Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-21/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-21/Traffic report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-21/In the media
Wikimedia Labs: soon to be at the cutting edge of MediaWiki development?
23 April 2012
MediaWiki 1.20wmf01 hits first WMF wiki, understanding 20% time, and why this report cannot yet be a draft
16 April 2012
What is: agile development? and new mobile site goes live
12 September 2011
The bugosphere, new mobile site and MediaWiki 1.18 close in on deployment
29 August 2011
Code Review backlog almost zero; What is: Subversion?; brief news
18 July 2011
Wikimedia down for an hour; What is: Wikipedia Offline?
30 May 2011
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
25 April 2011
What is: localisation?; the proposed "personal image filter" explained; and more in brief
21 March 2011
This week's Technology Report sees the first in an occasional editorial series entitled What is?. The series aims to demystify areas of the Wikimedia and MediaWiki technology world for the casual editor. Today's article is on "localisation", a process where the MediaWiki interface is translated into other languages (over 300 of them).
For the past five years, localisation is something MediaWiki has done very well. For 188 different languages (or language variants), 490 or more out of the most used 500 interface messages (including sidebar items and "Revision as of", for example) have been translated from the default (English) into that language. That list includes big names (French, German, Spanish) but also a myriad of smaller language groups as diverse as Lazuri (spoken by approximately 32,000 people on the Black Sea) and Tachelhit, a Berber language spoken by 3 to 8 million Moroccans (full list).
Translation, in the vast, vast majority of cases, cannot be handled by MediaWiki developers alone. Instead, the effort is crowdsourced to a large community of translators at translatewiki.net, an external site with nearly 5,000 registered users (source). The site was built for translating all things MediaWiki, but now also handles a number of other open source projects. When new interface messages are added, they are quickly passed onto translatewiki.net, and the finished translations are then passed back. Every project which uses the LocalisationUpdate extension (including all Wikimedia projects) provides access to the latest translations of interface messages to users in hundreds of languages within a few days of translation.
Over 100 issues (source) remain with language support for right-to-left languages, languages with complex grammar, and languages in non-Roman scripts, but the situation is slowly improving. For more information about MediaWiki localisation, see MediaWiki.org.
At the upcoming meeting of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees on March 25/26, a design draft for the "Personal image filter" will be presented, a system that will allow readers to hide controversial media, such as images of a sexual or violent nature, from their own view. This modification would be the first major change to come out of the long-lasting debates about sexual and other potentially offensive images. In May last year they culminated in controversial deletions by Jimbo Wales and other admins on Commons, at a time where media reports, especially by Fox News, were targeting Wikimedia for providing such content. Subsequently, the Foundation commissioned outside consultants Robert Harris and Dory Carr-Harris to conduct the "2010 Wikimedia Study of Controversial Content", which was presented at the Board's last physical meeting in October. The study's recommendations were not immediately adopted, with the Board forming a workgroup instead. (See the summary in the Signpost's year in review: "Controversial images".)
The study had recommended that "a user-selected regime be established within all WMF projects, available to registered and non-registered users alike, that would place all in-scope sexual and violent images ... into a collapsible or other form of shuttered gallery with the selection of a single clearly-marked command ('under 12 button' or 'NSFW' button)", but that "no image [should] be permanently denied to any user by this regime, merely its appearance delayed".
