On October 26, 2011, Representative Lamar S. Smith introduced the "Stop Online Piracy Act" (SOPA) in the United States House of Representatives. The bill would give the U.S. Department of Justice the power to more closely pursue online copyright infringement, allowing them to bar Internet-based services such as PayPal from working with websites accused of infringement, blocking search engine results for these sites, and requiring Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to the sites completely; it may even make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a felony. The proposed bill has met with protests from a significant number of major websites, while drawing support from the Hollywood production houses whose works are being infringed. The Washington Post depicted the bill as a battle between the old media and new.
Discussions on the proposed bill raged across Wikipedia this week. Jimbo Wales's talk page was flooded by editors arguing over the bill after he seemingly proposed a server lockdown, similar to the Italian lockdown in October over a similar bill that was circulating in their parliament. A straw poll at the Village pump in support of the idea failed to gain traction and was quickly closed.
So far, the Wikipedia community has only achieved consensus to do something, with suggestions ranging from standing by, to shutting down Wikipedia for a day, to replacing the Main Page with an anti-SOPA demonstration notice. In a post on the foundation-l mailing list, Kat Walsh (mindspillage) crystallized the Wikimedian position on the issue, saying:
| “ | Wikimedia projects are organizing and summarizing and collecting the world's knowledge. We're putting it in context, and showing people how to make sense of it. But that knowledge has to be published somewhere for anyone to find and use it. Where it can be censored without due process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikimedia. Where you can only speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or if your views are pre-approved by someone who does, the same narrow set of ideas already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to. | ” |
General Counsel Geoff Brigham has posted a legal overview of the law on the Wikimedia Foundation's blog, as well as a rough schedule of the Congressional process of considering the bill.
In an IRC office meeting on December 15, Brigham and Sue Gardner discussed the Wikimedia Foundation's stance on the issue (summarized here), stating: "The official position of the Wikimedia Foundation is that we are opposed to SOPA ... [but] we believe that the community should make up its own mind about whether to take any kind of on-wiki action." Gardner said the Wikimedia Foundation will follow community consensus in any actions against the proposed bill while doing its best to provide legal interpretation and guidance. Meanwhile, community action has shifted over to the new SOPA initiative page, a workshop to explore the various actions that the community could take in opposition to the bill, and the Wikimedia Foundation has routed all of its updates on the bill there.
The Wikimedia Foundation has released its Annual Report for the 1 July 2010 to 30 June 2011 fiscal year (see also the Foundation's recent November report and financial audit). The report details:
Other case stories include QRpedia, the recognition of Wikipedians as officially accredited photographers, and a breakdown of financials from the audit earlier this year. The report is available in six language versions—Arabic, Japanese, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish—which reportedly "took some serious coordination to time translation, design, production and wiki publishing." Printed copies will be available in the Foundation headquarters within the week.
Shiju Alex, a Wikimedia Foundation consultant for Indic Initiatives, has released statistics on contributions from Indic language Wikipedia projects this week. The report is subdivided into three sections:
The spread to Wikipedia of the online furore over the potential impact of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a piece of legislation being considered by the United States Congress, has been well-marked in the media. Although the campaigning against the bill by prominent Internet organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Google, PayPal and Tumblr had been afoot for some time and the matter had been debated on a small-scale by Wikimedians (see "News and notes"), it was Jimmy Wales' instigation of a poll to assess whether the English Wikipedia editing community had the stomach for protest that drew the interest of the online press (the precipitating discussion can be found here). Among the outlets to cover the story were CNET, The Atlantic, The Hill, and Paste magazine.
The Daily Telegraph highlighted Wales' urging of the community not to underestimate their power to terrify Congress members by inciting a "popular uprising" in protest of the Act. VentureBeat tracked early support for a putative strike at 87% of respondents. The intrepid and attentive The Register proffered an incisive taxonomy of respondent sentiment beyond simple support and opposition: "Confused, Uncertain, LOL, and Fuck knows", and The Daily Mail characterised the informal poll as a threat by Wales on his "private Wikipedia blog" (user talkpage) to "turn off" the site.
MSNBC's Technolog asked whether a Wikipedia blackout could "save the Internet". TheStreet.com worried about the possible impact on students working on their final papers of the academic term, while SF Weekly's The Snitch remarked "it seems like pulling the plug on Wikipedia might not do much more than piss off people who just want to find out who played bass on the Rolling Stones' last album or which Simpsons episode featured Krusty's racist standup routine". ZDnet's iGeneration proposed nonetheless that it might be worth the disruption but ended its article on a note portended with doom:
If the SOPA bill does come in to play, Wikipedia may end up on more than a voluntary, short-term blackout.
