On February 4, Sue Gardner announced the hiring of Geoff Brigham as General Counsel to the Wikimedia Foundation. The General Counsel is in charge of the Foundation's day-to-day legal issues. According to the job description, the General Counsel is responsible for "maintaining and developing the legal and contractual infrastructure required of a US-based nonprofit foundation which operates internationally; maintaining and developing policy and legal defenses relevant to the operation of a Top 10 multilingual information website created via the efforts of a broad, international volunteer community; [and] advising the Wikimedia Foundation and the global Wikimedia movement on ethical and mission-driven policy positions."
The office was created in 2006 (Signpost coverage: "Foundation hires Brad Patrick as general counsel and interim executive director"). In July 2007, Mike Godwin was hired for the position. Godwin handled legal affairs for the project for three years, dealing with several high-profile disputes, before leaving the project last October for undisclosed reasons. In late October, human resources firm m|Oppenheim was charged with finding a replacement for Godwin. Sue Gardner noted the challenge to recruit a person who "can handle a broad range of legal issues including the legal defense of our projects in an international context, an array of matters related to policy and regulatory compliance, issues such as privacy, and helping us with the challenges of opening a new office in India." m|Oppenheim talked to "hundreds of connectors and candidates" for the position, and around 12 short-listed candidates were interviewed.
English- and French-speaking Geoff Brigham received his law degree from the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington DC, and a BA in Political Science and French from the Indiana University in Bloomington. Prior to the appointment, Brigham was for nearly eight years Deputy General Counsel of eBay, where he handled legal affairs in 15 countries. Before that, Brigham was the Assistant US Attorney in Southern District of Florida, Senior Liaison Legal Officer in Paris, Federal Appellate Attorney, Associate with Finley, Kumble, Wagner et al., and Judicial Law Clerk. Wikimedians have been welcoming him to the Foundation on the Foundation-l mailing list.
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After the launch of the Google Art Project last week, which hosts very high-resolution images (up to more than 10 gigapixels) of famous artworks from galleries and museums around the world, a debate ensued on whether and how to upload those that show public domain works to Wikimedia Commons.
It was discussed whether Google's terms of services permit such reuse, whether it would still be legal under copyright in case of the lack of such permission, and whether it might offend cultural institutions that are collaborating with Wikimedia or could intend to do so.
Witty lama, who has long been known for his work on such GLAM relationships (Galleries, libraries, archives and museums) and in December took up a fellowship position at the Wikimedia Foundation, strongly advised against copying the reproductions: "Of course, legally and ethically the community and WMF's position remains that you can't copyright a PD artwork merely by making a faithful reproduction of it (cf. Bridgeman v. Corel). However, from a pragmatic point of view the advantages of having a dozen gigapixel images of important paintings (as awesome as that would be) would, IMHO, be outweighed by the blow this would deal to our reasonably good-standing in the cultural sector these days."
Apart from the diplomatic concerns, the images also present technical challenges, their full resolution exceeding the 65536 x 65536 pixels maximum of the JPEG specifications and the 100MB file upload limit on Commons. Dcoetzee announced that he had started to download and archive some of the images in full resolution, and has already uploaded three of them in a somewhat lower resolution to Commons (File:Giovanni Bellini - Saint Francis in the Desert - Google Art Project.jpg,File:Pieter Bruegel the Elder- The Harvesters - Google Art Project.jpg, File:Van Gogh - Starry Night - Google Art Project.jpg). The full 1.6 gigapixel version of one image, Starry Night, has been uploaded to the Internet Archive.
Recalling the 2009 legal threat of the UK's National Portrait Gallery (NPG) against Dcoetzee for similar uploads of reproductions of public domain paintings (Signpost coverage: "Copyright threat"), Witty lama strongly criticized him for the new uploads: "Didn't we learn anything from the NPG fiasco, especially you Derreck!?" David Gerard retorted "Yes: we learnt to stand up to odious and reprehensibly fraudulent claims of copyright on public domain works. ... Derek did nothing wrong and is doing nothing wrong." Dcoetzee said that the three images were just a "sample" and that he planned "no further uploads for a while, just gathering data on local storage". He also indicated that the legal concerns from the NPG case do not apply to museums in the countries like the US where the public domain status of faithful reproductions of 2D public domain artworks is more clearly established than in the UK.
