Last week, it was revealed that the German Wikimedia chapter is creating a new limited-liability non-profit corporation (in German, gemeinnützige Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung, or gGmbH) to replace the existing membership-based association (Verein) as the recipient of donations from Wikimedia fundraisers. This will enable the direct transfer of donation money to the Foundation, which has so far been impossible due to local charity laws.
Founded in 2004, Wikimedia Deutschland is the oldest Wikimedia chapter. Its legal status does not allow it to transfer funds to an organization abroad without risking the loss of its charity status (this problem already became apparent in its first year, according to a long-time member). To some extent, this restriction was overcome by the chapter's providing funding for several endeavors of Foundation-wide relevance, including the Wikimedia Toolserver, the cache-server cluster in Amsterdam, and gatherings such as the 2009 and 2010 Wikimedia Conferences in Berlin. According to notafish, other chapters (including Wikimedia France) are currently grappling with similar narrowly framed regulations in their own jurisdictions.
The new gGmbH non-profit corporation, called "Wikimedia Fördergesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung", will be entirely controlled by the membership-based Verein, and will split fundraising income equally between the Verein and the Foundation. Donations to the gGmbH will be tax-deductible for German donors, unlike direct donations to the Foundation. Last week's announcement was made by the chapter's treasurer, prompted by and confirming a rumor that had been brought up on the Verein's mailing list. It appears to have caught most members by surprise; many expressed concern that they had not been informed earlier, even though the process of establishing the new organization had been going on since August. The treasurer explained it had been necessary to act quickly, without extended public discussion, because of the Foundation's position on fundraising since this year:
The current solution was negotiated between the Foundation and the Verein in early August during a visit to San Francisco by Wikimedia Deutschland's CEO Pavel Richter and its Chair, Sebastian Moleski (User:Sebmol). Sebmol has acknowledged that the Foundation's new focus on "community giving" (small donations as the main source of income, rather than grants and few large donations), an outcome of the Strategic Planning process, means that it will need to rely on chapters more, and that a direct revenue stream is important to retaining the Foundation's independence. According to the WMF's deputy director Erik Möller, the fundraising aspect of the relationship between the Foundation and the chapters was discussed extensively at a fundraising summit held last May in Bristol, UK.
These negotiations between the Foundation and the German chapter appear to have gone on for some time, and have also concerned the renewal of the chapter agreement between them, which ended by default in 2009. In the chapter report for March/April 2009, Sebmol reported he had retained a San Francisco law firm pro bono to develop a response to a draft new agreement prepared by the Foundation's legal counsel Mike Godwin, which Sebmol regarded as disadvantageous for Wikimedia Deutschland. In the Foundation's most recent monthly report for July 2010, it was stated that the legal department "re-engaged a charity-specialist attorney" for various issues, and that "we confirmed that there are ongoing structural issues, particularly in Europe, with transferring charitable funds to WMF – we're looking for holistic, comprehensive ways of resolving these issues."
The Foundation's deputy director, Erik Möller, denied the Foundation had made a particular model a precondition for Wikimedia Deutschland's participation in the upcoming fundraising. He described the relationship between the Foundation and Wikimedia Germany as "excellent" and said that the WMF regards the chapter as "a model for professional organization and development of projects to support free knowledge", highlighting the Bundesarchiv image donation (see Signpost coverage) as "one of the most important developments in the Wikimedia universe in the last two years", and WM DE developer Daniel Kinzler's "WikiPics" project as "one of the most innovative ideas to make media files accessible".
The Spanish police are investigating four Internet users for edits made in the months up to July 2009 to the Spanish Wikipedia's article about politician Javier Arenas of the center-right People's Party (PP). As reported[1] by news agency EFE on September 25, a resident of Albacete and one of a village in the Levante were recently summoned to testify at their local courts, joining as suspects two other Internet users that had come under scrutiny some months ago. According to the PP, whose complaint led to the investigation, the offending edits included "insults and coarse language" against Arenas and his family, and false information that was subsequently used by a government member to insinuate that Arenas had needed a long time to complete his law degree.
