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Wikimedia Foundation English fundraising campaign - November pre-tests

Hi everyone,

As previously mentioned here, I will continuously inform you of pre-tests on English Misplaced Pages as the Wikimedia Foundation prepares for the English fundraising campaign starting later in November. As part of the English campaign we test our infrastructure on a regular basis. In the final month before the campaign, you might see banners every now and then on Misplaced Pages if you are not logged in.

The scheduled dates for November are (you can find the September ones in this post and the October ones here):

• 26th of October - a 100% traffic three hour test JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 10:39, 26 October 2022 (UTC)
• 1st of November - a 100% traffic three hour test
• 7th - 14th of November - a low level week long test (During the test, a banner will only be shown to users 5% of the time until the maximum of 10 impressions (1 big and 9 small banners) is reached.)
• 15th of November - a 100% traffic three hour test
• 18th - 20th of November - a low level weekend test
• 29th of November - banner campaign launch

Generally, before and during the campaign, you can contact us:

• On the talk page of the fundraising team
• If you need to report a bug or technical issue, please create a phabricator ticket
• If you see a donor on a talk page, VRT or social media having difficulties in donating, please refer them to donatewikimedia.org

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks you and regards, JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 10:43, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

What's the point of informing us if, like last time, you can't or won't tell us which banners will be used, and it turns out that the feedback you receive about the banners and the many problems with them aren't taking into account anyway (yes, some minor issues are perfunctorily changed, but the main complaints about agressive tone, lack of truthfullness, ethical problems... are just ignored again and again). Fram (talk) 11:13, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

These "tests" are so extensive that they sum up to about 1 full day of fundraising in each of the three months. You have effectively added three days to your end-of-year fundraising campaign, haven't you? Andreas JN466 11:34, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

Actually, make that four days. I'd forgotten you started "testing" in August (Misplaced Pages:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)/Archive_71#Wikimedia_Foundation_English_fundraising_campaign_-_further_pre-test_dates). Though it wouldn't surprise me if there were some "tests" in July, June, May ... as well. --Andreas JN466 17:16, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

Web page references

Hello, I am new to the rules of the wiki, but I am trying to make a page that was combined into a larger category (in sandbox). I was wondering if I am allowed to refer to a website that is providing information for my page (ex: "...the next step- referencing (website name)..." . I currently have the page up right now if you click on the link on my user page, so if anyone could look over it I would appreciate it. Is this the right place to put this question? Thanks! User:Robins birdtalk 12:20, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

@Robins bird, the page for new users to ask questions is at Misplaced Pages:Teahouse. Read the reference sections at the Misplaced Pages tutorial, Help:Introduction for an explanation of how to write references for websites, books, etc. You might find it easiest to use the Visual Editor. Also this is an encyclopedia, now a how-to manual. This is not the place to tell the world about a treatment you discovered. Instead only use material from reliable published sources, which can include websites. StarryGrandma (talk) 22:35, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

Many people have experienced this disease with poultry, and the Misplaced Pages main-space article gives very little information. I am not going to edit an article that covers a broader topic than the category that I am working in. You can also see there is a redirect that goes to the main article. Creating this smaller portion of a big disease will help give more detail and profound understanding than telling the reader what it is and nothing more. I have found multiple reliable resources (and cited accordingly), and I have a section that I am using for treatment. If you looked you might have seen it. Sorry for the confusion, thank you for your time.

User:Robins bird talk 18:15, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Looking for good examples to explain terminology confusion

The article on Cortical minicolumn is fairly good at explaining the concept of Cortical column but the coiner of the term Mountcastle used the term minicolumn to be part of the cortical column and that concept is used in quite a lot of literature. I'm looking for examples of how that might be handled. There is a possible example that I am not fond of in Predictive coding where the very first line says:

The term predictive coding is used in several disciplines (including signal-processing technologies and law) in loosely-related or unrelated senses.

Thanks for any ideas. Bodysurfinyon (talk) 17:46, 23 October 2022 (UTC)

Is there a list of WP pages with no photo(s)?

