Jan Eissfeldt is a German Wikimedian, holding down the position of administrator on the German Wikipedia and administrator and bureaucrat on the cross-community Outreach wiki. Here, he writes about the nature of the German Wikimedian community, and what lessons might be learned from its response to the recent proposals for an opt-in image filter.
The views expressed are those of the author only. Responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. The Signpost welcomes proposals for op-eds. If you have one in mind, please leave a message at the opinion desk.
Something is different on Meta these days. Substantial parts of the German community, usually focused on itself and the three German language Wikimedia chapters, are going up the walls. Why is that?
Well, to keep an extremely long story very simple: they really hate the image filter and therefore the German projects are the only corner in the Wikimedia universe (it seems to me) heavily resisting this feature following the recent global referendum (see previous Signpost coverage).
According to stats.wikimedia.org, approximately 35% of the core community of the German Wikipedia (357 users) voted to totally reject the idea of the proposed image filter as they interpreted it in a local poll that publicly passed with 86% support. Traditionally, the community sorts out differences in binding crucial votes and nearly half of the core community took part in this one. Additionally, I attended their annual community conference this month and can tell you: many of those who did not participate in the poll aren't happy either. As a result, the Terms of use update is mainly under fire there right now for this reason.
What is different
The Annual General Meeting of Wikimedia Deutschland, which helps co-ordinate the close-knit German Wikimedian community
So, what's different about these folks? For one, their way of building and running their projects. The German community mainly lives in a concentrated geographical area, smaller than Texas, and is extremely homogeneous even by Wikimedia standards. As a result, their community life is mainly conducted via real life meet ups, called Stammtische, and users are on record for knowing up to 350 other users personally – in a core community of approximately 1000 people. Fine, that makes them something The Guardian's Michael White would most likely call a tribe and the academic studies on this community largely agree. But since the image filter is a tool for readers, that doesn't really count, right?
Right, but take a look at their readers. Public debates about the Internet in Germany have centred around the idea of filters for years now. The so-called Grand Coalition introduced them back in 2009, in an attempt to combat child pornography, but the public reaction was disastrous and filters were accused of being tools for protecting the abuse they were supposed to attack. For the very first time a national government was forced to not enforce a law it had already enacted, and the constitutional court had to deal with the question; on a more localised level, major German sites don't use filters either. The law, called the Zugangserschwerungsgesetz, was finally abolished in 2011 in response to wide-ranging criticism.
It seems that filters aren't a popular concept in Germany generally and you can largely count Austria and the German-speaking part of Switzerland there as well. How does this translate into the view of Wikimedians? Well, the German Wikipedia reached an unusually high degree of penetration and reputation relative to the related language community. In 2007, Stern magazine claimed that the German Wikipedia was more reliable than the Brockhaus, the largest traditional German encyclopedia. Additionally, the German project already had its share of practice tests (Signpost coverage) and there was no major public outcry. If we are ready to take that as a given, they are doing all right and their content doesn't seem to be controversial to their particular audience. The obvious exception is their hostility towards popular culture, which is often cited as a reason to use the English Wikipedia rather than the German one. Coincidentally or not, so far the biggest flare-up of this disagreement between German readers and community was triggered by the deletion of an article (Signpost coverage) about an anti-filter organization protesting the bill in 2009. In essence, German Wikimedians mirror the population they are drawn from.
What follows out of difference
That said, what does that mean for us? Well, we as participating community agreed with the Wikimedia entities back in the strategy process 2009/2010 that spreading free knowledge in the foreseeable future will mean reaching out to the Global South and to do that means among other things – in my understanding – going into the messy business of balancing out arising value conflicts, which are non-binary by definition.
The image filter tool, like it or not, can potentially ease such debates by free choice-diversification of viewed images (which are different from text for all sorts of well-known anthropological-epistemic arguments I can't name here), while preserving our "NPOV/one article" approach. All-in-all a solution far more clever than what was tried on Commons back in 2010 and it takes into account what we know about people without a proper voice inside our debates – and the readers and contributors we all are looking for as well.
This looks quite settled to me, since I got the impression out of the referendum that low-level contributors are significantly more enthusiastic about the whole idea than the core community. These occasional contributors without a proper voice in our usual decision-making processes are the nearest we can get to readers and, by taking into account their views, the Board of Trustees was designed to push for unpopular proposals if necessary.
But the global conclusion misses the point regarding what I wrote above about the structurally different German case and dealing with them regarding any given topic – as the response to the terms of use update shows – will become even more difficult as long as their identity question dominates minds. There is no voiceless German-speaking global south – or east, in other cases – to be safeguarded.
What should be done
I could, of course, be wrong about this local audience as a whole and this local community in particular. But taking the outlined unique tribe and the global position both as a given: it seems reasonable to me to look at this special case, maybe within a few months after implementation to check whether or not I'm right regarding readers, for a proper local response to this local problem.
A paper addressing gender imbalance in Wikipedia ("Gender differences in Wikipedia editing") by Judd Antin and collaborators won the "Best Short Paper" award at WikiSym.[1] This follows the awarding of "best full paper" to another study on the gender gap[2] already covered in previous editions of the research newsletter. The study by Antin and collaborators sampled 256,190 users who created a new account on the English Wikipedia between September 2010 and February 2011 and qualitatively coded their contribution by category of wiki work. The results suggest that, whereas in the lower three quartiles by activity level men and women make roughly the same contributions in each category of wiki work, in the top quartile editors behave in a significantly different way. The researchers found that among the top 25% of Wikipedians by activity level:
only 27% of all revisions are made by women;
women tend to make larger revisions than men;
top female editors make significantly larger revisions than men in at least two categories: "adding new content" and "rephrasing existing text"
Effects of reverts on wiki work
Two plots show the changes in an editor's boldness after being reverted.
Another WikiSym 2011 paper by GroupLens researchers, including Summer of Research fellow Aaron Halfaker ("Don’t bite the newbies: how reverts affect the quantity and quality of Wikipedia work"), reports on the effects of reverts on the quality and quantity of Wikipedia editors, with a specific focus on newbies.[3] The study uses a number of key metrics to assess the quality of editor contributions (using reverts per revision and Persistent Word Revisions or PWR, to measure the survival across revisions of words added by an editor, other than stop-word) and changes in editor activity (using a controlled activity delta that calculates an editor's variation of activity across weeks with respect to the week preceding the revert, normalized by the editor's daily rate of activity). The results point at the same time at the important role of reverts as a learning and quality improvement process but also at their negative effects on new contributors. Below are highlights from this study:
Compared with their activity prior to a revert, in the first week after a revert reverted editors decrease their activity by 0.1 standard deviations compared with an increase in a control group of non-reverted editors of about 0.3 standard deviations.
It matters who performs a revert: editors reverted by a registered editor do not recover to the average level of activity for at least one month, whereas editors reverted by anonymous users recover much faster.
Reverts affect the quality of one's work: reverted editors are less likely to be reverted in the future (particularly in the week after the revert), whereas the probability of being reverted in the control group keeps growing every week. Reverted editors are also less likely to make important changes to an article after being reverted, compared with the control group. However, the productivity of reverted editors in the following weeks increases more rapidly than non-reverted editors.
Reverts affect newbies more negatively. Experienced editors are less affected by reverts on their average activity while newbies are significantly less likely to continue editing after a revert than experienced editors.
