Erik Zachte, Data Analyst at the Wikimedia Foundation, has produced visualizations showing the geographic provenance of edits to various language versions of Wikipedia on a particular day, using bubble maps, heat maps and animations. For example the bubble map for the spatial distribution of edits for the Chinese Wikipedia on that day clearly indicates that most contributions came from Hong Kong and Taiwan, instead of mainland China. The maps for the Ukrainian and Turkish Wikipedias hint at noticeable diaspora communities outside the main country, in contrast to, for example, the Norwegian Wikipedia. The spatial distribution for all languages combined shows a clear predominance of edits from within Europe.
The data used for the visualizations included the IP addresses of logged-in editors, which are subject to the WMF privacy policy. To protect editor privacy, edit timestamps were obfuscated by adding small errors, and geocoordinates were rounded.
Wikimedian GerardM celebrated his birthday by interviewing the Foundation's Executive Director Sue Gardner on his personal blog. Among other things, she discussed preliminary results of the 2011 editor survey conducted recently by the WMF, which showed a markedly higher satisfaction with the performance of the WMF than with that of chapters (on a scale from 1 to 10, respondents ranked their own performance at 6.24, that of volunteers overall at 7.14, the Wikimedia Foundation's at 7.32 and that of chapters at 4.33). She believed this result was due to the relative youth of chapters. (In March, Gardner had—somewhat controversially—warned of possible risks from the inexperience of many chapters' boards, and Deputy Director Erik Möller had earlier stated that "the very existence of chapters [was] increasingly being questioned", a statement that was questioned itself. Cf. Signpost coverage.) She also commented on recent rises in traffic for the Chinese Wikipedia (with a general rise in Chinese Internet users as the most likely explanation) and from mobile devices.
Earlier last week, GerardM interviewed Hisham Mundol, the WMF consultant for National Programs, India.
A speech given in the UK House of Commons by British further education minister John Henry Hayes was largely copied from Wikipedia, according to a detailed comparison by ePolitix.com. Hayes was responding on behalf of the government to a private member's bill to create an additional bank holiday, and numerous sentences in his speech correspond almost verbatim to parts of the article Bank holiday. ePolitix noted that the speech was given on a Friday, where attendance in parliament is usually very low, and mentioned the minister's remark that the particular section of the speech had been prepared for him to read out, but nevertheless called the incident "not exactly a glowing example for students", pointing out that Hayes "is an honorary member of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers".
Last week, Jimmy Wales was interviewed by USA Today ("Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales takes wiki work seriously"). Among other things, the paper noted his recent editing about current events, having been the Wikipedian who moved Catherine Middleton to Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge during the British royal wedding ("Yes, I am just that big a Wikipedia geek that I was waiting with my finger on the mouse button..."); however, another Wikipedian overtook Wales in updating Wikipedia with the death of Osama bin Laden.
The Chicago Sun-Times's profile of Jimmy Wales ("Wikipedia still ad-free at 10") focused on financial aspects: "Wales splits his time between London and Florida and says he earns a living by making speeches to industry groups and schools." The newspaper quoted an online marketing consultant who estimated that Wikipedia is foregoing at least "$1 billion" in advertising revenue but added "that's good. There should be some places online without ads."
This week, we took a break from our regular interview format to focus on ways Wikipedians can revitalize semi-active and inactive WikiProjects. Our "WikiProject Report" feature has looked at more than 100 WikiProjects in the past three years, but there are countless projects that have come and gone without any fanfare. You can browse the greyed-out names in the WikiProject Directory or the vast inactive WikiProject category to get an idea how many good intentions have long since been abandoned, merged, or otherwise stopped functioning. Some of these inactive and semi-active WikiProjects may be ripe for a reboot if enough editors are willing to dedicate time to rebuilding and maintaining the project.
Projects may lapse into a dormant state for a variety of reasons. Inactivity may be a natural part of a project's life, occurring when the project's goals are achieved or the circumstances surrounding the project's purpose change. For instance, WikiProjects created as part of an academic course typically cease activity when the semester ends; Harvard's Cyberlaw course in 2006 and Croatan High School's AP Biology class in 2009 are two examples. When the International Race of Champions was discontinued, the members of WikiProject IROC voted to disband. When the Signpost's WikiWorld comic strip ended, the purpose for WikiProject WikiWorld's existence ended as well. Projects that have naturally reached the end of their life are marked as defunct and a revival is unlikely.
