On 18 January (from 05:00 UTC) the English Wikipedia joined thousands of other web sites in protesting SOPA and PIPA by blacking out its own content for 24 hours.[1] Exceptions from the blackout were made for read-only access to pages about the protest and articles relating to SOPA and PIPA. The purpose of the blackout was twofold: to raise public awareness, and to encourage people to share their views with their elected representatives.
English Wikipedia's blackout was supported by dozens of other Wikimedia communities, typically with a blackout banner, as recorded at Wikipedia:SOPA initiative/Actions by other communities. Many other websites participated in the protests against SOPA and PIPA on 18 January, but English Wikipedia's blackout featured prominently in media coverage (Wikipedia:SOPA initiative/Media) – see "In the News" in this issue of the Signpost.
After the blackout the Wikimedia Foundation's Brandon Harris posted a blog entry on the blackout implementation process, focussing on the blackout screen and banner design considerations.
Mobile service provider Orange has made a three-year commitment, in partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation, to provide access to Wikipedia without data charges to customers in 20 countries in the Middle East and Africa. The service will initially be offered in Tunisia and Cote d'Ivoire, beginning in a few months. The partnership between Orange and the Wikimedia Foundation is service-based and does not involve money.
Wikipedia access is provided via a lightweight "Wikipedia Zero", developed by the Wikimedia Foundation; however, the Orange service is not being branded as "Wikipedia Zero", as that may cause confusion with Facebook Zero. Wikipedia is provided as text-only, reducing bandwidth loads, and if a user clicks on an image, they will incur data charges (with warning).
Last week's 24 hour Wikipedia blackout protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act was heavily covered by the world's international media. A full page listing media covering of the blackout is on Meta-Wiki.
Before the protest started, Jimmy Wales gave interviews to CNN, and appeared on BBC Radio 5 Live, and on BBC Two's Newsnight to debate Michael O'Leary, a representative of the Motion Picture Association of America. After the blackout concluded, the Bits blog of The New York Times interviewed Jimmy. Wikinews interviewed Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner.
The blackout led Seth Borenstein at MSNBC to wonder what it would be like if the Internet went down. The article claims that for a day or so, there wouldn't be any major physical harm, but after a few days it would lead to economic crisis and mass unemployment. As a response to the blackout, The Guardian launched a blog feature called "Guardipedia", where bloggers responded to questions using printed copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica and Who's Who as an alternative to Wikipedia. The Signpost noted that the Britannica volumes were out-of-date, and were not much help in answering a question about South African history: "Apparently Nelson Mandela is still in jail? That's what the book says, anyway."
Twitterers gently mocked Wikipedia's absence with a hashtag called "#FactsWithoutWikipedia" where people made up outlandish claims. MSNBC reports on doug_gross' 'fact': "Marc Zuckerberg (real name, Horblatt Snarfleblurp) was an alien scout sent to Earth to ruin human productivity." Russia Today posted more tweets:
The meme was also taken up by a number of other news sources: Now. Here. This., the blog of Time Out London, pulled some choice London facts like "Sophie Ellis-Bextor once ran for a Lib Dem councillor seat in West London" and "Ed Miliband is a London based Alt-Folk band". IrishCentral.com quoted tweets posted under the derived hashtag #irishFactsWithoutWikipedia including "The IRA was a splinter group of The Richard and Judy Book Club that just got a bit out of hand". SBNation.com quoted a variety of NASCAR-related phony facts.
There was a significant amount of post-blackout coverage, with one focus on US senators who changed their minds over SOPA, as well as how SOPA and PIPA would affect the Internet as we know it.
Reader comments
In the WikiProject Report's four years of existence, the Signpost has never interviewed a Canadian project. This week we end that drought. WikiProject Toronto covers Canada's largest city and the surrounding areas of Ontario. Started in January 2003 using WikiProject London as a template, WikiProject Toronto has grown to include 20 pieces of Featured material and 39 Good Articles. WikiProject Toronto is the parent project for WikiProject Toronto Blue Jays and a child of WikiProject Cities and WikiProject Canadian Communities. The project maintains a to-do list, items for recognizing valuable contributors, and a watchlist. This week we interviewed Eelamstylez77.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Toronto? Are you a Maple Leafs fan? Do you contribute to any other WikiProjects related to Ontario or Canada?
