Addressing an issue that has come up with increasing frequency in recent months, the Chapters committee of the Wikimedia Foundation has put out a statement dealing with the prospect of local chapters for the United States. With efforts ongoing to organize a chapter in the state of Pennsylvania, this is expected to be the first of multiple chapters organized in the country, with the relationships between these and a potential national chapter still to be defined.
The statement was presented on Wednesday, 1 August, by Chapters committee vice chair Austin Hair. It indicated that Wikimedia policy on U.S. chapters was not fully determined, but would involve "a different approach from that we've established over the last few years working to build chapters in Europe and elsewhere." The committee signaled its intent to let policies be determined as particular needs arise based on practical issues.
Creation of local chapters, which began in Europe and has more recently seen developments in Israel and East Asia, has so far focused on national organizations. With the Florida-based foundation behind the global Wikimedia structure, countries have been the basis for chapters because they provide a legal jurisdictional footing, and due to the similarities to other international nonprofits such as the Red Cross. Where this has deviated from the national model, as with the Wikimedia Hong Kong chapter currently in process of organizing, it has been due to unique political situations.
Organization of a chapter in the United States has yet to take place for a variety of reasons. One incentive, the potential for tax-deductibility of donations, hasn't been necessary since the global organization is already based in the U.S. Meanwhile, the U.S.'s geographical breadth has been cited as an obstacle to organizing on a national level.
To allow for chapters to organize people in reasonable proximity, two possibilities have come up. One is to create chapters based on states, the next-largest political unit to provide a natural jurisdictional basis. An alternative would be to orient chapters toward metropolitan areas, which sometimes cross state boundaries, so as to involve more people and keep them geographically close enough for a chapter to function. Illustrating this challenge, the proposed Wikimedia Pennsylvania would be based in Philadelphia, whose metropolitan area extends to New Jersey, Delaware, and even Maryland.
The potential ramifications would also depend on questions such as how individual membership in a chapter is determined, and whether multiple chapters can exist in a state. Such issues, along with whether to eventually organize state or regional chapters under the umbrella of a national U.S. chapter, remain to be determined. For now, Hair merely acknowledged the "unique geopolitical circumstance" presented by the United States situation.
A recent quote on Bash.org read, "Wikipedia! you go to look up a CSS term.. and you end up reading about Spanish painters and astronaut micrometeorite protection."[1] Ars Nova, a small theatre group in Manhattan, recently decided to replicate that experience for users in the form of The Wikipedia Plays, a series of short plays that ran from August 3rd through 6th.
Kim Rosenstock is the Associate Producer at Ars Nova, and she created and runs 'Play Group', the in-house writing group at Ars Nova group. In the course of brainstorming a new show, "The group came up with the idea collectively at one of our meetings when we were discussing possible framing devices for a group project." One of the members, Carly Mensch came up with the idea of doing a set of interconnected plays. Members used Wikipedia to pick a starting point, then traced away from that, 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon-style', each article referring to and leading to the next, and each becoming a subject for one of the plays.
The unique format of the plays, and the act of connecting them was noted. "(This is) a theatricalized exploration of language following the academic model that Wikipedia and other encyclopedias present," says Andrew Kircher, Ars Nova's General Manager. "It should be said that these plays are not based on the Wiki entries in full, but rather simply the titles. Wikipedia was the tool our playwrights used to bounce from topic to topic, following the embedded reference links in each entry to the next 'title'."
Rachel Shukert was the author of 'Stiletto Heels', one of the short plays. She admits, "I regularly fall into Wikipedia for hours at a time, particularly now that the new Harry Potter book is out," and cheekily adds, "(I) take it on faith that EVERY WORD is absolutely accurate. That's true, isn't it?" Shukert used Wikipedia as many editors suggest it should be used; as a starting point for gathering information. "I used very few of the Wikipedia facts, and kind of went with a prevailing cultural attitude toward my subject, although Wikipedia helped with this."
Kircher dealt with more of the technical aspects of the production, such as getting permission from Wikimedia to begin with. "Wikimedia was kind enough to loan us use of the name for our title and premise. This is a small production that serves to support the work of our playwrights group," he explains, when asked about the GFDL and how it might apply to these works as possibly derivative. "These plays are still the property of each playwright. We (Ars Nova) only hold the rights to produce these four performances. Given that these plays merely take their titles from Wikipedia, it seems the GFDL does not apply. Wikimedia's only request was that we share any media (photos, video, etc) of the show when it ends for their site." Unfortunately, while the theatre company was willing to release the media, the actors' union rules don't allow them to do so.
When asked if she'd enjoyed her experience with the play and Wikipedia, and if she might write another play in the same fashion, Shukert happily says she would "Totally do it again! It was fun!"
