The "gender gap" discussion about the low rates of participation of women in Wikipedia continued last week, and extended to overlap with another much-debated topic where the Wikimedia Foundation has been pondering changes: controversial content (sexual images).
On 17 February 2011, the Foundation's Executive Director, Sue Gardner posted "a quick note recapping the basics about Wikipedia's gender gap and Wikimedia's response to it." She recalled the widespread media coverage that was triggered by a January 31 New York Times front-page article on the issue (cf. Signpost coverage), and revealed that the Foundation had actively sought it out, based on the insight that the gender-gap problem is complicated because "solutions don’t lie entirely within the Wikipedia editorial community, because important voices are missing there. We knew we would need to bring in voices from outside, and support them in making themselves heard."
In 2009, after the presentation of the UNU-MERIT study (whose estimate that only around 13% of Wikipedians are female also formed the basis of the recent debates), Noam Cohen, the author of the recent NYT article, had already written about the same topic (cf. Signpost coverage: "Wikipedia's changing culture, and gender statistics"). Indicating an explanation for how the same topic made it to the paper's front page, Sue Gardner recounted how last month she and Moka Pantages (the Foundation's Global Communications Manager) had "used the occasion of Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary to have an off-the-record lunch with New York Times staff", talking with them about Wikipedia's gender gap. Summarizing the state two and a half weeks later, she said: "[w]e've leveraged Wikipedia's visibility to develop public awareness of the gender gap, resulting in a flurry of decentralized activity in expected and unexpected forums, brainstorming potential solutions".
For example, on 17 February 2011, a list participant announced that she had started the website Women4Wikipedia.net, aiming "to organise Womens Wikipedia Hackfests between now and International Womens Day (8 March)" and is hosting weekly chat sessions on the topic. A Facebook group has been started as well. Since its inception on February 1, the "Gendergap" mailing list has reached over 600 postings at the time of writing. The gender gap page on Meta collects material on the topic.
Two days later, Gardner listed "Nine reasons women don't edit Wikipedia (in their own words)" on her personal blog, based on an extensive reading of online conversations generated by the NYT article. It mostly quoted comments made outside Wikimedia sites, with an exception being reason 7 – "Some women find Wikipedia culture to be sexual in ways they find off-putting". There, Gardner listed some answers to a question that was posed on the Gendergap list by George Herbert and herself to women editors: whether they had "come across explicit material on the Wikimedia projects that...[they found] offensive, degrading or discouraging". This was triggered by a current debate on the English Wikipedia about an essay by Herostratus.
The essay (in its current version) argues that "Wikipedia should not include images from hardcore pornography", and has been cited with regard to the article bukkake. After conflicts with users who disagreed with that view, it was userfied, but this decision was overturned by Jimmy Wales. Gendergap list members chimed in, such as Wikipedia researcher Joseph Reagle, who – somehow reminiscent of Gardner's "bring in voices from outside" – asked: "Is this the sort of thing that would benefit from public pillory? For example, a posting on Geek Feminism blog or elsewhere?"
Last November, Gardner herself had already touched on that topic in a blog post (cf. Signpost coverage: "Controversial content and Wikimedia leadership"), where she noted that "we’re the only major site that doesn’t treat controversial material – e.g., sexually-explicit imagery, violent imagery, culturally offensive imagery – differently from everything else", and that the Board of Trustees had aimed "to probe into whether that was helping or hurting our effectiveness at fulfilling our mission" at its October 2010 meeting. On that occasion, the 2010 Wikimedia Study of Controversial Content was presented, commissioned by the Foundation after widespread debates over the deletion of sexual images. It had been expected that the Board would adopt its recommendations immediately, but about half of them proved controversial (cf. last week's Signpost coverage), and a working group was formed instead. On Sunday, an update on the group's progress was posted by one of its members, Trustee Phoebe Ayers (Phoebe). She reported that she had asked the Wikimedia Tech Department about possible specifications to implement the study's recommendations for features that would enable users to block content they find offensive, for themselves only. However, no actual development of such features would commence without a request from the Board. Two of the original group members, Jan-Bart de Vreede and Kat Walsh, had stepped down and were replaced by Matt Halprin, Jimmy Wales and Bishakha Datta. Phoebe said "the board does not yet have a formal position on this whole issue".
