The tradition of "reverse" April fools' jokes on Wikipedia's main page – statements which are designed to appear made-up but are factually accurate – was continued this year. For example, the summary of the featured article of the day played on the ambiguity of the name of one of the article's protagonists, while the "Did you know" section included the US Senate's candy desk.
This did not remain without controversy, with the arguments exchanged largely resembling those from previous years' debates, as pointed out by William Beutler (User:WWB) on his "The Wikipedian" blog. He also noted (illustrated by a screenshot) that "in a nod to last fall’s controversial banner ads" a large animated headshot of Jimmy Wales was included on the main page. However, this change was reverted after half an hour.
Off the main page, various frivolous deletion requests and other non-reverse April Fools' pranks took place.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) last week served the Wikimedia Foundation with a DMCA takedown notice concerning a fair use sample (25s, 64kbps) of "Deeper Understanding", a song by Kate Bush originally released on her 1989 album The Sensual World. It appears that the RIAA may have confused the file with the sample of a new version of the song, to be released as a single for her upcoming album Director's Cut. According to a music blog, a sample from the song's new version had been published on Amazon.co.uk; at the time of writing it is still available on Soundcloud. A few days later, a full-length version of the 2011 edit was made available in some countries on Kate Bush's official YouTube channel. Still, the 2011 sample was deleted on Wikipedia citing an OTRS request. The 1989 sample has since been deleted on other grounds, as the article where it had been in use was converted into a redirect (according to the non-free content criteria, fair use media that are not in use in any article have to be deleted).
The Guardian published an article by Zoe Corbyn on the relationship between Wikipedia and academics. It featured an interview with User:Mike Peel, a postdoctoral researcher at Jodrell Bank Observatory and secretary of the Wikimedia UK chapter, as well as Dario Taraborelli (who last week was announced as the Wikimedia Foundation's "Senior Research Analyst, Strategy", having served as a contractor since December), Mark Graham from the Oxford Internet Institute, Paul Goldberg from the University of Liverpool, Suzie Sheehy from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and Daniel Mietchen, the managing editor of Citizendium.
The story highlights the Expert participation in Wikipedia survey being conducted by Wikimedia Foundation Research Committee members Mietchen, Taraborelli and Dr Panagiota Alevizou. It was featured in a Slashdot story that has generated 384 comments as of April 4.
An ongoing debate regarding the neutrality of the article Murder of Meredith Kercher came to a head recently with the intervention of Jimmy Wales, causing attention from outside the project from passionate advocates on both sides of what some believe to be a miscarriage of justice in a murder trial.
Kercher, a British university student, was killed in Perugia in Italy in 2007, and in 2009 two of her flatmates, Raffaele Sollecito and US citizen Amanda Knox, as well as a third person (Rudy Guede), were convicted of the murder. A movement of sorts has emerged who believe that Knox and Sollecito are innocent. They have been campaigning online through various blogs and other outlets and editing the Wikipedia article. On the other side, a campaign has started that argues that the convictions are sound (originating in part from the True Justice for Meredith Kercher website – also known as 'TJMK').
The controversy has gotten so heated on the talk page that the page is now semi-protected and has twenty-nine pages of archived discussion. Adding fuel to the fire is the perception that the split between the innocence and guilt advocates falls along national boundaries between the U.S. and Europe.
Joseph W Bishop, an advocate on the 'innocent' side, posted an Open Letter to Wikipedia Founder Jimbo Wales concerning the Murder of Meredith Kercher Article on the blog "Injustice in Perugia". The post alleged that the article
| “ | for the most part relies on obsolete and inaccurate British tabloid reports for its information. The omission from the article of the criticism of the numerous important experts who have stated in no uncertain terms that Knox and Sollecito did not receive a fair trial calls into question the article’s neutrality. Other flaws in the article include false statements about luminol evidence, the de-emphasis of Rudy Guede and Giuliano Mignini’s criminal acts prior to the crime, and the characterization of the support for Ms. Knox as a PR campaign. Until recently, the article contained a fabricated claim that the Rudy Guede’s apartment had been purchased for him by a wealthy Perugian family. | ” |
Wales answered this with a long comment posted on the talk page on March 24 which attempted to show how the article could be made more neutral by carefully replacing the use of the word "testified"—which has the implication of being sworn testimony as in a courtroom—with words like "claimed", "maintained" and "said".
