Oliver Keyes (User:Ironholds) is an administrator on the English Wikipedia. The following article on the conservatism of the Wikimedia movement was adapted from an August 27 2011 post on his website, Quominus.org. Oliver previously spoke about related issues in his address to the 2011 Wikimania conference "Hippies with Guns: how ideological conflict shapes Wikipedia and what we can learn from it".
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.
Above is one of my favourite images at the moment – a graphical representation of all the key words found in taskforce planning for the Wikimedia Strategy project, in which the community got together and basically crowdsourced a long-term strategic plan. The reason I find it interesting isn’t because of the words which are displayed prominently, but the words that aren’t; specifically, those looking to move the community forward neglected the word “community” (slightly to the right of “work”) and the word “social” (slightly above “working”, and, in comparative terms, dwarfed by the word “php”. Sigh.)
I’m not going to lie, this doesn’t surprise me. Wikimedians actually tend to put a fairly small amount of stock in changing things to boost the community or the social aspects of the movement. Whether it’s WikiLove, help reform or any other project to ameliorate the less pleasant aspects of the projects, the same refrain comes from an annoyingly large chunk of the community – “I managed to edit and contribute to the projects without [whatever is being proposed], so other people can too”.
The source of this is fairly clear – people don’t like change, and because existing editors are largely comfortable with the current situation (after all, they built it, either accidentally or deliberately, and since they’ve stayed around we can conclude they don’t mind it that much) they don’t really see that there’s so much of a problem. In a way, I reckon this is a result of our successes more than our failures; while new user numbers are dropping, we maintain an enviably high retention rate for existing editors. As a result, experienced users don’t see a problem. Why would they? Oh, sure, they hear rumours that user numbers are dropping, but all their friends are still here, so it can’t be that bad. Cries that “yes, all your friends are still here, but you just missed out on a thousand new ones” aren’t met or internalised well.
My problem with all of this isn’t just that there is genuinely a lot of stuff we need to do to Fix the Wiki that people don’t get, it’s that this position is based on a pair of fallacies that the individuals in question could, with a bit of effort, think through and avoid. When people say “I managed to edit and contribute to the projects without [whatever is being proposed], so other people can too”, what they’re saying is:
People drop ideas for reform on the grounds that they managed and therefore anyone else can. This is based on the fallacy that the system has remained the same since they started, which is of course not the case – except, possibly, for our newest users. Even users who are a year old are dealing with a completely different environment from the one they started off with; policy bloats, our tolerance for expansion has been reduced, and the community has become increasingly harsh and automated in its dealings with new users over time. The fact that the system in 2006 when Exampleexperienceduser joined was nice and characterised by decent, friendly communication and a million opportunities to expand the wiki does not mean that the current one is.
In other words – for the aforementioned statement to be true, the potential new editors now have to be largely identical in terms of motivation, interests and enthusiasm to the existing users. We can’t say that our current system works for new users because it works for established users unless there are actually similarities between the two groups.
The problem is that there aren’t. Early adopters of Wikipedia were, by-and-large, nerds. Utter nerds. I don’t mean that in a bad way, I mean that in a “it was 2001 and they were on the Internet” way. Longhairs from the 1960s and 1970s counterculture movement (cf. Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture, recommended), early computer and Internet proponents, FOSS addicts, codejunkies, we had them all. Early adopters were people who saw a nascent project – or later on, an established project that everyone with any academic or political value ripped the hell out of – as something it was worth contributing to, for free. Early adopters were happy to use a pseudo-HTML markup scheme to contribute and delve deep into the raw guts of an article or talkpage to make their views or facts known.
What we’re dealing with now in terms of potential volunteers is largely different. People bandy around the term “Facebook generation”, but it’s true; we’re dealing with a completely distinct group of people. 2011 users are likely to be people who have grown up with the Internet and with Wikipedia. If you’re at university now, Wikipedia will have been around since you entered secondary education, and possibly before that. It is no longer new and exciting, it is no longer a step into the unknown, and so the motivations of people who do try to contribute are likely to be pretty damn different. Moreover, the people we’re dealing with don’t want to have to deal with markup, or raw pagetext in this fashion; they aren’t used to looking under the hood. If they’re WordPress users they live in a world in which looking under the hood is not mandatory; if they’re Facebook users they live in a world in which looking under the hood isn’t even possible.