The Wikimedia Foundation has appointed a "consultant for National Programs, India", whose role will be "to design and implement specific pilot programs that encourage many more Indians to become contributors to our projects in Indic languages as well as English." The new position is being filled by Hisham Mundol, who worked on "large-scale national programs on HIV/AIDS prevention" when he was a consultant for the Public Health Foundation of India. As Hisham Mundol said in his first IRC office hours, he speaks Hindi, Malayalam and English, and is currently based in Delhi.
The announcement by the Wikimedia Foundation's Chief Global Development Officer, Barry Newstead, explained that Mundol is "a newcomer to the Wikimedia movement [who] will be spending the coming weeks (not months!) in learning mode". In an FAQ on the new position, it was explained that among the 179 applications, there were only seven from active Wikimedians, who do not have the required experience.
The Foundation had not been advertising a job opening for a consultant for National Programs. Instead, the job opening in last August was for a "National Program Director, India", who would have been "the Wikimedia Foundation's chief representative in India". Newstead did not mention the previous job title or explain the modifications, except to note in the FAQ that the new position was as consultant rather than a staffer, partly because "we want to keep our options open in regards to the potential structure of future Wikimedia Foundation operations in India". It is likely that concerns about such a director's exposure to legal liability for Wikimedia content may have played a role. Asked in the IRC office hour about "the strategy we have for dealing with legal issues in India", Newstead emphasized that the Indian chapter and "Hisham, who is an independent contractor, have NO control over Wikimedia content as organizations." Discussing such concerns further, he advised the Indian chapter to get a good legal counsel, and align with organizations like the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), which might be inclined to support Wikipedia.
The current media debates about the role of digital communication technologies in the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 focus mostly on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, but Wikipedia was mentioned a few times as well. As already noted last week, activist Wael Ghonim made headlines by saying "Our revolution is like Wikipedia... Everyone is contributing content, [but] you don't know the names of the people contributing the content. This is exactly what happened".
In an article about the role of the Internet for the protesters on the New York Times' "Link by Link" blog ("Egyptians Were Unplugged, and Uncowed"), Noam Cohen drew from, among other things, impressions and contacts made at Wikimania 2008:
| “ | This comfort with a relatively free-flowing Internet was on display in 2008, when Wikipedia's annual convention was held in Alexandria, at the new high-tech library built near where the legendary Library of Alexandria had been.
Filled with much of Egypt's technical class, which included many women, the gathering was billed as an effort to bolster Arabic Wikipedia. The relatively low number of articles didn't accurately reflect the importance of technology in the Arab world, the thinking went. Many Egyptians had an active, even bustling, Facebook presence, and attempts were made to organize protests at the site on behalf of bloggers who had been persecuted by the government. |
” |
Trying to draw a direct line to the recent events where the government had shut down the entire Egyptian Internet to quell the protests, Cohen quoted Moushira Elamrawy, "an advocate for free culture and free software in Alexandria" nowadays working for the Wikimedia Foundation (where she recently became "Chapter Relations Manager", see Signpost coverage; in fact she received the news about Mubarak's resignation during her first IRC office hour). She "remembered the conference as a chance for the budding techie community in Egypt to meet in person. Two years later, the Internet shutdown showed the need for an independent community of technical experts to protect Egyptians' connection to the world. The day the Internet was shut off represented a point of no return, Ms. Elamrawy said. 'It was definitely one of the most provoking things. We felt abandoned – completely isolated from the world.'"
In his 2008 coverage of the event, Cohen had observed that "In Egypt, Wikipedia is more than hobby", putting "the enthusiasm for building a stronger Arabic Wikipedia" among the young local participants in the context of the then-ongoing April 6 Youth Movement.
