As articulated by the last editor-in-chief Jarry1250 in his outgoing address, The Signpost aspires to evolve beyond mere transmission of news, to challenging and provocative treatments of issues of importance to the English Wikipedia and the associated infosphere.
Alas, of late, many areas of interest on which we'd like to deliver high-quality coverage are underserved by our current volunteer resources, and in recent months, maintaining quality of service in the most basic reports has been a struggle. For this week's edition, this shortfall in manpower unfortunately resulted in us having to drop the 'News and notes' section.
This is a call for fellow Wikipedians to help us ensure The Signpost can be as consistently excellent and ambitious as its readership deserves. Are you a keen follower of the topics The Signpost covers, capable of thinking critically while writing objectively about those topics? If so, we ask for you to step forward now. Areas of potential contribution are as follows:
Other news beats, such as Featured content, the WikiProject report, the Arbitration report, and the Technology report, tend to be comparatively well served, but could always use further assistance and review.
The bulk of The Signpost is compiled weekly by a half a dozen volunteers from an editing community of thousands. Imagine what we could accomplish with two dozen.
Thank you for your continued support,
Skomorokh and SMasters (managing editors)
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Emilio (User:emijrp) has been a Wikipedia editor since August 2005, and is a bot programmer and a cataloger of human knowledge. This opinion essay is adapted from his essay Wikipedia:There is a deadline (whose title makes reference to the well-known older essay Wikipedia:There is no deadline).
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.
Every day, distinct stores of knowledge are lost forever with no copies extant. When a natural disaster hits a region or a war breaks out, many libraries, archives, museums, monuments and other heritage, valuable buildings, incunabula and unique objects are destroyed.
There are plenty of examples of this from before Wikipedia's existence. The Library of Alexandria, the lost Chinese encyclopedias, churches, monasteries, convents and libraries destroyed during the Spanish Civil War,[1] a storage vault fire in 1937 that destroyed all the original negatives of Fox Pictures' pre-1935 movies,[2] hundreds of libraries and archives bombed and burnt during World War II,[3][4] more than 6,000 Tibetan monasteries destroyed during the Cultural Revolution along with unique statues, tapestries and manuscripts,[5] the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina shelled and burnt to the ground along with thousands of irreplaceable texts,[6] to name only a few.
Since Wikipedia's inception, the destruction of knowledge has been at least as bad as before. The Iraq National Library and other repositories of culture were looted and burnt during the 2003 Iraq invasion,[7] the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake damaged or utterly destroyed libraries and archives in several countries, much of Haiti's heritage was damaged or destroyed in the 2010 Haiti earthquake,[8] just as with Chilean heritage during the 2010 Chile earthquake. Recently, the Egyptian Museum was looted during the 2011 Egyptian revolution.[9] But it does not always take a war or a natural catastrophe to endanger knowledge, as illustrated by the Duchess Anna Amalia Library fire in 2004,[10] or the collapse of the building hosting the Archive of the City of Cologne in 2009.[11]
These events usually remove pieces of human knowledge and sometimes entire cultures. Today, many of the world's languages are in danger.
Furthermore, hundreds of websites are closed every day on the Internet; the average life of a web page is only 77 days.[12] Those websites are used in many cases as references, but while projects such as the Internet Archive or WebCitation and volunteer groups like Archive Team[13] save copies of some of them, many others are lost forever.
Wikipedia and its sister projects can and must save all these forms of knowledge, through creating articles, uploading images to Wikimedia Commons, preserving languages in Wiktionary and transcribing books into Wikisource. Events like Wiki Loves Monuments may help to immortalize monuments around the world before they are damaged or destroyed, but the 2011 edition only covers European countries.[14]
There is a deadline. This is a battle against time.
Oliver Keyes, who edits as Ironholds on the English Wikipedia, was interviewed this week about becoming a contractor for the Wikimedia Foundation.
What do you think your work with the Foundation is going to entail?
Are there specific shortcomings in terms of feature releases that might have prompted the Foundation to seek a community representative?
There's obviously been some negative reactions to things like WikiLove and the Article Feedback Tool (and that's before you even get anywhere near the can of worms that is the Image Filter). Is there a communication gap between the Foundation and editors/projects?
Are there specific projects or initiatives that are high on your agenda?