Wales also argued that the selection and placement of sources biases the article towards Knox and Sollecito's guilt by making it seem that the comments of Timothy Egan, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, have the same weight as the comments of the businessman and Apprentice host Donald Trump. Wales' other contributions include supporting a call for a review by uninvolved editors as part of the Good Articles review process, as well as weighing in on the notability of Amanda Knox and whether she should have an article created on her. Replying to allegations of hostility "to any potential editor who has a potential skepticism regarding the guilt of the accused", Wales questioned the block of an article contributor in September 2010 for block evasion: "I just now personally ran checkuser and found nothing". In response, it was pointed out that this observation was meaningless as the Checkuser data from the time of the block would have already expired.
Advocates of Knox and Sollecito's innocence have welcomed the intervention of Wales with Candance Dempsey, author of a book on the case and a blogger on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer website, posting an article discussing Wales' intervention. Advocates of Knox and Sollecito's guilt have been less than happy with Wales' intervention. A Wikipedia editor posting on the True Justice for Meredith Kercher website said:
| “ | Wales entered the Murder of Meredith Kercher article rather like an elephant in a china shop, essentially accusing established editors who had laboured for years to try and maintain the article of having conspired to suppress and censor other points of view. | ” |
| “ | On the walls of his office were framed copies of Google search results and Wikipedia entries of clients: a reality television star, a movie actress and a chief executive officer. Mr. Tom calls it his “wall of fame.” | ” |
Three issues ago, the Signpost reported on Sue Gardner's "March 2011 Update", which dedicated a significant chunk of prose to the results of the Editor Trends Study. The study showed a low retention rate for new editors; this joins a mass of other evidence as to the difficulty new users have with integration, and also the decreasing rate of account creation and new user participation. The number of new accounts has been dropping, with 7,428 created in February 2011 compared to 8,161 a year before; at the same time, more recent statistics suggest that the number of new accounts which make more than five edits is dropping, as well as the number of new accounts which make more than 100. This indicates an ongoing problem with the community's attraction and retention of new editors. Gardner's message and the results of the study were also highlighted in a recent "Message to community about community decline" by the Foundation's chair Ting Chen. A session at the recent Wikimedia and last week's IRC office hour with Sue Gardner were dedicated to the problem, too.
Article creation in general has been declining, as evidenced by a graph covering creations from 2001 to the present. One of the reasons given for both the decline in new articles and new users is the reception users receive at Special:NewPages. It is a commonly held belief within the community that the attitude there has the tendency to be WP:BITEy and to discourage new users from contributing further. Statistics gathered by Mr.Z-man from February 2010 show that almost a third of new users who edited (about 21,000 accounts at the time of the data snapshot) choose to create new pages immediately rather than edit existing ones, and only 0.6 percent of those whose articles are met with deletion stayed editing, compared to 4.4 percent of the users whose articles remained.
In line with the Special:NewPages issues, a proposal at the Village Pump advocates preventing users from creating articles unless they have made a certain number of edits and been registered for a specific period of time. User:The Blade of the Northern Lights, who proposed the change, argues it would help by reducing the backlog for the seriously overworked new-page patrollers (saying that he, personally, had to patrol 200+ pages a day to keep the backlog under control) and, as a result, by reducing the bad experiences of new editors (less stressed editors are less likely to bite newbies). New editors would instead be directed to Articles for Creation, or would be asked to wait until they fulfil the criteria. Another rationale in support of the argument include that a large proportion of newly-created articles are inappropriate; sending the new editors through Articles for Creation would ensure that not only are they less likely to be bitten, but those contributions which are approved are of higher quality than current new articles.
