On August 4–7 Haifa in Israel will host Wikimania 2011, the seventh annual meeting of Wikimedians from around the globe, joining Germany, the United States, Taiwan, Egypt, Argentina and Poland in hosting the conference. Wikimedia Israel, responsible for overseeing their event, has said that at least 600 Wikimedians are definitely attending the event, which, although nominally four days, will also include preliminary events such a Global south meeting on 2 August, Developer days (see this week's "Technology Report"), and a Chapters meeting. During Wikimania proper, over 120 sessions will be spread across five tracks, covering topics such as GLAM outreach, intellectual property law, the global south, and Wikimedia in education (a full list of sessions is available). There are a number of keynote speakers (including representatives of the Foundation, Professor Yochai Benkler of the University of Harvard, and Dr. Joseph Reagle), hands-on workshops, and social events such as a cocktail party.
In preparation for Wikimania 2011, the Wikimedia Foundation announced the sponsorship of 77 Wikimedians for full scholarships and 52 for partial scholarships, to include contributions to both travel and accommodation at the event, which, although not free, offers discount rates to Wikimedians. In a posting on the Foundation's official blog, Jessie Wild, Special Projects Manager, Global Development, wrote that "This year’s group of full scholars represents the most diverse we have ever had! Female scholarship recipients are up to 18% of the total full scholarships, and 53% of full scholarship recipients hail from the Global South (representing 62% of the funding). Moreover, recipients are coming from all regions of the world."
As part of a continuing analysis of the April 2011 editors' survey, the Foundation's Head of Global Development Research, Mani Pande, has written a blog post on what the results reveal about the reasons for not voting in Wikimedia's annual elections to its Board of Trustees. The most recent elections, earlier this year—in which the three seats up for election were filled by Ting Chen, Samuel Klein and Kat Walsh—were generally felt to have engaged only a small fraction of the wider Wikimedia community, despite a field of 18 candidates. This perception was backed up by the survey, which found that only 13% of editors in the survey, let alone the wider community, said they had voted in any such election.
"Among those who had not voted in the election, the number one reason for not voting in the election was they (45%) had never heard of the elections. Thirty-four percent said that they were not interested in participating in board elections", wrote Pande. When the editors who had stated that they had never heard of the elections were asked whether they would vote in the future now that they knew about them, 54% said that they would be interested in voting in the future. Nine percent of all respondents had run or would like to run in the board of trustee elections, with the rest split among "not interested in running" (84%) and "not eligible to run" (8%).
Journalist Mark Anderson, writing this week for the news site IEEE Spectrum, has claimed that Wikipedia has been a bit too quick to dismiss those who doubt that William Shakespeare wrote the works popularly attributed to him. In an article "Wikipedia's Shakespeare Problem", Anderson writes that the consensus process has for a long time worked quite well on the article Shakespeare authorship question, with the Stratfordians (those who believe William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was the author of the plays attributed to him) and Oxfordians (those who believe that the works were written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford) creating an equilibrium that approximated the academic divide between the two camps.
Unfortunately, writes Anderson, more Stratfordians came along and pushed the article towards their point of view, and the mediation process (Signpost coverage) left the article biased towards the Stratfordian point of view. In this vein, Anderson claims that the push to get the article featured (already protested at the time by a blog dedicated to alternative theories, see previous Signpost coverage) succeeded only in putting on the main page a version that had "as much claim to evenhandedness as does an entry on Libya's history written by Muammar Gaddafi". This claim is fiercely contested; the Wikipedia article in question itself cites a sharply different judgment from a reliable source that described Wikipedia's coverage of the authorship controversy as putting "to shame anything that ever appeared in standard resources". The IEEE Spectrum article itself quotes John Broughton, the author of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, and WMF board member Ting Chen (User:Wing).
PC World, a global computer magazine, recently published an article on Wikipedia's 10 biggest edit-wars, documenting the confrontations that occur when Wikipedians disagree about the content of an article and repeatedly overwrite each other's contributions. According to PC World, the subjects of the 10 biggest edit-wars on Wikipedia were Nikola Tesla, Caesar salad, Death Star, Nintendo Wii, Street Fighter game characters Ryu and Ken, Yao Ming, The Eagles, Pluto, the Polar bear, and co-founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales.
