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4 July 2011

News and notes
Picture of the Year 2010; data challenge; brief news
In the news
WikiLove roll-out; €25,000 in damages for being removed from Wikipedia; brief news
WikiProject report
The Star-Spangled WikiProject
Featured content
Two newly promoted portals
Arbitration report
Arb resigns while mailing list leaks continue; Motion re: admin
Technology report
June report: Virginia datacenter, parser, user profiles; WikiLove 1.0; brief news
 

2011-07-04

Picture of the Year 2010; data challenge; brief news

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By Tom Morris, TheGrappler, Dank and Tilman Bayer

Commons Picture of the Year 2010 announced

Commons Picture of the Year 2010: "Laser towards Milky Way's Centre", taken last August by Yuri Beletsky, at the high-altitude Paranal Observatory in Chile. The laser "creates an artificial star at an altitude of 90 km high in the Earth's mesosphere", as a reference-point enabling the adaptive optics to correct the blurring effect of the atmosphere, thus improving observations of phenomena such as the giant black hole at the centre of the galaxy.

On the Wikimedia Foundation's blog, the results of the fifth annual Picture of the Year competition were officially announced last week. 2,463 votes were cast, with all 783 pictures that were promoted to featured picture status in 2010 entered into the competition. The winning image is a photo by Yuri Beletsky, Photo Ambassador of the European Southern Observatory (ESO): File:Laser Towards Milky Ways Centre.jpg (above, Signpost readers might recognize it as "choice of the week" from the November 8 "Features and admins" section).

Reacting to the news via email, Beletsky said in thanks, "I am really honored and delighted with the results of the poll. I am happy ESO released the image under a free license." ESO (which had itself featured it as "Picture of the Week" in September) highlighted the result in an announcement on their website: "ESO Picture of the Paranal Observatory Voted Wikimedia Picture of the Year 2010".

Wikipedia data analysis challenge

Last week, the Wikimedia Foundation announced "the launch of the Wikipedia Participation Challenge, a data-modeling competition to develop an algorithm that predicts future editing activity on Wikipedia", hosted by Kaggle, a platform for crowd-sourcing predictive modeling. Based on data derived from Wikipedia's public XML dump, contestants are to "develop a model to predict the number of edits a given editor will make in six months' time", competing for $10,000 in prize money provided by an anonymous donor. The challenge was noted on various blogs, such as Revolution Analytics and New Scientist. User:Protonk noted that the dataset has been anonymized "to obscure editor identity and article identity, simultaneously adding focus to the challenge and robbing the dataset of considerable richness", and gave detailed advice to participants, especially those not familiar with Wikipedia editing processes. A blog posting by a former collaborator of the WMF's data scientist Diederik van Liere, titled "Mind. Prepare to be blown away. Big data, Wikipedia and government", compared the challenge to an earlier one on Kaggle that had significantly improved existing models from HIV research, and noted that "Within 36 hours of the wikipedia challenge being launched the leading submission has improved on internal Wikimedia Foundation models by 32.4%". By July 1st, the dataset had been downloaded more than 200 times. At the time of writing, 17 teams have submitted models.

In brief

An offensive image as it would look when hidden by the proposed personal image filter


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2011-07-04

WikiLove roll-out; €25,000 in damages for being removed from Wikipedia; brief news



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2011-07-04

The Star-Spangled WikiProject


WikiProject news
News in brief
Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.
Apple pie, baseball, and the American flag are cultural icons of the United States
Cartogram indicating how heavily each US state is covered on Wikipedia (number of geotagged Wikipedia entries)
Founding fathers, presidents, diplomats, and bitter rivals John Adams (seated) and Thomas Jefferson (standing) both died on July 4, 1826, fifty years after they drafted the Declaration of Independence
The United States is the only country to land humans on the moon, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (pictured) first stepping foot on the moon's surface in July 1969
New York City is the most populous city in the United States, home to Lady Liberty, center for the largest stock exchange in the world, and headquarters for the United Nations
The United States Marine Band performs John Philip Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever, the national march of the United States

