From 20–22 May, around 30 Wikimedians from all around the world – four continents and eight countries in all – came together at the New York Public Library for GLAMcamp NYC, "a workshop targeting a small group of community-focused and technology-focused Wikimedians to kickstart the key elements of the glamwiki.org project".
Although many participants had arrived the day before, the event itself began on Friday, with a public workshop. Fifty extra people attended, from four US states, museums, libraries and archives (large and small), as well as several private art galleries, government agencies, universities, think-tanks, and the Wikimedia Foundation.
The workshop lasted for two hours, and included a keynote presentation from Meg Bellinger from Yale University, which has recently announced it will release the contents of its digital archive into the public domain. This was followed with a quick talk from Maarten Zeinstra, from Creative Commons Nederlands, about the Public Domain calculator, and a breakout into smaller groups of both WIkimedians and other participants for Q&A.
The rest of the day was spent on various tasks, although primarily on GLAM ambassadors, tools, and documentation. One group focussed on improving the guide to batch uploading, while another worked on the GLAM point of entry and its subpages. The GLAM ambassadors group decided on a complete overhaul of the project, and renamed the system to "Local contacts", although the term "e-volunteer" was also suggested.
The day ended with a VIP tour of the Met. Barbara Bridgers, General Manager for Imaging, took people around the photography department, after which Neal Stimler and Susan Chun showed groups their favorite artifacts in the Museum.
Day 2 started where Day 1 had left off: writing documentation. The POE group continued with what they were doing, and work began on a mass uploading tool. During this time, Nina Paley – famous cartoonist and free culture advocate – dropped in and talked with the Wikimedians.
The first parallel sessions after lunch focused on more coding/documentation and a discussion of the proposal of a Free Culture Index "to evaluate free culture compliance within the GLAM sector", such as whether a museum releases photos for free use, or allows photography by others. The group decided against the idea that this might be awarded to the GLAM by Wikimedians, judging that it would probably be both easier and better if the institution could give themselves some sort of badge for their website, probably along the lines of the HTML5 badge.
The final session of the day was a lengthy discussion of metrics and tools that could be used for GLAM-Wikimedia collaborations. Participants mentioned various tools, which can be seen on the Tools & Requests page.
On the final day around half of the participants made their way towards the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library. Sunday was mostly spent working on the projects that had been started during the previous two days.
Ryan Kaldari (Kaldari) showed the group his new "Wikimedia bulk uploader" tool, and gave a demonstration with "Airview" images. The participants then split back up into two groups, working on documentation – in particular, how-to guides and FAQs – and metrics for GLAM partnerships.
The final session of the day was a plenary/wrap-up. Liam Wyatt led the group in going through all of the things that had been achieved throughout the weekend, and who would continue to work on them. Another potential GLAMcamp conference was discussed – which would be held in Europe, if at all – as well as finishing off all of the new guides and tools.
The event was supported by a $10,000 grant from the WMF; the budget appears to have been met.
The Foundation's legal department has published a draft of legal policies documenting internal staff practices in various matters. These include office actions (such as DMCA takedowns), subpoenas (noting that "As a general rule, the Wikimedia Foundation may not recognize a foreign subpoena or order") and the harassment of users ("The Wikimedia Foundation will fully cooperate in investigations involving harassment of users that include credible threats of violence. Users, however, must report the harassment to local police"). On his personal blog, Larry Sanger (known for his role until 2002 in getting Wikipedia started) applauded the part about dealing with child pornography, interpreting it as a vindication of his allegations a year ago when he reported the WMF to the FBI for "knowingly distributing" such matter. (These allegations were rebutted by the Foundation's legal counsel at the time and do not appear to have resulted in any action by the FBI.)
Online magazine The Awl published an article by Maria Bustillos, "Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert". It starts with a plea to stop "kvetching about Wikipedia" and describes the various technical and social processes that are used to stop Wikipedia from becoming "a giant glob of graffiti". Bustillos makes the point that the "byzantine array of forces working for accuracy and against edit-warring, sock-puppetry and the like" don't always work:
It's not perfect, of course, but neither is any other human-derived resource, including, as if it were necessary to say so, printed encyclopedias or books.
Bustillos argues that Wikipedia has benefits for those doing serious research: it presents a richer set of citations and bibliographies than traditional encyclopedias (in part due to the insistence on verifiability); it responds quickly to new developments (such as royal weddings and Japanese earthquakes); and most importantly it enables readers to look "under the hood" at the history and talk page of any article, providing valuable access to the controversy related to the subject, albeit with a proviso:
Of course, a load of dimwitted yelling and general codswallop may also emerge, but let's face it, the same thing happens with any given stack of books in the library, only in more formal, less convenient packaging.
