Sue Gardner has published an "Executive director trip report: Stockholm, London, Dubai, Delhi", describing her activities and personal impressions while travelling to these cities on Wikimedia-related business from November 20 to December 6, and also including a subsequent three-week vacation with a 10-day silent meditation retreat organized by the Indian Dhamma Institute ("the McDonald’s of Buddhist meditation retreats"), her first extended holiday since being hired by the Foundation in 2007. "I chose to vacation to India because it’s a strategic priority for the Wikimedia Foundation, and I wanted to get a little more exposure to the country and its people."
In Stockholm, Gardner gave the keynote at the Swedish chapter's "Wikipedia Academy" and in London at the GLAM-WIKI conference (Signpost coverage). In Dubai she was a speaker at the local TEDx event, and as in the other cities, met with local Wikipedians, which meant their first-ever meetup (Signpost coverage). Gardner remarked that she found it "always interesting to get a sense of how Wikipedia is being received/understood in different parts of the world", e.g. "Wikipedia has always seemed to me best-loved and most-accepted in Germany", comparing media attitudes toward Wikipedia in particular (with UK journalists being the least friendly). She related an observation from her talk in the United Arab Emirates (a region which had been considered for a possible expansion of the Wikimedia Foundation, after India):
| “ | I gave my standard talk, in which I describe how Wikipedia works and talk about its impact, including giving examples of readers whose lives have been significantly changed by access to Wikipedia. ... [These include] references to an Israeli Wikipedian and a gay Wikipedian. I’d considered using different examples for the UAE audience, but decided not to. The audience reaction was interesting: there was a small kerfluffle of about 30 tweets criticizing the talk as culturally insensitive (particularly the homosexuality reference), and afterwards people told me they found it ‘challenging,’ ‘brave’ and ‘provocative.’ I found this a bit dismaying, particularly because I’d chosen my words carefully to try to avoid offence. I don’t subscribe to the school of thought that says Wikipedia’s an Enlightenment product that can’t thrive in non-Western cultures, but I’d say following my talk in Dubai, my view shifted just a notch or two closer to it. | ” |
Videos from the TEDx event are currently being uploaded, with Gardner's talk not yet available at the time of writing.
The Wikimedia Foundation acted on two separate DMCA take-down notifications this month, in both cases removing images from Commons where apparently an image creator or purported rights holder had withdrawn or amended a previous permission for usage. (DMCA takedown notices are legal procedures under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, whereby a copyright owner notifies an online service provider such as the WMF of an alleged infringement on its servers, and the provider can retain immunity from copyright violations committed by its users if they remove the allegedly infringing material promptly. Last year, the Foundation's former legal counsel Mike Godwin stated that "I typically get only one or two true take-down notices a year. I always thought I would get more, but our community is very good at removing infringing material before a copyright owner complains to us.")
The first take-down notice concerned a multitude of coat of arms images on Wikimedia Commons (example image description page in Google's cache) uploaded by a user who later had tried to impose an additional reuse restriction on them (discussions about the case include [1] before and [2], [3] after he took legal action), and is now blocked.
The second DMCA notice was issued against the Wikimedia Foundation by classical music label Deutsche Grammophon, concerning an official portrait photo of the singer Placido Domingo. It appears to have been the same photo as one used by DG on the tenor's Facebook page, where it celebrated his 70th birthday on the day the undated take-down notice was enacted (January 21st). According to the image description page as still available in Google's cache, the photo had been uploaded "with permission from the company that owns and holds the rights for the photo", as documented in an OTRS ticket dated September 2008. However, in November 2009 the uploader already requested the removal of the image, saying it had been "received with written consent from Mr. Domingo's PR, who are also incharge of his website (www.placidodomingo.com). I have just received e-mail from his PR asking me to remove "File:DomingoJ1.jpg" from Wiki. It is a request from Sheila Rock. Could you please remove it as soon as possible? (I think partly because it is not entirely belong to Sheila Rock, the photo was taken for Deutshe Grammophon)".
