After thirteen months as the Signpost's editor-in-chief, I am now stepping down. I think that the Signpost serves a very important role in informing the community, and it has been an incredibly rewarding experience working to fulfill this with the members of the Signpost's core team and the many more people who are constantly helping us with occasional tips, contribute one-off stories, make suggestions on how to improve the Signpost, or just do some copyediting and fact-checking. Jarry1250 is overseeing the publication of this issue (besides his regular duty on the "Technology Report" beat), while discussion about the future organization of the Signpost's editorial process continues.
The reason I am resigning as editor is that I am taking up work for the Wikimedia Foundation, supporting movement communication activities as part of the WMF's communications team. While I see this work as ultimately directed toward the same goal of informing the community (and an opportunity for myself to devote more consistent and sustained activity toward it), it would make it too much of a conflict of interest if I were to continue to make final editorial decisions for a community-run publication. To cite my predecessor Ragesoss' remarks when he left last year for similar reasons: "Holding the powerful to account is a core purpose of the broadsheets we've tried to emulate. I've always viewed the Signpost's independence from, and constructively critical stance toward, the Foundation as a key part of the Signpost's identity—if at times an underdeveloped one." As a regular writer for the Signpost's "News and notes" section, I have tried to provide that kind of independent coverage, now it is other writers' turn. However, I will continue to support the Signpost both as a WMF employee and as a volunteer, offering to write from an explicit Foundation perspective or about non-COI issues.
Around a year ago when I took up the editorship, we had many discussions about the Signpost's direction, and a consensus emerged to increase coverage beyond the English Wikipedia, symbolized by a slight rename from "Wikipedia Signpost" to "The Signpost". I think we have managed to follow through, while staying strong in our reporting about the English Wikipedia, e.g. in the revamped Featured Content section. The global Signpost subscriptions on other Wikimedia projects that we introduced last September have been a success, and the global message delivery service set up by MZMcBride for this purpose has now found numerous other uses for movement-wide communications. Another testament to the Signpost's enduring popularity is that its publication process and template system were adapted by two other movement newsletters founded this year, WikiPatrika and This month in GLAM.
Another important trend is the role of social media (outside the wikis), especially microblogging, which appears to be taken up by more and more Wikimedians. The Signpost's Identi.ca and Twitter presences have proven important to gather and disseminate timely news (with the latter currently approaching 2000 followers).
A recent first for the Signpost is having one of our writers attend a conference as a dedicated Signpost correspondent, in this case at the invitation of the Foundation's Public Policy Initiative – you can read the resulting coverage in this issue and the upcoming one.
Thank you for reading and contributing to the Signpost.
Regards, Tilman Bayer
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The Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit was held July 8–9, 2011 at Simmons College in Boston. Approximately 120 students, professors, online and campus ambassadors, and Wikimedia Foundation staff involved with the Public Policy Initiative gathered to review how the past year went, and discuss the future of the program as it expands globally.
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Archivist of the United States David Ferriero opened the summit with a keynote, talking about challenges for Wikipedia in working with institutions of higher education, which tend to be wary of anything radical. For Ferriero, the National Archives had to be involved with Wikipedia because "that's where people are" and because it's a way to make its content "more transparent and available". He suggested the best way in experience of the Archives to overcome skepticism about Wikipedia is to encourage people to use and work with it, and that students writing for Wikipedia is a terrific learning opportunity.
Public Policy Initiative staff Rod Dunican, Amy Roth, Annie Lin, LiAnna Davis, and Sage Ross shared results from the past year. In 2010–2011, 24 universities, 47 courses, and 800 students in the United States participated in the initiative—200 students in the Fall (Sept–Dec 2010) and 600 in the Spring (Jan–May 2011) terms, and the campus ambassadors were 46% female. Outcomes for the initiative included not only improving Wikipedia content, but also helped improve students' skills in collaboration and media literacy.
After Ferriero, Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner gave a keynote speech on how the Public Policy Initiative fits within the Foundation's strategic priorities. She explained that the important goal for Wikimedia now and in the foreseeable future is increased participation, along with improved quality which in turn attracts more readers—a small portion of whom become editors who, in turn, help strengthen quality of the content and create a virtuous circle. In addition, increased diversity is a key goal of the Foundation, including closing the gender gap and better geographic representation. Already, the initiative has had much higher female participation rates than routine editing, and, by expanding the initiative to India, Brazil and elsewhere, the Foundation hopes to stimulate better geographic diversity.
Rosta Farzan, of Carnegie Mellon University, and the Foundation's Sage Ross demonstrated course tools that were developed in support of Wikipedia programs in universities, to help instructors assess students' work.
