Barnstars work; Wiktionary assessed; cleanup tags counted; finding expert admins; discussion peaks; Wikipedia citations in academic publications; and more

To gain insight in what makes Wikipedia tick, two researchers from the Sociology Department at Stony Brook University conducted an experiment with barnstars.^[1] They were surprised by what they found.

Professor Arnout van de Rijt and graduate student Michael Restivo wanted to test the hypothesis according to which receiving recognition for one's work in an informal peer-based environment such as Wikipedia has a positive effect on productivity. To test their hypothesis, they determined the top 1% most productive English Wikipedia users among the currently active editors who had yet to receive their first barnstar. From that group they took a random sample of 200 users. Then they randomly split the sample into an experimental group and a control group, each consisting of 100 users. They awarded a barnstar to each user in the experimental group; the users in the control group were not given a barnstar. The researchers found their hypothesis confirmed: the productivity of the users in the experimental group was significantly higher than that of the control group. What really took the researchers by surprise was how long-lasting the effect was. They followed the two groups for 90 days, observing that the increase in contribution level for the group of barnstar recipients persisted, almost unabated, for the full observation period.

One major factor the experiment did not take into account was whether it mattered who delivered barnstars and whether they were anonymous, registered, or known members of the Wikipedia community. During the experiment, it was noted on the Administrator's noticeboard/Incidents page that a seemingly random IP editor was "handing out barnstars", which led to some suspicion from Wikipedians. The thread was closed after User:Mike Restivo confirmed he accidentally logged out when delivering the barnstars. He did not, however, declare his status as a researcher, and the group's paper does not disclose that the behavior was considered unusual enough to warrant such a discussion thread.

A chapter titled "Wiktionary: a new rival for expert-built lexicons?"^[2] in a collection on electronic lexicography to appear with Oxford University Press contains a description and critical assessment of Wikipedia's second oldest sister project (which will celebrate its 10th anniversary in December this year) – subtitled "Exploring the possibilities of collaborative lexicography", which it calls a "fundamentally new paradigm for compiling lexicons".

The article describes in detail the technical and community features of Wiktionary. Though it is not immediately clear, the article's focus is on several language editions and not just English (as often happens in research about Wikipedia and its sister projects). The article gives a comprehensive account of the coverage of the world's languages by the various Wiktionary language editions. There is a critical analysis of Wiktionary's content, first with what appears to be a thorough statistical comparison with other dictionaries and wordnets, including an examination of the overlaps in the lexemes covered, which the authors found to be surprisingly small.

The article notes an important characteristic of open wiki projects: they allow "updating of the lexicons immediately, without being restricted to certain release cycles as is the case for expert-built lexicons" (p. 18). Though this characteristic is obvious to experienced Wikimedians, it is frequently overlooked. The discussion of the organization of polysemy and homonymy is comprehensive, although limited to the English Wiktionary. Other language editions may do it differently. The article notes that "it is a serious problem to distinguish well-crafted entries from those that need substantial revision by the community", which is good constructive criticism. The paragraphs about "sense ordering" make some vague claims (e.g. "Although there is no specific guideline for the sense ordering in Wiktionary, we observed that the first entry is often the most frequently used one") which could be interesting and useful from a community perspective, but offers little actionable evidence and should be investigated further. The paper's conclusions identify some of the features that enable Wiktionary to rival expert-built lexicons: "We believe that its unique structure and collaboratively constructed contents are particularly useful for a wide range of dictionary users", listing eight such groups – among them "Laypeople who want to quickly look up the definition of an unknown term or search for a forum to ask a question on a certain usage or meaning."

On a critical note, the last paragraph says "we believe that collaborative lexicography will not replace traditional lexicographic theories, but will provide a different viewpoint that can improve and contribute to the lexicography of the future. Thus, Wiktionary is a rival to expert-built lexicons – no more, no less", which sounds a bit contradictory. The authors also note that "Lepore (2006: 87) raised a criticism about the large-scale import of lexicon entries from copyright-expired dictionaries such as Webster's New International Dictionary". It would be nice if the authors would write at least a short explanation of the problem that Lepore described. But the actual article^[3] mentions Wiktionary only very briefly. For the most part, the article is a good academic-grade presentation of Wiktionary: it is very general and does not dive too much into details; it makes a few vague statements, but they present a good starting point for further research.

Xiao and Askin (2012) looked at whether academic papers could be published on Wikipedia.^[4] The paper compares the publishing process on Wikipedia to that of an open-access journal, concluding that Wikipedia's model of publishing research seems superior, particularly in terms of publicity, cost and timeliness.

The biggest challenges for academic contributions to Wikipedia, they found, revolve around the level of acceptance of Wikipedia in academia, poor integration with academic databases, and technical and conceptual differences between an academic article and an encyclopedic one. However, the paper suffers from several problems. It correctly observes that the closest a Wikipedia article comes to a "final", fully peer-reviewed status is after having passed the featured article candidate process, but makes no mention of intermediary steps in Wikipedia's assessment project, such as B-class, Good Article and A-class reviews; nor is the assessment project itself mentioned. Despite its focus on the featured-article process, no previous academic work on featured articles is cited (although quite a few have been published). Crucially, the paper disregards the most relevant of Wikipedia's policies, no original research. Thus, the study fails to consider whether Wikipedia would want to publish academic articles without their undergoing changes to bring them closer to encyclopedic style – a topic that already has become an issue numerous times on the site, in particular regarding difficulties encountered by some educational projects. In the end, the paper, while a well-intentioned piece, seems to illustrate that university researchers can have a quite different understanding of what Wikipedia is than those more closely connected with the project.

In other news, however, a scientific journal appears to have found a viable way to publish peer-reviewed articles on Wikipedia: The open access journal PLoS Computational Biology has announced^[5] that it is starting to publish "Topic Pages" - peer-reviewed texts about specific topics, which are published both in the journal and as a new article on Wikipedia. It is hoped that the Wikipedia versions will be updated and improved by the Wikipedia community. The first example is about circular permutation in proteins.

The article "A Jester's Promenade: Citations to Wikipedia in Law Reviews , 2002–2008" concerns the issue of citations of Wikipedia in US law reviews and the appropriateness of this practice.^[6] The article seems to be well researched, and its author, law reference/research librarian Daniel J. Baker, demonstrates familiarity with the mechanics of Wikipedia (such as the permanent links). For the period 2002–08, Baker identified 1540 law-review articles that contain at least one citation of Wikipedia – most in law reviews dealing with general and "popular" subject matter, with a significant proportion originating from authors with academic credentials.

The article notes that 2006 marked the peak of that trend, attributing it (thereby demonstrating some familiarity with Wikipedia's history) to a delayed reaction to the Seigenthaler incident and the Essjay Controversy. (Since the article's data analysis ends in 2008, the question of whether this trend has rebounded in recent years is left unanswered.)

The author is highly critical of Wikipedia's reliability, arguing that a source that "anyone can edit" – and where much of the information is not verified – should not be used in works that may influence legal decisions. Thus Baker calls for stricter rules in legal publishing, in particular that Wikipedia should not be cited. In a more surprising argument, the paper suggests that if information exists on Wikipedia, it should be treated as common knowledge, and thus does not require referencing (a recommendation that follows a 2009 one – Brett Deforest Maxfield, "Ethics, politics and securities law: how unethical people are using politics to undermine the integrity of our courts and financial markets", 35 OHIO N.U. L. REV. 243, 293 (2009)). This argument does, however, raise the question of whether no citation at all is truly better than a citation to Wikipedia; if such a recommendation were followed, it could lead to a proliferation of uncited claims in law review journals that would be assumed (without any verification) to rely on "common knowledge" as represented in the "do not cite" Wikipedia.

