Phoebe Ayers has been a Wikipedian since 2003 and is a science and engineering librarian at UC Davis; she was appointed to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees in 2010.
It’s time again for the Board of Trustees elections for the Wikimedia Foundation. This year, 19 candidates are running for three open seats. If you are an active editor (with more than 300 edits before April 15, and 20 recent edits – a threshold determined by the independent elections committee) you are eligible to vote, and can do so from whichever wiki you edit most; directions are here. You can vote up until the end of June 12 (UTC), so do so soon.
But wait, let’s back up. Elections for what now? And why should you vote? What’s going on?
The Board of Trustees is the governing body for the Wikimedia Foundation. Here’s what that means: the Board is entrusted with the ultimate legal responsibility for and authority over the Foundation's $20 million annual budget, and with setting the direction for the Foundation along with the Executive Director, Sue Gardner. The Foundation provides the hosting and technical infrastructure to run almost 300 Wikipedias, plus Wiktionary, Commons, Wikiquote, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, and MediaWiki projects; the Foundation also provides press, legal, financial, and outreach support for these projects.
The Board of Trustees annual Q&A panel at last year's Wikimania. I am standing and introducing myself to the attendees, shortly after being appointed and announced.
Does the Board intervene in Wikipedia editorial decisions? No. Do we have much to do with daily decisions on the projects? Not really. It’s much more high-level than that. If you’ve seen the fundraising banners on the projects – well, the Board doesn’t design or approve the banners. We don’t specify in what manner the banners are rolled out. We don’t even hire the fundraising staff, or say that the fundraiser should start in November. All of that comes under the authority of the Executive Director. What the Board does do is give the Executive Director the authority to raise and spend this money in the first place.
The Board is also the body ultimately responsible for taking the long view of all the projects: where are we going to be in ten, twenty, a hundred years? What’s our mission, and will it stay the same? What kind of a body do we want the Wikimedia Foundation to be, and what direction do we want the Wikimedia movement to go in?
There are ten Board members, all with two year terms. Three members are directly elected by the editing community, two are appointed by the chapters, one is the “founder” seat occupied by Jimmy Wales, and the remainder are appointed by the Board itself to ensure we have a good mix of expertise. Having half of the seats community-selected (community-elected and chapter-appointed) helps to ensure that the Board always has a community perspective and orientation.
It’s important to note, however, that Board members aren’t direct representatives. I was put on the Board last summer through the chapter-appointment process, but I don’t specifically represent the chapters in Board discussions; although I'm a long-time Wikipedian, I’ve never even belonged to a chapter myself. The point of the Board is to keep all of the interests of the Wikimedia Foundation – including our mission, our projects, and our global community – central to what we do. So the people elected to the Board should possess general qualities (some of which are laid out in the Board manual), as well as an understanding of Wikimedia and the challenges we face, and relevant skills and experience that can be brought to the table. And Board members should be dedicated: this is a demanding position that requires a serious commitment of time and energy, an occasional thick skin, and belief in Wikimedia's mission.
That commitment isn't necessarily visible. For one thing, the Board is international, and the position requires a fair amount of travel: three to four in-person meetings a year, held in San Francisco and in other countries with the Chapters meeting and Wikimania. Added to that is a time commitment for online meetings, reading emails (there's a lot of reading – and writing!) and generally staying abreast of the movement. But the commitment of energy is substantial as well: the questions the Board faces aren't easy and don't have pre-determined outcomes, and figuring out the future of the most important online project of our time is not something that has been done before. Thankfully, it's a collaborative position: the Board is supported by the hard work of the staff, the Executive Director, and the many Wikimedians who hash out difficult questions of projects, languages, chapters, outreach, and development. And we rely on each other, as colleagues, to approach our task with good faith and good judgment.
“Huh,” you might be thinking to yourself. “So who’s running then, exactly?”
Of the 19 people running for those three community-elected seats, three are incumbents (Ting, SJ and Kat), who were voted in two years ago. Some candidates have held or currently hold community-elected positions in chapters; a few have helped found chapters. Several of the candidates have had long-standing involvement in Wikimedia committees and governance activities, and some long-term editors are running. In other words, this year there’s a great field of devoted Wikimedians.
“Ok, that’s all fine and good,” you might say, “but I don’t know any of them. Who should I vote for? How do I decide?”
Each candidate has a statement up here, and each has answered questions (you can still ask further questions). Here’s my advice: look for traits of outstanding leadership, good judgment, and collaboration. Has the person shown evidence of being able to thoughtfully consider issues, to listen to diverse views, and to build consensus in a small (and a large) group? Have they done cool projects? Do they have outside skills or an important perspective they can bring to the board? Do they understand the job of a Board member, and the Wikimedia Foundation? And finally, do you agree with where they think Wikimedia should go, and with what issues they consider important?
Once you decide who you want on the board, you can vote by ranking candidates; make sure you rank all of the candidates you want to see elected higher than those you don't want (1 is highest). Only around 1,500 people or so have voted so far, compared with around 3,000 to 4,000 in years past. But there’s still time to vote! You have the chance to help shape Wikimedia governance, and I encourage you to take advantage of it.
Board resolutions on controversial content and images of identifiable people
Last week, the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees published its long awaited resolution on controversial content, accompanied by a Resolution on images of identifiable people. Last year, controversies about sexual images on Commons had prompted the Foundation to hire a consultant to provide a report on controversial content and make recommendations, which were presented to the Board at its October meeting (see the
summary of events in the Signpost's "2010 in review").
One of the recommendations is likely to become the most visible outcome of the process: The implementation of a "personal image hiding feature that will enable readers to easily hide images hosted on the projects that they do not wish to view" (Signpost coverage of the design mockup for this feature: "'Personal image filter' to offer the ability to hide sexual or violent media"). According to the Board's minutes, this aspect was "discussed at length, as the most complex proposed outcome of the working group". In connection with this personal filter, the resolution also mentions the "principle of least astonishment for the reader", which has in the past been invoked in such controversies (cf. Signpost coverage: "Explicit image featured on German Wikipedia's main page"), and which the Harris report had recommended to be elevated to policy status as a fundamental principle governing relationships with readers.
