On October 19, the Wikimedia Foundation's Executive Director Sue Gardner announced that Mike Godwin, long standing general counsel to Wikimedia, would be leaving the Foundation on October 22. Gardner described Godwin's departure as a "confidential personnel issue" and said that "we want to handle this kind of thing with respect for people’s privacy and dignity, and we are hopeful we can do that in this instance," stressing that his departure is neither "because of a change in direction or policy, related to our legal context" nor "over a point of principle" nor "because he did something egregious" ("The Wikimedia Foundation believes Mike has always acted in what he believes to be the Wikimedia Foundation's best interests").
Mike Godwin was hired on July 3, 2007, less than a week after Sue Gardner (see Signpost coverage). Before working for the Foundation, he had 17 years of experience as a technology and free speech lawyer, some of which resulted in his 1998 book Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age. He is also credited with the invention of "Godwin's law," a whimsical adage on Internet discourse, which states that "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." He has edited Wikipedia as User:MGodwin.
The General Counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation is in charge of the day-to-day legal issues within Wikipedia. During his time on the Foundation staff, Mike Godwin had been involved in several important legal issues, including the introduction of employee background checks after the case of former COO Carolyn Doran, the 2008 privacy and data retention policy updates, the 2008/2009 license migration and the August 2010 FBI seal issues. While the Foundation has chosen not to reveal the details of his severance package, Sue Gardner did say that he will remain available to Wikimedia for several months longer. The Foundation is currently seeking for a replacement for Godwin through its employment agency m|Oppenheim, and is expecting to fill the position by January. Shortlisted candidates will be interviewed by senior WMF staff. In the interim, an outside counselor will fulfill the Foundation's day-to-day needs. In the announcement's Q&A (described as "cryptic" by law blogger Rober Ambrogi), Sue Gardner said about Godwin's future prospects that
| “ | we wish him all the best, and we hope that he will continue to do the same kind of work he’s always done -- helping to advance people’s online freedoms. We think he’s really good at that work, and we hope it’s what he continues to do. | ” |
Among the Wikimedians commenting on Godwin's departure was Board member Kat Walsh (User:Mindspillage), who thanked him for his work noting that
| “ | Since the nature of the job means sometimes you can't talk about everything you're doing [...], he may not have gotten all the public appreciation he deserves for his work, but he has really been a great champion of the foundation and the movement, and guided WMF through a major expansion and some truly crazy situations. | ” |
Until the call for nominations starts on 14 November, the parameters of the election are open to community feedback. There is a draft set of nine questions for all candidates (discussion here); voters will also be able to ask a unique question of each individual candidate on the public pages, and any number of questions on candidates' user talk pages. Editors interested in helping to organise the elections are encouraged to sign up as volunteer coordinators.
The Arbitration Committee is a critical part of the English Wikipedia; experienced and committed editors are urged to seriously consider standing for election.
Last week, an online editorial in The Atlantic asked "In rancorous times, can Wikipedia show us how to all get along?" (also featured on Slashdot). Based on Joseph Reagle's new book "Good faith collaboration: the culture of Wikipedia" (cf. Signpost review and Reagle's response) and his observation that the founders of Wikipedia had tried to avoid the problems of USENET culture, it mused that "obviously, Wikipedia has a slightly smaller mission than world peace, but perhaps some of the lessons about good faith the site teaches us can be applied to other realms.... Maybe this period of extra nasty divisiveness in politics will push us out of the USENET phase and into a productive period of Wikipedian civility." The Atlantic article was written on the occasion of a talk by Reagle at Harvard University's Berkman Center (video and audio recordings and slides).
Like the book, the presentation featured several quotes from Raul's laws and Wikipedia:WikiSpeak. Opening the discussion after the talk, Charles Nesson asked Reagle about his reaction to the (thus far only) customer review of the book on Amazon.com, by indefinitely blocked Wikipedian User:Thekohser (owner of MyWikiBiz), who admitted not having read it beyond the freely available first chapter, but nevertheless recommended against buying because "the entire work regurgitates the tired old public relations pablum that the Wikipedia organization sputters forth on the Internet and on the increasingly uncritical media". Nesson called this a "bullying tactic" and an example of bad faith that stood in contrast to the good faith culture of Wikipedia postulated by the book. In response to a question by Clay Shirky, Reagle mentioned the recently concluded Climate change arbitration case. He answered a question from User:SB Johnny (relayed by indefinitely blocked User:Moulton) about how communities like Wikimedia projects could overcome a "founder effect" with regard to Jimmy Wales. On October 21, Reagle gave another presentation about the book in the form of a webcast on Red Hat's site Opensource.com (recap and slides).
