There are many good short stories this week, and many new and upcoming events. I am planning to add a small calendar to the main Signpost page to help keep track of everything that has just taken place or that is about to happen. Please suggest additions to the calendar along with content suggestions, in the Newsroom.
This week also sees the return of editor-in-chief Michael Snow, from distant travels, with interest and to form.
-- Samuel Klein (filling in for Michael Snow)}}
The next meeting of the Wikimedia Board is scheduled for today, Monday, May 16. Items on the agenda include the upcoming Board elections (see related story) and Official positions. This meeting will be private, including Wikimedia President Jimmy Wales, Vice-Chair Florence Nibart-Devouard, Executive Secretary Angela Beesley, Trustees Tim Shell and Michael Davis, and Chief Financial Officer Daniel Mayer. It is expected to finalize the number of seats on the Board up for election, as well as a budget for the coming months.
Other items on the agenda include a discussion of official positions, and other topics from a list of open questions posted on the Meta wiki last month.
Election notices for the upcoming Board election are currently being drafted for translation, and the nomination of candidates is expected to begin this Saturday.
Several news outlets this week reported research conducted last month by web traffic analysis company Hitwise [1]. The company reported that Wikipedia's traffic and popularity had soared over the past year, raising the site to the second-most popular reference site on the internet, and most popular encyclopaedia overall.
Hitwise found that since the beginning of 2004, Wikipedia's share of the reference market had risen by 618 per cent. Back then, the site ranked 13th in Hitwise's education/reference category, but an inexorable rise in traffic has seen us overtake the likes of About.com, Encarta and Answers.com (which re-uses substantial amounts of Wikipedia content) to lie behind only Dictionary.com. Of all sites receiving traffic via search engines, Wikipedia has fared similarly well. In June 2004 our overall ranking according to Hitwise was 146; by April of this year it had risen to 33.
Hitwise also analysed the demographics of Wikipedia users, and found that there was an even split between male and female users, with those between 18 and 24 years old considerably more likely to visit the site. Interestingly, families with total incomes over 150,000 US Dollars were 34 per cent more likely to visit the site.
Search engine magazine www.searchenginewatch.com reported that one possible factor in the increase in traffic was a campaign by some bloggers to increase the Google ranking of Wikipedia's online poker pages, to combat link spam [2]. However, Hitwise reported that their analysis offered no evidence that this was the case, with the most popular search terms leading web users to Wikipedia articles during their study being Terri Schiavo, Pope John Paul II and The Amityville Horror.
E-business magazine line56.com examined Wikipedia this week in an article considering the benefits and drawbacks of open source software [3]. Starting with the benefits, the article noted that Wikipedia draws on the efforts of tens of thousands of volunteers, far greater in number that those working on the Encyclopædia Britannica, for example. And of course, being free, Wikipedia has a considerable price advantage over its traditionally-produced rivals.
However, the article said that these benefits are counterbalanced by the issue of quality. While the very large user base means that obvious vandalism is rapidly removed, edit wars and other content disputes mean that quality does not uniformly increase over time. "Anonymous bigots, cranks, and eccentrics [can] distort subjects beyond comprehension", said columnist Demir Barlas.
In the end, the article sat on the fence, declaring itself unconvinced either that Wikipedia was the encyclopaedia of the future or that it was a ludicrous idea. "It remains to be seen whether the communal/democratic creation of content, software, and knowledge can trump the efforts of an inspired few", said Barlas, quoting John Stuart Mill's aphorism that "with small men no great thing can really be accomplished".
The Times Higher Education Supplement this week took a look at Wikipedia ([4], requires registration). The article notes that the English Wikipedia alone has over 510,000 articles, compared to Britannica's 120,000, and says this has all been achieved "without a penny being paid for its contributions or an ounce of kudos lent to its contributors". Many would dispute the second part of that statement, with considerable kudos given to the project by its many supporters around the world.