One participant in the Foundation-l discussion about the announcement on Foundation-l conjectured that the other resolution, about images of identifiable people, will be the more consequential, requiring "considerably more self-examination on the part of every project that hosts or uses images".
WMF Community Department announces "Summer of Research" participants
The Wikimedia Foundation has announced an interdisciplinary team of eight researchers (most of them Ph.D. students) who from June to August will be working "on a wide-ranging set of questions that address vital issues of openness and participation in Wikipedia". Led by the Community Department, the questions they will address include:
The efforts will build on preliminary research conducted recently and covered earlier in The Signpost. Quantitative studies will use the Wikilytics software developed for the Foundation's Editor Trends Study.
The Community Department invited involvement from Wikipedians and feedback from external researchers, promising them that "where allowed by the Wikimedia privacy policy, we'll be publishing our code and data under open licenses and in formats that encourage reuse".
Editing Workshop revives Wikipedia in indigenous language
Four of the students at the workshop, with the main page of the Northern Sami Wikipedia in the background
In a workshop held by the Norwegian Wikimedia chapter on 28 and 29 May, eight women from the indigenous Sami people were trained in editing Wikipedia by seven experienced Wikipedia volunteers. The event is credited with reviving activity on the Northern Sami Wikipedia (se.wikipedia.org) which, according to User:Ulflarsen, was "for all practical purposes dormant", having seen only about two to four edits a day in the lead-up to the workshop, most of them from bots (cf. project statistics). At the moment, it contains around 3600 articles; the language has about 20,000 speakers. The event was funded from a grant of 350,000 Norwegian kroner – around $65,000 or €45,000 – that Wikimedia Norge had received from the Sametinget (Sami Parliament of Norway) in two tranches since 2009 (original press release), which until now had remained largely unspent. Larsen told The Signpost that the grant enabled him to travel to Kautokeino (one of the cultural centers of the Sami area) to connect with the Sami community, and hold a one-day workshop in April. The recent workshop in Oslo was covered by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (Google Translate). Jarle Vines (User:Jarvin, head of Wikimedia Norway) said it is the most encouraging event he had attended for years within the Wikimedia movement.
Briefly
Good article monthly roundup: This May, the number of good articles crossed the 12,000 mark. However, the monthly increase of 181 GAs was the smallest since July 2010, and was fewer than half the rise achieved in March. The number of articles awaiting review has risen to 380, with a backlog dating to March in some categories. A shortage of reviewers, and fatigue from a backlog reduction drive earlier this year, have been blamed for the current slow progress. Reviewers are urgently sought, particularly for the lengthy queue of music articles and in connection with a university assignment project on several sociology topics.
Image donation: As announced by Kippelboy, the Biblioteca Museu Víctor Balaguer, a library and museum near Barcelona, will upload images of its art collection to Wikimedia Commons. It includes many paintings from the 19th and 20th century. Participants at the British Library Editathon
British Library Editathon: On 4 June, as part of the GLAM-Wiki partnership with the British Library, Wikipedians, curators, researchers, authors and even a few American graduate students on a study abroad trip participated in the second Editathon at the British Library (see the Signpost coverage and the event page of the first British Library Editathon). The day was sponsored by the English and Drama Department, and focused on early fantasy and fictional worlds, international modern poets and Victorian authors, resulting in the creation of and improvement of related articles, new images, and audio files on Commons, and new content on Wikisource (results and more pictures are at the event page on Wikimedia UK's webpage). Wikipedians received guided tours of the British Library's Science Fiction exhibit "Out of this world" by the specialist curator who researched the exhibition, and were given opportunities to have a personal hands-on with original rare books and manuscripts, including those of works by Oscar Wilde and Dickens. Richard Power (User:Helical gear), one of the representatives from the British Library, said the "achievements of the day are to be determined in the long term". The Editathon also spawned ideas for future events with the British Library and several image requests.
Epilogue to Houellebecq plagiarism affair: In 2010, French writer Michel Houellebecq was found to have copied three passages in his novel La Carte et le territoire almost verbatim from the French Wikipedia (see Signpost coverage: "Houellebecq defends himself against charges of Wikipedia plagiarism", "Houellebecq copyleft controversy"). Last month, Wikimedia France announced that its efforts to convince the book's publisher Flammarion to comply with Wikipedia's CC-BY-SA license at least in the new ebook edition of the novel had been partially successful – Wikipedia is now named in the acknowledgments in the following form: "I also thank Wikipedia (http://fr.wikipedia.org) and its contributors, whose notes I have sometimes used as a source of inspiration, notably those about the housefly, the town of Beauvais and about Frédéric Nihous". However, the French chapter's request to identify these passages precisely by page numbers was not honored. A headline on French IT news Numerama site read "Wikipedia acknowledged, but not sourced".Participants of the Dharwad workshop
Kannada workshop: Indian Wikipedian HPN has written a report on a Wikipedia workshop in Dharwad, attended by 51 people. It was the first ever such event to have been held in the Southern Indian area of North Karnataka and was conducted entirely in the Kannada language. He called the number of women participants "encouraging".
New administrator.January (nom), from the UK, has gained expertise in copyright issues on the English Wikipedia. She intends to contribute as an admin to speedy deletion, usernames for administrator attention (dealing mainly with promotional usernames, the most frequently reported problem) and copyright problems. January also contributes to WP:BLP issues, non-free content evaluation, and sockpuppetry investigation.
