Wikipedia articles
"How do you know whether to label an edit on Wikipedia as minor? Why does it matter?"
- The only things that should be labelled "minor edit" are changes in punctuation, spelling, and some types of formatting. Breaking a long paragraph into 2 shorter ones could be considered a minor change; making one of them into a new section, maybe not. Any change that affects the meaning conveyed or the sources provided is not a minor change. "If there is any chance that another editor might dispute a change, the edit should not be marked as minor."
- Some people spend most of their time making minor changes, like fixing misuse of "it's" and "its". Others spend much of their time editing and sourcing content.
- Wikipedia software allows users to see the proportion of minor changes made by a particular user. It allows users to ignore minor changes when they are reviewing edits, to streamline workflow. Robots may use the minor/major distinction when making decisions.
“In general, what level of sophistication of the audience should Wikipedia articles aim for?”
- Should it be like World Book Encyclopedia or Britannica Encyclopedia or something higher or something lower? Nolabob (talk) 15:17, 11 July 2020 (UTC)
- This may depend in part on the article. Ideally the goal is to communicate clearly to someone who may have little knowledge of the topic, someone at an entry level.
- Science communication can be particularly challenging (also math). The Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University teaches science communication.
- Medical articles require a higher level of sourcing (MEDRS), based on scientific publications rather than popular science or news sources, to ensure that they can be relied on for accurate information.
"Is there a best practice for editors to follow to make their articles mobile-friendly?"
- It has been reported that many people around the world research Wikipedia using mobile and tablet devices.
- There are best practices that come into play at a variety of levels, such as principles for Responsive web design. Wikipedia's user interface (UX) for mobile was designed separately and independently from the historical desktop version, as is described here.
- Many of the layout conventions for both mobile and desktop are determined at the level of the implementation. For desktop, many options exist and it is possible to choose skins that alter the interface.
- Wikipedia has its own particular content policies and writing style -- factual, neutral point of view etc. The lead should be a brief summary of content, and establish notability.
- There are general writing best practices that are consistent with Wikipedia style -- the ABC's "Accuracy, brevity, clarity" are certainly things to strive for.
- Accessibility can also be useful for thinking about how to write.
- "Make it easier for users to see and hear content including separating foreground from background." Accessibility guidelines often include suggestions like breaking up long paragraphs into shorter conceptually-related units, making sentences shorter and simpler, and using section headings to identify subtopics within a page.
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines: WCAG 2.0 and Understanding WCAG 2.0. See for example this discussion of reading level, readability, and decoding.
- WCAG 3.0 is under development.
- What Are the Four Major Categories of Accessibility? PRINCIPLES: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.
- Make Your Web Content More Readable: Tips and Tricks for More Effective Web Pages
- Pages evolve over time. Even if they are well organized to begin with, they may not end up that way. It is useful to ask yourself what someone coming to a page might be looking for, and whether they will find it. Major reorganizations are challenging, but sometimes they are needed. It can help to rework a page in stages.
“Can I create a new article on Wikipedia using an article from another language Wikipedia?”
- Yes! Starting with a Wikipedia article in another language can be very useful in creating a new article. Because Wikipedia requires everything on it to be released under a copyright license that allows reuse, there are no copyright issues. An existing article can give you a nice overview of what is known about the person. Be aware that requirements for sourcing may be very different on different language Wikipedias. English Wikipedia will require you to cite sources for all information; the other Wikipedia article is not a citeable source. Be sure to verify all your information; some very strange errors can creep in during translation. Check all names. By the time you go through the entire article, verifying, citing, and expanding, your final article may look very different from the article you started with!
- e.g. Dexter Award ==> {{Interlanguage link multi|William Arthur Smeaton|de}} ==> Google translate ==> William Arthur Smeaton
“What is the "Did you know" item referred to in the "Special mentions" section of this agenda?”
- "Did You Know" (DYK) is a section on the main page of English Wikipedia. Twice daily, it lists several facts from new (or recently expanded) Wikipedia pages, one of which is accompanied by an image. For example, on 19 March 2020, the DYKs included "Did you know... that Jan Yager's artwork American Ruff (pictured) is made from discarded crack-cocaine vials and caps?" Hundreds or thousands of readers may click through to read each DYK article. To appear as a DYK, an article must meet several criteria, be nominated, and go through a review process. You can see more about this, including proposed DYKs under review, at Template talk:Did you know.
“How are Article Ratings determined? Should we as Wikipedians be concerned about ratings of articles we've written or edited? How do we solicit a re-evaluation of an article we've written or edited?”
- Everybody is concerned about the quality of the articles they write and there are many ways that quality is assessed on Wikipedia. As long as the article is good enough to avoid deletion and you are satisfied with the quality, don't worry too much. A page is always a moving target, so a rating may not accurately reflect what you are seeing on the page.