It is from this that Bustillos' main argument emerges: that Wikipedia embodies a shift away from the "era of print", with its culture of ownership of ideas by experts and its linear and authoritative representations of knowledge; Wikipedia, she is saying – based on an interview with Bob Stein (director of the "Institute for the Future of the Book") – is at the forefront of an era of digital knowledge as described by Marshall McLuhan, based on "collaborative" and "tribal" knowledge. After responding to critics of this general trend – including Nick Carr and, especially, Jaron Lanier – Bustillos takes the argument further, reaching this rather disquieting conclusion:
Wikipedia is like a laboratory for this new way of public reasoning for the purpose of understanding, an extended polylogue embracing every reader in an ever-larger, never-ending dialectic. Rather than being handed an "authoritative" decision, you're given the means for rolling your own. We can call this new way of looking at things post-linear or even "post-fact" as Clay Shirky put it in a recent and thrill-packed interview with me. [Shirky said:] "Wikipedia, if it works better than Britannica, threatens not only its authority as a source of information, but also the theory of knowledge on which Britannica is founded. On Wikipedia 'the author' is distributed, and this fact is indigestible to current models of thinking. ... Wikipedia is forcing people to accept the stone-cold bummer that knowledge is produced and constructed by argument rather than by divine inspiration."
Shirky compares this with the historical example of the transition from alchemists to chemists: "Alchemists kept their practices shrouded in secrecy. ... The difference was that chemists had become willing to expose their methods and conclusions to the withering scrutiny of their peers" (an example that Shirky had already used in his 2010 book Cognitive Surplus, as summarized in the Signpost's review).
Bustillos admits that "there continues to be resistance to the idea that expertise itself has been called into question". But are Wikipedians the ones calling expertise into question? It seems strange to say that people who spend considerable time hunting down citations in old books, journals, newspapers and scholarly databases are undermining the role of expertise. Indeed, the increasing tendency of Wikipedians to try and reach out to universities, museums and libraries (through Campus Ambassadors, GLAM projects, the Public Policy Initiative, and so on) suggests there may be some life left in making a profession out of knowing things. The popularity of so-called "denialist" movements that often set up in populist opposition to the views of experts (for example, climate scientists) may be considered a rather more negative version of the "post-fact" world Bustillos is describing, as pointed out in the comments section to Bustillos' article.
For some, the rhetoric of epistemic free-for-all goes above and beyond the reality of projects such as Wikipedia. One example from the comments section:
Wikipedia hardly devalues experts. It enshrines them like never before. Every statement in a Wikipedia article has to be backed up with a citation to an article or book produced by a journalist, an academic, a scientist, or some other credentialed expert who has carried out primary research according to currently prevailing methods in journalism or academia.
Finally, Wikipedia co-founder and Citizendium founder Larry Sanger weighed in with a post on his personal blog entitled 25 Replies to Maria Bustillos.
In the United Kingdom, controversy over the superinjunctions taken out by at least 4 celebrities to block publication of allegations regarding their private lives raged on, and continued to involve Wikipedia (see earlier story). Legal action brought against Twitter to reveal the identities of users publishing the blocked information prompted discussion on Foundation-l about the implications for the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia users. Mike Godwin, former legal counsel of the WMF, recounted that "I've discussed this precise issue (informally) with Twitter's general counsel, and we agree that the exposure for Twitter in the UK is significantly different than it would be for the Wikimedia Foundation" (presumably lower), but that "the risks for WMF in the UK (and, indeed, throughout the EU as a function of UK membership in the European Union) remain pretty significant".
Jimmy Wales, adding to his statements in an earlier interview with the BBC (see last week's "In the news"), continued to speak out against the superinjunctions in an interview with The Independent newspaper ("Wikipedia founder opens new front in privacy battle"), similar to Godwin stating that "We probably wouldn't consider setting up [an office] in the UK due to potential problems with censorship."
After Scottish newspaper the Sunday Herald published the identity of one of the celebrities, footballer Ryan Giggs, followed by US media such as Gawker and Ars Technica, the information eventually stayed on Wikipedia, too. In The Independent interview, Wales vowed that "if someone tried to force us to take the information down, we would definitely fight them. If we got a valid court order from a judge in the USA, there would be little we could do other than to comply. But I think that is very unlikely, because of the First Amendment." Similarly, asked on his talk page whether the WMF would release information about an editor's identity in such cases, Wales said that "as someone able to closely observe the general opinions of the board and staff and legal team of the Foundation, I can say that it would be very unlikely that the Wikimedia Foundation would comply casually with a request from a non-US court where no ones life is in danger and there is not clear evidence of libel." In a 2009 court case – held, like some of the current superinjunction hearings, before Justice Tugendhat – concerning the insertion of "private and sensitive information" into the Wikipedia article about the plaintiff and her child, the WMF had "indicated that it would not disclose the [editor's] IP address without a court order, but that it would obey such an order even though it was outside an English court's jurisdiction."