It was also debated whether Wikimedia projects have a need for such high resolutions at all. Dcoetzee defended their usefulness, pointing to an essay titled "Why we need high-resolution media". The newly created category "Google Art Project" already contains a few detail images that were excerpted from Google's reproductions (one of them currently being used in the article Tudor rose). The version of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "Harvesters" uploaded by Dcoetzee (see above), while reduced to 280 megapixels from Google's 4.5 gigapixels, compares favorably to a previously uploaded high resolution version (3.6 megapixels) from another source, allowing the viewer to recognize grazing cattle in the background or the facial expressions of the harvest workers in the foreground.
In other GLAM-related news, a monthly newsletter titled "This month in GLAM" has been started on the Foundation's Outreach wiki. Among various other items covered previously in the Signpost, the first issue records the following events for January:
The Deseret News, a Utah newspaper owned by the Mormon (LDS) Church, published an article titled "Wiki Wars: In battle to define beliefs, Mormons and foes wage battle on Wikipedia". It stated that "for people looking into the doctrines, history and practices of the LDS Church and other religions, Wikipedia is seen as the most accurate, reliable and unbiased definition", and cited a 2007 comment by M. Russell Ballard, a member of the LDS Church's Quorum of the Twelve: "[Internet] conversations will continue whether or not we choose to participate in them. But we cannot stand on the sidelines while others, including our critics, attempt to define what the church teaches."
Much of the rest of the article illustrates the "battle" by focusing on two editors: User:Bochica (later User:Roger Penumbra), a mormon who got involved in Wikipedia in 2006 after experiencing "the power of Wikipedia.org to define the world – and his faith" through an exchange with an LDS missionary who had grown doubts about the church's tenets after reading Wikipedia, and User:John Foxe, an account which according to Deseret News belongs to "a professor at Bob Jones University, a Christian college and seminary located in Greenville, South Carolina that has historically been hostile to the LDS Church".
Finally, the newspaper quoted Richard L. Bushman, a professor of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University and author of the reference cited most often in the article on Joseph Smith, Jr. (founder of the LDS movement). Bushman called the article "a picky piece that isn't inaccurate, but it sort of lacks depth. It ends up being shallow, I think."
Concerns about the small proportion of women editing Wikipedia have been voiced for a long time, e.g. by senior Wikimedia figures including Sue Gardner and Jimmy Wales in recent interviews. However, The New York Times front-page story on January 31 (see last week's "In the news") brought an enormous amount of additional attention to the topic. This attention included further international media coverage (some summarized by Gardner on her personal blog), and a renewed discussion among Wikipedians. Much of the latter discussion took place on the newly opened "Gendergap" mailing list, which is hoped to "become a space where Wikipedians and non-Wikipedians can share research and information and tactics for making Wikipedia more attractive to women editors" (Gardner). The Gendergap mailing list discussion reached almost 200 postings within less than a week. The issue was also highlighted in a posting on the Foundation's official blog.
On the Gendergap list, Sue Gardner recommended a discussion on Metafilter on the topic ("Wikipedia, Snips & Snails, Sugar & Spice?"). Jessamyn West, who works as a full-time community manager at Metafilter and had written one of the eight commentaries invited by the NYT after its initial article, described on the list why the Metafilter community had a more balanced gender ratio – around 60/40 male/female:
| “ | I credit this both to some aggressive moderation in what is otherwise a lightly moderated site [we delete rape jokes and I'll take the heat when people flip out about censorship] some cultivation of female members and some visible norm-setting among all the moderators for how we want the community to run. | ” |
Sue Gardner concluded that "the lesson for Wikimedia [from the Metafilter example], is that if the community makes something a priority, and continually reinforces it, then culture change can be achieved. I find this heartening because I think the people at Metafilter are fairly similar to the people at Wikimedia".