Opponents of the idea make several arguments. First, they say, the backlog does not "properly" exist: of the 30-day buffer provided for new articles, the backlog currently leaves 24 days free – the wiki will not burn down if people take a few days off to reboot. Second, shifting newbies to Articles for Creation would not fix the problem, but would just move it somewhere else; AfC would quickly become overloaded, backlogged and understaffed, like Special:NewPages, resulting in the same issues with the community's reaction to new users that is already prevalent. Third, the proposal has the distinct possibility of disenchanting new users by creating an additional hoop for them to jump through, disinclining those who start by creating articles (nearly a third of new users) from contributing in the first place.
The proposal has since been made into an RfC (Request for Comment).
In response to Sue's March update and the general concerns regarding the experience new editors receive at Special:NewPages, several projects have been created to tackle the problem. The article incubation trial, supported by Philippe and James at the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Department, is assessing whether user retention rates can be improved if users have their articles incubated rather than deleted, with full assistance and tutoring provided by the users who do the incubating. People interested in getting involved are invited to sign up and begin userfying potentially viable pages.
User:Snottywong and User:Kudpung have been working over the past few weeks to deal with one of the issues: users who show a less-than-pleasant attitude at Special:NewPages. With the help of a bot, Snottywong and Kudpung have produced a list that has looked at
| “ | the most recent patrols from mid-October 2010 to mid-March 2011 that were performed in the Main namespace (413,902 patrols total). It counted how many articles each user patrolled, as well as each user's edit count. It then generated this table, sorted by "Edits per patrol". The users at the top of this list are those who have both a relatively low edit count and a relatively high patrol count. It also lists the date of each user's first edit. The bot initially found a total of 3,310 unique users who have patrolled articles in this time frame, but skipped any users who have patrolled less than 40 articles. This resulted in 882 unique users. | ” |
The idea of the list is for it to be a starting point for finding editors who have a tendency to bite newbies while patrolling and nudge them towards more friendly, non-BITEy behaviour.
The list can be found here; editors are invited to use it to gently correct those who may be making mistakes or who are showing signs of burn-out. This is intended not to attack new-page patrollers, but to allow problems to be tackled quickly and for the long-term benefit of the community, the new contributors, and the editor in question.
Other Requests for Comments are ongoing as part of the Wiki Guides initiative: Allow socializing, Change CSD to userspace drafts, and Minimize talk page templates.
This week, we venture towards the stars and take a look at WikiProject Solar System. Started in January 2007 by Dvyjones, it has spawned two sub projects. Covering 51 Featured articles, 6 Featured lists, 97 Good articles and 4 Featured topics, the project is also home to a task force covering the scope of Jupiter.
The Signpost interviewed three of the project's members. Serendipodous joined the project in 2007 and is one of the project's assistant coordinators; active WikiProject Solar System member Kheider joined Wikipedia in 2006; and Ckatz is an admin who joined Wikipedia in 2006.
What do you like about volunteering for WikiProject Solar System?
How long have you been working on WikiProject Solar System?
What is the most interesting article that you have seen covered by WikiProject Solar System?
WikiProject Solar System has quite a lot of Featured articles. Have you been a main contributor to any of them?
How can new members contribute to WikiProject Solar System?
Next week, we'll visit an island community that knows how to overcome everything Hell can throw at them. Until then, the Earth will tremble under the weight of our previous reports in the archive.
Reader comments
Eight articles were promoted to featured status:
Three lists were promoted:
One featured list was delisted:
The Arbitration Committee opened one new case during the week. Four cases are currently open.
This case was opened after allegations of misrepresentation of sources, as well as tendentious and antisemitic editing. 106 kilobytes was submitted as on-wiki evidence.
During the week, another 8 kilobytes was submitted as on-wiki evidence. Earlier today, drafters Newyorkbrad and Jclemens posted a proposed decision for arbitrators to vote on. The primary proposal being considered is a ruling concerning a single editor.
During the week, another 16 kilobytes was submitted as on-wiki evidence while proposals and comments were submitted in the workshop by arbitrators and others.
See earlier Signpost coverage; the Committee determined that the subject will remain blocked until further notice.
