there should be a checkbox for them to select subscribe to Signpost because I would hate to have anyone miss the most recent Humour article. Barbara ✐ ✉ 21:49, 3 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
A challenger has risen (permanent link), and so it begins. I fear our days are numbered now, that final death knell soon to be rung. It was fun while it lasted! —Nøkkenbuer (talk • contribs) 12:58, 26 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
In other news, the Wikimedia Foundation redesigned the website, as announced here. As seems to be the case in every project the Foundation undertakes, the new website has come under some fierce, yet justified criticism -- an example -- that anyone familiar with the history of the Wiki[p|m]edia movement could have foreseen. A request for comment from ED Katherine Maher was not answered because she was out of the office. -- llywrch (talk) 06:25, 4 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I've been back to Wikipedia for several weeks now and only JUST found out about the existence of the Signpost by finding it listed on someone else's User Talk page. Signed up right away... Something I'd like to add to the idea of a "welcome" message is the idea that I'd actually benefit from a Wikipedia Jargon Dictionary. Terms like RfA, RfC, RfD and such confuse me in Wikipedia parlance. Does such a glossary or dictionary exist? --TadgStirkland⁴⁰¹ (Tadg^Talk) 02:07, 22 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@TadgStirkland401: Where you would expect. --Izno (talk) 02:15, 22 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Izno: It might be a good article in the Help space called simply Dictionary with a redirect from Glossary. --TadgStirkland⁴⁰¹ (Tadg^Talk) 02:40, 22 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps this will help, TadgStirkland401? —Nøkkenbuer (talk • contribs) 13:52, 22 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Nøkkenbuer: That’s perfect. Is there a redirect from Dictionary or Glossary? I can’t imagine anyone searching for Wikispeak. —TadgStirkland⁴⁰¹ (Tadg^Talk) 17:46, 22 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Well, the WikiSpeak page is actually a humor page; I only linked it for some levity given the apt context. More seriously, Izno's mention of Wikipedia:Glossary is where any such redirect should go. Wikipedia:Dictionary is already a redirect, so unless that redirect is overwritten, that is not available. Given what links to the redirect, I'm not comfortable with simply boldly overwriting it. Regardless, any reader who needs to peruse such lingo can turn to Help:Glossary; any editor can turn to Wikipedia:Glossary. There are also directories and indexes and the reader's guide to Wikipedia, among others.
Perhaps we can make these resources more visible, though I'm not sure how. Adding them to welcoming templates is an option and not too difficult to do. Template:Wikipedia editor navigation is a massive template that basically has all the links to major pages any reader or editor will ever need, including links to the glossaries, appendices, and indices. That template is already added to many pages. What else needs to be done?
To be clear, the reason why it's called a glossary is because that is what the section of a work that contains definitions to certain technical terms is called, including in encyclopedias. Although glossaries are also dictionaries in a sense, a dictionary is usually understood to be a book of definitions for words, often based on common usage among the general dictionaries. For anyone familiar with what an encyclopedia is, such as a print copy of Encyclopædia Britannica they used in school for an assignment, they will probably also be familiar with a glossary is.
This discussion is venturing out of the scope of The Signpost, especially the News and notes feature, so it may be best to continue this elsewhere if you wish to do so. For a more general audience, the village pump may be the best place to go. Otherwise, Wikipedia:Glossary's talk page is another option. —Nøkkenbuer (talk • contribs) 10:00, 23 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

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