Anything planned for projects that don't end in "pedia"?
Thanks for talking to the Signpost.
Oliver, along with another new hire Fabrice, will be participating in an IRC office hours session (in #wikimedia-office) on Thursday 27 October at 19:00 UTC to discuss the future of the Article Feedback Tool.
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PBS MediaShift Idea Lab published a piece titled "Wikipedia isn't journalism, but are wikipedians reluctant journalists?" The article covered Wikipedia policy about news and then talks about its successes. The author concludes "Wikipedia may be a reluctant journalist, but its influence on the media landscape is unmistakable."
A six-hour editathon at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts titled Wikipedia:The Musical took place last Saturday October 21. It was covered in The New York Times, The Faster Times, and Aussie Theatre. The goal was to improve content related to WikiProject Musical Theatre.
In her article on the editathon, The New York Times writer Amanda Petrusich explored how "Doug Reside, the digital curator for the performing arts at the New York Public Library, will offer participants a brief tutorial on how to edit an entry properly, as well as 'a quick overview of some important collections at the library that are not well represented in Wikipedia’s current articles'", including Audrey Hepburn's lesser known stage career. "Reside also emphasized the library’s material on various theater technicians [including designer Boris Aronson], many of whom remain unlisted on Wikipedia, or whose entries are brief", writes Petrusich.
The partnership, being organised with the help of Wikimedia New York, is intended to benefit both Wikipedia (which gains content) and the library (which gains publicity and inbound links). The New York Times article quoted Ben Vershbow, a manager at the library as explaining that the event fits into a broader programme of "training our staff to learn best practices of Wikipedia, to add links and content, in appropriate ways, to articles which correspond with their areas of expertise."
The shorter (and lower profile) coverage on AussieTheatre.com picked up on similar points. Notably, however, it explicitly asked the question of whether a similar editathon should be organised in Australia to fill in coverage of "Australian theatre greats". The Faster Times also covered the events in New York, albeit in brief.
David McKie of The Guardian writes how Wikipedia mistakenly reported him as dead, Fashionista reports lurid defacement of the Anna Dello Russo article, Wonkette covers vandalism to Dick Durbin and Lynn News defends their town against assertions found in Wikipedia that "[North Lynn is] the home of drug addicts and shoplifters".
This week, we took a break from our regular interviews to look at the creativity behind designing WikiProjects. Like businesses, organizations, governments, products, websites, and a variety of other entities, WikiProjects often use images and logos to brand themselves and communicate their purpose. Depending on the design, a project's imagery can make the project look more inviting, exciting, or professional than basic text and section headings. Some projects opt for simple icons or use pictures taken from Commons to make the project easily recognizable, while others prefer a traditional wordmark or nameplate to establish the project's identity.
It should be noted that distinct designs do not guarantee a project's success. Branding by itself should not be expected to save a struggling project, and attractive projects can lapse into inactivity just as quickly as projects with only black-and-white text. (See our special report on Reviving WikiProjects for details on the many challenges facing WikiProjects and tips for improving a project's organization, scope, and membership.)
Nonetheless, many Wikipedians have chosen to invest a little of their time and creativity in designing WikiProject logos. The list below showcases fifteen examples of interesting design that stood out among the many projects surveyed by one Report writer. We hope these logos will serve as inspiration for members of other WikiProjects to liven up their project pages. This list is in no particular order and is by no means exhaustive. For great logos we may have overlooked, we invite our readers to post their favorite WikiProject's logo in the comments section of this report.
First up is a popular design among many WikiProjects, featuring the project's name sandwiched between horizontal bars with a flag or other symbol sitting on top. The earliest example appears to be the WikiProject Iceland logo created by Maxí in 2007, with nearly a dozen country-specific projects creating their own versions since then. Non-country projects like WikiProject Animation (interviewed a couple months ago) have also made use of the design.
WikiProject Beer doesn't need to spell out its name. Their beer mug icon is probably the most universally understood graphic on our list. So it should be no surprise that WikiProject Beer borrowed the icon from French Wikipedia's Projet Bière. The icon was created in 2007 along with several variations by French contributor Caribou.
