Newsworthy project happenings and books relevant to the community continue to flow by at a faster rate than the Signpost can keep up with. If you have an interest in writing for the Signpost, contact an active contributor or jump right in.
On the books front, a variety of recently published works deal directly or indirectly with Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. One upcoming book in particular should be a priority for timely review: Joseph Reagle's Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia, due out in September. A prospective reviewer—preferably with a social sciences or humanities background—should be prepared to commit to completing the review by September, assuming review copies go out far enough ahead of time. Suggestions for other books to review can be added to the review desk, which also has a list of earlier suggestions that have not yet been reviewed.
Several Signpost beats have been understaffed or unstaffed lately, particularly the discussion report and the technology report. The discussion report has only been part of the Signpost for short bursts, and requires much of its writers, but when done well it is also a very useful way to keep the community informed about important discussions. Especially given the pending deployment of usability updates and flagged revisions, regular technology reports are also a great service to Signpost readers. And as always, more help is welcome and appreciated for "In the news", "News and notes", and other regular features.
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Controversy erupted across the Wikimedia community this week after Jimmy Wales spearheaded a purge of sexual content on Wikimedia Commons.
Recent allegations by Larry Sanger that Wikimedia projects have been hosting child pornography (see archived story) seem to have prompted a new wave of media attention to Wikimedia's sex-related imagery. To head off anticipated negative press,[1] Wales began pushing for rapid cleanup on 6 May. He stated that:
Wikimedia Commons admins who wish to remove from the project all images that are of little or no educational value but which appeal solely to prurient interests have my full support. This includes immediate deletion of all pornographic images.
The previously rejected guideline Commons:Sexual content became the locus for attempts to create a clearer guideline for dealing with sexual and pornographic media. The scope of Commons is limited to media with educational value, and it has long been accepted that low-quality and non-educational sexual content should be deleted; however, the line between what should be deleted and what should be kept has been a matter of common practice and individual judgment, rather than a specific guideline.
In attempting to create such a guideline, it quickly became clear that the Commons community was divided over how permissive the project should be in hosting explicit images. Wales argued that any image should be deleted if it would trigger the record-keeping requirements of the U.S. Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act, which mandates producers to keep proof of age for models and actors in sexually explicit material. However, Wales then extended it to include artworks and diagrams, which the original act does not cover, and which proved highly controversial.
Wales himself deleted 71 files on 7 May, including a number of Wikimedian-made illustrations used in articles about sex acts, as well as some historical art images that featured sexual acts. Discussing the controversial deletions afterward, Wales said:
I deleted some things that I assumed would be undeleted after a discussion. I wanted us to take an approach that involved first deleting a lot of borderline things, and then bringing them back after careful case by case discussions.
He further claimed that
I had thought that a good process would be to engage in a very strong series of deletions, including of some historical images, and then to have a careful discussion about rebuilding. That proved to be very unpopular and so I regret it. It also may have had the effect of confusing people about my own position on what to keep and what to get rid of.
During the deletions themselves, Wales indicated that he did not want any discussions to happen until everything he considered pornographic had been purged from Commons. On May 7, while the controversy was reaching its peak, and his deletions were ongoing, he wrote:
We can have a long discussion and work out a new set of parameters after the cleanup project is completed. It is not acceptable to host pornography in the meantime.
and specified June 1st as a date to begin discussions on whether Commons should "ever host pornography and under what circumstances". He further wheelwarred with several administrators to keep the artworks in dispute deleted, which included works by Franz von Bayros and Félicien Rops.
Several Commons administrators followed Wales's directive, deleting hundreds of explicit images and videos. Other users, however, objected to the deletion of artistic works, and what they saw as overly aggressive deletions which were not done through the normal discussion-based Commons deletion process. A "Petition to Jimbo" asking him "to respect the processes and policies established by our community" was started late on 7 May and gathered momentum on 8 May, attracting 268 signers and 27 counter-signers by 10 May.
The deletions also activated the CommonsDelinker bot, which removes image code from articles across Wikimedia projects after they are deleted on Commons. In anticipation of the undeletion of some of the images, the bot was temporarily blocked on several projects to minimize disruption.
We don't intend to create new policy, but rather to reaffirm and support policy that already exists. We encourage Wikimedia editors to scrutinize potentially offensive materials with the goal of assessing their educational or informational value, and to remove them from the projects if there is no such value.