By Monday the name was uttered in the UK's House of Commons, which is exempt from the injunctions by parliamentary immunity, and eventually found its way into major British sources like the BBC.
Kevin J. O'Brien has written an article for The New York Times about the possibility raised by the German Wikimedia chapter ("Wikipedia’s German overseer") of nominating Wikipedia to be listed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO (cf. past Signpost coverage: May 16, April 4, March 28). The petition is currently featured on the homepage of Wikimedia Germany and on that of the Foundation's tenth anniversary wiki, already listing over 700 signatories at the time of writing. The NYT article quotes Jimmy Wales in support of the idea, and Susan Williams, head of external media relations at UNESCO in Paris, saying that "anyone can apply" for World Heritage Site status but Wikipedia "may have difficulty fulfilling the criteria" as Wikipedia is not currently endangered. The article goes on to explore other possible UNESCO statuses Wikipedia could potentially apply for. The website Monsters & Critics featured an interview with Jimmy Wales with dpa on this and other subjects. User:Ziko briefly summarized coverage of the UNESCO proposal in German media.
This week, we turn our attention to WikiProject Formula One. Started in October 2004 by Rdsmith4, it has 290 active members. The project is home to 13 Featured articles, 4 Featured lists, 24 Good articles, and a Featured portal – with a total of 3,584 articles under its care. The Signpost interviewed project members 4u1e, Bretonbanquet, and DH85868993.
Tell us a bit about yourself, what F1 team/s you support, and what motivated you to become a member of WikiProject Formula One?
Your project has 3,584 articles associated with it. How do you keep all these up to standard and what are your biggest challenges?
WikiProject Formula One has 13 FA-class articles, 4 FLs, 24 GAs and a Featured portal. How did your project achieve this and how can other projects work toward this?
A typical F1 season runs for around nine months. What do members do between seasons and does the project have any special activities to encourage participation during the off-season?
Do you collaborate with other WikiProjects?
What are the most pressing needs for WikiProject Formula One? How can a new contributor help today?
Next week's article will be a traveler's delight. Until then, transport yourself to the archive.
Reader comments
Four lists were promoted:
One featured list was delisted:
There were no new featured articles or delistings.
Four images were promoted. Medium-sized images can be viewed by clicking on "nom":
The Arbitration Committee opened no new cases. Two cases are currently open.
During the week, drafter PhilKnight submitted a proposed decision for arbitrators to vote on.
During the week, further comments were submitted in the workshop. Drafter Elen of the Roads is currently expected to submit a proposed decision.
A request for arbitration was filed during the week regarding biography of living persons (BLP) articles and implementing the shutdown of pending changes (PC) on those articles. The Committee passed a preliminary injunction, applying to all administrators (admins), which is effective immediately:
Note from the editor: the issue of the Signpost in a fortnight's time will be the first anniversary of my time in the role of "Technology Report" lead. In that time, the flavour of the report has not changed greatly: it is much as it ever was. I would like the 6 June issue to include a handful of trial elements, to see if they meet with approval; as such, it would be great to take comments on this issue about what you, Signpost readers, think about the "Technology Report" and what suggestions you may have. Thank you.
Periods of intermittent slowness (many causing timeouts and consequently edits being lost) intensified this week, prompting a raft of complaints at the English Wikipedia's Technical Village Pump (permalink). The issues were raised on the Foundation's mailing list, prompting WMF Deputy Director Erik Möller to relay suggestions from the Wikimedia operations team as to what might be behind the issues, which have affected users as far apart as the east coast of the United States and Australia:
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(The extension deployed on May 18 - cf. bug #21919 - was GoogleNewsSitemap, an extension designed to make wikis, in this case the English Wikinews site, more accessible to the Google News aggregation service.) The problems underline the need for the forthcoming Ashburn, Virginia data centre, through which requests could be rerouted. In his email, Möller also warned against checking the usual reports on Wikimedia uptime at http://ganglia.wikimedia.org, which is "in the process of being fixed".
In unrelated news, this week also saw a fatal error which made Wikimedia Commons unable to accept edits for a period of some minutes (bug #29078).
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.