Besides being mentioned by Reagle, the Arbcom decision regarding the climate change "battlefield" (see last week's Signpost coverage) generated coverage in blogs opposing the mainstream scientific view on global warming, and news media from the North American political right. Most of them commented favorably on ArbCom's sanctions against User:William M. Connolley (William Connolley), whose earlier conflicts as a scientist with global warmings skeptics had been highlighted in Nature, The New Yorker and Journal of Science Communication as an example of the problems that experts can face when contributing to Wikipedia (see Signpost coverage: "Role of experts on Wikipedia and Citizendium examined"). A comment in the Wall Street Journal ("WikiPropaganda – Wikipedia bars a global warming censor from editing its pages", paywalled) said that "last week Wikipedia acknowledged it had been hijacked by global warming alarmists who squelched dissenting science ... It is censorship, and Wikipedia deserves credit for finally, if belatedly, stopping it." The Canadian global warming skeptic Lawrence Solomon, who had been criticizing Wikipedia's climate coverage and attacking Connolley in several earlier comments published in the National Post, likewise showed satisfaction with ArbCom's ruling ("Global warming propagandist slapped down"): "William Connolley, arguably the world’s most influential global warming advocate after Al Gore, has lost his bully pulpit." Connolley retorted, pointing out factual inaccuracies in Solomon's article. Bloggers Anthony Watts[1] and Luboš Motl[2] appeared to welcome the ArbCom decision as an opportunity for global warming skeptics to re-engage in the topic on Wikipedia, although the latter expressed disappointment that his first attempts to do so were stopped by two admins whom he suspected to be sockpuppets of Connolley.
But Connolley was only one of many users topic-banned from climate-change articles, several of whom had been engaged on the other side of the "battlefield" to advocate a global warming skeptic viewpoint. On his "The Wikipedian" blog, William Beutler (User:WWB) discussed the focus on Connolley in the coverage, noting that "he is among the most carefully-scrutinized Wikipedia editors – the discussion page associated with his account is the 11th-most 'watchlisted' Talk page outside of a couple technical pages and those belonging to Wikipedia’s best-known contributors."
The Supreme Court of India has cited information taken from the Wikipedia article Common Law Marriage as the basis for a judgment. The ruling has shocked the orthodox among the Indian judicial community. Based on the article, Justice Markandey Katju listed four conditions a couple must satisfy if they are to get the benefit of such a marriage: they must hold themselves out to society as being akin to spouses; they must be of legal age to marry; they must be otherwise qualified to enter into a legal marriage, including being unmarried; and they must have voluntarily cohabited and held themselves out to the world as being akin to spouses for a significant period of time. See "Can Wikipedia be the basis of SC ruling?" in The Times of India and "Government counsel takes exception to use of word ‘keep' in judgment" in The Hindu.
In similar news from the US, a column in the The Huffington Post by Josh Sugarmann, "Activist judge rules against Wisconsin's CCW ban, cites Wikipedia, ignores facts", criticized a decision of a Wisconsin Circuit Court that overturned the state's ban on carrying concealed handguns in public, for citing the Wikipedia pages List of fatal cougar attacks in North America and List of fatal bear attacks in North America as evidence for the necessity of guns for "the outdoors person".
The two decisions add to a long list of uses of Wikipedia as a court source. According to a database search conducted by Legally India ("'Offensive' SC judgment cites Wikipedia to define legal term"), Wikipedia "has been cited as a source at least 63 times by Indian courts".
As reported in the Signpost, the blog "Got Medieval" recently announced a humorous contest to find "the weirdest claim about the Middle Ages on Wikipedia", with both true and false statements eligible, selected by a jury of bloggers and rewarded with a $75 gift certificate to Costumes, Inc. The winning statement, announced last week, comes from the article about Icelandic magical staves (rune-like symbols), explaining one such symbol, the "Nábrókarstafur", as "Necropants, a pair of pants made from the skin of a dead man that are capable of producing an endless supply of money". It is sourced from galdrasyning.is, which describes itself as the website of the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, whose extended description of the necropants adds the caution that one has to get permission to use the man's skin before his death in order for the magic to work, and further explains that "a coin must be stolen from a poor widow and placed in the scrotum along with the magical sign, nábrókarstafur, written on a piece of paper" to activate the garment's revenue-generating functionality.
