Nominations for the annual elections to the Arbitration Committee are now closed. There are 18 candidates, vying for a maximum of seven vacancies (sitting arbitrators are marked with an asterisk):
AGK, *Coren, Courcelles, DeltaQuad, Eluchil404, Geni, Hersfold, Hot Stop, *Jclemens, *Kirill Lokshin, Kww, Maxim, NWA.Rep, Panyd, *Risker, *Roger Davies, SilkTork and Worm That Turned.
These community-run elections involve candidates' nomination statements, a guide to the candidates, questions for those running, links to individual voter guides, and discussion pages; all are accessible through this template. The five "fallow" days for voters to further question and discuss candidates have begun. Voters can view candidates' responses to a set of common general questions, and to specific questions that editors have posted. These specific questions have included queries about a candidate's statement, requests to comment on scenarios involving problematic editors, questions on individual ArbCom cases, and issues concerning real-world legal threats.
The election, via the SecurePoll voting interface, will go live from 27 November to 10 December. MediaWiki sysadmin Tim Starling will assist with the setting up and troubleshooting of the SecurePoll interface. Three WMF-identified editors—Happy-melon, Tznkai, and Skomorokh—have offered to be election administrators. They will oversee the election, including the SecurePoll voting system.
The vote will then be audited by three independent scrutineers drawn from the ranks of non-native stewards, to ensure the election is free of double-voting, sockpuppetting, and other irregularities, and to tally the results and announce it on the election page. The stewards will be Bencmq (originally from the Chinese Wikipedia), Trijnstel (originally from the Dutch Wikipedia), and Vituzzu (originally from the Italian Wikipedia). All community editors will be invited to scrutinise the list of those who have voted as the election proceeds, using their knowledge and intuition to help ensure that all votes are legitimate.
The results will be announced on the election page. Successful candidates will start their two-year terms on 1 January 2012.
As part of her annual European travel, Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, spoke at Imperial College, London last Sunday 13 November on the participation of female editors on Wikipedia and its sister projects.
More than 40 people attended, including around half a dozen students. Gardner opened the address with an introduction to Wikimedia projects, the slides of which talk are available on the Foundation wiki. She suggested that attendees watch with the intention of giving the same talk themselves someday. The introduction focused on the remarkable popularity of Wikipedia, which dwarfed that of conventional informational outlets such as The New York Times, CNN, BBC and so on.
The gender imbalance of editing on Wikipedia was first brought to the attention of the public after an article on the topic was published in The New York Times in January of this year.
Gardner addressed the reasons put forth to explain the gender gap, substantially recapping her landmark February blog post Nine Reasons Why Women Don't Edit Wikipedia (in their own words). She referred frequently to data to support her analysis, citing amongst other studies the 2011 Women and Wikimedia Survey. The first – and simplest – reason she gave was that MediaWiki markup is "a pain" to learn. She said that a WYSIWYG editor is in the works and will help all editors to contribute. She used several direct references to opinions from women who had been quoted in the survey results; one woman had stated that she was "not thick-skinned enough for Wikipedia" – an opinion Gardner endorsed. "Many of the editors," she said, "used the heated discussion as a form of intellectual sparring" and that it's "not necessarily as serious as it seemed."
One female Wikimedian had also voiced the worry that "[Female YA author(s)] are not notable, meanwhile 1-Book, Nobody Dude's Wikipedia page is 14 printable pages long!" Gardner agreed that topics of interest to female editors were often less well-developed than articles on areas of interest to men, citing hairstyles as an example. The issue of Wikimedia culture being sexualised also arose, as she recounted a problem she herself had come across where she was surfing Wikipedia articles and had arrived on an article on garment necklines of shirts. The article was illustrated with an image of a woman wearing a round necked shirt, and while the content of the image itself was fine, the file was denoted by a "less than satisfactory name: it was called Boobies.jpg". Although the file was renamed during the talk, the notion was a cause for concern; a culture which produced such decisions as well as phenomena like userpage galleries of sexualised depictions of women lent weight to the conclusion that "Wikimedia can seem like a smutty mens' locker room at times". Another worry highlighted by female editors was that, in some language projects where words are gendered, female editors have been addressed by the male version of the word "user" – "the software called me male!".
Gardner elaborated on "what it took to be a Wikipedian", describing a conversion funnel which begins with being literate, proceeded through requirements as having access to the Internet, having spare time (however little), being reasonably tech-literate and thick-skinned and being pedantic and emphasised the importance of having a topic you love. She made the remarkable admission that despite their keen appreciation of the significance and causes of the gender gap, Foundation staff had no plans to specifically combat it, but were instead relying on existing outreach efforts such as the Global Education Program to attract a more balanced gender distribution than that of the existing editing community. The talk ended with a brief question-and-answer session and a presentation of gifts to the speaker by Wikimedia UK volunteers.