Designed by Parutakupiu in 2007 for WikiProject Olympics, the Olympic pictogram (leftmost image) features a running athlete composed of stylized Olympic Rings. The project's logo is part of a large collection of images (four sampled below) that Parutakupiu created to provide a uniform look to pages regarding the various sporting events at previous Summer and Winter Games. In our 2010 interview with the project, Parutakupiu noted with amazement that he had received "e-mails from sports event organizations and television channels asking me for permission to use these images!"
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A white pigeon perched on Wikipedia's capital letter "W" forms a tranquil scene for WikiProject Public Art. The young project formed in 2009 under the name "Wikipedia Saves Outdoor Sculpture," later renamed "Wikipedia Saves Public Art," has reinvented itself many times. Its current logo is actually an adaptation of an earlier effort seen here. Both versions were created by the mysterious HazelBee.
The logo for WikiProject Japan (interviewed earlier this year) was actually created as a banner ad intended to advertise the project on Wikipedia. The image incorporates part of Gaifū kaisei (South Wind, Clear Sky), one of the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. Wikipedia user Nihonjoe brought it all together in 2009.
WikiProject Visual Arts is represented by the palm-shaped amulet Hamsa which is popular in the Middle East and North Africa. It is recognized as a sign of protection and a defense against the evil eye. The image was created specifically for WikiProject Visual Arts in 2007 by Sparkit from English Wikipedia, vectorized by Swedish Wikipedian Fluff, and cleaned up by Perhelion, who bounces between several German wikis, Commons, and a few languages of Wikipedia.
This slick graphic is the property of WikiProject Business. It is based on an earlier briefcase image created by SaintDaveUK in 2009 that has since been deleted. The only surviving copy was uploaded by Beao in 2010. Activity at WikiProject Business appears to have entered a bear market, so additional editors are encouraged to invest some of their time in reviving the project.
The logo for WikiProject European Union, created and recreated by Ssolbergj, evolved from a collection of stars and text in July 2007 to a glossy button in October of that year to the current image, unchanged since January 2008, depicting the European Parliament's Louise Weiss Building in Strasbourg, France. The logo has since been translated for use on the French, German, and Russian Wikipedias.
Another creation by Ssolbergj, the WikiProject Europe logo is a glossy globe highlighting Europe with stars to the right. While not as easy to read at small sizes, the image looks glorious enlarged.
WikiProject Star Trek (see our July 2010 interview) opted for a basic logo reminiscent of the title cards for the movie Star Trek: First Contact and the later seasons of Star Trek: Enterprise. So why is it included on this list? Click the wikilink that leads to the project's page, where you'll find that all of the section headers are designed to match the logo. The page's minimalist layout complements the headers. From automated features such as Article Alerts and Recent Changes to static descriptions of Guidelines to ever-changing lists of Participants, the entire page features a crisp, consistent theme.
How would a list of WikiProjects be complete without the king of them all, the WikiProject Council? Simple but distinctive, the image designed by Titoxd and modernized by Neurolysis suggests that the council serves the purpose of a United Nations of WikiProjects. After a page redesign earlier this year by Kirill Lokshin, the project now has a nice blue theme that matches the image. To learn more about the WikiProject Council, check out our interview from earlier this year.
WikiProject Military History and its newsletter The Bugle feature bronze/brown text in an inviting yet serious typeface (a gold version also exists). Bellhalla may have created the original letterhead in 2009, but each of the project's myriad task forces has incorporated it into their ranks by adding images to the left of the text that identify their areas of expertise. For more on WikiProject Military History, see our most recent interview from 2010.
Icon creator Kintetsubuffalo describes the graphic for WikiProject Scouting (2008 interview) as "a fleur-de-lis positioned on a trefoil, in the original Scouting colors chosen by Lord Baden-Powell. To be considered for use as a non-trademark Scouting logo where questions of legality are involved." In his quest to create a generic version of the scouting emblem, he managed to make an icon that is quite attractive in its own right.