The choice of Egypt as the site of Wikimania 2008 had initially been controversial because of the Egyptian government's human rights record (Signpost coverage).
The Guardian featured a long portrait of Jimmy Wales last week ("The Saturday interview: Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales"). It opened by noting that Wales had just moved to Britain to join his fiancee, who was Tony Blair's diary secretary, is currently a director at Freud Communications, a London-based PR firm (where she is handling the 2012 Summer Olympics) and is about to give birth to Wales' second child. Author Aida Edemariam then covered many topics about Wales' life and Wikipedia that have been reported elsewhere, adding several details, for example that Wales had grown up as a "'super-geek' with thick glasses and a very early interest in computers". While describing Wales as "generally being the suave public face of his company [i.e. Wikipedia - sic]", the article also gave examples of how he was still doing "some of the nitty-gritty" of Wikipedia editing, "of keeping an eye on new entries, vetting the quality of their sources, flagging up inappropriate bias ..., and reverting anything dubious". Wales noted that there are several kinds of vandalism, distinguishing libelous modifications of BLPs from more harmless edits that are called "sandboxing – people are treating it like a sandbox – they know they can't really hurt anything." The article claimed that Wales "is, in fact, generally dismissive of traditional modes of authority – peer-reviewed journals, the requirement for strings of letters after names. 'I think people have to recognise that the traditional modes of authority weren't that great.'" On Wales' actual company Wikia, the article reported claims by unnamed critics that it "in effect piggybacks on the reputation built up by the legions of unpaid contributors to the encyclopedia, and thus ruthlessly exploits them", a charge dismissed by Wales.
A recent essay titled "The Missing Wikipedians" argues that "as large parts of Africa go online, it is expected that they will start to edit Wikipedia and that they will edit it in their own language. Both of these assumptions may be incorrect." The author, South African Heather Ford, a former member of the Wikimedia Foundation's advisory board, published the essay on her personal blog, but it will be part of an upcoming reader edited by the "Critical Point of View" (CPOV) Wikipedia research initiative (cf. Signpost interview with two of its organizers).
The essay centers around the case of the article Makmende on the English Wikipedia, about a fictional superhero that last year became what has been called Kenya's first Internet meme. Around that time, blogger and Berkman fellow Ethan Zuckerman (also a member of the WMF advisory board) had tried to look up the term on Wikipedia and instead encountered deletion log entries telling him that the article had been speedily deleted three times (a later version was kept). This prompted him to write a blog post presenting the deletions as a case of what Wikipedians call systemic bias: "Makmende may never become particularly important to English speaking users outside of Kenya. But the phenomenon's quite important within the Kenyan internet". Ford's essay expands on Zuckerman's blog post, quoting from a subsequent AfD: "Wikipedia editors claimed that the article needed to be deleted because there existed 'no reliable sources, and no claims of notability'. Pointing to the lack of sources relating to African culture online [a user] came back with this retort: 'The problem is that there is hardly any content on African influences in the 90's and 80's which may make it hard to make the connections'. However, Ford also noted that "interestingly, Makmende does not exist in the Swahili version of Wikipedia ... There seems to be a disconnect between where ordinary Kenyans want their cultural narratives to live, and where outsiders imagine it."
The essay was discussed on the Foundation-l mailing list, where participants questioned the accuracy of the description of the deletions. Thewub argued that "this particular example is portrayed absolutely incorrectly", explaining that the first version had been rightfully deleted as G1 ("Patent nonsense, meaningless, or incomprehensible"), consisting only of "Makmende. Kenyan Superhero. Spawned. Not born. Amphibious. Breaths underwater." The next two speedy deletions concerned a copyright violation. And the AfD had in fact resulted in an eight keep votes and none for deletion except the nominator (but only his statement was quoted by Ford). He concluded "Honestly, I think this is an example of Wikipedia working pretty well. The only problem was perhaps a misleading third deletion summary" (citing G3 - "pure vandalism" - instead of G12 "Unambiguous copyright infringement"). Last year, Wikimedia Trustee SJ had offered similar clarification about the speedy deletions in the comment section of Zuckerman's blog post.