From Friday, August 3 to Monday, August 6, Ars Nova, a Manhattan-based non-profit theatre company focused on supporting emerging artists, presented The Wikipedia Plays, a series of short, loosely connected plays inspired by 17 Wikipedia entries. The plays were written by Ars Nova's PLAY GROUP, who wanted to close out their inaugural year with an evening of plays incorporating work from all seventeen of the project's playwrights. They had the idea to use Wikipedia as inspiration, and, starting with our article on The Defenestration of Prague (according to the event program, "Because someone smart suggested it and no one knew what it was"), they followed the links on each page and randomly assigned each word or subject to a different writer, with the restriction that each play must be "inspired by a Wikipedia entry," be ten minutes or less in length, and contain a reference to the entry-word or phrase of the play to follow.[1]
On Friday evening, I went to Ars Nova's tiny (~less than 70 seats) but comfortable Off-Off-Broadway performance space in Hell's Kitchen to take in the first showing of The Wikipedia Plays. Tickets were $11.50, including the $1.50 online purchase fee, which is about the price of a movie ticket in New York City, and significantly cheaper than a Broadway production (average ticket price: $75.77 [2] ). The performance was sold out, and the audience was generally made up of people one would normally find at an Off-Off-Broadway play (rather than individuals like myself who were seeing the play because of the Wikipedia connection). As would be expected in an Off-Off-Broadway production, the stage was small and the sets minimalist, but had professional lighting and sound, as well as a large screen on the back wall where video and images were projected.
The plays were presented in the following progression: "The Defenestration of Prague" → "Bohemia" → "Prokop the Great" → "Democracy" → "Yale Law School" → "Bill Clinton" → "Global Warming" → "Uncertainties" (see Uncertainty) →
"Weather Forecasting" → "Troposphere" → "Turbulent" (see Turbulence) → "Golf Ball" → "Wooden" (see Wood) → "Particle Board" → "Stiletto Heels" → "Fetish" → "Castration Anxiety."
Overall the plays ranged from surreal to science fiction, from multimedia presentations to monologues. All but two of the plays were intended as comedies. The first play, "The Defenestration of Prague," had absolutely nothing to do with the historical event, instead focusing on an "Apology Hotline" where callers apologized to the operator for some fault or misdeed. One caller, on the verge of suicide over her failing marriage and still-born career, regretted writing her college dissertation on the historical Defenestration (thus connecting it to the subject matter of the first article in the chain), and in her lines, mentioned Bohemia (thus connecting the following play to the current one). All the other plays would follow the same pattern, briefly mentioning the word that inspired the play and the word or subject of the following play. During the brief set changes between plays, the article that provided inspiration for the prior performance would be shown on screen, zooming in on the link in the article that would show the title of the new play about to commence. But beyond these minor uses, the production really had little to do with Wikipedia itself, and with some plays, the supposed inspiration was dubious, at best. Where "Stiletto Heels," "Prokop the Great" and the wonderful "Particle Board" clearly used the inspiration provided by the subjects of the articles, some plays, such as the boring funeral gossip piece "Yale Law School" or the utterly dreadful stream-of-consciousness monologue of "Turbulent" seemed irrelevant to the "inspiration." As it was readily evident that the production was less about Wikipedia than about showcasing rising stars of the theatre world, I changed my expectations and looked at (and here, review) the plays as stand-alone works unrelated to Wikipedia.
Of the seventeen plays, "Particle Board" stole the show. Staged as a documentary retrospective on a long dead superstar comedian whose schtick was the use of a piece of particle board in his routine, the focus switched between the overly devoted narrator, interview subjects from the comedian's life, and delivery of the comedian's dreadfully hilarious one liners (which focused on his wood, and which always ended with the comedian hitting himself on the head with the particle board). In ten short minutes, we learned of the comedian's successes, bizarre sexual conquests, and eventual breakdown on American Bandstand and death to particle-board overdose. In addition to being such a beautifully silly piece, the play also clearly showed the inspiration of the subject: instead of just saying the word or mentioning the subject in passing like many of the evening's plays, this one used the inspiration, particle board, as the central facet of the focus character's existence.
Two other highlights of the evening were the dialogue-free plays "Weather Forecasting" and "Golf Ball." In "Golf Ball," a golfer strolls up to the tee, and readies his swing. Just as he's about to hit the ball, a loud, booming rap song plays out, told from the perspective of the golf ball. Utterly flummoxed, it only gets worse for the golfer when a crew of female hip-hop dancers dressed in full golf attire come out to dance to the golf-ball's driving rap. "Weather Forecasting" was a whimsical, wordless telling of the aftermath of an affair, a French crooner running away, while a woman frantically gets dressed and flys off on two umbrellas, arms wrapped in tin foil.
