Citing editor statistics, Foundation presents upcoming product plans
Age (in "wiki-years") of editors who made at least 50 edits in 2010"The beginning of the retention drop [red] in 2005 coincides with the explosion of active editors [blue]."
The Wikimedia Foundation's "Editor Trends Study" (commissioned in October "to help better understand the internal dynamics of our communities") was published last week. The summary lists five "early conclusions:":
“
Wikipedia communities are aging [in terms of editor experience].
The retention of New Wikipedians dropped dramatically from mid 2005 to early 2007, and has since remained low.
This trend cannot be simply attributed to increased newbie experimentation or vandalism.
Editor retention has not worsened over the past three years.
The retention rate of long-time editors is about 75–80%.
"Between 2005 and 2007, newbies started having real trouble successfully joining the Wikimedia community. ... Here’s what we think is happening: As successful communities get really big, they naturally suffer growing pains. New people flood in, creating an Eternal September effect, in which the existing community struggles to integrate the newbies while at the same time striving to preserve the ability to do its work. It does that by developing self-repair and defense mechanisms – which in our case, turned out to be things like bot- and script-supported reverts, deletions, user warnings, and complex policies. All those mechanisms are obviously helpful ... But they’ve also made it harder and harder for new people to join us, which in turn seems to have made experienced editors' work harder as well.
”
She then went on to name "Openness Begets Participation" as a strategy to solve the problem ("I believe we need to make editing fun again for everybody: both new editors and experienced editors. ... Quality and openness go hand in hand"), and outlined "The Year Ahead", based on the Foundation's "Product Whitepaper" (Signpost coverage, "a comprehensive analysis of our product priorities" based on its 2010–15 strategic plan (with "product" being defined as "technology through which people receive and develop Wikimedia content"). The following priorities were named, some of them comprising already ongoing efforts:
Create a visual editor
Improve the newbie experience
Support community growth in developing countries
Serve audiences on all devices
Create a delightful experience for contributing and reviewing multimedia
The 4,000 most active Wikipedians compared to the rest of the EN Wikipedia community as of March 2, 2011.Edit distribution for the 4,000 most active Wikipedians (previous research indicates that might satisfy a power law)
In related news, Kevin Rutherford recently analyzed the edit numbers of the most active editors on the English Wikipedia (by edit count), concluding that 27% of all edits have been done by a core group of 4,000 editors. In the last three years the number of edits needed to get onto List of 4,000 Wikipedians who have done the most edits rose from 5,000 edits to 11,426. Since the start of last year the number of editors breaking the 100,000 barrier has jumped by more than half, from 68 to 109, whilst the number of editors who have contributed over 200,000 edits has doubled from ten to twenty. This prompted a proposal to broaden the list from the 4,000 editors with the highest edit count to 5,000. So as of 9 March 2011, all editors with 9,168 edits or more are on the latest list (though some have opted out of being named).
Foundation staff: New positions for "Movement Communications" and data analysis, chief officer leaving
Last week, the Wikimedia Foundation posted a job opening for a Movement Communications Manager, a new position (reporting to the Head of Communications, currently Jay Walsh), whose purpose will be to "serve the Wikimedia community and Wikimedia Foundation staff by increasing the quantity and quality of communications between and among the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia community." The list of job duties, apart from those concerning the communication of the achievements of Wikimedia projects to an external audience, also indicates planned changes to the interaction between the Foundation and volunteers:
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Develop an internal, movement communications strategy for WMF that leverages pre-existing platforms (wikis, blogs, mailing lists, etc) and proposes new methods for bringing stories, mission-critical and general information to the 100,000+ strong Wikimedia community.
..
Establish a Foundation-wide, information broadcast schedule to enable more predictable and consistent sharing of Foundation news, activities and accomplishments with the community."
Build strong relationships with Wikimedia project representatives (Wikipedia and its sister projects), chapter members, and informal organizations (including student groups) to improve the quality and quantity of story-telling directed at users, contributors, media, and important stakeholders.
...
Actively monitor and participate in discussions on mailing lists.