So we’re not dealing with the same system, or even the same people; we’ve got a bloated and increasingly unfriendly wiki on the one hand and a pool of potential recruits with vastly different motives and expectations from our norms on the other. This means that we can’t simply sit in our ivory tower and make judgements about whether Wikimedia is failing, or succeeding, or what our potential users expect; we have to go to those potential users and ask them. The problem is that the Foundation has been doing exactly that in a lot of places, trying to get information on what people want from the horse’s mouth, and when acting on the data (as with WikiLove) has largely been met with a big stubborn sign saying Do Not Want.
Wikimedia is a fantastic movement. It’s the Whole Earth Catalogue for the 21st century, a smorgasbord of educational material and trivia that for the first time offers the potential for people to truly take their education into their own hands – after a fashion, anyway. But if we want to live up to the expectations, if we want these projects to continue, we have to start accepting the data people bring us and accepting that we might need to make some changes. We need to throw out our assumptions, throw out our fallacies and innate resistance to change, and seek to build a movement that people want to contribute to rather than one people don’t mind contributing to.
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The Wikimedia Foundation announced this week that they have received a $3.6 million grant from the Stanton Foundation. According to the press release from the Foundation, the funding will go to support development of the long-awaited visual editor and other technical improvements including the addition of editing facilities to the new Wikimedia mobile site. The grant can also be put towards any project that "make[s] Wikimedia a friendlier and more understandable environment for new editors".
| “ | The Stanton Foundation is a long-time funder of the Wikimedia Foundation, and I am thrilled they're increasing their investment in us. The Stanton Foundation was one of the first institutions to recognize that Wikipedia is a serious educational endeavour that's having a significant impact on people around the world. I will always be grateful to them for taking a risk in first funding us, many years ago." | ” |
| — Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation | ||
The $1.2 million grant in 2010 from the Stanton Foundation helped fund the Public Policy Initiative and a 2008 grant of $890,000 helped fund usability improvements. This week's $3.6 million donation is the largest ever to have been received by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Following the announcement and discussion covered in last week's Signpost, Italian Wikipedia was shut down for three days in protest against a proposed law that could have held bloggers, web site owners and possibly even Wikipedians liable for posting corrections to content within 48 hours or facing a stiff fine.
The Wikimedia Foundation rapidly endorsed the shutdown with a blog post entitled Regarding recent events on Italian Wikipedia; the endorsement was reported on by Business Insider. The shutdown was widely covered by the media with articles posted on the websites of BBC News, The Independent, The Atlantic, Euronews, The Register, TechCrunch, Ars Technica, Techdirt and CNETA News. An Associated Press report was published on a number of sites including Forbes.
Cynthia Wong posted an entry on the blog for the Center for Democracy and Technology claimed that the Wikipedia shut down shows that if passed the law "would, in effect, shut Italy out of the global community of Wikipedia users".
During the shutdown, Jimmy Wales weighed in through an interview posted on the International Journalism Festival website. In the interview, Wales claimed: "The decision was taken by the Italian community in part because they felt that there was no genuine avenue for protest in the mainstream media without a bold action."
As the Nieman Journalism Lab blog reports, during the shutdown a hashtag appeared on social media website Twitter called #graziewikipedia, with users of the microblogging service showing support and solidarity for the shutdown. Cory Doctorow blogged about the story for BoingBoing describing the proposed law as "punitive" and "batshit". News aggregation sites Reddit and Hacker News both had lively discussions of the protest.
On Thursday (October 6), as AFP reports, Italian Wikipedia reopened following an announcement that the law would be amended to only cover traditional news media sites. The Wall Street Journal's TechEurope blog reported the amendment following the strike as "in the short-term at least... a victory for Wikipedia".