The two papers on gender gap mentioned above will be presented in a session titled Understanding Wikipedia, along with other original works some of which were already reviewed in the research newsletter, such as a study by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania examining revision deletion in the English Wikipedia (see also the summary posted on AcaWiki).[4]
Using the STiki software by one of the authors, which is already widely used as an anti-vandalism tool on the English Wikipedia, the researchers collected mainspace edits adding external links and extracted a corpus of 5,962 link additions classified as either ham or spam, using criteria such as whether the edit had been rolled back (to determine spam), or whether it had been added by a user with rollback rights (to determine ham). From this, the researchers derived numerous features that indicate link spamming behavior, in three areas: On-wiki evidence (including very simple metrics such as the URL's length – spam links tend to be shorter – or that older and more popular articles are more likely to be targeted), properties of the landing page that the link points to (these were found to be less useful), and classification from third-party sites, including Alexa and Google Safe Browsing. The backlinks data provided by Alexa proved to be most useful for the classifier that the authors went on to construct, and tested in a live implementation in the STiki tool. They conclude that "it is clear this work will benefit the Wikipedia community".
In another paper, presented earlier this month at CEAS ‘11, five authors from the same university including two of the same researchers examine the possibility of "Link spamming Wikipedia for profit". They picture spam detection on Wikipedia as a pipelined process, with the MediaWiki spam blacklist as the first stage (currently containing around 17000 regular expressions), recent changes patrollers (often aided by software tools) as the next – often reacting within seconds after an edit, watchlisters as the third (within minutes to days), and finally review by normal readers as the last stage. Based on a spam/ham corpus constructed as in the other paper, this paper contains some further analysis of the characteristics of link spam destinations and spamming accounts, and of the exposure spammed links receive before they are removed (determined by both the link's lifespan and the popularity of the spammed page). The most sensitive part of the paper then leverages these results to "describe a novel and efficient spam model we estimate can significantly outperform status quo techniques", e.g. by rapidly adding links to exploit the time lag of Wikipedia's spam removal process, or targetting popular pages. In a nod to WP:BEANS, the researchers admit that "there is the possibility that we have introduced previously unknown vectors", but the "Ethical Considerations" section emphasizes that:
"It is in no way this research’s intention to facilitate damage to Wikipedia or any wiki host. The vulnerabilities discussed in this section have been disclosed to Wikipedia’s parent organization, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Further, the WMF was notified regarding the publication schedule of this document and offered technical assistance."
The authors also point to the implementation of the spam mitigation tool described in the WikiSym article.
However, the paper fails to mention that last year, one of its authors conducted actual, extensive tests of spamming techniques on the English Wikipedia that are very similar to those outlined in the paper. The spam attacks gained the attention of several IT security news websites, and even involved setting up a fake webshop to measure how many Wikipedia readers would have carried out an actual purchase of the penis enlargement pills advertised in the links. The case led to the researcher's temporary ban as a Wikipedia user, later lifted by the arbitration committee, and informed the research guidelines drafted later that year by the Wikimedia Foundation's Research Committee. See Signpost coverage: "Large scale vandalism revealed to be 'study' by university researcher" (includes a background interview with the researcher).
How social ties influence admin votes
A paper by three researchers from the University of the Philippines Diliman[6], presented at the International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2011) two months ago, examined statistical relations between the voting behavior in requests for adminships (RfAs) and the on-wiki social contacts of participants. The paper includes a brief review of existing literature (in particular two papers which already studied the relation with existing social networks[7][8]). Drawing from a January 2008 dump of the English Wikipedia, they analyzed 2,587 elections conducted between 2004 and 2008 (48% of them successful, with 7,231 users voting or running in at least one RfA, and 80% of the final non-neutral votes being supportive), and "1,097,223 instances of communication between 265,155 distinct pairs of users" who had run or voted in an RfA – from user talk page messages, an undirected social graph was generated. Their results concern three areas:
"Factors that motivate participation": As a first result, the researchers found that the number of a user's contacts who already voted in an RfA, and (more strongly) whether the user had been in contact with the candidate, "contribute positively to the probability of a user’s participation in an election. This may be due to the fact that voters are inclined to support candidates with whom they are acquainted with."
As "Factors that influence voting" (i.e. the support/oppose decision) the authors considered the numbers of "support" and "oppose" votes that a user's contacts have already cast when the user votes, and whether the user had been in contact with the candidate before. All yielded regression coefficients with the expected sign (acquaintance with the candidate weighing positively), and the authors conclude that "we can already explain voting behavior by just examining the immediate neighborhood of a voter", but note that "it is interesting to note that the presence of contacts who have voted negatively weighs more heavily compared with those who voted positively."
Finally, the paper examined "Influential voters in the social network", by calculating various well-known social network metrics for both the "support" and "oppose" camps in each election ("degree, closeness centrality, betweenness centrality, authority, hub, PageRank, clustering coefficient, and eigenvector centrality", averaged over all voters in each camp, and combined into a weighted difference). Closeness, PageRank, and eigenvector centrality were found to have the largest regression coefficients in predicting the outcome of an RfA, suggesting to the authors "that decisions of influential nodes can affect the outcome of the RfA process. Although it was not studied in this paper, a possible explanation for this result is that influential users may sway other users to vote the same way and this aggregate behavior may have an impact on the result of the election".
Wikipedians' weekends in international comparison
A paper titled "Temporal characterization of the requests to Wikipedia" examined how search requests, read accesses and edits on Wikipedia change over time, and relate to those at the entirety of Wikimedia sites (based on squid logs for the whole year of 2009, provided by the Wikimedia Foundation). Among findings are differences between language versions of Wikipedia, such as that the "the number of edits tends to raise in weekends" for the French, Japanese, Dutch and Polish Wikipedia, but not for other languages. Another paper, titled "Circadian patterns of Wikipedia editorial activity: A demographic analysis"[9], similarly analyzed "34 Wikipedias in different languages [trying] to characterize and find the universalities and differences in temporal activity patterns of editors", with the underlying data provided by the German Wikimedia chapter from the toolserver. They found that "in contrast to diurnal [daily] pattern, which is universal to a great extent, weekly activity patterns of WPs show remarkable differences. We could, however, identify two main categories, namely 'weekends' and 'working days' active WPs."[10]
In brief
Gender bias in Wikipedia and Britannica: An article by Joseph Reagle and Lauren Rhue titled "Gender bias in Wikipedia and Britannica" examines gender bias in biographical coverage, comparing the English Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica.[11] The study suggests that "Wikipedia provides better coverage and longer articles, and that it typically has more articles on women than Britannica in absolute terms, but we also find that Wikipedia articles on women are more likely to be missing than are articles on men relative to Britannica". See the accompanying blog post with the full datasets used in this study.
Wikipedia as a potlatch: Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega compares Wikipedia to the potlatch, a traditional gift-giving ceremony whose participants gain status based on the generosity of their gifting, in this blog post summarizing his new book with Joaquín Rodríguez ( “El Potlatch Digital: Wikipedia y el Triunfo del Procomún y el Conocimiento Compartido” ["The Digital Potlatch: Wikipedia and the Triumph of Commons and Shared Knowledge"], published in Spanish by Ediciones Cátedra.[12] Drawing from new qualitative research (interviews with editors of the Spanish Wikipedia) as well as existing quantitative research, the book concludes that recognizing the gifts Wikipedians make, through meritocracy and explicit acknowledgement, helps motivate participation.
Bowel obstruction was one of the articles edited by the University of Texas students during the course.How medical students edit Wikipedia: A paper published last month by the Kansas Journal of Medicine asked "Are students able and willing to edit Wikipedia to learn components of evidence-based practice?" [13] In 2007 and 2008, two groups of senior medical students at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio participated in an exercise where they were asked "to place succinct summaries of [medical] studies in Wikipedia" (after a four hour introductory course on wikis). In a survey, 91% of them said that the project should be offered again in the next year, and 71% planned to edit Wikipedia again. (The authors caution that this group was self-selected.) The articles were examined two months after their edits, and 46% of the students had their contribution improved in some way, while "the pages edited by 62% of students had additional edits in response to incidental vandalism to the pages, but in no instance was the vandalism done to an edit by a student".