Various media reported on comments made by Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales on a recent visit to Malaysia. AFP ("Wikipedia founder says Malaysia should ditch censorship") quoted him as saying that "a very open flow of information" was important in "making sure that the people have the information they need" and that "I want to write that information (on sites like user-generated Wikipedia) so that my fellow citizens have the knowledge they need so they can't be oppressed."
On the other hand, Wales repeated earlier criticism of Wikileaks (see Signpost coverage: "Difficult relationship between WikiLeaks and Wikipedia"), a website set up to publish leaked information: As reported by Associated Press, Wales said that the site has committed an "irresponsible" act by knowingly releasing the contents of classified military information, and that it could potentially "put innocent lives at risk". In related news, Wales recently explained on Wikipedia why the domains wikileaks.com, wikileaks.net, wikileaks.us, wikileaks.biz, and wikileaks.mobi appear still to be registered to Wales' company Wikia, even though
| “ | Wikia does not serve any of the sites. The CNAME records in DNS direct the traffic to www.wikileaks.org.
The domain names were legally transferred to Wikileaks a long time ago, but for unknown reasons, Wikileaks never completed the technical aspects of the transfer. Wikia has made multiple requests to them to do so, with no result yet. Mr. Assange has indicated that he is very busy right now, which seems likely to be true, given recent news events. |
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Malaysian tabloid The Star quoted Wales [2][3] on various other topics, e.g. his education, negative media coverage by Fox News related to his deletions of sexual images on Commons earlier this year ("That controversy, says Wales, is all over, too. 'Fox News basically ran some outrageous, inflammatory stories that were absolutely not true'), the dispute over whether Larry Sanger should be called a co-founder of Wikipedia ("this so-called controversy has overshadowed his contribution not as co-founder but as a very important employee and a very important part of the early community"), a 2009 Wall Street Journal article about Wikipedia having lost 57,000 editors within a year ("I said, ‘Well, I found them – in my refrigerator’. It was just a badly done study") and many other topics.
Yet another interview with Wales was published a few days later in the Financial Times Magazine—a list of personal questions titled The Inventory. Asked for his "mentor", Wales said that one is Larry Lessig ("He was one of the first people who realised what I was doing at Wikipedia"). To the question "What ambitions do you still have?", Wales replied: "My goal for the next 10 to 20 years is to build Wikipedia in the languages of the developing world."
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Wikipedia is also a community. For most people – and especially for readers of the Signpost – these two banal facts hardly seem worth noting. The current trend in Wikipedia commentary is to show how it is more than an encyclopedia: how it is, at its core, paradigmatic of a radically new way of thinking, learning, knowing, organizing, and collaborating in our brave new digital age. We are constantly told that the success of Wikipedia has significant lessons for business, government, journalism, academia, the Internet, and practically every other institution in contemporary society. Amongst all of these attempts to package up and export some kind of universal “wiki way,” Joseph Reagle’s book Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia[1] is a refreshing look at what Wikipedia means to Wikipedians.
This focus stems from the fact that Good Faith Collaboration is an ethnography, an anthropological style in which the researcher attempts to capture the spirit of a people in writing. Whether one travels to Papua New Guinea or an online community, the goal of any ethnography is to relate their ethos to the rest of the world. It is to give people who have never set foot on an island in the South Pacific or edited a single Wikipedia article an idea of how those people live, where they came from, what they care about, and why they do what they do. And like Margaret Mead or Bronisław Malinowski, Joseph Reagle spent years with this odd tribe of Wikipedians, becoming an editor (User:Reagle), attending meetups, and trawling through mountains of archived talk pages and mailing lists. It is perhaps because of this extended participant-observation that Good Faith Collaboration goes well beyond most accounts written about Wikipedia, insisting on studying Wikipedians both on and in their own terms.