European doctors' significant reliance on Wikipedia
300 GPs were interviewed across Europe for a report by Insight Research Group that looked into how regularly doctors are accessing the social web for both professional and personal reasons. The finding that 60% of European doctors consult Wikipedia regularly for professional reasons has surprised many in the industry. The proportion jumps to 69% when all social media sites are considered – not just Wikipedia, but sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter. Reported in Response Source and Swansea College of Medicine library blog. On BBC news, a GP who hadn't used Wikipedia for professional purposes before was asked for his impression of Wikipedia's medical coverage, and said that "I was quite impressed by the information I looked up today", calling it "very accurate, very up to date". However, he cautioned that much of it was "highly technical information far beyond the reach of the layman", who "may find it hard to interpret".
India a natural target for Wikipedia growth
Outlook India Magazine carried an article that analyses why India has been chosen as a target for Wikipedia's growth in the Global South. It argues that India's strong culture of free speech and its numerous languages are significant factors in the choice. There are currently 20 Indian-language Wikipedias, at various stages of growth. Indicative of the move is the Wikimedia Foundation's intention to open its first office outside the US, in Delhi, the appointment of Mumbai-based documentary filmmaker Bishakha Datta to Wikimedia’s Board of Trustees, and the launch of the first-ever Indian Campus Ambassadors’ program in Pune. The latter was also covered on the front page of The Hindu ("Wikimedia Foundation launches Campus Ambassadors Program in Pune "), quoting Hisham Mundol and Frank Schulenburg from Wikimedia.
"Jimmy Wales's Wikipedia Balancing Act": A concise article in BusinessWeek reported statements by Jimmy Wales "on empowering his army of volunteers while still maintaining control of the site—and not selling out", referring to the absence of ads on Wikipedia, and the relationship of the Wikimedia Foundation to Wikimedia chapters: "Early on, some people thought we should radically decentralize and have local groups in different countries control their own sites. Each could have its own look and its own standards. The Germans were the first to organize and want to start a chapter. Some wanted to set up a club to represent Wikipedia there, but the idea raised tough questions. You don't want to give away too much power." (Such questions are among those examined by the "Movement roles" working group, which last week published draft recommendations to the WMF Board of Trustees)
US teens "wary" of sexual health information on Wikipedia: As reported in Canada's National Post, the recently published results of a survey conducted among US teenagers in 2008 show that most of them are "wary" about the reliability of sexual health information on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia's "little blue numbers in brackets": Following an episode about Wikipedia that had received much attention the previous week, webcomic xkcdmocked the tendency to ascribe credibility to statements merely because they carry citations of references – a phenomenon that a recent study confirmed in college students, see this week's "Recent research".
Behind the scenes: An article on PopMatters titled "Wikiocracy, or We're all doomed... citation needed" examined various "behind-the-scenes" oddities of Wikipedia's internal processes (e.g. the "lamest edit wars" list), but concluded that there are actually some "Wikieditors who survive all of the above with their humour, perspective, and good sense intact and against all odds demonstrate that the real potential of the form is inherent in humanity’s eccentricities, not its nobility."
Baseball players ranked by article length: US baseball blogger Andrew Simon conducted "A useless study of baseball and Wikipedia", by ranking 50 current players according to the length of their Wikipedia articles (not counting infoboxes, charts, etc.), exploring how the word count would correspond to each player's notability or the length of their career. The posting opens by mentioning "baseball's greatest Wiki" – former Major League player Wiklenman Vicente "Wiki" González, who however, unlike Wikipedia, is not "a vast resource of mostly factual information about any topic you could think of".
Why pay for encyclopedic information?: A column in The Ledger wondered "Why pay for encyclopedic info?", compared the different pricing schemes of Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica, and recalled the demise of Encarta.
Palin remarks prompt discussion: Little Green Footballs[1] and Politico[2] highlighted a (rather limited) controversy about the article Paul Revere, where according to Politico, fans of Sarah Palin tried "to back up her description of Revere's midnight ride" she gave in recent remarks that were widely perceived as inaccurate.
Evidence of "shared leadership" found in 4 million talk page messages: As described in a paper titled "Identifying Shared Leadership in Wikipedia" , four researchers from Carnegie Mellon University used machine learning to train an algorithm to classify the text of talk page messages, based on evaluation of a set of formal criteria into four kinds of behavior indicating different kinds of "leadership", using the following descriptions and examples:
Providing Positive Feedback (Transactional Leadership: Energize people through acknowledging work and provides rewards): "I’m so impressed. This is a very fine article!"
Providing Negative Feedback (Aversive Leadership: Regulate people through reprimands): "If you continue in this manner you will be blocked from editing without further warning. Please stop, and consider improving rather than damaging the work of others."
Directing (Directive Leadership: Direct people through issuing instructions, commands, assigning tasks, setting goals): "Here is a new article on a former airport I thought you might want to check out."
Social exchange (Transformational Leadership: Promote emotional engagement through for example talking nice, starting off-topic conversation, etc.). "Drop me a line on my talk page sometime, we’ll get a coffee over at Hot Rize or the new King Kocoa…".