A third DMCA take-down notice was also made available on the Foundation wiki this month, dating back to November and concerning the specification for the PCI bus, an article that was already subject to an office action.
WMF Deputy Director Erik Möller explained that (unlike previous fellowships announced by the Community Department) the project is being funded by a Wikimedia grant (of $21,500, approved on December 17) and will result in the creation of a video documentary:
| “ | In the same way that the usability videos showing the experiences of real users editing Wikipedia helped the community to have conversations about the editing interface, we hope that the film documentation that Achal will create will help the community have conversations about citations and sources, and offer practical approaches to deal with lack of published materials in many of the languages in which Wikipedia is available. | ” |
Exley and former Wikimedia chair Anthere (Florence Devouard) stressed that the Foundation's Advisory Board indeed has a purely advisory role and holds no powers within the organization, i.e. that there is no conflict of interest if an Advisory Board member is receiving a grant or being hired by Wikimedia (Prabhala had been an Advisory Board member since its inception and among the original members "has probably been the most active in the past years", according to Devouard). Likewise, to alleviate such concerns, Indian Board of Trustees member Bishaka Datta described the process that led to her appointment as a Trustee in March 2010, which involved interviews with five senior Wikimedians but not with Prabhala, who however mentored her and did "some serious handholding in the first three months" after her appointment. The Foundation's Chief Global Development Officer Barry Newstead also expressed his appreciation for Prabhala's help in launching Wikimedia in India, and other issues: "I, personally, have found him to be an excellent advisor and not someone who expects anything in return."
On January 27, The Hindu published a portrait of Prabhala ("One among the clan of Wikipedians"), where he described how he was introduced to Wikipedia by Angela Beesley and Erik Möller ("they looked like college students") in 2005 while working as an activist against restrictive copyright and for affordable school textbooks in South Africa, recalled "making nervous, anonymous edits to the entries of obscure sci-fi writers who I thought deserved more attention" and attending the first Wikimania in Germany. He said that after moving back to Bangalore, Wikipedians became one of the reasons for him to like the city (which has an active Wikipedian meetup and is the seat of the recently incorporated Wikimedia chapter): "... hundreds of encounters with Wikipedians later, I'm kind of excited about being home. I've been witness to some extraordinary, selfless, tireless and downright funny instances of community work, and I've seen people turn Wikipedia into something local and lovable."
About the fellowship program in general, Möller said that while it was being scaled up, "it would be good to have more open conversations about the criteria and process through which fellowships (but also Wikimedia Foundation grants) are awarded. ... I do think it's important to give the community more of a voice in both proposing and selecting individuals and projects, perhaps through some form of review committee which makes a preliminary recommendation, and which strongly interfaces with WMF to align the program with our strategic priorities." Newstead agreed that there was "room for improvement in our processes at WMF": "we have used the title of Fellowship for different types of activities e.g., hiring someone on a contract for general staff-like purposes, providing a grant to someone for a specific activity. We should figure out how to distinguish between these (and other roles) more clearly."
On the Foundation's wiki, a page about fellows was subsequently created. Human Resources Manager Daniel Phelps clarified that the "Community" in "Community fellow" was "a misnomer, Achal isn't specifically a Community fellow and as the fellowship program expands this will likely contain fellows from multiple departments" and said that unlike the other five fellows, Steven Walling "is on payroll and is set to work in the office during the duration of his fellowship as a staff member. We have to process each Fellowship currently based on several criteria as to how we engage with them. Much of this is based on HR [Human Resources] law." At the time of its introduction in September (Signpost coverage), the program - where community members were to "lead intensive, time-limited projects focused on key areas of risk and opportunity" with some of them possibly joining the permanent WMF staff later - had been called the "Community Fellowship program"; it followed the Community Department's earlier "Community hiring" call (Signpost coverage).
Newstead also announced that he was "planning on introducing a community input mechanism into the grant process for 2011/12."
