This editor has joined in opposition to the targeting of editors by the correct "Point of View" and "Ideology" crowd so that the majority of us can keep the encyclopedia free for anyone to edit and not let it become the encyclopedia edited only by those who have yet to do something unacceptable to the easily-offended.
Don't let the octopus of the easily-offended bring down the entire project!

SEMI-RETIRED

This user is no longer very active on Wikipedia.

You may want to increment ((Archive basics)) to |counter= 2 as User talk:John Carter/Archive 1 is larger than the recommended 150Kb.

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 2

For this month's issue...

Making sense of a lot of data.

Work on our prototype will begin imminently. In the meantime, we have to understand what exactly we're working with. To this end, we generated a list of 71 WikiProjects, based on those brought up on our Stories page and those who had signed up for pilot testing. For those projects where people told stories, we coded statements within those stories to figure out what trends there were in these stories. This approach allowed us to figure out what Wikipedians thought of WikiProjects in a very organic way, with very little by way of a structure. (Compare this to a structured interview, where specific questions are asked and answered.) This analysis was done on 29 stories. Codes were generally classified as "benefits" (positive contributions made by a WikiProject to the editing experience) and "obstacles" (issues posed by WikiProjects, broadly speaking). Codes were generated as I went along, ensuring that codes were as close to the original data as possible. Duplicate appearances of a code for a given WikiProject were removed.

We found 52 "benefit" statements encoded and 34 "obstacle" statements. The most common benefit statement referring to the project's active discussion and participation, followed by statements referring to a project's capacity to guide editor activity, while the most common obstacles made reference to low participation and significant burdens on the part of the project maintainers and leaders. This gives us a sense of WikiProjects' big strength: they bring people together, and can be frustrating to editors when they fail to do so. Meanwhile, it is indeed very difficult to bring editors together on a common interest; in the absence of a highly motivated core of organizers, the technical infrastructure simply isn't there.

We wanted to pair this qualitative study with quantitative analysis of a WikiProject and its "universe" of pages, discussions, templates, and categories. To this end I wrote a script called ProjAnalysis which will, for a given WikiProject page (e.g. Wikipedia:WikiProject Star Trek) and WikiProject talk-page tag (e.g. Template:WikiProject Star Trek), will give you a list of usernames of people who edited within the WikiProject's space (the project page itself, its talk page, and subpages), and within the WikiProject's scope (the pages tagged by that WikiProject, excluding the WikiProject space pages). The output is an exhaustive list of usernames. We ran the script to analyze our test batch of WikiProjects for edits between March 1, 2014 and February 28, 2015, and we subjected them to further analysis to only include those who made 10+ edits to pages in the projects' scope, those who made 4+ edits to the projects' space, and those who made 10+ edits to pages in scope but not 4+ edits to pages in the projects' space. This latter metric gives us an idea of who is active in a certain subject area of Wikipedia, yet who isn't actively engaging on the WikiProject's pages. This information will help us prioritize WikiProjects for pilot testing, and the ProjAnalysis script in general may have future life as an application that can be used by Wikipedians to learn about who is in their community.

Complementing the above two studies are a design analysis, which summarizes the structure of the different WikiProject spaces in our test batch, and the comprehensive census of bots and tools used to maintain WikiProjects, which will be finished soon. With all of this information, we will have a game plan in place! We hope to begin working with specific WikiProjects soon.

As a couple of asides...

Database Reports has existed for several years on Wikipedia to the satisfaction of many, but many of the reports stopped running when the Toolserver was shut off in 2014. However, there is good news: the weekly New WikiProjects and WikiProjects by Changes reports are back, with potential future reports in the future.
WikiProject X has an outpost on Wikidata! Check it out. It's not widely publicized, but we are interested in using Wikidata as a potential repository for metadata about WikiProjects, especially for WikiProjects that exist on multiple Wikimedia projects and language editions.

That's all for now. Thank you for subscribing! If you have any questions or comments, please share them with us.

Harej (talk) 01:43, 21 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

This week's article for improvement (week 14, 2015)

A man garbage picking through a skip (dumpster)

Hello, John Carter.

The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection:

Garbage picking

Previous selections: Antagonist • Dinner

Get involved with the TAFI project! You can...