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This week, we took a look at a spooky project that dates back to 2006. WikiProject Horror covers novels, films, and other media that fit in the horror genre. As a result, many of the project's articles also fall into the scope of WikiProject Novels, WikiProject Films, WikiProject Television, WikiProject Video games, WikiProject Media franchises, and WikiProject Biography. Activity at WikiProject Horror has waxed and waned in the past year, although members have continued to produce featured and good content at a steady rate. The project is currently home to 27 featured articles, 3 A-class articles, and 68 good articles. Members are currently working on one featured article nominee (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) and four good article candidates. The project maintains a portal, a cleanup listing, watchlist, and a task force covering the Saw franchise.
We interviewed four active members for this week's article. Bignole is a fan of slasher films from the 80s and 90s. He can appreciate "more intellectual" films like The Ugly, but he also enjoys "watching stupid teenagers run around and get their heads chopped off." TaerkastUA (The Taerkasten) is also a fan of horror films dating back to "one of the greatest and most controversial horror films of all time, the legendary cult classic, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, whose sheer influence cannot be emphasized strongly enough." Kaguya-chan grew up on "far too much 19th-century horror literature and Castlevania for my own good." Her favorite survival-horror video game is Silent Hill 2, prompting her to ask "is there anything scarier than Pyramid Head?" Andrzejbanas began working on Wikipedia in 2006 and found his calling adding infoboxes and theatrical posters to film articles. He became interested in horror and other pulp genres because "they usually have interesting posters." His favorite horror film is Night of the Demon which "has all the best (and worst) features of pre-60s horror films."
Have you contributed to any of the project's 27 featured articles or 71 good and A-class articles? Are you currently working on bringing any articles up to FA or GA status? Has there been a push to create articles to run in Did you know in time for Halloween?
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is currently a featured article candidate and three articles (Inseminoid, A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010 film), and Anandabhadram) are good article candidates. Have you been following these FA and GA nominations? Do members of the project help tweak an article that is going through the FA or GA process?
What are some of the difficulties associated with keeping a project active? Do you have any plans to build membership at WikiProject Horror?
WikiProject Horror is home to the Saw Task Force and was once home to a newsletter and a collaboration of the month. Do you foresee these elements of the project coming back to life if more members join the project? Were they worthwhile endeavors when the project was more active?
Has the project formed ties with any other projects? Are there projects which significantly overlap WikiProject Horror?
How can a new member help today?
Anything else you'd like to add?
Next week, we'll try to defend against a power play. Until your time in the penalty box expires, entertain yourself with some old reports from the archive.
Reader comments
The Signpost welcomes Vejvančický (nom) as our newest admin. Vejvančický, from the Czech Republic, has more than 16,000 edits and two and a half years' experience in a wide range of areas, including new-page patrolling, and our currently backlogged speedy deletion and AfD processes. He has an impressive list of mostly Czech-related pages he is working towards creating at the English Wikipedia.
Choice of the week. The Signpost asked FA nominator and reviewer Jimfbleak to select the best newly promoted article from this week's offerings, together with the four promotions last week.
| “ | My benchmark for the quality of a Wikipedia article is whether I find myself reading from start to finish an article on a subject of which I know nothing; all ten of these FAs passed that test. It was interesting to discover that it seems to have been perfectly acceptable for a teacher in Nixon's America to enrol her charges as political cheerleaders, although less of a surprise to find that Yorkshire cricketers can be nearly as irascible as their Australian counterparts.
Jersey Act, perfidious Albion at work again, was a small but perfectly formed example of what a good collaboration should be, and Bring Us Together was a fascinating peek into the US of 40 years ago. However, overall I was torn between two of the five biographies, Francis Tresham and Barnes. For me, Sid Barnes with the Australian cricket team in England in 1948 edges it, if only because it's harder to write well about something as intrinsically boring as cricket than it is for a gunpowder plotter! |
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Choice of the week. We asked FL nominator AngChenrui for his choice of the best:
| “ | Tough choice really, considering that almost all the featured lists have to do with pop culture and sports. I found List of battlecruisers of the Royal Navy—an exception here—highly informative and well-written. List of Best in Show winners of Crufts was a good read as well, since its not everyday that you hear about championship-winning dogs. I liked the last two in the list above; I suppose many of us here can identify with the music listed there. However, Choice of the week goes to Gordon Bennett Cup (ballooning) for me. The Cup is the oldest gas balloon race in the world, as you would find out, and the article sure piqued my curiosity. In this age of technology and faster-than-sound travel, it is a pleasure to be reading about slower-cruising aerial vehicles. Of course the competition is not without incident too; last month's race saw the disappearance of two Americans, both of whom were never found. | ” |
Choice of the week. Nergaal, a regular reviewer and nominator at featured picture candidates, told The Signpost: "A good variety of pictures was promoted to featured status this week, but in the end, the choice is a pretty obvious one. It is rare that the project receives a donation of a high-quality artefact such as a copy of the original 1842 manuscript of Chopin's Polonaise in A flat, Op. 53, for solo piano. It is a high-quality scan of the score of one of the most popular compositions by Chopin. The composer's own autograph is visible in the top right corner of the page. Notable mentions are well deserved by other two promotions: the colorful animated projection of a whole-body PET scan, as well as another historic image, taken by Voyager in 1986 of the seventh planet."