Before the incident, an anonymous contributor had edited that article to add a link to the website of a company offering "total web consulting", based in Pickerington, Ohio. However, two minutes after posting the link in the article, the same IP removed the link. The website appears to have since been taken offline, and an HTTP 404 ("not found" error) message is displayed.
Then, a link to an old ID of the article was posted on the Facebook fan page through Mark Zuckerberg's personal account, with comments about the way the social networking site is run. "If facebook needs money, instead of going to the banks, why doesn't Facebook let its user [sic] invest in Facebook in a social way?" Why, he questions, does Zuckerberg not "transform Facebook into a 'social business'" in the way Nobel Prize winner "Muhammad Yunus described it?"
A whois check on the IP address used to make the edits shows the edits were made from a United States Department of Defense computer in Williamsburg. Although this could indicate the edits—and, indeed, the identity of the Facebook page hacker— could have been the actions of a member of the U.S. military, The Guardian points out the edits could be made using a proxy server from outside the military base.
An article on the January 31 front page of the The New York Times ("Define gender gap? Look up Wikipedia’s contributor list") concerned the gender gap in Wikipedia's editor base and how it is affecting article quality. Written by Noam Cohen, it gives examples of how subjects dear to girls and women tend to be short while those dear to boys and men are voluminous. It points out that the entry on friendship bracelets, likely to be of interest to teenage girls, is limited to only four paragraphs, whereas the article on baseball cards, a topic more likely to be followed by boys, is voluminous and includes a detailed chronological history of the subject. The entry on TV series Sex and the City includes only a brief summary of each episode while the one on The Sopranos includes lengthy, detailed articles on each episode. The New York Times quotes Sue Gardner as saying how she has set a goal to raise the share of female contributors to 25 percent by 2015 from its present 13%, but "that for now she was trying to use subtle persuasion and outreach through her foundation to welcome all newcomers to Wikipedia, rather than advocate for women-specific remedies like recruitment or quotas", being wary of triggering the "strong feelings" of many people for whom gender is "a huge hot-button issue". Wikimedia Board member Kat Walsh (User:Mindspillage), who was also quoted by the NYT, reacted to the article by publishing a draft essay on "Women on Wikipedia" disagreeing with the statement "that Wikipedia has a culture that is unfriendly to women ... I think the disproportionate lack of women in the community isn't about gender so much as it is about a culture that rewards certain traits and discourages others. And we're not getting people who don't have those other traits, male or female; more of the people who do fit the current culture are male. But the focus should be on becoming more open and diverse in general--becoming more inclusive to everyone, which will naturally bring in more women."
A paper titled "Imagining the Wikipedia community: What do Wikipedia authors mean when they write about their 'community'?" was published last month in "New Media & Society" (doi:10.1177/1461444810378364, paywalled) by Christian Pentzold, a doctoral student at Chemnitz University of Technology. Led by the question "What particular meaning do the Wikipedia editors attach to the term 'community'?", the paper examines postings on Wikipedia-l, the oldest Wikipedia mailing list, from its founding on January 22, 2001 until the end of 2007 (the author notes that the list has "lost traffic" to other lists). Of the 30,500 postings during that time, 3105 contained the word "community", used in 5563 passages. A part of them was coded using grounded theory procedures, using a set of standardized questions such as "Q7. In which activities can people partake?" (in the "community" referred to in that particular passage) or "Q10. What are prohibitions?". The author arrived at four "categories representing particular phenomena", labeled "ethos-community" (defined by a shared ethos, i.e. a set of norms and standards such as NPOV), "language community" (e.g. the Finnish Wikipedia community), "technical community" (limited to "a core group of technical rights access holders", e.g. developers) and "expert community" (a group "contributing their special knowledge to the encyclopedia"). Further axial coding led to elevate the "ethos-community" category to a "core category" and reformulate it as "ethos-action community", i.e. its members are not only defined by sharing the ethos, but also by adhering to it "apparent and assessable in their performances". The second part of the analysis elaborated on the connections between various subcategories to "narratively" lay out "an empirical theory of the 'Wikipedia community'".
