Wrangling over the optimal release strategy for the MediaWiki software that powers both Wikimedia wikis and other websites continued this week on the wikitech-l mailing list. It follows the publication of a Foundation-led "post-mortem" of the 1.17 release, which discussed what was done well and what could use improvement at a time when 1.18 is looming. The team were generally happy with the finished product, but identified weaknesses in the early-stage release process (particularly under-documentation) that made it difficult to distribute among multiple staff members.
The main point of contention, however, is the desirable number of releases per year: the report noted that "The range of opinion seems to be anywhere from 'multiple times a day' to 'every six months'", whilst a follow-up post by volunteer MZMcBride concluded that there was a fundamental difference between the view of the release manager (Tim Starling), who argues for slower release, and "Brion, Neil, Chad, Roan, and in some ways Erik, among
others" who want quicker releases. As a consequence, he argued, Tim achieved his own goals but not necessarily those of the broader community. More broadly, the accompanying thread saw the first significant discussion about actively trying to break the current system of similar WMF and non-WMF ("tarball") release schedules. Developer Roan Kattouw summarised his own view, namely that "3 [tarball] releases per year is fine. However, I think we should deploy to WMF sites much more often than that". This got agreement from Bryan Tong Minh and implicit support from MZMcBride.
As a result of the process issues identified, the WMF tech team held meetings on 7 and 8 July to discuss "the code review, deployment and release management process" – including the timing issues above – and to answer questions such as"how do we dissipate key skills more widely among both staff and volunteers" and "how/when can we split "big hairy projects" with integration issues into more manageable chunks" (also wikitech-l). The draft results of the meeting, published on mediawiki.org, suggest that a move to more rapid deployment is likely to carry the day, as are an effort to reduce the stigma attached to being reverted and further pushes towards a "continuous integration" model.
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.
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Bugmeister Mark Hershberger called for a triage of bugs attached to old versions. Given that the task only required attempting to reproduce the bugs, he argued that it was ideal of non-coders anxious to help (wikitech-l mailing list). A second triage aimed to identify "easy" bugs perfect for 'wannabe' developers (also wikitech-l).
Users reported problems with using the secure server. Although almost certainly related to changes made to the configuration of the secure (HTTPS) servers, the problem is yet to be authoritatively declared fixed at time of writing.
An error that impaired the display of those interface messages shown by JavaScript in some web browsers was fixed (bug #29726).
The JSMin+ library will now be included with MediaWiki. Its JavaScript parser, the only part to be utilised initially, will mean that bad JavaScript will now give the correct line numbers for errors for the first time since the ResourceLoader was deployed in February.
The Romanian Wikipedia has become the latest to take up for-profit company Linterweb's offer to archive its links (Linterweb blog). Other Wikipedias, such as the English Wikipedia, have traditionally sought to avoid reliance on advertising-supported Linterweb, instead favouring sites such as WebCite with mixed success.
More than two years after Revision Deletion was enabled, the ability to apply traditional oversight measures to malicious edits was withdrawn from oversighters on the English Wikipedia (bug #18511).
On the Wikimedia Foundation's blog, results from the Editor Survey that ran in April 2011 were published this week. They show that Facebook is the most popular online activity of Wikimedians with the social networking sites beating other activities such as watching online videos, using instant messaging and tweeting. Indeed, 68% of Wikipedia editors use Facebook compared to only 30% who use Twitter, while only 18% of Wikipedia editors play online multi-player games including World of Warcraft and uptake of online games such as Farmville and Cityville is limited to the same percentage. 29% of editors blog, whilst only a slightly lower percentage (22%) say that they actively contribute to the development of open-source software (including, but not limited to, MediaWiki itself).
Sloan Foundation renews grant
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a philanthropic funding institution, announced this week that it will award a grant of $3 million to the Wikimedia Foundation. This is the second grant of this amount awarded to the Wikimedia Foundation from the Sloan Foundation's Universal Access to Knowledge component of its Digital Information Technology program. The Sloan Foundation's first grant of $3 million, awarded in 2008 and with effect through to 2010, represents the largest single grant ever received by the Wikimedia Foundation. In announcing its renewal, the WMF described the previous grant as having enabled the Foundation to "grow its core operations to support and sustain Wikipedia as a high-quality free knowledge resource". The Wikimedia Foundation is "delighted to have received this vote of continued confidence in its work".
Speaking for the Sloan Foundation, Doron Weber said that "Wikipedia embodies the ideal values of the world wide web and we are proud to be part of this bold endeavor to use the wisdom and the altruism of the crowd to create the biggest, most up-to-date and most open global encyclopedia in human history", whilst the WMF are confident that the funds will help with "increasing Wikipedia's quality, increasing the number and demographic diversity of its editors, and reaching more readers, particularly in the global south".
Brief news
The English Wikipedia may have a declining number of active editors (blue) but the number of those involved in vandal fighting (red) is declining faster (logarithmic scale).
Less vandalism and fewer vandal fighters: A Summer of Research investigation by EpochFail into "vandal fighting" on the English Wikipedia in the period 2007 to 2010 found that the amount of vandalism left for editors to cleanup has been reducing over the years and suggests that this could be the result of improvements in the quality of both edit filters (first introduced in March 2009) and anti-vandalism bots. The research also found that the proportion of editors involved in reverting vandalism has fallen over time, even as the community itself has contracted.