The first annual WikiConference India, held this past weekend at the University of Mumbai, attracted widespread coverage in the national press and beyond. BBC News reported that the event commenced with an opening address by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, in which he speculated that the 700-strong gathering "could be the largest wiki-conference that's ever been held" and outlined the Wikimedia movement's expansion plans in India. The Hindu picked up on Wales' belief that the rules and procedures in operation on the English Wikipedia would need to be simplified for smaller language projects if organic growth was to be encouraged – "There are over three million entries in English. A large community needs a lot of rules. But we don't need to copy these for a small group." According to BBC News, the Hindi Wikipedia has only 50 editors, and is thus dwarfed by the more than 35,000 editors of the English Wikipedia.
Hundreds of millions of people are more comfortable thinking and dreaming and talking and counting in their mother tongue ... The different kinds of sweets, saris, history, culture – at about every parameter there's so much magic you could write about.
— Hisham Mundol, addressing the conference, as reported by BBC News, November 20
The expansion plans were elaborated upon by the Wikimedia Foundation's head of India programmes Hisham Mundol, who put particular emphasis on the development of Indic language projects, revealed efforts at getting DVD versions of Wikipedia into schools (motivated by the still slow rate of Internet penetration), and described the recent university outreach efforts of the India Education Program. Colleague Nitika Tandon also discussed the pilot program, which saw Indian students encouraged to submit their essays as Wikipedia articles, and noted problems the pilot had revealed concerning students' understanding of copyright and plagiarism norms (see Signpost special report). A special Hackathon was held simultaneous to the conference, focusing mainly on the challenges of non-Latin scripts used by the Indic language projects (see "Technology report").
Coverage of the content of the conference appeared in The Times of India, Moneycontrol.com, Asia Times, Hindustan Times, Hindustan Times again, The Hill Post, Business Standard and The Jakarta Post. Daily News and Analysis ran a series of articles, covering Wikipedia plans various initiatives in India, Marathi Wikipedia targets schools in villages yet to get Internet, In India, for 10 people, there are 12 opinions: Jimmy Wales, Wikipedians not impressed with Arnab Goswami's talk in WikiConference, and Wikipedia's future lies in India, says co-founder Jimmy Wales.
A group of about a dozen protestors from the youth wing of the nationalist BJP political party demonstrated against one map on Wikipedia, whose depiction of the contested border regions surrounding Jammu and Kashmir they objected to. The Times of India revealed that several protestors were detained by police, and planned to file a criminal case against "Jimmy Whales and Wikipedia's India chairman [sic]". An unruffled Wales responded "It's very important all people become educated on the issues. I want Wikipedia to be neutral on the issues; it's not up to us to decide what's the correct map of India of course, but it is up to us to explain there is this controversy." The fracas threatened to overshadow the conference, inspiring the creation of a Wikipedia entry (now deleted) as well as articles in a host of media outlets and websites, not limited to The Hindu, The Times of India, OneIndia News, Silicon India, Indian Express, Hindustan Times, GulfNews, Khaleej Times, the Daily Pioneer, and Wikinews splinter outfit OpenGlobe.
The Wikimedia Foundation's 2011 Fundraiser had its first major donor coup this week, with US$500,000 from the Brin Wojcicki Foundation of Sergey Brin and his wife Anne Wojcicki – co-founders of Google and 23andme respectively. Although the Foundation averred its commitment to relying on small donations rather than seeking indulgent sponsors following its Strategic Planning findings last year, it welcomed the news in a press release as "an important endorsement" of the organisation and its work. The story was picked up by a host of media outlets and technology websites, notably The Washington Post, Reuters MediaFile blog, the San Francisco Mercury News, VentureBeat, and Ars Technica, and inspired much commentary in response.
The New York Times Bits blog greeted the news with the impudent remark "Keep an eye on Sergey Brin’s Wikipedia page. It might just get a more positive spin soon", and noted previous tensions with Google over Google Knol, a now-stagnant crowdsourced knowledge repository project once mooted as a Wikipedia-killer. The dedicated Wikipedia-watchers at The Register saluted the entrepreneurs' generosity with the caveat "even if the Wikimedia Foundation can be a bit of an odd duck at times". PC Magazine wondered whether Brin had simply gotten tired of seeing Jimmy Wales' face.
