Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 15:13, 9 November 2006

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Next issue (November 13)

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• Special stories
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• Regular features
  • Interwiki -
  • News and notes -
  • In the news -
  • Features and admins -
  • Arbitration report -
  • Wikiproject report -
    • I'd like a bit more (any?) discussion before we add a new regular feature. Can you sketch out a rough draft of what such a report would be? Ral315 (talk) 15:13, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

• Discussion
  • Hi, I'm wondering if I could use the signpost, to make the community aware of the WikiProject user warnings project. It's recently be re-energised, and in the coming weeks the format and context of the templates used thoughout user pages will be shortly changing. This includes the ubiquitous test messages through to copyvio, joke, and personal attack warnings. This is due to a harmonisation program that is being applied across all the templates to remove ambiguity and standardise the syntax and levels. This could have implications for amongst others, those in the RC patrolling community, and I would like to use your platform to bring this to the attention of as many editors as possible. If you require any further information please do not hesitate to get in touch. Regards Khukri 18:54, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
    • Feel free to write a short paragraph for next week's news and notes. Ral315 (talk) 04:53, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Longer term planning

After a discussion with elian I'd like to put up for debate the issue how the interwiki report should look like in future. There's only the Russian report to be done (as far as 100,000+ article Wikipedias are concerned) so it might be the right time to think about the future format of the reports.

We agreed with elian that the current form, however informative, is a little boring and making next versions in the same form is not advisable.

One possible solution might be to create topical international reports on important issues across all major Wikipedias like:

• dispute resolution
• fighting vandalism and copyright violations
• editing tools, scripts and helpful templates
• and so on (what's your vote?)

This kind of report requires more time and effort, interviewing representatives from respective Wikipedias and sometimes advice from experts (software, templates, etc.) However if done right might give a broad picture to Wikimedia audience with potential implementation of some solutions in other projects. This kind of reports with real lasting value should be archived on the Meta.

Apart from these topical reports, regular "What's new" reports can be of use in future as well. Needless to say Wikipedias are very dynamic, bustling with various activity and interacting with the outside world so it'd be also good to inform the English-speaking Misplaced Pages community about it.

Kpjas 09:01, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

I'd volunteer to take care of such a regular column. I can't promise to deliver a weekly report since each topic requires a lot of research, but it should be possible on a two week basis. --Elian 19:22, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

A very good point indeed. I'm not sure if taking a topic and comparing across Wikipedias is advisable (I expect they'll tend to go in the form of "X wikipedia does Y this way. Z wikipedia, meanwhile, does Y this way...") Perhaps spotlighting a language a week or two, as is the case today, but giving a broad look at things like this- I would imagine one could look at arbitration cases, things like featured articles, where I noticed the German community has only 20% less than us, etc. The other advantage to taking one Misplaced Pages at a time is that it's a lot easier to get in contact with one language a week rather than 5-10.

The only thing is that if we're going to change this, I want to do it for every report from here on out, not have one excellent report and ten comparatively horrific reports. Otherwise, I'm perfectly open to tinkering with the format on this. Ral315 (talk) 01:29, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

I think the idea of comparing ways other languages deal with common issues is very useful and could promote Best practices across the Wikimedia Foundation. --Trödel 01:36, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

If it's a big issue, I agree. If it's something like "X has featured articles and good articles. Y has only featured articles", I can see it getting bad. Ral315 (talk) 05:13, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

For the next Dutch report, Cyriellie reads the Signpost and might be interested. Ral315 (talk) 05:13, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Sorry - only just noticed this discussion. I agree that the current format has become a little boring, but there was no reason for each report to adopt the same template; I guess it was just easiest to write each one the way the previous one was done. The most interesting parts to me have been the discussions of evolving policy and recent issues.

It would be nice if we could build up a cohort of "foreign correspondents", with at least one in each of the other main non-English Wikipedias, who could report once a week (or fortnight, or month, or whatever) on local developments. Perhaps rotating each month would be best, with a report each week from three of the top 12 wikipedias, and irregular reports from the others? Or would this be too formal/difficult? We would need bilingual volunteers to write the copy, of course. -- ALoan (Talk) 10:39, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

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