They used this to classify four million user talk page messages from the English Wikipedia, from a January 2008 dump, "sent by 130,000 distinct users (who had edited Wikipedia for an average of 13.6 months) and were received by 1.1 million distinct users (who averaged 10.8 months of editing)". Aiming to find differences between Wikipedians in central and peripheral roles, the researcher compared results for admins and non-admins, and according to membership in a WikiProject (non-members, regular members or core members, the latter defined as founder or top three contributor of a WikiProject). They found that "the more central editors perform more leadership behaviors per person because they are generally more active. However, these differences are not huge. For example, 2.8% of administrators’ work consists of sending directive messages compared to 2.0% for non-administrators". They interpreted this as "strong evidence of shared leadership in Wikipedia" (defined as "a dynamic, interactive influence process among individuals in groups for which the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of group or organizational goals"), with "a large proportion of leadership behaviors performed by editors in peripheral as well as central roles", in contrast to traditional models of leadership. Although editors in all roles showed leadership behaviors, there were differences: "the role of core members in Wikiprojects may be less task-focused and more person-focused, with social or motivational messages to keep members active". Kempt enough to be "my kind of people"? Wikimedians at Wikimania 2010
Negative stereotypes about Wikipedians may deter newbies: For a paper titled "My Kind of People? Perceptions About Wikipedia Contributors and Their Motivations" (slides), a Yahoo! researcher conducted 20 in-person interviews with participants who had all edited Wikipedia before, but infrequently. When asked how they imagined Wikipedia contributors, interviewees used three "primary stereotypes": That of "regular folks", reflecting a perception of Wikipedia as an egalitarian community, secondly "well educated, credentialed group", and thirdly, "By far the most common image that participants invoked to describe Wikipedia’s contributors was that of the solitary techno-geek, ... an unflattering picture [where Wikipedians] are 'geeky' or 'nerdy,' technologically adept, unkempt, unhealthily obsessive, and absorbed with online life." The author stressed the potential damage caused by such negative stereotypes (even if their factual accuracy was questionable), as they might prevent new editors from joining the community. He states that a wiki's "deliberate design decision to hide the identities of individual authors in favor of a kind of collective authorship ... has consequences which are to date insufficiently investigated", possibly allowing readers to fill the void with preconceived stereotypes. "Wikipedia’s ongoing educational efforts could include 'meet the author' informational campaigns which highlight the identities of heavy contributors and emphasize their pro-social motivations. In other words, Wikipedia can combat speculative answers to the question 'Who writes Wikipedia?' by explicitly revealing and promoting that information to its users." The paper has already been noted by the Wikimedia Foundation's "Account Creation Improvement Project".
Wikipedia on a DVD player: Also at CHI 2011, a note titled "Utilizing DVD players as low-cost offline Internet browsers", describing a method that "enables communities in the developing world to access Wikipedia and other resources at very low cost", received a honorable mention. According to the abstract, the researchers put "the entirety of schools-wikipedia.org – encompassing 5,500 articles and 259,000 screens – to a double-layer DVD. We evaluate our system via a study of 20 low-income users in Bangalore, India. Using our DVD as reference, participants are able to answer factual questions with over 90% success."
WebSci'11: Diversity, edit-wars, wikilink distance and reference blindness
The program of next week's ACMWebSci'11 conference contains several presentations and posters about Wikipedia:
The paper for a short presentation titled "Towards a diversity-minded Wikipedia" consists largely of a review of existing literature on the demographics of the Wikipedia community and other topics which to the authors make it "seem likely that high barriers exist for new viewpoints to be accepted in Wikipedia, even if they objectively contain useful information". The authors then proceed to say that "together with the German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, the European research project RENDER will work on building a truly diversified Wikipedia", by providing "representations, techniques and tools to discover, understand, and use the following types of information: the multitude of opinions, sentiments and viewpoints, the points of dissent, content that would otherwise disappear from view, the quality of articles, and controversies surrounding specific topics." (An employee at Wikimedia Germany has been working on the RENDER project since about March, see the chapter's April report. Expect more thorough coverage of RENDER in a future Signpost issue.)
Posters:
Frequency of edit wars: Aiming at a "Characterization and prediction of Wikipedia edit wars", five authors from Budapest University of Technology and Economics suggest a relatively simple formula to measure the "controversiality" of a Wikipedia article, based on identifying the editors who have reverted or were reverted in that article, and counting their total contributions to it. Having tested it on five different language Wikipedias, also against the presence of templates warning about controversies, they consider it efficient at detecting edit wars (as discerned from mere vandalism reverts), and use it to measure the total proportion of controversial articles: "Only one page in a hundred becomes even a candidate for war (less than 30k out of over 3m articles in the English WP). Less than 0.5% of pages shows significant signs of war".
How far do wikilinks go?: In a "Wikipedia Case Study" about "Measuring Hyperlink Distances" two researchers from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro examined the distribution of the distance between a Wikipedia article and another that it links to, as measured by various distance functions based on which categories these two articles share. They found evidence "that hyperlinks in Wikipedia are more likely to point to documents that are not related" than to similar ones. In passing, they note that "the document with the most categories is 'List of mathematics categories', with 1391 categories."
Reference Blindness: In a third poster titled "Reference Blindness: The Influence of References on Trust in Wikipedia", three researchers from the University of Twente asked a survey group of 23 college students to rate the credibility of four articles from the English Wikipedia, in various versions altered such that the same article text appeared with fewer or unrelated references. As "the most remarkable observation" they found that "only 6 of the 23 participants noticed that the references were not related to the topic of the article in the low-quality condition. However, 17 participants indicated that they had paid attention to the references. We coin this phenomenon reference blindness: users consider references important for credibility, but as long as they are present, the quality of the references mostly does not seem to matter. " In addition, two of the authors evaluate another method to assess credibility, namely the WikiTrust software, in last month's issue of First Monday ("Evaluating WikiTrust: A trust support tool for Wikipedia" – finding that "the participants in our experiment rated usefulness of WikiTrust low"), and published another article titled "Factual accuracy and trust in information: The role of expertise" (abstract) in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
In his dissertation titled "Hackers, Cyborgs, and Wikipedians: The Political Economy and Cultural History of Wikipedia" (submitted at Bowling Green State University last month), Andrew Famiglietti argues that Wikipedia "was shaped by an ideal I call, 'the cyborg individual,' which held that the production of knowledge was best entrusted to a widely distributed network of individual human subjects and individually owned computers. I trace how this ideal emerged from hacker culture in response to anxieties hackers experienced due to their intimate relationships with machines." Yochai Benkler's ideas are referred to, among those of others. One chapter, titled "Wikipedia and Google", rejects a blogger's claim that Wikipedians decide on the notability of article subjects solely based on Google hits. A detailed analysis of the fate of new articles from one entire day (which the author provides online in the form of a blog, tagged by their eventual fate – e.g. those speedily deleted under CSD A7), finds that while Google searches indeed play an important role in the corresponding deletion processes, Wikipedians "are justifiably confident in their ability to skillfully use" it, avoiding the "if it is not on Google it doesn't exist" trap.
