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Wikimedians from across the world congregated in Haifa, Israel, last week for three days of intensive discussion of Wikimedia projects as part of Wikimania 2011, an annual gathering that has taken place every year since 2005 when it was first organized in Frankfurt, Germany. This year saw over 650 participants attend the main conference, accompanied by the pre-event meetings for developers, a chapters meeting and a meeting of the Communications Committee. (See also this week's "News and notes" and "Technology report")
On Wednesday, participants were welcomed to the event with professionally produced badges, lanyards, conference programmes, goody bags, T-shirts and very necessary cold drinks. The first order of business was a welcome from the organisers, and a welcome from a representative of the Israeli parliament. Outside the venue, a "tent city" had been set up, where young Israelis protested the rising cost of housing (see 2011 Israeli housing protests, the Wikinews story and media from Commons).
Professor Yochai Benkler, the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard University and author of The Wealth of Networks, presented the opening plenary session on Thursday. Benkler was the first academic to write about Wikipedia, in an article in the summer of 2001 entitled "Coase's Penguin", and this time presented a highly optimistic lecture arguing that a fundamentally positive and co-operative vision of human nature is captured in projects like Wikipedia as well as free and open source software. He tied it to the housing protests, describing how "right outside, people are standing, sitting in tents, trying to claw back a sense of what a decent society and what a decent community can be within a market system beyond simply maximizing the returns for capital", and also went further to reference the protest movement in Syria. What then does the Arab Spring share with Wikipedia? The understanding of how "humans can work together to overcome structures of hierarchy, structures of markets that necessarily reduce us to supply and demand curves. According to Benkler, before Wikipedia, the principles behind open source were ignored with various attempts at special pleading: the theory went that one has nothing to learn from strange hackers writing open source software in a profoundly strange way. When normal people started writing encyclopedias for the same reasons hackers write open source software, that argument was undermined.
To show how academia was dominated by market thinking before Wikipedia, Benkler pointed to Information Rules, a 1999 book by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, which described the disruption to the business model of Encyclopedia Britannica brought by Microsoft's Encarta. They could easily see how a modestly priced CD-ROM encyclopedia threatened an expensive printed encyclopedia like Britannica, but completely failed to see how much more radically disruptive Wikipedia was or could become.
Benkler goes on to describe how there now seems to be a shift in a wide variety of academic disciplines away from markets and selfishness to co-operation: in economics, evolutionary biology and the social sciences.
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Perhaps appropriate for Wikimania in the tenth anniversary year of Wikipedia, Sue Gardner signalled the increasing maturity of the Wikimedia projects by quoting a French journalist who told her "Making fun of Wikipedia is so 2007". Gardner listed two primary challenges facing the Foundation over the coming year: user retention and mobile. The new mobile version of Wikipedia is in development and promises great improvements over the old version, but Gardner also hinted at the search for new editing behaviours for a world where the vast majority of users will interact with Wikipedia less on desktop and laptop computers and more on phones (both smart and otherwise), tablets, and post-PC devices.
Following the presentation by Sue Gardner, the current board of trustees were introduced by Harel Cain, one of the main organisers for Wikimedia Israel, to take part in the customary Q&A session. Top of the agenda was the question of "Facebook-isation", a criticism raised following the rollout of both the Article Feedback Tool and WikiLove on English Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales harshly criticised the current trend in Silicon Valley technology companies for "gamification" or introduction of game mechanics on "check-in" sites like Foursquare describing them as "what you do when you don't have a good idea". Wales also said of WikiLove that the behavior of thanking users was already an established practice on Wikipedia, and that the extension simply makes this existing behaviour easier.
Kat Walsh also described one fundamental difference between the aspects of social networking being tested tentatively on Wikipedia by arguing that compared to Facebook, the social tools on Wikimedia have a purpose: to help produce free knowledge.
Kat also described one of the reasons why participation on Wikipedia may be slowing by saying that "it's just part of the Internet now", hinting that it is no longer a grand experiment in participatory culture and the original impetus to participate may have faded slightly as it becomes just a handy reference tool rather than an experiment.
Open source developer Benjamin Mako Hill asked the board why they haven't started any new wiki projects since the opening of Wikiversity in 2006, hinting at the potential benefits of creating Wikipedia-level, Foundation-blessed sister projects to collect material on genealogy (to break the hold of proprietary database services) and also to collate bibliographic material and annotations to academic papers and documents, perhaps to connect with the increasing quantity of open data being published by scientists. Board member Samuel Klein (SJ) described how the board "don't have a clear process" for deciding on the creation, closing and modification of scope for existing projects but pointed to work being done by the Movement Roles project.
