Liam Wyatt (User:Witty lama) has become the sixth recipient of a Wikimedia fellowship, for a one-year project (until December 2011) where he "will be working to build the capacity of the Wikimedia community to undertake partnerships with cultural institutions – known as GLAMs [Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums] a term he popularized", according to the announcement by the Wikimedia Foundation's Human Resources Manager Daniel Phelps. A Wikipedian since 2005, Wyatt has been doing volunteer work in this area for two years. He convened the "GLAM-WIKI" conferences in Australia (2009, Signpost coverage), and the UK (2010, Signpost coverage), and a Wikipedia workshop at the "Museums and the Web 2010" conference (Signpost coverage). Also in 2010, he volunteered five weeks as "Wikipedian in Residence" at the British Museum, a pilot project to facilitate collaboration between Wikimedians and the institution (see Signpost coverage).
Witty lama, who is currently based in Sydney, has also been the Vice President of the Australian Wikimedia chapter, and one of the hosts of the "Wikipedia Weekly" podcast.
Through his blog post last November, entitled "How to make cultural collaborations scale?", concerns were voiced that "the sheer number of collaboration projects being offered to us" meant that many such opportunities would be irreparably wasted unless there was a "consistent, easily findable, and easy to understand processes for handling potential partnerships when they are presented to us". He added that we must put in place processes to "scale-up our capacity to professionally manage" collaborations, whilst being "consistent with the grassroots nature of Wikimedia projects."
Work on documenting such processes has now started on the Outreach wiki (with http://glamwiki.org/ as a shortcut), where a "WMF Fellow's to do list" has been developed since December 20. The page also features a "'This month in GLAM' report". Volunteers will be invited to collaborate on improving the "Guide to batch uploading" on Commons during the next one or two weeks. In February, Liam Wyatt will travel to India (like other WMF staff before him), meeting with Wikimedians in Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi to explore collaboration possibilities with GLAM institutions there.
Watch for an interview with Liam in an upcoming issue of the Signpost.
A 3:43 minutes long video titled "The State of Wikipedia", narrated by Jimmy Wales and produced by Washington D.C. based creative agency JESS3, was published last week on video sharing sites and on http://www.thestateofwikipedia.com/, under a CC-BY-SA license. It illustrates the history of Wikipedia with colorful animated computer graphics (some stills), accompanied by quirky electronic music. On its inception, Wales said that "As a founder of Nupedia, I led the group to establish a farm team of sorts for future Nupedia articles. We used a new software platform to make collaboration easy - the wiki; Wikipedia." Wales also commented about his current role on Wikipedia and the importance of the Foundation ("I still lead the community, and the Wikimedia Foundation helps us to make Wikipedia what it is today"), and looked into the future: "There has never been anything like Wikipedia before, and its future horizon is very very long."
On the company's blog, Leslie Bradshaw and Becca Colbaugh from JESS3 explained that the video was "aimed at teaching the layperson Wikipedia’s initial concept and consequent evolution into becoming one of the most visited web sites across the globe", and that it had been developed over months together with the Foundation, as the company's gift to Wikipedia on its tenth anniversary. Wikipedian William Beutler (User:WWB) was involved in the project as an Executive Producer. On YouTube, the video had received almost 83,000 views at the time of writing.
A recent interview has shed new light on the 2002 fork of the Spanish Wikipedia and the influence it may have had on the development of Wikipedia as a whole, and ignited a controversy between Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales about the stance on advertising in the early phase of the project.
Edgar Enyedy, an early activist on the Spanish Wikipedia who describes himself as "some sort of unofficial leader together with Javier de la Cueva" of the fork Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español, was interviewed by Nathaniel Tkacz of the "Critical Point of View" (CPOV) Wikipedia research initiative, on whose blog the interview was first published on January 15 ("‘Good luck with your WikiPAIDia’: Reflections on the 2002 Fork of the Spanish Wikipedia". See also the recent Signpost interview with Tkacz and fellow CPOV member Johanna Niesyto).
Concerns about possible plans to use advertising on Wikipedia are often named as the main reason for the fork. Enyedy confirmed that remarks about ads in a February 2002 announcement by Larry Sanger triggered the exodus of the Spanish Wikipedians ("Bomis might well start selling ads on Wikipedia sometime within the next few months, and revenue from those ads might make it possible for me to come back to my old job"), but insisted that several other issues played an important role, including concerns about the insufficiently international nature of Wikipedia - an "American shadow [that] marked the first point of contention between myself and Sanger and Wales." As examples, he named the fact that "the basic pages ('what Wikipedia is not', 'be bold', 'how to start', 'sandbox', etc) were all in English; we had the American logo in English and so on", but also referred to issues that are in some form still relevant today, such as the internationalization of the interface: "The software, for example, was not translated at all and it cast an English (language) shadow over the entire project", and cultural differences between Europe and the US regarding sexual images ("Former AOL users used to remind me that explicit biology images are widely accepted among us, but would be considered inappropriate on the American version"). The Spanish Wikipedians also differed from their English counterpart by introducing a stylebook, and an index based on the Universal Decimal Classification.