Historical discussions about "No Personal Attacks" policy analyzed: In a paper titled "Self-Governance Through Group Discussion in Wikipedia: Measuring Deliberation in Online Groups" (appearing in the June issue of "Small Group Research", abstract), researchers from Ohio University, Cornell and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville examined "the small group discussions that undergird policy-making processes in a well-established online community, Wikipedia. Content analysis shows that these discussions demonstrated a relatively high level of problem analysis and providing of information, but results were mixed in the group’s demonstration of respect, consideration, and mutual comprehension". They note that Wikipedians "do not simply write and discuss encyclopedia articles: they also propose, collaboratively create, discuss, agree on, and enforce the policies that guide their interactions. This stands in sharp contrast to most online communities, where governance resides in the hands of a relative few community leaders". Concretely, they analyzed the postings on the talk page of Wikipedia:No personal attacks "from April 2002, when the first version of the policy was proposed, through August 2005" (it was first proposed here by Jimmy Wales), comprising 282 posts across 35 discussion threads, and coded them "on eight of the nine dimensions of deliberation: creating an information base, prioritizing values, identifying solutions, weighing solutions, making decisions, comprehension, consideration, and respect. For example, 40 postings or 14.2% were evaluated as showing "Lack of respect". They also created a social network graph of discussants on one archive page (with User:Snowspinner and User "SamS" as the two biggest nodes), and highlight concrete examples (including user names) of patterns formally interpreted as "conflict management" or "good deliberative discussion".
Editor retention not necessarily a good thing?: In an article titled "Membership Turnover and Collaboration Success in Online Communities: Explaining Rises and Falls from Grace in Wikipedia", two researchers from Boston College examine "the longitudinal history of 2,065 featured articles on Wikipedia" and find evidence that "contributions from a mixture of new and experienced participants both increases [sic] the likelihood that an article will be promoted to featured article status and decreases the risk it will be demoted after having been promoted. These findings imply that, contrary to many of the assumptions in previous research, participant retention does not have a strictly positive effect on emerging collaborative environments."
Web of trust: Three researchers from Paris reported on efforts to group Wikipedia editors into a "signed network" (also known as web of trust), based on the following kinds of interactions: "edits over commonly-authored articles, activities such as votes for adminship, the restoring of an article to a previous version, or the assignment of barnstars (a prize, acknowledging valuable contributions)."
Venetian network: Researcher Paolo Massa (user:Phauly) also examined "Social Networks of Wikipedia" (a paper presented at the ACM Hypertext 2011 conference this week), consisting of users on the Venetian Wikipedia with the edges of the network determined by the number of messages one user has left on the talk page of another.
A paper titled "Wiki-watchdog: Anomaly Detection in Wikipedia Through a Distributional Lens" describes "an efficient distribution-based methodology that monitors distributions of revision activity for changes. We show that using our methods it is possible to detect the activity of bots, flash events, and outages, as they occur. Our methods are proposed to support the monitoring of the [Wikipedia] contributors" and other things.
Wikipedia's historiography: Dominant or alternative?: An article titled "The nature of historical representation on Wikipedia: Dominant or alterative historiography?" (appeared in this month's issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology) compared the "Wikipedia accounts of Singaporean and Philippine history", according to the abstract. The author argues that "information professionals [should] take a keener interest in Wikipedia, with an eye to helping include accounts of documented historical perspectives that are ignored by mainstream historiographical traditions."
Identifying current events: A publication titled "WikiTopics: What is popular on Wikipedia and why" by three US researchers described an automated method to "identify and describe significant current events as according to Wikipedia content, and metadata", by first selecting articles with significantly increasing page views, followed by clustering, and then "generat[ing] textual descriptions for the clustered articles to explain why they are popular and what current event they are relevant to".
8.5% of Wikipedia articles tagged as flawed: A paper titled "Towards automatic quality assurance in Wikipedia" (prepared for the World Wide Web Conference 2011 two months ago) analyzed the frequency of cleanup templates (e.g. for NPOV or notability problems) on the English Wikipedia (as of January 2010) and found that 8.5% articles were tagged for at least one flaw – most often with Unreferenced, which was encountered in 135210 articles (4.57%). The researchers from Bauhaus-Universität Weimar then built automatic classifiers that tried to discern featured articles from those carrying one of the most frequent flaws, which worked "with a nearly perfect precision" in the case of the "orphan" and "notability" tags. They announced that "based on the lessons learned, we plan to operationalize our classification approach as a Wikipedia bot that tags articles autonomously".
A paper describing a method for the "Quality evaluation of Wikipedia articles through edit history and editor groups" promises that it "has better performance in quality evaluation than several existing metrics", according to the abstract.
The Guild of Copy Editors is accepting nominations for three new coordinators and a lead coordinator to serve six-month terms after the term for the incumbent "tranche" of coordinators expires at the end of June. Nominations are currently open and the election will run in the last two weeks of June. For details, see the election page.
Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.
A variety of Wikipedia books printed by PediaPressTables and figures
This week, we turn our attention to WikiProject Wikipedia-Books. Started in March 2009 by Cerejota, the project is a collaboration to improve Wikipedia's coverage and documentation of Wikipedia-Books (from now on, simply 'books'), as well as to improve and maintain the organization of books, books-related categories, and books-related templates. [A Wikipedia Book is a collection of Wikipedia articles that can be easily saved, rendered electronically in PDF, ZIM or OpenDocument format, or ordered as a printed book.] The project has 20 participants, who currently look after over 1,700 books.
The Signpost interviews project members Headbomb, Discographer, and Sven Manguard. Headbomb is a Canadian Wikipedian who has had a Wikipedia account since 2006, but only became active from March 2008. Discographer, a European living in Canada with his wife, has been a Wikipedian since August 2009, and is a huge fan of The Supremes. Sven Manguard is an American Wikipedian who works primarily in files and back end areas of the project.