In general, projects covering Canadian cities, provinces, and infrastructure do not appear to be as active as those in Britain and the United States. Why have WikiProjects had such difficulty thriving in Canada? Do you feel Canadian Wikipedians focus more on other topics?
WikiProject Toronto is home to 12 Featured Articles, 8 Featured Lists, and 39 Good Articles. Have you contributed to any of these articles? What are some challenges facing editors as they try to improve articles about Toronto?
With Toronto serving as Canada's business and financial hub, does the project deal with many articles about Canadian businesses based in Toronto? Are there any challenges to maintaining and keeping promotional language out of these business articles?
Toronto is represented in seven major league sports, including the only Major League Baseball and National Basketball Association teams in Canada. How well are Toronto's sports teams covered on Wikipedia?
With a variety of educational institutions located in Toronto, including the University of Toronto and the Royal Conservatory of Music, have there been any efforts to recruit college and university students to improve Wikipedia's articles on Toronto? Could the GLAM project do more to attract contributions from Toronto galleries, libraries, archives, and museums?
What are WikiProject Toronto's most urgent needs? How can a new contributor help today?
Anything else you'd like to add?
Next week's interview will be prehistoric. Until then, search for the records of extinct species in the archive.
Reader comments
In our ongoing series of interviews with editors who contribute to knowledge on little-represented areas, this week The Signpost interviewed Muhammad Mahdi Karim. Muhammad is an avid participant at Featured picture candidates and has shot featured pictures related to his homeland of Tanzania, his current home in India, and Islam.
On dealing with systemic bias:
I don't do anything particularly out of my way to combat the bias. I guess due to my location and the culture I live in, what I consider everyday life, is what is under-represented at wiki. One thing I noticed is some prominent Islamic figures don't have wiki articles or if they had, these have been deleted due to a lack of written sources to back them up. Pictures of such people are thus not put to use.
On representation of Tanzania:
When it comes to Tanzania, I think we may have more than enough insects to keep us going for a while :)
I feel pictures of animals and architecture/landscapes from the eastern part of Tanzania (Dar es Salaam and surrounding areas) are somewhat covered. We are short on pictures of politicians, culture and perhaps landscapes from the northern, western and southern parts. Unfortunately, I don't see us getting many pictures of politicians due to their inaccessibility to photographers like me. The rest of Tanzania could be covered but one would require to travel the country as volunteers from these areas are unlikely.
Photographing in some areas/events in Tanzania require a mandatory media pass. As such, most governments buildings like the Karimjee Hall or the Bunge building (parliament) are out of my reach. I have been stopped a few times and scolded for shooting things even from public space! It would benefit photographers if Wikipedia/Wikimedia offered a media pass to recognized photographers to avoid such skirmishes.
On photography and Islam:
Photography in some sects of Islam is strongly discouraged. Thus taking pictures in some places such as near the Kaaba is very difficult. When I was there, I snuck in a mobile phone and snapped the picture at the top, which is one of the most widely used images of the Kaaba on the net. Unfortunately, this image was not featured due to the quality of the picture. At the nomination, some users maintained that the image should not be featured as a better one was bound to come. It has been over 3 years now and we still do not have any featured image for Islam's holiest place. This is a challenge I face from non-Muslims who expect the same quality of images to be delivered regardless of the limitations.
Some sects of Islam are particularly against depiction of humans or animals. When I was tasked by a potential buyer to get a picture of a Muslim praying, some Muslims I asked refused to pose for me. I in turn felt awkward about asking others.
My mosque in Dar es Salaam has no problem with me taking pictures but every once in a while I do get a weird look from a person wondering perhaps why I was taking pictures and not worshiping.
Two featured articles were delisted:
One list was promoted:
One featured portal was promoted:
One featured topic was promoted:
Five images were promoted. Please click on "nom" to view medium-sized images:
The Arbitration Committee opened no new cases this week, and closed no cases, leaving four open.
On 19 January, the Arbitration Committee announced that it will begin accepting applications for membership on the Audit Subcommittee ("AUSC"). AUSC was established by the committee to investigate complaints concerning the use of CheckUser and Oversight privileges on the English Wikipedia, and to provide better monitoring and supervision of the CheckUser and Oversight positions along with the use of the applicable tools.
There are three vacancies in non-ArbCom positions on the subcommittee, due to the election of past members to the full committee itself. Applicants for the positions will be reviewed by arbitrators in internal discussions before the community is invited to submit questions to candidates. On 29 February, the committee will announce the appointments.