In comparison with PC World's brief of documenting "the most heated, most bitterly contested, and most pointless confrontations over facts in Wikipedia's 10-year history", the English Wikipedia maintains its own list of the lamest edit-wars that have graced its articles. Since the page includes a number of those included by PC World, it is a possible source for the article, which one commentator decried as not having provided "enough verification" of its examples.
As part of the 2011 Summer of Research, the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Department has announced an experiment to investigate potential improvements to the new editors' experience of their first contact with patrollers, using the Huggle anti-vandalism tool. The Summer of Research is a three-month intensive project to study aspects of participation in Wikipedia that may have a significant effect on editor retention. It brings together a group of researchers, mostly PhD candidates, who have experience in both computer science and the social sciences, to give us a more well-rounded understanding of participation in the projects. (See also earlier Signpost coverage: "Wikimedia Summer of Research: Three topics covered so far", "WMF Community Department announces 'Summer of Research' participants")
The Signpost interviewed researchers R Stuart Geiger (who uses the Staeiou account for non-research editing), Aaron Halfaker, and Wikimedia Foundation Fellow Steven Walling to find out more. Steven has been a volunteer editor on the English Wikipedia since 2006, and before taking up the Foundation Fellowship was a professional writer and blogger, mostly for technology publications and companies. Stuart has been a Wikipedia editor since late 2004, and has been studying the project as an academic since his undergraduate senior thesis in 2006. Since then, he's been gathering from a number of fields the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological tools necessary to study something as complex as Wikipedia. "At present, I'm a doctoral student from the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and I have a keen interest in both the digital humanities and social statistics movements." Aaron is a computer science graduate student from the University of Minnesota. He's been an editor since 2008 and has published academic research on Wikipedia since WikiSym 2009. He specializes in statistical data mining and designs user-scripts for Wikipedia to understand/improve editor interactions.
How did the Summer of Research project come about, and what questions will it investigate? According to Steven, the experiment aims to test "warning templates that are explicitly more personalized and set out to teach new editors more directly, rather than simply pointing them to policy and asking them not to do something". Steven says he personally got involved because, as a Fellow at the Foundation, research has been part of his job. "I currently share the responsibility for leading the project team with Diederik van Liere and Maryana Pinchuk. Diederik has experience with the technical side of this project, Maryana is a qualitative researcher with an academic background, and I lend community experience to round out the leadership team. We built an enormous, multi-part question list publicly on Meta. But it turns out that was just a beginning guide. We've been structuring the summer as a series of weekly sprints, and to get a feel for the research topics that have been and are currently being explored, I'd check out the public list on our Meta page. Because the team has a wide variety of skills, we've looked at many different aspects of Wikipedia as a community so far."
Aaron said they decided to experiment with Huggle's standardised warning system because the project goal is to understand the decline in new editors, so it seemed logical to focus on new editors' experience in the community. "Team-member Dr. Melanie Kill suspected that welcome messages might have an effect on how new editors perceive the community. So because Hugglers send out the most messages to new editors, we wanted to see if we could improve conversion (from damage) and other retention rates by just changing the wording of the message."
We wondered how the Foundation's sometimes lofty strategic goals, like "Support the recruitment and acculturation of newer contributors", are translated into practical initiatives such as this. Steven points to the Board resolution on Openness and the Foundation's Annual Plan for 2011–12. "Recruiting and retaining editors for Wikipedia is now one of our top priorities, and Zack Exley, our Chief Community Officer, designed the summer to really dig deeper into the exact areas of English Wikipedia and other projects that have the largest effect on new editors, and whether those editors stick around. The Editor trends study gave us a high-level understanding of the trends in participation, but it didn't tell us with certainty what internal community factors most have an impact. We need to have more data we're confident in if we're going to make good decisions, thus the Huggle experiment, which is clarifying that automated editing tools have a huge impact on new editors. The project was in the sweet spot of being able to gather a statistically significant sample quickly and with minimal impact on the normal functioning of the community."