What are Wikipedia-Books and what are the most important functions of the project?
Headbomb: Basically, it's the rallying ground for anyone with an interest in Wikipedia books. So it serves as a notice board for issues that affect large numbers of books, or a place to ask questions when things are unclear, or guidance is wanted. We've also got watchlists that monitor everything that goes on with books, so it's very easy to track what goes on with books every day.
Discographer: Wikipedia-Books are a collective of books we have here on Wikipedia ranging from many different types of subjects. My personal favourite subject of course is on music. An important part of this is to include all the articles on the subject for each book, as their is a "recent changes" function key that allows one to review a grand comprehensive list of changes that may have occured affecting the subject editing matter. This is, of course why, I try and do my very best to include all the articles which are somehow connected to that subject matter.
Sven Manguard: I see Wikipedia-Books as a great little fundraiser for Wikipedia. A portion of the sale goes to the WMF. Mind you there are nowhere near enough sales right now to put a dent in obnoxious Jimbo banner season, but one can dream for the future. As for what the books are, they're corporeal manifestations of the millions of hours that the community has put into creating Wikipedia. They are Wikipedia content in paper form. As such they are as flawless or as flawed as the articles that go into the books. Our collection of South Park material, in book form, would beat anything that the local library has on the subject. Our collection of material, on say, "Great Women Scientists of the 20th Century", would not.
How did you get involved in the Wikipedia-Books project?
Headbomb: "A while ago, Heiko Hees, head of PediaPress, the developers of the collection extension and the book tool, made a post on one of the various Signpost pages saying he was looking for someone who was involved with the English Wikipedia and was able to create a link between the developers and the community. As I was heavily involved with WikiProjects, proficient with templates, and generally knowledgeable about the behind the scenes stuff, I felt this was right up my alley, so I talked to them, and now I'm part of the team. [The project] existed before I got involved, but it was rather disorganized, and lots of the technical stuff needed for WikiProjects to run smoothly were either nonexistent (like the WikiProject banner) or disorganized (categories). Books were also very new and not many people knew about them, so many were neglected, or of very poor quality. There was no standard way to link to them from mainspace articles (now, this is mostly handled through {{Wikipedia-Books}} or at the bottom of banners like {{Megadeth}}). I spent lots of time just cleaning up things, writing documentation, and setting up the backbone to make things both user-friendly and bot-friendly."
Discographer: "... though not "officially" a member, I like to say I really am (I'm non-commital, that's why I've not "officially" joined). Headbomb and I are the biggest contributers to this project, which I just adore, as I love things like this". "... books are what lets one generate knowledge, for it's what's in them that can be educational and useful".
Sven Manguard:: "To be honest, I really don't remember how I wound up working in books. If I had to guess, I'd say that Headbomb brought it to my attention over the IRC, so I looked around a bit and decided to take up PediaPress on their make a book, get a book free offer. I'll admit that I'm not as active as I could be, but I stayed around and made a half dozen books after the initial one. There are still about 90 of those free books left, by the way".
Headbomb: Cleanup. That's a very tough cookie to crack, much more than on articles. First you inherit all the cleanup of the articles in your book, then have additional cleanup to do like removing certain navigational templates from articles. Then you have additional considerations. In articles, redirects are not very important; but they can greatly affect a book. A redirect from Endgame (album) to Endgame (Megadeth album) is no big deal since you end up where you intended, but if you have a redirect like Barney Calhoun to Characters of Half-Life in Book:Half-Life series, then the book will suffer from it. Likewise, links to disambiguation pages (such as Chell instead of Chell (Portal)) are another thing to watch for. This is very hard to catch manually, but luckily we have book reports from NoomBot to help us with that.
Incidentally, books and book reports are wonderful tools for people who are interested in a particular topic, even for people who couldn't care less about books themselves. Every book comes with a watchlist of all their articles (see Recent Changes, on the bottom-right of the banner in Book:Canada), and with a book report of what goes one with the articles of the book themselves. I picked a book about my country, but this obviously applies to all kinds of books, such as one on someone's city, their favourite band or videogame series, or on serious and not-so-serious topics.
Discographer: For me, it's the length of what a book is going to turn out to be. If I find an article on an individual with relatively few and light articles, and am interested in turning this into a book, then I'll go ahead and automatically do this. Easy peasy. Now, say for example, I wanted to create a book on Elvis Presley (which I really want to by the way), then that's really going to take a lot of studying, a lot of work, and a lot of time. This is the very matter that dis-interests me in creating such articles like that, as knowing they're going to be of enormous size. Doing these without getting any money for and on our own is a complete different matter.
Sven Manguard: Book quality. Making books is easy. Sure it takes time, and as Discographer mentions, it takes research, but making books is a heck of a lot easier than making articles. Trust me, I've done both. However, as I alluded to in the question on what Wikipedia-Books are, books are only as good as the articles that go into them, and there are a whole lot of articles that are in need of improvement. Wikipedia-Books is a worthwhile endeavor, but I think it has yet to really take off because the amount of books that contain material of a high enough quality that people would spend money for them is relatively small. What I recommend is that people find something that they are interested in. If it dosen't have a book on it, they should make that book themselves. Then they should spend some time improving the articles that go into that book. There's something special about being able to hold the fruits of your own work in your hands, to be able to look at it and be proud of it, and the ability to show it to others and say, "This is what I did". Wikipedia books affords people the opportunity turn their passions into real, printed books. It's an opportunity that should not be passed up.
What are the most pressing needs for WikiProject Wikipedia-Books? How can a new contributor help today?
Headbomb: Well, like all WikiProjects we can always use more people. More people equals better books, more books. But in terms of specifics, nearly all topics are under-represented in books. Start up the book creator (or create them manually), if you have ideas for 100 books, there's probably 98 of them that don't already exist, and the other 2 can always use extra attention. For those who don't feel like creating new stuff, pick random books, and check the talk page for the book reports.