The one play that did directly reference Wikipedia was "Prokop the Great." In it, two laptop computers were put on center stage, with microphones near their speakers. The computers "performed" the play through speech synthesis, one computer Prokop the Great, the other Prokop the Lesser. When the Lesser asked the Great why they were fighting a battle to the death against Utraquists, Prokop the Great says that he doesn't know because "Wikipedia doesn't say." The ensuing final battle, told only in the computerized voices, was really quite funny and inventive, and was a good use of of the inspiration coupled with outside the box thinking you can only really see Off-Off-Broadway.
Most of the other plays were certainly passable for restricted short theatre: "Stiletto Heels" (more or less performed by stiletto heels in the vein of Sex in the City), "Wooden" (about a couple with a ventriloquist's dummy sexual fetish), "Troposphere" (about two people sent out on a space ship to populate a distant planet), "Global Warming" (about two self-absorbed yuppies and their encounter with a Greenpeace activist, which the largely yuppie audience seemed to thoroughly, if not self-knowingly, enjoy), and "Democracy" (about CIA recruitment, although with an unexpectedly kinky twist). Also of note was "Uncertainties": the only other dramatic play of the evening, it featured a sex-addict coming to terms with his own failings as a person. While it certainly had something to say and was well-performed, it felt out of place amongst the belly laughs coming out of the evening's other fare.
Overall, for ten bucks I got more than 2 and a half hours of inventive, funny, well-performed theatre with a great deal of variety between plays. By Signpost press time, the play will have come and gone. But should the producers at Ars Nova decide to extend the run, it certainly would not hurt to go see this play if you are in New York. Indeed, there are dozens of small theatre companies producing quality plays, musicals, and comedies throughout New York, usually off the beaten path, but usually quite good, so take the opportunity to watch one if you are visiting our great town.
Ars Nova, which shares its name with a stylistic music period from the middle ages, is a 501(c)(3) registered not-for-profit organization that produces theatre, music, and comedy events in its New York City performance space.[3] Ars Nova's PLAY GROUP is a select group of emerging writers who gather every other week to share new works and gather feedback.[4] Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project with nearly 8 million articles in more than 200 languages operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization.[5]
This week's WikiWorld comic uses text from "Terry Gross" and "Fresh Air". The comic is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
Similpedia is a new site that uses web pages or paragraphs of text to find related Wikipedia articles. By pasting the URL of any web page, or a paragraph of at least 100 words, the page outputs ten Wikipedia articles that are somehow related to the text.
Eight users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Awiseman (nom), Raymond arritt (nom), Caknuck (nom), Calliopejen1 (nom), Tabercil (nom), Marasmusine (nom), Angelo.romano (nom) and DarkFalls (nom).
Six bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: WikiBotas (task request), PipepBot (task request), Scsbot (task request), JL-Bot (task request), ImageRemovalBot (task request) and STBotI (task request).
Thirty-three articles were promoted to featured status last week: Rock Springs massacre (nom), Io (moon) (nom), Love. Angel. Music. Baby. (nom), Hippopotamus (nom), By the Way (nom), Walter Model (nom), John Mayer (nom), Roy Welensky (nom), Shaw and Crompton (nom), Be Here Now (nom), Sophie Blanchard (nom), Banksia ericifolia (nom), Parasaurolophus (nom), Georg Cantor (nom), Kaziranga National Park (nom), You Only Move Twice (nom), Postage stamps of Ireland (nom), Night of the Long Knives (nom), CM Punk (nom), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (nom), ESRB re-rating of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (nom), Saturn (nom), Bishop Henry (nom), Ironclad warship (nom), Richard Hakluyt (nom), Tang Dynasty (nom), Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories (nom), 300 (film) (nom), Octopus card (nom), Jersey Shore shark attacks of 1916 (nom), Chicago Board of Trade Building (nom), Leek Town F.C. (nom) and Cædwalla of Wessex (nom).
Two articles were de-featured last week: Trench warfare (nom) and Speaker of the United States House of Representatives (nom).
Five lists were promoted to featured status last week: The Simpsons (season 1) (nom), List of people associated with Jesus College, Oxford (nom), List of counties in Wyoming (nom), St. Louis Rams seasons (nom) and List of Kentucky state insignia (nom).
No lists were de-featured last week.
No portals, topics or sounds were promoted to featured status last week.
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: École Polytechnique massacre, Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Supernova, Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, Mauna Loa and European Parliament.
The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Cleveland tower, Territorial evolution of Mexico, Fashion photograph by Toni Frissell, Antennae Galaxies, Marines operating the M198 howitzer, Eden Project and Atlantic Bobtail.
Two pictures were promoted to featured status last week and are shown below.
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This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Note that not all changes described here are live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.4 (a8dd895), and changes with a version number higher than that will not yet be active.
The Arbitration Committee closed one case during the week from 30 July to 6 August. No new cases were accepted this week.