The Brin Wojcicki Foundation has previously donated to causes including the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's research, the X Prize Foundation for the development of private space exploration, the anti-poverty group Tipping Point Community, the cyberactivists Electronic Frontier Foundation as well as Creative Commons. The Wikimedia Foundation said it had raised $1.2 million in the first day of the fundraiser, and Arutz Sheva reported that it seeks to raise over $28 million this fundraising season, which is expected to last into January.
The Jimmy Wales banner appeals have already attracted the by-now-traditional mockery taking advantage of the impression that the omnipresent banner image relates to the topic of the Wikipedia article, notably highlighted this year in The Oatmeal, which illustrated several images of Wales' face adorning the Douche, Sex offender, Nazi, Crossdressing and Anal wart entries. Alexia Tsotsis of TechCrunch was less forgiving, excoriating the fundraiser for inviting ridicule on this front, and advising Wales to "take some of the donation money, especially the 20 bucks I’m about to throw at you out of guilt for writing this post, and hire a professional graphic designer so you’re not creeping people out or (worse) making them laugh unintentionally." This cost assessment may be at odds with those of the Foundation's accountants, who have budgeted fundraising expenses at $1.8 million for 2010-2011.
| “ | Why is Twitter or Facebook such a priority, while Wikipedia goes unnoticed? Are you over-investing in shiny objects? Why have we invested in large, fragmented, unmanageable social sites that can take years to build a following and grow SEO, when a hand-full of rule-bound, manageable, community built pages already top the search tools we know all our constituents use every day? | ” |
| — David King of Socialfresh on marketers' outreach efforts | ||
On November 15, a proposal was put forth at the Village pump asking the Wikimedia Foundation to place a black bar over the Wikipedia logo on November 16, site wide, in protest of two laws moving through the United States Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). The proposal garnered more opposition than it did support, and the 16th came and went without a change to the logo.
The Wikimedia Foundation blog placed the bar over its own logo, and released a statement endorsing American Censorship Day, the name adopted by the websites that have altered their logos. In the post, Head of Communications Jay Walsh made the argument that the proposed laws would threaten Wikipedia, saying "In short, our users and all of our projects, would be forced to operate in an untenable legislative environment, putting Wikipedia at the beck and call of the rights owners as opposed to the distribution of free knowledge."
MediaWiki developer Petrb put forward a proposal that the OnlineStatusBar extension be integrated into Wikipedia as an opt-in feature for registered users. The extension checks when a user last viewed a Wikipedia page while logged-in, and uses that information to display a message in the top right corner of an opted-in user's talk page indicating whether or not that user is online at the moment (example). According to the developer, a key advantage that this system has over the existing Qui and StatusTemplate scripts is that OnlineStatusBar does not require the user to make an edit to update the bar.
The proposal initially met with a large amount of opposition, centered mainly around the social networking aspects of such a tool, as well as potential privacy concerns. Support for the proposal came strongly in the days after the proposal was made, however, and at the time of writing the proposal has been archived without being closed, with a 5:1 ratio in support for the implementation.
A Request for Comment was started on November 8 to decide whether or not the article Occupy Wall Street should mention that the movement has been endorsed by the American Nazi Party and the American Communist Party, as well as to determine if anti-Semitism expressed by some of the protesters warranted inclusion. Consensus against covering either point has emerged since the RfC began.
A second RfC, this one regarding the usability of a specific image, was initiated on November 11. The image in question, taken by David Shankbone and displayed to the right, is alleged to be unusable because of the logos on the flag and on the poster that the protester is holding. While large in size, the discussion has attracted only a few editors. The matter has since been brought to Media copyright questions, where an editor judged that the image was allowable under the principle of de minimis. The RfC was closed on November 16, with instructions that further concerns should be raised at Wikimedia Commons, where the image is hosted.
Finally, the lead section of the article is also in dispute, with several editors each submitting their own proposed leads for consideration. Thus far none of the suggestions have gained any significant amount of support, and a formal Request for Comment has not been filed on the matter.
A Request for Comment was opened on November 4 asking the community to decide whether or not NOTCENSORED protects "incidental material" from being removed from articles. The RfC mentioned a number of articles in which disputes over images have erupted, including Pregnancy and Muhammad, but did not actually define what the author meant by "incidental material". A number of threads were subsequently opened below the RfC in attempts to resolve that question. With the discussion largely ground to a halt, the view that NOTCENSORED does protect material from being removed has more support than the alternative by a 3:2 margin.
We're pulling an all-nighter in the university library with WikiProject Academic Journals. Started in February 2007, the project has grown to include a long list of participants maintaining over 9,000 pages covering academic journals, publishers, societies, conferences, prizes, and monographs. To help fill holes in Wikipedia's coverage, the project keeps lists of missing journals and missing journals that have been cited in Wikipedia articles. In addition to creating and improving articles, the project tries to promote the use of citations, particularly the {{cite journal}} template. We interviewed Headbomb and DGG.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Academic Journals? Do you specialize in a specific academic field?