Gardner outlined a "kind of 'theory of the problem'", starting by saying the reason why the gender gap should be considered a problem for Wikipedia at all: "We want women to contribute to Wikipedia because we want Wikipedia to contain the sum of all human knowledge, not just the stuff that men know." She then went on to list the reasons for the gap, one being that "for many reasons that there's no point articulating because they're outside our control, women tend to be less tech-centric than men, and they tend to see technology as less "fun", something to be addressed by usability efforts. Secondly, that "women tend to have less free time than men, and they tend to spend their free time less in solitary pursuits". Adding to this, she observed a "social/cultural barricade [that] is essentially: women (tend to) dislike fighty cultures more than men".
Annie Lin and Sage Ross from the Foundation's Public Policy Initiative pointed out "that the Wikipedia Campus Ambassador program is currently about 55% male and 45% female – a gender ratio that we are quite proud of"[4] and that "a lot of our Campus Ambassadors are people who totally new to the community"[5]. (Gardner, too, had remarked in earlier interviews that women seemed more ready to volunteer for such activities when classes were asked on campus.)
Another issue, criticized as "hardcoded discrimination", is that in languages where there are different female and male forms of the word "user", such as German ("Benutzerin" vs. "Benutzer"), a user page on the corresponding Wikipedia will appear to denote a female Wikipedian as male (such as in de:Benutzer:Example), and standard messages inviting people to create a user account might appear to address newbies as male too. Sue Gardner called this "awful" and "a key piece of information that is important and new (at least to me)."
The estimate that only 12.64% of Wikipedians are female, which formed the bases of much of the debate – having been quoted in some form in nearly all the recent media coverage, as well as in various WMF interviews in past months – comes from the 2010 UNU-MERIT study. In a posting on "Floatingsheep" (a group blog by researchers from the University of Kentucky and the University of Oxford) the authors wondered "if this figure accurately reflects the Wikipedia community", asking about possible sample bias ("for example, Russia and Russian speakers are the largest language and country groups represented in the survey even though the Russian section of Wikipedia is only the 8th largest linguistic group"), and further possible selection bias: "There were three times as many male respondents as female respondents. Does this accurately reflect the makeup of the Wikipedia audience? Given the unexpected results for language and country, it is not clear if there might be gender bias as well". Indeed, a different estimate of the Wikipedia audience by Quantcast (quoted by Jezebel writer Anna North in her contribution to the NYT debate, "The antisocial factor") gives vastly different numbers for Wikipedia's readers: 52 percent men, 48 percent women.
In addition, the Floatingsheep post noted a lack of information about the methodology on wikipediasurvey.org (which may be somewhat mitigated by the slides from a Wikimania 2009 talk about the then ongoing study). Wikipedia researcher Joseph Reagle (who is currently working on the topic of free culture and sexism) also noted that it was "as most surveys" subject to selection bias, but quoted an earlier, smaller survey which had given an even lower percentage: 7.3%.
Assuming its validity, the report of the UNU-MERIT study includes several further insights into the gender gap besides the much-quoted number, including:
| “ | The overall share of unregistered users among female Wikipedians [i.e. visitors to Wikipedia sites] is significantly higher than the respective share within male Wikipedians (52% vs. 35%). ... This gender difference is not surprising, and is probably explained by female Wikipedians being more protective of their privacy than male Wikipedians, and thus less likely to register. ...
The share of ex-contributors within 10–17 years old female Wikipedians is 3.1% and exceeds thus by far the respective share of this group in the [corresponding] male age cohort (2.2%). ... ... female contributors to Wikipedia appear less specialised in thematic fields than their male colleagues, and while their degree of specialisation increases with age, this increase is is less for male Wikipedia contributors. ... In accordance with overall patterns of education and labour markets in many economies, the share of scientists among male contributors is about three times larger than the share of scientists among female contributors. Another gender specific is that female contributors tend to focus on philosophy, religion (belief systems) and social sciences at a young age while male contributors focus on these thematic fields in the oldest age cohort. ... The reasons why women in this age cohort [32 and older] spend more than 2 hours more per week than men have to be further analysed, but the fact that women at this age are less often full-time employed, often stay at home in order to care for children, and often work as freelancers may play a role here. |
” |
The report noted that the gender gap does not only show in edits, but extends to financial contributions: "Men are obviously more willing to donate money to Wikipedia than women, as they show considerably higher shares of donors in all age cohorts".