A paper titled "A Breakdown of Quality Flaws in Wikipedia"^[7] examines cleanup tags on the English Wikipedia (using a January 2011 dump), finding that 27.53% of articles are tagged with at least one of altogether 388 different cleanup templates. In a 2011 conference poster ^[8] (a version of which was summarized in an earlier edition of this newsletter), the authors analyzed – together with a third collaborator – a 2010 dump of the English Wikipedia for a smaller set of tags, arriving at a much lower ratio: "8.52% [of articles] have been tagged to contain at least one of the 70 flaws". Using a classification of Wikipedia articles into 24 overlapping topic areas (derived from Category:Main topic classifications), the highest ratio of tagged articles were found in the "Computers" (48.51%), "Belief" (46.33%) and "Business" (39.99%) topics; the lowest were in "Geography" (19.83%), "Agriculture" (22.57%) and "Nature" (23.93%). Of the 388 tags on the more complete list, "307 refer to an article as a whole and 81 to a particular text fragment". As another original contribution of the paper, the authors offer an organization of the existing cleanup tags into "12 general flaw types" – the most frequent being "Verifiability" (19.46% of articles have been tagged with one of the corresponding templates), "Wiki tech" (e.g. the "orphan", "wikify" or "uncategorized" templates; 5.47% of articles) and "General cleanup" (2.01%).

Kaltenbrunner and Laniado look at the time evolution of Wikipedia discussions, and how it correlates to editing activity, based on 9.4 million comments from the March 12, 2010 dump.^[9] Peaks in commenting and peaks in editing often co-occur (for sufficiently large peaks of 20 comments, 63% of the time) within two days. They show the articles with the longest comment peaks and most edit peaks, and the 20 slowest and 20 fastest discussions.

The authors note that a single, heavy editor can be responsible for edit peaks but not comment peaks; peaks in the discussion activity seem to indicate more widespread interest by multiple people. They find that "the fastest growing discussions are more likely to have long lasting edit peaks" and that some editing peaks are associated with event anniversaries. They use the Barack Obama article as a case study, showing peaks in comments and editing due to news events as well as to internal Wikipedia events (such as an editor poll or article protection). Current events are often edited and discussed in nearly real-time in contrast to articles about historical or scientific facts.

They use the h-index to assess the complexity of a discussion, and they chart the growth rate of the discussions. For instance, they find that the discussion pages of the three most recent US Presidents show a constant growth in complexity but that the rate of growth varies: Bill Clinton's talk page took 332 days to increase h-index by one, while George W. Bush's took only 71 days.

They envision more sophisticated algorithms showing the relative growth in edits and discussions. Their ideas for future work are intriguing – for instance, the question of how to determine article maturity and the level of consensus, based on the network dynamics. (AcaWiki summary)

Several of the accepted papers of this month's Asia-Pacific Web Conference APWeb2012 concerned Wikipedia:

• Prototype tool searches for expert admins: In the article "Exploration and Visualization of Administrator Network in Wikipedia",^[10] four Chinese authors examine the collaboration graph of administrators on the English Wikipedia (where two of them are connected by an edge if they have edited the same article during the sampled time span from January 2010 to January 2011), and "define six features to reflect the characteristics of administrator’s work from different respects including diversity of the admin user interests, the influence & importance across the network, and longevity & activity in terms of contribution." The authors observe that the recognition of an admin's work by other users in the form of barnstars seems to agree with the overall rank they calculate from these quantities: "By analyzing the profiles of the top ranked fifty admin users as a test case, it has been observed that the number of barn stars received by them also follows the similar trend as we overall ranked the admin users."To extract topics from an admin's history and define diversity, Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) is used. The authors describe a prototype software called "Administrator Exploration Prototype System", which displays these various quantitative measures for an admin and allows ranking them. In particular, it "will automatically find the expert authors based on the editing history of each admin user". An example screenshot shows a list of results for a "Search for "Expert Admin User" for the keywords "Music, Songs, Singers", topped by Michig, Mike Selinker and Bearcat. Analyzing the whole network, the authors find a "decreasing trend of the clustering coefficient [which] can also be seen as a symptom of the growing centralization of the network." Overall, they observe that "the administrator network is a healthy small world community having a small average distances and a strong centralization of the network around some hubs/stars is observed. This shows a considerable nucleus of very active administrators who seems to be omnipresent."

• 

  Detecting "minority information" on Wikipedia: A paper^[11] by two Japanese researchers proposes "a method of searching for minority information that is less-acknowledged and has less popularity in Wikipedia" for a given keyword. "For example, if the user inputs ‘football’ as a majority information keyword, then the system seeks articles having a sentence of “....looks like football....” or similar content of articles about soccer in Wikipedia. It extracts as candidates for minority sports those articles which have few edits and few editors. Then, it performs sports filtering and extracts minority articles from the candidates. In this case, the results are ‘Bandy’, ‘Goalball’, and ‘Cuju’." The authors constructed a prototype system and tested it.
• Completing Wikipedia articles with information from other language versions: In an article titled "Extracting Difference Information from Multilingual Wikipedia"^[12], four Japanese researchers describe a "method for extracting information which exists in one language version [of Wikipedia], but which does not exist in another language version. Our method specifically examines the link graph of Wikipedia and structure of an article of Wikipedia. Then we extract comparison target articles of Wikipedia using our proposed degree of relevance." As motivating example, they note that the English Wikipedia's coverage of the game cricket is much fuller than the Japanese Wikipedia's, but spread over separate articles beyond just the main one at cricket. The goal is a system where a (Japanese) user can enter a keyword and will receive the "Japanese article with sections of English articles that do not appear in the Japanese article".

• 

  Unchanged quality of new user contributions over time. GroupLens PhD candidate Aaron Halfaker (who also collaborates with the Wikimedia Foundation as a contractor research analyst) shared some preliminary results on the quality of new user contributions,^[13] part of a larger study currently submitted for publication. The results, based on an analysis of revert rates in the English Wikipedia combined with blind assessment of a new editor contribution history, indicate that new editors have produced the same level of quality in their first contributions since 2006. Despite the fact that "the majority of new editors are not out to obviously harm the encyclopedia (~80 percent), and many of them are leaving valuable contributions to the project in their first editing session (~40 percent)", today's user experience for a first-time editor is much more hostile than it used to be, as "the rate of rejection of all good-faith new editors’ first contributions has been rising steadily, and, accordingly, retention rates have fallen. These results challenge the hypothesis that today’s newbies produce much lower quality contributions than in earlier years.
• Modeling Wikipedia's community formation processes. An important factor behind the success of Wikipedia is its own internal culture. Like any social group, a community of peer production has its own rules, norms, and customs. Unlike traditional social groups -- a recently-defended doctoral dissertation in computer science argues -- the process of formation of these traits involves, and often determines, how contents are being produced. The dissertation, defended by former Summer of Research fellow and Wikimedia Foundation contractor analyst Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia,^[14] uses computer simulation to study how the community of Wikipedia may have formed its specific cultural traits and distinctive sociological features. Starting from the distribution of user account lifespan in five of the largest Wikipedia communities (English, German, Italian, French, and Portuguese) this work shows how the statistical patterns of the data can be reproduced by a simple model of cultural formation based on principles taken from self-categorization theory and social judgment theory.