Asked by the Signpost for comment, Ford acknowledged that "thewub makes some good points about the exact sequence of events that I think are important to add to the story", but that they would not refute the larger arguments in the essay, which had used the Makmende deletion "as a story that epitomises Wikipedia's current growth problems and the challenges it faces as it seeks to 'make all human knowledge accessible'."
Indeed the Foundation-l criticism did not extend to the rest of the essay. After citing various researchers on the slowing growth of Wikipedia, rising revert rates and deletionism, and questioning the expectation that increased Internet access in developing countries will generate an influx of new Wikipedians, Ford comes back to the Makmende example, asking "why was the Kenyan community so determined that the Makmende article exist on the English version of Wikipedia?", despite the existence of a Wikipedia in their own language, with much less bureaucratic red tape. To answer this, she applies four different kinds of motivation to contribute to public good in online cooperations that sociologist Peter Kollock identified: Anticipated reciprocity by other users, reputation, a sense of efficacy (having an impact) and need (of others, i.e. altruism).
In the conclusion, Ford argues that for "people in developing countries like Kenya ... the motivations for contributing in English Wikipedia are ... much greater than [for] contributing to the Swahili version, but it is unlikely that the vast holes in geographical and cultural content will be filled when the costs of contribution are so large." She observes that "far from having nothing left to talk about, Wikipedia has a number of holes", but that it needs "a strategy for dealing with local notability".
As part of a collaboration with Wikimédia France, the Palace of Versailles announced last week that they will host a "Wikimedian in Residence" for six months, to be "the interface between the scientific staff of the Palace and the editor communities".
The Palace, a royal château near Paris, was the residence of the Kings of France from 1682 until October 1789 - from when Louis XIV moved from Paris until the start of the French Revolution. The Palace and its park are viewed as an architectural masterpiece and a historical symbol strongly associated with the monarchy. It is listed by the UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. As an institution, the Palace makes use of new technologies and mediums, with the creation of mobile applications, the organisation of a photo contest on the social photo-sharing site, Flickr, and its recent involvement with the Google Art Project.
Following the partnership established by Wikimédia France with the City of Toulouse, Adrienne Alix, chair of the French chapter, was contacted by Laurent Gaveau, Deputy Director of Information and Communication of the Palace of Versailles. Gaveau was interested in building links with the Wikimedia projects. He attended the Rencontres Wikimédia in December 2010, where he met Benoît Evellin (User:Trizek) and discussed the idea of bringing together Versailles and Wikimedia. After the example of Liam Wyatt's past residence at the British Museum last year (cf. Signpost coverage), the project settled on the idea of a Wikimedian in Residence.
According to Laurent Gaveau, the institution realized that Wikipedia – the second most widely used source of information about the Palace after the official website – could not be ignored. He says his institution finds the articles numerous and of good quality. "Thus, this is not about correcting them strictly speaking, but going into the subject in greater depth, and in particular providing first-hand material to Versailles enthusiasts who edit Wikipedia". He mentions, as possible activities, taking photographs to illustrate articles, consulting archives, and gaining feedback from curators. Jean-Jacques Aillagon, former Minister of Culture and Communication and the current President of the Château de Versailles, mentioned that several curators already contribute to Wikipedia at their own initiative.