As the United States of America celebrates its Independence Day, we sat down with two members of WikiProject United States to see how the world's last superpower fares on the world's largest encyclopedia. The project was founded by BrendelSignature in August 2006 and was rebooted from late 2010 to early 2011 by Kumioko. WikiProject United States is home to over 100,000 pages which include 235 Featured Articles, 133 Featured Lists, 254 pieces of Featured Media, 56 A-Class articles, and 396 Good Articles. The banner for WikiProject United States incorporates a growing variety of nation-wide subprojects ranging from American Television to the Library of Congress to State Legislatures. No individual states are currently included in the project's scope, although the project does support WikiProject District of Columbia. WikiProject United States maintains the United States Portal, a newsletter, and the U.S. Wikipedians' notice board. We interviewed project members Kumioko and Royalbroil.

Kumioko set out to restart WikiProject United States back in October 2010 because the project "was dormant for the last few years with almost no organized activity." In addition to rebuilding the project page, he led an initiative to centralize the banners of many fragmented projects that had become inactive in the past couple years. His most recent initiative is an effort to make Featured Media a widely used article quality classification. Royalbroil is a member of both WikiProject United States and WikiProject Wisconsin, one of the more active state-focused WikiProjects. He is an admin with 111 Did You Know? articles under his belt. Royalbroil praised Kumioko, saying he "did a great job of revitalizing the WikiProject by going to child WikiProject to solicit new members."

The project went through some revitalization and reorganization earlier this year. What are some of the project's new features? Were there any concerns brought forth by other projects and if so, how were they resolved?

Kumioko: Basically we have restructured and rebuilt almost everything but here are some of the key improvements:
  • We restructured the project page
  • We automated a lot of the project tasks using bots. The full list of the bots in use on the project and what the do can be seen on the Members tab of the project.
  • We restarted the project collaboration, portal and created a newsletter
  • We were the ones that suggested creating the new Featured Media class that several projects have already started using.
In regards to the 2nd question there were some other projects and editors who had problems with the broad scope of the project. These concerns still occur occasionally today but we continue to work through the concerns and discuss them as needed.
Royalbroil: The biggest issues were "What is the scope of the WikiProject?" and "How should it overlap with state WikiProjects?" Some non-state WikiProjects were completely inactive so they were incorporated into WikiProject US.

What are some of the challenges of overseeing 92,000 pages? Have you borrowed any strategies from other large projects? Have there been any efforts to reduce overuse of the project's banner on articles?

Royalbroil: A lot of the discussion during the early revitalization phase focused on deciding what belongs in the project so that WikiProject US is manageable. We could have included every state in the scope but decided against since it may have resulted in almost 1 million articles.
Kumioko: Well on this one I would first like to clarify that the 92,000 includes a lot of templates, categories, files and the like that were added so that they can be more easily watched for changes (using a notification by Article Alert Bot). In actual articles we currently only have about 38,000 articles but that number does continue to grow. There are challenges to this but they are minimized through the use of bots and other tools. It also makes it easier to have the articles under 1 project rather than multiple projects that all need to be maintained and watched.
Many of the tools and strategies we use in the project are borrowed from other projects. Most notably WikiProject Military History but we have also created several of our own as well that are being used by other projects. Some of the things we have used from other projects include automation of tasks by bot, creating a newsletter, the format of the project page, the collaboration and many others.
As for the question about overuse of the banner we try to only add it to pages that meet one or more of a couple of criteria:
  1. The article is of National importance or interest
  2. it falls under one of the projects that are supported directly by WikiProject United States (like District of Columbia or United States Government)
  3. The article is part of an ongoing collaboration of the project
  4. The primary project that the article falls into does not support that class (some of the US related projects don't support all the assessment classes)

Does the project sponsor any monthly collaborations, drives, or newsletters?