Ethnography of wikiculture set free: Joseph Reagle's 2010 book on the cultural dynamics of Wikipedia, Good Faith Collaboration, is now freely available to read online, having been released under an accommodating Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).[14]
Provenance for Wikipedia articles: A (closed access) doctoral dissertation defended at the University of Arizona presents a "domain ontology of provenance for Wikipedia based on the W7 model", building on the notion of the five Ws. The author applies this ontology to extract provenance for Wikipedia articles and to assess their quality, thereby identifying "several collaboration patterns that are preferable or detrimental for data quality".[15]
Geographies of the World's Knowledge: as already mentioned in last week's Signpost, the floatingsheep collective, in collaboration with the Oxford Internet Institute, released a report titled "Geographies of the World's Knowledge" visualizing the temporal and geographical distribution of Wikipedia articles.[16] Drawing from roughly 1.5 million articles in a 2010 database download, the report revealed among other findings that more articles had been written about Antarctica (7,800) than any South American or African nation, that the country with the most internet users (China) accounted for barely 1% of articles, that its biographical articles overwhelmingly geolocate to Western Europe and, from the 18th century on, North America, and that vastly more biographies per year were written for the 20th and particularly the 21st century compared to preceding time periods. The report is released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.
Wikipedia found to have grown until 2007: A paper by a sociology researcher from the University of York, titled "Measuring the Development of Wikipedia"[17], explores the development of the number of edits and the number of participants on the English Wikipedia from 2002 to 2007 (curiously asserting that "there is only 6 years data"). As first result, the research "reveals that the number of edits and the total number of participants both increased in Wikipedia from 2002 to 2007". The paper's most tangible contribution appears to consist of histograms plotting the number of users with a particular edit count in each of the years 2002 to 2007, which the author finds "are similar with the Pareto distribution in the shape, [and therefore] we assume that the participation situation in Wikipedia is one type of the Pareto Distribution". A large part of the four page paper (available for $26) is devoted to general explanations of this distribution. It also mentions the need to use a statistical method such as maximum likelihood estimation to confirm the optical impression that the histograms follow the Pareto distribtion, but it remains unclear if the author actually carried this out. Also, despite emphasizing several times the importance of determining the changes in the k parameter over the years (a measure of the inequality associated with the postulated Pareto distribution) – calling it "vital to model the participation situation in Wikipedia" -, the actual values are never given. The abstract promises "an equation to predict future development trend of Wikipedia", but it remains unclear to this reviewer which equation this refers to.
References
^Antin, Judd, Raymond Yee, Coye Cheshire, and Oded Nov (2011). Gender Differences in Wikipedia Editing. WikiSym 2011: Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis, 2011. PDF
^S.T.K. Lam, A. Uduwage, Z. Dong, S. Sen, D.R. Musicant, L. Terveen, and J. Riedl (2011). WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia's Gender Imbalance. In WikiSym 2011: Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis, 2011. PDF
^Halfaker, Aaron, Aniket Kittur, and John Riedl (2011). Don't Bite the Newbies: How Reverts Affect the Quantity and Quality of Wikipedia Work. WikiSym '11: Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis. PDF
^A.G. West and I. Lee (2011). What Wikipedia Deletes: Characterizing Dangerous Collaborative Content. In WikiSym 2011: Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis. PDF
^Ferron, Michela, and Paolo Massa (2011). Collective memory building in Wikipedia: The case of North African uprisings. WikiSym 2011: Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis. PDF
^Cabunducan, Gerard, Ralph Castillo, and John Boaz Lee (2011). Voting behavior analysis in the election of Wikipedia admins. In: 2011 International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, 545–547. IEEE DOI
^J. Leskovec, D. Huttenlocher, J. Kleinberg (2010) Predicting positive and negative links in online social networks. ACM WWW International conference on World Wide Web (WWW '10), 2010. videoPDF
^J. Leskovec, D. Huttenlocher, J. Kleinberg (2010) Governance in Social Media: A case study of the Wikipedia promotion process. In: AAAI International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM '10). videoPDF
^Yasseri, Taha, Sumi, Róbert, Kerétsz, János (2011). Circadian patterns of Wikipedia editorial activity: A demographic analysis, ArXiV (September 8, 2011). PDF
^Reinoso, Antonio J., Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona, Rocio Muñoz-Mansilla, and Israel Herraiz (2011). Temporal characterization of the requests to Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on New Challenges in Distributed Information Filtering and Retrieval (DART 2011). ETSI Caminos, Canales y Puertos (UPM), September 13, 2011. PDF
^Reagle, Joseph, and Lauren Rhue (2011). Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Britannica. International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 1138–1158. PDF
^José Felipe Ortega and Joaquín Rodríguez López (2011). El potlatch digital. Wikipedia y el triunfo del procomún y el conocimiento compartido, Catedra, September 2011. HTML
^Badgett, Robert G, and Mary Moore (2011). Are students able and willing to edit Wikipedia to learn components of evidence-based practice? Kansas Journal of Medicine 4(3), August 30, 2011. PDF
^Reagle, Joseph M. (2010). Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia. The MIT Press, 2010. HTML
^Liu, J. (2011). W7 model of provenance and its use in the context of Wikipedia. PhD dissertation, The University of Arizona, 2011. PDF
^Graham, M., Hale, S. A. and Stephens, M. (2011) Geographies of the World’s Knowledge. Ed. Flick, C. M., London, Convoco! Edition. PDF
^He, Zeyi (2011). Measuring the Development of Wikipedia. In 2011 International Conference on Internet Technology and Applications, IEEE DOI
Foundation overrules community consensus on autoconfirmation trial
Wikimedia Foundation Deputy Director Erik Möller, who intervened to halt the implementation of the Autoconfirmed article creation trial, which was seen as striking an unwelcome exclusionary stance.
In a heated altercation between English Wikipedia community members and MediaWiki sysadmins in the course of a bugzilla thread, a proposed trial for barring non-autoconfirmed editors from creating articles, which had garnered significant local consensus in a widely publicised Request for Comment, was thwarted by Wikimedia Foundation staffers and developers. The trial had been motivated by the perceived ineffectiveness of prevailing article creation mechanics, whereby a large portion of articles created by new editors were swiftly deleted and their authors reprimanded. By barring new editors from creating articles and funnelling them through the Articles for Creation and Article Creation Wizard processes, it was hoped to ease pressure on new page patrollers, alienate fewer new contributors and ensure a higher quality of new articles. After reticence to implement the trial from sysadmins and an intemperate reaction, Wikimedia Foundation Deputy Director Erik Möller after acknowledging the stated intentions of the initiative, put the boot down firmly on the petitioners' hopes:
However, we believe that creating a restriction of this type is a strong a statement of exclusion, not inclusion, and that it will confuse and deter good faith editors. Instead of trying to address many different issues by means of a simple but potentially highly problematic permission change, we believe that in order to create a friendly, welcoming and understandable experience for new editors, we need to apply an iterative, multi-prong approach, including but not limited to:
simplifying the actual workflow of new article creation and reducing instruction creep
experimenting with alternative models to provide new users with safe spaces for new article development
connecting new users with experienced mentors faster.
Möller and the developers attempted to redirect efforts to the ArticleCreationWorkflow project at MediaWiki in the face of strong resistance from the English Wikipedia community members, with the initiator of the bug report Snottywong commenting "ArticleCreationWorkflow doesn't discuss any real solutions to the problem, so I will not be contributing there". Charges of unilateralism, incivility and a patronising tone were levelled at Foundation staff as it became evident the report would not result in implementation. Volunteer developer and long-standing English Wikipedian Happy-melon attempted to bridge the growing divide with an entreaty for perspective:
On the other hand, there *is* a separation of *cultures* here, and it's something that an awful lot of members of the wiki communities do not appreciate. The developers and (separately) the sysadmins/WMF form their own separate communities with their own goals and practices; and those goals and practices, while closely matching those of enwiki or whereverwiki, do not
necessarily precisely align. There is nothing unrealistic, or wrong, with enwiki having goals which are very slightly different from those of the WMF as a whole, or for their requests to not be ones that the Foundation feels bests fits with their own strategies.