However, there are many projects that die long before their prime. Some of these projects never built a substantial membership because their focus was too narrow or too broad, the project's goals were unclear, or the project never received adequate publicity. Submitting a proposal to the WikiProject Council before building a WikiProject can help attract Wikipedians who are interested in the topic, clarify the project's purpose, and help prevent false starts. Networking with Wikipedians that share similar interests can help build a project's membership, and announcing the project's news in the Signpost's WikiProject Report can reach larger audiences.
For projects with too narrow a focus, it may be better to merge the project into a larger, more active WikiProject. This is how many task forces are born; for example, the Desserts Task Force was previously WikiProject Ice Cream. But some narrowly focused or poorly defined projects may have so little content that they don't warrant a revival. The old project may end up deleted, although editors can still create a new project that serves a similar purpose, building on the lessons learned from the previous failed attempt.
At the other extreme are projects with a focus that is too broad. Some broad projects simply become shells for grouping together smaller child projects while others end up reinventing themselves in order to stay relevant. For example, the first WikiProject ever created, WikiProject Sports in September 2001, has struggled to remain active as specialized projects for nearly every sport have moved editor attention to their own talk pages, assessments, and portals. In contrast, the recently revived WikiProject United States has been reorganized and absorbed some responsibilities previously held by other projects. Discussions continue about the new scope of WikiProject United States and its relationship to child projects.
Bots can save time and effort
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Even with proper planning, many projects simply run out of steam. As the initial enthusiasm of the project's members wanes, the project's initiatives may become neglected and fall into disrepair. Productive members may leave projects after heated disagreements about specific articles or hurt feelings after mediation and arbitration. Busy editors may become so engaged in other activities both on and off Wikipedia that they stop visiting WikiProjects in which they were previously actively involved. Regardless of whether these projects are tagged as inactive, semi-active, or not at all, an effort to revive the project may be worthwhile.
The WikiProject Guide provides helpful advice for reviving a WikiProject. A good place to start is updating the list of active members to get a better picture of where the project currently stands. Some members may still be active on Wikipedia and may even continue to improve the project's articles independent of the WikiProject. Others have moved on to other things or have left Wikipedia entirely. Divide the member list into active, inactive, and former members with each member determining their own status. Check each user's contributions to see if they have been active on Wikipedia in the past few months; members who have not edited Wikipedia in several months can be classified as inactive until they return. To bring old members back and involve them in the project's revitalization, post a message on the talk pages of editors asking them to update their status and include ways they can contribute. New members can be invited personally or through public postings at the Community Portal or the WikiProject Report's news sidebar. Simply adding names to the participants list won't spur activity. In each invitation message, ask that members add the project's talk page to their watchlist and suggest ways they can aid the project's initiatives.
Improving the aesthetics of the project's page may be appropriate, although attractive projects can lapse into inactivity as quickly as projects with only black-and-white text. A new coat of paint won't fix the underlying problems of many floundering projects, but improved organization can help new and returning members find information more easily. There are a variety of generic WikiProject templates that may be helpful. Templates like {{Infobox WikiProject}} can provide a starting point for new members as they discover the project's resources. Unnecessary clutter can be removed from the project's main page, although this information should be archived in case it becomes important again. Clear suggestions as to how members can help should be easy to find, including to-do lists, {{tasks}}, cleanup listings, and watchlists. The {{WikiProject help}} template can also direct attention to the project's pressing needs.
During the project's inactive or semi-active period, portions of the project may have fallen into disrepair, templates may have been deleted, or services provided to the project may have changed or discontinued. Recreate any missing userboxes, project banners, or user invitation templates. Check the assessment system and the project's banner to ensure it still works. Parameters for automated functions like article alerts and hot articles may need to be updated. If the project has a portal, check that the fields are populated with content and make sure additional content is ready and waiting for when the portal is refreshed.
Reach out to projects that are already active and form collaborations where possible, particularly on articles where projects overlap. Competitions and drives like those held on alternating months by the Guild of Copy Editors and WikiProject Wikify can build relationships and mobilize the members of another project to achieve your project's goals.
In areas where a few small projects struggle to remain active, a single centralized project may be better. Mergers can concentrate the attention of members and allow them to more easily pool their resources, although the actual merging of projects can become contentious. Make sure all parties have been notified and have a chance to discuss a merger before it takes place.
