| Final decision in Muhammad images case February 8, 2012 |
| German Wikipedia continues image filter protest October 31, 2011 |
| 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 |
A new chapter opened in the controversial content saga this week, as fallout from an ArbCom ruling earlier this year regarding the handling of images of Muhammad (Signpost coverage). Among other parts of its decision, the committee approved by a 6–4 vote a remedy requesting the community to establish a final consensus on the content issue, which is beyond the authority of ArbCom. This request for comment (RfC) opened on March 20.
The discussion centers around ten questions and options for how to balance Wikipedia's policies and guidelines – which themselves require interpretation – with a view widely held in significant parts of Islam that prohibits the display of images of Muhammad.
To facilitate the process of reaching a decision, the RfC provides a short summary of historical facts – for example, the differences between Shia and Sunni views on the matter, and how Wikipedia has handled the case until now. The relevant key policies to be reconciled with any decision taken are verifiability and the neutral point of view.
The renewed discussion was quickly noticed by the German Wikipedia community, which has traditionally been very skeptical of the controversial content issue, and the Kurier picked up the story within hours. The resulting discussions focused on the different tools employed by the English and German communities to deal with controversies, and how widespread problems are in relation to aniconism. It was quickly pointed out that this view is not only held in Islam but in other religions as well.
The RfC came shortly after debates on another controversial content issue: allegations of child porn. The debate had taken center stage since allegations on March 7 on Commons and the wide-ranging transwiki discussions, in which Germans also played a prominent part, led to office action against one editor, Beta M, and shifts in Meta policy.
The request for comment will close at 23:59 on April 19, after which a team of three uninvolved administrators are set to perform the task of consensus analysis. Editors interested in taking part should take into account that ArbCom has authorized the use of discretionary sanctions on "all pages relating to Muhammad, broadly interpreted."
The Wikimedia Foundation has begun the "community launch" of the new official Wikimedia merchandise store, offering Wikipedia T-shirts, hoodies, pins etc., with the goal "provid[ing] affordable high-quality merchandise to the project volunteers and the general public to reward its volunteers and spread the Wikimedia and project brands around the world", according to the FAQ by James Alexander, who recently became merchandise manager at the Foundation (moving from the Community Department).
Wikipedians have expressed the wish to be able to show their affiliation with the project by means of a Wikipedia T-shirt as early as 2001, and around the time of Wikipedia's first anniversary in January 2002, a T-shirt design vote was held (with one suggested slogan proudly proclaiming "20,000 articles created in one year"). A CafePress store was set up, but is now being discontinued in favor of the new outlet, because there "we had low-quality merchandise and made basically no money (while Cafepress made quite a lot and had rights to use our trademarks)", as Alexander explains. The new shop currently uses the Shopify platform and has a San Francisco–based contractor help with order fulfillment and shipping, but is hosted on a wikimedia.org domain.
Back in 2001, merchandise had been thought of as a possible source of income to cover the costs of hosting Wikipedia, but the annual fundraising has long been found to be a more effective means of achieving this, and the FAQ makes it clear that the shop is "not intended to become a profit center. The proceeds go back into the shop to keep costs low, subsidize shipping and help provide merch specifically to community members."
Other than through the old CafePress store, "the only normal way to get merchandise was specific real life events (Wikimania, Wiki10 etc.) or doing something special with the WMF or a chapter", says Alexander, referring to the tenth anniversary of Wikipedia last year, which – like the first anniversary – provided another impulse for the development of global Wikipedia merchandise: the Foundation developed "party packs" consisting of T-shirts, buttons and other items designed for the celebrations, and mailed them to Wikimedia chapters or other affiliated groups worldwide, gaining experience in the global delivery of such items (Signpost coverage). Affordable global shipping and the involvement of Wikimedia chapters continue to be objectives of the new shop.
James Alexander illustrates the outreach power of Wikipedia merchandise with an anecdote: "At a GLAM event late last year in NYC, four or five Wikimedians were outside the museum after meetings, talking. One of them had an old Wikipedia bag that was recognized by a girl walking by. She ran up and asked them if they 'really edited Wikipedia'. When they said yes she 'giggled', asked if she could hug them (and did), and then just said that they had no idea what the project meant for her, and ran off." To expand the current choice, community members' design ideas are being solicited, in particular for merchandise for Wikipedia's sister projects.