”
Another job opening was posted for a Data Analyst and Researcher who "on a day-to-day basis ... will create, mine and analyze data to help understand readers and editors of different Wikimedia projects, especially Wikipedia, across different geographies", and based on them create "reports, charts, graphs, maps and tables" to "concisely, clearly and meaningfully convey information for a lay audience, Wikimedia community and the foundation."
Outgoing CFOO Veronique Kessler
In other staff news, Veronique Kessler, who has been the Foundation's Chief Financial and Operating Officer (CFOO) since February 2008, announced she will leave for family reasons at the end of June, after completing the development of the 2011–12
business plan.
Briefly
GLAM trip to India: Liam Wyatt (User:Witty lama) has published a report on his recent trip to India as the Wikimedia Foundation's fellow for GLAMs (collaboration with cultural institutions).
Legal concerns about freedom of panorama and 2D reproductions in Germany: The German Wikimedia chapter recently published a legal opinion concerning the use of images on Wikipedia under German law, commissioned from its longtime counsel, Berlin law firm JBB. Regarding the reuse of reproduction photographs of two-dimensional public domain (gemeinfrei) works – the German equivalent of Bridgeman v. Corel -, it controversially stated that as long as the debate about the corresponding clause in German law (§ 72 UrhG) was still open, it had to be assumed that such reproductions "can not be used in Wikipedia unless the (reproduction) photographer has permitted the reuse". Another controversial conclusion was that while photos taken from a public place of copyrighted buildings and sculptures that are permanently located in such a place may be freely reproduced under the freedom of panorama clause (see also Commons:Freedom of panorama) as long as they are attributed, it is nevertheless not possible to publish them under a free license such as the CC-BY-SA, because the same clause (§ 59 UrhG) prohibited modifications. While presenting the expertise, Mathias Schindler from Wikimedia Deutschland emphasized that it "does not have an immediate impact on current practices, e.g. on Wikimedia Commons, and should be understood as a contribution to the continued discussion within the projects."
Wikimedia Hungary report: The Hungarian Wikimedia chapter published its report for February 2011.
New article feedback analysis: A further analysis on data from the pilot project exploring the use of the Article feedback tool has been published
DMCA takedown: The Wikimedia Foundation recently received and acted upon a DMCAtakedown notice by CEDRO, a Spanish author's rights society, concerning a link on the Spanish Wikipedia.
More than 9000 articles deleted on the Hindi Wikipedia: In a blog post titled "Quantity over quality: The sad story of Hindi Wikipedia", Utkarshraj Atmaram (User:Utcursch) reported that over 9450 of its articles (nearly one seventh of all articles of the Hindi Wikipedia) appeared to be exactly identical except for one word in the lead ("XYZ is a village of Uttarakhand, India"), despite being over 5000 bytes long – the rest of each article was mostly filled by a brief history of the Uttarakhand state. The articles have since been deleted.
For US$1,000 annual fee, new website publishes corrections to coverage on Wikipedia and elsewhere
"ICorrect", a new website that calls itself "the first website to correct permanently any lies, misinformation and misrepresentations that permeate in cyberspace", explains its raison d'être as follows: "So far, the likes of Wikipedia and Google searches consist entirely of hearsays. ICorrect uniquely provides 'words from the horses mouth'." Founded by Hong Kong businessman and socialite David Tang, it allows people and companies to permanently host correction statements they wish to make (after verifying their identity), for an annual membership fee of US $1,000 for individuals and US $5,000 for companies (a few days earlier, the individuals' price was reported as US $1,500). A blog post from The Daily Telegraph commented sarcastically: "Sir David’s absolute masterstroke is that he’s charging his pals $1,000 a year for the right to use the site. Wiki-ching! So that’s how you get rich." Tang's own corrections include The Mail on Sunday's claim that "David Tang is a creep": "This is greatly exaggerated".
