One of the sad facts about biographies of living people is that eventually one has to update the biography because the subject has died. Sometimes we are not as quick at that as we'd like to be, but as many notable people have bios on multiple language versions of Wikipedia, there is an opportunity to share information between different Wikipedia projects. Hence the creation of meta:Death_anomalies_table in June 2010. This table and set of lists enables any project that has a category equivalent to Category:Living people to feed in data, and request a report out.
The en.wiki report is at Wikipedia:Database reports/Living people on EN wiki who are dead on other wikis. User:Merlissimo has a bot that updates it daily, and is willing to produce reports for other projects.
While data is now being fed in from over 70 different languages, reports are only being generated for the German and English Wikipedias. However, initial results on en.wiki are encouraging: well over a hundred anomalies have been resolved, with probably more out-of-date biographies fixed than incorrect wikilinks corrected. As the number of contributing Wikipedias and interwiki links increases, we anticipate that the number of anomalies this finds will increase.
| “ | I'm excited to see this kind of machine-assisted editing. In the foreseeable future, it will not be possible for machines to actually make judgment calls about editorial matters, but it is entirely possible for this type of work, as well as more advanced semantic analysis, to provide useful assistance to human editors, particularly in finding contradictions and anomalies. Merlissimo is a rock star! | ” |
| — Jimbo Wales, 26th July 2010 | ||
The American Customer Satisfaction Index, a monthly report by a Michigan-based company that measures customer satisfaction scores on a scale of 0 to 100 for many companies in the U.S., included Wikipedia.org for the first time in its survey. The results have just been published: Wikipedia scored 77 out of 100, the highest among the four sites in its category of "Internet Social Media", while YouTube was second with a score of 73. Against entries from the "Internet News & Information" category – which may have been a better categorization for Wikipedia – we also do well, tying for second place with USAToday.com. First place for informational websites was FoxNews.com, with 82 points, five more than Wikipedia. Each result is based on 250 telephone interviews with customers in the U.S.
In a commentary on the results, Claes Fornell, a professor of Business Administration at the University of Michigan and the founder of the American Customer Satisfaction Index, explained Wikipedia's good result ("more satisfying than most of the ACSI-measured news and information websites") as follows:
Fornell contrasted this with the poor results for the bottom two in the social media category, Facebook and Myspace, which he said are due to "controversies over privacy issues, frequent changes to user interfaces, and increasing commercialization" on these sites.
As reported in last week's News and notes, the recent Wikimania conference saw a presentation by Google that described the company's effort to increase the content in various smaller Wikipedia versions – "Arabic, Indic languages, and Swahili" – mostly using its Google Translate machine translation service.
In addition to the coverage and reactions mentioned last week, by CNet, The New York Times and a Wikipedian from the Tamil Wikipedia, the topic was examined at length in a front-page story in Indian newspaper The Telegraph, titled Wiki learns a lesson in Bengali. The paper focused on the reaction of the Bengali Wikipedia, which "took great umbrage and deleted Google-generated content because the translated material simply did not meet its standards." It cited two of the project's administrators (Ragib and Jayantanth) and Bishakha Datta, the Foundation's Board member from India.
Another recent blog post "What happened on the Google Challenge @ the Swahili Wikipedia", by Muddyb Blast Producer, a bureaucrat on the Swahili Wikipedia who is based in Tanzania, looked back at the company's "Kiswahili Wikipedia Challenge", in which university students were awarded prizes for submitting articles written using Google Translate (see earlier Signpost coverage). Muddyb appreciated the intentions behind the contest and its quantitative success ("we’ve got a huge number of [new] articles"), but had concerns about the quality of the added content which were quite similar to those of the Bengali and Tamil Wikipedians. He expressed disappointment that the contestants hadn't turned into sustained contributors, and were not responding when asked to help in correcting their articles:
Such concerns about Google's and other projects assisted by machine translation was briefly mentioned in an article titled "The state of the Wiki in India" (a guest post on GerardM's blog last week), by Salmaan Haroon, another Wikipedian from India who had also recently attended Wikimania: "India currently provides the fourth largest traffic to Wikipedia according to Alexa.com, behind United States, Japan and Germany", with much more potential as "India is poised for exponential growth in terms of internet users". Based on a description of the country's language diversity and the role of English as a "lingua franca", he argued that the Wikimedia Foundation should aim at "establishing a strong user base first and getting a high visibility rate in India" (which might involve the English language Wikipedia more than those in smaller languages) "before a diverse base could be nurtured".
