The best road to progress is freedom's road. - JFK
Texas
Novelists annotate Wikipedia; Wales promotes TPO; Working for free: Three novelists "have found a way to control the Wikipedia narrative" by using the annotation website Genius to annotate their own Wikipedia articles.
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Emily Gould
OMG I just love her comments and can sooooo sympathize! Of course I have spoken with many subjects of Wikipedia articles who have asked me to brush up theirs and out of curiosity I always take a look, but more often than not I feel just as helpless as she does in many cases, despite all of my experience as an editor. When it comes to BLP's I just feel lost. I often leave the keyboard with an unsatisfied feeling of "this is the best I can do, and it's still really lousy". I wish there was a genius website where I could post similar views but from the "experienced Wikipedia editor" side of things. Of course she is quite correct about the criticism-career ratio, and I often create articles on the fly because I watched something on TV (though not "Larry King Live"). My moment of caring about those on-the-fly articles is disproportionate to the articles I created from one of my lists of my main hobby, which is 17th-century art, so I will pretty much ignore those on my watchlist (unless I have personally interacted with the subject, in which case I feel a mild sense of responsibility, but not much more than that). I despair again and again behind my computer screen when I see that my photograph taken with a nervous hand of some notable person or place or artwork is really just not up to snuff. I will go ahead and upload it anyway under the motto "a terrible photo is better than none" but I am always plotting ways to get a better one. Thanks for posting these perspectives, because it shows how dismally unsatisfactory our current set of tools for editors really is. If I had wrote the Emily Gould page and read that feedback just now, of course I would respond. The problem is that I never receive any feedback except from bots or other Wikipedians. As for Sheila Heti's comments about nationality and amplification of minor quotes, I can only concur that those are both very valid arguments that everyone suffers from on Wikipedia, both alive and dead. All I can say is that she's right, but it's thanks to our deeply nationalistic system that many articles get created and watched. It's the artists who (Heaven forbid!) travel to foreign countries or start speaking and writing in foreign languages that are doomed to oblivion entirely. Jane (talk) 07:18, 24 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Working for free
I am delighted to see this topic covered so well, in such a large mainstream publication.
The Knowledge Graph panel is part of Google's strategy to keep users on Google's own, ad-rich pages, and to increase ad clicks. It is a factor in the vast increase in revenue Google has been able to achieve: Google announced $17.7bn in revenue for the 2nd quarter of this year, averaging close to $200 million a day. (Bing follows the same strategy with its Satori panel.)
Now, if – for the sake of argument – 1/365th of Google's ad revenue were due to its being able to show Wikimedia content that keeps users on Google pages a little longer, and trains them to look at the right hand side of the page where the ads are, then Google might each year want to pay one day's revenue towards the Wikimedia community. Just out of the kindness of their hearts, right? As a thank you.
To date there have been about 2.5 billion edits to Wikimedia sites, of which probably around 2 billion to the various Wikipedias.
https://tools.wmflabs.org/wmcounter/
So, for a very, very rough calculation – if, once a year, Google donated one day's revenue to the Wikimedia community, how much would that be per edit? About 10 cents. I have made about 55,000 edits to Wikipedias, so that would translate to about $5,500 for me, annually. Yay!!
But hang on ... maybe I've totally overestimated the advertising value of the Knowledge Graph panel, or the contribution of Wikipedia, Commons and Wikidata to its content. Let's assume I have overestimated it by a factor of ten. That would still mean that I should get about $5,500, once every ten years. As luck would have it, I will have been on Wikipedia for that long in the not too distant future. Yay!!!!
Again, this is what Wikipedians would get if Google set aside the advertising revenue of *one day per decade* to say thank you to Wikipedians. We haven't even mentioned Facebook and Bing (which has a nifty timeline in its Satori panel, copying Wikipedia sentences that mention years). Andreas JN466 13:29, 24 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Steve King
The original article was very skewed and lacked a world view. King is american. No other country would recognize his historey He is not German or Irish or any other European citizen. It's clear from the sources that the issue being discussed is politicians that have national roots but not language. Two fluent spanish speakers were highlighted. The sources make it clear that the language connection is significant. King may have descendants from Spain or Germany but neither country nor any citizens would consider him German or spanish. He's American and that is obviouse to 1st generation, Spanish speaking immigrants. That point was made in the reliable sources when they cited two, non-hispaniv but fluent speakers. --DHeyward (talk) 08:03, 25 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
speculationdiscussion that a particular BLP was transgender. It's time to WP:DROPTHESTICK. Gamaliel (talk) 20:16, 25 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]Quoting Jimbo
Is this accurate? Shouldn't it be "so on"?
"'I'll just make up a fake ID and pretend to be someone' and so one ..."— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 20:41, 27 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]