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Having handled hundreds of cases, the Committee is one of the most public faces of the English Wikipedia. ArbCom has been examined in research on dispute resolution, and its decisions and role in Wikipedia-related controversies have been reported in the mainstream media (two notable examples from last year are a story by Noam Cohen in The New York Times, and a send-up by political satirist Stephen Colbert). In the early days of Wikipedia, the project's serious disputes were dealt with by Jimmy Wales personally, but the burden soon proved too much for one person to handle—so in December 2003, he created ArbCom to share the load. There have since been gradual but significant shifts in the Committee's relationship with both Wales and the community. At first, the status and future of the Committee were uncertain; in January 2004, Wales even declared that he reserved the right "to dissolve the whole thing if it turns out to be a disaster." But in 2005, a community referendum ratified the current Arbitration policy, and in April 2007, Wales confirmed that ArbCom can overturn any decision he makes in his traditional capacity within Wikipedia.
Arbitrator Roger Davies says the Committee's role has evolved significantly as the structures of the English Wikipedia have matured. "Until a couple of years ago, ArbCom was taking maybe four or five new cases a month, usually disputes between two or three editors. Since then, the landscape has changed a lot. The community is handling more and more of the routine stuff at noticeboards like AN/I. So these days, it's mostly intense, hard-core disputes that end up with ArbCom—the things the community isn't really set up to handle. So the cases ArbCom hears have become bigger, nastier and much more complex. Good examples are the Scientology, Climate Change, and Israeli–Palestinian disputes. One of the greatest challenges we face is the need to pore over large amounts of evidence from these types of cases to extract the essentials, while keeping up with talk page discussions. We are always looking for better ways of handling such cases, and different lessons can be learned from each of them."
Kirill Lokshin says that while formal arbitration proceedings are probably the most visible element of the Committee's work, they are only the tip of the iceberg. "An ever-increasing fraction of our workload consists of 'behind the scenes' work—hearing appeals, responding to questions and complaints, investigating allegations of sockpuppetry. Managing this is less visible and glamorous than case work. Many new arbitrators come in thinking their main task is voting on proposed decisions, and are surprised by how little of that actually takes place." FloNight (arbitrator 2007–09) says, "the 24/7 nature of Wikipedia results in a constant flow of issues that need prompt attention. Behind the scene discussions are mostly related to ban appeals, and serious privacy- and harassment-related issues." Being an arbitrator also involves a considerable amount of correspondence. For Roger, "the variety of this work is challenging and engaging—each matter needs to be handled in different ways, with different degrees of diplomacy and sensitivity." One aspect of the workload arbitrators often struggle with, according to Kirill, is meeting expectations for the timely resolutions of tasks: "ArbCom has traditionally been quite bad at keeping to deadlines, self-imposed or otherwise. If there's one thing we perpetually need more of, it's arbitrators who can keep processes running and up to date."
The diverse nature of ArbCom's work benefits from the range of skills and interests among the individual arbitrators. In Kirill's opinion, "a group made up of editors with overly similar experiences would limit our ability to come up with new approaches to problems; we need members from all parts of the Wikipedia community to be successful." Risker agrees: "Far from being some sort of monolithic creature, one of ArbCom's greatest strengths is its diversity. Arbitrators' varied editing backgrounds and personalities have a significant impact on our ability to understand issues and anticipate the effects of decisions. Since the Committee's role is now more complex and its membership larger, different arbitrators tend to gravitate to specific roles. For example, this year one arbitrator has done much to coordinate the Ban Appeals Subcommittee and ensure timely responses; two arbitrators have focused on working with the checkuser and oversight teams. Probably the greatest challenge for us is to try to keep up with the information load. For a large or complex case, it's not unusual for arbitrators to review dozens of talk pages, archives and articles through their revision history; the evidence given by interested editors can often be just the starting point. Arbitrators who also track the oversight and checkuser mailing lists can easily find 100 new messages in their inboxes on any given day; it can be difficult to sort the chaff from the grain."