  

  
  The research finds that an important factor to determine whether a community will be able to sustain itself and thrive is the degree of openness of individual users towards differing points of view, which may be critical in the early stages of user participation, when a newcomer first enters in contact with the body of social norms that the community has devised. The thesis concludes that simulation techniques, when supplemented with empirical methods and quantitative calibration, may become an important tool for conducting sociological studies.
• Matching reader feedback via the Article Feedback Tool to editor peer review: An upcoming presentation at Wikimania 2012^[15] compares data gathered from the Article Feedback Tool (AFT) version 4 on the English Wikipedia over summer 2011 to ratings assigned by various peer review processes, e.g. good and featured articles. As might be expected, articles at any point in the peer review process tend to be rated more highly by reviewers, but this distinction is highly sensitive to the article length. Once length is accounted for (using a variety of methods), the differences between demoted or not promoted articles and unrated articles disappears. The research also offers a broad snapshot of the AFT dataset as well as some suggestions for future AFT design. Future revisions of the draft as well as the presentation will approach the dynamic relationship between peer reviewed status and reader feedback, exploiting entry and exit into various categories for identification.
• Referencing of Wikipedia in academic works is continuing unabated: An article in the "Research Trends" newsletter published by the bibliographical database Scopus, titled "The influence of free encyclopedias on science"^[16] charts the number of papers in Scopus that are either about Wikipedia or cite it. Considering that Wikipedia was only founded in 2001 (i.e. that these numbers have necessarily started from zero right before the observed timespan), the author's astonishment at the compound annual growth rates for both kinds of papers from 2002 to 2011 (which she calls "staggering" and "unbelievable", respectively) is somewhat surprising, but the article also gives the growth rates for the five years from 2007 to 2011 (ca. 19% per year for Wikipedia as a subject, ca. 31% per year for Wikipedia as a reference). Interestingly, Scholarpedia is showing itself to be the second most popular online encyclopedia to be cited, if lagging significantly behind Wikipedia (5%).
• Using Wikipedia to drive traffic to library collections: In an article titled "Wikipedia Lover, Not a Hater: Harnessing Wikipedia to Increase the Discoverability of Library Resources"^[17] in the Journal of Web Librarianship, two librarians from the University of Houston Libraries and a former intern report how they had successfully used Wikipedia to drive traffic to the collection of the institution's digital services department (UHDS), proceeding from merely inserting links into articles to uploading images from the collection to Commons (which still contain such link on the file description pages): "Originally, UHDS intended to contribute exclusively to the External Links section of existing Wikipedia articles. [However, over time] UHDS staff found it was much more effective to match digital items with Wikipedia articles and to share those items in Wikimedia Commons (WMC) rather than (or in addition to) the External Links section of the articles." While few statistics are given, the authors emphasize the effectiveness of their actions, observed already for the very first attempts: "Within hours of posting external links to existing Wikipedia articles, the digital library received hits to those collections at a surprisingly high rate." As an example of an article enriched with such images, the entry 1915 Galveston hurricane is named. Among the successful additions to external links section is the article about former US president George H. W. Bush, where the student intern linked a photograph showing Bush shaking hands with former University of Houston chancellor Philip G. Hoffman (as already noted in the Signpost's April 2011 coverage after the authors had presented their project at the annual meeting of the Association of College and Research Libraries: "Experts and GLAMs – contributing content or 'just' links to Wikipedia?"). Much of the paper describes basic technicalities of Wikipedia: The uploading of image, the use of contributions lists, talk pages and watchlists. While Wikipedia's external links guidelines are not cited in the paper, it notes that "contributing effectively to Wikipedia and WMC entailed a steep learning curve in order to align contributions with the granular and well-enforced Wikipedia guidelines for use", and among them notices policies against advertising. As one unresolved problem for such institutional usage of Wikipedia and Commons, the paper describes the prohibition "to share an editor username with other editors, and [that] organizational usernames are considered a violation of Wikipedia guidelines forbidding the promotion of organizations. When the pilot project transitioned into a permanent departmental program, UHDS staff struggled to devise a way that others on staff could continue to monitor previous edits and uploads and create new ones", e.g. due to the lack of shared watchlists.
• Weekly and daily activity patterns discern Wikipedia from commercial sites: Two Finnish researchers analyzed^[18] the distribution of timestamps in the recent changes RSS feed from four different language versions (Arabic, Finnish, Korean, and Swedish - Arabic having been chosen because its speakers are spread over "a very wide range of timezones", in contrast to the other three), and RSS new feeds from BBC World News "and the leading Finnish daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat". As the main difference between the activity on those two sites (which the authors describe as "commercial news sites") and on the Wikipedias, it was found that Wikipedia edits "distribute fairly equally over all days in all cases. The drop of activity on weekends that occurred with the commercial news services is not visible in the Wikipedias, quite the opposite, with Sundays typically seeing the highest average level of activity. Only the Arabic version has a slightly lower activity rate in Sundays, however, we should remember the fact that in Arabic countries the weekend falls on Friday-Saturday or in some countries on Thursday-Friday". The diurnal patterns are found to be "more spread out" on Wikipedia, where "the activity levels follow natural diurnal rhythms. Interestingly, a great number of changes are made during working hours, which leads us to 2 different, but not mutually exclusive, conjectures about the people who edit Wikipedia. Either, the editors are people with “free” time during the day, e.g., students, or people actually edit Wikipedia during the working hours at work. Our methodology is not able to answer this question".
  Furthermore, the authors offer a rather far-reaching but (if proven) significant conjecture based on their date: "Cultural and geographical differences in the Wikipedias we studied seemed to have very little effect on the level of activity. This leads us to speculate that the 'trait' of editing Wikipedia is something to which individuals are drawn, not something specific to certain cultures."
  Last year, papers by two other teams (covered in the September issue of this newsletter: Wikipedians' weekends in international comparison", but missing from the "Related work" section of the present paper) had similarly examined daily and weekly patterns on Wikipedia, coming to other results - in particular, different language Wikipedias showed different weekly patterns.
• Simple English Wikipedia is only partially simpler/controversy reduces complexity: "A practical approach to language complexity: a Wikipedia case study"^[19] analyzed samples of articles from the English Wikipedia and the Simple English Wikipedia from the end of 2010 with respect to the Gunning fog index as well as other measures for language complexity. Comparing them with other corpora including Charles Dickens' books, they observe that "Remarkably, the fog index of Simple English Wikipedia is higher than that of Dickens, whose writing style is sophisticated but doesn’t rely on the use of longer latinate words which are hard to avoid in an encyclopedia. The British National Corpus, which is a reasonable approximation to what we would want to think of as ‘English in general’ is a third of the way between Simple and Main, demonstrating the accomplishments of Simple editors, who pushed Simple half as much below average complexity as the encyclopedia genre pushes Main above it." However, the number of distinct tokens used (a measure for vocabulary richness) is almost the same on the English and Simple Wikipedia (the samples were chosen to be of the same size). Still "detailed analysis of longer units (n-grams rather than words alone) shows that the language of Simple is indeed less complex". In another finding, the authors "investigate the relation between conflict and language complexity by analysing the content of the talk pages associated to controversial and peacefully developing articles, concluding that controversy has the effect of reducing language complexity."
• Contributions from South America. "Mapping Wikipedia edits from South America",^[20] the latest from a series of studies and visualizations by Oxford Internet Institute researcher Mark Graham and his team, reports that almost half of all edits to Wikipedia from South America come from Brazil, which is unsurprising considering that the largest population of Internet users in South America lives in Brazil. More interestingly, Chile –- a country with only 5-6% of the continent's Internet population -- contributes more than 12% of edits to Wikipedia.