An article about Wikimania published by The Indian Express (Wikipedia, growing local) made a similar recommendation. The author, Gautam John, is involved in the process to establish an Indian Wikimedia chapter (which was already approved last month by the Foundation). He wrote that "the emphasis needs to be on boosting contributions in all Indian languages, including English – rather than just an 'Indic languages vs English' paradigm". Apart from the presentations about Google's translation projects, the article reported on Wikimania talks relevant for India, including Jimmy Wales' keynote and a presentation by Achal Prabhala, a Wikimedia advisory board member from Bangalore.
An article in the Times Higher Education (THE) last week (University may be given the keys to Citizendium) reported that Larry Sanger, the sole founder of the free online encyclopedia Citizendium, was considering "handing the reins to a university or a scholarly press" as "one possible future model for governing the project" after his planned departure as its editor-in-chief. Sanger reported "interest from major universities in both the US and the UK", but also mused on the possibility of a department within a university or a non-profit think-tank as Citizendium's "sponsoring or parent organisation".
Around the time of the project's inception in 2006, Sanger had announced that he would step down after two or three years. In July 2009, after he had become largely inactive as editor-in-chief, Sanger recalled that promise and reiterated his intention to step down after a sustainable governance structure was set up. This prompted a journalist from The Financial Times to declare "Citizendium founder ready to jump ship", and to report that Sanger was "looking for a suitable institution to take over management of his pet project" at that time already.
According to the recent THE article, Sanger's "executive committee [is] in the process of finalising a charter for how to proceed." The THE also mentioned criticism of Citizendium, from claims that "the site had progressed too slowly" to "suggestions that the articles are less scholarly than they purport to be"; however, Sanger said he believed it is "just a matter of time before we become a leading online community and reference work". (See also earlier Signpost coverage: Role of experts on Wikipedia and Citizendium examined)
The article prompted Wikimedia Board member Samuel Klein (User:Sj) to reflect in a blog post (Citizendium: failure to thrive, in search of peace) on Citizendium's difficulties, while still expressing "hope for a proliferation of cousin projects, all competing to find the best way to spur collaboration around free knowledge". In particular, Sj wrote about the problem of article verification (called "approval" on Citizendium), asking whether full academic qualifications should be demanded from reviewers, or whether the academic field of Law in the U.S. could provide inspiration, where "the most distinguished reviewed publications" are law reviews that are run by students without degrees, instead of being peer reviewed.
Larry Sanger had last made headlines after reporting the Wikimedia Foundation to the FBI and to his political representatives for "knowingly distributing child pornography" (see Signpost coverage).
British newspaper The Guardian last Monday named Jimbo Wales, founder of Wikipedia, to be the 47th most influential person in media in 2010 in their annual MediaGuardian 100 list, for which a panel of judges pick the 100 most influential media personalities of the year.
"Rather than writing about Wales we could simply point you to his Wikipedia entry – but beware of using the website as a single source. Its great strength – that its articles can be written and updated by anyone – can also be its weakness, although inaccuracies, both accidental and deliberate, tend not to last for long. Alabama-born Wales, who made his fortune as a Chicago futures trader, described Wikipedia as a 'charitable humanitarian effort to create and distribute a free high quality encyclopedia to every single person on the planet', one in which 'any reasonable person can join us in writing and editing entries on any topic'".
— The Guardian MediaGuardian 100 2010. Monday 19 July 2010
This week, we explored WikiProject Star Trek. Started in October 2004, the project has grown to include over 100 members who create and improve articles about the Star Trek franchise. WikiProject Star Trek is a child of WikiProject Television and grandchild of WikiProject Entertainment. The project maintains a portal, article guidelines, a to-do list, and a recent changes watchlist. We interviewed project members David Fuchs, pd_THOR, and EEMIV.