Benoît Evellin, who recently celebrated his 1000th day as a Wikipedian, is an administrator on the French-language Wikipedia and a member of the chapter. Active in helping newcomers learn about Wikipedia (as part of the Service de Parrainage Actif, equivalent of the English Wikipedia's Adopt-a-user program), he is also one of the leaders of a WikiProject dedicated to cultural heritage buildings. The Versailles domain contains many such protected monuments. He will be undertaking this residence as part of his studies, since it will be his "final training period for [his] master degree in cultural mediation". As such, "the Palace of Versailles gives me the legal compensation for a training period". The situation is similar to that of the second Wikipedian in Residence, Lori Phillips (HstryQT), at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis (cf. Signpost coverage), who spent a paid student internship there, while Wyatt was at the British Museum as an unpaid volunteer.
The official announcement was made on Tuesday, 15 February 2011, with a press release that was picked up in many media outlets (including Le Monde). Since then, Wikipedia and the partnership have been featured on the front page of the Palace of Versailles website (see also the English-language announcement on the Foundation's blog).
Early feedback from the French-speaking community has been very positive. Just a few hours after the announcement on the Village Pump, a WikiProject dedicated to the Palace was established, and a Château de Versailles Portal quickly followed. The editor who created both pages stated that "if it is announced everywhere (and it is!) that a partnership between Wikipedia and the Palace of Versailles is going to happen, then we have to prove now our capacity to set up a discussion space for coordinating such a project". Benoît Evellin also has a presence on Wikimedia Commons, and on the English-language Wikipedia.
Artinfo.com reported that "the fact that experts at the institution will edit the articles generated by the project may raise some eyebrows, and French art site Artclair has already been wondering if contributors will still have the ability to modify the articles that are officially sanctioned by the château." Responding to community concerns about original research, worrying that the Wikimedian in Residence or Versailles experts might be tempted to add true but unverifiable facts, Benoît said "I do not plan to go evangelizing people around by shouting "Edit, edit!". I am here to teach people how to edit Wikipedia well, the same way I strive to teach newbies while patrolling. Among other things, I am working to explain that every piece of information must have one verifiable source. The Five Pillars were presented, and they will be [presented] again".
Asked about the first week, Benoît Evellin tells the Signpost his time there has been busy:
This week, we take our first in-depth look at WikiProject Mathematics. Started in November 2002 by Chas zzz brown, it is one of the top 15 most active projects, and has 331 members. The project is home to 24 Featured articles, 3 Featured lists, 35 Good articles, 17 Featured pictures and a Featured portal – with a total of 8,850 assessed articles. The Signpost interviewed seven project members.
Charles Matthews has been on Wikipedia since 2003, and has a doctorate in mathematics; Jakob.scholbach joined around 2005, working mainly on frequently viewed mathematics articles; Geometry guy was invited to join the project in 2007, and became involved in assessment and review; Ozob is a professional mathematician who joined in 2008 and has a soft spot for calculus articles; computer scientist and mathematician David Eppstein, who has his own article in Wikipedia, joined in 2006; Kiefer.Wolfowitz is a statistician who joined in 2009; while CBM became involved because he "found the idea of a public, comprehensive, free reference of that sort, very exciting".
Although the project has some 8,850 assessed articles, there are actually over 25,400 articles associated with it. We asked how project members keep up with all these, and if there are any plans to assess the other articles. According to CBM, keeping up with such a large number of articles is a daunting task, "Fortunately, some of the original members of the project set up useful bots that index our articles automatically. The List of mathematics articles and List of mathematicians are maintained by a bot, and these lists are used to create Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Current activity. These tools have allowed us to track the huge number of math articles without relying on manual effort or talk page tags. The main limitation in going beyond tracking to actual editing is the ratio of editor time to the number of articles needing improvement." Project members, including Ozob and David, watch the Current activity list, while Kiefer works to provide references and short improvements to core articles, while developing a few articles.
Geometry guy contributed to the assessment of around 2,000 mathematics articles in 2007, but believes that "doing more than this would require substantial concerted editorial efforts that could be better applied to other goals." David sees assessment as "most useful at the top end, where GA and FA status provide recognition to excellent articles and at the bottom end, where the lists of stubs and User:Mathbot/Most wanted redlinks are a good hunting ground for articles in severe need of improvement. For the rest, I'd rather spend my editing time improving article space rather than trying to decide whether an article is really B or C class and exactly how important it is".