In response to the incident, English Wikipedian and developer MZMcBride assembled at Meta a list of instances of Wikimedia systems administrators rejection of configuration changes. The firm insistence of the Wikimedia Foundation to pursue its own vision of sustaining and developing the Wikimedia projects in defiance if necessary of the wishes of the core community of its flagship project – and the chief source of its funding – is an indicator of how far the organisation has grown in its brief history, and is sure to raise the hackles of those who conceived of it playing a primarily supportive role to the local communities.
Academic journals consider partnering with Wikipedia
This month, editors of two academic journals brought up the possibility of content partnerships between their respective journals and Wikipedia. Phil Bourne, Editor in Chief of PLoS Computational Biology, suggested that review articles on topics that are related to computational biology could be considered for publication in the journal in a way that would allow the article to be reused to start an entry on the topic in the English Wikipedia. In a similar move, Andrew Su – editor at the journal Gene and one of the driving forces behind the Gene Wiki – raised the possibility of gene stubs in the English Wikipedia being substantially expanded by way of review articles that could be published in the journal. In both cases, the details remain yet to be worked out.
The potential complementarity of open-access journals and Wikipedia has beennotedrepeatedly, but the Wikipedia policies WP:V, WP:MEDRS, WP:PSTS, WP:NPOV, WP:NOR, WP:NOT PAPERS, WP:TECHNICAL or WP:OWN as well as journal policies on prior publication or (for subscription-based journals) on reuse have all been put forward as possibly standing in the way of such a close association between Wikipedia and journal articles. PLoS Computational Biology publishes its articles under a CC-BY license, which does not allow the article drafting to take place under the more restrictive CC-BY-SA license employed on most Wikimedia projects, whereas Gene content is paywalled and fully copyrighted, such that any kind of reuse beyond mere citation requires written permission, which does not fit with CC-BY-SA either.
Nonetheless, the first journal with such a content partnership with Wikipedia is subscription-based: since late 2008, RNA Biology requires that manuscripts about new RNA families be accompanied by the draft for a corresponding Wikipedia article, and both documents will be subjected to the same peer review process. The first article arising from this collaboration was SmY RNA,[1] and a number of articles – e.g. YkkC-yxkD leader[2] – have been started in correspondence to papers published in journals other than RNA Biology. In a similar arrangement, identification keys of newly discovered species published in the open-access journal ZooKeys are routinely uploaded to a specialist wiki, thereby providing the basis for the corresponding entries at Wikispecies. The first such article was Neobidessodes darwiniensis.[3]
The 100,000th upload to Wiki Loves Monuments, according to a Spanish blog post. Pictured is a historic Portuguese church, part of a convent dedicated to Saint Clara.
Wiki Loves Monuments hits 100k: As reported by chapters such as Wikimedia España, the Wiki Loves Monuments project surpassed the 100,000 upload mark on the 26 September. The 100,000th upload was of a church in Portugal (pictured right).
Age-appropriateness of adult content editing raised A user who self-identified as a 13-year-old administrator hopeful was brought to the administrators' incidents noticeboard over the quality and responsiveness of his speedy deletion tagging this week. A standard ANI thread was set to ensue when it was quickly noted that in addition to being a member of WikiProject Professional Wrestling the editor also showcased a userbox identifying himself as a "hard-core member of WikiProject Pornography". A discussion about age restrictions for adult-oriented WikiProjects followed, the equanimity of which was seized upon by founder-turned-critic Larry Sanger as further evidence of Wikipedia's moral decay.
WMUK greets new CEO: Wikimedia UK have announced the end of their search for a Chief Executive with the appointment of Jon Davies, who has former leadership experience with as Chief Executive of parenting charity Families need Fathers, and with the London Cycling Network.
Office hours on the image filter: In this week's IRC office hours with Sue Gardner and other WMF staffers (see log) discussion predominantly focused on the proposed image filter for potentially controversial content, with specific reference to the reception of the idea within the German Wikipedia community – a topic addressed head-on by this week's opinion essay.
New administrators: The Signpost welcomes Wikipedia's newest administrator, Richwales, whose second attempt at adminship succeeded with minimal dissent after he took efforts to broaden his experience in content creation and traditional administrative tasks. A veteran of 6½ years editing, Rich envisages focusing his newly acquired powers on anti-vandalism efforts at least initially. One Request for Adminship, that of Anomie, a bot operator, is currently open.
Project milestones: The Shona, Sundanese and Twi Wikipedias reached milestones this week, with 1,000 total pages, 15,000 articles, and 100 articles respectively.
British columnist Johann Hari admits to Wikipedia vandalism
Disgraced Independent columnist Johann Hari, whose apology for unethical interviewing practices and surreptitious POV-pushing on Wikipedia was greeted coolly by peers.
Johann Hari, opinion columnist for the British newspaper The Independent, finally admitted to being behind the now-banned user "David r from meth productions", as well as using prior published statements in interviews without proper attribution.
In Hari's published apology, he details the nature and extent of his editing:
The other thing I did wrong was that several years ago I started to notice some things I didn’t like in the Wikipedia entry about me, so I took them out. To do that, I created a user-name that wasn’t my own. Using that user-name, I continued to edit my own Wikipedia entry and some other people’s too. I took out nasty passages about people I admire – like Polly Toynbee, George Monbiot, Deborah Orr and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. I factually corrected some other entries about other people. But in a few instances, I edited the entries of people I had clashed with in ways that were juvenile or malicious: I called one of them anti-Semitic and homophobic, and the other a drunk. I am mortified to have done this, because it breaches the most basic ethical rule: don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you.
I have received no personal apology from Hari; nor have any of his other victims. I have received no direct apology from the Indy, which defends him.
Hari's apology has, of course, been subject to considerable negative reaction (Erik Wemple at the Washington Post asked: "Hey, like, how is a journalism training course going to cure the ills of Johann Hari? A look at his own disclosures shows that his sins are sins of character, not training. Does he really need some instructor to tell him not to libel someone on Wikipedia?"). Hari's activity on Wikipedia has been discussed in a number of media outlets including The Guardian, The Economist and The Telegraph. William Beutler also discussed the story on The Wikipedian.
Is Wikipedia's search dominance coming to an end?
Business Insidercaught up with board president of Moveon.org and search guru Eli Pariser for insights into the changing nature of search in an era of increasing personalisation. Pariser had first taken note of the implications when he noticed Facebook had gradually been narrowing down the content it highlighted to him based on the political compatibility between him and the content's authors, part of a trend among websites to profile users based on their past browsing habits and to display content that is likely to appeal more prominently than that which is not.
Pariser's subsequent investigations found that the more websites tried to algorithmically tailor content to what they imagined users were looking for, the less universally oriented sites like Wikipedia featured prominently in search results. As attempts to make content as personally relevant to individual users represent a driving concern of most major websites other than Wikipedia, this could threaten the unparallelled stature of Wikipedia in search (particularly Google search) rankings that has been widely credited for its dominance as a top ten global online resource. This week, the encyclopaedia was reported to have been overtaken by microblogging service Tumblr in Quantcast-measured pageviews.
In brief
An illustrative animated gif image from the John Wall Dance article, which received coverage on the NBC Washington's Capital Games blog this week. The image uploader was accorded kudos by NBC Washington for their "slightly freaky" creation.
Wikipedia's leaderless organisation: Speaking at the Think global leadership summit in New York, MIT Media Lab director and Wikipedian Joi Ito dwelled on the observation that open source movements such as Mozilla and Wikimedia treated the concept of leadership quite differently to the traditional Newtonian conception held in business circles, noting that at Wikipedia members are pushed into positions of responsibility rather than seeking them out. This echoes the dictum attributed to long-serving Wikipedian David Gerard that On Wikipedia, the reward for a job well done is another three jobs.