It was only a matter of time before we brought up Wikipe-tan, the much beloved and even more despised moe anthropomorphism personifying Wikipedia, which Steven Walling described in an Ignite presentation as "our creepy unofficial mascot." Created in 2006 by Kasuga, she quickly became associated with WikiProject Anime and Manga (interviewed in 2009). Fans created a variety of outfits and altered her age to adapt her for duty with other projects, including WikiProject Military History, the Christmas Task Force, Tambayan Philippines, the Counter-Vandalism Unit, and Admin Coaching. She has appeared on the main page as a Picture of the Day, illustrated a Did You Know?, and was even promoted to featured status until being delisted a year later. Jimbo Wales defended her honor in 2007, but that hasn't stopped naughty cosplayers and a fanservice picture from turning her into tabloid material. Her sisters Commons-tan and Quote-tan terrorize other wikis. Regardless of whether you love or hate her, she's the most influential icon that Wikipedia has ever seen.
Our last example is the colorful logo of WikiProject Zoo (2010 interview). Created by ZooPro, this image shows that any Wikipedian with some basic knowledge of image editing software can spice up a project's page. Simple or complex, a single icon or a unified theme, it doesn't matter. Let your creativity guide you.
Did any of these stand out to you? Did we forget your favorite project's icon? Do you have something new you've been working on that you'd like to share? Post it to the comments section below!
Next week, we'll visit the Rugby School for some pointers on their famous game. Until then, avoid rucks and mauls by studying previous plays in the archive.
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Hudson Valley Rail Trail (nom), According to nominator Gyrobo, "this 4-mile (6.4 km) rail trail was once part of a useful rail corridor that was somehow despised by its various owners. In the 1980s it was sold for one dollar to a felon, then seized by the government and paved. Today, it's part of a larger trail network that spans two counties in New York."
Rogers Hornsby (nom) (1896–1963), an American baseball infielder, manager, and coach who played 23 seasons in Major League Baseball. Sportswriters consider Hornsby to be one of the best hitters of all time. (Oriolesfan8 and Wizardman)
Russian battleship Sevastopol (1895) (nom), the last of three ships in the Petropavlovsk class of pre-dreadnought battleships built for the Imperial Russian Navy in the 1890s. Sevastopol saw service in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05. Slightly damaged during a surprise attack on the surprisingly English-sounding east-Russian Port Arthur in early February 1905, the ship later participated in several attempts to break out from the besieged port. The ship was scuttled to prevent her capture by the Imperial Japanese Navy and was never raised. The remains lie outside the entrance to Port Arthur. (Buggie111)
One featured article was delisted:
History of merit badges (Boy Scouts of America) (nom: referencing)
Ten lists were promoted in the past two weeks:
List of 1984 Winter Olympics medal winners (nom) (Nominated by Parutakupiu.)
List of Oakland Athletics team records (nom) (Albacore.)
Lionel Conacher Award (nom) (Resolute.)
List of Major League Baseball players to hit for the cycle (nom) (Killervogel5.)
List of colleges and universities in Alabama (nom) (Spyder Monkey.)
List of international cricket five-wicket hauls by Shane Warne (nom) (Joesayers and The Rambling Man.)
List of deaths at the Berlin Wall (nom) (Violetriga.)
List of Real Madrid C.F. seasons (nom) (AdrianRO.)
List of World Heritage Sites in Africa (nom) (Ericleb01 and Arsenikk.)
Toni Braxton discography (nom) (Novice7.)
Three featured lists were delisted:
2006 NCAA Division I FBS football rankings (nom: lead, style, formatting, referencing)
2005 NCAA Division I-A football rankings (nom: lead, style, formatting, referencing)
List of elements by stability of isotopes (nom: referencing, style, formatting)
Two topics were promoted:
1991 Atlantic hurricane season (nom), with three featured articles and two good articles. The 1991 season was the first in more than 24 years in which no hurricanes developed from tropical waves, which are the source for most North Atlantic tropical cyclones (nominators Hurricanehink and Cyclonebiskit).
The Signpost asked Hurricanehink what brought him to the topic, and how he became interested in storms in the first place.
The second new featured topic is Crex (nom), with two featured articles and one good article. Crex are a genus of birds containing two species: the Corn Crake, which breeds across Europe and Asia and winters in southern Africa, and the African Crake, which migrates within Africa. Both are short-billed rails with blackish-brown upperparts, mainly blue-grey underparts, and barring on the flanks. Despite their huge breeding grounds and large populations, their future is uncertain due to the impact of human activity. (nominator Jimfbleak).