Some of these terms are the obvious ones, like the various strings of acronyms in policies or the odd way in which 'consensus' can mean anything between 51% approval and total unanimity. However, they also include more subtle ways of analyzing what Wikipedians care about and how the community comes to define itself. For example, some readers may be amused to see various well-known 'laws' of Wikipedian behavior at the beginning of each chapter, from "Show me an admin who has never been called a Nazi and I'll show you an admin who is not doing their job" to "Problematic users will drive good users away from Wikipedia far more often than good users will drive away problematic ones." As an ethnographer, Reagle does not take these laws to be true or false social science facts and is not that interested in proving or disproving them. They are instead windows into the world of Wikipedian culture, "a salient example of the community trying to understand itself and its circumstances."[2]
It is his emphasis on studying Wikipedians for their own sake that leads him to focus on the encyclopedic nature of Wikipedia, an aspect that is often passed over by social scientists who describe generalizable community dynamics or organizational principles. As such, the first chapter after the introduction is not about barnstars and Requests for Adminship, but encyclopedic communities from the 18th century Encyclopedie to Project Gutenberg and Nupedia. True to anthropological form, Reagle does not make the move of a historian and argue for himself that Wikipedia is the intellectual successor of these works. Instead, he shows how Wikipedians see their project much in the same way as Denis Diderot and Paul Otlet saw their reference works. In particular, he shows how a certain Enlightenment-era ideal of free knowledge is one of the community's driving concerns – and has also been the source of its most prominent forks.
At the core of these concerns, Reagle argues, is how to put into practice the lofty ideals of collaboration, which are best summarized in the demand for Wikipedians to assume good faith of each other. Yet the encyclopedic mission of Wikipedia makes the community of a different kind than those based around discussing politics or authoring fan fiction. Many communities have norms such as assume good faith, but Reagle sees this as an essential aspect of the Wikipedian community, as it integrates with other standards of knowledge and authorship. In chapter three, he shows how social policies and encyclopedic standards are linked: while it is easy to see Neutral Point of View as a purely encyclopedic standard, Reagle shows how it functions with the good faith mindset. As he argues, "NPOV renders the subject matter of a collaborative encyclopedia compatible, good faith makes it possible to work together."[3]
Subsequent chapters on openness, collaboration, and leadership continue with this theme, showing how each aspect of the community's norms relies on assuming a kind of good faith through discussions, policies, and case studies. However, readers wishing to learn whether Wikipedians "actually" assume good faith with each other or whether Wikipedia "really" is an open community may be disappointed by his anthropological perspective. When Reagle discusses Wikipedia as an open community, he is not speaking of participation metrics or exclusion rates. He locates the community's openness in a set of values that Wikipedians hold about themselves and each other – values that sometimes come into contention or contradiction with each other. Similarly, Reagle's analysis of the notorious “anyone can edit” slogan goes beyond the "can anybody really edit" discussions and shows how controversies over this definition reveal a complicated set of priorities that the community works to balance.
The seventh chapter, "Encyclopedic anxiety", examines Wikipedia's relationship with the rest of the world, looking at critics and supporters and the issues they debate in the public sphere. Like with Wikipedia's internal controversies, Reagle does not take much of a stance on who is right and who is wrong, instead analyzing what these kinds of discussions reveal about us as a society. In an interesting historical section, he gives a number of cases arguing that public controversies over reference works are often reflective of a broader cultural concern.
From dictionaries that began including the colloquial words of common folk and encyclopedias with "family-unfriendly" articles, reference works have been the subject of great debate for centuries. And as Reagle argues in the case of a dictionary that was published in the 1960s, "critics were alarmed at the social change occurring around them and attacked Webster's Third as an exemplar and proxy" (p. 140). He concludes by arguing that, in much the same way, many of the controversies directed towards Wikipedia are emblematic of larger social changes, some created by Wikipedia, and others merely associated with it.
In all, Reagle's ethnographic perspective is both the book's greatest strength and greatest limitation. He tends to focus on the mainstream elements of Wikipedian culture, offering a general description of what a good portion of the community believes about who they are and how they ought to act. It is precisely because of this that most Signpost-reading Wikipedians will find nothing too controversial or radically new. Most will probably agree with SJ's review:[4] it is well-written, well-sourced, and neutral; something I'd recommend for my mother. For an ethnographer, this is the highest praise one can give, as it means that the book captures the spirit of the people so well that most parts seem obvious, even boring at times.
