Sven Manguard has been editing Wikipedia for just over a year. He works primarily in the File namespace, but also participates in backlog eliminations and other gnomish tasks. Below, Sven makes a personal plea to the community, asking editors to become more involved in eliminating backlogs. The author would like to thank editors ThatPeskyCommoner, Ironholds, and Fox for offering their support and advice in the creation of this essay.
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.
Whatever people may say about declining participation, Wikipedia still generates a lot of new content. We add articles and upload dozens upon dozens of files every day, and that is unquestionably a good thing. However, as a community, we tend to neglect a large variety of problems that have cropped up in older articles. We sweep them under the rug, so to speak, and that is unquestionably a very bad thing.
The fact of the matter is that Wikipedia has swept so many problems under the rug that we now have a monster on our hands. We have backlogs that are in the hundreds, in the thousands, and in a few cases, in the hundreds of thousands, that have sat relatively untackled for months or years. These aren't petty issues either. There are 250,000 articles that need references. By that, I don’t mean that they need more references, I mean that there are, at last count, a quarter million articles that do not have a single citation to support them, and those are just the articles that are tagged as such. Some of these completely unreferenced articles were tagged as far back as October 2006, a half decade ago. There are an additional 250,000 articles that need additional references, and over 200,000 with unsourced statements. Less absurdly high in count but just as important, there are almost 10,000 articles tagged as containing original research, over 8,500 with disputed neutrality, and over 5,500 with disputed accuracy. I am cherry picking especially important issues with especially high numbers, yes, but there are about two dozen other content related backlogs with over a thousand items in them — listed at the Wikipedia Contribution Team’s backlog dashboard — that are not listed here.
What am I trying to say by listing all of these massive backlogs? I am saying that we, as a community, are failing our readers. People come to Wikipedia, for the most part, expecting accurate, neutral, well written articles. In almost a million cases, we cannot with a straight face vouch for the accuracy of the articles we're presenting. It is depressing, it is unacceptable, and unless the community, or significant portions of it, works to tackle these backlogs, the problem will only get worse.
There are a number of factors to blame for this problem. There was a time when ignorance of the problem was a valid claim, but considering the amount of times that one backlog or another has been mentioned in a prominent location, I no longer believe ignorance is a passable excuse. Instead, I believe it comes down to our culture. Working in backlogs certainly isn't glamorous, but more importantly, I don't perceive it as being looked upon by the community as being especially commendable or even as being especially valuable. It seems rather rare that a candidate for RfA puts forth their nomination by leading off their credentials with something like "I have spent the last six months clearing out the backlog at Category:Articles that need to differentiate between fact and fiction" (a category with over 3,500 items, by the way). Even worse, I can point to a few cases where someone did put forth backlog work as a credential, only to have it implicitly or explicitly disregarded by people who only seemed to focus on whether the nominee had written "enough" articles or had "enough" good and featured articles. Simply put, until the community decides that working on backlogs is a valuable activity, and shows it not only at RfA, but also in discussions and everyday community interaction, not enough people are going to jump in and start working on clearing backlogs.
This is not to say that no one values backlog work. There are a few groups of editors dedicated to working on clearing out particularly important backlogs. The Guild of Copy Editors and WikiProject Wikify deserve a tremendous amount of respect in particular for keeping the backlogs at Category:Wikipedia articles needing copy edit and Category:Articles that need to be wikified low; by doing so they ensure a great many articles are a great deal more readable than they otherwise would have been. In the area of files, which happens to be where I spend a majority of my time, backlogs are kept low by a combination of exceedingly useful bots, a few organized drives (such as WikiProject Images and Media's recently concluded Move to Commons drive), and a small handful of editors who devote large amounts of time to working with files.
It is, of course, not enough. This brings me to the primary motivation behind my decision to write this opinion piece:
I am asking, no, begging, everyone that reads this piece to go to this page, select a backlog that they think they can help out with, and knock off a few items. Spend an hour on it, devote ten minutes to backlogs once or twice a week, or do whatever else works for you. It doesn't have to take up a lot of time. If you want, show me a few diffs and I'll give you a barnstar; I'd be happy to. If 1,000 people read this, and each of them clears ten items this month, that’s 10,000 items. If everyone does ten items a month for an entire year, 120,000 items will have been cleared. Even distributed among two dozen or more backlogs, that is a formidable number.