Jimmy Wales took a different tack, not endorsing the creation of new projects and not ruling them out, but suggesting that the Foundation and the board could do a better job of focussing on improving support for the other projects including specifically Wikinews: "the Foundation has never provided much to Wikinews". Specifically on Wikinews, Wales noted that it "has not been the success it could have been", and compared it to the Huffington Post which has been much more successful using a partially volunteer-driven model even though "it's not high quality" in terms of fact checking and neutrality like an improved Wikinews could be.
The board were asked about improving outreach to academics and Phoebe Ayers pointed to the Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit in Cambridge, Massachusetts earlier in the year, which celebrated the Public Policy Initiative.
From here, the questions became slightly more critical. One questioner welcomed the desire to increase participation in the Global South but questioned why Africa seemed to not be part of the plan in the way Brazil and India seemed to be. Board members pointed to infrastructure problems in Africa that prevented effective outreach, and board chairman Ting Chen welcomed the formation of a new Wikimedia chapter in South Africa. Another questioner asked about the sustainability of the Foundation with the increase in funding being requested as part of the fundraiser each year and stated that at the rates of growth the fundraisers have been operating, in 2031, they would exceed the current global GDP.
The plenary on Friday was given by Joseph Reagle, author of Good Faith Collaboration, who gave a talk asking whether or not Wikipedia was inevitable and traced what he described as a "universal encyclopedic vision" that flowed down the ages from Denis Diderot and the Encyclopédie. Many aspects of Wikipedia, Reagle argued, could be found in previous proposals. Even the metaphor of the jigsaw which forms Wikipedia's logo can be found in H. G. Wells's "world encyclopedia": "we can solve the problem of that jig-saw puzzle and bring all the scattered and ineffective mental wealth of our world into something like a common understanding."
Reagle went on to describe a variety of network-based projects that followed the "encyclopedic vision" including Ted Nelson's Xanadu Project, Project Gutenberg, the Interpedia proposals, Richard Stallman's proposal for a "free universal encyclopedia" and then finally the development of Nupedia and then Wikipedia.
Reagle asked a number of questions about the historical status of Wikipedia and argued that it was inevitable as it has a number of innovative ideas built into it that previous proposals did not have. Reagle also poked a bit of fun at some of Wikipedia's critics: in 2002, Peter Jacso ridiculed the goal of getting to 100,000 articles from the measly 16,000 or so the project then had. Reagle also responded to Robert McHenry's famous criticism of Wikipedia as being akin to a public restroom ("[what] he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him") by pointing out that with talk pages and history listings, the reader actually "can see who pissed in Wikipedia". Reagle notes that criticism of reference works has a long history, and such criticism is a proxy for "culture wars" and other sociopolitical conflicts: the classic example being the criticism of Webster's for inclusion of the word "ain't" in the third edition published in 1961.
In the session on editor trends, some unnerving statistics were revealed about editor retention. In 2006, there were 244 new editors who became very active in the next year and made over 10,000 edits on the English Wikipedia. In 2009, that measure dropped to 56 users. This matches concerns expressed about the decreasing number of candidates suitable and willing to run for adminship on English Wikipedia. Similarly, according to the editor trends statistics, of new accounts created, the number who make one or more edits has been declining since the first quarter of 2007. The number of negative templates placed on user pages has also increased, a potential measure of the number of negative barriers for users.
One of the recurring themes of Wikimania this year has been the growth and successes of "GLAM", the outreach to galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Liam Wyatt (slides) described how a few years ago, what have now become GLAM volunteers, ambassadors, Wikimedians in Residence, etc. were not able to get museums and cultural institutions to return their phone calls, and now the Louvre is on the waiting list. Liam listed some of the successes of 2011 so far: residencies at the National Archives and Records Administration in the US, the rollout of QR codes at Derby Museum and a twenty-four challenge at the Château de Versailles. The GLAM projects have also worked to increase self-organisation through communication by running the This Month In GLAM newsletter and a number of GLAMcamp events to share success stories among Wikimedians. Liam made a number of suggestions on how to improve GLAM in 2012: a GLAMcamp in Utrecht, Netherlands, creating national "outreach coordinators" to train volunteers and creating a short term Community Liaison post at the Wikimedia Foundation. The success of GLAM projects in the United States also prompted Liam to suggest the creation of a "USA GLAM Fellow" to coordinate the dozen or more Wikipedians in Residence programs at many more American art museums Liam expects to happen in 2012.