• Deaths generate edit bursts: A student paper titled "Death and Change Tracking : Wikipedia Edit Bursts"^[21] examines the editing activity in nine articles about celebrity actors on the English Wikipedia after they died.
• Searching by example: This month's WWW 2012 conference in Lyon, France saw a demo titled "SWiPE: Searching Wikipedia by Example"^[22], showcasing a tool where the user can search for articles similar to a given one by modifying entries in that article's infobox, and also ask questions in natural language.
• Wikipedia in the eyes of PR professionals. A study published in the journal of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA)^[23] surveyed public relations and communications professionals about their perception of Wikipedia contribution and conflict of interest. The online survey was pilot-tested with members of the Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement (many of whom have recently pushed for Wikipedia to let PR professionals edit articles about their clients to a greater extent) and produced 1,284 usable responses after being disseminated via various outlets. The results indicate that "of the 35% who had engaged with Wikipedia, most did so by making edits directly on the Wikipedia articles of their companies or clients". The response time to issues reported on talk pages was found to be one of the important barriers in the interaction between Wikipedia community members and PR professionals. The author observes that "when the wait becomes too long, the content is defamatory, or a dispute with a Wikipedian needs to be elevated, there are resources to help. Unfortunately, only a small percentage of the respondents in this study had used them and many had never heard of these resources". As another argument against the "bright line" rule advocated by Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales (which says that PR professionals should not edit Wikipedia articles they are involved in), a separate result of the paper has been offered, which has met with heavy criticism by Wikimedians regarding statistical biases and other issues (see e.g. last week's Signpost coverage: "Spin doctors spin Jimmy's 'bright line'"): 32% of the respondents said that "there are currently factual errors on their company or client’s Wikipedia articles", corresponding to 41% of those respondents who said that such articles existed, or 60% of those respondents who said that such articles existed but did not reply "don't know" to that question. The press releases of the author's college and of PRSA interpreted the result as "Sixty percent of Wikipedia articles about companies contain factual errors", although the latter was updated after the criticism "to clarify the survey findings described in this press release and help prevent any misinterpretation of the data that this release may have caused".
• Wikipedia coverage of marketing terms found accurate: The proceedings of the recent "International Collegiate Conference Faculty" of the American Marketing Association (AMA) offer a more positive view on Wikipedia from PR professionals: "Is Wikipedia A Reliable Tool for Marketing Educators and Students? A Surprising Heck Yes!".^[24] The paper chose a more systematic way to examine the quality of Wikipedia articles than the PRSA study and focused on AMA's area of expertise, starting out from a "random sample of marketing glossary terms [that] were collected from 3 marketing management textbooks and 4 marketing principles textbooks", and rating corresponding Wikipedia entries from 1 to 3 according to a standard procedure for content analysis: "Each textbook definition was compared to the corresponding Wikipedia definition and rated using a 3-point Likert scale where 1=Correct Definition, 2=Correct but difficult to find the term or the definition was not easy to decipher, or 3=Incorrect definition when compared to the textbook term.". Of 459 items in the eventual sample only five were rated 3, and "the average score across all textbooks was a 1.18 demonstrating Wikipedia is an accurate source of marketing content."
• Wikipedia's osteosarcoma coverage assessed: An abstract published in the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery^[25] finds "that the quality of osteosarcoma-related information found in English Wikipedia is good but inferior to the patient information provided by the National Cancer Institute". The abstract refers to a study and results that appear to be identical to the one reported in a 2010 viewpoint article in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) (Signpost coverage).
• Wikipedia assignments for Finnish school students: A paper by three Finnish authors^[26] describes course assignments to upper secondary school students (age 16–18) involving "writing articles for Wikipedia (a public wiki) and for the school’s own wiki", in subject areas including biology, geography and Finnish history. In particular the paper reports that "a carefully planned library [visit] can help to activate students to use printed materials in their source-based writing assignments. [And that our] findings corroborate the generally held view that students tend to copy-paste and plagiarise, especially when exploiting Web sources."
• Wikipedia as a thermodynamic system - becoming more efficient over time: A paper titled "Thermodynamic Principles in Social Collaborations"^[27] (presented at this month's Collective Intelligence 2012 conference) applies principles and concepts from Statistical mechanics to the collaboration on (the English) Wikipedia. The analogy is based on interpreting the edit count of a user as the energy level of a particle, positing a "logarithmic energy model" for edits which assumes a "decreasing effort required for a given user to make additional edits in a relatively short period of time (e.g., one month) or to a particular page". (According to the authors this contrasts with two other theories which also explain the observed power law distribution of edit counts: The "Wikipedia editors are 'born'" notion, which assumes that different users need to expend different amounts of energy on the same kind of edits due to "an extreme heterogeneity of preference among the potential user population", and the "Wikipedia editors are 'made'" notion, which sees positive or negative feedback from other users as the defining influence.) Using the analogy, the authors define the entropy, free energy, temperature, entropy efficiency and entropy reduction of an editing community and their edits during a particular timespan. They then calculate the latter two for each month in the English Wikipedia's history from January 2002 to December 2009. They conclude that "Wikipedia has become more efficient in terms of entropy efficiency, and more ordered according to entropy reduction. The increasing power-law coefficient causes the shift of the contributions from elites to crowd. The saturation of free energy reduction ratio may cause the saturation of the active editors." The next section finds that "entropy efficiency is correlated with the quality of the social collaboration", and one figure is interpreted as implying "that the nature of Wikipedia is a true media of the masses, where pages produced by crowd wisdom will have higher quality and thus more readership compared to that produced by a few elites."
• Too many docs don't spoil the broth: Another paper^[28] presented at the Collective Intelligence 2012 conference similarly found "that the number of contributors has a curvilinear relationship to information quality, more contributors improving quality but only up to a certain point" - based on an examination of 16,068 articles in the realm of the WikiProject Medicine.
• The most influential biographies vary depending on the language/culture: Barcelona Media Foundation studied "the most influential characters" in the 15 largest language Wikipedias^[29], by asking which biographies are the most linked to ("central") from other Wikipedia biography articles. Political and artistic biographies are the most central, and the particular biographies depend on the language. They found, for instance, that Shakespeare's biography is among the most important for Russian, Chinese, Spanish, and Dutch, but not for English. And they estimated the Jaccard similarity coefficient (similarity) between the social networks in different language editions: most similarity can be explained by language-family and geographical or historical ties. One interesting finding is that Dutch "seems to serve as a bridge between different language and cultural groups". Some social connections are very common, and they produce a graph of the connections found in at least 13 of the language editions. The authors note that articles on people from non-Anglo-Saxon cultures may be missing if they are not known internationally, since the initial list of notable people is extracted from DBPedia. A blog post on Technology Review highlighted the fact that in the paper's table of most connected biographies (listing the top 5 from 15 language versions), among the 75 entries "only three are women: Queen Elizabeth II, Marilyn Monroe and Margaret Thatcher", which it interprets as one of "The Worrying Consequences of the Wikipedia Gender Gap". (Summary at AcaWiki)

2012-04-30

'ReferenceTooltips' by default

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By Whenaxis

Reference Tooltips (stylized as "ReferenceTooltips") allows a user to roll over any inline citation to see reference information, instead of having to jump away from the article text. Yair rand is the initiator of the current discussion to allow inline citation pop-ups to appear by default rather than as a user preference.