Is there a list of WP pages with no photo(s) that I can use to help add photos from Commons? If a list is available or can be created, does it or can the list WP show these pages by language? Thanks, -- Ooligan (talk) 04:35, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

There is Category:Misplaced Pages requested images. CMD (talk) 05:36, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

There are some other ways to find them, see meta:Wikipedia_Pages_Wanting_Photos/Lists_of_articles_with_missing_photos#Wikipedia_articles_needing_images. — xaosflux 15:27, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

PSA: How to bypass the NY Times paywall in a citation

We get a lot of citations to articles in the New York Times. That's generally a good thing, but many of the citations I see are to the paywalled version of the URL. If you've got a subscription, it's better if you use the non-paywalled URL. You can generate one of these by clicking the "Give this article" button. Our readers will thank you. -- RoySmith (talk) 14:03, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

that is truly a great idea. can you add that to a permanent essay or help section article? this sounds like very useful data. --Sm8900 (talk) 14:20, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Do the "give this article" codes function indefinitely? Similar mechanisms for sharing other publications expire after a few days. Certes (talk) 15:12, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Here's a "give this article" link: "Want to See the Weirdest of Misplaced Pages? Look No Further." Let's see if it lasts. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 15:16, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

I've stored that URL in archive.org. I'm not sure whether adopting a similar approach more widely would be legal and ethical or might have consequences for the NYT account which generated the link (but didn't archive it). Certes (talk) 16:32, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Huh. I had *thought* it was permanent, but now that I'm reading the instructions, it appears it's only good for 30 days. Well, don't I feel stupid. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:52, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Hmmm, they mention 2 weeks in once sentence and 30 days in the next. I think they're talking about two different expiration scenarios, but I can't quite figure out when it's one vs the other. In any case, certainly not forever like I originally thought. -- RoySmith (talk) 16:44, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

In a rolling 30-day period, you can share up to ten articles, each of which can be read by the recipient for two weeks. isaacl (talk) 17:01, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

@RoySmith it appears those expire in 2 weeks. — xaosflux 15:24, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

The ultimate solution is to use Bypass Paywalls Clean, but this isn't something we can advertise to our readers. 0xDeadbeef→∞ (talk to me) 15:34, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Since they expire in 2 weeks, it could create link rot problems. 15 articles have it. I can put a feature request in with Citaiton bot to strip ?unlocked_article_code from URLs which is a good idea regardless for archiving purposes, and we don't know how NYT will respond to these URLs in the future. -- GreenC 15:55, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

What do you mean link rot? It still has the original link and wouldn't NYT just fallback to original free/paywall rules if it expires? 0xDeadbeef→∞ (talk to me) 16:30, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Open Knowledge Association (OKA)

I have recently created the Open Knowledge Association (OKA), a tax-exempt non-profit that provides funding for translators to translate Misplaced Pages articles into English. I wanted to post here to make sure that the Misplaced Pages community is aware of the work we are doing.

We currently have 5 full-time translators: 2 in Spanish, 3 in Portuguese, and we will soon expand with French. The articles that we have published are listed here (bottom of the document, 85 articles so far) and the detailed workflow and instructions that our translators follow can be found here. More information is also available on our website. Our translators are listed here, and they all include a mention of their affiliation to OKA in their profile. At the moment, all of the funding comes exclusively from me, but in the future we will be looking for donors.

We are open to any suggestions on what we could do to improve our processes, or if some other editors would like to be directly involved in the process of selecting the articles we translate. While I have been light Misplaced Pages editing for a long time, I am myself not aware of all the best practices, so I am very open to any proposals for improvements to our ways of working. Feel free to reach out to info@oka.wiki

7804j (talk) 20:24, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

• This project has actually been going on for over 6 months, and many of the results are very problematic, with a large number of WP:CFORKs, editors who clearly have very poor English, don't read through their work (or are incapable of seeing problems) and don't add links and so on. As the OKA instructions linked above make clear, these are machine translations, with all the problems that brings. For a long time they did not "all include a mention of their affiliation to OKA in their profile", or add the appropriate templates at the translated articles, but this has been improved in the last week or so. The most successful translations are generally those that deal with Spanish or Portuguese subjects, where we certainly have gaps. But there have been a number of unwise attempts to translate long articles on large topics covering Western/classical history or art history in general, which all have major problems, some fatal. I think we neeed a special page somewhere to discuss what can be done about these articles. It's a great pity 7804j didn't announce the project and ask for advice until 6+ months in. Johnbod (talk) 13:01, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

  For transparency, Johnbod has already raised his concerns in this thread, which contains more details and detailed replies to his concerns. Several of his accusations are unfounded or exaggerated (at the moment, only 1 of the articles that we created has been removed, and that was due to lack of notability of the source page, not due to the English translation). Our translators manually review all translations, so they are not pure Machine Translations. Johnbod seems to be fundamentally against the idea of using Machine Translation as initial input, which of course puts us at odds against his vision for Misplaced Pages (even Misplaced Pages's own translation tool leverages Google Translate). See this thread for the related debate taking place on this topic.