When Wikipedia was created, everything was hard on the Internet. We were no harder than anything else. But today most forms of interaction online are easier than editing a wiki article and that creates a barrier to entry that doesn’t do anybody any good
— Sue Gardner, as quoted by The Economist
This week saw the launch of a trial for Wikipedia's first long-heralded "what you see is what you get" editing interface, the Visual editor (see "Technology report" for in-depth coverage). The new interface is intended to make the site's technically demanding wiki syntax less intimidating to potential contributors, and moved The Economist to state that "it would be no overstatement to call it the most significant change in Wikipedia’s short history". The newspaper's tech blog Babbage, which had early access to the project's sandbox, drew a contrast with a site at the other end of the accessibility spectrum, Facebook:
If HTML is a vast open field on which you can wander in any direction unfettered by restrictions, then Facebook is a city tram line, structured and restrictive of where those using it can go. Wikis fall somewhere in the middle, allowing a great deal of freedom within certain limits. Think of it as a network of pathways and cycle lanes where your route is based on the specific needs of your journey. The wiki syntax assumed people were familiar with the lay of the land. Visual editor is akin to handing out maps at the entrance.
The column cast the development in the context of a series of recent Wikimedia Foundation initiatives aimed at making the site a more welcoming environment, such as the wikilove extension. "It is hard to say whether that will be enough", it concluded,"[b]ut if things go well, Wikipedia’s famously grumpy senior editors should have their hands full once again."
The development was noted in characteristically concise terms by the Wikipedia-fans at The Register ("Wikipedia simplifies article editing for world+dog"), who disparaged the sandbox as "decidedly beta and somewhat buggy" and worried that "the thought of making it brain-dead simple to change a Wikipedia entry gives us pause". PC World was more optimistic, entreating readers to help test the interface and "usher in a new, user-friendlier editor for the benefit of all". Ubergizmo allowed that "the introduction of these new tools will probably help introduce a new generation of editors", but wondered whether they would "lead to more useless pages and errors". The development was also covered by The Verge and CIOL.com.
Coverage of discussions on the Stop Online Piracy Act can be found at this week's "News and notes" section.
A number of discussions emerged from the Harvard/Science Po poll advertised on a Wikipedia-wide top banner on December 8. As detailed in last week's "News and notes", anger was expressed over several issues: that an advertisement was run on Wikipedia for an organization other than the Wikimedia Foundation, that the discussion that led to the posting of the banner took place on Meta, not on the English Wikipedia, and that the study linked responses to the survey takers' usernames, edit counts, and user privileges. The discussions on Meta included criticism of the way that payments for completing the study were set up. Threads were also started at Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents and Central Notices. Discussions on the poll also took place on the Administrators' noticeboard in March, when the authors sought permission to leave messages on the user talk pages of several thousand editors. The idea was tabled after significant opposition. Plans for proceeding with the poll, and what form it would take, are still uncertain.
A Templates for discussion (TfD) debate was opened on {{Foreign character}} on December 6, arguing that the template is unneeded because non-English characters can be searched for, and that the template is dangerous because it offers non-neutral and potentially misleading advice. The debate generated a large amount of discussion for a TfD, with more than two dozen editors commenting, three-quarters advocating for the deletion of the template. Two additional and very similar templates, {{Foreignchars}} and {{Foreignchars2}}, were also placed for deletion in the same nomination. {{Foreign character}} is used on just over 1,650 pages, and the other two combined are used on just over 100 pages.
This week, we interviewed the outspoken members of WikiProject Economics. The project was created when WikiProject Business and Economics split in February 2007, also resulting in the creation of the sister project WikiProject Business. WikiProject Economics is home to 12 pieces of featured material, 2 A-class articles, and 47 Good Articles. Our interviewees this week were Kiefer.Wolfowitz, Fifelfoo, and Protonk.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Economics? Do you have any academic degrees or work experience in economics?
The terminology and concepts behind economics can be overwhelming to a layperson. How do you approach writing or rewriting articles that are sufficiently detailed but can be understood by readers who do not have prior knowledge of the subject? What role does the project play in helping non-experts write articles about economics?
Charts and diagrams are often used to illustrate articles about economic concepts. How easily can someone contribute graphics like these? How can new contributors find articles that need charts or diagrams? Are there any photographic images that would be appropriate in economics articles?