Stuart's background seems ideally matched to an experiment that seeks to understand social phenomena using technical methodologies. "I'm an adherent of the sociotechnical systems approach, which thinks in terms of how social and technical phenomena are inherently intertwined, especially when we study processes in communities as technologically mediated as Wikipedia. Our motto, 'the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit' speaks to this principle that the Wikipedia community can't be fully understood without taking into account the code on which it runs – and vice versa. Huggle is a great example of this: scripts, tools, and bots like Huggle, Twinkle, and User:ClueBot have become the predominant way in which new users are introduced into Wikipedia. In fact, here's a statistic that is hot off the research press: almost 75% of newbies have their first talk page message sent to them from one of those semi- or full-automated software systems."
How were the parameters of the experiment decided on – for example, the number of warnings delivered, the proportion of changed warnings? Aaron says they settled on three variables for testing in the experiment: personalized, teaching-oriented, and image. "Dr. Kill, a professor of rhetoric, produced personalized and teaching-oriented versions of the default warning template for Huggle; Stuart and Aaron then expanded these templates with image/no-image versions and prepared a random template generator. Our requirement for the number of experimental welcomes/warnings is based on a bit of statistical algebra that allows us predict how many observations we'll need to find statistically significant differences between the variables."
The Huggle experiment is not the first to investigate the interactions of patrollers and new page creators. In the 2009 community-led Newbie treatment at Criteria for speedy deletion experiment (Signpost coverage), experienced editors (one Signpost interviewer included) posed as inexperienced article creators to look into how new contributors are treated in the patrolling process. The experiment attracted significant controversy due to ethical concerns surrounding the lack of informed consent of the participants. Steven says that before the experiment they posted a public notice at the Village Pump. "We also spoke directly with the main Huggle developers over email, IRC, and on-wiki (Addshore, Gurch and other volunteer developers deserve a lot of credit here; we couldn't have done this without their help and consent beforehand). I should probably point out that we felt pretty confident about this experiment because Stuart is a prolific Huggler himself. Even if we had no volunteer editing experienced as a team, I think the key difference between this and the treatment experiment you referred to is that we've been transparent about our actions before going forward with it."
Aaron points out that Huggle users come across hundreds of potential editors every day, and a surprising proportion of these editors are testing whether they can, in fact, edit Wikipedia by damaging an article. "We suspect that the reaction these potential editors receive affects whether they'll register an account and try contributing productively. We hypothesized that the tone of the welcome/warning message could be an important factor in this decision. We have Hugglers testing a few variations of the 1st-level warning message to find out if we're right."
So can we expect more experiments like this in the future? Steven says he could probably do an entire Signpost report just on this topic. "But let me give it a quick shot by saying that the recently released Annual Plan (see link above) will give you a very good idea of what direction we're focusing on, as well as activity on mediawiki.org, the tech portion of blog.wikimedia.org, and the impending software deployments page. We try to make sure to push a message locally here when new experiments with features or anything else is happening, but those three places are where to look if you're interested in these topics in the future."
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In honor of Croatia's Victory Day on Friday, we interviewed WikiProject Croatia. The project focuses on the history, geography, politics and culture of Croatia as well as biographies of notable Croats. The central-southeastern European country is represented on the English Wikipedia by 33 editors maintaining over 10,000 pages, including 5 pieces of featured content and 16 Good Articles. In addition, WikiProject Croatia maintains a portal, popular pages list, intertranswiki page, and a task force focusing on the capital city Zagreb. WikiProject Croatia is a child of WikiProject Europe and, as a former component of several countries, shares articles with WikiProject Military History's Ottoman Empire Task Force, WikiProject Former Countries' Austria-Hungary Task Force, and WikiProject Yugoslavia. We interviewed project member GregorB.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Croatia?
Do you speak Croatian? What are some of the challenges to writing about a non-anglophone country on the English Wikipedia? Have you contributed to the Croatian Wikipedia?
Why has WikiProject Croatia remained more active than the projects of many larger European countries like WikiProject Spain or WikiProject Turkey? Does WikiProject Croatia collaborate with the projects of any former-Yugoslav countries?