Above all, the editors who are spearheading the revival should be open to the ideas of other members. Just like Wikipedia articles, WikiProjects are not owned by any editor no matter how much work that editor puts into rebuilding the project. Additionally, the Wikipedians involved in reviving a project should be dedicated to the project's goals before and after the revival. This means remaining active in the project, even after the project's initial rebirth. Simply creating a WikiProject and leaving it to take care of itself does not guarantee the project's survival, nor does simply revamping a project. Participate in the project's discussions and work on improving the project's articles. Building a thriving community takes time, but projects like WikiProject Oregon and WikiProject Military History show that it's possible.
Next week, we'll burn some rubber. Until then, make a pit stop in the archive.
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Two editors were reconfirmed as administrators:
At the time of publication there are three live RfAs: DeltaQuad 2 due to finish Thursday UTC, Sadads, due to finish Friday, and Logan, due to finish Friday.
There were no new featured articles. Anthony Michael Hall (nom) was delisted because of referencing problems.
Atlantic Coast Conference football championship games (nom), with four featured articles and four good articles. The ACC Championship Game is an American college football game held on the first Saturday in December by the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) each year to determine its football champion. The game pits the champion of the Coastal Division against the champion of the Atlantic Division following the conclusion of the regular season (nominated by JKBrooks85 and praised by the reviewers as fine work).
Newly promoted sounds will be included in next week's edition.
The Arbitration Committee opened no new cases. Two cases are currently open.
During the week, 40 kilobytes was submitted in on-wiki evidence before the evidence phase came to a close. Drafter PhilKnight submitted a complete proposed decision in the workshop, where comments were submitted by arbitrators, parties, and others.
The evidence phase came to a close during the week. Further comments were submitted in the workshop.
A request for arbitration concerning a hyphens and dashes dispute was filed last week. In lieu of opening a case at this time, the Committee passed the following motions:
As previewed in last week's Signpost, the now annual Berlin Hackathon was held this week in the German capital, hosted by Wikimedia Deutschland and attended by 100 participants (among them 32 Foundation employees). Predictably, the event received a large amount of digital coverage, including several postings on the Wikimedia Blog and a live video stream from which a large number of recordings were taken (album). It was accompanied by meetings of the Wiki Loves Monuments team, whose preparations for an Europe-wiki photo contest include various software tasks, and of the Language committee.
Many of the topics featured in Friday's "lightning talks" will be familiar to regular readers of the Technology Report: development of a new parser that would make WYSIWYG editing so much easier, for example, and the new Virginia data centre (which will be online from next week). They did, however, cover some new ground, including operational details. Mark Bergsma noted that the two data centres are unlikely to both channel traffic at the same time: instead, one will serve 90% of the traffic while the other will play a secondary, backup role, though the arrangement will be flipped at monthly intervals. WMF developer Neil Kandalgaonkar talked about a recent proof-of-concept hack combining MediaWiki with Etherpad-style realtime collaborative editing in form of the "Hackpad" software (also described on Wikitech-l and in a blog post). There were also talks on the "Kiwix" offline reader (cf. previous Signpost coverage), Firefogg 2, and the Narayam extension among others. In addition to these familiar themes, the line-up also included unfamiliar names, such as PhotoCommons (a new WordPress plugin) and qunit, a JavaScript testing suite that could open up interface testing to the crowd.
Saturday proved just as informative: Trevor Parscal reported the results of trialling left-aligned section edit links (116% more clicks and 9% more edits resulting); a tentative "end of July" release date was set for MediaWiki 1.18, which will bring gender intelligence and the ability to rotate photographs to MediaWiki.
Brion Vibber, who is leading the Foundation's efforts to rewrite the parser, laid down some of his ground rules (including "no new syntax" and a gap between the release of the new parser and its use on the majority of existing pages,), see also mw:Future. According to a tentative timeline, Wikimania in August will see working demos and in November, some beta code being will go live on Wikimedia sites in the form of opt-in gadgets.
There were, however, also heterodox opinions presented. Hannes Dohrn, speaking on behalf of the Sweble Wikitext Parser team, strongly advocated a move away from the familiar "apostrophe syntax" for bold and italic, along with further changes to the wikitext syntax. In a blog post on the same day, the Sweble team made an "offer to the Wikipedia community": "Come up with a new and better Wikitext and use the Sweble Wikitext parser to convert old Wikipedia content to that new format. ... We have spent more than one year full-time working on a parser that can handle the complexities of current Wikitext and it does not make sense to us to create another one."
