Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-21/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-21/Traffic report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-21/In the media
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:
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-21/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-21/Opinion
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.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-21/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-21/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-21/In focus
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.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-21/Humour
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