On 14 January 2011, Science, one of the world's most prominent scientific journals, published a "Science Hall of Fame" (SHoF),[1] which they described as "a pantheon of the most famous scientists of the past 2 centuries". Unlike in traditional assessment of "fame" and "influence", which usually relies on polls and the opinion of experts in the field, Science has opted for an objective approach based on how many times people's names are found in the digitized copies of books available on Google Books, and whether Wikipedia considered these people scientists.
The Signpost takes a look at what they did and reports some of the trends in the data.
The origin of the SHoF was made possible by a paper written by Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden and published on 17 December 2010.[2] Michel and Aiden aggregated data from Google Books, which at the time contained 15 million digitized books—roughly 12% of all books ever published. Filtering for quality revealed that about a third of the original data was suitable for analysis; this is available online at ngrams.googlelabs.com. Based on Michel and Aiden's work, John Bohannon from Science and Adrian Veres from Harvard University teamed up to create a pantheon of the most influential scientists as measured by the number of times their names appear in Google Books. However, millions of names can be found in books, and thus a way was needed to decide who is a scientist and who is not. This is where Wikipedia comes in, with its 900,000 biographical entries (the authors report 750,000),[3][4] which can then be searched using for science-related categories, science-related keywords, and years of birth and death.[5]
They have created a new unit, the darwin (D), defined as "the average annual frequency that 'Charles Darwin' appears in English-language books from the year he turned 30 years old (1839) until 2000". Scientists named more often than Darwin himself would have a fame greater than 1 darwin. However, as few people were as influential as Darwin, the millidarwin (mD; a thousandth of a Darwin) is used instead. As it turns out, only three people beat Darwin in terms of fame as measured by this metric: John Dewey (1752.7 mD), Bertrand Russell (1500.1 mD), and Sigmund Freud (1292.9 mD). Other famous figures, such as Albert Einstein (878.2 mD), Marie Curie (188.6 mD), and Louis Pasteur, (237.5 mD) rank lower.[6] This is not a measure of the impact of their scientific work, but rather of how often they are mentioned in all types of books. For example, a scientist could have a moderate scientific impact but be famous for political involvement or even for negative scientific impact, such as involvement in scientific fraud or high-profile pseudoscience.
The authors warn that the current version of the Science Hall of Fame is a rough draft subject to further refinements; not all fields are covered equally and some scientists were excluded for technical reasons. Further details are on the Science Hall of Fame website, especially their FAQ section. As an aside, the authors called this an experiment in "culturomics" (the analysis of large sets of data to find cultural trends), which has been dubbed by the American Dialect Society as the "least likely to succeed" word of 2010.[7] It will be interesting to see if the word catches on, or if the culturomics link will remain red or turn blue.
Based on this measure of fame as established by Bohannon and Veres, a comparison of Wikipedia with the SHoF (WP:SHOF) was created by Snottywong, based on a suggestion from this article's writer. The comparison lists scientists, along with their fame in mD and years of birth and death as reported by Science, as well as years of birth and death as reported by Wikipedia and assessment ratings (taken from the {{WikiProject Biography}} banner). Since the SHoF remains a rough draft at the moment, a highly-rigourous analysis of its findings would be pointless at this stage; however, some things are worth noting.
First, some numbers. As of writing ...
The high degree of "completion" or of "accuracy" should not be considered a sign that Wikipedia is "complete" or "accurate", because the authors used Wikipedia to determine whether people were scientists or not and possibly used dates from Wikipedia articles. People who lack a Wikipedia entry would presumably be excluded on "technical grounds". It is also possible that the discrepancies merely reflect changes in Wikipedia due to vandalism, mistakes, and corrections which occurred since the data was acquired.
