Category talk:Wikimania submissions

Sort by track

Would there be an easy way to sort the submissions by track? --Anthony Lorrain 01:09, 4 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder why we don't have subcategories for tracks, or even finer grained... if there is no objection we could start categorizing real-soon-now, as it's already become impractical to access submissions. --Solstag 06:44, 24 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"no less than 300 words"

I wish to discuss the way this request is phrased.

The first time I read it, I didn't notice the "no" in the request. My eyes registered it as "please use less than 300 words", which seemed reasonable; after all, abstracts are, usually, very short.

Only when I re-read my submission, a few minutes later, I noticed that little "no". I expanded my abstract, then.

Today, reading some submissions, I find that many of them do not have the requested mininum of 300 words in their abstract.

I don't believe that anyone would deliberately send a submission that does not answer to all the rules.

As the majority of the wikipedians aren't English native speakers, I think the choice of "no less than" (instead of "more than") may have misled many of the partcipants.

What will happen to those submissions whose authors understood the request as "please use less than 300 words"?

Thank you for your attention.

--Betty VH 18:02, 24 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I agree – 300 words ought to be enough for anybody. A minimum doesn't make much sense; if you manage to write a good abstract in <300 words, that should be fine --Church of emacs 18:08, 24 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

While I see a benefit to set a minimum word count (it may help reviewers and possible audience to shape an image what they'll actually get at the venue), I fully agree this kind of complicated expression is not desirable for multilingual environment. As non-native speaker of English, I took it "less than 300 words" at the first glance and then somehow perplexed. If you guys intend to set a minimum, it would be better to word "more than 300 words". --Aphaia 20:57, 24 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

We intend to see at least 300 words since short abstracts are difficult to review, in most cases we do not understand what the presentation is going to be about. I think this was made clear in the call, and also we contacted the authors of short abstracts asking them to expand the abstract. Ok, if it 293 words, we can live with this, but 50 is notoriously different to make an opinion of.--Yaroslav Blanter 05:49, 25 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I read it as "please keep it below 300 words" (and did that) and judging from the submissions I read I'm not the only one. Multichill 09:21, 29 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

In future make the language simple, so that the intended meaning is conveyed to the speakers of all languages. no less than 300 words is notoriously confusing. :) --Shijualex 06:01, 30 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]