I wouldn't go as far as to beg random strangers to do this if I weren't absolutely convinced that this was of vital importance, but here I am begging for all to see. I also wouldn't ask this of the community if I didn't think it were possible to make a noticeable difference. Recently I cleared a 1,500 item backlog in just a month, with the assistance of one other editor. The two of us, in weeks, took out a backlog that had sat untouched for years, and that specific backlog will never come back. While we'll never be able to eliminate maintenance tasks, it is possible to eliminate the massive backlogs that we have now, and return the number of pending cleanup tasks to a reasonable, functional, level. All it takes is work — and editors willing to do that work. Please join me in the coming months. Together we can defeat the monster under the rug.
Reader comments
WikiSym 2011, the "7th international symposium on wikis and open collaboration", took place from October 3–5 at the Microsoft Research Campus in Silicon Valley (Mountain View, California). Although the conference's scope has broadened to include the study of open online collaborations that are not wiki-based, Wikipedia-related research still took up a large part of the schedule. Several of the conference papers have already been reviewed in the September and August issues of this research overview, and the rest of the proceedings have since become available online.
The workshop "WikiLit: Collecting the Wiki and Wikipedia Literature"[1], led by Phoebe Ayers and Reid Priedhorsky, explored the daunting task of collecting the scholarly literature pertaining to Wikipedia and wikis generally. Research about wikis can be difficult to find, since there are papers published in many fields (from sociology to computer science) and in many formats, from published articles to on-wiki community documents. There have been several attempts over the years to collect the wiki and Wikipedia literature, including on Wikipedia itself, but all such projects have suffered from not keeping up to date with the sheer volume of research that is published every year. While the workshop did not reach consensus on what platform to proceed with to build a sustainable system, there was agreement that this is an important topic for the research and practitioner community, and the group developed a list of requirements that such a system should have. The workshop followed and extended discussions on the wiki-research-l mailing list earlier this year on the topic.
In a panel titled "Apples to Oranges?: Comparing across studies of open collaboration/peer production",[2] six US-based scholars reviewed the state of this field of research. Among the takeaways were a call to study failed collaboration projects more often instead of focusing research on successful "anomalies" like Wikipedia, and – especially in the case of Wikipedia – to broaden research to non-English projects.
Another workshop, titled "Lessons from the classroom: successful techniques for teaching wikis using Wikipedia"[3] was a retrospective on the Wikimedia Foundation's Public Policy Initiative.
Among the conference papers not mentioned before in this newsletter are:
Wikipedia-related posters included
A study entitled "Accuracy and completeness of drug information in Wikipedia: an assessment"[10] in this month's issue of the Journal of the Medical Library Association of five widely prescribed statins found that while these Wikipedia drug articles are generally accurate, they are incomplete and inconsistent. The study's authors conclude:
| “ | Because the entries on the five most commonly prescribed statins lacked important information, the authors recommend that consumers should seek other sources and not rely solely on Wikipedia. | ” |
The Wikimedia Foundation announced the winner of the Wikipedia Participation Challenge. The data competition, organized in partnership with Kaggle and the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, asked data scientists to use Wikipedia editor data and develop an algorithm to predict the number of future edits, and in particular one that correctly predicts who will stop editing and who will continue to edit (see the call for submissions). The response was overwhelming, with 96 participating teams, comprising in total 193 people who jointly submitted 1029 entries (listed in the competition's leaderboard).
The brothers Ben and Fridolin Roth (from team prognoZit) developed the winning algorithm. They developed a linear regression model using Python and GNU Octave. The algorithm used 13 features (2 based on reverts and 11 based on past editing behavior) to predict future editing activity. Both the source code and a description of the algorithm are available. Unfortunately, because it relied on patterns in the training dataset that would not be present in the actual one, the model's ongoing use is severely restricted.
Second place went to Keith Herring. Submitting only 3 entries, he developed a highly accurate model, using random forests, and utilizing a total of 206 features. His model shows that a randomly selected Wikipedia editor who has been active in the past year has approximately an 85 percent probability of becoming inactive (no new edits) in the following 5 months. The most informative features captured both the edit timing and volume of an editor's activity.
The challenge also announced two Honourable Mentions for participants who only used open source software. The first Honourable Mention went to Dell Zang (team zeditor) who used a machine learning technique called gradient boosting. His model mainly uses recent past editor activity. The second Honourable Mention went to Roopesh Ranjan and Kalpit Desai (team Aardvarks). Using Python and R, they too developed a random forest model. Their model used 113 features, mainly based on the number of reverts and past editor activity (see its full description).
All the documentation and source code has been made available on the main entry page for the WikiChallenge.
