Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-05-28/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-05-28/Traffic report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-05-28/In the media
A minor change—tweaks to the default heading used at the top of diff pages—provoked a long debate on the English Wikipedia when it went live this week. The discussion focussed on an issue that has bubbled to the surface intermittently for the past few years: as the MediaWiki developer base professionalises, are developers becoming less responsive to English Wikipedian demands?
Most developers would agree that editors of the English Wikipedia are given less priority than they used to be. There are overtly more projects than there used to be and more languages to support on each of them. Staff development projects are far more likely to target "newbie" editors than existing stalwart editors (a decision that seems to have significant support given this week's poll results, below); design choices are increasingly being made in the name of helping the former, potentially at the expense of upsetting the latter. Needless to say, decisions that fit such a paradigm (including the recent diff colours switchover) have not proved universally popular.
| “ | The horrific technological inertia that is developing within the community is only going to lead to two possible outcomes ... Either the developers abandon any hope of satisfying the community and stop bothering to even try to engage with it, or they stop trying to develop beneficial features at all. | ” |
—Happy-melon | ||
Ultimately, a number of viewpoints emerged from the resulting discussion. They centre on two questions: firstly, whether developers are targetting the "wrong" things, and secondly whether they should be expected to communicate the changes they have made better. Both have proved to be contentious issues. Equazcion, in proposing the former, talked of developers implementing their "own whims regarding what is best for the community"; but such a critique relies on a certain view of the community as being a superior judge of what is best for itself and its future members, rather than as an insider group keen to resist any kind of novelty. Moreover, volunteer developers, much like Wikimedians who work in an idiosyncratically narrow area, are likely to resist any attempt to tell them what new features they can and cannot work on, especially since virtually all will have been proposed by some community or other at some point.
The issue on which a consensus is more likely to form revolves around the need for better communication between developers (who frequent the wikitech-l mailing list, MediaWiki.org, and Bugzilla, which, in unrelated news, was down for considerable periods this week) and editors who frequent their home wikis. When pushed for comment on the thread, WMF developer Ryan Kaldari was the first to admit that despite the amount of time WMF developers were putting in to communicating with communities, more could still be done. "Right now", he wrote "there are so many different venues for discussion it's rather unmanagable [and] we have a very hard time getting people to beta test things for us. ... It seems no matter where we advertise it, we generally only get significant community feedback after the features are deployed".
The issue is not restricted to the English Wikipedia, although it is certainly the place that the issue is invoked most frequently. By contrast, members of smaller wikis are more likely to complain not that too many changes are being forced on them, but that rather too few are made—that their many feature requests are simply never acted on because they are neither WMF strategic priorities nor aligned with the personal interests of volunteer developers. The difficulty for WMF development coordinators undoubtedly lies in addressing all of these multifarious complaints simultaneously and without trade-off.
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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.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-05-28/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-05-28/Opinion
The petition was initiated by the group Access2Research, whose members include the executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), Heather Joseph, law professor Michael W. Carroll, and Dr John Wilbanks of the Consent to Research project, a major medical data-sharing endeavour. In backing the petition, the WMF has joined a wide range of educational and research institutions and communities, like the Association of Research Libraries, Creative Commons, Harvard's Open Access Project, and digital communities such as Academia.edu.
Kat Walsh is a prominent Wikimedian who has signed the petition. She is a co-author of the foundation's endorsement announcement, along with senior research analyst Dario Taraborelli and general counsel Geoff Brigham. Kat told the Signpost that "we spend public money on research because it's important to everyone—why isn't it beyond question that the public should have access to it?" The WMF announcement points out that Wikipedia as well as the other projects hosted by the foundation are heavily dependent on verifiable, reliable sources, and that its volunteers should be "empowered to read it, report on it, and cite it."
Joseph pointed out that the petition shows not only major public support, which is likely to lead to improvements in open-access policy and, critically, will exert a positive influence on consideration of the proposed Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), previously put to Congress in 2006, 2010, and again this year. The FRPAA would require that 11 US federal science agencies deposit articles on research they have funded into publicly accessible archives; the articles must be maintained and preserved by that agency or another repository that permits public access. Articles must be made available "gratis" to users within six months. The legislation commands bipartisan support in both houses of Congress, and would complement executive actions with a legislative framework that could not be easily rolled back by a later administration.
Beyond the US, the open-access debate is moving in a similar direction. Prominent mathematicians are calling for a boycott of Dutch publisher Elsevier, the biggest player on the medical and scientific literature market, and Jimmy Wales has been appointed to advise the UK government on open access (Signpost coverage). Heather pointed out that the Foundation's endorsement is important not just because the Foundation is a major player, but because elected representatives remember the Wikipedia community's action in response to the proposed SOPA (Signpost coverage) and the public attention carried by Jimmy's status as public figure.
To have an impact, the petition needs at least 25,000 signatures by June 19. Anyone who is at least 13 years old, US citizen or not, can sign it.
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After a protracted 60 days, the request for comment on the pending changes feature (Signpost coverage) ended May 22 without a clear preliminary result. While the final administrative evaluation of the process is still under consideration, the sheer numbers indicate higher participation than in the last RfC on the issue in 2011.