Wikipedia as a continued source of 'inspiration' for authors: The Guardiannoted with amusement that the British edition of the Goncourt-Prize-winning La Carte et le territoire by acclaimed novelist Michel Houellebecq, which had borrowed liberally from Wikipedia passages (see previous Signpost coverage), contained in the acknowledgements a straight-faced appreciation by the author for the encyclopaedia (the result of conversations between Houellebecq's French publisher and Wikimedia France, see Signpost coverage). In related news, academics Yasmin H. Said and Edward J. Wegman were strongly suspected of having botched a copypaste of the Simplex algorithm article into their paper, eliding the mathematical notation and introducing errors in the process. Meanwhile in the United States, author Ron Suskind was accused by White House spokesman Jay Carney of lifting a passage from the Wikipedia Fannie Mae article for his book Confidence Men, a critical look at the Obama administration; Suskind rejected the charge out of hand, pointing out that the two sentences were differently worded in each text and any similarity was accounted for by it being the natural phrasing for describing the institution.
Accuracy of Wikipedia BLPs a running joke: Wikipedia biographies came in for a kicking in REAMDE, the latest doorstopping novel by celebrated speculative fiction author Neal Stephenson. Speaking to The Oak Park Patch, Stephenson revealed that the widely held inaccuracy of the encyclopaedia in the eyes of its subjects was something of a running joke in the thriller novel and that he rarely looked at his own entry which had painted him perhaps unfairly as a recluse, remarking that reviewing the article "just seems narcissistic and usually leads to me getting aggravated".
Student-led competitor for Wikipedia Books? A group of undergraduates from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology have launched a book-creation tool for Wikipedia, BookIt, the outcome of a semester-long start-up project. Unlike the Wikipedia:Books initiative, in which discrete articles are selected and assembled to form a printable volume, BookIt works using an algorithm to compile material based on its relevance to search terms entered by users.
Surfer-model-actress-fraud?Hannah Cornett a purported surfer, model and actress, was the subject of an exposé by Deadspin which disclosed allegations of her complicity in credit card fraud and indicated that accounts of her accomplishments given on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia may have been fabricated or significantly exaggerated. Cornett's biographical article has been dramatically stubbed since the story emerged.
NBC praises "slightly freaky" wiki entry: NBC Washington's Capital Games blog hailed the ascension of the John Wall Dance into the vaunted ranks of dance routines with dedicated Wikipedia articles, commenting of the celebration that "The John Wall Dance has enough swagger to stand alone", and singling out its animated portrayal (right) for particular praise.
Macs come with Wikipedia built-in: Cult of Macrevealed that the latest iteration of the Mac OS X operating system, Mac OS X Lion, allows you to access definitions of selected words in Wikipedia by simply double tapping on the trackpad whilst focusing the mouse cursor on any highlighted term.
Omar comin' yo, to check his Wikipedia bio: Chicago radio station WBEZ's Wikipedia Files series continued with an examination of the accuracy of the Michael K. Williams article with the actor himself, best known for his portrayal of gangster Omar Little from The Wire. Williams regretfully had to correct the assertion that he was brothers with slam poet Saul Williams, but confirmed the basis of the assertion that Janet Jackson had inspired him to leave his comfortable job to pursue a career in dance, and that he had secured the role of Little in one audition.
Join the 2012 Bacon Challenge, an effort to improve Wikipedia's coverage of bacon in time for National Pig Day at the beginning of March 2012. The Bacon WikiCup is being held concurrently. Join in the deliciously fun competition and earn an award for your efforts.
Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Automobiles? What is your favorite vehicle?
Mr.choppers I was having some issues with the use of different methods for measuring power, and jumped into a discussion on the project talkpage. My favorite car is hard to say, but I think I'll nominate the Suzuki Fronte.
Daniel J. Leivick I've been interested in vehicles since my early childhood and I've always been hungry for information, particularly about obscure or rare vehicles like the Lancia 037 or the Soviet made Wankel enginedVAZ-2108. Wikipedia is unparallelled in its depth and breadth of coverage regarding automobiles and it was only natural that I was attracted to improving it. WikiProject Automobiles has a good track record of acting as a central point of discussion for car related issues and I've been proud to help decide broad issues related to our coverage of the topic.
OSX I realised that anyone could edit this a short while after seeing this website a few too many times courtesy of Google (which started sending me here in early 2006 and I was editing by mid-year). Cars being one of my primary interests led me to make a few small changes here and there. Then I started adding very crufty features lists to various car articles to accompany the myriad of non-free images that I uploaded. After seeing the WikiProject badge on the user page of another editor, I too decided that the aesthetic improvement would be a worthwhile addition to my user page. There was nothing systematic about it, but I slowly became more involved with the internal politics and discussions at the project over the years. My favourite car? Don't ask me that... there's just too many to list. If I must choose, then at the moment the Rolls Royce Ghost and Range Rover Evoque would be up there, but ask me again next week and I'm sure you'd get a different answer. We are spoiled for choice!
Typ932 As being car nut, I found the English Wikipedia (just note that I mainly edit this Wikipedia and not my native one) had a quite large article base of automobiles, this happened around 4 years ago. So it was very interesting to join this particular Wikipedia and making its article base even more comprehensive. I don't have any particular favorite vehicle, but Italian cars are closest to me as I have been driving with those my whole life.
IFCAR A former active user here put out a call for photos on an automotive forum I'm active on. This was right when there was a movement against the fair use manufacturer shots that were in use across most articles, and I've helped fill that void. I still mostly contribute photos, but if I see another obvious change needed, I'll step in.
DeLarge: I was in a Mitsubishi car owners' club, and someone wrote a Wikipedia article about our vehicle. It didn't conform to Wikipedia rules, so I straightened it out. Then I realised coverage of Mitsubishi Motors in general was pretty dreadful (e.g. WP:Recentism, WP:Systemic bias), so I stuck around to try and improve things.
Mariordo I actually did not formally sign up for the project, but I have contributed significantly in articles related to green cars. My motivation comes from my interest with sustainable transport in general, and began with the lack of information in the English Wikipedia about the Brazilian motor fleet, which is one of the cleanest in the world (I was living there at that time). My favorite vehicle is the Chevrolet Voltplug-in hybrid, and I hope to see the flex-fuel version soon.
Trekphiler. Like others, I more or less stumbled into it, after finding the project tag on a movie page. I've found the coverage of rods and customs pretty awful, unfortunately... and an amount of hostility to customs that I also find unfortunate. If I had to pick a favorite car, I'd say the 911 or 912 Porsche.
Pineapple_fez I came to Wikipedia as a solution to my problem of using various (and sometimes contradictory) different automotive websites. Wikipedia was just the most comprehensive--or so I thought. When I saw missing information, articles that I had exist and poor formatting in some articles, I felt compelled to contribute. But it wasn't until a while later when I joined WP:AUTOS. At first I was still inexperienced with editing, so I left editing automotive articles to experienced and instead practiced with mostly obscure non-automotive articles. As for my favorite car, I don't think I will ever have one. All the time do I fancy certain cars over others cars in particular, but never do I have a consistent favorite. At the moment though, two cars that I have become interested in are the Susuki Twin and DOK-ING XD; I like their design and efficiency. However next month I will probably prefer different cars.
The project is home to 7 Featured Articles and 26 Good Articles. Have you contributed to any of these? Do you have any tips for editors working on bringing an automobile-related article up to FA or GA status?
Mr.choppers I may have, I don't know and cannot say I care very strongly about how an article is rated. For me, Wikipedia is really a depository of information, and I only worry about whether the content is correct. The ratings system feels more like politicking, and often the concerns addressed in the nomination process are completely irrelevant - sometimes even making for worse articles.