Of the 8,850 assessed articles, there are some 4,053 Start-class articles and 3,401 stubs. What is the project doing to advance these articles? For Jakob, many of these short articles just contain a definition of some specific concept, "in which case, it is unlikely that they will get much longer anytime soon or at all. The main task for this type of articles is to provide accurate references; here steady progress is made. From my personal experience, such highly specific topics actually tend to be more satisfactory than articles on broader mathematical subjects which require much more expertise to write".
WikiProject Mathematics has numerous Featured content. How did the project achieve this and how can other projects work toward this? For Jakob, the project as a whole has an enjoyable, friendly atmosphere: "I found that the usual procedures ensuring a sound article quality such as Peer review and Good article nomination, work well. On the other hand, most members of WikiProject Mathematics don't seem to focus on working on recognized content. For example, Riemann hypothesis (worth $1.000.000) has been pushed to an FA-ish level by a group of editors, but was not nominated. Reviewers' expectations at the FA candidacy tend to be quite high as far as the accessibility of scientific articles to the "general public" is concerned. This is often the most challenging bit in having a successful GA or FA candidacy, given that most mathematical subjects rely on a rigorous, abstract language that is not part of usual daily life. One way to deal with this issue in a more systematic way might be a "non-peer review", or just a forum for editors to meet mathematically untrained editors willing to work together on the accessibility of advanced scientific articles, outside the rather hasty FA process."
According to Kiefer, "On Wikipedia, mathematical topics present few temptations for editors to engage in point-of-view editing or to make personal attacks; goodwill flows in discussions on exposition (focusing on the public's needs) and scope (applications and generalizations). The cooperative atmosphere in Wikipedia is similar to that in the world of mathematics, and more generally, in mathematical sciences such as computer science and statistics. At the end of a day of research or teaching, editing Wikipedia is a relaxing hobby for mathematical scientists."
"Articles on mathematics are under-represented in the GA and FA categories, which do have biographies of mathematicians. Improving mathematical articles to GA and FA status is especially challenging, because of the demand that articles be accessible to the reading public. Perhaps Wikipedia should feature more good articles on important topics rather than excellent articles on minor topics and trivia? Mathematical scientists worry that Wikipedia indulges in "slumming"—dumbing down its content and showing contempt for the public's intelligence and attention—neglecting the mission of true encyclopedias, which has been and should remain enlightenment. Wikipedia should inform the populace rather than popularize infamy and so oppose the commercialism of the mass media," Kiefer added. He further suggests that Wikipedia should highlight mathematics and science on its main page, "and refrain from promoting Pokémon, pornography, and professional wrestling on Did you know?."
CBM does not think the lack of FA nominations as necessarily negative: "It has been said that Wikipedia is not a unified work, it's a collection of mostly-independent specialist encyclopedias that share goals and build on each other. Only a few members of the mathematics project have been active in nominating articles for FA status; the most recent promotion was Euclidean algorithm in 2009. I don't view this as entirely a bad thing. On a site the size of Wikipedia, there will naturally be differing visions of what an ideal article should be. One of the strengths of Wikipedia is we accommodate such a wide range of topics and writing styles." Charles believes that mathematics is different when it comes to featured content, "the FA criteria don't fit that well with what survey articles in the subject typically try to do, and we are still wrestling with the consequences for exposition. It isn't easy".
We asked what the most pressing needs for WikiProject Mathematics are, and how a new contributor can help. Charles identifies four areas, "better biographies, particularly for mathematicians outside the English-speaking world; connected historical coverage; referencing; and expository work, for topics up to first-year graduate level, through gradual expansion of material which although accurate, may be "impacted" and short of standard motivating remarks and heuristics". Ozob says that the most important way someone can help is by notifying the project of what is not clear, and feels that good exposition is their biggest problem, not just as a WikiProject but as a profession: "There's hardly any mathematical exposition for the layman anywhere. And that's despite there being some fascinating stuff which can be explained in very elementary terms. ... The WikiProject has an especially big problem with math articles that have applications to the sciences and engineering. Non-mathematicians frequently try to read those articles and end up stymied by thickets of abstraction, because we often discuss modern mathematical methods that are very abstract but very powerful. But sometimes it's our fault; we think like mathematicians, our reliable sources are written by mathematicians, and without meaning to, we sometimes end up writing for mathematicians."
