Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2017/December

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17:50, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

Invitation to Blocking tools consultation

Hello all,

The Wikimedia Foundation's Anti-Harassment Tools team invites all Wikimedians to discuss new blocking tools and improvements to existing blocking tools in December 2017 for development work in early 2018.

How can you help?

  1. Share your ideas on the discussion page or send an email to the Anti-Harassment Tools team.
  2. Spread the word that the consultation is happening; this is an important discussion for making decisions about improving the blocking tools.
  3. Help with translation.
  4. If you know of previous discussions about blocking tools that happened on your wiki, share the links.

We are looking forward to learning your ideas.

For the Anti-Harassment Tools team SPoore (WMF), Community Advocate, Community health initiative (talk) 23:23, 7 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

17:58, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

Interesting read on digital journalism

Of course, there are many of these but maybe someone will find this enlightening: https://traffic.piano.io/2017/12/11/the-information-doesnt-want-to-be-free/Justin (koavf)TCM 23:28, 11 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

15:26, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

Knowing how journalism works combats conspiratorial thinking

Original paper, popular article. —Justin (koavf)TCM 22:38, 28 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Photo's Russian country houses

Interesting story (Wikidata-item- Russian news article is the original one) about images published with free license. Someone who wants to translate? --Livenws (talk) 15:24, 30 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@LIVE NIEUWS: Um, afaik, on this project only User:Gryllida is an active native speaker of Russian. Without them, I do not think we would be able to do anything.
•–• 16:34, 30 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I translated into Dutch with the help of a translate machine, it's not a very complicated story. It would be nice if it were published here! :) --Livenws (talk) 16:40, 30 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Machine translation -- gives me goosebumps. I don't trust it, and it is better if someone who knows Russian can help. @Gryllida: can you find time for that article? The link is ru:Аэрофотосъемка 200 русских усадеб пожертвована Википедии.
•–• 16:51, 30 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]
An anecdote I usually end up telling about how truly dreadful automatic translate is, is a story about some minister (from Turkey, maybe?) missing a meeting somewhere, and a (Turkish?) source automatic translation said he had been decapitated. Which seemed unlikely... though not quite as unlikely as it would be in some countries. I did quite a lot of digging to deduce the decapitation was brainless translation of a passage saying he had a bad head cold (I suspect it may have involved an idiom similar to "sneezing one's head off"). I've encountered much worse, things that produce no warning signs like a claim of decapitation; like a Spanish source that I didn't realize was a press release because I couldn't pick up on the patterns of writing that only a fluent reader would be able to observe, and it made a big difference to the entire review that I didn't realize it was a press release. We handle automatic translations with extreme skepticism. --Pi zero (talk) 17:32, 30 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]
This is a fairly easy article to understand with translate machine, other articles can be different (like that of Turkey), but you could not miss much in this. --Livenws (talk) 17:53, 30 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]