TheSpec and Physorg both covered the Wikipedia evangelism of Wikimedia Canada president Dr James Heilman (better-known hereabouts as User:Jmh649) at McMaster University. Heilman was there to beseech the academic community to engage with the encyclopaedia, entreating that "We know it is extensively read and we know the quality of information is hit and miss. Some is good. Some is poor. We want to provide high quality medical information to everyone around the world and to do that we are going to need the help of our colleagues." Citing the high usage rate of Wikipedia's medical articles by both patients and physicians (of whom between 60% and 70% consult the site according to surveys cited by Heilman) as evidence for the importance of improving coverage of medical-related topics, and recounting his own experience as a contributor, Heilman called on faculty to incorporate Wikipedia editing into university assignments. It was, he asserted, a "huge missed opportunity when you have these very intelligent people doing research papers and learning all about an issue just to have the paper sit on a shelf ... we can leverage the knowledge to improve everyone's knowledge about health-care subjects. We all have an interest in making sure good information is available". The event attracted 30 participants. Last month, Heilman had published an article in a medical journal explaining to his colleagues "Why we should all edit Wikipedia" (Signpost coverage), and Wikimedia Canada is currently offering a C$1000 scholarship to the Canadian student who makes "the most significant contribution to Wikipedia's medical content."
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject World's Oldest People, a project dedicated to improving biographies and lists of notable centenarians and supercentenarians. The project got off to a rocky start in March 2008 when its founder, an enthusiast from Yahoo's World's Oldest People discussion board, attempted to affiliate the WikiProject with the Gerontology Research Group. After years of edit warring, hostile debates, deleted page histories, removed images, AfDs, and arbitration, the project finally found peace and has accumulated six Good Articles and one Featured Article. The project supplements the guidelines of its parent, WikiProject Biography, with some notes on notability, sourcing, and the treatment of biographies of living people within the project's scope. We interviewed two project members, SiameseTurtle and David in DC, along with independent contributor The Blade of the Northern Lights.
What motivated you to join WikiProject World's Oldest People?
How does the project handle articles about disputed or missing records of a person's longevity?
How is notability determined for articles about the world's oldest people? How frequently does the project deal with disagreements and misunderstandings about notability?
The project is home to one Featured Article, one A-class Article, and five Good Articles. Have you contributed to any of these articles? What are some challenges to getting an article on a supercentenarian up to FA or GA status?
Are images of the world's oldest people difficult to obtain? What lessons have you learned from acquiring the images currently used in articles?
What are the project's most pressing needs? How can a new member help today?
Anything else you'd like to add?
Next week, we'll see where some of the world's oldest people might have lived. Until then, continue to read about the good old days in the archive.
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From the authors: Well, now we have your attention, yes, one new stomach-turning featured article we could hardly bear to read beyond extracting the blurb; and one new featured picture might just as well have been titled Woman having sex with octopuses—regarded as too lewd even to display on the featured-picture nomination page. We leave it to readers, if they're so inclined, to access these items. Meanwhile, we draw your attention to two new featured portals, which in their quite different ways concern major issues of the day.
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* Portal:Renewable energy (nom), which comprises 19 selected articles (3 FAs and 9 GAs), 11 biographies, 17 quotations, 9 DYKs, and 22 selected pictures. Renewable energy comes from natural resources such as sunlight, wind, elevated water, ocean waves, tides, and geothermal heat, which are naturally replenished. About 16% of global final energy consumption comes from renewables, with 10% coming from traditional biomass, which is mainly used for heating, and 3.4% from hydroelectricity. New renewables (small hydro, modern biomass, wind, solar, geothermal, and biofuels) accounted for another 2.8% and are growing rapidly. Elekhh, who nominated the portal with substantial assistance from Johnfos, told The Signpost that it "was born in a moment of enthusiasm for the idea and is the result of group effort. While it was initially put together in a relatively short time, it was continually refined over a longer period. There was a lot of support for creating a renewable-energy task force within WikiProject Energy, but this has yet to be implemented. If anybody is interested in joining the task force, they'd be welcome." picture at top
* Portal:Supreme Court of the United States (nom), the highest judicial body in the United States and leads the judicial branch of the federal government. The justices are nominated by the US president and confirmed with the "advice and consent" of the Senate. The court has a fascinating history in the governance and politics of the US, and some of its judgments, such as Roe v. Wade, have changed the course of American history. An insight into the court's significance, and the philosophical dimensions of writing dissenting judgments, is captured in what Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told National Public Radio in 2002:
(Nominated by Cirt)
Six articles were promoted to featured status:
* McDonnell XF-85 Goblin (nom), an American prototype fighter aircraft conceived during World War II. It was a diminutive jet aircraft featuring a distinctive egg-shaped fuselage and a forked-tail stabilizer design. The prototypes were built and underwent testing and evaluation in 1948. Flight tests showed promise in the design, but the aircraft's performance was inferior to the jet fighters it would have been facing in combat, and there were difficulties in docking. (Nominated by Sp33dyphil)
* Seacology (nom), a non-profit charitable organization headquartered in Berkeley, California, that focuses on preserving island ecosystems and cultures around the globe. (Visionholder)
* Xeromphalina setulipes (nom), is a species of fungus that was first collected in 2005. It was described and named in 2010, and is known only from oak forests in Ciudad Real Province, Spain. (J Milburn)
* HMS Princess Royal (1911) (nom), the second of two Lion-class battlecruisers built for the Royal Navy before World War I. (Sturmvogel 66)
* The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (nom), a 2010 Dutch body horror film that tells the story of a German doctor who kidnaps three tourists and joins them surgically, mouth to anus, forming a "human centipede". It has been described as "the most horrific film ever made", and as "torture porn". (Coolug)
* Heidi Game (nom), a hard fought American football game remembered because the ending was not shown by the TV network, enraging many viewers. Al Davis, who died Saturday, plays a role in the article. (The Writer 2.0 and Wehwalt)
Seven lists were promoted in the past two weeks:
* List of songs in Green Day: Rock Band (nom) (Nominated by Drilnoth.)