At the time of writing, the majority of the listed corrections appear to concern tabloids and other traditional media, and impersonations on Twitter and Facebook. One of the complaints concerning Wikipedia was made by John Bond (currently chairman of Vodafone, prompting a blogger to mock him as "the man who paid £600 to edit his Wikipedia entry", pointing out that the article was freely editable and that the mistakes stated by Bond hadn't even been fixed yet - User:Whitepawdid so later, citing Bond's ICorrect statement as a reference. Likewise, the articles about Eugene Shvidler[1] and Anouska Hempel[2][3] have already been changed according to their complaints, while the correction filed by Hempel's husband Mark Weinberg does not seem to have had an effect yet. Andrew Knight (director of News Corporation) filed a tongue-in-cheek "correction" stating: "My Wikipedia entry is anodyne and largely accurate. ... Never mind, let's keep it that way".
Questioned in an interview on Sky News about how ICorrect.com would avoid spreading libel and misinformation itself, Tang admitted that the site "does not set out to police the veracity of people's corrections - we are not in a position to do that".
US psychological society starts Wikipedia initiative
Last month, the Association for Psychological Science followed up on a call to its members to edit Wikipedia from December with a more detailed call to action, involving its own online platform for the "APS Wikipedia Initiative". Informed by discussions with the Wikimedia Foundation, it aims to "provide the smoothest possible entry into the process of creating and editing Wikipedia articles". One suggestion is for professors to include the writing of Wikipedia articles in their coursework, similar to the model of the Foundation's Public Policy Initiative. The association "will recognize exceptional contributions and the articles that have improved because of APSWI volunteerism". One blogger voiced concern "that by calling 'experts' to systematically create and update Wikipedia entries, we run the risk of spilling academic debates into a different forum that lacks the checks and balances in academia." See also Signpost coverage of a similar call from the American Psychological Association, likewise issued in December.
Briefly
Illinois locals scrutinize Wikipedia coverage: Hilary Gowins has a somewhat critical piece on Wikipedia and local history in the Northwest Herald, a newspaper covering McHenry County, Illinois. It asks a number of mayors and local officials what they think of the Wikipedia articles about their towns and villages. The mayor of Crystal Lake, Illinois believes that the entry pays too much attention to a purported controversy over the hosting of the rowing event in the 2006 Gay Games, while the mayor of Ringwood, Illinois noted that the article on neighboring Johnsburg, Illinois stated that Johnsburg had attempted to annex Ringwood. Following publication, the Johnsburg, Illinois article was updated. The Herald article then goes on to quote a psychology instructor and a number of local historians critical of Wikipedia's open editing. Nancy Fike from the Crystal Lake Historical Society was quoted as saying: "I blame Dr. Spock, Sesame Street and McDonald’s hamburgers. The mentality these days is that if I can’t get what I want in less than 15 minutes, then I don’t want it."
Student newspaper defends Wikipedia: An op-ed in the student newspaper of Mississippi State University argues that Wikipedia is better than some of its academic critics make out, asking academics to "give it a chance" and states that "Wikipedia is essentially the chapter summary or the SparkNotes of everything we want to know about ideas in our life".
Rise in popularity in India on mobile: Wikipedia has placed fifth on a listing of the most popular websites for users of the Opera Mini browser in India in January 2011. Wikipedia's position in the chart has risen from number eight in December 2010, and is currently only beaten by Google, Facebook, YouTube and Orkut. (Opera Mini is a tiny browser used for older handsets. Unlike modern smartphone browsers, it takes web pages that are requested, loads them on a proxy server owned by Opera Software and then delivers a binary object to the phone to display, with images pre-compressed. It is marketed for phones that are lower-end or on less reliable connections.)
Animated revision history: Wikipedia researcher Paolo Massa has made a video showing the revision history of the article 7 July 2005 London bombings during the first few hours after the event, describing it as an "example of history unfolding under your eyes as it develops, of how people create their collective memories in real time" (the page had been started just 28 minutes after the first explosion). In 2005, blogger Jon Udell had made a similar screencast based on the revision history of the article heavy metal umlaut, see Signpost coverage.