More information on application requirements and submissions can be found on the AUSC appointment page. Applications must be in by 31 January.
This case was opened to address user conduct over a dispute on what depictions of Muhammad, if any, are appropriate to display. New arbitrator AGK published a proposed decision in this case on 20 January, which was his first drafted decision. While a great deal of proposals involve sanctions on disruptive editors, the largest debate among arbitrators have been over proposed principles to guide the handling of future disputes in this area. As of publication, Newyorkbrad's proposed principle on editorial decisions has attracted the greatest support in this area, with a total of eight arbitrators signing on. The principle in part explains that "reminding fellow editors that 'Wikipedia is not censored' will often be the beginning, not the end, of a well-informed analysis regarding inclusion or exclusion of content."
A final decision may be published within a week.
The Betacommand 3 case remained at the proposed decision phase this week. Originally the case was opened to address the multitude of sanctions in effect on this editor. None of the proposed remedies, ranging from site bans to editing restrictions, has garnered adequate support to pass. A motion to close was withdrawn yesterday as the committee continues to work towards consensus. The newest proposal again divided the Committee, so far, in a 5 to 4 vote.
This case, which is one of the most active at present, was initially opened due to the actions of several administrators in relation to a user who was blocked over perceived incivility. The evidence and workshop pages were closed after submission deadlines passed. A proposed decision is due to be posted by the end of the week.
This open case was brought to the Committee by an editor to appeal a site ban that was imposed by Jimmy Wales. The expected proposed decision, as mentioned in previous Signpost coverage, is yet to be posted. The tentative date for release had been 16 January. Nevertheless, discussion has continued on the workshop and workshop talk pages.
Developers working on MediaWiki 1.19, the latest version of the software on which Wikimedia wikis run, are now welcoming beta testers (as announced, for example, on Wikimedia Commons' village pump). According to the release's page on MediaWiki.org, it will feature improvements to the distribution of CSS styling, block log searching, timezone recognition and diff readability (as previously reported); and increased support for different relational database management systems and different languages and scripts. Over a hundred bugs are also expected to be fixed in the release (a reasonably comprehensive list of these is available).
The lengthened testing period (and more generally, the broadness with which testing is being carried out) is designed to head off the kind of implementation problems that have marked previous deployments. Work on reviewing the 1.19 code prior to deployment slowed this week, under the burden of SOPA blackout preparations. As a result, the January 31 deadline for code review will almost certainly be missed; at time of writing, 177 revisions are still in need of review compared to the target of just 44 (full chart).
The importance of 1.19 could well extend beyond its actual deployment; it is currently slated as the final SVN release before a faster, Git-based release cycle kicks in (details). As such, how well the existing process functions is likely to significantly influence the many choices that will be made during the migration to Git.
Another problematic issue of interest to wikitech-l regulars this week was referenced in a short exchange between staff developer Timo Tijhof (better known by his alias Krinkle) and bugmeister and general development process overseer Mark Hershberger. The issue centres on the tricky matter of the correct balance between backwards compatibility and modernisation in the realm of JavaScript loading.
Since the introduction of ResourceLoader in MediaWiki 1.17, core scripts and (some) gadgets are loaded as 'modules'. One of these modules is 'mw.util', on which many user scripts now rely for proper operation. The problem has arisen because, in the past, little effort was made to economise the loading of these modules, and they were assumed to be present when another script needed them (including Common.js). For the past 18 months, however, much more time has been devoted to streamlining the loading process, allowing for faster loading times and a reduced physical footprint for each page: a boon for those on slow Internet connections.
However, this improvement makes it necessary for scripts and script writers to declare which modules their script relies on (known as 'dependencies'). Officially, this has been mandatory since the introduction of ResourceLoader, but until now, these modules were already loaded by other core scripts, allowing scripts to run without errors.
Many scripts have been, or will need to be, updated to conform to the ResourceLoader specification, however. That is ultimately where the problem of backwards compatibility comes in: how to transition to the new standard while not breaking functionality of existing scripts, particularly on smaller wikis that could have lain untouched for years. "If we upgrade MediaWiki and we know that people are going to complain because a widespread dependency (like mw.util) disappeared, let's [avoid making that happen]" wrote Hershberger, "[Nobody wants a] horribly shocking experience after we upgrade the cluster". The best way to achieve that without largely nullifying the performance gains from modernisation is still being discussed (see this bug report).
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.