OSX I have worked on several good and featured articles, but like Mr.choppers don't really care about the ratings anymore. That said, both the good and featured article processes are invaluable for developing skills as an editor. One does learn a lot in the process—the rules and regulations, the ability to recite entire verses from the bible, and catering to the general capriciousness and hair-splitting requests from all and sundry. So my advice: just pay attention to what the reviewer is asking and follow through as requested and you should be fine. You can only get better by practice and by taking on board the feedback from those more experienced.
Typ932 I have just made some adjustments for these articles, but I'm not yet so familiar with this rating system, but I think it is good way to get one article in greater interest and gather more editors to edit it.
IFCAR I happen to have photos in a few of those articles, but I have no contributions to report toward the more formal process.
DeLarge: One GA (and another that has nothing to do with cars), plus I was credited with helping out on a (former?) FA too. Don't really have any tips. I think I'd rather see the general quality raised before I'd worry about getting shiny little badges for individual articles.
Mariordo I am the main contributor and went through the GA process of seven articles (plus five in other subjects). If you decide to go for a GA, normally be ready to work hard, though not all reviewers are so strict. For me a GA at least guarantees that the content is properly backed by reliable sources and a decent NPOV.
Trekphiler. As far as I know, I've had no contact with an FA or GA article. I agree with Mr. Choppers, I treat Wikipedia as a depository of information, and I want it to be complete and accurate.
Pineapple_fez I have contributed to a handful of WP:AUTO's good and featured articles, however not to a great extent. I did however try to bring the Proton Saga article up to Good Article status without success. The tips I have learned from that process are to really read over and check much of the article and to reference almost everything, the latter which was impossible for me.
How difficult is it to locate good images for articles about automobiles? Does the age or price of the vehicle play a role in whether usable pictures are available? What pitfalls should photographers avoid when taking pictures for automobile-related articles?
Mr.choppers It can be. One of my main occupations is to mine Flickr and other places. The cars I find interesting (older Japanese cars, especially those sold in tertiary markets such as Chile or Malta) are very hard to find pictures of, especially unmolested examples. As for taking photos, be aware that older cars have often been customized and don't feel bad if others think that yours is not the best available photo of the car in question.
Daniel J. Leivick We have a couple of really dedicated automobile photographers, the standout being IFCAR, who have contributed many of our images. Wikimedia commons is also an excellent source of images, particularly for vehicles not sold in the English speaking world. At WP:AUTOMOBILE, we have particular standards for our images which are outlined in the conventions section. I've made a couple of good images based on these standards, including the Porsche 944 (It was my car at the time, unfortunately I had to sell it to pay for graduate school) and the Toyota MR2. Any image is better than nothing, but I'd say the biggest issue with images is distracting backgrounds, pictures of cars taken in parking lots surrounded by other vehicles are not that useful.
OSX it depends on the car. If it's a best-seller car, then finding something reasonable is usually not too difficult. Getting quality with quantity has always been an issue, but as this project has matured we now have several users uploading what are generally very reasonable photographs. Like how many of us started out, most of my original images are far from reasonable, but my newer images aren't too bad. My personal advice is to avoid taking photos when it appears to be even remotely sunny (any form of grey outside is an excellent sign to get out there with a camera). This is because the good old sun doesn't work very well with car photos. You can get the odd image that comes out perfectly, but shadows and reflections are whole lot worse with sunshine. My second tip is to take photographs of cars parked on quiet suburban streets as opposed to busy parking lots. This way you can get nice backgrounds of gardens and the streetscape as opposed half a dozen other cars. I also tend to stand back a fair way from the vehicle in question, as not only does it produce better proportioned images (compare this to this), but the unobtrusiveness of this technique makes the neighbours less suspicious (another user has claimed to have been mistaken as a terrorist). Going back to my earlier point, this distance is not possible in busy car parks where the vehicles are parked together closely.
Age does tend to be an issue. As most people don't drive around in 40-year-old cars, they are unsurprisingly an uncommon sight. However, as I am more inclined to photograph rarer vehicles, they disproportionately account for many of my personal uploads. Pricier vehicles also tend to be harder to photograph. Firstly, they obviously sell in fewer numbers than mainstream models at affordable prices. Secondly, the owners of such prestige/performance vehicles tend to park their best cars undercover in garages, relegating their lesser vehicles to the driveway or kerbside.
Typ932 Usually its quite easy to find some images, but sometimes it takes a quite long time before we can find good quality image, for old and rare vehicles its sometimes very hard to find free images.
IFCAR We definitely have a great repository of photos to choose from now, with a wide selection from prolific photographers in North America, Europe and Australia (whom I know about) and presumably others elsewhere. We're at the point for those models where we're rarely trying to fill a vacant photo hole so much as upgrade the illustration from good to great or great to outstanding. My personal knowledge, and therefore focus, is on modern everyday cars; I'm sure it's more difficult to illustrate something older and more obscure. @ Leivick: Awww, shucks, yer makin' me blush.
DeLarge: Haven't noticed any difficulties myself. In fact I think there's too many images, many of them redundant. I've seen editors insisting the vital importance of photographically illustrating that a car's front grille has changed slightly from one year to the next.
Mariordo I also have contribute my share of pictures, particularly of green cars. The fellow editors have already summarized what is required for a good pic, nevertheless, sometimes you see on the street that vehicle that has no picture in the Commons, and you simply have to take the opportunity.
Mr.choppers One minor addition, to minimize the troubles with sunshine, is to get a polarizing filter. My favorite aid. Also one should memorize which cars are missing from Commons to know whether to take a photo or not; my proudest such capture is that of a Daewoo Chairman. At a wide and distortive angle, and in a crowded parking lot, but still better than no photo at all!
Trekphiler. I tend to mainly ignore "mainstream" vehicles, figuring they're easier to find images of. (And they tend not to catch my eye.) For the specialist areas I'm mainly interested in, free-use pics are extremely hard to come by, and good ones even more so. This isn't helped by the widespread perception Wikipedia is unreliable, so enthusiasts (rodders, customizers and model builders) tend to avoid Wikipedia, where their access to some of these cars, or their own pictures of them, would be a great help.
Pineapple_fez Commons does have a great collection of images of cars, thanks to editors from around the world. Flickr and Picasa can usually supplement the images on Commons, but sometimes cars go unphotographed. The age of the vehicle does help a lot, though. Major auto shows are always covered by Commons users, which provide a steady, year round (in a sense) flow of images or brand new and classic or vintage cars. It's the ones that do not fit into either category which are the hard to photograph ones.
WikiProject Automobiles maintains a Japanese Cars Task Force in collaboration with WikiProject Japan. Has this task force produced any content or discussion? Should more task forces exist to cover automobiles from other countries?
This image of the 1928 Ford Model A is another Featured picture
Mr.choppers I'm a member, which has gotten me a nice infobox for my userpage. Other than that, nothing at all whatsoever. Perhaps if the editors in ja.wikipedia who work on cars joined in, we could have something happen. I think it would be better to focus on the core automobile project, it's not like we're running out of room or anything.
Daniel J. Leivick These task forces tend to be rather low activity and personally I think the main purpose of projects tends to be standardization of coverage. Individual countries don't really require special coverage in my opinion.
OSX I was asked to join this taskforce by Mr.choppers, but since it doesn't do anything, I decided not to join as a protest to the poor choice of userbox image, depicting a vehicle that I don't like. On a more serious note, if such taskforces were actively utilised, my guess is that they would be counterproductive by burdening everyone with just that extra layer of bureaucracy.
Typ932 In my opinion we don't need such task forces as seems that we dont have enough active members for sub forces. If we would get much more active editors these kind of country forces could work well anyway.
DeLarge: No, there should be fewer task forces, wikiprojects, and general bureaucracy. There seems to be an entire sub-species of editor on Wikipedia who enjoy slapping "ownership" banners on talk pages despite never having contributed one iota to the article itself. All these little factions are for the benefit of editors, not readers.