Demise of "crowdsourcing" predicted: In an opinion article, John R. Quain predicts a decline of content created by unpaid volunteers on the web ("'Crowdsourcing' powers sites like The Huffington Post and Wikipedia. But not for much longer"). He claims that "readers increasingly regard such sites as notoriously inaccurate, irrelevant and generally suspect", in the case of Wikipedia observing the fact that "company profiles in Wikipedia may be written by the business' own PR department." On the writer's side, he fears "an even more threatening groundswell", as "some of the unpaid, unappreciated volunteers supplying all this free content are going on strike. Many have become disillusioned with others taking credit for their work. Some have simply become bored (witness the decline in the number of volunteer editors working on Wikipedia). ..." The article (which for the time being is available without charge on Foxnews.com) concluded by stating that "free information" is a "fallacy" which "violates the basic principles upon which our entire economy and culture is based."
Professional society calls to mitigate US bias on Wikipedia: In a press release titled "CIOB calls on construction professionals to challenge Wikipedia definition", the Chartered Institute of Building (a professional association in the UK) asked people involved in construction management to improve the term's "narrow US definition on Wikipedia", proposing a wider definition itself. "Too often we let others inaccurately describe us when we should be setting them straight. ... We have a long way to go but we're starting with Wikipedia and we invite anyone involved in CM to look at the Wiki and question whether this describes what they do". The Institute said that its own attempts "to widen Wikipedia's own US focused definition have so far been unsuccessful."
Baseball star inaccurately blames Wikipedia for inaccuracies: US baseball star C. J. Wilson recently criticized a portrait of him in Sports Illustrated, claiming it contained many inaccuracies: "The [SI writer] spent a couple days with me, which is why it's surprising, but other than that, he just went on Wikipedia, looked up some stuff and just copy and pasted it." However, none of the statements he named as inaccuracies appear to be contained in the current version of the Wikipedia article, or its recent history (back to June 2010). According to Yahoo! news, Sports Illustrated is standing by the story.
Term for editability wanted: In a recent edition of his SPARC Open Access Newsletter, open access advocate Peter Suber presented answers to his question about a good term for a wiki's "openness to edits" (as opposed to "open access", denoting openness to reading), by Larry Sanger and Wikipedia researcher Joseph Reagle.
New featured picture: User:AngMoKio's photograph of a racing greyhound in full flight. The image was shot with a Canon EOS 40D, shutter speed 1/1000 s, aperture 8, ISO number 400, and focal length 85 mm.
This week's "Features and admins" covers Saturday 5 – Friday 11 March
Administrators
New featured picture: a Swallow-tailed Gull (Creagrus furcatus), the only fully nocturnal gull and seabird in the world.New featured picture: Marine Iguana, found only on one island in the Galapagos The week saw no new admins. At the time of publication there are two live RfAs: JaGa, due to finish Wednesday 16 March and My76Strat, due to finish Tuesday 15 March.
Featured articles
There were no new featured articles. Two featured articles were delisted:
Great Knot (nom; related article), a bird whose breeding habitat is in the northeast Siberian tundra and is strongly migratory; this one was taken in Thailand. Reviewer Muhammad commented: "amazing if taken from a boat". Photographer User:JJ Harrison said that about four out of five shots of this bird were sharp: "the IS/Tripod probably helped, and the swell was not huge. The movement made it more difficult to keep the camera on target."
Marine Iguana (nom; related article), a brightly coloured individual of a subspecies found only on Española Island in the Galapagos. Photographer User:Benjamint444 said "my understanding is that the iguanas found on Espanola are brightly colored all year round because of the concentrated pigments in their diet."
Swallow tail in flight (nom; related article), an equatorial seabird in the gull family. It spends most of its life flying and hunting over the open ocean at night; this is the only fully nocturnal gull and seabird in the world. This adaptation is explained by their diet: squid and small fish which rise to the surface at night to feed on plankton. (Created by User:Benjamint444.)
Featured sounds
Schubert's autograph of the Octet in F (D.803)
Schubert's Octet D803 (nom) (related article), composed in 1824 and of almost an hour's duration. Here, it is performed on period instruments by Monica Hugget (director and violin 1), Rob Diggins (violin 2), Vicki Gunn (viola), Sarah Freiberg (cello), Curtis Daily (double bass), William McColl (clarinet), RJ Kelley (horn), and Charles Kaufmann (bassoon).
Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 7, Op. 10, No. 3, First Movement (nom) (related article), composed in 1798 and performed in November 2008 by User:La Pianista
A map created by Fallschirmjäger won high praise from the reviewers last week, when we had little room to spare at F and A. We don't see many featured maps, so we've taken the unusual step of displaying it this week.
This case will review the handling of AE sanctions (including the classification, imposition and reversal of such sanctions, the relevant processes, and whether administrators who regularly work in this area are appropriately receptive to feedback from uninvolved users). The case will also examine concerns about the conduct of certain editors in the pseudoscience topic area - a topic area which was subject to an arbitration case in 2006. During the week, 61 kilobytes was submitted as on-wiki evidence by 11 editors.
During the week, another 5 kilobytes of content was submitted as on-wiki evidence, while several comments were also submitted in the workshop. Yesterday, drafter Elen of the Roads submitted a proposed decision on-wiki for arbitrators to vote on. Proposals being considered include rulings concerning four editors, as well as a discretionary sanctions scheme.
During the week, drafter David Fuchs submitted a proposed decision on-wiki for arbitrators to vote on. Proposals being considered include a ruling concerning a single editor.
Motion
An interim motion was passed: a case which was accepted and titled as "Ebionites 2" has been put on hold to permit mediation to proceed. On 5 April 2011, or earlier if the mediation is closed as unsuccessful, the Committee will reexamine the situation to determine whether the case should be opened or dismissed.
Other
AUSC
Seeking to appoint at least three non-arbitrator members to the Wikipedia:Audit Subcommittee (AUSC) (cf. Signpost coverage), the Committee released the names of the candidates being considered for these positions.
The six candidates being actively considered for these positions are:
The Community may pose questions to the candidates, and submit comments about the candidates on the individual nomination subpages (or privately via email to arbcom-en-b@lists.wikimedia.org) until 23:59, 21 March 2011 (UTC). The Community has been invited to review the candidates' nomination statements, the questions that have been posed to the candidates, as well as the answers (if any) that the candidates have provided.
Historically, the links for editing individual sections of a page have been aligned to the right hand side of the page, distancing them from the sections to which they refer. At the same time, having left-aligned edit links next to each header has been an available gadget on the English Wikipedia. In 2009, the Wikimedia Usability Initiative suggested making the left-aligned variant the default for all users, but although Wikia switched over and reported an increase in section editing the change was never implemented on WMF wikis.
In renewed efforts to increase the number of editors on Wikimedia projects, on 9 March the Foundation's usability and engineering departments began a joint week-long study of the editing impact of any switch to left-aligned edit links. To achieve this, they began to collect anonymous click data from readers, some of whom will be temporarily switched to the left-aligned style. If successful, this test could prove to be the first of many such experiments (Wikimedia Techblog). Developer on the project Trevor Parscal added that the current tests would be strictly quantitative and would be "followed up with additional research that will better assess the more subtle effects of such a change... these are experiments... just guidance as we explore ways to improve the usefulness of the site."
In response to privacy concerns, the blog post also added that "if any editor would like to abstain from participating in this and other experiments in the future, they can select the 'Exclude me from feature experiments' option in their user preferences."
Further bug fixes highlighted
After numerous bugs were found in the wake of the deployment of MediaWiki 1.17 almost a month ago, developer Robert Lanphier chose to highlight some of the issues that had recently been resolved (Wikimedia Techblog).
“
We're still in the middle of cleaning up some lingering issues from the 1.17 deployment, and despite our best efforts, you may see a little bit of quirkiness in the site. One problem with the site since the deployment was a problem with our job queue, which meant that emails that were supposed to be sent from the site weren’t. This backlog was removed last night, and a lot of pent-up email was sent. Additionally, there were some HTML cache invalidations that caused parts of the site to get overloaded for a few minutes [causing intermittent slowness and/or unavailability], and yesterday [8 March], we started the deployment of the category sorting improvements. We deployed some modifications to the database today. This resulted in a few hiccups on the site that we've since mostly recovered from.