Reader comments
This week, we turn our attention to WikiProject Spaceflight. Started in September 2006 by Mlm42, it has 40 active members. The project is home to 12 Featured articles, 5 Featured lists, 22 Good articles, and a portal – with a total of 5,258 articles under its care.
The Signpost interviewed five project members, and started by asking what motivated them to join the project. It is clear that all members have a passion for topics related to space. Colds7ream and Mlm42 were both drawn to spaceflight articles because of STS-115 during 2006, then under WikiProject Space missions. Mlm42 was inspired by banners like {{WPMILHIST}}, and was keen to jump on the 1.0 Article Assessment bandwagon, hoping to create a project banner that could track spaceflight articles. There was a discussion in 2007 to reorganize all space-related WikiProjects under a "WikiProject Space", and in 2008, WikiProject Space missions and WikiProject Space travelers were merged into WikiProject Human spaceflight as part of an effort to increase editor activity. A couple of years later, Mlm42 decided to bring Expedition 1 up to GA-status, in time for its 10 year anniversary in August 2010. Following a further discussion, it came to light that WikiProject Astronomy was not using, and had no desire to use, the "WikiProject Space" banner that had been created in 2007. So, it was decided to dissolve WikiProject Space completely, and simultaneously merge everything under Spaceflight into one project. GW was actively editing in this area prior to joining the project, and became a member when its scope was expanded from exploration-related articles to everything to do with spaceflight. He is active in both content and organizational areas of the project, and has been involved with most of the reorganization of space projects over the last four years. ChiZeroOne realised that collaboration with other editors is a means to improvement, and has been helping in any way possible with the revival of WikiProject Spaceflight. N2e has been editing space-related articles since 2004, and is particularly interested in private space ventures, such as the recent new competition for the national-monopoly governmental space initiatives of the early decades of the space age.
WikiProject Spaceflight has 5,258 articles associated with it. How do you keep all these up and what are your biggest challenges?
Do you collaborate with other WikiProjects?
WikiProject Spaceflight has Task Forces as well as Working Groups. What are the differences between the two?
What are the most pressing needs for WikiProject Spaceflight, and how can a new contributor help?
Any final words?
Next week, we'll see the genesis of new articles authored by anonymous users. Until then, read all the articles created by Signpost regulars in the archive.
Reader comments
The Signpost welcomes four editors as our newest admins.
At the time of publication there are two live RfAs: 5 albert square, due to finish 7 February, and ErikHaugen, due to finish 10 February.
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Four lists were promoted:
Information about new admins at the top is drawn from their user pages and RfA texts, and occasionally from what they tell us directly.
Reader comments
Two cases are open. The Committee did not open or close any cases during the week.
Due to the unavailability of one of the parties, a final extension has been granted for evidence submissions: the deadline is 9 February 2011; the target date has accordingly been extended to 13 February. During the week, over 200 kilobytes of content was added to the workshop by arbitrators, parties and others.
During the week, arbitrators, parties, and others, added 110 kilobytes of content to the workshop; over 45 kilobytes of this content was contributed by a single party. No proposed decision has been submitted for the arbitrators' consideration.
Following the completion of an automation task as authorised by the Committee (see Signpost coverage: 6 September 2010), Lightmouse (talk · contribs) filed an amendment request on 29 January 2011 applying for another single automation task authorised by the Bot Approvals Group. Six arbitrators replied, with three soliciting feedback from the community. Three editors, including arbitrator Shell Kinney, stated their belief that the previously granted permission would still apply to the task for which approval is sought this time; four indicated potentially supporting granting approval for Lightbot (talk · contribs) to "floating" tasks negotiated with the BAG. On 6 February, arbitrator Newyorkbrad proposed an amendment.
On 1 February, Ohconfucius (talk · contribs) filed an amendment seeking to terminate the restriction on his use of alternative accounts, citing his desire to operate a bot to ensure consistency of date formats in articles in line with WP:MOSNUM. Arbitrator Jclemens, along with six other arbitrators, indicated they would not oppose a single bot account, conditional on BAG approval for the task. They noted that no justification was advanced for multiple accounts, so they would address a wholesale removal of the restriction once the bot has proved successful. On 6 February, arbitrator Newyorkbrad proposed an amendment.