One picture was promoted among many rejections by those tough reviewers: Missing square puzzle (nom; related article), an optical illusion used in mathematics classes to help students reason about geometrical figures. (created by User:Fibonacci).
Activity was low this week with only one case remaining open, Abortion, which saw a very modest amount of activity in the workshop. A request for amendment on the Climate Change case seems to have soaked up what limited activity there was this week; continue following The Signpost for coverage of the outcome, probably next week.
Arbitration enforcement was as dramatic as usual, but otherwise unremarkable.
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This week, The Wikimedia Foundation launched its first ever coding challenge, inviting outside coders to assist in the development of MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia and other Wikimedia wikis (wikitech-l mailing list: 1, 2; Wikimedia blog: 1, 2). Described as an "experiment" by Deputy Director Erik Möller, the well-advertised challenge takes the form of three separate contests: to allow mobile media uploading; to "surface change in real time" in order to make Wikipedia feel more "alive"; and to create a modern, high quality image slideshow feature for Wikipedia articles.
The challenge, which utilises a special 'Contest' extension built by Jeroen de Dauw, is being conducted with the help of Greg DeKoenigsberg, formerly a Senior Community Architect at Red Hat. The contest is backed by a free ticket to a 2012 event of the winner's choice (such as Wikimania 2012) as well as non-monetary benefits in the form of "certificates of coding excellence" designed to be "a great addition to anyone's CV".
In his presentation of the contest to the Wikimedia community, DeKoenigsberg wrote that the idea of a contest may turn out to "be brilliant, or it may not... offering a big prize for challenge winners may be a master stroke, or it may be a terrible mistake. The contest may yield lots of smart developers or lots of clueless noobs. ... I have no idea what to expect, and I'm not about to pretend otherwise. I will be fascinated to see how the next few weeks play out". He also paid tribute to the MediaWiki developer community in expectation of the "helpfulness and patience" he knew the competition organisers could rely on.
| “ | What if we could get amazing people to demonstrate their skills against concrete challenges, and use the completed challenges as the first evaluation screen for all candidates -- rather than their CVs? We'd still look at the CV, but at the end of the day, we’re looking for amazing, brilliant, dedicated people who will deliver excellent results. | ” |
| — Erik Möller, contributing to the Weekend of Code MediaWiki page | ||
Early indications seem to be promising. Less than 24 hours after the start of the challenge, the Wikimedia blog reported that 500 contestants from 80 countries had already signed up to participate; submissions must be made by 9 November.
These figures will no doubt cheer DeKoenigsberg, as well as the wider Foundation engineering department. It is hoped that the model of micro-involvement on show in the challenge could provide a useful insight into the pool of talented international developers who might consider working for the Foundation in the future. Indeed, at this moment in time, there seems to have been little said against the trial, which is being conducted in the spirit of nothing ventured, nothing gained when it comes to generating the diverse and expanded MediaWiki developer community needed for Wikimedia wikis to reach their full potential.
Wikimedia Deutschland announced this week that it has officially begun hiring eleven members of staff to work on its Wikidata project. The project would see a central data repository created to hold interwiki links. If successful, further stages would allow for a shared infobox repository, as well as a remote interface to generate up-to-date lists.
According to a post on the wikitech-l mailing list, the German chapter is hoping to secure "world-class" talent to turn their detailed proposal into reality. A shared data repository has been on the wishlist for many years (see, for example, Signpost coverage from August 2010) as a way of enabling cross-wiki updates to common facts and figures. At the very least, a central interwiki repository would drastically cut the amount of maintenance required when trying to map the links between articles on different wikis.
Wikimedia Deutschland described the Wikidata project as "new and ambitious ..., [a] project that aims to change the Web once again", and the news that it is actually happening will no doubt buoy the spirits of those who thought that the time for big, structural changes to Wikimedia wikis had passed. Likewise, Lead Software Architect Brion Vibber and Director of Features Engineering Alolita Sharma have both since commented on the news to signal their excitement at the project.
Of course, the eagerly anticipated project is also likely to be monitored closely by chapters around the world, and its success or failure could drastically effect whether or not they too choose to take on large technical challenges of this sort in future. As such, the project will also contribute to the continual debate about whether or not MediaWiki's reliance on WMF "head office" support for major engineering projects is justified in the medium-to-long term.
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.