”
When the category sorting changes come into effect, they should enable non-English wikis to have their categories sorted in a more logical order, rather than have letters with diacritics sorted after Z.
In brief
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. Users interested in the "tarball" release of MW1.17 should follow bug #26676.
Okawix, a new piece of software designed to allow users to read Wikipedia articles offline on their mobile devices, has entered its beta testing phase and would like to get more testers on board (Wikiwix blog).
Calls were put out for potential Google Summer of Code applicants to put their names forward. Students could work either on MediaWiki or Semantic MediaWiki; the programme, which runs from April to September, attracts funding of 5000 USD per student (wikitech-l mailing list).
The ability to export articles in an openZim format was integrated into the "Collection" extension (wikitech-l mailing list). The integration forms part of the Foundation's efforts to make Wikimedia wikis more available in offline formats.
After long discussion surrounding bug #24313, the preference for uniformly marking all one's edits as minor by default has been removed from the English Wikipedia. The removal was designed to discourage its use. As a result of bug #27403, however, users may temporarily find themselves "locked in" to their old preference even if it was set to true. A process of notification is underway.
Registration for the Berlin Hackathon is now open. The annual meetup will feature "more hacking and less talking" this year (wikitech-l mailing list).
Blocking usernames including spaces should now work correctly (bug #28017).
Gerard Meijssen blogged about bug #19412, which refers to PHP's failure to interpret dates in languages other than English.
In the last three years the number of edits needed to get onto List of 4,000 Wikipedians who have done the most edits rose 5,000 edits to 11,426, meaning a very small number of extremely active users continue to contribute large numbers of edits. Since the start of last year the number of editors breaking the 100,000 barrier has jumped by more than half, from 68 to 109, whilst the number of editors who have contributed over 200,000 edits has doubled from ten to twenty. This prompted a proposal to broaden the list from the 4,000 editors with the highest edit count to 5,000. So as of the 9th March 2011 all editors with 9,168 edits or more are on the latest list (though some have opted out of being named).
Across all Wikimedia projects the threshold is much higher on the list of the thousand Wikimedians with most edits everyone has over 55,000 edits. If it could combine edits by the same editor across multiple projects the minimum would doubtless be even higher.
Kevin Rutherford (user:Ktr101) has created these charts to compare the number of edits by the most "prolific" editors on the English language Wikipedia to the rest of the community:
I originally created the graphs after a few on and off ideas over the past few months of wondering how many edits the top four thousand of us hold. At first I thought that it would be a fairly small percentage, something like one out of every eight edits. After I compiled the edits, I was shocked to realize that the top 4,000 editors hold over one quarter of the edits on this site. Divided up amongst the top four thousand, each user on the list makes just over 30,275 edits. This might not seem to much at first, but to those of us who make manual edits, those are years of our lives that are being shown on that graph. I also created the edit distribution graph as a way to see what the last end of a distribution of Wikipedian edits would be and it was exactly as I thought it would be. As expected, it climbs steadily and then jumps up at the end, as our most active editors are counted in. If you think of the fact that there are around 14.1 million editors on the site, that chart is probably just a tiny percentage of the overall percent of Wikipedians who edit.
It is quite a fascinating idea to think that the bunch of us who also are in this group also come from a diverse background in our lives. The average Wikipedian is a male post-graduate student who edits in his spare time. The range of active community is quite unlimited in age but when you think about the fact that it is more likely that these average editors are also giving a lot of time to us while simultaneously earning a degree, it makes one step back and wonder what they can do to help the site some more.
Comparing 4,000 most active editors by thousands (data as at 2nd March 2011)
Edit distribution for the 4,000 most active Wikipedians, showing a steady increase with a dramatic final spike from a very small number of editors with extremely high edit counts
The 4,000 most active Wikipedians when stacked up against each other
N.B. Wikipedians who do not want to be on the list of most active editors can have themselves removed in one of two entirely painless ways: by fessing up to actually being a bot and applying for a bot flag at wp:bot requests, or more conventionally by adding themselves to the opt out list.