The statement did not explicitly mention sexual content or Wales's actions. The Board's intent with the statement was immediately questioned, and several people called for individual Board member comments on the issue. Several Board members did respond, spawning a new line of discussion over the proper role of the Wikimedia Foundation and its trustees in setting the scope of content on Wikimedia projects.[2]
On 9 May, Sue Gardner wrote that she is trying to follow the conversation and suggested that the Board is having real conversations about how to deal with the issue.
Wales's deletions and the ensuing pushback brought new attention to a proposal to remove the Founder flag; the 'founder' userright gave Wales the ability to perform restricted actions like deletion and checkuser across all projects, and to modify user rights. The proposal was started in March 2010, after Wales intervened on English Wikiversity and made comments that some users interpreted as a threat to close Wikiversity (see archived story); however, by early May the proposal had found only 23 users in support and 36 in opposition. In the days following the Commons controversy, the number of supporters grew to more than 300 as fewer than 100 defended Wales's privileges.
On 9 May, at his request, Wales's 'founder' privileges were reduced considerably. Once Wales's request for changes went into effect, the list of remaining rights includes the oversight ability, which removes content such that even administrators cannot view or restore it, and the ability to view deleted and oversighted content across projects.
Although Wales several times suggested the crisis had been averted by his actions, on 10 May, Fox News published Despite Content Purge, Pornographic Images Remain on Wikimedia, an attack article which used the purge to imply that things were substantially worse before Wales's actions than they were, and claimed thousands of images had been deleted, when, in fact, the number was nearer 400, of which many had been undeleted by then.
Further, Wales's loss of his founder powers have been taken up by the media, attached to the story of his deletion spree. For instance, the UK Daily Telegraph article Wikipedia porn row sees founder give up his editing privileges.
Discussion of the deletions and the sexual content policy continues on Foundation-l, Commons, and other projects, with discussions focusing both on Wales's actions as a Board of Trustees member and the deleted content itself.
As of 10 May, nearly half of the files Wales deleted have been restored, and many sexual content speedy deletions performed by Commons administrators are also being re-evaluated.
It seems that the media purge has done only little to address Larry Sanger's initial concerns over images of child sexual abuse. The Commons pedophilia category, which consists largely of historical line drawings related to the subject, retains most or all of the images it contained before Sanger's complaint, although most of the explicit cartoon images from the lolicon category were deleted.
We were about to be smeared in all media as hosting hardcore pornography and doing nothing about it. Now, the correct storyline is that we are cleaning up. I'm proud to have made sure that storyline broke the way it did, and I'm sorry I had to step on some toes to make it happen.
Ashgate Publishing, 191pp, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-7546-7433-7, September 2009
"Everything is radical about Wikipedia except for the actual articles", Dan O'Sullivan told the recent Critical point of view conference in Amsterdam. Many aspects of Wikipedia's community and knowledge production, he said, are profound departures from the Western cultural tradition, and the suppleness, pluralism and interconnectedness that Wikipedia achieves amount to "a change in the very nature of knowledge itself". But in his view, while an article in old-style encyclopedias such as the Britannica can gain authority by adopting a particular angle, Wikipedia’s conventions of neutrality and consensus—the "blended compromise"—are a conservative formula that can weaken the distinctive voice of an article, resulting in a certain sterility.
Dan O’Sullivan is a British historian with his name on five books, most recently this one, which traces what he sees as antecedents of the "wildly successful" Wikipedia phenomenon back more than 2,000 years. The author describes a set of pre-Internet communities of practice (whence the book's slightly clunky subtitle) in terms of their aims, participants, transactional costs, public relations and legacy. But rather than deepening our insights into Wikipedia, these historical vignettes disappoint: most of the connections with the earlier communities of practice are obvious or tenuous, and we are subsequently presented with a decidedly superficial analysis of how Wikipedia is "conservatively radical" in relation to them.
Much more is known about The Royal Society of London, created in 1660 by a group of professional gentlemen to champion the value of evidence-based knowledge. The boldness of setting up the Royal Society could have been underlined if we had been given a sense of the tumultuous state of England at the time; and here, too, was a chance to follow up the concept of the expanding public space, explored in the opening, theoretical chapter but nowhere thereafter. The conclusion that the Society was "without patronage" and neutral on questions of politics sits oddly after an account of the royal patronage, both financial and political.
While the Royal Society anticipated the Enlightenment, the Frenchman Denis Diderot was one of the leading figures of that movement. Having introduced Diderot a little unfairly as a hack writer, jailbird and one-time pornographer, O’Sullivan describes how he took up a proposal by Parisian printers for a French translation of the English Cyclopedia (1728). But the Encyclopédie was no mere translation: it turned into a visionary 28-volume work, with more than 70,000 articles plus illustrations. This is an interesting account of how Diderot and hundreds of collaborators strove not just to assemble knowledge, but to move it firmly out of the hands of an elite and into the public domain. However, tracing a parallel between Wikipedia and the Encyclopédie on the basis of the use of "the latest technology" to produce and disseminate their knowledge is dubious without proper investigation.