Considering the views of Wikipedia detractors, the THES quotes long-time critic Robert McHenry, a former Britannica editor, who accuses the project of cherishing an "irrelevant principle - openness". Internet journalist Andrew Orlowski, meanwhile, describes Wikipedians as "the Khmer Rouge in diapers" with an unfounded belief in the "mystical power" of the internet.
The article does not take a side on whether the project will tend towards excellence or mediocrity over time, but does point out that one major strength of the project is its contemporaneousness, noting that Wikipedia's coverage of recent events is "far ahead" of the opposition.
Larry Sanger, formerly closely associated with the project, is quoted as saying there is a need for greater deference to expertise, and that a more traditional quality control mechanism should be sought. Jimmy Wales responded robustly, saying that "my basic response is that he is completely wrong about everything". Wales agreed that expertise should be acknowledged, but said the important thing was to find a way of doing this that was compatible with the basic principles of the project.
Newspapers around the world continue to use Wikipedia as a source of information. The Guardian once again rated a Wikipedia page as one of 'six of the best' on a subject - this time it was Friday 13; whimsical columnist Smallweed referenced Heavy metal umlaut in the same paper later in the week [5], while diarist Marina Hyde also recently insinuated that Nicky Campbell himself may have been responsible for an anonymous but glowing edit to his article [6]. In Ghana, news website GhanaWeb referenced Crown Prince and Heir apparent in an article considering a possible misuse of the title by a chief's son in the traditional succession system of the region of Gonjaland [7]. And in New Zealand, independent news outlet Scoop looked to Wikipedia to clear up the confusion about what Neoconservatism is [8], saying that Wikipedia is "much more upfront and makes far greater sense" than WordNet's "rather unhelpful definition".
The latest upgrade to the MediaWiki software which is the backbone of Wikipedia and all other Wikimedia foundation projects is now well advanced, with an alpha version of MediaWiki 1.5 now available for download for testing purposes. The new software is running on a test wiki at http://test.leuksman.com/, and the release of a stable version is scheduled for 1 June 2005.
MediaWiki is a wiki engine which was written specifically for Wikipedia, and has developed since its early days into one of the most fully-featured and widely used wiki engines available. In Wikipedia's earliest days, the site used UseModWiki, but in early 2002, Magnus Manske finished work on a PHP-based replacement which eliminated support for CamelCase links, among many other improvements. Manske's software became known as 'Phase II', and was supplanted later by 'Phase III', which became known as MediaWiki in response to the need for a more standard version numbering system, and the software's use across all Wikimedia projects.
MediaWiki 1.4 has been in use on Wikipedia since 20 March 2005, but current lead developer Brion Vibber has been spearheading work to incorporate further features which have been requested since then. Major updates include a revised schema for the database, which should significantly speed up rename and delete operations on pages with long edit histories. The schema change is likely to lead to some downtime for large wikis such as Wikipedia when they upgrade to the new software.
One feature that has been commonly requested is a fixed ID for the most recent revision of a page. Currently, links to old versions of a page take the form http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Open_cluster&oldid=13445382, with the most recent revision always having oldid=0. This means that one can only link permanently to old revisions of an article. MediaWiki 1.5 will assign a permanent oldid to the current revision of an article, which will assist in any sifting which may take place as Wikipedians work towards offline editions.
Another feature which has been in some demand recently, thanks to the efforts of User:Willy on Wheels and User:Wikipedia is Communism page-move vandals, is a record of page moves in Special:Log, and a 'rollback' function for page moves, available to administrators. Page moves will also appear in article revision histories.
General improvements to editing capabilities include the availability of a 'diff' for edit previews, to allow users to keep track of their changes during large edits; automatic conversion of '--' to an M-dash (—) or N-dash (–), depending on the context; and the ability to specify a file name for uploads distinct from the original filename on the user's hard drive.