A team of researchers based at the Polish Japanese Institute of Information Technology (PJIIT) published a study presented at SocInfo 2011 looking at Requests for Adminship (RfA) discussions in the Polish Wikipedia.[11] The paper presents a number of statistics about adminship in the Polish Wikipedia since the RfA procedure was formalized (2005), including the rejection rate of candidates across different rounds, the number of candidates and votes over the years and the distribution of tenure and experience of candidates for adminship. The results indicate that it was far more complicated to obtain admin status in 2010 than it was in previous years, and that tenure required to be a successful RfA candidate has soared dramatically: "the mean number of days since registration to receiving adminship is nearly five times larger than it was five years before".
The remainder of the paper studies RfA discussions by comparing the social network of participants based on their endorsement (vote-for) or rejection (vote-against) of a given candidate with an implicit social network derived from three different types of relations between contributors (trust, criticism and acquaintance). The goal is to measure to what extent these different kinds of relations can predict voting behavior in the context of RfA discussions. The findings suggest that "trust" and "acquaintance" (measured respectively as the amount of edits by an editor in the vicinity of those by the other editor and as the amount of discussions between two contributors) are significantly higher in votes-for than in votes-against. Conversely, "criticism" (measured as the number of edits made by one author and reverted by another editor) is significantly higher in votes-against than in votes-for.
This study complements research on the influence of social ties on adminship discussions reviewed in the past edition of the research newsletter.
An article titled "Ranking of Wikipedia articles in search engines revisited: Fair ranking for reasonable quality?", by two professors for information research from the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (which appeared earlier this year in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology and is now available as open access, also in form of a recent arxiv preprint[12]) addresses "the fiercely discussed question of whether the ranking of Wikipedia articles in search engines is justified by the quality of the articles". The authors recall an earlier paper coauthored by one of them[13] that had found Wikipedia to be "by far the most popular" host in search engine results pages (in the US): In "1000 queries, Yahoo showed the most Wikipedia results within the top 10 lists (446), followed by MSN/Live (387), Google (328), and Ask.com (255)". They then set out to investigate "whether this heavy placement is justified from the user’s perspective". First, they re-purposed the results of a 2008 paper of the first author,[14] where students had been asked to judge the relevance of search engine results for 40 queries collected in 2007, restricting them to the search results that consisted of Wikipedia articles – all of them from the German version. They found that "Wikipedia results are judged much better than the average results at the same ranking position" by the jurors, and that
| “ | The data indicates that contrary to the assumption that Wikipedia articles show up too often in the search engines’ results, the search engines could even think of improving their results through providing more Wikipedia results in the top positions. | ” |
To conduct a more thorough investigation (the 2008 assessments having only focused on the criterion of relevance), the present paper sets out to develop a set of quality criteria for the evalulation of Wikipedia articles by human jurors. It first gives an overview of existing literature about the information quality of Wikipedia, and of encyclopedias in general, identifying four main criteria that several pre-2002 works about the quality of reference works agreed on. Interestingly, "accuracy" was not among them, an omission explained by the authors by the difficulty of fact-checking an entire encyclopedia. From this, the authors derive a set of 14 evaluation criteria, incorporating both the general criteria from the literature about reference works and internal Wikipedia criteria such as the status of being a featured/good article, the verifiability of the content and the absence of original research. These were then applied by the jurors (two last year undergraduate students with experience in similar coding tasks) to 43 German Wikipedia articles that had appeared in the 2007 queries, in their state at that time. While "the evaluated Wikipedia articles achieve a good score overall", there were "noticeable differences in quality among the examples in the sample" (the paper contains interesting discussions of several strengths and weaknesses according to the criteria set, e.g. the conjecture that the low score on "descriptive, inspiring/interesting" writing could be attributed to "the German academic style. A random comparison with the English version of individual articles seems to support this interpretation").
The authors conclude:
| “ | In general, our study could confirm that the ranking of Wikipedia articles in search engines is justified by a satisfactory overall quality of the articles. ... In answer to research question 4b, 4c ('Is the ranking appropriate? Are good entries ranked high enough?'), we can say that the rankings in search engines are at least appropriate. | ” |
Both the search engine ranking data and the evaluated Wikipedia article revisions are somewhat dated, referring to January 2007 (the authors themselves note that it "could well be that in the meantime search engines reacted to that fact [the potential of improving results by ranking Wikipedia higher] and further boosted Wikipedia results", and also that regarding the German Wikipedia, the search engine results did not take into account possible effects of the introduction of stable versions in 2008).