During the week, the Committee passed a motion regarding the minimum activity levels expected of CheckUser and Oversight permission holders. Functionaries are also subject to expectations regarding planned prolonged periods of inactivity on the English Wikipedia. Additionally, when the Committee or the Audit Subcommittee contact such functionaries by email about their use of their permissions, those functionaries are expected to reply within seven days. Failure to comply with these expectations may lead to removal of the permissions. Prior to removal of access, two attempts will be made to contact the functionary using the email address they provided to the Committee. Parts or all of this motion do not apply to certain functionaries (such as Wikimedia Foundation Staff).
During the week, the Committee appointed three non arbitrators as members of the Wikipedia:Audit Subcommittee (AUSC) (cf. Signpost coverage). The successful candidates of the appointment process were:
Another editor, AGK (talk · contribs), was appointed as an alternate member. Should one of the above three appointed members resign during their term, then AGK will be given CheckUser and Oversight permissions for this role.
Reader comments
The Foundation's Engineering Report for March was published last week on the Wikimedia Techblog, giving a brief overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in the last month. Most of the major developments (Brion Vibber's reappointment, for example), have been covered in previous editions of The Signpost. However, the report also gave details on a number of other projects not covered. For example, it highlighted the publication of a product whitepaper by the strategic product team (and the associated update from Sue Gardner) that will guide future engineering efforts, and the release this week, as expected, of version 1.0 of the new UploadWizard (see previous Signpost coverage).
Also in the report was the first target completion date of the new Virginia data centre (May 2011), and an update on Ryan Lane's efforts to create a virtualisation cluster, now expected sometime this month (see also an update on his blog). Russ Nelson's work on improving the media storage architecture is likewise progressing well; the necessity of this work had been highlighted by recent image thumbnailing failures (see this week's In brief). Work was also done to allow official surveys to pull data about users automatically, in order to shorten the amount of time required to complete them. The Foundation added that a beta release of version 1.17 of the MediaWiki software to external sites is expected "in early April", and a second deployment of the PoolCounter extension, first released last month (as covered by The Signpost) but quickly withdrawn after performance fears. A new project, the integration of a new caching system, known as EHcache, in order to decrease the number of requests that have to be handled directly, was also announced; in a less serious (but perhaps as important) development, the report noted that Ryan Kaldari had written a script to allow users to exchange gifts (including "virtual kittens") and other niceties more easily.
Readers interested in keeping up-to-date with specific projects may also be interested to note that the Foundation is trying harder to allow users to find this information and keep it up-to-date, for the benefit of staff, volunteer developers and users. This includes simplifying and improving the current system of Wikimedia blogs and creating a new page on the wikitech wiki to track recent and upcoming software changes, besides the server admin log.
This year's MediaWiki Google Summer of Code (GSoC) scheme was announced this week on the Wikimedia Techblog. The blogpost, which served as a call for students and mentors for this year's programme, which is worth up to 5000 USD for budding students.
| “ | Over time, MediaWiki has benefited from GSoC students and their projects. For example, Samuel Lampa’s 2010 RDF import/export extension in Semantic MediaWiki is in use. And Jeroen De Dauw, GSoC student in 2009 and 2010, is now a persistently contributing member of the MediaWiki community, as is Brian Wolff, 2010 GSoC student...
This year’s ideas include writing and implementing cite templates in a PHP extension, improving the ImageTagging extension, XML dump work, pre-commit checks in our code repositories, and more. And of course we want to hear your own ideas, too! Interested? University, community college, and graduate students around the world are eligible to apply to Google Summer of Code. You don’t need to be a computer science or IT major, and you can work from home, [but you do need to] already know PHP. It’s also great if you have some experience with LAMP, MAMP, LAPP, or one of those kinds of stacks, and with the Subversion version control system. If you’d like to participate, check out the timeline. Make sure you are available full-time from 23 May till 22 August this summer, and have a little free time from 25 April till 23 May for ramp-up. |
” |
The post has already attracted a number of proposals in the wikitech-l mailing list and elsewhere.
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.