Posted by: MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of EuroCarGT (talk) 00:08, 30 March 2015 (UTC) • Opt-out instructions[reply]

Infoboxes II

Hope you don't mind, but I decided to be WP:BOLD and added Infoboxes II to WP:LAME. Hawkeye7 (talk) 02:07, 30 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Today's articles for improvement

Hello John Carter:

Please consider participating in this week's vote for TAFI's upcoming Week 17 collaboration. Last week's voting did not receive many participants. Thanks for your consideration. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 15:54, 31 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Peace offering

Regarding email communications with potentially-not blocked users
Regarding this: Please read my comment more closely. I did not assert anywhere that you should have a public email (I don't). I merely stated that the fact that you don't have a public email means that whoever contacted you did so through the Wikipedia email service, and there if he/she is the same person who has been abusing said service to badmouth me to multiple users over the past two years that could be a problem. I will take your word that it doesn't appear to be the same site-banned user. But there are only about three other users with whom I have had long-term problems who are not indefinitely blocked, one of whom hasn't edited in over a year and the other two of whom haven't interaed with me on-wiki for the same amount of time. So I find it very disturbing that you would defend such stalkerish behaviour, regardless of who it is.

Regarding email communications with potentially-not blocked users

Regarding this: Please read my comment more closely. I did not assert anywhere that you should have a public email (I don't). I merely stated that the fact that you don't have a public email means that whoever contacted you did so through the Wikipedia email service, and there if he/she is the same person who has been abusing said service to badmouth me to multiple users over the past two years that could be a problem. I will take your word that it doesn't appear to be the same site-banned user. But there are only about three other users with whom I have had long-term problems who are not indefinitely blocked, one of whom hasn't edited in over a year and the other two of whom haven't interaed with me on-wiki for the same amount of time. So I find it very disturbing that you would defend such stalkerish behaviour, regardless of who it is.

General summary of why I'm calling for a truce that got a little long-winded. Read if you want.
Anyway, if the email stated, like the earlier emails that went out to Toddy1 among others, positively that I am a "troll" who likes to get in fights, it was wrong. I admire Miyazawa Kenji and I hate it when people try to defame him (something that hardly ever happensby outside Wikipedia, mind you). I also hate it when people violate NOR, in general. I still believe that these are recurring and near-constant problems with the user you defended in our most recent string of interactions, and I think said user is a liability to Wikipedia as long as he/she is still active. Pointing out on article talk pages that said user's proposed edits constitute OR or are otherwise problematic, and that this is a recurring problem, is not a "personal attack", as several other users told you on your most recent ANI thread.

General summary of why I'm calling for a truce that got a little long-winded. Read if you want.

Anyway, if the email stated, like the earlier emails that went out to Toddy1 among others, positively that I am a "troll" who likes to get in fights, it was wrong. I admire Miyazawa Kenji and I hate it when people try to defame him (something that hardly ever happensby outside Wikipedia, mind you). I also hate it when people violate NOR, in general. I still believe that these are recurring and near-constant problems with the user you defended in our most recent string of interactions, and I think said user is a liability to Wikipedia as long as he/she is still active. Pointing out on article talk pages that said user's proposed edits constitute OR or are otherwise problematic, and that this is a recurring problem, is not a "personal attack", as several other users told you on your most recent ANI thread.

But now that those content issues are more-or-less resolved, at least for the time being, I have no further interest in arguing with you. This was true when I apologized for my gruff tone on ANI a month ago and it is still true now. I hope you will accept this peace offering and we can both go about normal editing again. I will continue to talk this issue out with you if you so desire, but I see no reason for any further ANI threads, accusations of personal attacks/stalking or the like, and would be just as happy to receive no further discussion of any of it.

182.249.17.119 (talk) 03:38, 1 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

BTW I don't like having to post logged-out so I'd also like this to be the last place the email affair is mentioned. 182.249.17.119 (talk) 03:40, 1 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Hijiri88: If you don't like to post logged out, why would you do so? You seem to still be acting on some sort of frankly irrational and dubiously supportable belief that you have to post even when circumstances make it difficult for you to do so. No one's edits are so time-critical that they can't wait until a convenient time. I already told you this, more or less, on your user talk page. I am sorry that you still, apparently, believe your comments to be of such immediate importance that you must make them while logged out. Also, honestly, if you waited a while before posting, you might be less obviously emotional and you might be able to contribute to discussions in a less problematic way than you often do at present. That would probably be for the best. If it meant posting less often or less repeatedly, and I see you have had to post multiple times for this individual comment already, well, honestly, maybe that would be for the best. John Carter (talk) 16:40, 2 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Talk back

Hello, John Carter. You have new messages at User talk:The Herald/Talkback.
Message added 05:38, 1 April 2015 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the ((Talkback)) or ((Tb)) template.

Arbitration case request

You are involved in a recently filed request for arbitration. Please review the request at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case#WikiBullying and, if you wish to do so, enter your statement and any other material you wish to submit to the Arbitration Committee. As threaded discussion is not permitted in most arbitration pages please ensure that you make all comments in your own section only. Additionally, the guide to arbitration and the Arbitration Committee's procedures may be of use.

Thanks, It appears the filing party did not notify the named parties. --L235 (t / c / ping in reply) 13:38, 3 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]