However, Good Faith Collaboration isn't just about Wikipedia's culture – it is quickly becoming part of Wikipedia's culture. The book has won accolades from a who's who of people in and around Wikipedia, including Lawrence Lessig, Clay Shirky, and Jonathan Zittrain, and will likely have profound influence on how academics, cultural critics, and journalists imagine Wikipedia. That alone makes the book worth reading, but I also suspect that Good Faith Collaboration will have a powerful impact on how the community sees itself. Wikipedians are highly reflective, as Reagle notes, and I have no doubt his analysis will be endlessly debated and interpreted in discussions at all levels of the community.
This has already begun with Sue Gardner's praise for the book, and in particular Reagle's analysis of how conflict resolution in Wikipedia is similar to that in Quaker communities. As she describes in multiple blog posts,[5] Gardner was so inspired by this that she read about a dozen works on the Quakers and then went to visit a Quaker community to learn about how they resolve conflict. Because of her enthusiasm, I expect the Quakers to become a familiar example, even among Wikipedians who don't read Reagle's book, and would not be surprised to see the analogy invoked on both sides of a debate in the near future. I only wonder what other sentiments are hidden in the book.
This week, we had an explosive visit with WikiProject Volcanoes. Started in 2007, the project has grown to include almost 4,000 pages, including 25 featured articles, 3 featured lists, and 40 good articles. The project's total number of members is healthy, with around 25 active contributors, however, the project is seeking new participants. The project maintains a featured portal, in addition. We interviewed Resident Mario, Ceranthor, Volcanoguy, and Avenue.
What motivated you to become a member of WikiProject Volcanoes?
Have you contributed to one of the project's recognized articles (GA, A, FA, FL, etc.)? Share your experience.
Has your project developed particularly close relationships with any other projects?
What are WikiProject Volcanoes' most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?
Anything else you'd like to add?
Next week, we'll visit a real archive. Feel free to browse ours in the meantime.
Reader comments
Fifteen articles were promoted to featured status:
"Abandoning with regret all sports, music albums, battleships, flora and fauna after a quickish read-through—I'm very sorry, but I'm just not equipped for giving opinions on those subjects—I dived into David Bowie, Lat, and Grace Sherwood with relish. Such intriguing subjects! Articles that do them full justice! Picking one of those three wouldn't be easy, I reflected, and then promptly stumbled over an irresistible and unlikely article, my choice for the week. Saint-Gaudens double eagle is about a twenty-dollar gold coin, first produced in 1907. Strictly for the numismatics otaku, is it not? No. The piece is a great read for anybody who enjoys human, historical and cultural eccentricity and battleground. It's very considerate of the ignorant reader, and I especially appreciate that, even though the subject is so American, it's perfectly transparent and accessible to the international reader. I can hardly wait for the third part of Wehwalt's numismatics trilogy."
Choice of the week. We asked FL nominator and reviewer Parutakupiu for his choice of the best (ignoring his own):
| “ | Five lists elevated to featured status in the past week, one of them nominated by myself: not much to choose from. But taking a careful read of the other four, I would pick List of largest volcanic eruptions as the most interesting. It is about a topic that has always fascinated me, and it really allows one to put in perspective how "tiny" the most recent volcanic cataclisms were in comparison with those of pre-historic times. Needless to state how comprehensive, lengthy and well sourced this work is. | ” |
In those days, Makeemlighter says the process was fairly casual – some of the nominations even lacked closing statements. It took more than a year after the first FPs were created for a template to be developed. Fair-use images, not permitted nowadays, were allowed for a while, and there seemed to be little of the modern formal emphasis on the notion of encyclopedic value. The process was different mechanically, too: "Images that received any objections would not be promoted unless that objection was dealt with and a 'nearly unanimous consensus' was reached. Today, the general rule is 2/3 support and an image passes", within a strictly applied nine-day period. By October 2004, there were more than 130 FPs. Tau Emerald in flight was the 1,000th FP, in December 2007. Rambutan white background was the 2000th FP, in September 2009 .