One aspect which Liam thought needed work was better management and development of tools to support GLAM activities: currently, there are lots of different tools, often hacky and custom-built for mass upload of images and metadata management, and it would make life easier if they could be improved and standardised. In addition, often institutions need metrics to show the effectiveness of image uploads, article collaboration and other activities, which are currently not provided as well as they could be.
Maarten Dammers (User:Multichill) from Wikimedia Netherlands gave a talk on the "State of GLAM in the Netherlands" (slides) discussing outreach with the Tropenmuseum, Wiki Loves Monuments and other GLAM outreach projects they conducted.
As at previous Wikimanias, Jimmy Wales rounded off the event with a report on the "State of the Wiki". Wales responded to the reports that the number of editors was dropping by arguing that "Wikipedia is not dying". Increasing the number of editors is only of secondary concern; the primary concern is increasing quality. Pointing to WikiLove and the Article Feedback Tool, Jimmy argued that through software changes we can improve the experience of editing Wikipedia dramatically. He asked the community to help in this process: "we need to relax a bit and be less conservative".
Illustrating the complexity of the current system on the English Wikipedia, Jimmy described the process of trying to use Requested Moves (WP:RM) in order to seek consensus on moving John Hutton (British Labour politician) to John Hutton, Baron Hutton of Furness in March—Jimmy is well known for his interest in the House of Lords. He found it exceptionally complicated to do so and after making a mistake, a bot came and overwrote it, a process he described as feeling as if "a robot ate my homework!" If, he goes on, this is too complicated for a long-time user of the site to get right, how on earth do we expect ordinary users to get it right?
Jimmy also announced the creation of an annual award—Global Wikipedian of the Year. This was given to Rauan Kenzhekhanuly of Kazakh Wikipedia and consisted of a $5,000 award to Wikibilim, the chapter in Kazakhstan, to pay travel expenses to Wikimania next year. This would be presented to Kezhekhanuly at a ceremony in Kazakhstan with the country's prime minister Karim Massimov. The Kazakh Wikipedia has been a dramatic success: the number of active editors has increased from 15 to 231 and has passed the milestone of 25,000 articles. Kezhekhanuly mentioned in an article in June that the Kazakh Wikipedia is adding 500 new articles a day and is aiming to get to 200,000 articles by the end of the year. At the time of writing, it has 68,935 articles.
Immediately following Jimmy's talk, James Hare made a presentation on behalf of the Wikimania 2012 team. Wikimania 2012 will be held on the Georgetown University campus in Washington, D.C. in July 2012 and will include an unconference day and a dedicated track for GLAM outreach.
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From 4 to 7 August, Wikimedians congregated in Haifa, Israel for this year's Wikimania conference, which also included preliminary events on 2 and 3 August. Unofficial estimates put the number of attendees at around 1,000 when both locals and visitors from 54 other countries around the world are included. The full schedule included some 125 sessions available for attendees, a large number of which were filmed and will be put on both Commons and Wikimedia Israel's own YouTube channel, which already includes shorter teaser videos of highlights from the conference. See also the dedicated coverage of some of the most important sessions in this Signpost issue.
Whereas previous conferences have struggled to make sufficient Wi-Fi coverage available to the hundreds of Wikimedians who attend each year, attendee Christophe Henner tweeted that Wikimania 2011 included "fully working wifi", helping to make hands-on sessions during the event run more smoothly.
The first registration slots for Wikimania 2012, to be held in Washington D.C., are expected to become available later this month. Suggestions for what makes a successful Wikimania are already coming in. Adam Hyland, who attended Wikimania 2011, commented that "diversity made this conference a success", while more mundane suggestions include the designation of a 24-hour lounge area and the creation of a space accessible to curious members of the public.
Further coverage of Wikimania is available from the Wikipedia Weekly podcast, which returned from a two year hiatus to publish three recordings from the conference (44 minutes, 39 minutes and a 20-minutes interview with Liam Wyatt about GLAM outreach). A summary of coverage relating to the technical side of Wikimedia can be found in this week's "Technology report".