Discographer: Getting people involved is the most pressing need for Wikipedia-Books. We definitely could use all the help we can get, because with more people, that alone will give us more ideas, and with more ideas that will help turn this into something quite possibly amazing. The more the better!
Sven Manguard: Think about your city, your country, your favorite band, your favorite show, your favorite genre of art, literature, or music, your favorite academic discipline, your favorite (insert your passion here), chances are that that topic is missing a book. Not many people remember Wikipedia in its infancy, when even the most basic of topics lacked coverage. Heck, most of the users here today weren't even around when most articles lacked coverage. Wikipedia-Books is one of the few spaces, possibly the only space, where coverage of even the most basic content is missing.
You can download book versions of The Signpost at Book:Wikipedia Signpost. Next week, we'll take to the skies. Until then, glide over to the archive.
User:Matthew Field took this panoramic photograph at dawn of the city of Pittsburgh from Washington Heights, a steep hill that overlooks the city's skyline. It is now a featured picture.
This week's "Featured content" covers Sunday 29 May – Saturday 4 June
Featured articles
How technical should our articles be? Logarithm is a new featured article that was the subject of prolonged discussion by reviewers.Madame guillotine in rural England: a 19th-century print of the Halifax Gibbet, the subject of a new featured article. At least 52 people are known to have been beheaded by the device, which was dismantled after Cromwell forbade its use.New featured article: the air-tractor sledge, damaged in Australia and used in the Antarctica as a tow until abandoned. It is presumed to be still under the ice. This photograph is from 1912.Striped hooves are a characteristic trait of the Appaloosa, the visually striking breed of horse that is the subject of a new featured article.Fourteen articles were promoted to featured status:
William Brill (nom), an Australian country boy who became a World War II bomber pilot, eventually commanding No. 467 Squadron RAAF. (Nominated by Ian Rose)
Sack of Amorium (nom), one of the most memorable events of the Byzantine–Arab Wars, with major religious consequences. (Constantine)
Halifax Gibbet (nom), one of many decapitation devices in use long before the French Revolution. A replica is on display in the town of Halifax in England. (Malleus Fatuorum) picture at right
Appaloosa (nom), a breed of spotted horses originally developed by the Nez Perce Indian tribe and now registered by the third-largest breed registry in the world. (Dana boomer) picture at right
Water Rail (nom), a bird of the rail family which breeds in well-vegetated wetlands across Europe, Asia and North Africa, in some places migratory and in others a permanent resident. (Jimfbleak)
RAF Northolt (nom), a Royal Air Force "station", or airport, on the north-west outskirts of London. (Harrison49)
Holy Thorn Reliquary (nom), probably created in the 1390s in Paris for John, Duke of Berry, to house a relic of the Crown of Thorns, and bequeathed to the British Museum in 1898. The article has been kindly read by the British Museum curator, "who said nice things about it" and forwarded it to the author of the main source, according to the nominator Johnbod.
Thatgamecompany (nom), an American independent video game developer co-founded by University of Southern California students Kellee Santiago and Jenova Chen. The studio is currently a second-party developer for Sony Computer Entertainment, and is under contract to create three downloadable games for the PlayStation 3's PlayStation Network service. (PresN)
Brockway Mountain Drive (nom), a famous scenic drive in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that was built as a project of the US government during the Great Depression. This is the first article on a US country road to achieve featured status. (Imzadi1979) picture at bottom
Draped Bust dollar (nom), which began mintage in the same illegal standard as its predecessor, the Flowing Hair dollar; but this was changed when the US Mint hired a new director, Elias Boudinot, who was known for his honesty. (RHM22)
Air-tractor sledge (nom), the first plane to be taken to the Antarctic—a converted fixed-wing aircraft taken on the 1911–14 Australasian Antarctic Expedition. Abandoned when it broke down while towing a train of four sledges in 1913, most of its remains are believed to lie beneath the ice at Cape Denison. (Apterygial)
Logarithm (nom), a fundamental mathematical phenomenon, introduced by John Napier in the early 17th century as a means of simplifying calculations. The nomination involved much debate as to the appropriate level of technicality in such an article, and the treatment of the theme in the lead. (Jakob.scholbach) picture at right
Liber Eliensis (nom), a 12th-century English chronicle and history, covering the period from the founding of the abbey in 673 until the middle of the 12th century. It incorporates documents and stories of saints' lives and is typical of a genre of local history produced in the last quarter of the 12th century. (Ealdgyth)
Five images were promoted. Medium-sized images can be viewed by clicking on "nom":
Nudibranch sea slug (nom; related article), a species of sea slug that reaches 60 mm in length; the nudibranch photographed is yellow with three black stripes on its mantle; the marginal band fades from dark golden yellow at the edge, to a buttery yellow. (Created by Nick Hobgood.)
Maid of the Mist (nom; related article), a boat tour of Niagara Falls, and the name of the boats used for the tour, which takes tourists into the dense mist of spray inside the curve of the Horseshoe Falls, also known as the Canadian Falls. (Created by User:Saffron Blaze.)
Shasta Dam under construction (nom; related article), an arch dam across the Sacramento River at the north end of the Sacramento Valley in California; this photograph of its construction was taken in 1942. (Created by Russell Lee, US Farm Security Administration) picture at right
Pair of Chinese shoes for bound feet (nom; related article). Foot binding was practised on young girls and women for approximately a thousand years in China, from the 10th century to the first half of the 20th century; it resulted in lifelong disabilities for most women who endured it. (Created by Daniel Schwen.)
User:Nick Nolte took this panoramic of Lake Superior and surrounding woodlands from the top of Brockway Mountain Drive, the subject of a new featured article.