The Scotsman James Murray was the principal editor of what would become The Oxford English Dictionary. Like Diderot a century before, he was the hub of an almost unmanageable flood of contributions from widely dispersed writers, and was plagued by subprofessional standards—an inevitable trade-off in harnessing the huge volunteer workforce that sifted the literature for contexts in which words are used. This might have been the opportunity to explain why so many Wikipedians are keen to give their time and effort gratis and largely unacknowledged. But the reader has to work hard to winkle out what could have been a clearly stated analogy: that the OED project offered a conduit between ordinary people and a high-profile, prestigious publication to which they could make piecemeal contributions without the burden of professional deadlines; and that Wikipedia, too, has redefined expertise, unlocking within editors' personal timeframes their specialised knowledge, even if just on their own locality or school. The picture might have been filled out later in the book by asking whether earning social esteem within the Wikipedia community, in combination with this private–public conduit, might be what fires editors to donate hundreds of millions of dollars worth of their labour.
The subsequent treatment of Wikipedia is wide of the mark, wasting an opportunity to deeply probe its community and process of knowledge production. Instead, some 30 pages are devoted to reproducing versions of a single article at three stages of its development, with insubstantial conclusions. Almost 20 pages are devoted to setting out a cumbersome numerical system for assessing articles and presenting a kind of detached how-to-use-it guide. Yet the basics are missing. There is no recognition of the hierarchy of rules and standards—the pillars, policies and guidelines. The relationship between articles is discussed in terms of the category system, but not of the use of summary style to reach deeply into the nooks and crannies of human knowledge through the creation of "daughter" articles of increasingly narrow scope—the ultimate tree. Only one of the six featured-content processes is mentioned, featured article candidates, and there is no discussion of how it has evolved as an influential model for article quality—the sharp rise in standards over the past few years, the complex relationship among nominators, reviewers, and delegates, and the jostling among the FAC process, the Manual of Style, the main page exposure of featured articles, and the rule that no editor owns any article.
O'Sullivan sees the cauldron of wikipolitics largely in terms of how neutrality is handled. If he contends that Wikipedia's pillar of neutrality enfeebles its voice with a have-a-bet-each-way formula, a comparison would have been useful with the editorial policies of the world's only two non-commercial, independent state broadcasters—the British and Australian Broadcasting Corporations—since they are charged with addressing a similar need to balance the angles of competing interest groups. Still untouched is an analysis of the extent to which neutrality in practice is skewed towards the cultural perceptions of the educated, middle-class anglophones who call the tune at Wikipedia. And there was scope to probe the robustness of the no original research pillar—to ask whether there can ever be a clear distinction between original research and the handling of secondary sources in Wikipedia's articles.
The author stresses the "comparative lack of hierarchy" in the community, quite forgetting that the freedom to edit is subject to constraints for social and legal reasons, and is overseen by Wikipedia's own police force and judiciary. The book might have traced how official power in the community has developed to deal mainly with behavioural issues, even though matters of behaviour and content are often entangled. Related to this could have been an examination of how sovereignty, originally emanating entirely from Jimmy Wales, is evolving in the light of his changing role.
This book needed to penetrate the dynamics of Wikipedia, characterised as they are by the contest of opposite forces. Among these are democracy versus consensus (still poorly defined), reform versus the status quo, privacy versus the management of identity fraud, and the ownership of intellectual property versus fair use. The world's most prominent information site brings into sharp relief many of the issues that will be played out in "real life" societies over the coming century. We await a book that analyses in depth how these dynamics are unfolding on Wikipedia.