With one of the WMF's two top product development projects (the parser) discussed on Saturday, on Sunday WMF User Interface Designer Brandon Harris gave a talk on the second, editor retention and improving the "-1 to 100 edit experience". More specifically, he outlined the thinking behind upcoming changes to make the "identity" of contributors more visible, e.g. displaying affiliations, interests and roles, which is hoped to strengthen communities by connecting members with tasks and collaborators corresponding to their interests. He acknowledged that "the big fear is that we are going to turn Wikipedia into Facebook", and promised that this wouldn't happen, but argued that there were things to learn from Facebook in successful community building. Harris predicted that some of the upcoming changes will be controversial, but concluded the talk by advising "it's time to achieve Zen acceptance that we are going to be adding these things, in order to save the projects".
Domas Mituzas, a paid developer for Facebook and a MediaWiki volunteer, spoke on improving performance, especially given the increasingly large number of actions that could seriously slow down larger wikis, e.g. changing widely used templates. A key goal is to reduce the burden of citation processing, which can occupy over 50% of the parsing workload for a given page. Mituzas emphasized the relation between performance and editor retention (sluggish website response times while editing can drive contributors away). Both he and (in the next talk) Tim Starling talked about HipHop integration, with its improvement in performance of up to 400%. It is envisaged to be deployed in late 2011 or early 2012.
Mark Bergsma gave an address (with slides) on Wikimedia's preparations for World IPv6 Day on June 8.
This year's motto was "talk less, code more", and, in addition to the talks, a significant amount of development work ("hacking") was completed: 65 bugs were squashed (see In brief below, for highlights), progress was made on localisation work, and even the start of an attempt at one of the features most requested by Wikimedians, global watchlists. An overhaul of the HTTPS access to Wikimedia sites (outlined last month by Brion Vibber and Ryan Lane) was being worked on.
The three day event also included social elements such as parties and outings. The ongoing success of the Berlin hack-days is almost certain to create interest among other chapters, including the United Kingdom chapter where proposals for a similar event have already been floated.
Further information: Friday blogpost, Friday notes, Saturday blogpost, Saturday notes, Sunday blogpost, Sunday notes, Monday blogpost.
The Foundation's Engineering Report for April was published last week on the Wikimedia Techblog, giving a brief overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in the last month. Given the ten day publication lag this month, the updates provided on many of the major development threads have since been superseded by relevant talks at the Berlin Hackathon (see above). However, the report also gave details on a number of other projects not covered there. For example, it highlighted how work on the mobile projects has "taken off" and the department's involvement in budgeting for the 2011-2012 fiscal year.
Also in the report was news of contractor Russ Nelson's work in improving the media storage and retrieval architecture by deploying new software in the form of "OpenStack Swift", which was deployed on three test servers. In April they started handling a small amount of operations, though the result of this test was not given. The WMF also said that it had received the account details that it needed from Google to start taking up their offer of backup space, helped by a transition to a new, more powerful server from generating the dumps themselves. A new search indexer was installed last month, resolving the space issues experienced with the older server and the Foundation's ability to monitor its uptime was also improved. It wasn't all plain sailing during April, however: according to the report, a click tracking trial with the Article Feedback tool had to be abandoned during the month, as did an upgrade to the Foundation's Squid software (see previous Signpost coverage). Work on keeping the code review backlog down was also unsuccessful, though a specific effort to handle shell bugs proved more effective.
The report added more detail on the new Article Feedback tool, which was recently expanded to cover 100,000 articles on the English Wikipedia, noting that, in a possible evolution of the tool, "users [would] be able to promote particularly relevant reviews to the talk page of the article reviewed" and that the tool would consider the credentials of the reviewer in question. References to a new LiquidThreads timeline were also included with their August release date, along with details of significant work on the project by its sole developer, Andrew Garrett. At the same time, Roan Kattouw and Timo Tijhof started to work on specifications for a version 2 of the ResourceLoader. In addition, following discussions about the deployment of the Interlanguage extension to Wikipedia, designer Brandon Harris made several recommendations to the extension's developers. Also included was news from Wikimedia's commercial partners PediaPress, who have patched the current extension so that generated openZim exports (i.e. articles saved in a format suitable for offline browsing) now have a navigable table of contents. They also report that more than a thousand openZim files were downloaded in just one week of April. In addition, the PoolCounter extension for avoiding repeats of the "Michael Jackson" effect was successfully deployed at the second attempt.
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.
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