During a board meeting coinciding with the seventh annual Wikimania conference, in Haifa, Israel, the Wikimedia Board of Trustees announced the allocation of roles and responsibilities for the 2011–12 board members, the composition of which was confirmed after board elections held earlier this year. According to the posting, Chinese Wikimedian Ting Chen retains the post of Board Chair, which he has held since July 2008, and Dutch Wikimedian Jan-Bart de Vreede regains the post of Vice-Chair that was briefly held by financial expert Stuart West from 2010 to 2011. According to the blog post, West will remain the Foundation's Treasurer and Phoebe Ayers will take responsibility for secretarial matters. The four officers share the board with Samuel Klein, Bishakha Datta, Matt Halprin, Arne Klempert, Kat Walsh and Jimmy Wales (in his "Founder" role). In unrelated news, the new Secretary was responsible for posting a summary of the Board's activities in May and June this year.
As expected, the Board of Trustees took the opportunity to discuss possible adjustments to the method for allocating funding between chapters—in particular, the utility of direct, automatic allocations to chapters of funds donated from within their countries was discussed. Justified by what it described as "its legal and financial obligations to safeguard money" given by donors, the group released a joint letter calling for greater restrictions to this funding channel (the Foundation also offers project-driven grants to chapters). Coming just weeks after the latest round of Foundation–chapter fundraising agreements were signed, the letter's publication has provoked consternation in some quarters. John Vandenberg of Wikimedia Australia said that imposing what he sees as an arbitrary condition (tax deductibility) on eligibility for direct donations so soon after negotiations finished "is not how you do change management". However, overall there was general consensus among commentators that the accountability of chapters needs to be improved; Chris Keating of Wikimedia UK stated that "Chapters' performance in terms of reporting and accountability has not been great on the whole". MZMcBride suggested that it should not be out of the question "to ask for some of the money back" from last year's fundraiser if it had not been used. Phoebe Ayers defended the letter's publication, adding that with the 2011 fundraiser approaching, the Board was "short on time" if it sought to improve practices.
Researcher Aaron Halfaker (User:EpochFail) of the Wikimedia Foundation's Summer of Research has discovered a strong predictor of new editor retention – the rejection they experience when first trying to edit the encyclopedia.
As a response to recent results that point to a decline in new editors retention since 2007,[1][2] Aaron examined the work that new editors perform in their first few editing sessions and the community's reaction to that work, in order to build a model for retention. The results suggest that rejection of newbies' first few edits plays a strong role in newcomer retention. Moreover, the amount of initial investment (edits in the first session) exhibited by a new user exacerbates the effect.
"Wikipedia's climate has changed since the early days before and during the exponential growth. Back then, the community was driven toward building content. More recently, with popular articles becoming longer and more elaborate, a shift seems to have occurred for quality over quantity. I suspected it has become much more difficult for newbies to make edits that wouldn't be immediately rejected and that this would has an effect on their motivation to continue editing. I wanted to look for such an effect and find out how much it matters with respect to the decline in new editor retention."
Aaron's work on the length of an articles the newbies are editing provided him with evidence that editors are editing longer articles, and that this is a strong predictor of being reverted, [3][4] presumably because of Wikipedia's increasingly stringent quality control mechanisms.[5]
To understand whether this increased rejection could explain the decline in editor retention, Aaron used a logistic regression model to explore factors that predict whether a new editor will survive or not. He found that the proportion of an editor's edits that are rejected by being deleted or reverted in their first three edit sessions[6] is a strong negative predictor of survival. This confirms the hypothesis that if a newbie's first experience editing Wikipedia is full of rejection, he or she would be unlikely to continue working in the project. It turns out that this effect has existed throughout the history of Wikipedia and has been increasing over time, though it has decreased somewhat in recent years. What's more, while editors who show a high initial investment in the community (by making many edits in their first edit session) are more likely to survive in general, these highly invested new editors suffer even more from having their work rejected than editors who express a lower investment.
These findings suggest that it is precisely the kind of newbies that Wikipedia needs – highly invested and prolific editors – who are being turned away by reverts and deletion.
However, it is also evident that the characteristics of newcomers are changing. Newcomers are expressing less initial investment, making fewer edits than they used to. This could be explained by an early/late adopter effect, or some other external factor.
A WMF report suggests that the number of editors who make acceptable contributions to the encyclopedia is still very high, but a more thorough analysis is needed to determine how much the increase in rejection can be attributed to changes in the quality of new editors' first contributions.