Wiki Loves Monuments contest: The Wikimedia Foundation blog carried a post about the second annual "Wiki loves monuments" photo scavenger hunt, which is to be held in September in 16 countries across Europe. The contests are being organized by Wikimedia local chapters, and in some countries without chapters, local Wikimedians have organized the contests in their place. However, on the mailing list of the UK chapter, which is not taking part, volunteer Charles Matthews opined that the competition had lacked a "clear brief as to what that involved", a charge denied by project organisers.
Language coverage investigated: Milos Rancic, an editor and board candidate in this year's elections, published his analysis of the state of language diversity within the Wikimedia movement this week on the foundation-l mailing list. He concluded that although 270 languages have had recognised projects, only 12 languages have projects in all 7 categories; his report prompted a debate about the optimal role of the WMF in supporting languages in decline, if any.
Article Feedback moves out of trial phase: Starting on 12 July, the ArticleFeedback extension will be rolled out across the English Wikipedia's 3.5 million articles. The deployment is expected to last some 10 days as new articles are added to the enabled list in batches, according to the Foundation's software deployments page. It is currently enabled for just 100,000.
One new English Wikipedia administrator.Worm That Turned (nom) lives in England and works in the Information Technology (IT) field. He has been helping with OTRS tickets, and now will be able to handle things he previously had to skip over because he was not an administrator. (Information about new admins comes from their RfA or user pages, or from what they tell The Signpost directly.)
Milestones
On July 6, the Czech-language Wikipedia reached 200,000 articles and remains the largest reference work ever written in Czech, according to a report on the Prague Daily Monitor website, and has 679 active editors. The 200,000th article was on the ice hockey goalkeeper Ron Hextall, added by User:Gothic2. The article creation rate for Czech Wikipedia has been around 100 a day for the past three months. There were also important milestones for a number of other projects:
The case was opened after allegations of long-term COI editing on the Tree shaping article, and problematic usage of the article's talk page. 9 editors submitted evidence on-wiki, and several proposals were submitted in the workshop, including proposed principles and findings of fact by drafter Elen of the Roads. Drafter Elen of the Roads amended the proposals before submitting them in the proposed decision for arbitrators to vote on, and remedy proposals were considered over the last week. 13 active arbitrators voted on the final decision before the case came to a close today.
What is the effect of the decision and what does it tell us?
The subject/topic involved in this case is a relatively new art form in which three-dimensional works of art are created by modifying the growth of living trees. The dispute focuses on what title to give the article on the subject. Practitioners have developed their own names for their particular techniques and forms of the art, some of which have commercial status as brand names. There are also a variety of terms from arboriculture and elsewhere that are used to describe both the techniques used and the final results. As editors of the article have not reached a consensus as to a consistent preference within reliable sources on the use of any one term, the title of the article (currently Tree shaping) has continued to be disputed.
Some of those editing the article are themselves practitioners of the art, or have a professional or commercial interest in the art. These editors potentially have a conflict of interest, as it may be in their interests to have the title of the article reflect the description used for their own artworks, and this may conflict with Wikipedia's policies. Although expert editors (including those with a professional or commercial interest in the subject of the articles they edit) are welcome on Wikipedia, the guidelines concerning conflicts of interest must be observed where applicable, and expert editors must at all times avoid editing (or appearing to edit) the encyclopaedia in order to promote their own professional or commercial interest. Any editor who focuses primarily or exclusively on a narrow subject—sometimes referred to as SPAs— should avoid creating the impression that their focus is on advocacy rather than neutrally presenting information. Contributors who engage in tendentious or disruptive editing, such as by engaging in sustained aggressive point-of-view editing, may be subjected to editing restrictions or bans.
Discretionary sanctions have been enabled for the topic covered by the article, broadly interpreted.
Sydney Bluegum (talk·contribs) is banned from the topic of tree shaping/arborsculpture/pooktre (widely construed), anywhere on Wikipedia until July 2012.
Blackash (talk·contribs) & Slowart (talk·contribs) are each banned from all discussion on the correct name for the tree shaping/arborsculpture/pooktre topic until July 2012. These bans apply anywhere on Wikipedia, but only cover discussion of what name should be given to the practice and what title should be used for any articles on the subject. These restrictions will supersede the existing community-placed restrictions.
Due to their experience and familiarity with the area, Sydney Bluegum (talk·contribs), Blackash (talk·contribs), and Slowart (talk·contribs) will be given limited exceptions from their topic bans to outlay proposals and background rationale at the commencement of a particular RfC on the article. That particular RfC should determine the consensus name and scope for the subject matter, and whether it should stand alone or whether it is best upmerged to a parent article.
Article titles should be based on the name by which reliable English-language sources refer to the article's subject. When there is no single obvious term that is obviously the most frequently used for the topic, as used by a significant majority of reliable English language sources, editors should reach a consensus as to which title is best by considering recognisability, naturalness, precision, conciseness and consistency. In determining which of several alternative names is most frequently used, it is useful to observe the usage of major bodies and English-language media outlets, as well as quality encyclopedias and journals. In a few cases, there will be notable topics which are well-documented in reliable sources, but for which no accepted short-hand term exists. Although it can be tempting to employ a neologism in such a case, it is preferable to use a title that is a descriptive phrase in plain English if possible, even if this makes for a somewhat long or awkward title.