See earlier Signpost coverage for background about this case. Drafter PhilKnight submitted a proposed decision on the target date, 21 May 2011, and 6 of the 12 active arbitrators voted on the proposals. At least 3 of these 6 arbitrators voted on the additional proposals which were submitted since then, several of which were drafted by arbitrator Risker. With the exception of a single vote, no further votes were submitted on-wiki in this case for at least 5 days of the week.
See earlier Signpost coverage for background about this case. Since submitting proposals in the workshop last week, drafter Elen of the Roads has not yet submitted a proposed decision on-wiki for arbitrators to vote on. The target date for the proposed decision was 19 May 2011. No progress was made on-wiki in this case for at least 5 days of the week.
The restriction on using multiple/alternate accounts on User:Barong, formerly known as User:Jack Merridew was modified by motion. Now, User:Barong is directed to edit solely from that account. Should Barong edit from another account or log out to edit in a deliberate attempt to violate this restriction, any uninvolved administrator may block Barong for a reasonable amount of time at their discretion.
Update
The account Barong was globally locked as it was compromised, the person who edited with that account is directed to contact the Arbitration Committee with the name of the new account they wish to use in place of Barong.
Temporary desysop
In accordance with the process for expedient removal of permissions, Spencer195(talk·contribs·blocks·protections·deletions·page moves·rights·RfA)'s administrator permissions were removed due to concerns that the account may have been compromised and was used to abuse multiple accounts. The motion noted that the desysop is temporary until the entire Committee has had the opportunity to examine the matter and Spencer195 is given an opportunity to explain his actions.
From the editor: As promised, since I have now been writing the report for a year, I am trying out a new "How you can help" box.
Danese Cooper resigns; search on for new CTO
On 2 June, the Foundation's Chief Technical Officer (CTO), Danese Cooper, announced her resignation from the post after 16 months (WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list). Cooper, who joined in February 2010 (see previous Signpost coverage), cited the changing requirements of the role:
“
Sue [Gardner], Erik [Möller] and I have agreed that there's no longer a fit between the identified near-term needs and goals of the organisation, and my own interests. I've therefore decided to [resign] as CTO, but I remain a friend of the organisation and the mission.
”
The resignation of Cooper, who has largely remained out of the technology spotlight compared to previous CTO Brion Vibber, nonetheless attracted sympathy on the Foundation-l mailing list. "It is a sad day", wrote Gerard Meijssen, whilst Thomas Dalton commented that "the WMF is significantly poorer for losing you". A fuller summary of the impact Cooper's resignation will have on the overall Engineering hierarchy is expected from Erik Möller shortly. Cooper also said that she would stay on until the end of July to help with the transition; the post of CTO took some five months to fill last time it was vacant.
May Engineering Report published
The Wikimedia Foundation's Engineering Report for May was published last week on the Wikimedia Techblog, giving a brief overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in the last month. The major items referenced were the Berlin Hackathon (see previous Signpost coverage), the deployment of the Upload Wizard as the default uploader on Wikimedia Commons (previous coverage), the continued "development, deployment and roll-out" of the Article feedback tool, and "major progress in reducing our code review backlog".
Also in the report was an explanation for the delays in getting the Virginia data centre up and running (put down to delivery problems), delays in moving dumps to a new server that meant no dump of the English Wikipedia was produced in the month (though work on "puppetising" the servers was successfully begun), and the many troubles that plagued editors and visitors that led to an hour of downtime. The mobile survey launch was also delayed but is planned to go live in mid-July. On the brighter side, two new servers were allocated to improving the mobile viewing experience, and there was excitement about collaboration between MediaWiki developers and those behind a version of the Etherpad document editor that allows real time collaboration. Ryan Kaldari and Jan Paul Posma also completed the first version of the WikiLove extension, which is now pending review and should be deployed in June. During May, a code sprint gave the WMF's version of CiviCRM (donor management software) a huge performance increase.
The report also noted a new project, MoodBar 0.1, described as "a feature to encourage new users to provide feedback" and currently in the initial design stage. A development sprint for the second version of the Resource Loader is also planned for July, and a usability trial of the Kiwix reader (for context, see last week's "Technology Report") was said to have generated "eye opening" initial findings. Meanwhile, on 23 May, Google Summer of Code students started working on their projects full-time, according to the report. The report also suggested that the 1.17 version of MediaWiki should be release this week (beginning 6 June). The Code Review backlog also decreased during the month.
IPv6 day
This week will see World IPv6 Day, a 24 hour period when major IPv4 websites test whether they could survive a transition to the new standard. Wikimedia is hoping to participate in the 8 June event, with work on going. In February the final IPv4 block was assigned, emphasising the need for preparations to commence (see previous Signpost coverage); at the time a plan for better IPv6 support was outlined. Since then, the Foundation has been working to improve Wikimedia's support for IPv6. Some statistics are presented at http://ipv6and4.labs.wikimedia.org/; as of the publication date of this issue "on average the load time for a v6 address is 180.10% of the load time of the v4 domain".
Recently, the Toolserver was also converted to a level of IPv6 functionality by its admin, River Tarnell. Tarnell also added TLS support allowing the Toolserver to be accessed via the HTTPS protocol. In unrelated news, HTTP requests to toolserver.org use a Squid reverse proxy instead of a Solaris Cluster.
In brief
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.
How you can help
Comment on a BRFA
Have a spare few minutes this week? Help provide outside comment on a Bot Request for Approval (BRFA). Bots undertake large runs of automated edits; community input is vital in deciding whether or not they should be approved.
The API was changed to enforce the use of a token when watching or unwatching pages to improve security (wikitech-l mailing list).
With the resolution of bug #29156, the ArticleFeedback tool will no longer appear on the print view of articles.
In response to a long series of threads about shifting the code review backlog, several programmers pledged to devote a day each week to it (wikitech-l mailing list).
Developer Simetrical outlined a plan for transitioning more gently to HTML5 mode after attempts to change to it overnight had problems previously (see previous Signpost coverage).
The reason field supplied when a registered user creates an account will now show in the log (bug #28696).