This week was uncommon at FPC in that only four images were promoted. They will be considered for Choice of the week along with next week's promotions. Medium-sized images can be seen by clicking on "nom":
One file was promoted: File:Pleasant_Moments_Piano_Roll.ogg nom, a 1916 recording of Pleasant moments (2 m, 56 s), a ragtime waltz recorded on a piano roll by Scott Joplin. Thought lost until discovered by User:PlayerRoll in 2006, it has been scanned and recorded on a grand piano as an MP3 file. Piano rolls—in which perforations were etched into a roll of stiff paper that could operate a pneumatic playing system on a piano—were one of the first forms of digital memory, and provided home entertainment to millions of people in the early 20th century.
This week saw no new administrators.
The Arbitration Committee opened one case this week, leaving two open.
This case concerns accusations of wiki-hounding and disruptive editing. Stevertigo alleges that several editors deem his editing to be "disruptive" or "in need of banning" because they "still hold the grudge that previous cases did not find in their favor regarding [Stevertigo]". He also alleges that he "largely won" an argument against two editors in relation to the Time article, and that those two editors began editing the Punishment article due to an undue interest in Stevertigo's editing rather than due to an interest in the article. The case is currently in the evidence phase.
Innovations have been introduced for this case, including special rules of conduct that were put in place at the start of the arbitration. However, the handling of the case has been criticized by some participants; for example, although the evidence and workshop pages were closed for an extended period, no proposals were posted on the proposed decision page and participants were prevented from further discussing their case on the case pages (see earlier Signpost coverage). The proposed decision, drafted by Newyorkbrad, Risker, and Rlevse, sparked a large quantity of unstructured discussion, much of it comprising concerns about the proposed decision (see earlier Signpost coverage). A number of users, including participants and arbitrator Carcharoth, made the discussion more structured, but the quantity of discussion has continued to increase significantly. Rlevse had said that arbitrators were trying to complete the proposed decision before September 6, but it was later made clear that he will no longer be voting on this decision.
A few participants recently made further criticisms of the handling of the case ([4] [5] [6] [7] [8]). Arbitrator Roger Davies was the only user who responded in ArbCom's defense but agreed with some of the criticisms and reconfirmed that after the case has closed, a workshop will be held where users may provide feedback ([9]). This week, further attempts were made to manage the quantity of discussion, and arbitrators made further additions and votes to the proposed decision. The proposed decision is said to be "winding down" as arbitrators move towards a final decision.
Proposals being considered for the decision include:
Some proposed rulings in relation to the 18 individuals
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Recently, Per Honor et Gloria requested that his restrictions (which ban him from articles relating to the Mongol Empire, the Crusades, and Hellenistic India) be lifted. The restriction was imposed after the case found that there was a continued likelihood of POV-pushing if he was permitted to edit the articles he was banned from. Arbitrator SirFozzie stated that he is currently not leaning towards modifying the restrictions.
At the time of writing, no other arbitrators have responded since last week to:
The request to impose a topic ban on Ferahgo the Assassin from race and intelligence related articles remains open. Earlier in the week, Ferahgo the Assassin stated that she would voluntarily accept a probation; she alleges that this would avoid the need for incessant accusations by the same two involved users from the case, while allowing uninvolved administrators to determine if there are any legitimate concerns with her editing. At the time of writing, no arbitrator has responded to this suggestion yet.
Reader comments
Following Brion Vibber's temporary rehiring (see last week's Signpost), and with the absence of the only previous code reviewer (developer Tim Starling) imminent, another measure was last week taken by the Foundation to unblock bottlenecks in the code review process. Rob Lanphier (User:RobLa) announced that, partly because of Tim's absence, and partly "because we're long overdue for distributing the load", there would be an expansion in the number of users able to take part in the "code review" process, which defines the time it takes for new code to get from the sandbox into a live Wikimedia site, or in some cases a MediaWiki release version (wikitech-l mailing list).
| “ | Here's who we have available for code review, and what they'll be focused on:
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The Foundation has published a draft version of what its focuses have been over the past month in terms of "major development and operations initiatives" (MediaWiki.org):
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This is a monthly follow-up post to September's WMF Engineering update; for October's, collaboration was invited (unsuccessfully).
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.