What are some of the difficulties of improving articles about academic journals? Has the project struggled with promoting articles to FA and GA status? Are some academic disciplines better covered on Wikipedia?
In terms of coverage, I would say that Math, Physics, and Astronomy are ahead of the curve, but Medicine, Psychology, and Biology are severely lacking. I haven't paid attention much to Law journals, but I suspect they get "average-ish" coverage.
How frequently does the project deal with issues about notability and conflict of interest? How easy is it to show that an academic journal has received substantial coverage in other publications?
Also unlike in several other areas on Wikipedia, I think WikiProject Journals is more welcoming of those "COI editors" because several of them end up saving us massive amounts of work with article creation, updating articles with the latest information (impact factors, editors, etc.), and so on. So if we have an intern from e.g. Cell Press taking care of Category:Cell Press academic journals, then that's 11 journals we don't need to monitor for vandalism, outdatedness, etc.
In addition to improving articles about journals, the project supports and recommends that Wikipedians use the {{cite journal}} template. How widespread have these citations become? What kinds of citation mistakes do you find yourself correcting most frequently?
|volume=33 p.58 rather than |volume=33 |page=58). Luckily AWB and bots such as CitationCleanerBot help a lot with those tasks.The project maintains a massive list of red links for missing journals. Have you had any success reducing this list? What kind of resources does the project need to tackle a task of this magnitude?
Is there substantial crossover membership with other academic or literary projects? Does WikiProject Academic Journals collaborate with any other projects?
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 toot the horn of a military publication. In the meantime, get some R&R in the archive.
Reader comments
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The Napoleonic Wars (nom) were a series of wars declared against Napoleon's French Empire by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815. As a continuation of the wars sparked by the French Revolution of 1789, they revolutionised European armies and played out on an unprecedented scale, mainly due to the application of modern mass conscription. The portal includes rotations of selected battles, pictures, and biographies. pictures above and at the bottom
Four articles were promoted to featured status:
Australian cattle dog (nom), a breed of herding dog originally developed in Australia for driving cattle over long distances across rough terrain. A medium-sized, short-coated dog, it has either brown or black hair distributed fairly evenly through a white coat, which gives the appearance of a "red" or "blue" dog. It has been nicknamed red heeler and blue heeler on the basis of this colouring and its practice of moving reluctant cattle by nipping at their heels. Mdk572 coordinated the work of many editors in preparing the article, and shepherded it through the FAC process. The Signpost asked her how she became interested in the breed:
Amundsen's South Pole expedition (nom). Nominator Brianboulton says, "Almost 100 years ago a team of Norwegian explorers led by Roald Amundsen became the first to reach the South Pole, narrowly preceding a British expedition led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott. Amundsen's party returned safely, Scott's men died on their return journey. This tragedy overshadowed Amundsen's achievement for decades; many thought that he had stolen an unfair march on Scott by being less than honest about his expedition's objectives. Here is the story of his expedition".
Epsilon Eridani (nom), a star with an orange hue only 10.5 light years away – the third closest of the individual stars or star systems visible to the naked eye and the closest star known to host a planet. Its age is estimated at less than a billion years, compared with the Sun's 5 billion years. Despite being smaller and less massive than Sol, its stellar winds are up to 30 times stronger. (RJHall)
Persoonia lanceolata (nom), created and expanded by Casliber. Commonly known as lance-leaf geebung, it is a shrub native to the mid-eastern region of the Australian continent. The plant lives in sandstone-based nutrient-deficient soil in the dry sclerophyll forest. After a fire, it can regenerate itself using seed banks stored on the ground.
One list was promoted: Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children (nom) (nominated by Albacore). This is an honour presented at the Grammy Awards – a ceremony that was established in 1958 and was originally called the Gramophone Awards – to recording artists for works containing quality "spoken word" performances aimed at children. Among the recipients are former US President Bill Clinton, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and actor Sophia Loren, for their work on the album Wolf Tracks and Peter and the Wolf. The award was given to Audrey Hepburn in 1994, just after her death. By coincidence, a famous image of the actor was promoted to featured status this week. picture at right
Three images were promoted. Please click on "nom" to view medium-sized images:
Audrey Hepburn (nom; related article) (1929–93), the great British actor in her 20s, by an unknown photographer. This was a publicity shot for the 1957 film Love in the Afternoon. As nominator J Milburn said, "a striking photo of a striking woman". picture at right
Qasr Kharana in Jordan (nom; related article), close to the border with Saudi Arabia. It is believed to have been built sometime before the early 8th century, and is one of the earliest examples of Islamic architecture in the region. Reviewer Materialscientist wrote that this is a "remote historical jewel". Its purpose remains unclear today. "Castle" is a misnomer as the building's internal arrangement does not suggest a military use, and slits in its wall could not have been designed as balistraria, or arrow slits. It could have been a caravanserai or a resting place for traders, but lacks the water source such buildings usually had close by and is not on a major trade route. It is well-preserved, whatever its original use. The photographer, Wikimedian High Contrast, took this picture in 2009.