Proposal

At the moment, to enable ReferenceTooltips, any logged-in editor can go to My preferences → Gadgets → and click ReferenceTooltips.

Alternatively, any logged-in editor can manually install the script into their skin.js or their common.js page:

importScript('User:Yair rand/ReferenceTooltips.js');

importStylesheet('User:Yair rand/ReferenceTooltips.css');.

The proposal is to make this choice the default, so all editors have this gadget. Any editor who does not want it can then disable it in their preference panel.

Discussion

At the time of writing, there were 17 support votes and 5 oppose votes for this proposal. The support votes are mainly driven by the fact that it would make references more usable. For example, instead of clicking on a reference and then jumping to the bottom of the page to find the reference, ReferenceTooltips enables the user to move their mouse over the reference and read the information. The oppose votes are compelled by the technical limitations of ReferenceTooltips and how the pop-ups would make the Wikipedia experience worse. For instance, enabling the reference to pop-up by mere hovering will cause pop-ups all over the place if an editor is just scrolling through a page. In addition, there are concerns that browsers will block the pop-up as an advertisement.

Some suggestions to avert a technical mishap are to only enable a reference to pop-up when the user clicks the inline citation. Still, all of the oppose votes believe that most editors won't use the reference tool and only researchers would be able to use this tool. The oppose voters believe that ReferenceTooltips should be left as an opt-in tool or gadget rather than being available by default as many editors would find it obtrusive.

Voting

In favour of supporting the gadget by default, an argument provided by Silver seren was: "Yes! This would be extremely useful, rather than having to hit back to go to the spot you were in the article before you clicked it. This way, [you] can tell beforehand if it's a reference you will actually want to click into. Furthermore, it lets you know directly which reference that number is referring to, without having to go to the reference list. [ReferenceTooltips] [h]elps you understand the narrative of the article and its references without a bunch of back and forth clicking."

A contention provided by Nageh opposing the proposal (but later moved to "Weak oppose/neutral") was: "The vast majority of unregistered readers give a damn about references. They just want their information and they are done. Also, popups can easily become an annoyance, and they usually annoy me, too, even though I actually like this tool. That does not mean it should be activated by default. Leave it as an opt-in tool, as it is now, and anyone registered and really interested in this additional functionality can easily activate it."

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2012-04-30

The Cartographers of WikiProject Maps

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By Mabeenot

WikiProject news

News in brief

• The May Copyedit Backlog Elimination Drive has begun.
• A new issue of Ichthus has been published by WikiProject Christianity
• A new project has been started to prepare Wikipedia for the launch of the new IPv6 internet addressing protocol in June
• The Counter-Vandalism Unit has undergone an overhaul and has absorbed WikiProject Vandalism Studies
• The Multilingual Challenge sponsored by the Teyler's Museum runs until the end of May

Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.

This week, we located WikiProject Maps. Launched in February 2004, the project has grown to 4,000 articles and files, including five featured articles and one good article. The project maintains guidelines for creating and editing maps while teaming up with the Graphic Lab to provide a workshop for mapmakers. We interviewed EdwardLane and Yug.

What motivated you to join WikiProject Maps? What is the most interesting map you have uploaded or edited?

EdwardLane: I've always been interested in maps as I like to imagine there are dragons in the unexplored spaces. I joined WikiProject Maps when I realized that I kept coming back for answers to cartography-related questions. I've not (yet) made a map for Wikipedia, but I do aim to.

Yug: "Maps is emotion". I naturally have a visual profile. Images, drawings, attract me a lot. But after years to look at, work with, and design maps, I realized that for me, maps are "emotions". When looking at a map, I can read the core dynamics, the strategic places, the balance of powers, the populations moves leaving the insecure areas then flooding toward more secures cities, or richer lands. It's both intellectually challenging and emotionally touching. It's how I currently explain my odd fascination for maps.

My involvement for the Map project is a by-product of this attraction for maps, knowledge sharing (ie: editing Wikipedia), and my leadership within the Wikipedia:Graphic Lab created in 2005. Following the need for graphics, the Graphic Lab has since spread into a dozen language teams (en, de, fr, es, it, ru, ...) and improved or created from requests about 15,000 images and 5,000 maps so far. Request after request, maps appeared to be a core media for Wikipedia: clean, semantically rich, communicative. But the situation was quite messy, with hundreds of independent map styles, icons sets, color sets, and naming conventions. With the assistance of wiki-friends, I've led a six-year effort to make sense of this, drafting the current Wikipedia map conventions.

While the majority of the project's assessments are for image files, some articles are included under the project's scope. What kinds of articles are these? What difficulties does the project face when improving articles under its scope?

EdwardLane: The scope has recently expanded to include improving all map- and cartography-related articles, WikiProject Maps was originally (and still is) focused on creating maps when people request maps on the talk page for articles using templates like {{reqmapin|somewhere}}.

Yug: The Map project members are massively graphists with visual-oriented profiles. We lack encyclopedic/academic profiles to do scholarly researches to write good and featured articles. The very top priority is the article cartography, which is currently quite messy (the French version provide a good outline for anyone willing to launch a such rewriting).

How often do territorial disputes, civil wars, and disasters result in map changes? How does the project handle territories claimed by more than one government or group? What steps can the project take to prevent editors from altering maps to match their national or political point of view?

EdwardLane: Well, synchronicity strikes; WikiProject Maps has just had some bickering on this subject brought up in a RFC, and I feel a bit like ArbCom, having just worked out what I think would be an appropriate NPOV solution.

South Sudan's recent split from Sudan also triggered a reasonable amount of action from WikiProject Maps (and others) to update the relevant template maps. There are always changes ongoing, but making a map for Wikipedia means you need well-sourced data for the map, and that seems to solve most of those issues. Political issues between the de facto and de jure control of a territory on maps do raise issues, but mostly just portraying both boundaries or labeling the map correctly resolves those. And listing the source of the data in the meta-tags at least lets you know what it is showing.

Which national/political view is portrayed in a map will always be affected by the cartographer, I'll try to quickly explain cartographic generalization.

Imagine you could draw a perfect map of the US: on what scale do you draw it, and is there room for a particular city to be labeled – that's a political choice. For example, on Google maps, Baltimore only gets a label when you zoom in five times, while Philadelphia appears after three zooms, New York and Washington after four. Is there a reason? Well it's mostly to do with space on the map, as Philadelphia is probably not "more important" than Washington and New York, but is probably more important than the other names that could be written in that space and still be in the right spot.

Making those sorts of calls will always have political significance, or at least involve a value judgment, Cartography is in many ways all about deciding what you want the map to show, historically kings and emperors have paid good money to get a map showing their realm to be more powerful/influential/successful/pious than their neighbors.

