Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-04-25/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-04-25/Traffic report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-04-25/In the media
Over time, a large number of extensions (over 1500) have been written for the MediaWiki software on which Wikimedia wikis and other sites are based. A small percentage of these (approximately 80, in fact) are enabled on Wikimedia wikis. Today's What is? section looks at Semantic MediaWiki (official site), a package of extensions that are not currently enabled on Wikimedia wikis.
“ | What are the hundred world-largest cities with a female mayor? Wikipedia should be able to provide the answer: it contains all large cities, their mayors, and articles about the mayor that tell us about their gender. Yet the question is almost impossible to answer for a human, since one would have to read all articles about all large cities first! ... Computers can deal with large datasets much easier, yet they are not able to support us very much when seeking answers from a wiki: even sophisticated programs cannot yet read and understand human-language texts unless the topic and language of the text is very restricted [which is not the case on Wikipedia]. | ” |
Semantic MediaWiki (shortened to SMW) allows those writing an article to use tags like "[[Has population::82,060,000]]
" to allow automated tools to understand the answers to these sort of questions. In practical terms, many such tags would be included in infoboxes. Once it's there, a new breed of maps, calendars and graphs can be generated from it, and the data can also be passed on to third party users easily and in a machine-readable format.
Several hundred wikis do use the software, however, and there have long been calls to deploy it to at least some of the Foundation's wikis. Several SMW developers were invited to give presentations at the WMF's "Data Summit" in February (Signpost coverage). Though developers at the WMF are not yet satisfied that SMW can scale to meet the demands of the many millions of users Wikipedia and other WMF wikis get (Deputy Director Erik Möller recently called it "still a big heap of 'untrusted code' ... that we're not prepared to host on our main cluster yet"), many will undoubtedly be interested to see how SMW adoption progresses over time.
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.
m.wikipedia.org
. The fundamental problems with the site were highlighted in a post this week to the wikitech-l mailing list.Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-04-25/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-04-25/Opinion
Wikimedia France has published the first results of a survey among "Wikipedians" (comprising both readers and editors of the French Wikipedia), conducted at the beginning of the year by Telecom Bretagne in partnership with the French chapter. It received more than 16,000 responses, 13,627 of which were deemed usable. Altogether, 30.8% identified as female and 68.3% as male; but among those who had themselves contributed, 80% were male, and among the regular contributors more than 86% were men. Wikipedians were found to be more likely than the average French Internet user to have "a 'profession' where researching information has an important place": high school and university students, and executives/white collar employees (cadres). Blue-collar workers were found to be strongly under-represented. The responding Wikipedia users were generally younger than the average French Internet user, more than 60% of them being below 30 years. While the under 30s were still in the majority among contributing Wikipedians, they were older than the readers and more likely to be employed rather than attending high school or university. On the other hand, the distribution of the year where a respondent had first used Wikipedia differed little between readers and contributors, peaking at 2005 for both. Definitive results and further analyses will be published in the coming months.
Wikimedian Sarah Stierch (User:Missvain) has announced she will be a Wikipedian-in-Residence at the Archives of American Art, which are based in Washington DC and form part of the Smithsonian Institution. She told the Signpost that her residency will last from June to August, as an unpaid internship (but gaining credit towards her Masters degree in Museum Studies). While the details are still being worked out, the aims will include:
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The first instance of the "Wikipedian in Residence" model for collaborating with cultural institutions ("GLAMs") was Liam Wyatt's (User:Witty lama's) stay at the British Museum last year. Stierch will be the first Wikipedian-in-Residence at a Smithsonian Museum. Contact between Wikimedians and the institution was established last June (Signpost coverage: "Wikimedia Washington DC reaches out to the Smithsonian"). Earlier this month, Stierch had co-presented a five-minute talk with Katie Filbert (User:Aude) at the institution's "Ignite Smithsonian" conference, encouraging an audience of museum professionals to cooperate with Wikimedians ("Be GLAMorous: Join WikiProject GLAM/SI" – video, blog post).
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-04-25/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-04-25/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-04-25/In focus
The Arbitration Committee opened no new cases and closed no cases. One case is currently open.
Voting has continued during the week as to which proposals will form the final decision. More votes are likely to be made in the coming week.
On 21 April 2011, YMB29 (talk · contribs) requested that the Committee lift the topic ban that was imposed on him at the conclusion of the case. YMB29 is currently banned from editing articles about the Soviet Union and former Soviet Republics, and all related articles, broadly construed, for a period of no less than 6 months. As of 00:05 of 25 April no motion has been passed. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-04-25/Humour