Sunset on Lake Geneva with poppies. Used on SpringerImages twice (one already taken down, one in a book remains, complete with intrusive watermark and for sale). Originally posted on Flickr by Pear Biter under CC BY-SA. Licensing confirmed in 2009. Now labelled at Flickr as "All rights reserved".
Key issues with re-use of materials from Wikimedia Commons: lack of proper attribution (left and right) and improper statement of licensing terms (centre).
Last week, the Signpost was alerted to a blog in which a Cambridge researcher, Professor Peter Murray-Rust, observed that Springer Science+Business Media is taking Wikimedia content and asserting copyright over it. In his words, this is the "apparent systematic relicensing and relabeling" of Wikimedia content, "a breach of copyright and therefore illegal in most jurisdictions".
Springer SBM is the largest publisher of scholarly books in the world—a remarkable 7,000 a year—and with about 2,000 titles is the second-largest academic journal publisher after Elsevier. Springer owns 55 publishing houses and employs 6,200 people, and has considerable prestige and clout in the knowledge industry. One of their most popular websites is SpringerImages, the site on which Murray-Rust found the Wikimedia content. SpringerImages charges people for the use of their growing collection of 3.4 million scientific, technical, and medical images.File:1000 Year Temperature Comparison.png as seen on SpringerImages, violating the terms of the original licence. The watermark obliterates much of the information on the graph.Luc Montagnier, co-recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the HIV. Photo by User:Túrelio, licensed CC BY-SA. Used more than 100 times on non-Wikimedia websites, mostly without proper attribution, including a press release by Springer on the Nobel prize; after notification, the image was taken down.File:Beluga, Weißwal (Delphinapterus leucas).jpgUsed in Fig. 1 of a paper in the Springer journal Brain Structure and Function, together with three other images that had been generically attributed to Wikipedia, without mention of author (Eva Hejda), or licence (CC BY-SA).
One commenter at Murray-Rust's blog sought to explain how this could have happened, rightly pointing out the copyright transfer process: "Folks have been submitting articles to Springer, using Wikimedia images in them, and during upload have ticked a box saying they were the creator of all images. During this process, Springer likely requires you to assign copyright to them. Springer now slightly lazily assumes it owns copyright on the images. No great conspiracy." Murray-Rust responded, "But laziness is no defence in law. And Springer are SELLING these. If I appropriate someone's scholarly image I check. Springer [does not]."
Murray-Rust's accusations drew a sharp response from Springer's executive vice president, Wim van der Stelt, on the Google+ SpringerOpen blog:
Mr [sic] Murray-Rust not only attributes the problem incorrectly to Springer Images, but also insinuates that Springer is selling commercial rights to use images that are already open access. This is not only outrageous and blatantly false, it also damages our reputation. ... The larger implication, that Springer is "stealing" copyright and the insinuation that Springer is attempting to profit from "ill-gotten gains" is false and we call upon Peter Murray-Rust to correct this allegation immediately.
Murray-Rust has indeed retracted his more trenchant allegations, including that of "copytheft". He told the Signpost, though, that the current position for Wikipedia and many other providers is that there are many instances of apparent rebadging of material in SpringerImages. While Springer has been informed of this, they have made no comment, and these images continue to be offered for resale. "A typical price is US$60 for re-use in teaching/coursepacks."
Murray-Rust's interest in uncovering the misappropriation of Wikimedia materials by SpringerImages was piqued when he discovered images there from a paper on which he was a co-author. He also foundcases in which content imported from other publishers such as Wiley and PLoS—or in the public domain—was incorrectly labelled or licensed.
"I was personally affected", he said, "in that my CC BY content in BioMed Central journals had been copied and recopyrighted onto the Springer site. We've asked that at least SpringerImages announce to the world that there's a problem, and they have failed to do this. I've found hundreds of such instances, including content from museums and other companies. I'd guess there are thousands of images on SpringerImages that have been rebadged."
However, the poor attribution and licensing of material from Wikimedia Commons and the Wikipedias are far more widespread than just Springer's practices suggest. Even though detailed help is available on Commons, many downloaders make no effort to comply with the terms of the licences. With the exception of public-domain content, the use of materials found on Wikimedia projects requires attribution of the copyright holders and either the text of or links to the original licence.
Daniel Mietchen, Wikimedian in Residence on Open Science, told the Signpost that it's disheartening to see freely licensed images with instructions like "Viewing this image requires a subscription. If you are a subscriber, please log in." But the Springer issue is just "the tip of the iceberg", he says. "Wikimedia Commons has a dedicated category for cases in which uploaded files have been re-used externally in violation of these terms."