* Philadelphia Phillies all-time roster (R) (nom) (Killervogel5.)
* The Simpsons (season 10) (nom) (Theleftorium.)
* 1948 Summer Olympics medal table (nom) (Miyagawa.)
* List of accolades received by the Spider-Man film series (nom) (Crystal Clear x3.)
* List of centuries in women's Test cricket (nom) (SpacemanSpiff.)
* List of Square video games (nom) (PresN.)
Seven images were promoted. Please click on "nom" to view medium-sized images:
* Canon 5D Mark II (nom; related article), a 21.1-megapixel full-frame CMOS digital single-lens reflex camera made by Canon. It succeeds the EOS 5D and was announced on September 17, 2008. (created by Charles Lanteigne).
* Cape Petrel (nom; related article), in flight, East of the Tasman Peninsula, Tasmania, Australia. Photographer User:JJ Harrison said, "We only have a couple of deep-ocean bird photos featured, and all of them to my knowledge are taken on land near breeding sites. I recently went on a pelagic trip about 25–30 km off the coast of Tasmania to photograph some of them. Because the swell was 2 to 3 meters, which eased in the afternoon, it was often difficult just to keep the subjects in the viewfinder. Fortunately my camera's auto-focus was up to the task!"
* Shy Albatross in Flight (nom; related article), a common seabird of the Southern Ocean. (created by User:JJ Harrison; picture at right)
* Brown fur seal (nom; related article), hauling-out on the Hippolyte Rocks off the east coast of Tasmania, Australia. The species is the largest and most robust fur seal, with a large and broad head with a pointed snout that may be flat or upturned slightly. (created by User:JJ Harrison).
* Nail-clippers-variety (nom; related article), well, they're nail clippers. (Created by Commons editor Evan-Amos, who gives some tips for photo-taking on his user page).
* Tako to Ama (nom; related article), an erotic woodcut of the ukiyo-e genre by the Japanese artist Hokusai. From a three-volume collection of shunga erotic prints first published in 1814, it is the most famous shunga Hokusai ever produced. Playing with themes popular in contemporary Japanese art, it depicts a young ama diver sexually entwined with a pair of octopuses.
* Jeff Dunham and Achmed (nom; related article), American ventriloquist and stand-up comedian with his puppet-character Achmed the Dead Terrorist. Dunham has appeared on numerous television shows. Time magazine has observed of his characters, "All of them are politically incorrect, gratuitously insulting and ill tempered." (created by Richard Mclaren). picture at right
The Arbitration Committee closed one case this week, Senkaku Islands. Another case, Abortion, is still pending before the Committee.
Senkaku Islands has closed, a month and a half after it was originally filed by Qwyrxian. Two parties were topic banned, Tenmei indefinitely and Bobthefish2 for a year, and the former was also banned from Wikipedia for a year; Arbitrators cited the editor's past Arbitration sanctions in another topic area in the decision. Unusually, the Committee also considered an indefinite ban for the editor; but while five Arbitrators supported it, they did so only as an less-favored alternative to the 1 year ban. STSC was given a warning.