On March 21, Sue Gardner, the Wikimedia Foundation's executive director, announced a change in the structure of WMF departments and the creation of a new editor engagement experiments team to look at new options to tackle declining participation in Wikimedia projects.
The shake-up notably sees the disintegration of the current Community department, from which the new team's members are mostly drawn. The unit, created in June 2010 to engage with and support an expansive vision of the Wikimedia community that included readers and donors (Signpost coverage), will in the future focus on fundraising. Some of its remaining staff members will be moved to the Engineering and the Global Development departments.
The announcement sparked discussions on foundation-l, questioning whether it is wise to focus primarily on quantifying wiki activities rather than widening the focus to include the quality of new contributors and the costs of experimentation in the area. The departmental changes as such are aimed at pooling resources on issues related to projects such as the Visual Editor, a context in which the new team is supposed "to conduct many quick experiments", and will take effect on April 16.
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This week, we rocked it out with WikiProject Rock Music. Started in June 2006, the project has grown to include 62 Featured Articles, 45 Featured Lists, and 213 Good Articles. Project members maintain a to-do list and work on reducing rock-related unreferenced biographies of living people. The project has two task forces and a variety of sub-projects covering sub-genres and individual bands. We interviewed Sabrebd.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Rock Music? Do you prefer a specific sub-genre of rock music? What is your favorite band?
How active do you feel the project has been over the past few months? Do efforts to improve rock articles tend to be decentralized? Are there any obstacles that may be preventing the project from growing?
The project is home to 62 Featured Articles, 45 Featured Lists, and 209 Good Articles. Have you contributed to any of these articles? What are some challenges to improving rock music articles to FA or GA status?
How frequently do you deal with a band's fans, publicists, or detractors adding puffery or vandalism to articles? How do you typically respond? Have any editors you've dealt with for point of view (POV) or conflict of interest (COI) issues later become productive members of the project?
How much does the membership of WikiProject Rock Music overlap with projects for other music genres? Does WikiProject Rock Music collaborate with any other projects?
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 report about the reporters. Until then, explore Signpost history in the archive.
Reader comments
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Nine featured articles were promoted this week:
One featured list was promoted this week:
Eight featured pictures were promoted this week:
The Arbitration Committee neither opened nor closed any cases this week, leaving one open.
This case was brought to the Committee by SarekOfVulcan to "break the back" of a long-running dispute involving pages governing article naming and the Manual of Style (MoS). The case was closed on March 24 after a week of voting by arbitrators. Passing principles include a statement on the status of the MoS guideline, addressing how it is not "a collection of hard rules" and how changes to MoS pages should reflect consensus.
Beyond the principles in the decision, arbitrators found that Pmanderson has had a long history of conduct issues and had abused an alternate account in the course of the dispute, and that Born2cycle's behaviour in the topic area has hindered attempts to resolve the dispute. As a result, Pmanderson was indefinitely restricted from engaging in discussions and edits relating to the Manual of Style or policy concerning article titles, and Born2cycle was warned to be more open to compromise. In addition, discretionary sanctions have been authorised for all pages relating to MoS and article titles policy.
A review was opened of the Race and intelligence case as a compromise between opening a new case and ruling by motion. The review is intended to be a simplified form of a full case and will cover conduct issues that have purportedly arisen since the closure of the 2010 arbitration case. The evidence phase is expected to close soon, to be followed by the posting of the proposed decision by next week.
A team of social computing researchers based at Stanford and Cornell University studied how users evaluate each other in social media.[1] Their paper, presented at the 5th ACM Web Search and Data Mining Conference (WSDM '12), focuses on three main case studies: Wikipedia, StackOverflow and Epinions. User-to-user evaluations, the authors note, are jointly influenced by the properties of the evaluator and the target; as a result, differences in properties between the target and the evaluator should be expected to affect the evaluation. The study looks specifically at how differences in topic expertise and status affect peer evaluations. The Wikipedia case focuses on requests for adminship (RfAs), the most prominent example of peer evaluation in Wikipedia and a topic that has attracted considerable attention in the literature (Signpost research coverage: September 2011, October 2011, January 2012). Similarity is measured based on article co-authorship, and status as a function of an editor's number of contributions. Previous research by the same authors showed that the probability an evaluator will evaluate a target user positively drops dramatically when the status of the two users is very similar, and there is general evidence that homophily and similarity in editing activity have a strong influence on peer evaluation in RfAs. The study identifies two effects that jointly account for this singular finding:
In a direct application of these results, dubbed ballot-blind prediction, the authors show how the outcome of an RfA can be accurately predicted by a model that simply considers the first few participants in a discussion and their attributes, without looking at their actual evaluations of the target.