Reader comments
6 May 2010 marked the launch of the book tool on the English Wikipedia.[1][2][3] Previously, the creation of Wikipedia books was limited to logged-in users because of scalability issues, but now anyone in the world can take collections of Wikipedia articles, arrange them into chapters, and get them delivered to their door by PediaPress, the official print-on-demand partner of the Wikimedia Foundation. The books come as A5 format paperbacks, and users are able to select an image and background color for the book's cover. The books ship within two business days, and start at US$8.95 for a 100-page book. The books can also be freely downloaded as A4 format PDFs, as well as in ODT format, which can be printed at home and further edited. There are plans to make hardcover and color versions available by the end of August.
| “ | The service provided by PediaPress is an extremely important way of making sure that the free educational content of Wikipedia is available to all, everywhere, in areas with connectivity and without. Books made with the PediaPress service are a great asset to further the mission of Wikipedia: allow every single human being to share in the sum of all human knowledge | ” |
| — Jimmy Wales, Co-Founder of Wikipedia[2] | ||
| “ | Whether you want to learn about climate change or you‘re seeking information about your new travel destination – reading long texts on paper is not old fashioned, it is more comfortable, plus it's plain smart: people read 10 to 30 percent faster on paper than on screen. And you have no distractions: no chats, no emails. On the web, people are skimming for information. But when reading on paper, they can take their time to tackle a subject in depth. | ” |
| — Heiko Hees, Managing Director of PediaPress[2] | ||
The book tool is currently enabled for 17 languages, and books have been delivered to 33 countries.[2] The launch of books caught the eye of several media outlets, such as TechCrunch, Gizmodo, Mashable, and The New Yorker.[4][5][6][7][8][9][10]
Make your own book with Wikiproject Wikipedia-Books
6 June 2011
ArbCom tally pending; Pediapress renderer; fundraiser update; unreferenced BLP drive
6 December 2010
Fundraisers start for Wikipedia and Citizendium; controversial content and leadership
15 November 2010
Wikipedia books launched worldwide
10 May 2010
Wikipedia-Books: Proposed deletion process extended, cleanup efforts
22 March 2010
New Book namespace created
11 January 2010
35k donated, WikiProject for Wikipedia-Books, 2M rated articles, and more
30 November 2009
Books extension enabled
2 March 2009
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PediaPress released a new screencast for the book launch, explaining how to create books with the book tool.
Users interested in creating and maintaining "community books", that is books which can be edited by everyone (such as Book:Canada and Book:Messier objects), can join WikiProject Wikipedia-Books, which is a collaboration of editors who are interested in creating and maintaining Wikipedia books.
To celebrate the launch of Wikipedia books to the world at large, PediaPress is giving away 100 coupons for free printed books. Each coupon has a value of $20 (USD) and will be awarded on a first-come first-served basis to editors who create a community book (books uploaded in the Book namespace). If the price of the book comes to more than $20, then a $20 discount will be offered instead. For the full details, see User:Headbomb/Coupons.
This week, the Wikimedia Foundation announced its new public policy outreach initiative, funded by a grant from the Stanton Foundation. The new initiative focuses on working with faculty and students at universities in the U.S. to improve articles related to U.S. public policy. More information about the initiative can be found on the Outreach wiki.
The initiative is hiring five positions: a Campus Team Coordinator, a Communications Associate, an Online facilitator, a Research Analyst, and a Project Assistant. All jobs are one-year positions lasting from July 2010-September 2011. The first four jobs close on May 17; the project assistant job closes on June 2.
The Pediapress Books extension is now available to all users of the English Wikipedia, whether logged in or not. Starting May 6, the extension became available to all; previously users of the service on the English Wikipedia had to have an account and be logged in.
PC Pro magazine reports that Jimmy Wales has asked Commons administrators to delete images that "appeal solely to prurient interests". His plea came in the wake of Larry Sanger's reports to the FBI that the Wikimedia Foundation is freely hosting and distributing "depictions of child sexual molestation" (see archived story), the subject of a remarkably one-sided article by Fox News that cast the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as Wikimedia deputy director Erik Moeller, in a negative light.
The story of the sexual content purge and the ensuing controversy has been picked up by several news websites, including BBC News [1] and The Register.[2] To date the only major newspaper to cover it is the Indian Daily News & Analysis, which published an eleven-paragraph wire story on 29 April [3] and an eight-paragraph wire story on 8 May.[4]
On 9 May the Sunday Telegraph published an investigative article, titled "MPs, their expenses and the Wikipedia 'cover-up'", about how British politicians have removed details of the Parliamentary expenses scandal from their Wikipedia biographies. It appeared on page eleven, overshadowed by the front-page story on talks to form a coalition government which was broken down over the first five pages, but the article was part of the newspaper's election coverage.
The journalists list ten cases in which details of expenses claims were removed by either the politicians themselves, a staffer, or a confidant of the politicians involved. They note that in some cases "the ploy worked" while "in other cases, the details were reinstated and the people who tried to delete them were reprimanded".