Mathsci (talk · contribs) proposed an amendment seeking a site ban on Captain Occam (talk · contribs). A few arbitrators indicated that they do not think further action is warranted at this time and that everyone should move on within their respective restrictions. A couple of arbitrators indicated that the request is more of an arbitration enforcement report, while another indicated that the act of fighting old battles needs to stop.
On 5 January 2011, Piotrus (talk · contribs) requested the Committee to lift his modified topic ban which bans him from "articles about national, cultural, or ethnic disputes within Eastern Europe, their associated talk pages, and any process discussion about these topics". The ban was set to expire on 2 March 2011 (see Signpost coverage: 10 January 2011). A motion to end the ban was passed on 3 February 2011, with two abstentions and three recusals. The motion included a reminder that "further disruption related to this case may result in the topic ban or other remedies being re-imposed."
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For most of its history, code for the MediaWiki software which forms the basis of WMF wikis and other sites was developed, packaged into sequential releases every three or four months, and then deployed. However, more recently, major changes have been deployed immediately (i.e. out of cycle), easing the pressure on set-piece deployments of code. On Tuesday, February 8, starting at 07:00 UTC, the latest major release of the MediaWiki software, version 1.17, will be released, giving WMF wikis around six months' worth of not-already-deployed code updates (Wikimedia Techblog). A release to other sites will follow soon after. The release represents a massive code review effort in the last two months to check all updates to the software (approximately 1200 of them) before they are released.
If the deployment goes well, it is unlikely that Wikimedians will notice much difference: most of the major features have already been implemented on WMF wikis. (Some interim disruption is nonetheless expected; for example, database dumps are to be stopped temporarily.) Among the major unreleased developments is the new ResourceLoader, designed to speed up page loading times, though it could cause JavaScript errors on less well maintained (smaller) WMF wikis. Other updates are less obvious: a full list, which includes already released developments, is also available. A number of other developments dependent on 1.17 will be added shortly after its release.
The regularity of releases – and particularly the criteria used for determining which updates were deployed immediately and which had to sit in the queue – has been a contentious issue in recent months (see, for example, previous Signpost coverage from October 2010: 1, 2). There is now hope that after the release of 1.17, it may be possible to act upon volunteer developers' calls to have a more regular development cycle. For example, Brion Vibber, for a long time Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Wikimedia, commented (wikitech-l mailing list):
| “ | 1.17 releasing soon should bring the schedule back to semi-annual, but there's no firm impediment other than our own self-organization to pushing 1.18 out 3 months later instead of 6 or 13. | ” |
In addition to the major announcement concerning 1.17, the Foundation's Engineering Update for February (and covering the activities of January) was published last week on the Wikimedia Techblog, giving a brief overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in the last month. It summarised the developments:
| “ | January 2011 was a tough month for Wikimedia engineers. About 75% of us caught the "WikiPlague" (a.k.a. RSV) and were out of commission between 3 and 10 days. Also, with the end of the Fundraiser coming early, this past month has been a time of re-starting and re-setting priorities... Major accomplishments this month include: the completion of equipment specs and negotiations to order all equipment for the new primary data center in Ashburn, Virginia; major work on getting MediaWiki 1.17 released, especially by reducing the Code Review queue to releasable levels; and work on increasing Nagios and Watchmouse monitoring [to prevent and minimise downtime]. | ” |
The update also noted that new job openings for the positions of Operations Engineer and Senior QA Engineer, previously announced, had been published; and that work had been done on evaluating LiquidThreads but that development of the Article Feedback tool had been put off until after the release of 1.17. Other noticeable improvements include the imminent launch of improved category collation code, allowing sub-categories, files, and pages to be paged separated. This "dark-launch" will be invisible at first, while the feature is stress-tested to check for errors before it is finished and made visible to the average user. According to the update, a survey related to the Wikimedia mobile site is also being drafted.
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
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