David Fuchs, a self-described "full-time Star Trek geek" and Wikipedia admin, built the Starship Enterprise out of cardboard in art school. He says "it's only natural that I'd like to write about it online as well." To pd_THOR, his love for Star Trek has to be balanced with his love for Wikipedia. He writes that "I don't want Star Trek content to look like a fanboy wet dream on Wikipedia; I feel very strongly that the real world probably has enough verifiable, reliable sourcable content to legitimately and encyclopedically discuss Star Trek topics." EEMIV stumbled into Wikipedia one day to edit an article about a club he was part of in college. Poking around, he ran into the Star Trek content and jumped right in. EEMIV confesses that his initial efforts were made under the assumption that Wikipedia could be "another repository for lots of in-universe, trivial information" but he "got shaken of that soon enough."
The project is home to 7 featured articles and 2 good articles, all of which David Fuchs has worked on. He shared with us that "getting the directors' edition DVD of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was the springboard for me to start on a mission to create a featured topic out of all eleven (probably twelve by the time I finish) Star Trek feature films." He's also worked on an episode and character FA as well. pd_THOR had praise for Fuchs, stating that David Fuchs "has done more for our project alone than I feel I've done for the whole of Wikipedia in six years. We're blessed to have such a tenacious quality-oriented editor." pd_THOR refered to his own edits with modesty, stating that he had "made a few edits to Star Trek: First Contact when it was being improved to FA-quality, but I don't know if anything stuck." EEMIV describes his contributions as "gnome-ish" and based on a "fix-small-things attitude." He has edited "small, picayune details" for FA and GA nominations, but he has also taken a leadership role on one occasion and looks forward to the day "when James T. Kirk meets the GA threshold, having kickstarted the overhaul of that one."
With a wide range of information from the multiple television series, movies, and other media, we asked the project members: "How does the project determine notability for the characters, locales, and technologies in the Star Trek canon? Does the project frequently deal with cleaning out in-universe language or fancruft?" Each of our interviewees had a few things to say:
Another wiki, Memory Alpha, serves as a vast repository for Star Trek lore. pd_THOR "actually came across Wikipedia after finding Memory Alpha in late 2004. Memory Alpha satisfied the almost OCD-level of Star Trek knowledge I was looking for when StarTrek.com, The Star Trek Encyclopedia, nor even Wikipedia could. That, I think, is the singular difference between the two Wikis, and one I took a while to learn at first; Memory Alpha covers anything in Star Trek canon (consisting of the published TV series and the films), requiring only a reference to the episode or film... [including an] article for Alvanian brandy, an alcohol that's only referenced once in all of Trekdom, and is only on screen for a few seconds. In contrast, Wikipedia's article for the episode in which Alvanian brandy appeared is nominally a stub on Wikipedia; consisting only of the episode's plot, airing minutae, and one "reference" to StarTrek.com. Wikipedians would be hard-pressed to argue for inclusion of [Alvanian brandy]."
EEMIV adds that "Memory Alpha is an excellent complement to what Wikipedia offers. There have been a few times, actually, when Memory Alpha has had superior sourcing: I definitely turned to many of their real-world citations when revamping James T. Kirk. I am disappointed that MA limits its content to "canon," although I think perhaps they permit "in this non-canon book, X happens" to be included -- maybe not. Regardless: it's a great site. Community connection? I don't know: I've edited MA only a handful of times, and have no sense of whether people jump between the two."
When asked how WikiProject Star Trek handles fanon, the "decanonized" Star Trek: The Animated Series, and inconsistencies within the official canon, pd_THOR refered us to the project's detailed section dedicated to dealing with Star Trek canon. EEMIV opined that the "definitions of "canon" are themselves WP:OR -- a few years at TrekBBS.com rehashing that debate cemented that for me." His attitude toward canon is that it doesn't matter as long as third-party sources provide appropriate and thorough coverage. "There's a lot of information about elements of The Animated Series, and certainly fan productions garner a lot of ink -- but BobKirk1701's latest diagram of the Uber-class war-destroyer probably won't wind up at Wikipedia."