This time, there were three options: to oppose (1) or support (2) the feature as such, with another option (3) to accept the tool but reject the current draft policy on the other. According to figures published by a community member, the numbers are as follows:
While 3% of the RfC participants (17 users) supported option 3, the opposing camp managed to rally 35% (178), and the support camp rallied 61% (308). The support option also received the highest relative level of support among reviewer user rights holders within its own voting block (63%, 193 users) but the lowest numbers among editors with fewer than 1000 edits (15%). All options received a high level of comments and justifications.
Last year the third phase of the pending changes trial ended with a closure that delivered just over 66% support for the proposal (127 ayes to 65 nays), as well as concluding that no consensus to keep the feature had been established. Additionally, two caveats, each related to a set of BLP-related issues and articles, received some support.
This year's RfC aimed to follow up at the 2011 results and to reassess the tool that was temporarily taken out of service in response to those results. However, in terms of participation both proceedings are significantly below the level of activity generated by the vote on the German Wikipedia, the largest project using the more restrictive flagged revisions, back in 2008. The German community, which regularly decides project governance issues by vote-only procedures rather than deliberative RfCs, voted in favor of their version of the tool by 53.7% (638 of 1189 votes) and has abided by this decision to this day.
A co-ordinating administrator of the English Wikipedia RfC, Fluffernutter, stated that no fixed target date for the administrative closure of the RfC at hand is set.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-05-28/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-05-28/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-05-28/In focus
The Arbitration Committee closed no cases last week and opened one case; another is pending review. (This was the first time in 22 months that there were no pending cases.)
A case has now been opened concerning alleged misconduct by Fæ. This follows a submission for a case by MBisanz two weeks ago that was rejected on the basis that other dispute resolution forums had not been explored. In his statement, MBisanz claims that "Fæ has rendered himself unquestionable and unaccountable regarding his conduct because he responds in an extremely rude manner that personally attacks those who question him." He alleges that Fæ mischaracterises commentary about his on-wiki conduct as harassment, further stating that while "Fæ has been treated poorly by some users off-wiki (and possibly on)", his violent responses to commentary about him on-wiki "has become the issue itself."
In Fæ's response, posted on his behalf by clerk Guerillero, he noted that MBisanz's writings on Wikipediocracy during May about a planned private meeting with Gregory Kohs "should be of interest to many and appears to directly relate to the nature of his complaints about matters off Wikipedia." In his statement, Themfromspace states that "views at the RFC were divided over the legitimacy of Fae's adminship when it was alleged that heleft [sic] his previous account "under a cloud". Questions were raised about the scope of ArbCom's involvement in the RFA (Fae stated that it was sanctioned by ArbCom; John Vandenberg stated that Fae was mistaken and that only he endorsed the RFA)."
Moreschi advised Fæ to step away from external websites adding that "50 percent of what people say about you at WR et al is simply driven by hurt vanity: 40 percent is based on misinformation provided by those of the hurt vanity, and 10 percent (at best) might be fair criticism of some validity." Arguing that if Fæ "can't filter out the white noise" that he not read the threads at all and continue "working quietly here without starting vast drama-filled BADSITES AN threads in which you then go make yourself look awful."
Anthonyhcole asked the committee to accept the case, provided they manage its pages "for relevance and civility." He notes that Fæ abandoned his earlier account, claiming to be leaving the project during an RfC/U where the likely outcome would have been "to sanction him in the area of BLPs." The committee, however, agreed to a clean start and in his RfA Fæ stated he changed his name after an RfC/U[1] and that he'd never been blocked or sanctioned under the earlier name.[2] Cole continued, saying that "this implied, to the !voters at his [Fæ's] RfA, that the RfC/U had found nothing sanctionable" adding that it is probable he would not have passed if !voters were aware of the circumstances in which he left the RfC/U.
Cole asked the committee to "address Fæ's fitness to edit BLPs" which he said "is still an open question." He conjectures that the committee should have stipulated that "he return and complete the RfC/U before agreeing to a clean start." Cole continued and stated that the right decision which, given the misleading evidence Fæ supplied in his RfA would be for him "to ask the community to reconfirm his adminship. It is argued that the value he adds to the project as an admin is too great to jeopardise with a reconfirmation RfA."
Steven Zhang has submitted a case for review into the disruptive editing of his mentoree GoodDay in the use of diacritics; GoodDay, who is topic-banned from articles pertaining to the UK and Ireland, broadly construed, believes that diacritics should not be used in articles as they are not part of the English language, in his statement, Zhang states that "at times he is rather uncivil when discussing his objections with other editors. When questioned on his edits, he will often remove the comments from his talk page, citing harassment."
In response, GoodDay remarks that "there's nothing for me to add here, except that folks should take a look at the English alphabet." In their statement, Resolute says s/he and GoodDay have both agreed and disagreed on certain points over the years in the ice hockey project—in particular, on the use of diacritics: "we used to agree but now disagree. I don't know much about his conflicts in the realm of the British Isles, but his attitude around diacritics has become increasingly combative as of late in my view."
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-05-28/Humour