In an article to appear in Ethics and Information Technology, Paul B. de Laat analysed debates occurring in the English, German and French Wikipedias about the evolution of the rules governing new edits.[2] As noted by the analysis of the English Wikipedia's rules, by Butler et al., 2008,[3] these rules are numerous and have increased in number and complexity; they range from the more formal and explicit (intellectual property rights) to the more informal.
De Laat's work is based on a study of the discussions around the proposal to introduce a system of reviewing edits before they appear on screen (flagged revisions, discussed on English Wikipedia at Wikipedia:Flagged revisions). It focuses on the perennial debate around the construction of knowledge commons theorized by Elinor Ostrom:[4] being a collective, open project, it must be accessible to most, but as its production becomes important for its "owners" (readers and producers), boundaries have to be set to protect its integrity. De Laat's article describes and analyzes the tensions and permanent adjustments needed to manage these apparently opposed goals.
In a Weberian analysis of bureaucracy, applicable to Wikipedia policies, he shows that two views can be invoked to explain the intensity of the discussions. He summarizes the debate as a clash between (i) those who saw the flagged revisions as "a useful tool for curbing vandalism", enabling and empowering users and editors, and (ii) those who denounced it as "a superfluous bureaucratic device that violates egalitarian principles of participation", designed to introduce a more controlled and hierarchical environment. He muses that "an intriguing question that remains to be answered, of course, is: What brought the three language communities to ultimately choose or reject such a review system? Why is it that, each in their own ways, the Germans voted for acceptance, the French for rejection, while the English have been wavering all the time between acceptance and rejection"? (p. 11) This question, and Wikipedians' views of flagged revisions, can shine light onto what kind of community Wikipedia should be, according to various factions of editors. As De Laat answers it, "many of those who reject the system of review do so from a vision of Wikipedia as an unbounded community that shares knowledge without mutual control and suspicion, while many of those who embrace the review system do so because they have a vision of Wikipedia as an organization producing reliable knowledge that keeps vandalism outside its borders". De Laat suggests that further research is needed to fully understand the factors affecting the decisions on different Wikipedias taken with regard to flagged revisions, postulating a hypothesis to be tested in further research that "those whose mother tongue is German may possibly be more deferential to hierarchy than those who speak either French or English, and therefore may prefer the order and respectability introduced by a system of reviewing".
In a paper published by the European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics,[5] Oliver Ferschke and coauthors describe a study of talkpages on the Simple English Wikipedia. This paper uses speech act theory and dialog acts as a theoretical framework for studying how authors use discussion pages to collaborate on article improvement. They have released a freely downloadable corpus of 100 segmented and annotated talk pages, called the Simple English Wikipedia Discussion Corpus and based on a new annotation schema for coordination-related dialog acts. Their schema uses 17 categories, grouped into these four top-level categories: article criticism, explicit performative announce, information content, and the interpersonal. The authors use their corpus to develop a machine-learning-based UIMA pipeline for dialog act classification, which they describe but which is not freely available. They provide a useful discussion of conversational implicature theory and good pointers to seminal and new research in dialog acts. (A longer, editable summary is available on AcaWiki.)
An article appearing in "Teaching in Higher Education"[6] "discusses the use of Wikipedia by academics and students for learning and teaching activities at Liverpool Hope University, [considering] the findings to be indicative of Wikipedia use at other British universities". Having sent email invitations to all staff and students at the university, they received responses from 133 academics and 1222 students. 75% of the student respondents said they used Wikipedia for "some purpose", which according to the authors indicates that Wikipedia use "has risen appreciably in a short period of time" among British university students, citing a 2009 study[7] which had put that number at only 17.1%. "However", they cautioned, usage was "significantly lower than usage in the USA."