- Ratings of article quality, like many things on Wikipedia, tend to be community based. Featured quality and good quality articles go through an extensive community review process. Some WikiProjects may have their own standards for rating articles, e.g. Wikipedia:WikiProject National Register of Historic Places/Assessment. Ratings supplied by different Wikiprojects may legitimately differ. At the end of the day, someone makes a judgement call and assigns a value to the page.
- Rating an article properly is a lot of work, so please be patient when requesting a rating. Generally all you need to do to get an article re-rated is to remove the rating on the article's talk page, leave a short note there and in the Wikiproject's talk page. Then wait six months.
- If you want a ballpark assessment, ORES software uses artificial intelligence to predict the rating an editor would give an article. It's fairly consistent, but can't detect some issues that a human will spot.
- A quick example: James M. Baxter as of this comment has a permanent ID of 961281489. To get the permanent ID, go to the article, click "permanent ID" in the left hand column and the number appears at the end of the URL. Then open https://ores.wikimedia.org/ui/, enter "enwiki", "article quality", put the permanent ID number in the big box and click "Give me results". Immediately scroll down, and ORES tells you that it predicts that an editor has a 63.5% chance of rating the article as "Start" but only 11.8% chance of rating it "C". For more information, see ORES.
“Wikipedia provides various metrics to characterize articles, for example, it provides a "pageviews" analysis. To what extent as Wikipedians should we be concerned with these metrics on our articles?“
- There are many Wikipedia:Statistics, including Wikipedia:Pageview statistics which can be used to indicate how often people view a page. In some ways this is a bit of a vanity metric, but if you want to pick topics that are read by more people to maximize your impact as an editor, you can certainly do that.
- Strategic choosing of articles to work on may be helped by looking at a Wikiproject like Wikipedia:WikiProject Chemistry. They have a table of "Chemistry articles by quality and importance " that can be useful in identifying important articles that need work.
- This can also be useful if you are working in a field where you are reporting on your work and its impact to others to show impact.
"Proper citations are indispensable to any good Wikipedia article. However, with the decline of print media, citations in Wikipedia articles are more dependent on on-line citations which may not be permanent. How does Wikipedia manage the transient nature of these citations? How should Wikimedians manage citations in this regard?"
- The issue of whether any lasting record of electronic media will continue to exist, comparable to printed media, has relevance far beyond Wikipedia. A number of archiving projects attempt to record electronic publications and capture the ephemeral nature of the internet. One of the best known is archive.org whose Wayback Machine has been used for decades to store copies of electronic pages from websites.
- Wikipedia has the capability of Help:Using the Wayback Machine to do lookups of no-longer-available urls and to serve pages that no longer exist. However, this will only work if the page has previously been archived. It is possible to request the archiving of existing pages on archive.org and to look up urls that no longer appear to work, and add template code that will retrieve archive.org's stored value.
"How do you know a permanent url when you see it?"
- Permanent urls (PURLS or permalinks) are urls that are written in a way that is supposed to remain usable even if underlying computer systems or sites change their link structure. Non-permanent urls can change over time, even from one session to the next. The url that is shown in your browser may not be the permanent url; it may be a temporary form that the permanent url has been converted to by the computer software.
- It is desirable to use a permanent url in a Wikipedia citation or a Wikidata reference because it is more likely to continue to work and to be verifiable by someone else.
- A finding aid or other web page may explicitly state its permanent url in the page's text. The easiest way to find it is to search for "http". You can also search for URL, PURL, permalink or permanent link. There is no standard for what term is used: some sites may simply cite it: e.g.
Alan G. MacDiarmid, interviewed by Cyrus Mody in University of Pennsylvania on December 19, 2005. Philadelphia: Science History Institute, n.d. Oral History Transcript 0325. https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/z316q261v
- If you see a handle (url containing hdl)that is a permanent URL. DOI's or Digital Object Identifiers are also examples of handles and are permanent links.
“Can you say something about how the “short descriptions” tag is used?"
- It’s at the top of many (but not all) Wikipedia articles.
- The Short Description appears at the top of articles in the Desktop View if you have the *ShortDesc* helper set in the *Gadgets* section of your profile preferences. It also shows by default on mobile views of articles.
- It is meant to be very short: less than 40 characters, so maybe 4-6 words that explains the scope of the article (e.g. "American textile artist" "woodworking technique" "Nobel prize-winning chemist"). Dorevabelfiore (talk)
"What tools can be useful in reviewing an article (your own or others)? "
- Earwig's Copyvio Detector is a very useful tool for checking for copyright violations: Paste in an article title and press "Submit". Higher numbers may indicate use of quotations, long titles, or long names of organizations or awards, all of which are fine. The "Compare" buttons will show you what is the same in the Wikipedia article and a given source. I use this as a final step to check my new articles for cut-and-pastes or rephrasings that are still a bit too close for comfort. Mary Mark Ockerbloom (talk) 03:19, 13 December 2021 (UTC)