Breakout sessions in the afternoon included a panel with professors Jon Beasley-Murray, Brian Carver, Cindy Allen, and Chris Cooper, and sessions discussing the experiences of online and campus ambassadors, institutionalizing Wikipedia on campus, improving the ambassador program, and incorporating Wikipedia into the syllabus.
A key issue discussed was how to organize online ambassadors and match them with students. Should students continue to individually select online mentors? Discussions leaned towards the opinion that online ambassadors should be matched up with courses, as outlined in pod structure changes. This would allow online ambassadors to coordinate better with campus ambassadors and professors in a more consistent way, and hence could be a more scalable way of organizing the program.
On Saturday, Frank Schulenburg and Barry Newstead presented on the Wikimedia Global University Program and future direction for campus programs. Schulenburg explained that participation and interest in the program has greatly exceeded expectations, and exponential growth is expected to continue, hitting 10,000 students by 2013. In the next year, the program is expanding to Canada, the UK, Germany, Brazil and India, as well as more universities in the United States.
P.J. Tabit, coordinator of the India Education pilot program in Pune, joined the summit via video conference. For the fall semester, 13 professors in Pune have been recruited, and out of 700 applicants to be campus ambassadors, 22 have been selected. As elsewhere, the India program is expanding beyond public policy courses, including engineering, economics, nutrition and textiles courses, and a women's college.
In an afternoon panel, students shared their experiences, and there were breakout sessions for each U.S. regional group to discuss plans for the upcoming year, as the campus programs expand away from solely Public Policy and into other topic areas.
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).
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".
Last week, MacUser, a biweekly Macintosh and Apple magazine in the UK, published a three-page review by Steve Caplin entitled "Encyclopedia Britannica vs Wikipedia", specifically pitting the free encyclopedia anyone can edit against the 2011 DVD edition of Britannica for the Macintosh (£39.99) along with the annual website subscription (£49.95). While the comparison was not systematic, it touched on a number of key areas. Firstly, it reported that the usability of Wikipedia trumps that of Britannica—Wikipedia's fast loading times were praised, as was its design, which was described as "clean, informative, and apart from the small logo, entirely devoid of visual clutter". By comparison, wrote Caplin, the process of searching Britannica "is a little slow" and there are technical issues with switching between the search field and the results.
To test how well Britannica keeps up with current affairs, Caplin tested the article on Nick Clegg. He noted that the 2011 DVD edition of Britannica fails to mention that Clegg became Deputy Prime Minister in May 2010, although the online version is slightly more up-to-date. The online version, though, lacks the detail of its 7,500-word counterpart article on Wikipedia and has only one image, compared to the seven on Wikipedia and the 30 more the review states are on Commons (in fact, Nick Clegg's category on Commons has 44 files at the time of writing, although a few are not of Clegg). On the other hand, Wikipedia is not reviewed quite so favourably for the article on radiocarbon dating, which the review says has "a severe case of information overload" compared with Britannica's 640-word article, which is "concise, comprehensible and memorable". Fascism, the article notes, is only 12,260 words on Wikipedia, while Britannica's is 16,500 words (although this may be because further details on Wikipedia are tucked away in subsidiary articles and hatnoted).
The issue of Wikipedia's focus on pop culture and its skew towards recentism and possible systemic bias are raised, noting that Wikipedia has a comprehensive article on the footballer Ryan Giggs (and the superinjunction controversies—as covered by The Signpost on March 23)—as well as coverage of pop culture topics like Dexter, Avatar and Chatroulette. Such topics have no articles in Britannica. Wikipedia's coverage of science fiction (and, indeed, a vast array of "arcane trivia") dwarfs Britannica: Doctor Who in Britannica returns 283 words to Wikipedia's 12,500.
The article concludes that Britannica does better in "conciseness and accuracy", but Wikipedia scores very well despite covering pop culture in too much detail.
News that Vladimir Putin is set to be awarded the German-based Quadriga Award, which is "dedicated to all of those whose courage tears down walls and whose commitment builds bridges" (source), featured prominently in the German media this week. This is the same award Wikipedia received in 2008. At the time, Wikipedia was represented by Jimmy Wales, although he has forwarded it to Wikimedia Germany.
The decision of the Quadriga committee to award the prize to the former Russian president has received criticism from both the German media and Wikipedians unhappy that Wikipedia's contribution to global liberty has been put on a par with Putin, who many in the west consider responsible for a number of human rights violations in Russia. For this reason, some of them have called for a return and rejection of the Quadriga Award that Wikimedia Germany received in 2008.