Yug: More recently, an endless dispute over the People's Republic of China's map and its territorial claims opened again. ArbCom requested that WikiProject Maps suggest a fair/NPOV graphic solution. Edward and I defined the needs and are currently examining maps, collecting the current Wikipedia practices, and will soon suggest a new map convention for disputed areas.

• 
  The new country South Sudan (dark blue) was added to map templates in 2011
• 
  An orthographic projection showing the internationally recognized territories of China in dark green and disputed territories in light green
• 
  This year's Azawad rebellion in Mali, upon topographic background partially explaining human occupation.

Do you tend to see political or physical maps used most frequently on Wikipedia? Is one preferred over the other? What are some unusual or unique types of maps included in Wikipedia articles?

EdwardLane: Maps are not all about the "perfect" depiction of geography: some show the stars, some show how many people voted in a particular election, some show fictional worlds, some are abstract concept maps, some show the surface of other planets, or like the London Underground Map distort real geography to make a map which is much easier to read.

Yug: Administrative maps are the most common maps displayed across Wikipedia. Its norm is nowadays called "location maps" (guideline here) : a grey based map with administrative limits. They are frequently used as base maps for more complex maps such as animals ranges, election maps, as well as more complex historical maps —the maps within the history—, which are a critical element of an encyclopedia's map landscape. Other kinds of maps such as cartograms are also present in wikipedia, while rare.

• 
  History of Cilicia, upon a topographic background explaining widely the human occupation.
• 
  A cartogram depicting a distorted European Union showing population distributions by size and color

How was the standard palette of colors selected for Wikipedia's maps? Has this color scheme caused any difficulties when building complex maps?

EdwardLane: Check out Wikipedia:WikiProject_Maps#Map_colours – and Wikipedia:WikiProject_Maps/Conventions I don't think they have caused any problems.

Yug: In the earliest history of Wikipedia map-making, the CIA orange maps and grey-green png maps were the norms, aside from hundreds of independent styles. Between 2006 and 2007, two palettes of colors emerged: the 'Indian Project' palette was proposed by Planemad alone, and spread for a time. Its colors are quite vivid, and derived from the earlier CIA maps palette. In parallel, the French cartographic workshop team discussed and built a comprehensive palette with an incremental approach. Users STyx, Sting (Brazil), Sémhur, Yug (myself), NorthNorthWest (Germany) each made significant proposals that were enthusiastically commented on, improved, and implemented. This last palette was from the start conceived for the specific use of Wikipedia. The CIA colors were dropped for both moral/political and pratical reasons, the wiki gray was kept, softened, and enriched by web and screen friendly colors to create and strengthen Wikipedia's maps identity, topography —which often explain demographic occupation, history, battles— was pushed forward, while a set of standard icons and labels was provided. The aim was to coordinate map creations among map creators, with an semi-professional, standardized style increasing Wikipedia's maps readability and credibility. Since then, this palette (File:Maps_template-en.svg) is the real cornerstone of our coordinated effort. Within the public domain, it allows any cartographer to use this toolkit of elegant colors, icons, labels within his/her maps. These styles have been explained in our Map conventions pages, with some further improvements and alignments still planned.

Do any of Wikipedia's maps employ fictitious entries similar to the "copyright traps" used by some professional mapmakers? How can the average reader be sure of a map's accuracy without checking another source?

EdwardLane: Not that I'm aware of, though some might be inherited from the original source; but ideally the reliable source of the data should be listed in the map's meta-data. It's a nice question though.

What are the project's most urgent needs? How can new writers and mapmakers help today?

EdwardLane: Writers can no doubt help clean up the language and organize the cartography and map articles – they both need a fair chunk of work. If someone can organize all the various types of map projections and make sure we've not missed any in the Template:Map Projections, that could tidy things up a lot too. If you want to start making maps, say hello on the WikiProject Maps talk page. You could check out these links to tutorials, or we can point you at lists of requested maps.

Yug: We currently seriously need new SVG mapmakers. We recently finished a tutorial with SVG exercises for map-making. If you're interested in learning map-making, that's the place to start. We currently have dozens of requests in the backlog for map creation – which are dozens of learning opportunities!

For the future, I personally think that map-making and image creation in general now need a stronger and ACTIVE support from the Wikimedia foundation. Wikipedia is both text (wiki editor system) and images, with maps having a special place. Some innovative technical solutions and projects are already financed by the Wikimedia Foundation on the editing side. Serious and professional technical innovations projects are needed for images and maps as well. A good direction, for example, would be the development of a free on-the-cloud global map-making system similar to Google-map. Sharemap.org is creating a such online system specifically for encyclopedic maps and Wikipedia, but currently without any official support. But as for other heavy-coding projects, only some financial support can avoid failure and keep them going to improve the Wikipedia map sites. I sincerely wish the foundation can wake up and support this graphic side of its projects.

Next week, we'll learn a new language. Until then, practice your linguistics in the archive.

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2012-04-30

Featured content spreads its wings

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By Mathew Townsend

Featured articles

Six featured articles were promoted this week:

• United States Assay Commission (nom) by Wehwalt. The United States Assay Commission was an agency of the United States government from 1792 to 1980. Its function was to annually supervise testing of the gold, silver, and (in its final years) base metal coins produced by the United States Mint to ensure that they met specifications. Although some members were designated by statute, most of the commission consisted of prominent Americans, including numismatists. Appointment to the Commission was eagerly sought—for one, commissioners received a commemorative medal, different each year and, with the exception of the 1977 issue which was sold to the general public, rare and collectible.
• Hedley Verity (nom) by Sarastro1. Hedley Verity (1905–43) was a professional cricketer who played for Yorkshire and England between 1930 and 1939. A slow left-arm orthodox bowler, he took 1,956 wickets in first-class cricket at an average of 14.90 and 144 wickets in 40 Tests at an average of 24.37. Named as one of the Wisden Cricketers of the Year in 1932, he is regarded as one of the most effective slow left-arm bowlers to have played cricket. Never one who spun the ball sharply, he achieved success through the accuracy of his bowling. On difficult pitches, particularly ones affected by rain, he could be almost impossible to bat against.
• Steamtown, USA (nom) by Ishtar456. Steamtown, USA was a steam locomotive museum that ran steam excursions out of North Walpole, New Hampshire, and Bellows Falls, Vermont, from the 1960s to 1983. The museum, founded by millionaire seafood industrialist F. Nelson Blount, was operated primarily by the non-profit Steamtown Foundation after his death in 1967. Due to Vermont air quality regulations that restricted steam excursions, declining visitor attendance, and disputes over the use of track, some pieces of the collection were relocated to Scranton, Pennsylvania, in the mid 1980s; the rest were auctioned off. The National Park Service conducted historical research on the remaining equipment which was used for a Scope of Collections Statement for Steamtown National Historic Site and published in 1991.
• American Cream Draft (nom) by Dana boomer. The American Cream Draft is a rare draft horse breed, the only such breed developed in the United States that is still in existence. It is recognized by its cream color, known as "gold champagne", produced by the action of the champagne gene upon a chestnut base color, and by its amber eyes, also characteristic of the gene; the only other color found in the breed is chestnut. Like several other breeds of draft horses, the American Cream is at risk for the autosomal recessive genetic disease junctional epidermolysis bullosa.
• Giraffe (nom) by LittleJerry. The giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis) is an African even-toed ungulate mammal, the tallest living terrestrial animal and the largest ruminant. Its specific name refers to its camel-like face and and the patches of color on its fur, which bear a vague resemblance to a leopard's spots. The giraffe is noted for its extremely long neck and legs, as well as its horn-like ossicones. It stands 5–6 m (16–20 ft) tall and has an average weight of 1,600 kg (3,500 lb) for males and 830 kg (1,800 lb) for females. It is classified under the family Giraffidae, along with its closest extant relative, the okapi. There are nine subspecies, distinguished by their coat patterns.
• Battle of Radzymin (1920) (nom) by Halibutt. The Battle of Radzymin took place during the Polish–Soviet War (1919–21). The battle occurred near the town of Radzymin, some 20 kilometres (12 mi) north-east of Warsaw, between August 13 and 16, 1920. Along with the Battle of Ossów and the Polish counteroffensive from the Wieprz River area, this engagement was a key part of what later became known as the Battle of Warsaw. It also proved to be the bloodiest and the most intense.