A main reason for the fork was objections to the leadership of Wikipedia's chief organizer Larry Sanger:
| “ | Larry Sanger acted as a Big Brother. He was an employee, a Bomis-Wales wage-earning worker. ...
The American Wikipedia might have seen him as a "facilitator", but we regarded Sanger more like an obstacle. At that time he was not an open-minded person. I have to admit that he brought some good ideas to us, but the American Wikipedia was too caught up in the interests of Bomis Inc. I engaged in head-on confrontations, open clashes, with Sanger. We were all working on a basis of collective creation, with peer-to-peer review. It was an open project, free in both senses. We were all equals, a horizontal network creating knowledge through individual effort – this is the most important thing to keep in mind. But Sanger turned out to be vertically minded. His very status as a paid employee led him to watch us from above, just waiting for the right moment to participate in active discussions in the (mis)belief his words would be more important than ours. |
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Also contributing to the decision to fork was a distrust of Jimmy Wales' intentions, who to Enyedy seemed reluctant to steer Wikipedia into a non-profit direction.
| “ | All Wikipedia domains (.com, .org, .net) were owned by Wales. I asked myself ‘why are we working for a dot-com?’ I asked for Wikipedia to be changed to a dot-org. ... I didn’t trust Wales’ intentions. Not at all. We were all working for free in a dot-com with no access to the servers, no mirrors, no software updates, no downloadable database, and no way to set up the wiki itself. We were basically working for Bomis Inc., and asked in a gentle way to translate from the main Wikipedia. | ” |
Asked by Tkacz how the right to fork (granted in principle by the Wikipedia's free license) looked in detail in this case, Enyedy said that the activists had to download and transfer the articles one by one. (The accessibility of timely Wikipedia dumps continues to be a point of debate today.)
Enyedy said that the Enciclopedia Libre, while still active today, "was not intended to last. It was merely a form of pressure. Some of the goals were achieved, not all of them, but it was worth the cost", and emphasized its continuing influence:
| “ | as it is known today, the international Wikipedia that you all know and have come to take for granted, might have been impossible without the Spanish fork. Wales was worried that other foreign communities would follow our fork. He learnt from us what to do and what not to do. The guidelines were clear: update the database; make the software easily available on Sourceforge; no advertising at all; set up a foundation with a dot-org domain and workers chosen from the community; no more Sanger-like figures, as well as some minor things [...], such as free (non proprietary) formats for images. | ” |
According to Tkacz, Enyedy said "that he has been approached several times a year since 2002, but has never shared his story because the people contacting him were either mainstream journalists or people from wikimedia and he wasn't convinced they would let him tell his version of the story".
The abstract of a talk about the fork given at Wikimania 2005 also mentions issues that led to its creation.
On January 20, Wired UK published an abbreviated version of the interview ("The Spanish Fork: Wikipedia's ad-fuelled mutiny"), which included reactions by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.
Sanger objected sharply to Enyedy's statements, saying that "the only sort of person who could seriously describe my role as an Orwellian "Big Brother" is a radical anarchist, for whom even the slightest possible exercise of authority is outrageous oppression. To be sure, Wikipedia had quite a few of such vocal characters in its early days. The story has not yet been fully told just how they essentially took over with the blessing of Jimmy Wales". But Sanger agreed that the fork "might well have been the straw that finally tipped the scales in favor of a 100% ad-free Wikipedia."
Jimmy Wales issued a much shorter statement:
| “ | Sanger was absolutely adamant that Wikipedia must have ads, and it was my refusal to do so that led to Wikipedia being as it is today. The Spanish fork did not provoke any changes of any kind. We stayed the course. I didn't want to have advertising, and I found ways to avoid it -- the Spanish fork was an important event in the history of Wikipedia, but not in the sense of "provoking change". | ” |
Sanger objected even more sharply to Wales' statement, questioning the veracity of the first sentence, first on Twitter ("He was long in favor; I long opposed. Apologize, pls!"), then on his personal blog, recalling or citing various statements by Wales about ads from 2000 to 2002 ("From the beginning, Wales let me know in no uncertain terms that, once it garnered enough traffic, Nupedia would become ad-supported"). Sanger said that in December 2001 (when all other Bomis employees had to be laid off and his own position appeared to hinge on possible advertising revenue), he "was still uncomfortable with the idea of ads being run to support me, even in a non-profit context". The discussion then continued on Jimmy Wales' user talk page, where Wales said that "I don't see what the discrepancy is supposed to be", and Sanger accused him of lying.