Not surprisingly, the members of WikiProject Star Trek are involved in other projects that focus on sci-fi franchises, like WikiProject Star Wars. EEMV mentions that "certainly there are a lot of familiar names across both projects, and talk-page discussions often draw in folks more heavily involved with Fiction-at-Wikipedia in general."
David Fuchs reviewed several old Star Wars GAs as part of Sweeps, and relates that "like many early articles they were rather shoddy." EEMIV's work on Wikipedia actually leans more toward Star Wars-related material than Star Trek. He states that "I've done heavy lifting for a few GAs, and also do the same kind of category clean-up and redirect action I do with Star Trek. I notice the Star Wars venue's similar struggle with trivia and minutiae, although I think for the most part they're further along in trimming that -- except when it comes to the printed material, esp. comics, still laden with material I don't have the comfort level and know-how to clean-up. David Fuchs feels that "a cross-collaboration of media franchise projects would greatly help the accessibility of our articles. Too often are articles about fiction solid and well-referenced, but utterly impenetrable to non-fans of the series. By having each other checking our work, we might see some of those issues disappear."
As far as the project's current initiatives and goals, David Fuchs took the lead in inviting new members to help with his personal project at WikiProject Star Trek. "Well, as part of my mission to improve all the Trek films, User:Erik sorted through his research databases and posted a list of possible sources to use on the talk page of every article. Anyone with good LexisNexis or interlibrary loan resources can find these and add the relevant information to the articles for Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Star Trek Generations, Star Trek: Insurrection, and Star Trek: Nemesis. Aside from that, helping to demonstrate the notability of individual Star Trek episodes, as well as improving the main Star Trek page and top-priority articles would be hugely beneficial."
Next week's project is a photographer's delight. Until then, flip through our previous snapshots of various projects in the archive.
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The current issue and the next will cover only six-day periods as we transition our coverage from Mondays–Sundays back two days, to Saturdays–Fridays. This is important to our need to meet the weekly publication deadline of 03:00 UTC Mondays.
After last week's tsunami of 15 featured article promotions, this week saw no changes to the featured article logs. However, the list of candidates undergoing scrutiny for promotion now numbers 55 articles, so readers can look forward to what will probably be a feast next week. FAC and other content-review processes always welcome more reviewers (see previous Signpost coverage).
Nine lists were promoted:
Choice of the week. We asked Courcelles, author of three featured lists and regular reviewer, for his favorite: "In a subject that offers such potential for high-quality lists, I notice we only have ten FLs related to Christianity, and just a few more on other religions. Seeing one come through FLC is a nice treat, and we got a good one this week: List of sects in the Latter Day Saint movement is a well referenced, well illustrated, neutral account of a subject that is familiar only in passing to many. This is one of the highest-quality lists I've seen come through FLC recently, and I hope more are forthcoming."
One topic was promoted: Transandinomys (nominator Ucucha), with two featured articles and one good article. Transandinomys is a genus of rodents found in forests from Honduras in Central America down to the coastal regions of Ecuador and northwestern Venezuela in South America. They are distinguished by their very long whiskers.
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This week was quiet compared with last week's 23 promotions, although this is partially because of the six-day period we're using to give our commentators a bit more time.
Five images were promoted:
Choice of the week. TonyTheTiger, a regular reviewer and nominator at featured picture candidates, told The Signpost, "My choice this week is French cyclist Léon Georget. It is a timely choice since the 2010 Tour de France concluded yesterday. I consider the restoration work to be tremendous. I am also excited to see an interesting non-taxonomy of life image get promoted."
Selections from our favourite articles and images to reach the main page this week.