The Signpost's own analysis of the article histories shows that there was prolonged edit warring on four articles, but only two (on the Joan Ryan and Ian Taylor articles) resulted in the details being removed permanently. (Note: both articles have since been corrected). There was consensus to remove details on Malcolm Rifkind. The vast majority of edits which removed details were caught with the Twinkle vandalism tool or manually reverted within a few hours, but those that went unnoticed lasted for days or even weeks.
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On 3 May the Irish Independent published an article on page two, titled "State reports used Wikipedia as source", revealing that two government-published reports, a study produced by the Department of Environment and a report by the Department of Agriculture cited Wikipedia as a source. Apparently, neither report used Wikipedia for technical citations, as was the case in a recent Australian report that was attacked over sourcing (see Signpost coverage).
Opposition Senator Paschal Donohoe criticised the departments for failing to double-check their sources. Long-time Wikipedia critic Ian O'Doherty wrote in his column on 5 May that it was "bizarre" the government was relying on such an unstable source, pointing out that his biography has twice been vandalised this year.
This week, we invited the members of WikiProject Birds to share their experiences and a flock of eight editors answered our call. This very active project is home to over 100 active members and boasts a collection of 63 featured articles, 19 featured lists, 49 good articles, 2 featured sounds, and a vast library of featured pictures. The project dates back to April 2003 when Tannin created the project's page, including in the first few sentences the same mission statement that remains at the top of the project's page today: "The aim of this project is to set out broad suggestions about how we organize data in the bird articles. These are only suggestions, and you shouldn't feel at all obligated to follow them." WikiProject Birds is part of WikiProject Tree of Life and home to the Domestic Pigeon Task Force. Included in this week's interview are Sabine's Sunbird, Jimfbleak, Innotata, JerryFriedman, Casliber, Shyamal, MeegsC, and Maias.
What motivated you to become a member of WikiProject Birds?
With so many birds in the world, how does the project determine notability? In addition, how does your project get 15,325 pages sorted and improved?
There are no unassessed articles within your project. How did you accomplish this and do you have any advice to other projects with large backlogs of unassessed articles?
WikiProject Birds currently has 63 featured articles, 19 featured lists, and 48 GAs. How did you achieve this and how can other projects get to this point?
Which of these articles are you most proud of being involved with? Overall, what have been some of the project's greatest achievements?
Many projects are dealing with little activity and initiatives ending unsuccessfully. Has your project experienced these and what lessons have you learned from them?
What are the most pressing needs for WikiProject Birds? How can a new contributor help today?
Anything else to add?
Next week, we'll look at a revived project that focuses on the written ideas of Wikipedians like you. Until then, read volumes of our previous work in the WikiProject Report archive.
Reader comments
One editor was granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Blurpeace (nom).
Fifteen articles were promoted to featured status this week: Lemur evolutionary history (nom), Free State of Galveston (nom), Funerary art (nom), Battle of Villers-Bocage (nom), The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (nom), Terry Fox (nom), Keith Miller in the 1946–47 Australian cricket season (nom), Bog turtle (nom), Silky shark (nom), The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman (nom), Gough Whitlam (nom), Wilfred Rhodes (nom), Mycena haematopus (nom), Westcott railway station (nom) and Cottingley Fairies (nom).
Nine lists were promoted to featured status this week: Family Guy (season 5) (nom), List of FC Barcelona seasons (nom), List of National Parks of the United States (nom), List of 1920s jazz standards (nom), List of Olympic medalists in softball (nom), List of Phi Kappa Psi brothers (nom), List of Kansas Jayhawks head football coaches (nom), List of Colorado Buffaloes head football coaches (nom) and List of South Africa women ODI cricketers (nom).
No topics were promoted to featured status this week.
No portals were promoted to featured status this week.
The following featured articles were displayed on the Main Page as Today's featured article this week: Bird, Sex Pistols, George V of the United Kingdom, 1937 Social Credit backbenchers' revolt, 2009 Giro d'Italia, Jason Voorhees and Neville Chamberlain.
Two articles were delisted this week: 35 mm film (nom) and Marshall Plan (nom).
Two lists were delisted this week: List of Formula One fatal accidents (nom) and List of family relations in the NHL (nom).
No topics were delisted this week.
No portals were delisted this week.
The following featured pictures were displayed on the Main Page as picture of the day this week: Southern Crowned Pigeon; white nectarine; missing square puzzle; illustration for Act II, Scene 3 of The Winter's Tale; Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin sitting together at the Yalta Conference; Eastern billabong fly and photo of a man scalped as a child.
No featured sounds were promoted this week.
No featured pictures were demoted this week.
Four pictures were promoted to featured status this week.
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