A master's thesis defended by Ashish Kumar Ashok, a student in computing at Kansas State University, describes machine learning methods to determine how the final outcome of an Article for Deletion (AfD) discussion is affected by the editing history of the article.[15] The thesis considers features such as the structure of the graph of revisions of an article (based on text changed, added or removed), the number of edits of the article, the number of disjoint edits (according to some contiguity definition), as well as properties of the corresponding AfD, such as the number of !votes and the total length of words used by participants in AfD who expressed their preference to keep, merge or delete the article. Different types of classifiers based on the above features are applied to a small sample of 64 AfD discussions from the 1 August 2011 deletion log. The results of the analysis indicate that the performance of the classifiers does not significantly improve by considering any of the above features in addition to the sheer number of !votes, which limits the scope and applicability of the methods explored in this work to predict the outcome of AfD discussions. The author suggests that datasets larger than the sample considered in this study should be obtained to assess the validity of these methods.
• arxiv.org PDF
| The global mission, the image filter and the "German question" September 26, 2011 |
| Personal image filter referendum highlights polarization August 5, 2011 |
| "Personal image filter" to offer the ability to hide sexual or violent media March 31, 2011 |
| Draft of controversial content recommendations published September 27, 2010 |
| Board resolution on offensive content July 28, 2010 |
| Porn madness May 10, 2010 |
| Larry Sanger accuses Wikimedia of hosting illegal images April 12, 2010 |
| Explicit image featured on German Wikipedia's main page March 3, 2010 |
In June 2010, following controversy over the appearance of the vulva article as the German Wikipedia's article of the day, allegations by Larry Sanger of hosting inappropriate graphic depictions of children, and other controversial events, the board voted for an external survey, to be conducted by Robert Harris, of controversial images on Wikimedia. The study was completed by October of that year, but its recommendations were not immediately adopted. In the interim, in December, a poll failed to gain the consensus necessary to promote Commons:Sexual content to a policy, and the Wikimedia leadership focused on the topic as a central issue for 2011. In March 2011 a technical draft of a personal image filter that enables users to hide for themselves images they do not want to see was presented to the Board.
However, a poll this August showed just how polarizing the issue is for many users; on the German Wikipedia in particular, a separate vote showed that more than 4/5 of users were opposed to institution of the filter, including some 35% of core users. As Jan eissfeldt explained in an op-ed last month, the German community is particularly motivated against censorship issues; as another user put it on the mailing list, "it is against the basic rules of the project. It is intended to discriminate content. To judge about it and to represent you this judgment before you have even looked at it." On October 9, the results of the poll were followed by a "Letter to the community on Controversial Content" from WMF Board chair Ting Chen (User:Wing) and a clarification by WMF executive director Sue Gardner that although the Board's May resolution on controversial content still stood, "the specific thing that has been discussed over the past several months, and which the Germans voted against" was not being pursued any more, and that "the goal is a solution that's acceptable for everyone". Still, the letter triggered extensive discussion by German Wikipedians; and Sue Gardner promised to discuss the issue with them directly when coming to Germany in November for the German chapter's annual meeting.
Shortly thereafter, Wikipedian Sargoth proposed on October 19 that users should put white paper bags over their heads as a sign of protest when Gardner arrived. In the interim, users have taken to posting an image of a white paper bag on their userpages in protest. As of writing, more than 150 users have done so. The image filter issue has united the Germans, as one user wrote, "in a way that I haven't seen in several years." In addition, a filter-less German Wikipedia fork has been proposed, and as of writing the community poll on the issue stands at 31/40/24/1. In the meantime the referendum committee published the second and third appendices of results on Meta to make the votes per project and by age of account transparent. On October 28, Sue Gardner reiterated that she had taken the category-based solution off the table, and will not impose anything on the German community against their will.
On the occasion of Citizendium's fifth anniversary, Ars Technica interviewed its founder Larry Sanger (known for his role in starting Wikipedia until 2002) and editorial council member Hayford Pierce, presenting their "candid assessments of what went wrong, and what we can learn from the experience" and looking back at the "great debate about the merits of Wikipedia's radically democratic editing process" which had been prompted by Sanger's September 2006 announcement. "Citizendium turns five, but the Wikipedia fork is dead in the water" was the grim headline given to the interview. Last month, shortly after the anniversary of Citizendium's first announcement, the Signpost interviewed the project's managing editor Daniel Mietchen: "Citizendium, half a decade later".
Vandalism to the article on Anna Dello Russo this weekend was picked up in several places. Part of why it received so much attention was undoubtedly its unusually humorous nature. "As much as I'm trying to be pissed at whomever did this, it's kind of...hilarious", wrote Ology.com. The defacement was also noted by New York magazine's fashion desk.