Are there any disagreements over terminology for automobile parts or related products that differ from country to country? How are these differences resolved?
Mr.choppers Very little. Usually only from new editors. Our system (use the terminology used in the cars main market, if such a one is easily discernible. If not, then use the terminology originally applied for the entry) works fine, and there are plenty more interesting things to worry about.
Daniel J. Leivick Automobiles have a lot of terminology which varies from country to country. Boot/trunk, bonnet/hood, saloon/sedan, petrol/gasoline, the list goes on. We don't seem to have much problem though, WP:ENGVAR covers it well and if we just stick to the policy we don't waste much time with this stuff.
Typ932 We have had many conversations about these issues and most of them are solved and we have good policy which is followed quite well, there are still some issues which I would like to solve like timeline templates which have differences between Europe and USA vehicles.
IFCAR The biggest one I can remember is the use of model year a car is designated versus the calendar year in which is was produced. Cars sold in North America use the latter system to eliminate overlap between generations (e.g., when a redesigned car appears in June 2007, it can be branded as a 2008 model to distinguish it from its 2007-model predecessor that was built in May), but few other markets tend to follow suit. This can make it confusing to refer to a specific model in a way that is clear to readers everywhere.
DeLarge: Loads, but as DJL says, as long as we pay attention to over-arching guidelines (i.e. ones penned for the encyclopedia as a whole and not for our little WikiProject) then things can usually get sorted.
Mr.choppers The one I get the most aggravated about (aside from the "model year" troubles) is that units of measurement differ slightly throughout - not only in Wikipedia but often in the sources themselves.
Does the project collaborate with the Wikimedia Commons WikiProject Automobiles? Do you feel cross-project collaboration is possible for other WikiProjects on Wikipedia and the Commons?
Mr.choppers I did not know there was such a project, but I will check it out. Seems like it could be fruitful.
OSX I initiated this project a couple of years back to try and unite the various editors involved in photographing cars from all language versions of Wikipedia. This was in response to the emergence of several photographers based in Japan and Germany among other countries, but the project has yet to mature into anything of value.
DeLarge: I never consciously did when I was active, although I may have benefited from it.
What are WikiProject Automobiles' most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?
Mr.choppers I don't know that there is anything very pressing. We cover most cars made, and while just about all of them deserve more work, there's no particular problem areas that I see. US trucks of the fifties, sixties, and seventies are woefully underrepresented.
Daniel J. Leivick There are a couple of really messy articles which go into far too much detail without covering information that would be useful to someone who wasn't a owner or diehard fan. Subaru Impreza WRX come to mind, I've been meaning to clean it up for a couple of years now. New contributors are often very helpful and I'd advise them to dive right in and listen to the advice of experienced users when needed. The thing to avoid is unneeded crufty additions like popular culture appearances (The Internet Movie Car Database does this much better).
OSX The WikiProject seems to oscillate strongly from periods of far-fetching activity and conventions reform to months where nothing much happens at all. While this doesn't affect the editing of articles as such, it certainly gives the impression of not much happening when in reality, editors are probably spending the time saved making more productive edits to actual articles. Like any other WikiProjects, we could do with additional editors but we get by on what we've got.
IFCAR A new contributor can look at what makes a solid article, then adapt or expand an existing lesser one to meet that standard. We have no shortage of articles that need assistance, and because I for one don't have the time or energy to fix them, I'd welcome anyone who would.
DeLarge: 95% of "our" [sic] articles are inadequately sourced, and I'd reckon a depressing percentage of them are lacking references entirely. Don't know how things are now, but during my period of greatest activity with WP:CARS (2007–09) I'd say at least half the active editors in our little car clique wouldn't have known a citation template from an elephant's arse.
Mr.choppers And also keeping the fanbois at bay. Any articles that deal with tuneable Hondas, water-cooled VWs, any modern cars marketed in India, any car featured in The Fast and the Furious, many muscle cars, and so on: they all tend to attract the worst kind of anonymous editors. An inordinate amount of my time is dedicated to repairing or undoing this kind of edits.
Trekphiler. I would nominate any articles on hot rods or custom cars, especially "name" customs like The California Kid or Polynesian. In a related vein, bio pages of major customizers, like Pete Chapouris, are dreadfully lacking. There are also pages translated from foreign-language sources that could use attention, in particular those related to Ilario Bandini. (Yes, I've edited them; that's how I know they're in a sorry state, and I read no Italian.) New contributors, I think, are best advised to stick to areas they know well, at first, and if creating new pages, copy well-formatted pages and just change the particulars.
Pineapple_fez I think that the articles covered by WP:AUTOS are too often edited by "fanboys" of particular manufacturers, models or design companies, who tend to delete all of the existing information and replace it with long, overly-detailed, unwikified and unreferenced essays. Current Wikipedians who would like to join WP:AUTOS would help greatly by patrolling and generally fixing these articles, which although I'm sure most contributors to WP:AUTOS do anyway, essays will always keep popping up. Just the other day I saw this happen to the Gruppo Bertone article, which I slightly reformatted.
Next week, we'll go crazy for kiwis. Until then, snack on some kiwi while searching for records on endangered kiwi in the archive.
New featured picture: Dadaab mass grave. Children have walked for weeks across the desert to get to Dadaab, and many perish on the way. Others have died shortly after arrival. On the edge of the camp, a young girl stands amid the freshly made graves of 70 children, many of whom died of malnutrition. The photograph was taken by London-based photographer Andy Hall for the relief agency Oxfam; he is currently photographing in east Africa with Oxfam ambassador Scarlett Johansson, where 13 million people are at risk of starvation and disease from the 2011 East Africa drought.
This week's "Featured content" covers Sunday 18 – Saturday 24 September
Featured articles
From the new featured article Aldwych tube station. The station was used during both world wars to shelter artworks from London's public galleries and museums from the threat of bombing.Quarterback Joe Namath, who played for the Jets in the notable Heidi American football game in 1968, the subject of a new featured article.New featured picture: Enzifer, of the Norwegian black metal band Urgehal, displaying typical black-metal apparel while performing in Belgium a month ago.Five articles were promoted to featured status:
* Aldwych tube station (nom), possibly the London Underground's most famous closed station. Opened in 1907 as a left-over from an altered plan and poorly integrated into the network, the station always suffered from poor patronage and was used during World War II as a secure place to protect the Elgin Marbles from the Blitz. It was closed in 1994 when the lifts wore out, but has had a second career as a filming location. (Nominated by DavidCane) Picture at right
* Heidi Game (nom), an American football game played on November 17, 1968, that led to a change in the way professional football is televised on network television. (The Writer 2.0 and Wehwalt) Picture at right
* United States Senate Democratic primary election in Pennsylvania, 2010 (nom), which took place on May 18, 2010, when Congressman Joe Sestak defeated incumbent Arlen Specter; this led to the end of Specter's five-term senatorial career. Nominator Hunter Kahn pointed out that "there are very few FAs about elections, let alone one about a primary election."
* Frank Bladin (nom) (1898–1978), a senior commander in the Royal Australian Air Force, "a quiet achiever who didn't quite make it to the top job, deserving as he may have been", says nominator Ian Rose.
* Enzifer (nom; related article), of the Norwegian black metal band Urgehal. The visual characteristics of the genre are corpse paint, fake or real blood, leather clothing featuring spikes, and anti-Christian imagery, including inverted crosses and pentagrams (created by Commons user Vassil). picture at right
* Spotted Pardalote male (nom; related article), one of the smallest of all Australian birds (only 8–10 centimetres [3.1–3.9 in] long), and one of the most colourful; it is sometimes known as the Diamondbird (created by JJ Harrison).
* Spotted Pardalote female (nom), the girlfriend. JJ Harrison says, "These two were busy padding out their nest (a hole in an embankment) next to a relatively busy footpath".