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As expected, this year's Wikimania conference has attracted a significant amount of media coverage, particularly within the Israeli press who were pleased that Israel had been allotted the event. For example, the pride of the outgoing chairperson of Wikimedia Israel was evident in a quotation selected by YNetNews, the English-language edition of a popular Israeli news site. "In the world of free content," wrote Shay Yakir, "the decision to hold the conference in Haifa of all places is like having Israel host the Olympic Games". The article also included a positive quotation attributed to the mayor of Haifa and thoughts from an American Wikimedian at the event. Similar coverage could be found in the Jerusalem Post (Israel's "most-read English website"), whose article, entitled "Wikipedia: Prophecy fulfilled or info apocalypse?" rounded off with a positive review of Wikipedia, concluding that it was "a happy accident that has surpassed all expectations". Haaretz included an article focussed on Wikimedia's effort in outreach (both in terms of GLAM-collaborations and in distributing offline copies of content), whilst the Jewish Chronicle was one of a number of sources to highlight the fact that Wikimedians had flocked to Israel even from countries that do not officially recognise Israel (Venezuela and Indonesia). Shalom Life described the gathering as "the largest wiki conference in history".
Outside Israel itself, the international media tended to focus on specific aspects of the news from Wikimania, including Jimmy Wales' concern that the number of Wikimedians on big-language projects cannot be sustained in the current editorial climate. Following an article by The Associated Press published on Thursday in which Jimmy Wales was quoted as saying "We are not replenishing our ranks, it is not a crisis, but I consider it to be important", there was additional media coverage of the issue in PC Magazine ([5]), The New Republic ([6]), The Atlantic Wire ([7]), Boston Globe ([8]), and PCWorld ([9]). Frederic Lardinois, writing for PaidContent, a site that focusses on methods for monetising the web, described Wales' remarks as "[probably] the first public acknowledgement by Wales and Wikipedia that the number of contributors is indeed declining... [and] that it's an issue". Although this may be true, the rush of press coverage follows months of internal analysis on editor trends (see previous Signpost coverage).
In attributing causes to the decline, the articles cite Wales' concerns over "impenetrable" editing practices in addition to other possible factors, including the diminishing amount of so-called "low hanging fruit": opportunities for ordinary people to write about things they know, rather than more specialist topics. In addition, The Atlantic Wire jokily suggests the problem might be the advent of Google's new social networking site Google+, which has rapidly built up a large number of young male users. According to the news site, Wales described the average contributor to Wikipedia as "'a 26-year-old geeky male' who moves on to other ventures, gets married and leaves the website". By contrast, The Independent quoted Wales as saying that "the current number of contributors is stable and sustainable" and that he only wanted to increase visitor numbers in order "to improve Wikipedia's accuracy and reach".
An article in British newspaper The Independent this week covered Wikimedia's "gender gap" in an article entitled "Wikipedia seeks women to balance its 'geeky' editors". The article contains the rather dubious assertion that "Mr Wales revealed that he plans to double the number of people actively editing the site's pages within a year", probably a misquote. A leading editorial for the newspaper agreed with the desire to get more women involved in Wikipedia. "Mr Wales is right," said The Independent, "Women of the web: Wikipedia needs you".
Following the publication of The Independent's article, a number of other news outlets devoted space to the issue, including The Guardian ("Women! Wikipedia needs you"), ITProPortal ("Wikipedia Seeks Balance, Recruiting Female Contributors"), New Zealand-based TopNews ("Wikipedia founder wants more female contributors", and articles syndicated from the QMI Agency, including CANOE ("Wikipedia wants women").
This week, we set our sights on WikiProject Firearms. Started in December 2006 by LWF, the project has grown to include 80 active members maintaining nearly 4,000 pages including 2 Featured Articles and 10 Good Articles. The project works on a long list of open tasks, oversees very detailed weapon infoboxes and cartridge infoboxes, and monitors a watchlist. The project is closely related to the Weaponry Task Force at WikiProject Military History. We interviewed project members Mike Searson (Mike), MatthewVanitas, DeusImperator, Three-quarter-ten (¾-10), and Berean Hunter.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Firearms? Do you own any rare or unique firearms?
The project's talk page is very active. What attracts editors to the talk page? Do you have any suggestions for other projects that struggle with bringing their members together for discussions?
Do discussions about firearm-related articles ever become heated? How have you handled situations like these?
The project's main page is no-frills black-and-white text, and the project does not maintain a portal. Are the elaborate templates and decorative items found on many other projects seen as unnecessary? How has the project remained so active without them?
Does WikiProject Firearms collaborate with any other projects? If so, how do you split the workload between these projects?
What are the project's most pressing needs? How can a new member help today?
Anything else you'd like to add?
Next week, we'll interview a project that has struggled with "reverse Californication". Contemplate what that means in the archive.
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One featured article was delisted: Belgium (nom: referencing and coverage)
Five lists were promoted:
One featured list was delisted:
Six images were promoted. Medium-sized images can be viewed by clicking on "nom":
The Arbitration Committee closed one case, and opened a new case this week. There are now two open cases.