Kiefer suggests that mathematics instructors should consider donating lecture-notes to appropriate articles. "More generally, graphical donations enliven articles and increase their appeal. Instructors in computational geometry and computer graphics should encourage their students to contribute, perhaps for course projects. Maybe the Wikipedia Foundation should give a special award recognizing the graphical donations by David Eppstein, Oleg Alexandrov, and others?" he added. "WikiProject Statistics has hard-working cadre like Qwfp and Melcombe, and we all would welcome new members. Personal invitations have recruited some great editors, but I am embarrassed at not having invited a professional colleague to join the project, yet! Perhaps the Wikipedia Foundation should hire staff for the mathematics project, or project members could write a letter appealing for volunteers in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society?"
CBM's recommendation is for new editors to pick a stub article on a topic that they have some knowledge about, and expand it into something a little longer. For Geometry guy, "The project has done really well in providing references for the expert, but we need to draw more readers in, while also defending the importance of specialist content to the encyclopedia. Mathematics is a stark example of this tension, but not the only one: I heartily recommend the essay Many things to many people (written primarily by Markus Poessel) for wider discussion."
We'll be Bach next week with a classic project. Until then, let our previous work serenade you in the archive.
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The Signpost welcomes two editors as our newest admins.
At the time of publication there are three live RfAs: The Bushranger and Glane23, both due to finish on Tuesday 22 February, and Snottywong, due to finish on Monday 28 February.
Six articles were promoted to featured status:
Seven lists were promoted:
Four featured lists have been delisted in February thus far:
Five featured sounds were promoted, in twelve parts:
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
The Committee opened no new cases during the week, but closed two cases. Two cases are currently open.
During the week, 11 editors submitted over 67 kilobytes in on-wiki evidence. One of these editors also submitted several workshop proposals.
During the week, another editor submitted an additional 15 kilobytes in on-wiki evidence. No workshop proposals were submitted.
This case concerns allegations about disruptive editing on articles relating to the Shakespeare authorship question. Evidence was submitted on-wiki by 27 editors, including co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimbo Wales (talk · contribs). During the case, Smatprt (talk · contribs) also appealed the Community's restriction which topic-banned Smatprt from William Shakespeare related articles until 3 November 2011. Although drafters Newyorkbrad and SirFozzie did not submit their proposed decision to the workshop, arbitrators Cool Hand Luke and Elen of the Roads submitted a new principle to work on, which built on the proposals made in the workshop (cf. Signpost coverage). The case came to a close during the week, after a total of 15 arbitrators voted on the proposed decision.
The case concerns allegations about problematic conduct, conflicts of interests, notability, and sourcing in relation to longevity articles. Evidence was submitted on-wiki by 12 editors over several weeks after parties requested for additional time to submit evidence (cf. Signpost coverage). Drafter Kirill Lokshin submitted a proposed decision in the workshop, before it was submitted for arbitrators to vote on. The case came to a close during the week, after a total of 11 arbitrators voted on the proposed decision.
After the attempted deployments of MediaWiki 1.17 on 8 February 2011, which were quickly reverted on performance grounds (cf. Signpost coverage), the latest edition was deployed once more to Wikimedia sites on February 16. Although a number of relatively significant problems soon appeared, these were regarded as fixable without the need for a retreat to 1.16 (Wikimedia Techblog). There was only a partial recurrence of the load spikes seen with the previous attempts at deployment.