Patrouille de France (nom; related article), the French Acrobatic Patrol, is the precision aerobatic demonstration team of the French Air Force. Established in 1931, it is one of the world's oldest and most skilled demonstration teams, and is noted for the presence of women in the team of pilots. In this image, the pilots are captured flying the Dassault-Breguet/Dornier Alpha Jet in full formation. (created by Wikimedian Łukasz Golowanow).
Two cases remain open, Abortion and Betacommand 3.
After several weeks of low activity, Abortion entered the voting phase this Tuesday when the drafting arbitrators, Jclemens and Coren proposed 17 principles, 11 findings of fact and 16 remedies. Some of these appear to be quite unusual, notably a mandatory three year semi-protection for the relevant articles (including even the talk pages) and the opening of a structured discussion co-ordinated by the Committee with the intent of resolving the naming dispute once and for all. Many users, including several very established ones, are also set to receive bans of various sorts. Stay tuned to next week's arbitration report for the final results!
Nominations for candidates wishing to stand in the 2011 elections to the Committee are due to close by midnight tonight UTC. At the time of writing, sixteen candidates had stepped forward (see "News and notes").
Reader comments
Two hackathons were held simultaneously over the weekend, one in Mumbai, India, and another in the British seaside town of Brighton. The former was designed to coincide with WikiConference India, a major meetup for editors interested in the expansion in Wikimedia's presence in India (see "In the news").
The Mumbai Hackathon featured work on the Narayam extension, allowing editors to work with non-Latin scripts more easily within MediaWiki. The WebFonts extension, set to be deployed to several wikis on 12 December and aimed at eliminating the "square box" character phenomenon by taking advantage of the latest web technologies, was also tested. Unfortunately, the typeface used for a number of Indic scripts was found to be lacking for certain characters, prompting a number of bug reports to be sent to its maintainer Red Hat.
Mumbai also saw work on the Kiwix reader, India-MobileFrontend tie-ins and, more broadly, the hackathon helped to share knowledge among the large number of potential developers and contributors at the event. Overall, internationalisation team member Gerard Meijssen was led to comment that "the [India] hackathon proved as always that when you bring great people together special things can and do happen." Among others, the hackathon was attended by WMF Volunteer Development Co-ordinator Sumana Harihareswara and staff developers Brandon Harris, Tomasz Finc and Patrick Reilly.
The smaller Brighton Hackathon had fewer participants, with work on creating a standalone version of MediaWiki within the Vagrant framework and on bugsmashing (approximately 25 bugs were resolved), among other projects. In attendance were staff developers Roan Kattouw, Antoine Musso and Sam Reed, along with a number of other volunteer developers, Wikimedians and members of the wider free culture movement (notes from Saturday, notes from Sunday).
In March 2007, a method for having horizontal lists – especially those in navboxes – rendered as proper, semantically-correct, standards-compliant and more accessible HTML lists was proposed by Andy Mabbett. The following month, he created the {{flatlist}} template for this purpose. In those days, however, support for the necessary CSS styling was severely lacking in some browsers. In March this year, Andy again asked for help to resolve the outstanding issues, but poor CSS support in older Microsoft browsers was still a problem. Despite this, editors increasingly began to add the flatlist template to navboxes.
This November, discussion resumed, prompting Erwin Dokter to do a complete overhaul, using CSS that is supported by all modern browsers, along with a few lines of JavaScript to extend support to older browsers, to achieve horizontal lists without recourse to the previous method of using resource-hungry templates such as {{nowrap}} and {{•}}. This method quickly gained the consensus needed to roll out the revised format for horizontal lists en masse. Currently, several editors are in the process of converting navboxes to use the new hlist class, replacing most inline templates. A bot to complete the task has also been requested.
The advantages extend to both readers and editors. In addition to easier editing of navboxes and speedier page-load times, users of screen readers will no longer hear the confusing sequence "one dot two dot three dot..." and instead hear just the list items. Any type of list is permitted, and nested lists are also supported. For more details, see WP:HLIST.
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.
