Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-09-19/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-09-19/Traffic report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-09-19/In the media
On September 16, WMF director of platform engineering Rob Lanphier announced the deployment schedule of the latest version of MediaWiki, version 1.18, approximately seven months after the deployment of version 1.17. Due to the completion of the heterogeneous deployment project, software engineers at the Foundation have the chance for the first time to deploy to some Wikimedia wikis before others; developers reason that a staged deployment, when combined with a smaller release, will avoid many of the difficulties experienced in previous deployments when millions of visitors experienced small defects that only came to light at deployment time. With this in mind, Lanphier outlined the schedule as:
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As of time of writing, only four revisions (out of many hundreds) still need to be reviewed before deployment can commence. Lanphier encouraged users to test the wikis immediately after deployment and report any issues through the #wikimedia-tech connect IRC channel. Theoretically, MediaWiki 1.18 introduces several major new features, including support for gender-specific user pages, better directionality support for RTL languages, and protocol-relative URLs. Although Wikimedia wikis already benefit from a selection of the most major new features (priority changes are rapidly merged into production code), a myriad of smaller changes not yet debuted will indeed go live in the forthcoming rolling program of deployments. A full list of these is also available.
After the deployments, there will be a lag before the software is marked as stable enough for external sites to use and MediaWiki 1.18 is officially released. For version 1.17, the lag was four months, but the absence of under-the-hood changes in 1.18 means that an official release is scheduled for "shortly after" the internal deployment is complete on October 4.
Following the news on Monday that members of the English Wikinews community are to break away, a spotlight was cast on the Foundation's policy towards its smaller projects, particularly when it came to technical support. "They couldn't get essential components deployed for 2 years or so," opined Kim Bruning, whilst Jon explained the problems in the technical assistance the Wikinews project received in more detail. His words seem to conflict with those of OpenGlobe founder Tempodivalse, who did not cite conflict with the Foundation as among his motivations for starting the project:
“ | I can't speak for the entire Wikinews community, but a lot of it was the lack of technical assistance. Wikinews really need[ed the GoogleNewsSitemap extension] to be even remotely useful and it was very difficult to get any help at all. Eventually the community wrote the extension themselves but couldn't get the dev's to review it appropriately. This was drawn out over several years [until] the Foundation really started to turn around and give much better support starting about 1 year ago. ... There is also a host of other backend and support style related issues ... Simply put, the Wikinews concept needs a much more specific set of assistance than the general "Here's a wiki, have fun". | ” |
WereSpielChequers, meanwhile, suggested an overhaul of the mechanism for deciding which projects should receive paid developer attention:
“ | I think it would be great if we could ringfence some IT budget for bottom up initiatives ... What I'd like to see is a prioritisation page on Meta comparing the priority of multiple potential developments, - much like the way Wikimania chooses presentations. That way projects and editors could make a pitch for IT investments that their communities actually had consensus for - currently even the English Wikipedia can get consensus for change but not get IT resourced for it to happen. | ” |
Among the most damning public criticism of current Foundation policy was that from MZMcBride:
“ | From Wikimedia's perspective, I think this is "one down, several hundred to go." Wikimedia has made it clear that its singular focus is the English Wikipedia. All other Wikipedias are peripheral; all other project types are abandoned. Perhaps with the exception of Wikimedia Commons, which is able to pull in grant money, so it continues to receive some level of technical support. ... It's a great injustice to countless contributors that they receive support in name only ... I sincerely hope whoever administers your new site will treat you better than Wikimedia has. | ” |
Not all updates may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
With all page requests from those browsing Wikipedia on their handheld devices now being routed via the new MobileFrontend extension, administrators are being asked to update the HTML of the main pages of their home wikis to embed extra metadata. The metadata is then used to build up an improved mobile homepage.
{{REVISIONUSER}}
to be "fixed": A commonly used magic word's functionality will change significantly as developers plan to fix a bug. The {{REVISIONUSER}}
tag currently returns the username of the user who last edited the page, except when someone is editing that page, when it instead displays that editor's name. Developers plan to fix this soon (bug #19006), fundamentally changing the nature of the magic word. As a result, edit notices and templates used to preload or customise content that rely on the magic word will become non-functional; there are currently no firm plans to create another magic word with the existing functionality.Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-09-19/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-09-19/Opinion
Ushahidi, a non-profit information mapping software organization, has announced its intention to develop a wiki research tool built for Wikipedians editing breaking-news articles. The project was announced by the company and the Wikimedia Foundation on their respective blogs. In the past, Wikipedia has proved to be a valuable tool for disseminating breaking news (see this week's "Popular pages" report for specific examples); according to the Wikimedia Foundation, the site helps consumers of news to "understand and filter the news by curating and summarizing it as quickly and as accurately as possible."