Among the surveyed teaching staff, almost the same percentage (74%) used Wikipedia "for some purpose" as their students—but just 24% of them "tell their students to use Wikipedia for Learning and Teaching purposes, with 18% having not mentioned it to students and 58% having expressly told them not to." The independence of academics' answers to these two questions is highlighted by the authors as
In the conclusion the authors observe that "a significant proportion of what we would see as enlightened academics at Liverpool Hope and no doubt elsewhere realise that it is pointless to try to hold back the online tide of Wikipedia. Instead, they try to give guidance in the way that students consult it: for clarification, references, comparison and definitions."
"The people's encyclopedia under the gaze of the sages: A systematic review of scholarly research on Wikipedia"[8] is the title of a working paper which promises to be a major milestone in Wikipedia research. It is an attempt to synthesize a broad-based literature review of scholarly research on Wikipedia. The task of creating a comprehensive database of such publications has seen several efforts before and its difficulties were explored in a well-attended workshop at last year's WikiSym conference (see the October issue of this research report).
The authors intend to release their findings in a "Web 2.0" format through their wiki by the end of May 2012. The current paper is impressive in scope, but at 71 pages badly in need of a table of contents (the current version does not seem to adhere to any consistent manual of style, with headings using different font sizes and even colors) and clarifications (the current distinction between findings on p.12 and discussion on p. 19 seems somewhat arbitrary; the authors at one point promise a discussion of over 2,000 articles and in other places talk of a sample of 139) – perhaps due to its genesis (see below). Keeping in mind this is just a draft paper, we hope the final paper will have an improved flow and transparency. The presented methodology is useful for those interested in learning how to analyze large, thematic bodies of work using online databases. In one of their major contributions, the authors intend to present an overview of Wikipedia research grouped by themes (keywords), such as for example discussing research done on "vandalism reversion", "thesaurus construction" or "attitude towards Wikipedia". While the current draft is not yet comprehensive, it shows much potential, and in practice their wiki, which already groups the content with categories, may prove more useful as a reference work.
As explained by one of the authors, the paper merges two existing efforts, both of which already published drafts last year. And by choosing wikilit.referata.com as their platform, they embrace the work of a third party, Wikimedian User:Emijrp's "Wikipapers" wiki on the same domain. This follows discussions between the three parties reported in the January issue of this research report ("New effort at comprehensive wiki research literature database"). On the wiki, the authors acknowledge the modest efforts of a fourth party, namely this research report (which just released a dataset of all publications covered until the end of 2011): "We do not include any items published after June 2011, after which the Wikimedia Research Newsletter was formally inaugurated; we're letting them pick up from where we stop."
While the Wikipedia Ambassador Program has worked with college-level courses, pre-college education has been the focus of the Viquiescoles project ("Wikischools") at the Catalan language Wikipedia, with the 2012 edition already underway. This is an initiative promoted by Amical Viquipèdia (an association of Catalan-speaking Wikimedians) that gathers teachers for an editing workshop that shows both the basics of using Wikipedia, and the advantages of using it in classrooms. This teachers' workshop is later complemented with a competition where the teachers' students draft Wikipedia articles on a separate wiki, qualifying for various prizes. The best articles are then transferred to Catalan Wikipedia.
Wikischools exhibits peculiarities that make it a unique project: it combines teachers from different parts of the Catalan-speaking territories (and thus encourages the exchange of views and experiences); moreover it includes elements of reflection that go beyond a simple technical workshop to make the program an opportunity to discuss issues such as shared knowledge, the role of students in class, the actual use of new technologies in education and the promotion of critical thinking, among others.
In this year's edition, 16 teachers from 15 high schools are participating in the program. Teachers from both secondary schools and vocational schools are represented.
The program began in 2010 in the Balearic Islands, and in 2011 a test phase was conducted simultaneously in several territories, with the result that around 70 articles were included on Wikipedia. This year, the organisers expect to exceed those numbers, and hope to be attentive to the evolution of the newcomers into the next generation of full Wikipedians, whose contributions you will soon be able to read in the Catalan Wikipedia.