Kumioko: Yes, since restarting the project we have started to do many things of this nature, and we plan to do more in the future.
  • We restarted the U.S. Wikipedians' notice board including redirecting several defunct US related noticeboards there
  • We restarted the US Wikipedian's collaboration. It was formerly a weekly collaboration, but we changed it to Monthly in the reboot of the project. We have already made significant improvements to several articles and the United States Bill of Rights is the Collaboration for June. With this one we have reached out to the GLAM/National Archives project to collaborate with resources from the National archives to get this article to GA quality by July 4th.
  • We are also currently working to get Portal:United States to featured portal status. This will hopefully be done in the next couple months.

Have you had a role in maintaining the project's portal?

Kumioko: Yes, but only a minor one. I credit several of the other members like RichardF for doing the majority of the heavy lifting.

What are the project's most urgent needs? How can a new contributor help today?

Kumioko: I would say that there are several urgent needs that need more help:
  1. The most important thing is just to help improving the articles. It doesn't matter which one, just pick one that interest you and work on it.
  2. We are going to be working on a collaboration soon to either get all the states or all the presidents to FA status. Both of these 2 groups of articles are extremely high importance so any help on these would be hugely beneficial.
  3. Getting the Portal to featured status
  4. helping with the Collaboration of the Month articles
  5. We currently have about 1400 articles that need be assessed
Royalbroil: Improve the articles. I'm sure there will be more discussion about which items belong in the scope. I suspect that more child WikiProjects will want to be rolled into the scope of this WikiProject.

Anything else you'd like to add?

Kumioko: Over the past few months the primary focus has been on building the project infrastructure, membership, automation of tasks and establishing scope and guidelines. In the next few months we will begin focusing more effort on article improvement through drives and collaborations.


Next week, we'll show off our impressive collection of vinyl. Until then, enjoy our DRM-free content from the archive.

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2011-07-04

Two newly promoted portals



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2011-07-04

Arb retires while mailing list leaks continue; Motion re: admin

The Arbitration Committee opened no new cases. Two cases are currently open.

Open cases

MickMacNee (Week 3)

(See earlier Signpost coverage for background about this case.) During the week, the evidence which was submitted on-wiki by the filer of the case (now blocked as a sockpuppet of a banned user) was collapsed. Other parties made modifications and additions to their on-wiki evidence.

Tree shaping (Week 10)

(See earlier Signpost coverage for background about this case.) During the week, 11 of the 15 active arbitrators voted on the principles and findings of fact drafted by Elen of the Roads. In the coming week, arbitrators are expected to submit more votes in the remedies section of the proposed decision; currently, proposals concerning three individual editors and a discretionary sanctions scheme are being considered.

Motion

An arbitration case request regarding administrator Nabla (talk · contribs) was declined. Instead, the Committee enacted a motion, which was passed 13 to 1 (with 1 abstention):

  1. The Committee reaffirmed its expectation (along with the Community's expectation) that admins will observe all applicable policies, avoid inappropriate edits, and behave with maturity and professionalism throughout their participation on Wikipedia. While admins are not expected to be perfect, severe or repeated violations of policies and Community norms may lead to appropriate sanctions, up to and including desysopping.
  2. Nabla's conduct in admittedly making several unproductive edits while editing as an IP has been subject to significant, and justified, criticism. The Committee joined in disapproving of this behavior, but accepted Nabla's assurance that he will not repeat it in the future, even to express good-faith concerns or frustrations regarding aspects of the project.
  3. Nabla is aware from the relevant admin noticeboard discussion, as well as the arbitration case request, that some editors' trust in his ability to serve as an effective admin has been eroded, both because of his IP edits and because of his period of inactivity. If Nabla intends to resume active work as an admin, he should first refamiliarize himself with all applicable policies. The Committee recommended that he initially focus on less controversial admin tasks.
  4. The Committee noted that to an extent, the recommendations in 3. apply to any admin after a long period of inactivity.
  5. Although not directly relevant to Nabla's situation, the Committee expressed its awareness of the ongoing community discussion regarding inactive admin accounts. The Committee indicated that it stands ready to play its part if necessary once consensus has been determined.