How, then, are article quality and fame related? Number crunching by The Signpost revealed the following.
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We can see that as the quality of articles increases, so does the mean fame of the scientists within the assessment class. Another way to look at this is through the distribution of fame within assessment classes: as the quality increases, the distribution of fame shifts towards higher fame – that is, higher-quality articles tend to be about more famous people. While fame correlates to some extent with quality, it is still in no way a guarantee that a famous person will have a high-quality article on Wikipedia (or vice-versa). There is not much else to say about these rather unsurprising results, except perhaps to mention that the distribution of unassessed articles most closely matches that of stubs.
We can also take a look at some trends. For gender, the rankings of the top 10 men and top 10 women look like this.
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Unsurprisingly, the top 10 men have higher fame than the top 10 women. At first glance, it seems there is an enormous disparity between the relative quality of articles on men (1 FA, 1 GA, 5 B, 1 C, 2 Start, 0 Stub) compared to those on women (0 FA, 0 GA, 1 B, 0 C, 6 Start, 3 Stub). However that conclusion is not strongly supported at the moment. Since quality & fame are somewhat correlated, it would be natural for the top 10 women (who are on average, less famous) to have articles of somewhat lower quality, although the discrepancy here seems to be too big to be entirely explainable only by lower fame. Instead, what seems to be the top indicator of quality is a combination of fame plus field. Many of the men in the top 10 ranking come from hard sciences and philosophy, while most of the women come from humanities (especially feminism and psychology/psychiatry). Indeed, the two lower-ranked articles (Start-class) for men concern psychologists (Havelock Ellis and G. Stanley Hall), and the only one above Start-class for women is for a physicist (Marie Curie).
Based on this, a more sensible conclusion would be that famous people from the humanities are under-represented on Wikipedia, compared to other fields. However, even that conclusion should not be embraced blindly. After all, it relies on a very small sampling (10 men, 10 women). Someone interested in doing a rigourous analysis of the data would have to weight ratings scores according to fame and year of birth, classify people according to the fields for which they are famous, and make sure the ratings are up to date. For example, the articles on Anna Freud and Melanie Klein could arguably be rated as a C-class instead of their current Start-class, and Karen Horney is rated B-class by WikiProject Psychology but the WikiProject Biography rating has not yet been updated, and is still a Start-class. And lastly, there is possibly a bias in the Google Books selection. Books from certain fields could be digitized more often than books from other fields, or the writing conventions of the field could make full names more prevalent than in other fields, boosting the "measured fame" compared to their "actual fame".
The above analysis just gives a hint of the type of questions that can be asked and answered by analysis of the SHoF data. It will be very interesting to see if concerted efforts to improve coverage in fields which are lacking will take place, or see if the gender gap truly exists, or if it is the result of a coverage bias amongst fields. It will be equally interesting to see if culturomics will take off as a field and what direction it will take.
Got comments or ideas of your own? Share them here!
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
This week, we took a look at WikiProject Warriors which focuses on the Warriors series of fantasy novels and other media that follow clans of feral cats living in a forest. The project also covers the related Seekers series about the adventures of four bear cubs. Both series were written by several authors under the pseudonym Erin Hunter. The small project is home to 13 active editors working on 57 articles and lists, including three Good Articles promoted in the fall of 2010. The project maintains a to-do list and patrols a watchlist. We interviewed project members Brambleclawx, Derild4921, and PrincessofLlyr.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Warriors? Which book is your favorite?
Have you contributed to any of the project's three Good Articles? Are you currently working on bringing an article up to GA or FA status?
And I also helped out a little bit with Into the Wild (Warriors), but that was mostly just fixing grammar. I'm currently working on getting Moonrise (Warriors) to Good article, and hopefully FA after that, though it may be a little difficult.Has the project had any difficulty establishing notability for its articles? How does establishing notability for the Warriors articles compare to establishing notability for other literature projects?
Do you have any tips for editors working on improving articles about books or stories in general?