Bedřich Smetana (1824–84) was a Czech composer who pioneered the development of a musical style which became closely identified with his country's aspirations to independent statehood. Internationally he is known for his opera The Bartered Bride, and for the symphonic cycle Má vlast ("My Fatherland") which portrays the history, legends and landscape of the composer's native land. A gifted pianist, Smetana studied music under Josef Proksch in Prague. In 1866 his first two operas, The Brandenburgers in Bohemia and The Bartered Bride, were premiered at Prague's Provisional Theatre, the latter achieving great popularity. Factions in the city's musical establishment interfered with his creative work, and may have hastened his health breakdown. By 1874, Smetana had become completely deaf but, freed from his theatre duties and the related controversies, he began a period of sustained composition. His contributions to Czech music were increasingly recognised and honoured, but a mental collapse in 1884 led to his incarceration in an asylum and his subsequent death. Smetana's reputation as the father of Czech music has endured in his homeland, where advocates have raised his status above that of his contemporaries and successors. (more...)
The Mary Rose was a warship of the English Tudor navy of King Henry VIII in the first half of the 16th century. During four decades of service in wars against France, Scotland and Brittany, she was one of the largest ships in the English navy and one of the earliest ships specially built for warfare. The Mary Rose is well-known today due to the fact that she sank intact on 19 July 1545 in the battle of the Solent north of the Isle of Wight, while leading an attack on French galleys. The wreck of the Mary Rose was rediscovered in 1971 and salvaged in October 1982 by the Mary Rose Trust in one of the most complex and expensive projects in the history of maritime archaeology. Though much of the ship has deteriorated, the surviving section of the hull, with thousands of artefacts, is of immeasurable value as a time capsule of the Tudor period. The excavation and salvage of the Mary Rose has since become a milestone in the field of maritime archaeology, comparable only to the raising of the Swedish 17th-century warship Vasa in 1961. The finds include weapons, sailing equipment, naval supplies and a wide array of objects used by the crew, providing detailed knowledge of the era in which the ship was built, in peacetime as in war. Many of the artefacts are unique to the Mary Rose and have provided insights into topics ranging from naval warfare to the history of musical instruments. While undergoing conservation, the remains of the hull and many of its related artefacts have been on display since the mid-1980s in the Mary Rose Museum in the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. (more...)
Confirmation bias is a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions, independently of whether they are true. As a result, people gather new evidence and recall information from memory selectively, and interpret it in a biased way. The biases appear in particular for emotionally significant issues and for established beliefs. Biased search, interpretation and/or recall have been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a stronger weighting for data encountered early in an arbitrary series) and illusory correlation (in which people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations). Explanations for the observed biases include wishful thinking and the limited human capacity to process information. Confirmation biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. Hence they can lead to disastrous decisions, especially in organizational, military and political contexts. (more...)
There were no promotions to adminship.
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Wikipedia continually sees heated discussions over issues large and small. The Signpost chooses the most important debates, RFCs, discussions and AfDs each fortnight, so you don't have to!
On Saturday, David Spector suggested a new feature be made available as an option for all users: in addition to the orange banner telling a user that another Wikipedian had edited their talk page, the user would be sent an e-mail informing them of this.
It soon emerged that such a feature was available on MediaWiki, but it had been disabled on the English Wikipedia because of performance issues. Dougweller said, "I'd hate it. I don't want that much email. Vandals might love it."
TreasuryTag was the first to object. "I simply do not see the point. If anybody is interested in the collaborative side of Wikipedia, then they will most likely use the site. Even if they do not keep an eye on their watchlist, the orange 'new messages' banner will always alert them if anybody wishes to get in touch, no matter what page is being viewed at the time." He said it would be "irritating" for active editors to receive an e-mail every time a message was left on their talk page. He concluded that "any needless drain on the Wikimedia Foundation's (charitable) resources should not be contemplated" if developer time were needed to fix the performance issues.
However, Sadads thought it was a good idea: "if I didn't spend every waking moment plugged into Wikipedia I would want to get e-mails when I [had] something on my talk. It would be like what I do with Facebook."