In response to an inquiry by the Board if such a feature was feasible and how it might look, the draft design for the Personal Image Filter was developed by the Foundation's tech staff, in particular designer Brandon Harris (User:Jorm (WMF), no relation) and has already been presented to the workgroup, which in turn will present it to the Board this week. The design introduces a global "Content Filter" category on Commons, containing all images that can potentially be hidden according to a user's preferences, with a set of subcategories corresponding to such preferences. As a kind of localization of these, "individual wikis will be required to maintain a 'Category Equivalence Mapping'", to which they can add (but not remove) their own subcategories. The total number of subcategories is intended to be small though, with "somewhere between 5-10" global subcategories, and together with local ones "the interface can comfortably support around 10-12 filters before becoming unwieldy". Like the original recommendations from the study, the proposal appears to leave it to the communities to define the set of filterable subcategories, but it sketches a possibility:
| “ | A wiki's "Content Filter" category could contain the following sub-categories: "Sexually Explicit", "Graphic Violence", "Medical", and "Other Controversial Content". [For example,] images illustrative of sexual techniques could be placed in the "Sexually Explicit" sub-category while images of Mohammed could be placed in "Other Controversial Content" (or even "Images of Mohammed"). | ” |
Users (both anonymous and registered) can select which categories they want to filter via an annotation next to filterable images that lists the filter categories the image belongs to, or from a general display setting (accessible via a registered user's preferences, or for anonymous users via a new link next to "Log in/Create account").
Both the recommendations of the Controversial Content study and the workgroup's chair Phoebe Ayers emphasise the opt-in (i.e. voluntary) nature of the filtering. From a technical perspective, the changes needed to arrive at an opt-out (i.e. mandatory at first) version are obviously rather trivial, and indeed until very recently, the proposal encompassed an additional option for "Default Content Filtering", that could be activated on a per-wiki basis if consensus on that project demanded it. The option was removed by Jorm who explained that it had originally been included "because I could see this being used by non-WMF sites", but decided to remove it because it was "more of a suggestion for implementation, rather than a requirement, and appears controversial".
In fact, at least on the English Wikipedia, the standard skins have for a long time provided CSS and JavaScript code to allow parts of a page to be hidden for all readers. However, the use of the corresponding templates has generally been restricted to talk pages ({{collapse}}), tables and navigational components ({{hidden}}), with objections to their use for more encyclopedic content. Still, their use for controversial images has been advocated by some, including Jimmy Wales who argued in favour of using the "Hidden" template for Muhammad caricatures: "Wiki is not paper, we should make use of such interactive devices far more often throughout the entire encyclopedia, for a variety of different reasons." Wales, who has been a member of the Board's Controversial Content workgroup since a reshuffle in winter (the others being Ayers, Matt Halprin and Bishakha Datta), recently responded to two related proposals on his talk page ([1], [2]), supporting "reasonable default settings" for the display of controversial images, based on "NPOV tagging" such as "Image of Muhammad", rather than subjective assessments such as "Other controversial content".
The Controversial Content study's recommendations had suggested that the feature should be "using the current Commons category system", in the form of an option that users can select to partially or fully hide "all images in Commons Categories defined as sexual ... or violent". For registered users, it recommended even more fine-grained options, to restrict viewing "on a category by category or image by image basis" even outside the sexual or violent categories, similar to Wales' "NPOV tagging". But this was rejected as impractical for the Personal image filter proposal. Brandon Harris explained why:
| “ | 1) Cache invalidation. The way the system is proposed to work, we basically have to send the categories along with the HTML of the article, so that JavaScript [i.e. the code that actually does the hiding] can act on it. We have to invalidate that HTML whenever controversial content categories are applied or removed, which is hard enough with a set of 10-15 categories and some tens or hundreds of thousands of images [let alone] all 10M+ images and every single category operation that's performed on those images.
2) Subcategories. A system that allows you to choose arbitrary categories isn't particularly helpful if it doesn't also traverse subcategories (imagine choosing Nudity in art, and then not getting the actual categories that contain the relevant images). Traversal of subcategory structures completely breaks the approach we're proposing, and is generally very hard to do as you can tell from the absence of any meaningful traversal features in MediaWiki. 3) Localisation. All the complexity that we've talked about for 10-15 categories, but a few order of magnitudes more of it. |
” |
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.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-21/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-21/Opinion
On WikiEN-l, Scott MacDonald reported that the National Portrait Gallery website has copied text from the Wikipedia article for the Baroque portrait artist John Michael Wright for its own entry (WebCite) on the painter (another entry was suspected to have similar problems). Following investigations on the talk page, it turns out that MacDonald's allegations are well-founded. The Wikipedia article—which happens to be today's Featured Article on the main page—was edited in 2007/2008 to incrementally reach the current wording, while the National Portrait Gallery website added the material much later than that. Such reuse is allowed, but must be accompanied with the appropriate attribution under the terms of Wikipedia's copyleft Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, whereas the NPG's entry claims "© National Portrait Gallery, London 2011".