Standard discretionary sanctions were also authorized for the Senkaku Islands topic area, marking the sixth time in the past twelve months that the Committee has authorized discretionary sanctions. In contrast, from October 10, 2009 to October 10, 2010, the Committee only placed a topic on discretionary sanctions three times. The case also marked the first time the Arbitration Committee has devolved the authority to place discretionary sanctions; any "uninvolved administrator may, after a warning given a month prior, place any set of pages relating to a territorial dispute of islands in East Asia, broadly interpreted, under standard discretionary sanctions for six months if the editing community is unable to reach consensus on the proper names to be used to refer to the disputed islands."[nb 1]
Public commenting on the candidates for checkuser and oversight functionaries (see previous Signpost coverage) has concluded, and the Committee is expected to release its decision on who it is appointing by October 15. This deadline has been pushed back several times in previous stages of the appointment process; the decision date was originally to be October 5. The list of candidates that ArbCom is considering is:
The Committee also received two requests for clarification, one on WikiProject Conservatism (which was filed as a case request)[1] and the other on the propriety of administrators overturning unblocks by the Arbitration Committee. It closed two other clarification requests, one on the naming of Ireland articles and the other on Eastern Europe. The Committee also continued to consider a request for amendment by William M. Connolley, who had filed a request lifting removal of sanctions imposed on him in Climate change. As of publication, an unusually high number of 24 other editors had commented on the request, most of whom had been previously involved with William M. Connolley or the topic area in some form. The Committee received an additional amendment request from mediator Steven Zhang, who requested that two editors recently topic banned at Arbitration Enforcement be allowed to continue editing a mediation discussion page.
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With the dust settled from the first two phases of the deployment of MediaWiki version 1.18, on October 4 the full rollout programme began. Since small but technically interesting wikis had been the focus of the first two phases, only 2% of traffic had been routed through MediaWiki 1.18; now, all visitors and editors will be able to take advantage of its new features, which include support for gender-specific user pages and better directionality support for RTL languages. According to a post on the Wikimedia blog, progress with the final phase was slightly slower than anticipated but still good, with the French, Polish and English Wikipedias, along with Wikimedia Commons, having their version of MediaWiki updated within the first four hour window. Other wikis were then transferred during secondary windows on October 5 and 6.
The deployment did not go perfectly, however, and a number of bugs have since been discovered with 1.18; as of time of writing, approximately 40 open ones are currently being tracked under the auspices of bugmeister Mark Hershberger, although few are serious. The list of bugs reported but not yet fixed includes problems with the watchlist API (bug #31526), the localisation update system (bug #31559) and the display of <math>...</math> (bug #31442). Responding to the relatively high volume of bugs found despite a recent emphasis on improving Wikimedia and MediaWiki's pre-release test infrastructure, Hershberger appealed for help in writing unit and/or parser tests for key bug fixes to ensure that regressions are spotted more quickly in the future. If this is the case when 1.19 nears deployment (currently scheduled for late this year), the whole process would be likely to pass off "a *lot* smoother", wrote Hershberger (wikitech-l mailing list).
https support comes to Wikimedia wikisAlso announced this week was the https switchover. Writing for the Wikimedia Foundation blog, operations engineer Ryan Lane said that the secure.wikimedia.org domain had been officially deprecated. Lane advised security-conscious visitors to simply change http to https in their URL instead to take advantage of new functionality which has taken months of planning to achieve (including the introduction of protocol-relative URLs). In addition to a noticeable speed improvement over its secure.wikimedia.org forerunner, Lane was clear on the benefits of the switchover to full https functionality:
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The deployment of new https functionality was commended by many commentators; one wrote that "the lack of proper HTTPS" support had in his eyes been a long-standing issue with the site. At time of writing, support for secure browsing on the mobile site has not yet been enabled (bug #31333) – there are no plans to enable mobile support until the mobile and non-mobile sites are fully merged – but the core support for non-mobile devices outlined by Lane in his blogpost at least appears to be working correctly. HTTPS Everywhere, a popular browser add-on designed to make it easier to use the secure version of a website where it exists, is in the process of being updated to take advantage of the new format (wikitech-l mailing list).
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.
This week, Tomasz Finc, the WMF's Director of Mobile and Special Projects, issued a call for potential app developers for the Google Android operating system, whilst developer Jack Phoenix appealed for help with the Video extension.