Meanwhile, progressive magazine Mother Jones spotted intensive edit warring at the article about Walid Phares, a foreign policy advisor for U.S. presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. The nexus of the dispute was attempted detailing of Phares relationship with the right-wing Lebanese Forces during that nation's civil war. Finally, the Herald Sun documented alternately juvenile and death-threatening defamatory edits to articles on Australian politicians Robert Doyle and Ted Baillieu.
American magazine Good interviewed editor David Shankbone this week, portraying him as "The Most Important Occupy Wall Street Photographer You've Never Heard of". In the interview, he discussed his photography ("In 2003 I was on a volcano in Ecuador with some locals who ended up stealing my digital camera and all of my clothes, and it wasn’t until 2006 that I had a camera again."), the role it has played on Wikipedia, as well as his opinion of Occupy Wall Street. Shankbone had previously been interviewed as a "Thought Leader" in March for the PBS MediaShift blog by former WMF staffer Sandra Ordonez with the acclamation that he was "arguably the most influential new media photojournalist in the world."
Reporter's note: Last issue, a call for more writers was put out by the managing editors. In response, I decided to try to revive the Discussion report section. However, I'm going to need your help to do it. I watch most of the major discussion boards, and have done so long before taking on this responsibility, but I can't possibly be watching everything at once. At the beginning of the week, I am going to start the discussion report and throw in several items I will try to include for the finished product. You will be able to see the report in progress from the Signpost's Newsroom. If there is an important discussion that you're aware of, hasn't been covered in a previous report, and is not on my list, feel free to add a link to the discussion at the Signpost's suggestion board. I will not be able to cover sister projects or meta at all without tips, so I really, really need people who are active at other projects to keep me in the loop, so I can in turn keep you all in the loop. If I decide to write up a discussion I received from a tip (which I will, if it's a good tip), I'll give you credit for bringing it in. You can keep sending me tips until 48 hours before publication (I need the weekend to do the write ups).
I am currently planning for the report to be bi-monthly, but that may change in future. I'm also open to co-writing the report with anyone interested. For those who remember the pre-hiatus discussion report, I've also slightly reorganized the layout, adding a few sections including the sidebar.
And now, with all that explanation out of the way, please welcome back the Discussion report.
– Sven Manguard
A 45-day-long request for comment was initiated by MuZemike to solicit community opinions on a number of questions related to the upcoming Arbitration Committee elections. Dozens of proposals and hundreds of comments on important structural issues were made, and the RfC is set to close on November 1. A special edition of the discussion report will appear in next week's Signpost, devoted entirely to the results of this important discussion.
Wikimedia Foundation contractor Okeyes (WMF) (also known as Ironholds outside his official WMF capacity) recently distributed more than 4,000 invitations asking editors with experience in new page patrolling to participate in a survey designed to aid the Foundation's efforts to develop a new Special:NewPages interface. The Signpost asked Mr. Keyes about the survey:
"The staffers I've been in contact with have really been bowled over by the number of responses. We were expecting maybe 450; as of now, we've got over 1,000. The data gathered so far has torpedoed a lot of assumptions about new page patrollers. A majority of them have tertiary qualifications and are well above 18, for example.
However, we still need to normalise the data; a majority of patrollers have tertiary qualifications, but do they do the majority of patrols? If not, what demographic does most of the work, and what are their attributes? Hopefully this will be done in the next couple of weeks, and I should have some very interesting data to show people quite soon.
My thanks to everyone who has submitted information so far, or who plans to do so in the future; we're going to use it to build a Special:NewPages interface that's easier for existing editors to use, and easier for new editors to adapt to. Hopefully we can bring down the workload and make it a better experience."
If you have experience in the area but have not received an invitation, you can still take the survey by clicking this link. The discussion report will publicize the results of the survey as they become available.
A proposal was launched on the last day of September by Noleander to remove from the Notability (music) guideline the line "In general, if the musician or ensemble is notable, and if the album in question has been mentioned in multiple reliable sources, then their officially released albums may have sufficient notability to have individual articles on Wikipedia", on the grounds that it is so easy to find sources for just about any album that the criteria in question are not effective for judging notability. Instead, Noleander advocated the principle of "significant coverage". After five days, Lawrencekhoo restarted the discussion as a formal Request for Comment in a new thread immediately below Noleander's discussion. Discussion on the issue has slowed, with a significant majority supporting Noleander's proposal.
In response to concerns raised during the discussion of the possible unblock of TreasuryTag (coverage below), Eraserhead1 removed the line "as punishment against users" from the section of the blocking policy that listed what blocks were not to be used for. The change was reverted, and a Request for Comment was initiated by Hydroxonium to determine whether there was consensus for reinstating Eraserhead1's change. After 10 days and more than 100 comments, SilkTork closed the discussion with the conclusion that there was not a consensus for making the alteration.