Other

Arbitrator resigns

2011-07-04

June report: Virginia datacenter, parser, user profiles; WikiLove 1.0; brief news

June Engineering Report: Virginia datacenter, parser, user profiles etc.

The Wikimedia Foundation's Engineering Report for June was published last week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in the last month. Apart from various topics reported previously in the Signpost, it highlights work on the new "eqiad" datacenter at Equinix in Ashburn, Virginia (network setup at the site has been completed and connectivity with the old datacenter in Tampa was established, various services are expected to start getting served from eqiad this month); the first results from this year's Google Summer of Code; and "major progress on our code review backlog".

At the Berlin Hackathon in May (see previous Signpost coverage), a roadmap had been laid out for a reform of the MediaWiki parser, with the purpose of enabling visual editing. In June, Brion Vibber continued to work on the parser plan, while Trevor Parscal and Neil Kandalgaonkar worked on the "Visual editor 0.1".

User profile (avatar and self-description of interests) displayed in a version history, as envisaged for "StructuredProfile"

Also at the Hackathon, WMF User Interface Designer Brandon Harris had outlined plans to make the "identity" of contributors more visible, which is hoped to strengthen communities by connecting users with tasks and collaborators corresponding to their interests (while assuaging fears that this would "turn Wikipedia into Facebook"). The June report notes that Harris has now started to work on StructuredProfile, a "feature [which] aims to make it easier for new editors to fill out their profile pages with meaningful information about their background and interests, and surface select profile information to experienced editors within lists such as recent changes [and] watchlists". Currently, the profile is envisaged to contain details such as the user's real name should they wish to provide it; interests; languages; associations, such as WikiProject membership, being an admin or being a WMF staff member; a user avatar and a 140 character statement about the user's motivation to participate.

Chad Horohoe started work on a project called "academic publications authentication proxy", "whose goal is to allow selected Wikimedians to access third-party academic publishing sites to help with content verifiability". At the same time, however, WMF work on LiquidThreads 3.0 "was mostly on hold in June due to limited resources". A June 23 outage that lasted about 45 minutes and appears to mainly have affected logged-in users was linked to a failure of the server that hosts CentralAuth, the system that handles logging in.

The report notes the large number of jobs currently open in engineering (12 according to a summary by Erik Möller last week, who asked readers of Wikitech-l for help in reaching out to potential candidates).

In related news, Guilaume Paumier (User:Guillom, the report's main contributor) has now officially assumed the newly created role of "Technical Communications Manager".

WikiLove 1.0

Amid a flurry of media coverage (see this week's "In the news"), the new WikiLove extension (created by Kaldari and other WMF developers) was deployed to the English Wikipedia as scheduled on June 30 (see previous Signpost coverage). The extension was turned on for all logged-in users except those who marked "Exclude me from feature experiments" in their preferences. The deployment went smoothly, although some users of Internet Explorer reported problems using the "make your own" feature. This was traced to an API bug which will be fixed later this week (wikitech-l mailing list). Support for older skins such as Classic and Cologne Blue will also be deployed later this week.

Based on the first day of WikiLove usage, the Wikimedia Foundation posted an analysis page, showing some very preliminary usage trends. More extensive analysis is expected in the weeks to come. In addition to logging usage data, the Foundation is also collecting WikiLove stories to examine how the extension is being used by the community. Editors are encouraged to add interesting or exceptional stories to the page to facilitate discussion on WikiLove's impact.

Instructions for how to customize or disable WikiLove are available at MediaWiki.org.

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.

  • Jeff Green has been hired as Operations Engineer for Special Projects.
  • The order in which the ResourceLoader loads various modules has been modified. The main modules (startup, jQuery, mw.config.set()) are now loaded in the <head> again. Programmers can choose to have their own modules loaded in the <head> too, or at the end of the <body>. In the discussion, concern had been voiced that the execution of some modules which modify the appearance of the page significantly was sometimes delayed too much, in some cases causing users to click on the wrong links (bug #27488, revision #85616, which went live in #91089).

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