* Australian Brush-turkey (nom; related article), a spectacular large bird with black feathers and a red head. Its total length is about 60–75 centimetres (24–30 in), with a wingspan of about 85 centimetres (33 in). It is found in eastern Australia: despite its name, the bird is not closely related to American turkeys (created by JJ Harrison).
Last week Cptnono submitted a request for clarification to the committee about the use of "broadly construed" in sanctions, based on concerns that the phrase has not yet been defined clearly enough and that it left too much discretion to administrators.
Arbitrator SirFozzie was the first to reply, writing that:
Broadly construed means that one shouldn't attempt to "nibble around the edges", so to speak. If there's problems in topic area A, we don't want people to move on to "related topic B" and continuing. If there's doubt, don't do it, and get clarification first, like what's happening above.
This message was generally echoed by the several other arbitrators that weighed in; for example, on Friday, Arbitrator David Fuchs wrote that "SirFozzie['s definition] hits the nail on the head [...]".
Evidence presented and voting begins in the Senkaku Islands case
How the evidence presented by users related to each other (red arrows represent critique, green arrows endorsement)
Five weeks after the first piece of evidence was submitted, voting has begun on this case which centers on the naming of "Senkaku Islands" and "Senkaku Islands dispute" articles (it has been alleged that using the Japanese "Senkaku" gives too great an endorsement to the Japanese side of the debate). The case itself was opened to investigate if behavior contrary to Wikipedia policy were impeding consensus. Arbitrator Coren stated that "this is a relatively simple case where it's likely consensus could be reached if everyone behaved and where Arbcom could help by making sure everybody does".
1.18 initial partial deployment "mostly went well"
After the deployment of 1.18, MediaWiki will understand the correct orientation of any photograph taken by a modern camera, avoiding problems of ambiguity and the need to manually fix them.
Sticking to the schedule detailed in last week's "Technology report", 1.18 has so far been released to seven Wikimedia wikis for testing and evaluation. Developer Rob Lanphier has since written on the wikitech-l mailing list that the partial deployment (the first such deployment in Wikimedia's history) "mostly went well", with only the LiquidThreads extension and a series of compatibility fixes with the ResourceLoader needing to be adjusted at the eleventh hour. The deployment means that those seven wikis now have access to a range of newer features, with meta.wikimedia.org, en.wikiquote.org, en.wikibooks.org, beta.wikiversity.org, eo.wikipedia.org, nl.wikipedia.org and incubator.wikimedia.org following today. The preparatory work for today's updates has been causing intermittent server overloads, resulting in edits not being processed. Nonetheless, the problems are expected to be temporary, and all remaining wikis remain set to be changed over by 4 October.
In addition to those features outlined in last week's report, Brion Vibber chose this week to highlight the resolution of bug #6672, allowing for the native support of photos
where EXIF metadata specifies a non-default orientation. Vibber explained the pre-1.18 problem (1, 2):
“
This is very common in photos taken with digital cameras; a portrait-mode image may be saved [as landscape] with an orientationtag stating it must be rotated 90 or 270 degrees ... While most photo-editing applications understand this metadata natively and will simply show the image at its natural size, web browsers don't -- and neither did the server-side processing that MediaWiki was doing.
When this support goes live on Wikimedia Commons, it'll be a nice help for people uploading [photographs directly from their camera], as it will no longer be necessary to manually fix the rotation of your photos.
”
WMF localisation team member Gerard Meijssen passed on a reminder to administrators reading his blog (originally written by Right-to-Left expert Amir Aharoni) to check for broken Right-to-Left-related JavaScript and CSS on their home wikis after the deployment of 1.18, which makes a number of these so-called "hacks" superfluous.
Subversion to be abandoned in favour of Git
MediaWiki code is collaborated on using a system known as Subversion (see previous Signpost coverage for details), which, for a long time, was the standard in collaborative code development. In recent years, however, several alternatives have become popular, each offering a diverse array of possible improvements over traditional Subversion. Most significantly, the rise of distributed revision control systems offers developers a chance to abandon the linearity of Subversion commits in favour of dynamic "changesets", which can be applied in a different order from predecessor changes, or simply not at all. This ability derives from the fact that under a distributed system there is no central repository, and so no canonical order of changes in the first place, allowing developers the freedom to code without the prospect of a time-consuming merge at the end of the process (the developer equivalent of a complex edit conflict). As a result, a move away from Subversion (which is increasingly seen as outdated) to a distributed system such as Git has been suggested a number of times in the past, including in March of this year.
On 22 September, developer Rob Lanphier re-opened the case on the wikitech-l mailing list, if only to declare victory for those in support of a move. "For a long time, we've been talking about migrating from Subversion to Git," wrote Lanphier. "It's time to start getting more serious about it. ... There has been resistance to this in the past, and there still may be some resistance. However, I think we've worn everyone down. :)". Historically, criticism of any move has focussed on the practicalities, rather than direct criticism of Git itself, which has over time acquired something of the "mythical" about it, in the words of bugmeister Mark Hershberger, writing earlier this year. On this basis, Lanphier concluded that "the questions shift from "if?" to "when?" and 'how?'" and proposed a timetable that would see Git replace Subversion in November. With linearity abandoned, the long-talked-about goal of continuous integration (for example, weekly deployments of the newest code to Wikimedia wikis) has been brought forward accordingly and would, if the migration went according to plan, begin during December.
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.
That graph: statistics show that the number of active users on the English Wikipedia is in decline, part of the statistics package, developed by Erik Zachte.
Improved statistics: On his Infodisiac blog, WMF data analyst Erik Zachte described how he had "perform[ed] long overdue maintenance on Wikistats" including "fixing bugs" and "making good a long standing promise to publish summaries for all Wikimedia wikis". As he explained in a post on the foundation-l mailing list, the updates make available new monthly report cards for individual Wikimedia projects. Intended to give an at-a-glance overview of project activity broken down by language, the summaries contain key statistics on page views, article count, and editing activity in terms of monthly and annual changes. According to the report cards, some major language projects, such as French and Spanish, are at least stable. Most, however, are on a downwards trend. The August figures for the English Wikipedia, for example, make for dispiriting reading for editors on the Foundation's largest wiki: activity levels have fallen from the same month last year among editors generally (with edits down 10%), active editors (down 2%), and very active editors (down 8%). Despite a flurry of initiatives this year to reverse the decline, the past year has also seen a dramatic 10% fall in the number of new editors.
Wikimedia server setup documented: On 19 September, WMF Operations Engineer Ryan Lane posted on the Wikimedia blog about the publication of a detailed schema of Wikimedia's operations architecture. The hope is to make it easier for other organisations to learn from the experiences of Wikimedia in providing a global, top-10 website reliably. Lane, who has now spent a year working for the Foundation, summarised his achievements and his plans for the year ahead in a separate blog post ("I've been with the Wikimedia Foundation for a year. Have I met my goals?").
Bugmeister interview: Gerard Meijssen published an interview with WMF bugmeister Mark Hershberger. In it, Herberger admits that he has a "soft spot for WikiSource" driven out of a desire "to provide a community-driven replacement for reCAPTCHA". Regular readers familiar with the ongoing problem of code review will no doubt take heart from Hershberger's confidence that the WMF "can continue to keep unreviewed code low".
Babel extension deployed: The Babel extension, which provides a uniform and internationalised version of user language userboxes, has been deployed to Wikimedia wikis, according to a post on the Wikimedia Blog. It is accessible via the {{#babel:}} parser function. It replaces a complex system of templates, currently in use on most major wikis.
GSoC officially wrapped up: The status of this year's Google Summer of Code projects (see previous Signpost coverage) was described in a blog post by WMF Volunteer Development Co-ordinator Sumana Harihareswara. According to a parallel post on the wikitech-l mailing list, all the Wikimedia-related extensions are progressing well, and are well and truly "on the road to being merged and deployed".
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