Hammersoft (talk · contribs), on behalf of Δ (formerly Betacommand), has filed requests to undertake 20 separate automated tasks. Δ is required by community sanctions to seek consensus before undertaking a "pattern of edits", and is restricted to an average of four edits a minute during any ten-minute interval. At the time of writing, a majority of the proposals have more opposition than support, or have almost the same levels of opposition as support; seven, however, have achieved varying pluralities of support. They are:
3. undertake edits to remove external links where such links were used as a failed attempt to include an image in an infobox
7. add {{dead link}} as appropriate to references where the link is dead.
9. replace "Image:" with "File:".
13. add titles to bare URLs and convert inline links to refs where needed.
14. add non-breaking spaces to units, in accordance with WP:NBSP.
18. date maintenance templates.
20. combine templates as needed into {{multiple issues}}.
An effort to rewrite the editing restrictions placed on Δ is also underway at the same page; however, none of the proposed versions have achieved significant support, and the level of participation in the discussion is low.
A five-part RfC was initiated at the end of September by Dominus Vobisdu, in which the editor raised concern that several sections of the article Astrology give undue weight to a minority view of astrology, and over the use of unreliable sources in those claims. Duing the past month, more than 200 separate comments have been left on the talk page on these matters. Several editors have engaged in heated exchanges, and in mid-October the Arbitration Committee imposed a six-month topic ban from the topic of astrology on Ludwigs2, due to his comments at the RfC (the Astrology article is under general sanctions as a result of the case Pseudoscience). While a broad consensus has formed on most of the issues, the discussion appears likely to remain open for some time.
An RfC filed jointly by Paul Siebert and Smallbones seeks to end a dispute over the content of the lead section of Mass killings under Communist regimes, by crafting two potential lead sections and asking the community to choose which one should be placed in the article. The discussion has slowed to a halt, and at present neither of the two originally proposed leads, nor a third lead suggested during the discussion, has managed to achieve more support than opposition.
A modification to the verifiability policy was proposed earlier this month that would make two changes to the handling of "verifiability, not truth". The change would remove mention of the concept "verifiability, not truth" from the lead, in favor of mention that Wikipedia policies other than verifiability also affect the inclusion of content. "Verifiability, not truth" would instead be addressed in a new section, "Assertions of truth and untruth", placed right after the lead. Support for the change was just above a 2:1 margin, with almost 100 opinions already in, before a sudden spike in participation after a thread was opened on October 28 at the administrators' noticeboard alleging that the RfC was closed too early and was not closed by an uninvolved admin. The margin of support has decreased to around 3:2, with just under 250 comments in. SarekOfVulcan, the administrator whose close of the discussion led to the AN/I thread, voluntarily resigned his administrator tools on October 29.
An RfC was started earlier this week by Ridernyc that sought to gain consensus for inserting the line, "At this time there is no consensus that Esports [sic] participants are covered by the criteria of this guideline" into the page Notability (sports). A dozen editors have commented, and the discussion is ongoing. Another e-sports-related discussion is under way at the Reliable sources noticeboard, regarding whether or not several websites can be considered independent sources.
TreasuryTag, an editor since 2006, was blocked at the beginning of the month for "generally combative behaviour not conducive to collaborative environment". Having been blocked in August and September for unacceptable behavior, and each time being unblocked after promising to reform, TreasuryTag's October block was indefinite. A proposal by Worm That Turned was put forth at the Administrators' noticeboard that would have allowed the editor to be unblocked and given a final chance, on the condition that they be mentored and monitored by Worm That Turned and Fastily, both admins. Almost 50 people left comments on the matter. Sjakkalle closed the discussion and stated, in part, that consensus was against unblocking TreasuryTag, but that there was "general agreement in the discussion that both Worm That Turned and Fastily should be commended for their generous offer and attempts to find a satisfactory outcome".
Reader comments
The recently concluded 2011 Rugby World Cup on 23 October saw New Zealand's All Blacks crowned world champions after defeating France 8–7 in a nail-biting finish. Rugby union is a full contact team sport which originated in England in the early 19th century. It is one of two codes of rugby football. This week, we took time out to speak with members of WikiProject Rugby union. Started by DaGizza in December 2005, the Project is home to over 9,700 articles, with 7 Featured articles, 1 Featured list, 14 Good articles and a Featured portal. The Project has 166 participants. The Signpost interviewed project members MacRusgail, FruitMonkey, Bob247 and Aircorn.