  The reason why I waited for bringing it up in the Village pump is that I first wanted to set up everything and run a MVP to see if the model works. I wasn't sure that I would be able to recruit translators and get the non-profit recognition from the government, nor that it would be possible to train them on editing Misplaced Pages with reasonable effort, so I didn't want to bother the community with hypotheticals. Now that the concept has been tested and that I have had time to improve the processes, I am inviting the community to share its inputs. We never tried to hide our work.

  So far, we have only translated articles that were considered "Featured" or "Good articles" in the source language.

  We are continuously improving our processes -- some things may have been done incorrectly in the past, or could still be improved today, and we are open for any constructive suggestions for how to change it.

  7804j (talk) 13:19, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

  "...at the moment, only 1 of the articles that we created has been removed, and that was due to lack of notability of the source page, not due to the English translation" is certainly not true - only last night I found out that Livestock in Brazil had very properly been redirected as a WP:CFORK to the existing and better Animal husbandry in Brazil. This was by User:Yngvadottir, who became aware from a thread on Wikipediocracy. Possibly there are some bits that might be moved over to the existing article. The same has happened to other articles, and there will be others, I imagine. My main objection has been, as I said at the top, to inferior content forks, of which there are unfortunately several. Mixtec Culture seems decent, and to fill a gap, so I'm fine with that. I haven't looked at that many of the articles on the project's spreadsheet but I expect that many of the ones on Spanish/Portuguese subjects will be acceptable in terms of gap-filling and quality, but there are several very long articles on all-West art history that are both poor-to-terrible quality, and clear content forks. Johnbod (talk) 16:01, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Perhaps you will attract a higher number of serious responses by changing the name of your project from "Open Knowledge Association" (just another slogan) to something more descriptive and reality-based like for example "Funding service for select Misplaced Pages article translations". Yes, do away with the jazzy acronyms and meme-ready names. Once all the sophomoric promotional nonsense is off, maybe a legitimate discussion can take place. 67.247.99.116 (talk) 12:03, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

7804j, as Johnbod notes, the translations include duplicates of topics we already have (I have suggested on Thiago pigtv's talk that they check where the Commons images are in use rather than relying on Wikidata's interwiki links; Wikidata is also volunteer-operated, and it's all too common for a duplicate topic to be created there under a variant English name); this is a waste of money, effort, and time, including the time and effort of volunteers in the en.wikipedia community who must check and fix up the articles, as well as the time and effort of the translator. Also, the project is vitiated by bad translations. This was the state of Livestock in Brazil, 19 hours after its creation and 12 hours after the last edit, by a new page patroller. It contains obvious errors in English including in the opening sentences, and one of the headings is still in Portuguese (plus two in Latin). This would be of little use to English Misplaced Pages readers even if it was not a duplicate of an existing topic, and indicates the translator did a very sloppy job or does not have the competency in the language they are translating into. Whoever foots the bill for your project, whether you or donors, has a right to be embarrassed and angry at this waste. It also illustrates why English Misplaced Pages—which unlike most of the other Wikipedias, attracts many well-meaning contributors whose mastery of writing in the target language is not as high-level as they think—has a whole project for improving bad translations (with a backlog back to 2016) and why English Misplaced Pages has a policy that machine translations are worse than nothing, and requires extended confirmed status for use of the WMF's own translation tool to create articles. Quite apart from the issue of paid editing, which many Wikipedians regard with great distaste—it's a slap in the face to all of us who volunteer here for no recompense—the OKA project is not ready to be publicized, it needs urgent managerial attention to both the selection of the articles and the qualifications of the translators. Yngvadottir (talk) 22:15, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

At the moment of my posting, it was correct that only 1 article was affected. Animal husbandry is now another one, which we have taken note of; the feedback has been passed to the translator, and he has been given a warning. This was a new translator, so he is also less experienced in Misplaced Pages editing. Additionally, every time an article gets removed, we do a post-mortem analysis to understand what happened and to update our processes. For example, we have taken note of the feedback regarding WP:CPFORK, so we will in the future deprioritize any article that poses a high risk of being considered as such for topics where substantial other articles exist.

Nonetheless, these cases are only a small minority of the articles that our translators have published. Of course, the first version of published articles are rarely perfect, even when translated by a native English speaker, so some form of cleanup and peer review is always value-adding.

When it comes to assessing the return on investment, I think it is better to let us and the donors decide, as we have a better visibility on the costs and may have different priorities. Of course, we could get better article quality if we hired US-based PhDs to translate articles in their field, but for the cost of one such writer, we can fund more than 10 university-educated translators in other countries. Both have benefits and drawbacks, and I think a balance of the two is required.