The National Portrait Gallery have previously raised the threat of a lawsuit in English courts against Derrick Coetzee, a Wikipedia and Commons administrator, who had made a bot that copied photographs of out-of-copyright paintings from the gallery website and uploaded them to Commons (see Signpost coverage from 2009-07-13). While the case of Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. makes such copying legal under U.S. law, it is unclear whether the photographs the NPG had made of the artworks had copyright in the United Kingdom.
The Management Council of Citizendium, an English wiki encyclopedia project like Wikipedia but with "gentle expert guidance", started by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger in 2006, has released a financial statement. After changing hosting providers, the monthly cost of hosting the site has dropped from around $700 a month to $319.90. The site's current funds stand at $2,092.17 and thus the hosting of the site is paid for until September.
After the financial problems the Management Council inherited were revealed in November, there was a successful donation drive which raised $2,776.09 that month, and a further $934.33 in December. The Council have stated they are hoping to get a number of regular donors (between 20 and 30) to give between $11.25 and $17 a month to host the site. Three contributors have agreed to this, although as the active user base is around 70 (down from a high of 200), finding enough to support the site may prove difficult unless a corporate or non-profit benefactor steps in.
It was mooted after the financial revelations in November that the Wikimedia Foundation could support Citizendium, although Sanger quickly rejected the suggestion. Citizendium also has yet to work out how to incorporate itself as a new legal entity now that it has broken links with the Tides Foundation. The lack of incorporated non-profit status means contributions are not tax-deductible, which may reduce the number of larger donations.
This week, Wikipedians will be able to apply for an account on Credo Reference (formerly Xrefer), a subscription-based reference site that contains full text articles from a variety of different publishers and reference works (listed here). To give some examples, a search on a medical topic might bring up results from the Royal Society of Medicine Health Encyclopedia, the Cambridge Dictionary of Scientists, Black's Medical Dictionary and the Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia, while a search for a German philosopher brought up results from the Chambers Biographical Dictionary, Who's Who in Christianity, and the Encyclopedia of German Literature. Interestingly, topic pages on Credo reuse images from Wikimedia Commons, and Credo has announced that their topic pages are "The Librarian’s Answer to Wikipedia".
Wikipedians who do not already have access to Credo or a similar database through library or university subscriptions will be able to apply for an account donated by Credo starting at 22:00 UTC on Wednesday at Wikipedia:Credo accounts (WP:CREDO). The criteria include having a working e-mail address setup, to have 3,000 non-minor edits to article space and to have been involved in Featured Article or Good Article writing or reviewing, or being active in a content-focused WikiProject.
Credo Reference previously donated 100 user accounts in March 2010.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-21/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-21/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-21/In focus
The Committee closed one case during the week. Three cases are currently open.
During the week, another 56 kilobytes was submitted as on-wiki evidence while several proposals were submitted in the workshop by parties and others.
During the week, the Committee "voted for good cause to suspend further proceedings in the case until April 7, 2011 or as otherwise announced." Accordingly, all activity in the case (including evidence submissions, as well as workshop proposals and proposed decisions) has been suspended until further notice.
During the week, further proposals and modifications were reconsidered in the workshop and added to the proposed decision for arbitrators to vote on.
This case, following on from the 2006 case concerning Kehrli (talk · contribs), concerns allegations of disruptive editing to the Kendrick (unit) and Kendrick mass articles. Evidence was submitted on-wiki by four editors. Drafter David Fuchs submitted several proposed principles in the workshop before submitting a proposed decision for arbitrators to vote on. The case came to a close during the week after a total of 13 arbitrators voted on the proposed decision.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-21/Humour