MacRusgail is a Scottish Wikipedian, and has been editing since April 2005. A rugby fan and former player, he was motivated to join WikiProject Rugby union because: "I felt that the coverage at the time was poor, and the articles in general were not well written/non-existent. American sports and association football are already well covered, but many others are not." FruitMonkey has been a Wikipedian since October 2006, and works on many Welsh articles: "Although I was well aware of the sport, I was not a huge rugby fan. After a few low level edits on Welsh articles I got into a heated debate when a Welsh rugby club was flagged for deletion by an editor who was unaware of the nature of 'amateur' within rugby union. That set me on a little crusade and I started building articles on Welsh Victorian players, which has now spiraled into all things rugby." Bob247 is another Scottish Wikipedian, editing since July 2005: "I was contributing to other articles and came across the rugby ones while searching for information on the [Six Nations] and was surprised to see how little there was on rugby union compared with other major sports." Aircorn is a New Zealander and has been on Wikipedia since December 2009. He says that his "religion" is rugby union: "I played rugby until a broken knee turned me into a referee a couple of years ago. Rugby union was one of the first subjects I started editing when I joined Wikipedia in late 2009. Like many, I started editing on my favourite players and now contribute to a range of articles within the project."
Your Project has over 9,700 articles associated with it. How does the Project keep all these up to standard, and what are its biggest challenges?
WikiProject Rugby union has 7 Featured articles, 1 Featured lists, 14 Good articles and a Featured portal. How did your Project achieve this and how can other Projects work toward this?
Does WikiProject Rugby union collaborate with any other WikiProjects?
Your members have been heavily involved with updating articles related to the recently concluded 2011 Rugby World Cup. Can you share with us your experience of working on a live sporting event such as this?
What are the most pressing needs for WikiProject Rugby union? How can a new contributor help today?
Anything else to add?
Next week's Report will be about the SysRq button. Until then, read zeros and ones in the archive.
Reader comments
5 articles were promoted to featured status:
Georges Bizet (nom), a French composer, mainly of operas, who became famous for his work Carmen, but died several weeks after its premiere. As nominator Brianboulton explains, "He had no idea it would become one of the best-known and most successful works in operatic history. He thought that it had flopped, one more failure in a career marked by frustration and disappointment." (Nominated by Brianboulton)
Battle of Vukovar (nom), part of the Croatian War of Independence. The battle was an 87-day siege of the titular commune by the Yugoslav People's Army, between August and November 1991. (Co-nominated by Joy and Prioryman)
Willamette River (nom), a 187-mile (301 km) tributary of the Columbia River accounting for 12 to 15 percent of its flow. Its basin, the Willamette Valley, contains two-thirds of the population of Oregon. (Jsayre64)
Mothers of the Disappeared (nom), a little-known song by U2 which ended the album The Joshua Tree, detailing the disappearance of students during the Dirty War of 1976–1983. The melody for the song, which stemmed from Bono's philanthropic endeavors, came from a piece Bono had "composed in Ethiopia in 1985 to help teach children basic forms of hygiene." (Melicans)
Standing Liberty quarter (nom), a 25-cent coin struck by the United States Mint between 1916 and 1930, succeeding the Barber quarter, which had been minted since 1892. The coin is named for its representation of the goddess Liberty on one side, and it depicts an eagle in flight on the other. (Wehwalt)
2 featured articles were delisted:
Dog Day Afternoon (nom: various issues, including plot section and dead links)
Island fox (nom: various issues, including length of article and the lead section)
Eleven lists were promoted:
List of Florida Marlins managers (nom) (Nominated by Wizardman.)
List of Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves recipients (1945) (nom) (MisterBee1966.)
List of 1960 Winter Olympics medal winners (nom) (Fluffernutter and Courcelles.)
List of Christmas number one albums (UK) (nom) (A Thousand Doors.)
Edgar Martínez Award (nom) (Muboshgu.)
Latin Grammy Award for Record of the Year (nom) (Jaespinoza.)
James Nesbitt filmography (nom) (Bradley0110.)
David O. Selznick filmography (nom) (Jimknut.)
Jennifer Lopez discography (nom) (Status and 1111tomica.)
Venues of the 1948 Summer Olympics (nom) (Miyagawa.)
Philadelphia Phillies all-time roster (S) (nom) (Killervogel5.)
No Featured lists were delisted this week.
4 images were promoted. Please click on "nom" to view medium-sized images:
Battenberg Mausoleum (nom; related article), the tomb of Alexander of Battenberg, the first prince of modern Bulgaria and the first ruler of the so-called Third Bulgarian Kingdom. It is among the most important landmarks of the city of Sofia. (created by User:MrPanyGoff).