Some features which have been requested are likely to find their way into future releases of MediaWiki. One which has been talked about for some time is a page-ranking feature, where users can indicate how accurate and complete they have found an article. Magnus Manske has developed a page validation feature, and developers hope to incorporate it into a putative MediaWiki 1.6 release later this year. The push towards Wikipedia 1.0 will greatly benefit from this feature, which would allow sifters to rapidly gather together all articles rated above a certain threshold.
Wikinews contributor Ilya Haykinson released a tool last month to facilitate the uploading of images to the Wikimedia Commons, the repository of freely licensed images and media used across all Wikimedia projects. The software tool, called Wikimedia Commonplace allows users to drag and drop their files into the interface, and add captions and license information before bulk uploading to the Commons servers. Version 1.1 of Wikimedia Commonplace can be downloaded from http://tiredbrain.com/wikimedia/commonplace/.
The Commonplace tool has become popular among regular users of the Commons and among the English, German, and Italian Wikipedians, primarily for its bulk upload feature. It is a small file, but requires the Microsoft .NET Framework (a 20MB download) to run.
Another utility created by Haykinson is the "Wikinews Flickr License Searcher", which searches for images on Flickr which are released under free licenses. Flickr is a photo-sharing website which allows users to tag their images as released under various Creative Commons licenses, some of which are free, and allows them to tag images with keywords. Any user can tag any other user's images. The License Searcher can search the Flickr database for images with a given license which match a given keyword. It is available for download from http://tiredbrain.com/wikinews/flickr/.
As the name suggests, this tool was designed with users of Wikinews in mind, but it is useful to Wikipedians and other editors searching for images online to illustrate articles.
The Wikimedia Commons has recently been the beneficiary of a large donation of freely licensed scans of 10,000 works of art (see archived story) and is now one of the largest libraries of freely licensed content on the web. It was recently nominated for a Prix Ars Electronica (PAE) award in the Digital Communities category. The prestigious PAE awards are sometimes described as the Oscars of web design.
Last year saw the inauguration of the Digital Communities category, for which Wikipedia itself was nominated. Wikipedia won the top prize, the PAE Golden Nica Awards 2004, jointly with Ugandan sex education website The World Starts With Me.
Primary news sources about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects have proliferated in recent months, with many seeing the need for more reporting from within the community about its own developments. Starting with the creation of Goings-on pages on many projects early last year, and the development of many serious blogs by Wikipedians about the projects, the idea of internal news has caught on rapidly.
The Wikikurier, a "free international newsletter" of the German community and a source of brief German-language editorials about Wikimedia events, was one of the first internal news outlets. Started by elian in December 2003, its slogan is "not neutral, not encyclopedic, but hopefully maintainable and informative." The Kurier has become more active in the past two months, with thirty new entries over the past two months, three times as many as the preceding months.
Taking a page from the Signpost's book, a regular German newspaper, the Allgemeines Intelligenzblatt, has been initiated by German Wikipedian Mathias Schindler. It aims to be "a source for serious news about Wikipedia," according to Schindler, and hopes to coordinate content with similar outlets on other projects; however, it has yet to see its first full issue.
A condensed list of interesting news links from across the projects, classified by topic, is being maintained at the Metalogue. This is intended as a quick supplement to pages such as the m:Goings-on page used on some larger projects.
The third edition of the Wikimedia Quarto, the quarterly newsletter of the Wikimedia Foundation including official financial, technical, and administrative reports, is going through its final stages of copyediting and beginning translation.
The Quarto normally appears in 6 to 10 languages. There are plans to release this edition in text-only, PDF and print-ready formats; and to offer email subscriptions.
For the third week in a row, eight new articles gained featured status.
Prolific featured article editors Worldtraveller and Lord Emsworth each saw a nomination through the featured article process this week. The articles are Open cluster and British monarchy, respectively.
Open cluster's nomination received relatively widespread support, with the exception of an objection by Everyking, who felt that the article wasn't comprehensive, but declined to provide clarification as to what was missing from the article.