The anecdotal evidence coming from users is that page loading times have indeed been reduced by the new ResourceLoader as hoped. However, many of the issues wikis are now facing were also related to this change: as expected, it broke a number of JavaScript gadgets, including popular scripts such as Twinkle. Although these issues were soon fixed, users were also riled by a bug with the Vector-style edit toolbar when it was re-enabled for editors who had previously tried to turn it off. On this issue, developer Roan Kattouw said that he "apologized for messing up" and explained that the temporary loss of this preference setting was the lesser of two evils. "There are about 4,200 affected users on English Wikipedia, if memory serves," he added (Technical Village Pump).
Other issues were equally temporary. For example, the new stricter SVG parser refused to accept a number of images it had previously allowed, resulting in a loss of thumbnails. Some were soon fixed with a change to the parser (being incorrectly failed); others still need to be fixed manually as they have invalid syntax which results in discrepancies between web browsers, and, in the worst case, security holes. A change in the color of the "New messages" box from orange to blue (cf. Signpost coverage), was soon reverted locally on the English Wikipedia and several other wikis; the change, which was supposed to make the box visually more similar to the Vector skin, may still be reverted globally.
Developer Rob Lanphier explained where the development team was going to go from here:
| “ | We still have some deployment work left to do... we also want to reintroduce the category [pagination] improvements that Aryeh Gregor made last summer,... plan to update ArticleFeedback now that we’re on the newer codebase, and we’ll probably also update some other extensions, too. | ” |
With the deployment to WMF wikis of MediaWiki 1.17, developer attentions have begun to turn towards the strategy for MediaWiki 1.18. Mark Hershberger, developer and interim bugmeister (cf. Signpost coverage), outlined his views on where MediaWiki development should go from here (Wikitech-l mailing list):
| “ | The solution I'm proposing is that we branch 1.18 immediately after the release of the 1.17 tarball [the release to non-WMF wikis expected in the next couple of weeks]. Revisions on the trunk could be [proposed to be] merged to the 1.18 branch. Or, to make merging into 1.18 less of a chore for a single person, we could enable those doing code review to merge code they've reviewed into the 1.18 branch. In this way, we achieve Roan's (and my) goal of continuous integration [reviewing and deploying code very rapidly, rather than waiting for large set-piece deployments]. | ” |
The issue has been a hot topic in recent months (cf. Signpost coverage from October 2010: 1, 2) and this week proved no exception. Discussions included a debate of the merits of Subversion as the best version control software to be used, and whether a Mozilla-style system (where all developers submit patches, rather than adding their changes to the global codebase immediately) might be a better step. Developer Roan Kattouw expanded on Mark Hershberger's more modest proposal:
| “ | If we want to move to continuous integration (and I think the consensus is we do, considering the mess we've made for ourselves by deploying 9 months worth of commits and not knowing which of the ~15,000 new revisions killed the cluster the other day), our first step should be to get closer to continuous integration, i.e. bring deployment closer to trunk [the bleeding-edge codebase]. By the time we deploy 1.17, trunk will already be more than two months ahead... Stabilizing and deploying 1.18wmf1 should take considerably less time and allow us to get much closer to a continuous integration model. | ” |
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.
Early on Saturday, 19 February 2011, bugmeister Mark Hershberger posted a list on wikitech-l of critical bugs to work on over the weekend and fix before a MediaWiki 1.17 tarball is released.
P.Copp reported bug #27302, a ResourceLoader bug that attached a timestamp to site JS and CSS (e.g. MediaWiki:Common.js), even if these were empty, and attached timestamps to user JS and CSS, thus bypassing the caches, even if a user is logged out and does not have user JS or CSS. Developer Roan Kattouw fixed (r82219 and r82468) the bug, and with the fix, cut load to the 4 Apache servers serving ResourceLoader in half. [1]
Over the weekend, the following other bugs were fixed:
![[1]](http://file.status.net/i/identica/catrope-20110216T150241-xmvxh2t.png){kind=link}