Ushahidi intends to analyze how Wikipedians gather and distill information and create a tool based on their existing data-gathering software, WikiSweeper (or simply Sweeper for short). Most Wikipedians have their own verification techniques, but the tool would present a stream and identify accurate and relevant information, even including non-English sources where applicable. The project was born from a meeting between the Wikimedia Foundation's Erik Möller and Jon Gosier, a former director of Ushahidi.
Last week marked the fifth anniversary of the first public announcement of Citizendium, the free volunteer-written online encyclopedia project founded by Larry Sanger (known for his role in starting Wikipedia until 2002). In his September 15, 2006 essay (corresponding to a talk at the Wizards of OS conference in Berlin), Sanger emphasized that he had "always been an enormous fan of Wikipedia, and I still am", but then listed numerous "serious and endemic problems" of Wikipedia which had motivated a fork of the project's processes and articles (the latter plan was changed soon after the actual start of the Citizendium wiki in 2007). As evident from Sanger's remarks and the Signpost coverage at the time, Citizendium was intended as a project that "aims to rival Wikipedia", though its fortunes have been mixed. For example, a July 2007 analysis in The Signpost (2008 followup) already declared that Citizendium "has not reached a critical mass of participation" (a conclusion questioned in the same Signpost edition by a member of Citizendium's executive committee, which invited Wikipedians to join the project and stated that "we're ultimately on the same side: that of making more and better free content available to the world." Wikipedians too have taken non-competitive perspectives on Citizendium, e.g. porting some of its content to Wikipedia, analyzing the lessons it might offer for Wikipedia, or even arguing that the Wikimedia Foundation should support it when Citizendium found itself in financial troubles last year). Perhaps surprisingly, some of the most scathing criticism of the project comes not from egalitarian Wikipedians, but originates from the perspective of scientific scepticism, as evidenced by the extensive Article on Citizendium at RationalWiki (which is currently cited on Citizendium's article about itself).
Before founding Citizendium, Sanger had worked for the Digital Universe project, which had likewise required users to state their real names, and given a special role to authenticated experts. After the start of Citizendium, Sanger took up work for WatchKnowLearn.org, another freely accessible website with user-contributed content (a database of links to free educational videos), founded around 2006 and publicly launched (as WatchKnow) in 2008. (A Wikipedia article about the site has been started recently, and on its talk page, Sanger has posted corrections and supplied more information about the project's history.)
On the occasion of the five-year anniversary, regular Signpost writer Tom Morris (formerly an active author at Citizendium and a former member of Citizendium's editorial council) interviewed Daniel Mietchen, the managing editor of Citizendium. Daniel is also the Wikimedian in Residence for Open Science (Signpost coverage), and a member of the Wikimedia Foundation's Research Committee.
Five years on, what do you think Citizendium has achieved?
What do you think are the biggest misconceptions about Citizendium?
Critics of Citizendium say that the bureaucracy got too heavy, too early. The effect of this has been to make the editing process more political, with otherwise active article writers becoming elected bureaucrats and a lot of political power games. Do you agree with this assessment?
Do you think Citizendium's financial woes are going to be resolved any time soon?
One thing we have both stressed is the importance of contextualization of knowledge. Citizendium did this by embracing subpages (with articles being just one part of an "article cluster"). Wikimedia seems to spread the potential contextualization between different projects with the 'Gallery' subpage being Commons, while the 'Related Articles' subpage being handled by 'Outline' pages and categories. Do you think Citizendium has a better model here?
I was talking to a PhD student the other day who told me they don't trust anything that is said in Wikipedia about academic topics, but they do frequently use the references and bibliography section. Both Citizendium and the fork of Citizendium, Knowino, have Bibliography subpages and Citizendium also has an External Links subpage, which allows editors to develop an annotated bibliography of both scholarly and web resources. English Wikipedia does have some bibliography pages (Bibliography of New York, Evelyn Waugh bibliography). Do you think developing bibliographic resources could be something Wikimedia could try or might this be something only specialist academic wikis end up doing?
What do you think Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects can learn from Citizendium's successes and failures?
If we were betting, would you put €50 on Citizendium being around in five years time?
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-09-19/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-09-19/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-09-19/In focus
Two cases are currently open:
There are pending requests for clarification for three cases: Transcendental meditation movement (since August 26), Digwuren (since August 24), and Ireland article names (since August 19). There is also one case with a pending request for amendment: Russavia-Biophys.
On 23 August, La goutte de pluie resigned her position as an administrator as the result of a community recall process. KuduIO requested arbitration regarding her editing some weeks ago, alleging that she had abused her position of trust. This week, the original request for arbitration was officially declined by the committee, 3 to 5. The main voice for the arbitrators moving to decline was PhilKnight, who argued that the community could (and was) handling the situation by itself and ArbCom did not need to intervene. The same day the request was archived, a new request was submitted by OpenInfoForAll, which was speedily declined with OpenInfoForAll's consent a day later. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-09-19/Humour