There are four Wikipedia books that fall under the scope of WikiProject Economics: Economics, Macroeconomic Theory, the Federal Reserve System, and World Trade. Have you contributed to any of these books? What are your feelings on the future of Wikipedia books?
What are the project's most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?
Anything else you'd like to add?
Next week, we'll decorate the tree of life. Until then, categorize every living thing in the archive.
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This week, The Signpost interviews Farwestern, who has contributed numerous panoramas to the project (many of them featured pictures). He gives some background information on his new featured picture (above), and shares his favourite panoramas and his tips for those who wish to make better panoramas.
The new featured picture: This new featured picture was the best shot from three climbs of the mountain. I tried earlier in August 2009 and made the summit but the conditions were very smoggy due to a wildfire in north eastern Oregon. In this October attempt, conditions were just perfect (and that doesn't happen very often in Washington State): right after a snowstorm and with a temperature of 24 °F (−4 °C). A subsequent attempt yielded footage that didn't have the "wow" factor that this one did. So, you see, the physical energy, time, and effort expended was truly only something that a dedicated artist might expend a few times in a lifetime.
The mountain has a special place in my family's story. My father was once a mountain climber and journalist for the Tacoma News Tribune. He climbed the mountain both before and after the explosion. In 1980 he rode with President Carter and select members of the press, via helicopter, to survey the site to educate the president about the disaster. My father considers his coverage of the event to be the highlight of his career, and my brother and I grew up exploring the wilderness around the mountain and grew to love and respect it.
Favourite panoramas: It's hard for me to choose a single favorite. I aspire to communicate the essence of a place as holistically as possible, and that inspired me towards capturing everything; in the form of many 360-degree panoramas, which are like virtual worlds and capture a special time and place in a way that really wasn't possible before recent technology. However, if I had to choose only four images it would be the new featured picture, this one of Mount Ellinor, and two on my own site: Hurricane Ridge covered in snow and El Capitan at night. I'm working on a project to create an interactive experience that captures many of the highlights of the western United States. A lot of these images aren't yet published on Wikipedia, but they will be soon.
Creating panoramas: My suggestions for those interested in capturing panoramas are threefold:
- I spend huge amounts of time studying topographical maps of various outdoor areas. When I have a good understanding of the geography then I can usually predict places that will yield good results. You can usually tell where sunsets will look best by looking at where the sun will be relative to the environment. Then you can plan adventures around ideal setups. There is always that random-inspiration factor that sometimes happens but I find I am more "lucky" when I plan or do research about the place before going.
- Worry less about the camera and more about composition. Panoramas are a different art because the idea is to capture as much as possible in a creative, beautiful way. Anyone can find a single, beautiful angle in almost any place, but imagine how hard it must be to take an ordinary place and make everything there interesting or beautiful. The classic tricks apply, like framing, rule-of-thirds, lines, contrast, but some new ones also, like how to get the sun in the shot without flare (by stitching two photos together: one with the sun blocked, and one without, so the top-half can be inserted over the non-flaired bottom).
- Go places that other people aren't going. This is probably the biggest thing I try to do. A lot of the art is in getting to, and returning safely from distant, remote places. Images that offer something new are interesting. You can change a perspective by showing a common thing at night, or from a strange projection.
Eight featured articles were promoted this week:
Two featured lists were promoted this week:
Eight featured pictures were promoted this week:
What made this election notable was the continuation of the downward trend in voter numbers, to just 729, down from 854 in 2010 and from nearly a thousand in 2009 and 2008. The number of candidates too has fallen steadily, from 28 in 2008 to just 17 this year. Opinions varied on why the voter participation rate is so low, from the overall sagging in editor retention to the decision not to run a site banner advertising the election.
The pie graphs to the right show the aggregate proportions of the support, oppose, and no vote/neutral votes by all voters. They indicate the marked effect of SecurePoll in increasing "voting intensity". Before the use of SecurePoll, which made expressing an opinion on each candidate mandatory, more than three-quarters of voters' potential to support or oppose went unused.[1] In 2009, the first year of software-assisted voting, this fell to less than 45%, then 38% last year, settling on 35% this year. Because of this increase in voting intensity, the actual number of supports this year was 4,312 (an average of almost 6 supports per voter), whereas in 2008 that number was only 3550 (3.6 supports per voter). We do, in fact, have much more voter engagement than we used to, in this respect.