In December 2005, US law professor Eric Goldman (User:Ericgoldman) bet his friend Mike Godwin (later to become Wikimedia's General Counsel) that within five years "Wikipedia inevitably will be overtaken by the gamers and the marketers to the point where it will lose all credibility", if it would not give up its open editing model. ("Wikipedia Will Fail Within 5 Years", Eric Goldman's blog). Godwin predicted that anonymous editing would still be possible, even though "I think part of the design of Wikipedia was to allow for the evolution of contributor standards, even though as a 'foundational' principle anonymous contributors will always be allowed to edit it. Such evolution ought to be enough to keep Wikipedia alive and vital in the face of a changing digital environment." ("Will Wikipedia Fail in Five Years?", Godwinslaw.org). In 2006, Goldman reiterated his prediction for 2010 (Signpost coverage).
The bet was to be decided on December 2, 2010. On January 14, Goldman revisited the bet on his blog, admitting that "My 2005 Prediction of Wikipedia's Failure By 2010 Was Wrong". He identified the introduction of Nofollow on Wikipedia and anti-spam techniques developed by volunteers as the main reasons that Wikipedia is still able to resist spammers and marketers, but also noted other changes that he sees as "less salutary". While remaining somewhat skeptical about the sustainability of Wikipedia's model (citing his 2009 article "Wikipedia's Labor Squeeze and its Consequences", cf. Signpost coverage), Goldman (who is also a participant in the Foundation's Public Policy Initiative) praised the usefulness of the site: "I visit it daily as part of satisfying my intellectual curiosity. Happy 10th anniversary, Wikipedia!"
In a recent blog post ("Wikipedia is not a place for promotion"), Wikipedia researcher Felipe Ortega (whose statistics on Wikipedia editing frequencies had started debates about Wikipedia's sustainability in 2009) voiced concerns similar to Goldman's, identifying "conflicts around self-promotion in Wikipedia" as one of the "main challenges for Wikipedia over the next 10 years".
The morning included a welcome by US Archivist David Ferriero, presentations by NARA staff talking about records management and various other aspects of what they do, and a behind-the-scenes tour. During the welcome, James Hare brought up the idea of the Wikimedia DC group bidding for Wikimania 2012, with warm reception to the idea including from Ferriero. NARA's Beth Cron gave an overview of their records management process, and as a case study, Martha Murphy discussed NARA's collections on the John F. Kennedy assassination and examined the Wikipedia article on the topic. Kitty Nicholson gave a talk on record conservation. Jill Reilly James discussed work on improving the search functionality for finding records, and demonstrated a new search prototype. She also talked about digitization efforts. Currently, there are approximately 153,000 items digitized and available online, out of millions of cubic square feet worth of boxes. They are interested in increasing the priority of digitization to improve public access. NARA also talked about their interest in working with Wikipedia volunteers, and facilitating easier access to NARA records. At some point, they would like to have a Wikipedian-in-Residence working with them.
The afternoon featured lightning talks by Wikipedians and others, with the first session of the afternoon focusing on GLAM-Wiki topics. Thomas Gideon presented about the FedFlix and International Amateur Scanning League project for digitizing video from the National Archives holdings (see also the WikiProject FedFlix). Ed Summers presented on his Linkypedia tool for tracking outgoing links from Wikipedia to other websites. Harihar Shankar spoke about the Memento plugin for Firefox that helps access Wikipedia and other sites as they were at some date in the past. Sarah Stierch talked about Wikipedia:WikiProject Public art and her work on documenting public art around Washington, D.C.., sparking a good deal of interest from the audience to help photograph and map the artwork. Peter Meyer, a statistician at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, presented on Statipedia.
The second session of lightning talks focused on Wikipedia, more generally. Kat Walsh looked back at 10 moments in Wikipedia history, and User:Jyothis talked about the Malayalam Wikipedia and discussed about Indian language versions of Wikipedia. Sage Ross and PJ Tabit presented about the Wikipedia Ambassador Program and the role of Campus Ambassadors, discussing how it has worked so far and how they would like to see ideas translate to GLAM outreach efforts. User:Aude gave a brief overview of the collaboration between Wikimedians in DC and the Smithsonian Institution, including work with the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Archives of American Art.
The day wrapped up with celebration of Wikipedia's 10th birthday, featuring Wikipedia cupcakes donated by Georgetown Cupcake, followed by a session of Wiki-Trivia led by Kat Walsh and Phoebe Ayers. Socializing continued afterwards at a nearby pub, with discussion about Wikimedia DC's bid for Wikimania 2012 and moving forward with forming a chapter.