Featured lists

One featured list was promoted this week:

• Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play (nom) by Albacore. The Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play is an honor presented at the Tony Awards, a ceremony established in 1947 as the Antoinette Perry Awards for Excellence in Theatre, to actresses for quality supporting roles in a Broadway play. The awards are named after Antoinette Perry, an American actress who died in 1946. Honors in several categories are presented at the ceremony annually by the Tony Award Productions, a joint venture of The Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing, to "honor the best performances and stage productions of the previous year."

Featured pictures

Six featured pictures were promoted this week:

• Fyodor Dostoyevsky, oil on canvass painting (nom, related article), created by Vasily Perov, a Russian realist painter, and nominated by GreatOrangePumpkin who described it as a "large, informative, impressive, high-quality, great reproduction". In response to questions about the painting's darkness, a reviewer pointed out that darkness is a feature of the light shined on the painting when photographed.
• Australian White Ibis (nom, related article), created and nominated by JJ Harrison. Although an editor complained that the bird was too "white" and asked if it had been washed, the image passed because, in the words of reviewer Saffron Blaze, "no one wants to see a dirty bird anyway." The Australian White Ibis, a wading bird native to Australia, has been moving to urban areas over the past 40 years.
• Indian Yellow-nosed Albatross (nom, related article), created and nominated by JJ Harrison. Passed unanimously although there were complaints about the brightness of the white in the photograph. The albatross, the smallest of the mollymawks, is found in the Indian Ocean.
• Second Battle of Guam (nom; related article), created and nominated by Grandiose, with the rationale: "Using a verifiable map of the US military, [the map] was converted to SVG form, aiding in clarity, using conventional colours and scalable format." The Second Battle of Guam lasted for several weeks, starting in mid-1944.
• Atlas Moth (Attacus atlas) (nom, related article), created and nominated by Quartl. Editors agreed that the quality was great. A lightened version was proposed, but the original was overwhelmingly preferred. The Atlas moth, native to Southeast Asia and the Malay Archipelago, has the largest wing surface area of any known moth.
• USS Arizona (BB-39) (nom, related article); created by US Navy (Enrique Muller, Jr.), restored by Centpacrr and Crisco 1492; second version restored by Mmxx; nominated by Crisco 1492. Some editors complained of distortion in the photograph. A second version was proposed, but ultimately the editors preferred the original nomination. The image shows the Arizona passing through the East River in New York shortly after being commissioned in November 1916.

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2012-04-30

R&I Review remains in voting, two open cases

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By Lord Roem

The Arbitration Committee opened no cases this week, keeping the number of open cases at two.

Open cases

Race and intelligence review (Week 7)

A review of the Race and intelligence case was opened as a compromise between starting a new case and proceeding with a ruling by motion. The review is intended to be a simplified form of a full case, and has the stated scope of conduct issues that have purportedly arisen since the closure of the 2010 case.

A complete decision was proposed on 16 April by drafter Roger Davies. The proposed principles include clarifications of harassment policies and sockpuppet investigation procedures. After a long series of findings of fact, the proposed decision seeks to admonish one editor involved in disruptive actions and to ban two others for 12 months. Voting so far has established a tentative consensus on some principles and some findings of fact; agreement on the remedy in the case has not been reached.

Rich Farmbrough (Week 4)

The case involves accusations of disruptive editing against Rich Farmbrough. Specifically, concerns have been raised about the editor and his observance of bot policy. Arbitrator Hersfold originally filed the case, which the committee accepted four weeks ago.

Workshop submissions closed several weeks ago, with most parties presenting suggestions on principles to include in a final decision. The draft or "proposed" decision is due to be posted in a few days, by arbitrator Newyorkbrad.

Other requests and committee action

• The Ban Appeals Subcommittee announced the opening of community input regarding an appeal by Altenmann.
• Voting on a series of proposals regarding evidence limits in arbitration cases is still in progress.
  
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2012-04-30

What Git means for end users, design controversies and pertinent poll results

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By Jarry1250

Git: the state of play

Recently "Technology reports" have abounded with different stories arising from the Git switchover on March 21; it can be easy to miss the wood for the trees when negotiating one of the largest changes to their workflows developers have experienced in years. To assist in establishing the current "state of play" when it comes to the switchover, the Signpost caught up with Chad Horohoe, the WMF developer responsible for managing the switchover.

Chad, are you happy with how things have gone so far? Would you have done anything differently, and if so what?

So far, I think the migration has gone well. There's still a learning curve that people are trying to get past. As far as what I'd do differently if I had to do this whole process again, I would have been much more aggressive in recruiting guinea pigs to help me test our new system. The biggest complaint I have seen from users so far have been related to learning Gerrit and overcoming the Git learning curve I mentioned. Getting people involved in testing the process at an earlier point would've made this easier. Also, given some of the reservations with Gerrit, I think having people involved earlier would've helped us discover these issues sooner.

The move to Git has probably sounded rather abstract to many Wikimedians. What can they expect in the way of tangible differences?

The most important part of this process has been changing our commit workflow to a "pre-commit review" model. The MediaWiki codebase and its extensions have to be runnable at all times—we shouldn't break things when we can avoid it. So by changing our review model, we are trying to accomplish two big things:

• We're trying to lower the bar to contribution. Since the review process now keeps the codebase clean of things that aren't quite ready for production, we're trying to encourage a lot more casual contributors who maybe didn't have the level of skill that we'd look for when granting commit access (the ability to modify core MediaWiki code). As of this week, everyone's code is reviewed beforehand, so we're trying to level the playing field for everyone who wants to write code (whether it's a one-line fix or a huge new feature).
• By keeping the code more stable, we're trying to reduce the time it takes to release MediaWiki to our primary users—WMF wikis. Our targeted goal is currently deploying the latest reviewed code every 2 weeks. This encourages contributors who like seeing their work live on the sites, as well as gets fixes and new features in the users' hands much faster.

Technology Reports since "Git day" have included coverage of some of the issues that have arisen since the switchover. How confident are you that once developers get used to the new way of working, those concerns will be resolved?

I think there's two types of issues that have arisen from the changes. The first are "Git issues". These are all problems stemming from the fact that we're trying to teach people how to use a radically different tool from the past. Git has a learning curve, but I think we're starting to get more people over that hump and used to some of the day-to-day work. The second set of issues people are having are "Gerrit issues". Gerrit is not a perfect tool and there are some rough edges to work out. While I will be looking at the work Daniel Friesen and others put into alternative code review tools, I must say that I disagree with the assertion that Gerrit is fundamentally flawed. I've found the Gerrit development community to be active and responsive so I believe some of the more pressing bugs we've uncovered will be fixed for us. Overall, I think that these concerns will resolve over time as people get used to the new system and some of the more glaring issues are fixed.