Following TreasuryTag's comments on potential performance issues, David Spector, "a semi-retired software engineer with about 40 years' experience working with computers", said he did not think such a system would have any impact on performance. "I can't see how sending an email to those who want one whenever their Talk page changes would create a performance problem ... this is a Proposals page", he said. "I assume that means that every proposal will be considered for implementation on its merits, not on some memory of 'they already rejected that' ... of course, if there really would be a performance problem, or this proposal turned out to help vandals significantly, then this proposal should not be implemented."
TreasuryTag countered this, saying that the feature had been disabled by "a team of dedicated experts to make such judgements." David Spector responded that "I've designed and implemented improvements on a time-series, multidimensional OLAP business database system for Dun and Bradstreet. I improved the runtime performance of the Multics linker by 27%. I currently do database development for another startup of mine. I understand performance issues well. What I don't understand is the unnecessary but pervading atmosphere of viciousness here at WP." TreasuryTag told Spector that "We have developers to make decisions about performance. If you consider this apportionment of functions according to expertise to be 'vicious' then perhaps Wikipedia is not the right environment for you."
The proposal discussion continues.
Cultural impact of the Chernobyl disaster was nominated for deletion by Rodhullandemu who thought the article had "become a repository for unsourced trivia of the worst kind. There is no encyclopedic treatment or commentary, it's just a list of mentions."
Colonel Warden disagreed, pointing to a book chapter on the cultural impact of the disaster. Themfromspace supported the nomination: "an article on this topic may be acceptable if written in prose and compiled through material found in reliable sources which discuss the cultural impact of the Chernobyl disaster."
SummerWithMorons thought the article should be kept and that the AfD was invalid. "Arguments for deletion must be based on the notability of the subject itself. The supposed inadequacy of the content of current version of the article may be an argument for other changes, not for deletion."
Mandsford replied: "honestly, does anyone see anything here that describes the 'cultural impact' of the Chernobyl disaster? This one really was called 'Chernobyl in popular culture' until last year, and it's possible that someone hit the panic button when i.p.c. articles were being nominated, but this article is definitely not about the cultural impact of the Chernobyl disaster. We have lots of good articles that use the conventional 'in popular culture' name, and perhaps it's time for this one to go back to calling itself what it is, rather than to be pretending to be something that it isn't."
Courcelles closed the AfD more than a week after the nomination was posted. The result was no consensus.
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The Arbitration Committee opened no cases this week, leaving two open.
Note: Last week's Arbitration report coverage of ArbCom announcements regarding the selection of CheckUser and Oversight candidates has drawn some concern by FT2, who provided a reworded version. Here, both versions can be compared. As always, readers are welcome to leave informed comments about the Signpost's coverage and to express their general expectations of the Signpost.
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Last week saw a significant discussion on the wikitech-l technology mailing list about the future of category sorting. The discussion was prompted by Aryeh Gregor (User:Simetrical) announcing that he would be working on the area. Among the outstanding bug requests being targeted was the ability to paginate sub-categories, pages and files separately. Of particular interest to non-English wikis is the development of a system to allow custom category sort-orders, instead of relying on the Unicode specification. For example, this would allow the sorting of "é" straight after "e" in languages that use such a diacritic, rather than at the end of the alphabet as at present. Discussion on how best to fix these bugs is ongoing.
As User:TheDJ wrote, last week Guillaume Paumier (User:Guillom) of the Wikimedia Multimedia Usability team published some results on his blog from the first testing done of the usability of the Wikimedia Commons upload process, and the first prototype for the new upload wizard currently under development. Paumier noted of the tests:
| “ | Long story short: the current interface is a nightmare, and the prototype is way better, even if there are some minor things to improve. The good news is, all the items to improve were already planned features at the time of testing, and they have either already been added, or will be before the upload wizard is released.
Namely, one of the main remaining issues is the fact that users don’t really understand copyright and free licenses. That’s why we've been working on a licensing tutorial at the same time, to be released jointly with the new upload wizard. |
” |
He added, "we don't want to make a lot of publicity about our prototype yet. If you happen to know about it and you want to share your opinion, that's fine. But we'll officially invite the community later to try it out."
Note: not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
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page_props database table will now include the displaytitle value, allowing its far quicker retrieval via the API (bug #23936).