Does WikiProject Warriors collaborate with any other projects?
What are the greatest challenges facing WikiProject Warriors? How can a new editor help today?
Anything else you'd like to add?
Next week we'll launch monkeys into space. Until then, float over to our zero-G archive.
Reader comments
This week saw no new admins. Looie496 resigned as admin after a recall request against him succeeded, with five administrators "in good standing" supporting recall. Closing admin Kingpin13 wrote "Looie496 may at any time start another Request for Adminship, and a promotion there would override this recall. It should be noted that some of the administrators supporting recall said they might support an RfA." The request for recall made was in response to a controversial unblock performed by Looie496, while the block was under discussion at the administrators' noticeboard. This recall makes Looie496 one of the shortest-serving admins ever, since his RfA was in October (see the "F and A" blurb, The Signpost's story about a notable admin recall last July, and Wikipedia:Administrators open to recall/Past requests).
At the time of publication there are four live RfAs, all to close soon: Acdixon, Ponyo, Gonzonoir, and Smartse.
Four lists were promoted:
Gunpowder Plot (nom) was promoted to featured status, with seven featured articles and seven good articles. The Plot was a failed assassination attempt against King James I of England and VI of Scotland in 1605 by a group of provincial English Catholics led by Robert Catesby. It is a highly significant, complex, and multilayered part of English history. (Nominated by Parrot of Doom.)
Two cases are currently open. The Committee opened or closed no cases during the week.
This week, further on-wiki evidence in excess of 4,000 words (~38kb) was submitted, while several proposals were also made in the workshop. Evidence submissions came to a close yesterday.
During the week, one party made several proposals in the workshop. Drafter Kirill Lokshin has not yet submitted a proposed decision on-wiki for arbitrators to vote on.
Today, a request for comment on the Wikipedia:Audit Subcommittee (AUSC) was opened by the Committee. AUSC is a subcommittee of the Arbitration Committee which should review and act upon concerns received by the community about CheckUser and Oversight activities. The Community has been invited to comment on AUSC, and the effectiveness of AUSC to date (if any).
Comments have also been invited about ongoing Community representation in AUSC. Currently, AUSC consists of three arbitrators and three community representatives elected by the Community. The Committee is considering a suggestion to abandon the election method in favour of the system that was used to appoint CheckUsers and Oversighters last year (see Signpost coverage from 16 August 2010, 23 August 2010 and 6 September 2010). A suggestion to appoint standby representatives is also being considered.
Reader comments
As mentioned in the latest WMF Engineering Update (see previous Signpost coverage), Foundation developers have been working on a project to improve the availability of "offline" versions of Wikimedia content. These versions would enable readers to access the collective information of Wikipedia and its sister projects even in areas with non-existent or poor internet coverage, including India, which was recently visited by some of the Tech team. This week developer Tomas Fincz posted an update on progress with the project (Wikimedia Techblog, adapted slightly):
| “ | The first step in making Wikimedia content available offline is to select it. The Wikipedia Version 1.0 Editorial Team has been steadily releasing new versions of their beta Wikipedia collections, but technical limitations have hampered how quickly those can be finished. We're going to evaluate the team's tool set to see how to support them.
Once the content has been selected, it needs to be packaged into a standard file format. The openZim format is an actively developed format for offline Wikipedia content, and we want to facilitate its integration into our general architecture. Our first step is going to be the enhancement of the Collections extension to support openZim. This will be done by our partners from PediaPress, who have already started to work on it. After selection and packaging, the last remaining piece is the application that allows readers to access the content... During the strategic planning process, one app emerged as a good candidate for the WMF to actively support: Kiwix. In order to support this work and to help make the application even easier to use, we'll be conducting a usability study on Kiwix, focused on search and browse, during the first quarter of 2011. Later this year, we'll be focusing on an easier update cycle using openZim as the underlying storage format. We hope 2011 will be full of exciting news about offline Wikimedia content. |
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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.