Is it possible to avoid controversy when changing a design?

Changing the Wikipedia "puzzle globe" logo in May 2010 drew a similar amount of controversy as this month's diff colour update.

In 1957, C. Northcote Parkinson bemoaned the fact that getting agreement on the design for a new bikeshed is uniformly more difficult than getting agreement on the design of a nuclear reactor; though fewer people are affected, the entire community (in Parkinson's case a committee) are willing and able to give their opinion on the matter. MediaWiki tries to avoid this problem by allowing logged-in users to choose how they wish the proverbial bikeshed to appear to them, but it is often not enough: participants still argue over how interface elements should appear to the overwhelming majority of users who are not logged in.

Such was the situation this week as the English Wikipedia's Technical Village Pump became a forum for discussing the changes to MediaWiki's default diff colouration and formatting schema, brought in last week with the local deployment of 1.20wmf1. Predictably (see previous Signpost coverage), the result was much consternation and fierce debate (as of time of writing, it seems as though the new global default will remain the default on the English Wikipedia, albeit with possible tweaks).

Design controversy is nothing new to Wikimedia wikis, however. In May 2010, for example, an update to the famous Wikipedia "puzzle globe" logo caused pages of on- and off-wiki debate. Indeed, it was an episode that bore all the hallmarks of the present diff colour discussion: the change was primarily aimed at fixing an objective problem (incorrect characters) but also incorporated purely aesthetic changes, and hence sparked disagreement. In the end, the logo was adjusted slightly to respond to the criticism of it by Wikipedians, but the update was not reverted. It was around the same time that the Vector skin was rolled out – first optionally and then as the default for all users – prompting a similar number of complaints. These complaints included those of one user, still an active Wikimedia Commons editor, who wrote that "the kind of morons with no place whatsoever in Wikipedia ... I expect donations to plummet in reply to this change".

Not all central changes have stuck, either: the furore over a change to the colouring using in the new messages bar prompted it to be widely reverted. Of course, the correct analysis of this historical record is itself a controversial issue; commentators seem split between those who feel that controversy is a part of the design process that can't be eliminated and those who feel that it can be, but that developers and designers have never tried hard enough to eliminate it. One thing is certain, though: with design changes of some sort or another occurring on an increasingly rapid basis, it's rarely been a more topical issue.

In brief

Signpost poll

Development priorities

You can now give your opinion on next week's poll: New diff colours recently went live on the English Wikipedia after weeks of trailing in the Signpost. Which of these sums up the effect of actually using the diffs on what you thought about them?

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.

• Loss of session data still an issue: The tentative close of bug #35900 ("Odd session bugs") reported in last week's "Technology report" unfortunately had to be reversed this week after editors on the English Wikipedia continued to have problems remaining logged in. Although a recurring issue, the causes of this bout of session data loss have baffled developers, causing the bug to be escalated to WMF Lead Platform Architect Tim Starling in the hope of resolution. Pertinently, this week's poll results (shown right) suggest that approximately one-third of users would favour significantly greater WMF emphasis on performance versus feature development.
• Three MediaWiki releases: The first release candidate for MediaWiki 1.19 was announced on April 26, two months after the MediaWiki version was deployed to Wikimedia wikis (the intervening months being taken up with the Git switchover and moving to a new release cycle). It was accompanied at the same time by so-called "point releases" for both MediaWiki 1.17 (1.17.4) and MediaWiki 1.18 (1.18.3); these were targeted at fixing a small number of significant bugs in their applicable version. The releases prompted bugmeister Mark Hershberger (about to start his final month at the WMF) to investigate the upgrade state of external wikis. He found that only 15% of non-WMF wikis were updating regularly, with 4% not having updated since MediaWiki 1.10 (for a similar study conducted in August 2010 with not entirely dissimilar results, see previous Signpost coverage).
• Watchlist email notifications enabled on all wikis: With the resolution of bug #28026 (performance impact notwithstanding), users on all wikis are now able to receive email updates when an item on their watchlist is changed. Discussion on the wikitech-l mailing list focussed on what form default notifications should take, if the feature is to be enabled by default at all. Elsewhere, there was extended discussion about Wikimedia's readiness for the introduction of widespread IPv6 use among internet surfers (a subject which also gets its own page on meta); an RFC has also been opened on the subject.
• Wikipedia Zero: There was a significant uptick in attention this week for Wikipedia Zero, a WMF-led initiative aimed at negotiating free 2G Wikipedia access in regions where other forms of internet access are severely limited. The scheme, which is achieved through a combination of negotiation with network providers and WMF technical support in order to ensure it is not abused, will (for example) be launching with mobile provider Digi Malaysia shortly. Blogger Gerard Meijssen pointed out that the same technology could be used to provide free access to specialised wikis, including those used to share free agricultural knowledge.
• New Engineering Community Group established: The creation of a new Engineering Community Group has been announced on the wikitech-l mailing list. The group, which will be led by former Volunteer Development Coordinator Sumana Harihareswara, will take on the responsibilities of the "Technical Liaison; Developer Relations" group, which is being disbanded. Its responsibilities will include "facilitating collaboration and communication between the Wikimedia Foundation, its employees and the larger Wikimedia developer community, and facilitating collaboration and communication between the Wikimedia developer community and other Wikimedia communities". The news was met positively by the Wikimedia community. Harihareswara's specific remit will continue to include many of her previous responsibilities, including overseeing this year's Google Summer of Code projects (details of which, contrary to last week's story, will in fact be covered in detail in next week's issue).
  

  

• NewPageTriage to go live: The development of Special:PageTriage, a dashboard-style special page aimed at providing a more useful alternative to Special:NewPages, will take a step forward on Wednesday when an early prototype – little more than a redesign of the old page in many respects – is deployed by private URL this week to test its compatibility with the production environment. However New Page Triage (WP:NPT) missed its April date for the first level demonstration of its new interface. Okeyes (WMF), community liaison, said there were very minor delays due to last minute attempts to accommodate community requests and do further testing to identify "any and all rare bugs". Okeyes (WMF) has scheduled and booked May 2 for the deployment date.
• Article Feedback Tool/Version 5. Wikipedia:Article Feedback Tool/Version 5 has scheduled May 2 to deploy the test alternative versions of Option 1 feedback form. Feedback continues at Article Feedback Tool/Version 5. Interested users can also test a version of the tool hosted on Wikimedia Labs. It should be noted that the tool is eventually intended to have a variety of important features not yet present on the prototype. Elsewhere, there will be an Office Hours session at 18:00 UTC on May 4 in #wikimedia-office ^connect to discuss progress on the development of version 5 of the Article Feedback tool. WMF community liaison Oliver Keyes suggested that the office hours would be used as an opportunity to "show off the almost-finished feedback page and prep it for a more public release".
• One bot approved: 1 BRfA was recently approved for use on the English Wikipedia:
  1. MadmanBot's 13th BRfA, generating Wikipedia:Inactive administrators reports; delivering messages and e-mails to inactive administrators as appropriate.

At the time of this writing, 11 BRfAs are active. As always, community input is encouraged.

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