On 3 March 2012, Mexico had its first ever edit-a-thon, held at the Museo de Arte Popular (Popular Art Museum) in the historic center of Mexico City. While numerous edit-a-thons had been held in various institutions, one important element of the success of this event was the involvement of two of Mexico’s major institutions of higher education.
Students from ITESM-Campus Ciudad de México and the newly formed student group at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa joined with Wikimedia México to create six new articles, five in Spanish and one in English: Palo fierro (ironwood carving), Carlomagno Pedro Martínez (ceramicist), Colorantes naturals (natural dyes) (a translation from the English Wikipedia), Cerámica de Mata Ortiz (Mata Ortiz ceramics), Familia Soteno (Soteno family) and (in English) Alfeñique in Mexico.
This collaboration among Wikipedia groups not only made the event a success, but also allowed for members of said groups to connect face-to-face and discuss future events with mutual support.
| “ | I want to thank *everyone* for being so totally awesome with this process. I've put a lot of work into trying to do this right and the feedback (positive and negative) has been immensely helpful and at times nearly overwhelming :) | ” |
—Developer Chad Horohoe, who oversaw the migration | ||
As scheduled, on March 21 ("Git day"), MediaWiki was officially switched over from the older version control system Subversion to the newer competing system Git. As a result, developers ceased to be able to use Subversion to contribute to core MediaWiki code or over 100 of its WMF-deployed extensions. The switchover went remarkably close to plan, although the preceding code review backlog meant that some 100 revisions had to be initially reverted and then reintroduced afterwards as new-style patchsets. Developers are also now rapidly getting acquainted with the new code review system Gerrit, the Git-friendly replacement to the MediaWiki-based Subversion code review system that had been in use for years. Non-WMF-deployed extensions remain Subversion-based, though many will be moved over to Git in the coming weeks.
The changes sparked numerous threads on the wikitech-l mailing list as developers started to come to grips with the issues arising from the switch. Such issues ranged from working out the changes a developer made when amending a patchset to creating naming conventions and figuring out how to download MediaWiki releases and other snapshots directly from the central Git repository. A separate thread addressed problems in assigning ChangeIds (a vital new identifier used for code review) during merges and part-merges, whilst the question of managing Gerrit user permissions (such as the ability to approve code) was described in significant detail in another thread by Volunteer Development Co-ordinator Sumana Harihareswara. Overall, there seemed to be a sense of cautious optimism among the developer community that all the glitches and performance bottlenecks could be resolved in time.
Director of Platform Engineering Rob Lanphier described the way ahead: "In the short term, we're still deploying [to Wikimedia wikis] from Subversion... [so] all non-urgent deployments should hang on until we finish the work here ... We're currently planning security releases [see In brief] for 1.17, 1.18, and 1.19, which will be released from Git. In the medium term, we plan to have far more frequent deployments, starting as early as April 9. ... With the combination of Git and the workflow changes it enables, we're pretty excited by our new ability to deploy code more frequently, and we're pretty optimistic that we'll be able to actually get that benefit sooner rather than later".
The latest features developed for Wikipedias' mobile site variants will be going live to beta users immediately, it was announced this week. The updates being deployed include "changes to the footer, a cleaner design for revealing and hiding sections, and a revamped full-screen search experience", the announcement revealed.
One new feature that has the potential to make it in some form into the desktop site is the inclusion of an "in place" citation display system. Under the new system being introduced, [1][2][3]-style links on the mobile site will prompt a simple dismissible overlay of the content of the citation (pictured right), rather than scrolling the browser down to the applicable references section. The WMF team behind the update are keen to receive as much feedback as possible on this and all other aspects of the update, according to Software Developer Jon Robson, who made the announcement. He asked users interested in testing out the new features to opt-in to using them and then to try browsing their Wikipedia's mobile site (e.g. http://en.m.wikipedia.org), reporting any problems to a dedicated page on MediaWiki.org.
Improving performance of Wikimedia wikis on handheld devices was targeted as an area of "high strategic significance" in March 2011's product whitepaper, with the particular aim of expanding Wikimedia's audience in areas of the world with comparatively few desktop computers. The latest available statistics show that the mobile site – not to be confused with either the official Wikimedia Android app or its iOS counterpart (both of which attempt to take advantage of device-specific feature sets) – now accounts for over 10% of all Wikipedia page view requests.
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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.
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