Jimmy Wales is listed as a Quadriga Board member, which led some media, including the Austrian Der Standard and German Berliner Morgenpost newspapers, and television station n-tv, to believe that he did not vote against Putin. In fact, Wales has since clarified that he had nothing to do with the award, was not consulted, and states that he would not have voted in favour of giving Putin any award. Meanwhile, discussions about returning the award continue.
Johann Hari (born 21 January 1979) is a British writer and columnist for The Independent. An editor operating from the username David r from meth productions has, for quite a few years, been editing Wikipedia articles on Hari and on topics related to Hari including other journalists like Cristina Odone, Francis Wheen, Andrew Roberts, Niall Ferguson and Spectator writer Nick Cohen. The effect of the edits were to make Hari "seem one of the essential writers of our times" according to Cohen, who goes further in his 'Diary' piece for The Spectator this week, alleging that Hari is involved in a case of either anonymous sock puppeting or meatpuppeting.
David Allen Green, the legal correspondent for the New Statesman, investigated further and published an entry on his personal blog, Jack of Kent, entitled Who is David Rose?. Green traces User:David r from meth productions from Wikipedia over to SourceWatch, a wiki maintained by the Center for Media and Democracy, where a user called 'DaveR' had made edits primarily to the article and talk page on Johann Hari. At one point the DaveR user fails to login and uses an IP address which is traced to The Independent—217.118.114.3. Green goes on to state that what we know of the 'Dave R' character from various blog comments and wiki edits is that he is called David Rose, who claims to have gone to university with Hari and who also has an email address which was apparently used to publish a pornographic story.
The story was also covered in the The Telegraph's Holy Smoke blog by Damian Thompson under the headline Johann Hari, Wikipedia and a porn site: an extraordinary new development. The Telegraph also had a post from Cristina Odone on the topic. On Wikipedia, the story was mentioned on ANI, the BLP noticeboard, the Administrator's Noticeboard and the Conflict of Interest noticeboard.
This week, we listened to the members of WikiProject Albums as they shared their experience improving articles about music albums. Started in October 2002, WikiProject Albums has grown to include nearly 130,000 pages, including 78 Featured Articles, 35 Featured Lists, and 385 Good Articles. Despite an active group of editors, the project's members have acknowledged that the project has some difficulty keeping up with assessments, evidenced by the 36,000 unassessed articles under the project's scope. The project is a child of WikiProject Music and overlaps with several projects, including WikiProject Songs, WikiProject Discographies, and WikiProject Record Charts. WikiProject Albums maintains a to-do list, follows a watchlist, and contributes to the Music Portal.
We interviewed three of the project's members. Zidane tribal joined after creating an article for one of his favorite bands and "receiving very nice feedback from a member." His favorite albums are Legend and the Hola/Chau twin concerts. Backtable is a musician and music collector. He joined WikiProject Albums a while ago but only recently became active in the project. Among his favorite albums are Wish You Were Here, In the Court of the Crimson King, Red, Close to the Edge, Blackwater Park, Frances the Mute, Sub Templum, and Heligoland. Freekee joined both Wikipedia and WikiProject Albums "partly because one of my favorite albums had an article that really needed improvement. I won't tell you what album it was because in the five and a half years since then, I never fixed it." He describes himself as a wikignome who fixes categorization, grammar, and wording. He adds that he would just like "to make sure that there is a good source for information on the music that I love so much."
What motivated you to join WikiProject Albums? Do you have experience in the music industry? What is your favorite album?
The project is home to over 100 pieces of featured content and nearly 400 Good Articles. Have you worked on any of these articles? What are some common elements found in most FAs and GAs about albums?
How does the project handle notability of albums and promotional material added to articles about albums? How frequently does the project deal with editors who have a conflict of interest?
Are some music genres underrepresented by Wikipedia's coverage of albums? What can be done to improve coverage of these neglected genres?
Does WikiProject Albums collaborate with any other projects?
What are the project's most pressing needs? How can a new editor help today?
Anything else you'd like to add?
Next week, we'll try not to infringe on Hormel's trademark as we investigate some mystery meat that has been clogging up the internet's arteries. Until then, clean out your junk mail folder and visit the WikiProject Report Archives.
Reader comments
Four lists were promoted:
Two 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.) An additional kilobyte was submitted in on-wiki evidence.
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.
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.
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.
To comment on bugs, you need to be registered at Bugzilla. This is a great first step for users anxious to help direct software developments (Note that Bugzilla exposes your email address to other users.)