Edersee Dam (nom; related article), at Edersee, a lake near Waldeck, Hesse, Germany, with the Waldeck Castle in the background. (created by User:Carschten).
Turku Castle (nom; related article), dating from the 13th century, is the largest surviving medieval building in Finland, and one of the largest surviving medieval castles in Scandinavia. (created by User:Carschten).
"England Expects that every man will do his duty" (nom; related article); the image depicts the signal put up by Admiral Horatio Nelson on his flagship, HMS Victory, during the Battle of Trafalgar. The iconic message was signaled, via flags, by Nelson as he engaged the French on 21 October 1805, in what would become the most important naval engagement of the Napoleonic Wars. (created by User:Ipankonin).
Activity was at a virtual stand-still this week, with only a single edit to the Workshop of the only open case, Abortion. On October 26, the request to amend the Climate Change case was closed, with William M. Connolley's topic ban being modified to allow editing within the topic of climate change, while still prohibiting him from editing articles about living people associated with the topic. Two days later, another request to amend the case was opened, requesting that Scjessey's voluntary editing restriction be lifted. Also on October 26, a request for clarification on the Δ (formerly Betacommand) case was opened, requesting the Arbitration Committee's opinion on whether the community-proposed task of removing deleted images falls under Δ's NFCC-enforcement ban. The request for clarification has prompted SirFozzie to initiate a motion that would open up a new ArbCom case, tentatively called "Review of Δ sanctions".
Finally, a motion was passed this week that applied discretionary sanctions to articles within the scopes of thirteen prior ArbCom cases. All of the affected cases had imposed editing restrictions when the cases were first closed, so the only effect of this motion was to standardize the wording used in those restrictions.
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In an effort to increase its mobile presence, the Wikimedia Foundation has reached out to mobile carriers, who it hopes will see value in allowing free access to a "lite" version of the encyclopedia (Wikimedia blog, paidContent article).
The lite version will contain all of Wikipedia's textual content, but no images or other media, reducing the cost to a mobile carrier of supplying the service to users. In return, mobile carriers will hope to "lure in" potential web users with tasters such as Wikipedia. The WMF is following in the footsteps of Facebook, who unveiled a similar plan eighteen months ago. In addition to Wikipedia Zero, the WMF is also taking the opportunity to push for inclusion of "links to Wikipedia in [carrier's] WAP portals and basic browser bookmarks [and] use Wikipedia logos and other branding material in their own marketing efforts" paidContent reported. WMF Senior Manager Amit Kapoor added that the WMF was also "exploring ways to develop feature phone access to Wikipedia through SMS and USSD".
The efforts are forming part of a wider programme of delivering Wikimedia wikis to the developing world, where the mobile-to-desktop browsing ratio is far greater than in developed nations. Even in countries where that ratio is relatively low at the moment, readers are increasingly switching their Internet usage to mobile devices. Whilst in the West smartphones are generally the primary mobile access point for the Internet, the WMF's actions show it is also reaching out to users of older phones, as is common in the developing world.
Originally outlined as a top priority in the five year strategic plan published in 2010, more recently the focus on mobile browsing has prompted the launch of a new mobile site in September (see previous Signpost coverage) and the creation of an Android app set to debut shortly. Users of the new mobile site will be able to "Opt in" to receive beta features as soon as they are available, it was also reported this week on the Wikimedia blog.
Volunteer Development Coordinator Sumana Harihareswara published a writeup of the New Orleans hackathon (which was held in the American city on 14–16 October) this week on the Wikimedia blog (which was also summarised in a wikitech-l post). The two day event, aimed enticing more and more productive volunteer MediaWiki developing as well as allowing developers with different backgrounds to meet in person, included talks from a number of longtime MediaWiki developers such as Chad Horohoe (pictured) and Brion Vibber.
Reporting "broad progress", Harihareswara described the event as specifically helping to further work on "the SwiftMedia extension, Wikimedia Labs, continuous integration, ArchiveLinks, user scripts, Max's API Query Sandbox, Puppetization, Git migration, and more". She also reported how a "volunteer came in on Friday night knowing nothing about developing for MediaWiki, and by the end of the weekend had a working development environment on her laptop and had some ideas about how to contribute".
Future hackathons are scheduled for the Indian city of Mumbai (18–20 November; full details are available) and the British seaside resort of Brighton (19–20 November; full details). The former has been designed to coincide with WikiConference India 2011, and the timing and the proximity of its venue should allow potential contributors to attend both.
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.