In 2011, Courcelles was the most popular candidate: 59% of voters clicked Support for him, while the seven other successful candidates achieved 55, 51, 51, 48, 42, 47, and 43% support respectively. Again, voters appeared to favour editors who have already had experience on the Committee: five of the eight new arbitrators have already served in that capacity.
The eight successful candidates are:
A case was requested this week concerning Muhammad Images, after long-festering discord over which depictions if any of the prophet Muhammad are appropriate to showcase appeared to be beyond the community's ability to resolve. Fourteen parties were named and at the time of writing no arbitrators have voted to reject the case, while 7 have indicated their wish to see it opened, and a binding RfC has been mooted as a potential solution to the underlying dispute.
TimidGuy ban appeal and Betacommand 3 remained in the evidence phase, while requests for clarification were sought regarding Fringe theories, the Eastern European mailing list case and the Abortion motion.
The Signpost is seeking a regular writer for the Arbitration Report. If you have an interest in the Arbitration Committee and its proceedings and would like to see the report continue, consider applying either by emailing wikipediasignpost
gmail.com or by leaving a message in the newsroom.
Reader comments
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| “ | There is plenty of evidence that wiki-markup is a substantial barrier that prevents many people from contributing to Wikipedia and our other projects. Formal user tests, direct feedback from new editors, and anecdotal evidence collected over the past several years have made the need for a visual editor clear ... It’s the biggest and most important change to our user experience we’ve ever undertaken. | ” |
| — The Visual Editor Team, Wikimedia Foundation | ||
Tuesday saw an announcement at the Wikimedia tech blog of the deployment to a sandbox of what many see as having the potential to be a major breakthrough in making it easier to edit Wikipedia. The Visual editor project, which will provide an integrated "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) interface for wikitext, may well be in its early stages, but its demonstration version (released this week) has already attracted a great deal of attention (see "In the news" for media reaction).
At the moment, the visual editor team have focused on support for basic formatting such as bold, italics, section headings and lists, though they are continually adding to the list of supported wikitext structures. Having found native browser support lacking, they have also been forced to reimplement many features that people take for granted, including arrow-key scrolling, cut/paste, and undo/redo. A number of bugs with the editor have already been found in this round of early stage testing; many have since been fixed.
The WMF team responsible for the editor were keen to stress that the editor, which is set to launch to its first wiki in June, will allow for the seamless switch between visual and old-style direct editing modes. Nonetheless, it seems likely that hand-constructed pages will be subject to a one-off normalisation program, after which all manual edits will be silently normalised. Whole wikitext-template structures could also be phased out as part of the transition process.
The most significant limitation with the demonstration is undoubtedly that the interface only allows users to edit a small number of predefined articles, thus avoiding the problem of understanding potentially difficult wikitext. It has been this concern over backwards compatibility that has long been seen as the challenge for developers of WYSIWYG editors, of which a number of competing designs are already available. The difference this time, developers say, is that the introduction of the radically improved new parser will make all the difference when it comes to the provision of a truly comprehensive editor.
[See "In the news" for reactions from outside of the Wikimedia universe.]
While the visual editor project may have received little criticism so far, it seems that a number of other projects have not been so treated.
On Wednesday, Siebrand Mazeland – the project manager attached to the WMF localisation team – reported in his summary of the preceding WebFonts deployment (covered in brief last week) that he had received complaints over the speed of the deployment. Srikanth L, a self-admitted "critic" of the deployment, explained that one issue was whether "sufficient testing to a large user base" had really been carried out before the rollout. Mazeland responded by stressing that the Localisation team had for some time been trying to build up dedicated "language support" teams to consult with, although to little avail.
The comments came only hours after Lead Platform Architect Tim Starling relayed that he "had been hearing a lot of resentment from community members about the features team deploying extensions" without taking the time to "properly consult the community". On Monday, the recent change to image rotation had also led one upset commentator to deplore a state of affairs where staff developers seemed to make design decisions unsupported by reason (see also previous Signpost coverage). (Starling later pointed out that the recent image rotation adjustment had been a volunteer-led project that WMF developers had only been involved with in a review capacity.)
Starling's comments were made in a wider discussion about the deployment process faced by volunteers and staff developers. He recommended that to restore parity, staff developers focus on gaining wider community input, which would also yield "a huge amount of design input".
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.
https: With the resolution of bug #32028, visitors attempting to view certain Wikimedia blog "planets" will no longer be redirected away from the main site when trying (manually or automatically) to switch to the secure, https version of the site.
