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".
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.
The new WikiLove extension (a software feature created by Kaldari and other developers of the Wikimedia Foundation, allowing easy posting of messages of appreciation on user's talk pages, extending and simplifying the long-standing custom of awarding barnstars) went live on the English Wikipedia last week (see also last week's "News and notes", this week's "Technology report" and the earlier and later deployment notes).
Media coverage leading up to the deployment was unexpectedly intense, with stories appearing in Slashdot, Wired, The Huffington Post, MSNBC Technolog, PC Magazine, PC World, and elsewhere. Most of the news coverage simply reiterated the information from the Wikimedia blog post, including the research data on user interaction. Two exceptions to the neutral news coverage were Business Insider and The Atlantic. Business Insider put a positive spin on WikiLove: "… it actually sounds like a great idea. Giving people on the internet more opportunities to show appreciation can only be healthy." The Atlantic was more critical: "While I appreciate comments and praise as much as the next editor, I wouldn't appreciate my inbox filling up with the same generic cat pictures and beer steins by readers who are unwilling to go out of their way to reach me with a more personal message" (the feature supports, but doesn't require, individual text messages). Despite this criticism, The Atlantic still expected that it "could evolve into a truly useful feature".
The blog coverage of WikiLove was more diverse and opinionated. Slashdot characterized WikiLove as "a cunning plan to make wikipedians nicer to each other," while a Mashable post wrote that "The addition of this simple feature makes a lot of sense." The highest praise came from ReadWriteWeb: "This kind of gentle social engineering to create a structure for the site that's more welcoming, accessible and effective could help produce a better product for us all (more edited Wikipedia content) and could help the site better serve us as people. Ultimately that is the point of all this, right?" Opinions in the blogosphere were not universally positive, however. A post on The Stir characterized WikiLove as "a superficial system" with "ridiculous, immature awards" and suggested that "a boring ol' 'like' button is far less sophomoric than a barnstar." Several other sources also compared WikiLove with Facebook's 'like' button, in some cases erroneously assuming that their functions were analogous.
In somewhat related news, the WMF last week published results from its editor survey – conducted before the widespread introduction of WikiLove, in a blog posting titled "Positive feedback works for editing, say Wikipedia editors". 70% said that "getting a barnstar or similar award from another editor" motivated them to edit Wikipedia further, somewhat below the 78% for the top motivator, "having others compliment you on your edits/articles".
A French court decision issued on July 1st (as reported on lefigaro.fr) awarded the company Rentabiliweb €25,000 (US$36,000) in damage and interest from its competitor Hi-Media, on the basis of a single Wikipedia edit that had removed mention of Rentabiliweb (and a link to their website) from a list of vendors in the French Wikipedia's article on micropayment. The IP used for the anonymous edit, conducted in 2008, was held to be that "of a device belonging to Hi-Media". The Paris court rejected Hi-Media's objection that this method of determining the author of the edit was illegal (as an intrusion of privacy), since an IP address did not directly provide the person who used the computer, but on the other hand held that because the computer had been installed on Hi-Media's premises, "Rentabiliweb offered sufficient proof that it was a person acting under the authorization of Hi-Media which was the author of the deletion". Rentabiliweb initially claimed €150,000 in damages, but the court reduced the sum to €25,000, as there had been no detailed justification, and also because "Wikipedia does not appear to the site where an Internet user will habitually search for suppliers of services". (Because Rentabiliweb itself was found guilty of two other actions – unrelated to Wikipedia – for which Hi-Media was awarded €50,000 in damages each, the entire case still resulted in Rentabiliweb having to compensate Hi-Media for a sum of €75,000.)
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?
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?
Does the project sponsor any monthly collaborations, drives, or newsletters?
Have you had a role in maintaining the project's portal?
What are the project's most urgent needs? How can a new contributor help today?
Anything else you'd like to add?
Next week, we'll show off our impressive collection of vinyl. Until then, enjoy our DRM-free content from the archive.
Reader comments
Seven articles were promoted to featured status:
Two featured articles were delisted:
Twelve lists were promoted:
Three 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.
(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.
(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.
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):
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".
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".
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.
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.
<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).