Croatia recently released the results of the country's 2011 census. Were there any surprises in the census results? Was there any controversy? How much work was it to update the data on Wikipedia's articles?
WikiProject Croatia is home to 5 pieces of Featured material and 16 Good Articles. Have you contributed to any of these articles? Are there any tips you could give for improving articles about Croatia to FA or GA status?
Have you contributed to the Croatia Portal or the Zagreb Task Force?
What are the project's greatest needs? How can a new editor help today?
Anything else you'd like to add?
Next week, we'll take aim at a high caliber project. While we're busy reloading the Report, we hope you'll be blown away by our previous issues in the armory archive.
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Three featured articles were delisted:
Four lists were promoted:
One featured list was delisted:
Twelve images were promoted. Medium-sized images can be viewed by clicking on "nom":
The Arbitration Committee opened no new cases this week. Two cases are currently open.
See previous Signpost coverage for background and the specific scope of this case. During the week, several editors submitted on-wiki evidence.
See earlier Signpost coverage for background. During the week, drafter Kirill Lokshin submitted a proposed decision for arbitrators to vote on, including 5 principles, 5 findings of fact, and 4 remedies. In total, rulings concerning three editors and one administrator are being considered.
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With Wikimania 2011 set to begin on 4 August, a number of developers are getting ready to make the trip to Haifa in Israel. Indeed, even before the annual Wikimedia conference begins, two events are likely to catch the eye of the technically aware traveller (for those not making the trips, The Signpost will present a round-up of events in forthcoming issues). The first is a special "Developer Days" event, held on 2 and 3 August, to which 39 Wikimedians are already subscribed. Its schedule includes a workshop period for those interested in getting involved in MediaWiki development as well as a series of "lightning talks" about MediaWiki development. The second preliminary event is a meeting for "everyone interested in technical details around Wikipedia Offline... and get[ting] involved with openZIM"; the OpenZIM Project has sponsored several developers' attendance at the meetup.
When Wikimania proper begins, the schedule is likely to be as intense, although in general organisers have tried to avoid running sessions developers might be interested in concurrently (instead, one of the five "tracks" – analogous to stages at music festivals – has more or less been allocated to technical issues). Planned sessions include a number on topics with which Signpost readers will be very familiar: one on the ResourceLoader, another on Wikimedia Offline (including OpenZIM); two on Wikimedia's support for mobile devices (WMF Mobile Research and Wikimedia Mobile Panel) and a fifth on Testing for MediaWiki, which is set to include both an overview of existing functionality and practical advice for developers on how to take advantage of it. There is also a talk by Brion Vibber planned entitled Editing 2.0: MediaWiki's upcoming visual editor and the future of templates.
Other talks over the three day conference focus on other common issues, including interwiki links (Interlanguage links in Wikipedia and Discussion and Improvement Proposals for the Current Interwiki Linking System on Wikipedia), cross-wiki transclusions (CoSyne: Multilingual Content Synchronization with Wikis and A framework to visualizing wiki-based transclusion) and combating vandalism (Autonomous Detection of Collaborative Link Spam). Four more talks focus on very specific issues: A Qt library for MediaWiki, and what you can do with it (demonstrating a new tool to edit MediaWiki built using the cross-platform Qt framework), Opening up Wikipedia's data, The Site Architecture You Can Edit (focussing on Ryan Lane's effort to devolve basic sysadmin tasks to local administrators) and a proposal for Collaborative Watchlists.
Among less specific talks due to be held in Haifa next week is Ask the Developers (a question-and-answer panel) and a talk entitled Wikimedia Operations Overview. The Foundation's Guillaume Paumier will attempt to acknowledge and ease the potential for WMF staff to "appear to the community as ignoring requests, lacking transparency, and thus lacking accountability" (Wikimedia technical staff vs. the World) while Volunteer Development Coordinator Sumana Harihareswara will talk on How to get what you want from MediaWiki developers. There will also be a talk for those wanting A brief introduction to MediaWiki extension development.
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.
Know English and another language? Help with translating MediaWiki and other worthwhile open source projects at translatewiki.net.