The case was opened to examine allegations of incivility, unnecessary aggression, battleground behavior, and disruptive editing, as well as inappropriate and unnecessary use of the blocking tool. A few days after the case was opened, arbitrator Risker blocked the filer of the case, Chester Markel (talk · contribs), as a sockpuppet of a banned user. To mitigate the potential influence on the end result of the case, the sockpuppet-filer's proposals and evidence were collapsed/archived. 13 users, including the blocked sockpuppet-filer, submitted on-wiki evidence in this case, while arbitrators, parties and others submitted various comments in the workshop. Drafter Kirill Lokshin submitted proposed principles for comment, but did not propose editor-specific rulings in the workshop. During the week, these principles and the remainder of the proposed decision were submitted for arbitrators to vote on, before the case came to a close.
Following a request for arbitration, the Committee passed a motion to accept two separate cases (which are currently open). No other cases are currently open.
This case, the first of a pair of cases, was opened a fortnight ago, to examine the conduct of Cirt (talk · contribs) and Jayen466 (talk · contribs) – including articles about new religious movements (broadly construed) and BLPs, as well as interpersonal conduct issues arising between Cirt and Jayen466. The Committee determined that for this case, those two users will be the only parties and that evidence in relation to broader issues or other editors is not permitted – instead, such evidence will be allowed in the second of the two cases ("Manipulation of BLPs", below). During the week, several editors submitted on-wiki evidence. Arbitrators have extended the evidence phase of this case by one week; this means that the evidence phase is now expected to close on 15 August 2011.
This case, the second of a pair of cases, was opened this week, to examine meta-behavioural issues and to reconcile relevant principles. During the week, several editors submitted on-wiki evidence.
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| “ | I've started on a JavaScript-based parser implementation that can be used... for testing on existing wikis... Trevor and Inez are working on the visual editor components... [and] Neil's also putting together the infrastructure we'll need to do multi-user [simultaneous] editing. |
” |
| — Brion Vibber speaking at Wikimania | ||
As Wikimania 2011 wound down (it officially ended on 7 August; see this week's article on Wikimania, as well as coverage in "News and Notes", for details about the conference), a number of Wikimedia and MediaWiki developers published materials related to the conference, including slides, photos and videos. For example, notes for the pre-conference Hackathon were compiled in real time using the live collaboration software EtherPad before being transferred to Wikimedia wikis. These include notes for a workshop session where "two thirds of the participants had actually done some work" despite beginning with very varied skill levels, according to a blog posting by attendee Gerard Meijsen.
During Wikimania proper, realtime collaborations were also frequent. They included the questions and answers of Wikimania's own "Ask The Developers" session. The notes show that during the session German Wikimedian and developer Daniel Kinzler outlined "Wikimedia Germany's plans to develop a central repository for factual data" while Lead Software Architect Brion Vibber referred to the ongoing project to make "[server] configuration... editable from the wiki [concerned]". Efforts to make right-to-left editing work better were also mentioned in the session, according to the notes made by a number of attendees. Brandon Harris answered questions regarding default styling by pointing people to the MediaWiki style guide which, like Wikipedia's own Manual of Style, gives instruction on how to keep contributions from many different editors consistent.
Several presenters at Wikimania have posted their slides online for public dissemination. For example, Brion Vibber's slides for his Parser 2.0 project are a useful primer on the tricky subject of WYSIWYG editing, whilst also introducing his project that "combines the best" of previous attempts and promises better mobile editing support. It is scheduled for a mid-2012 public release, with opt-in functionality available later this year. This is in contrast to the much smaller Collaborative Watchlist project, whose slides show an initiative to build small efficiencies into existing systems rather than redesign them completely. Andrew West's slides (PDF) from his talk about combating vandalism form a useful introduction to ongoing initiatives at improving artificial intelligence to prevent linkspam. Meanwhile, a few bloggers have highlighted their thoughts about their stay at Haifa: the Wikimedia Deutschland blog, for example, commented on a talk about the Article Feedback Tool (quoting the fact that it is currently receiving 10 million valuations a month, compared to "only" 3.6 million edits to the wiki).
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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https-friendly URLs has increased to three (test, wikimania2005 and Wikimedia's own internal wiki). The week commencing 15 August has been suggested as the date for a fuller rollout (wikitech-l mailing list). In unrelated news, there was a question about incidental redirection to http of some Toolserver addresses (toolserver-l).