Despite the stress and acrimony that accompanies much of the work of ArbCom, the arbitrators find that it is not without recompense. FloNight says "the most rewarding aspect of the job was knowing that ArbCom was fairly addressing concerns that could not be resolved by the community alone. Despite the heavy criticism that ArbCom gets from parties in cases, positive remarks from the overall Community shows general support of ArbCom's work." Risker says, "One of the more rewarding aspects for me personally is when we have been able to identify that an editor or administrator is encountering significant difficulty, and defusing the situation before it has a disproportionate effect on either the project or the editor. It's far more healthy for the project as a whole to treat our volunteers with dignity and respect—particularly when they're not at their best than it is to have showcase discussions about all of their personal weaknesses."
For Roger, it's the complexity and variety that are rewarding about being an arbitrator, even though it can be stressful. There are some community debates he would like to participate in, but feels unable to because of the need to maintain the neutrality of his role. "The best part of it is where you occasionally see someone's attitude towards their own behaviour turn around during or after a case. That's when you feel you're really making a difference."
Reader comments
The Arbitration Committee opened no cases this week, but closed one, leaving none open.
This case concerns accusations of wiki-hounding and disruptive editing, and was filed by Stevertigo, a Wikipedia editor since 2002. He alleged 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 alleged 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 moved to the proposed decision phase during the week, and within 48 hours, 11 out of 12 active arbitrators finished voting on the decision. The case was closed shortly thereafter.
Earlier in the week, the Committee made an announcement that sparked a brief controversy. The Committee confirmed that Polargeo was the subject of several investigations, and that he requested for his tools to be removed earlier this month. It also stated that "Polargeo has created and/or used at least ten alternate accounts in a manner neither consistent with Wikipedia's policies nor meeting the minimum standards expected of administrators." The Committee's decision was that Polargeo will need to make a successful request for adminship if he wishes to regain his administrator tools.
Reader comments
About a week ago, significantly inflated pageview counts began to be noticed in Wikimedia's official statistics (for example, see Gerard Meijssen's blog post). Was it the result of some new technology directing users to WMF sites? Or just a technical glitch? Upon further investigation it (unfortunately) proved to be the latter, the result of requests to the new "Extension:CentralNotice" fundraising banner campaign. The statistics software was logging requests to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BannerController as it would log requests to a "useful" page that should be logged, such as articles and some special pages. The current convention, it was discovered (since, as Rob Lanphier noted, it had not been documented anywhere) was that requests of the "pretty" format /wiki/ would be counted, and that requests that ought not to be logged should use the alternative format /w/index.php?title=. Discussion then centred on whether this was a sustainable format or not, with a number of alternatives proposed, but no agreement was reached on the wikitech-l mailing list.
As reported last week, there has been a lot of discussion about getting the MediaWiki software onto a more useful development cycle, both for WMF purposes (potentially very regular updates, but of potentially imperfect software) and for that of third parties (releases months apart but thoroughly checked for bugs). Staff developer Roan Kattouw outlined his plan for getting the development cycle back on track (wikitech-l mailing list):
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This week, Rob Lanphier opened a discussion on the topic in response to "a number of calls to make the release process more predictable (or maybe just faster)". In understanding how best that could, and whether it should, be implemented, he asked first whether contributors felt "release cadence" (shipping to a specified deadline, regardless of how many features actually got released) or a feature-dominated release (shipping X, Y and Z features however long it took to develop them) was preferable. For the former, should writers of features not ready at a given date be prepared to see them cut? For the latter, how far in advanced could the list of features be reliably drawn up? And how deep is the belief that deployment to WMF sites must precede a release to third parties?
The resulting discussion was wide-ranging. Why shouldn't a new version just be released when it would be useful to release one, rather than at a specific point, some asked. Ultimately, the sentiment that garnered most support was a strong "yes" to the last question, and that the best way to implement this would be to get back to having a very fast turnaround on deploying to WMF sites (the "weekly deployments" of Roan's post, if not faster; Flickr, as Neil Kandalgaonkar pointed out, often deploys multiple times a day). "Wikipedia", wrote volunteer Aryeh Gregor, "is a great place to test new features, and we're in a uniquely good position to do so, since we wrote the code and can very quickly fix any reported bugs."
Wikimedia tech staff, contractor developers, and volunteers gathered this past weekend in Tysons Corner, Virginia (in the Washington, D.C. area) for Hack-A-Ton DC. (TechBlog post) The focus was on fixing bugs and reducing the backlog of fixmes in code review, but there also was discussion of operations issues, and on moving forward in implementing some maps features. Naren Datha of Microsoft gave a demo of the WikiBhasha translation tool, and Jan Paul Posma demoed his student project, Sentence Level Editing. On Saturday evening, hackers joined DC-area Wikipedians for DC Meetup #12.
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.