Similarly, I agree that there would be a lot of value in translating articles from English to Spanish in critical topics such as Mathematics, and we will certainly do so in the future, but at the moment we preferred starting with English because it is the version of Misplaced Pages that attracts the most readership. This is a philosophical debate, and I understand the opposite perspective as well.

Overall, I really encourage everyone to take a more holistic perspective on this discussion -- it is ok to flag specific articles that may have issues, but I think the focus should be on assessing the overall work of the 85 articles that were translated. I would also suggest not focusing on whether this is a good use of the funds or not, because it is not possible to make such an assessment without looking at the actual spend and comparing it to other projects with similar goals.

As mentioned above, I am open to all suggestions regarding how to best put in place additional controls or instructions for our translators, or even to directly include other Wikipedians or administrators within our process to be part of the selection of articles.

7804j (talk) 06:59, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

• The irony here is that there is a much greater need to translate articles from English Misplaced Pages into a massive number of other languages. No, I'm not talking about Britney Spears or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or even Wuthering Heights; I'm talking about mathematics, science, geography, chemistry, pharmacology, and similar articles. Maybe switching your translators to work the other way around might be more useful. It would, however, be even more useful if translations were going from any of the larger Wikipedias to any of the small or mid-size ones with significant basic encyclopedic knowledge gaps. Risker (talk) 02:52, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

  Agree 100% this process should be reversed..... and has been mentioned before ....other wikis simply aren't of the quality to simply copy over in many cases. That said if the topic is notable it is a good starting point. Moxy- 02:57, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

  English is the largest Misplaced Pages. Most missing topics will also be absent from non-English wikis. Many which are present will be of low interest to readers of English, e.g. a Brazilian village covered only in Portuguese. OKA translators seem to be fluent in another language(s) and have basic competence in English. That's an ideal combination for translating from English, where there are far more source articles. Perhaps OKA could work with the other language wikis to identify English articles for which they would like equivalents, then set about translating those from English. Certes (talk) 10:33, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Getting treated like vandalism for perfectly good-faithed edits

I'm angry at Favonian for reverting and warning me as though I was engaging in disruptive/unconstructive editing at Patrik Štefan. I was only adding facts (Ferraro's statement can be found on YouTube videos about his blunder, and his name can be found on multiple lists of the biggest draft busts in NHL history). Adding content without sourcing does not mean it's vandalism.

If my edits are to be interpreted as vandalism, then I won't edit Misplaced Pages ever again. 94.191.152.89 (talk) 21:49, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

94.191.152.89, this isn't the right place to complain.To answer your complaint, the content of your addition to Patrik Štefan wasn't quite constructive and was unsourced, although I think a level 1 warning might have been a better start. Diffs: 1 2. — Nythar (💬-🎃) 21:59, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Warning for editors at Talk:Christian Bale?

There have been literally dozens of requests at Talk:Christian Bale to change his stated nationality to Welsh, all of them denied for good reasons. To repeat an inquiry I left a few days ago at that talk page with no reply so far explaining how to proceed:

How does one go about getting a warning to be displayed when that talk page is opened for editing, similar to the one currently in use at Talk:Turkey, reading "STOP: Are you about to ask for a change in Christian Bale's nationality from English to Welsh?" followed by an explanation that this has been asked a zillion times before and that it's been denied because he considers himself English and because one isn't Welsh just because one's non-Welsh mother happened to have been in Wales on the day she gave birth? Or something a little more sober than the language that I just used. Largoplazo (talk) 19:29, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Editnotice is likely most applicable. - Floydian  _¢ 19:47, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

@Largoplazo: That editnotice comes from Template:Editnotices/Page/Talk:Turkey. Similar editnotice can be created at Template:Editnotices/Page/Talk:Christian Bale to achieve the desired goal. —CX Zoom 19:54, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

Thank you both! Largoplazo (talk) 20:00, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

@Largoplazo, if you can find a clear, strong source, then adding a sentence to the article like "Although he was born in Wales, that does not make him Welsh" would probably help even more. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:32, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

WP:NOCONFED

Those interested in the subject of the American Civil War, Neo-Confederates and the Southern United States (or at some other related subject) might be interested in WP:NOCONFED, a closely related essay that was created rather recently. —Sundostund (talk) 12:00, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Request for comment on samurai terminology

Comments needed concerning the historical figure Yasuke. https://en.wikipedia.org/Talk:Yasuke#Request_for_comment_on_samurai_terminology natemup (talk) 03:39, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

RfA

Hi everyone ! I have posted a recent RfA and was told to advertise it here. The WP:RFA is locate at WP:Requests for adminship/Craffael.09. If bureaucrats and admins could give it a look, that would be awesome thanks ! Craffael.09 (talk) 16:41, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

• Misplaced Pages village pump