Wikinews:Water cooler/policy/archives/2011/August

Personal image filter referendum

Hello. :) Though this is not local policy, the dates are approaching, and I wanted to make sure that your project was aware--as it is certainly far-reaching. (It seems like it might not have a lot of impact here, but might, and could certainly still be of interest.)

The Wikimedia Foundation, at the direction of the Board of Trustees, will be holding a vote to determine whether members of the community support the creation and usage of an opt-in personal image filter, which would allow readers to voluntarily screen particular types of images strictly for their own accounts. The referendum is scheduled for 12-27 August. You can read more about it at m:Image filter referendum/en; if you are interested in weighing in, you may especially want to review M:Image filter referendum/FAQ/en. Thanks! --Mdennis (WMF) (talk) 13:38, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

• Comment Could've been done, relatively trivially, and ages ago, by having a javascript widget to display Microsoft Bob instead of any "regular" image. My concern is actually having to 'rate' images for the filter to work. Might read the full proposal later. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 05:12, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

Proposal to make reviewing easier and end the publication of bogus material

Proposal: Require inline citations before publication to show where each fact in an article derived. The citations could be removed upon publication. This would significantly decrease the time required to search for a fact and would keep the writer(s) organized while preventing intentional or unintentional insertion of bogus material.--William S. Saturn (talk) 22:57, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

It would eb easier, I expect, if we did it with hidden comments. That way we wouldn't even need to remove them. DENDODGE George Watson 23:01, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

I believe bawolff built a system like that, whereby you could enable a gadget that allowed you to toggle the citations on and off. Non-reviewers didn't get the option, so the citations were hidden then. Nobody ever actually used it, which I think is a shame because it had great potential. Blood Red Sandman ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 23:09, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Tada.wav — μchip08 23:20, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Miscellaneous thoughts.

• I've wondered about this sort of thing, but there are a couple of serious difficulties I've never seen how to get around.

• Never saw how it could fail to add significantly to technical complexity.
• The reviewer needs to have looked through all the sources in their entirety, at least once, to have a sense of what is there so they can recognize contradictions and inconsistencies (and copyvios!). Just because a fact is in fact stated in a certain place in a certain source, doesn't mean it's okay. So we need to be very wary of a device that might encourage reviewers (and authors) to only check that everything said in the article appears somewhere in a source.

• On two or three occasions I was aware of, with an article having a largish number of sources, an author has provided a verbal description of what information was drawn from each source. That was, as I recall, immensely useful.

--Pi zero (talk) 23:38, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Do we have a program that can be used to search for plagiarism? --William S. Saturn (talk) 00:08, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

Yes. — μchip08 01:05, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

I was referring to something more like Grammarly.--William S. Saturn (talk) 05:02, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

• Pi Zero raises the biggest concern over this: It makes contributing substantially more technically challenging. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 05:07, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

Referendum time!!!!!

I know the image-hiding feature most likely won't affect Wikinews, but do make sure to express your opinion regardless. A lot is at stake! :) Ragettho (talk) 03:26, 19 August 2011 (UTC)