This week, we visited WikiProject District of Columbia which covers Washington D.C., the capital district of the United States and home to over 600,000 residents (more than the entire state of Wyoming). The project began in April 2007 and has grown to include 23 pieces of featured content and 44 good and A-class articles. WPDC is also home to a collection of featured and valued pictures. Members contribute to the Washington D.C. Portal and, because of the national importance of many monuments and institutions within the District, frequently see their content on the United States Portal.
We interviewed four members of WikiProject DC. epicAdam lives and works in the District. His general interest in his hometown's history and culture motivated him to help bring the main Washington D.C. article up to featured article status. Missvain lives in the Logan Circle neighborhood of the District and has made it her goal to document all public art in DC as part of WikiProject Public Art. She made a presentation at last weekend's WikiXdc event. Kumioko lives in Virginia but works in DC and is interested in the history of the area. SchuminWeb is an admin who lives in suburban Maryland, but works and spends much of his time in the District. He founded WikiProject Washington Metro and did most of the writing for October Rebellion and Fraser Mansion, bringing both of them up to Good Article status.
What kind of DC articles do you typically focus on?
Does the District's prominence as a tourism destination help or hinder the project's efforts to provide good photography with each article?
How far does the project's scope extend? Are neighboring areas of Virginia and Maryland included in the project?
Does the project collaborate with any other projects that share a DC basis?
There has been some discussion about consolidating WikiProject DC's assessment and tagging functions with WikiProject United States. How will this affect the project? Do you foresee similar integration occurring between WikiProject US and the projects covering each of the 50 states?
Next week, we'll follow clans of feral cats into battle. Until then, read previous issues of the Report in the archive.
Reader comments
The Signpost welcomes Gimme danger (nom) as our newest admin. Danger has been editing for four and a half years and has participated in many Wikipedia tasks. Among these are the help desks, speedy deletions, backlogs, and assisting new editors' contributions; an example of Danger's larger achievements is the clearing of WikiProject Wisconsin's assessment backlog of some 5,000 articles. Danger self-describes as "fundamentally a gnome".
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Four featured lists were delisted:
Seven images were promoted; each can be viewed in medium size by clicking on "nom":
One sound file was promoted: Bright College Years (nom and link to related article), a performance of the first and third verses of Yale's unofficial alma mater by the 2006 Yale Whiffenpoofs. It is the first choral a cappella performance to reach featured sound status.
Two cases are currently open. The Committee opened or closed no cases during the week.
This week, 23 editors submitted in excess of 12,000 words (~103kb) in on-wiki evidence. A workshop proposal was also submitted by one of these editors. As reported last week, the amended deadline for evidence submissions is 30 January 2011.
Evidence submissions closed on 15 January 2011. One party added 66kb to his analysis of evidence (see Signpost coverage from 17 January 2011). Drafter Kirill Lokshin has not yet submitted a proposed decision on-wiki for arbitrators to vote on.
The Committee conditionally suspended the indefinite block of SanchiTachi (talk · contribs). The conditions are such that SanchiTachi is:
On Wikimedia wikis, most important information about files (such as author and copyright information) is buried within the file description page itself, and is difficult for automated tools to extract. Last week, a new development project aiming to separate elements of that data into a separate database table, and exposing it via the MediaWiki API, was announced (wikitech-l mailing list). Developer Bryan Tong Minh described the project:
| “ | As you may have noticed [from the coverage of the Dutch Hack-a-ton], Roan, Krinkle and I have started to integrate more tightly image licensing within MediaWiki. Our aim is to create a system where it should be easy to obtain the basic copyright information of an image in a machine readable format, as well as querying images with a certain copyright state (all images copyrighted by User:XY, all images licensed CC-BY-SA, etc). At this moment we only intend to store author and license information, but nothing stops us from expanding this in the future. | ” |
Technical issues were discussed on the mailing list, as was the possibility of expanding the scheme into extracting other forms of data from pages, on a par with Semantic MediaWiki. Michael Dale suggested that it could be discussed at the forthcoming Data Summit. In the mean time, contribution on the current project talkpage was requested.
Also last week, the Multimedia Usability project published a report about its achievements. The project, funded by a $300,000 grant from the Ford Foundation from October 2009 to November 2010, created the new "upload wizard" and a cartoon-based licensing tutorial (see previous Signpost coverage). With these in place, the report heralded an "indisputable improvement" in users' experiences of the upload process:
| “ | The project's goal was to increase multimedia participation on Wikimedia websites. The main means chosen to reach this goal was to facilitate the upload process to Wikimedia Commons, the central media repository for Wikimedia sites...
A usability study was conducted by an independent firm, who compared the existing and new upload systems. Their results showed an indisputable improvement of the users' experience. Long-term impact of the project is still to be assessed. The Wikimedia Foundation indicated its intention to continue to improve the upload system beyond this project, and to support volunteers worldwide who share multimedia files on Wikimedia Commons. |
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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.