Meanwhile, a small number of featured articles (Mahatma Gandhi, Goa, Nuclear weapon and Java programming language) face losing their "featured" status at Wikipedia:featured article removal candidates. Discussion of eight different articles finished this week: four (Not The Nine O'Clock News, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Oxyrhynchus and Max Weber) retained their featured status, but the other four (Buckinghamshire, Doom, Have I Got News For You and Hubble Space Telescope) were demoted.
The eight articles gaining featured status last week were Civil Air Patrol, Rebecca Clarke, Dalek, Three Laws of Robotics, Open cluster, Libertarianism, British monarchy, and The Quatermass Experiment.
The eight new featured pictures were:
Last week only saw two successful adminship nominations, those of Bishonen and of Ausir.
In her bid for adminship, Bishonen received a record 109 support votes. She also received three votes of opposition, though two of them were obvious jokes. On her user page, Bishonen thanked all of her supporters for their kind words, and stated that she was "amazed, overwhelmed, and humbled."
Ausir, already well-known on the Polish Wikipedia, also fared well, receiving unanimous support from all who voted.
The Scandinavian Wikipedias are some of the most impressively developed, given the small number of native speakers of Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. These three wikipedias have 75,000, 31,000 and 25,000 articles respectively. But the situation with Norwegian is complicated by the fact that the language has two official written forms, Nynorsk (new Norwegian) and Bokmål (book language). This arises from the fact that Norway was ruled by Denmark for some four hundred years after the Kalmar Union in 1387, during which time Danish was the only widely used written language.
After Norway separated from Denmark and united with Sweden in 1814, movements to 'Norwegianise' the written language were started. One such movement, spearheaded by Knud Knudsen (whose Wikipedia biography in Nynorsk is three times as long as that in Bokmål), resulted in the development of a written standard called 'Riksmål', later Bokmål, retaining many similarities with Danish. A concurrent effort led by Ivar Aasen was more radical, and developed into modern Nynorsk. Today, all Norwegians know both forms of the written language, but about 90% of Norwegians use Bokmål as their first written language.
Now we can skip forward to 26 November 2001, when a Norwegian Wikipedia was created at http://no.wikipedia.org. Initially, this Wikipedia accepted articles in both forms of Norwegian, although given the prevalence of Bokmål there were very few Nynorsk articles. As the number of articles grew, particularly from late 2003 onwards, there were debates about how feasible it was to have two languages as distinct from each other as Swedish and Danish on the same Wikipedia. On 31 July 2004, a Nynorsk Wikipedia was founded and grew rapidly (it currently has over 7000 articles).
The success of Nynorsk led to renewed debates about the divisions between the two Wikipedias, with some on the original Norwegian Wikipedia feeling it should now become exclusively Bokmål, while others wanted to continue accepting all forms of Norwegian. The issue was put to a vote in March (see Wikipedia:Målform), revealing a slight majority in favour of a Bokmål-only Wikipedia. Notwithstanding this, the consensus was to leave the Wikipedia at the no. domain, rather than moving to the nb. that ISO 639-2 would suggest.
Given the strong feelings that could be aroused by a vote like this, the poll was overseen by two administrators from the Danish Wikipedia. This came about due to the Scandinavian Wikipedias' policy of coordination amongst themselves, via a page on the Meta-Wiki (Meta:Skanwiki). Because Swedish, Danish and Norwegian are all mutually comprehensible, articles written in one language can easily be understood by speakers of another. The Skanwiki initiative has led to the sharing of featured articles between the neighbouring Wikipedias, among other developments.
One sticking point for the new arrangement was that some Norwegian users proposed that there should now be a third Wikipedia, on which all forms of Norwegian would be acceptable. However, at the time of writing there seems to be a consensus among Nordic Wikipedians that this would lead to considerable duplication of effort.
The most visible effect of all this to users of the English Wikipedia is that where previously, interwiki links to Norwegian language articles took the form Norwegian and Norwegian (nynorsk), they are now styled Norwegian (bokmål) and Norwegian (nynorsk), to fully clarify the distinction between the two Norwegian Wikipedias.