Currently, more than 1800 affected files are on the list, some of which have been used over 100 times outside Wikimedia platforms. The category's description reads "sometimes, media organizations just don't understand that in most cases, you just can't rip an image off Commons and just use it."
Mietchen says "media organizations are far from the only organizations and individuals misusing Commons' content." For example, the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) declined to continue donating images to the Commons in 2010. Efforts by the German Wikimedia chapter had yielded a 100,000-image donation in 2008, the largest in Commons' history, but the results were troubling for the Bundesarchiv: "more than 90% of their images, while licensed correctly on the Commons, had been re-used without proper attribution across the Internet." In one notable case, more than 3,000 of the images, all available for free online, had been cropped to remove the attribution line and then listed for sale on Ebay as a "private collection" (Signpost coverage).
This is reflected on the individual level, too. Commons bureaucrat User:99of9 told the Signpost, "fewer than half of the files I've personally authored and uploaded to Commons have been attributed when re-used elsewhere on the internet; and fewer than 30% have appeared with the proper licence. Some Wikimedians have tried marking their files with a prominent notice about re-use in addition to the licence template, but this has been controversial at Commons. We've also trialled a click to re-use this image button, but there were technical problems and it's not currently in use."
"The 1800 files in the "misused" category at Commons," he says, "are almost certainly a vast underestimate, and re-use is a persistent problem for the site." We asked whether the solution lies in refining the warnings and making it easier for the public to understand their responsibility as re-users. "Certainly we need to educate the public, and what you suggest may be part of the answer."
Mietchen says that improper licensing sometimes starts at the source, even with publishers. For example, PAGEPress has been labelling their articles as "This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence (by-nc 3.0)", i.e. with long and short forms of the licence text in contradiction—at one point with a bad typo—that has since been corrected to CC BY-NC throughout, which renders the content ineligible for re-use on Wikimedia projects.
While the failure of SpringerImages to comply with Creative Commons licensing terms had been pointed out as early as 2009 by archivist Klaus Graf, Springer appears to have finally taken action to clean up the problem over the past few days. This has been done in part by removing any content generically attributed to "Wikipedia" (of which there had been 368 results on Friday) and "Wikimedia" (157), with just one remaining watermarked "SpringerImages" and attributed to "Wikipaedia" [sic].
More than a day before this edition of the Signpost was published, the company's executive vice president of corporate communications, Eric Merkel-Sobotta, told us, "We have worked all weekend to solve the issues, and will be ready to make an announcement within 24 hours. I will make sure this is sent to you." The Signpost has received no further correspondence from Springer.
On June 10–11, the working group advising on the design of the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) met in San Francisco to tackle several basic issues like who should be able or required to apply for FDC funds and how multilingual application processes will look. The FDC will be tasked with evaluating applications for funding, mainly by chapters, and on this basis will make recommendations to the WMF board of trustees on how funds should ultimately be allocated.
An "in-depth" point for discussion was whether staff and board members of organizations applying for FDC funding can serve on the FDC at the same time. While chapter functionaries had lobbied for chapter-selected FDC members, thereby being able to choose some of the people to be in charge of evaluating their own chapter applications, in the run-up to the meeting the working group stuck to the existing arrangement: five community-elected and four WMF-board-appointed voting members. On the wider COI question, the following clause remains in the draft:
"Staff / board members of entities requesting funds from the FDC may serve on the FDC; however, they must recuse themselves from deliberations pertaining to their entity's application."
The clause would come into effect if either the community elects or the WMF board appoints such members. However, the Signpost notes that a broad "recusal" requirement failed in the only comparable Wikimedia committee that has come under wider community scrutiny: the first German Community Project Budget Committee (CPB), established in 2011 to evaluate and recommend applications on how to use €200,000 of German chapter funds to the WMDE board of trustees. The CPB ran into trouble over CoI allegations against its own members and WMDE trustees who applied for CPB funds while in charge of its oversight and final approval. The unfolding debate triggered several resignations from both bodies. The chapter's general assembly responded by amending the CPB’s framework to exclude all sitting CPB and WMDE board members from applying for CPB funds.
Another point at issue in San Francisco was the management of FDC volunteers who become inactive. While the English Wikipedia’s ArbCom, one model looked at for best practices, has a larger pool of arbitrators to cope with members who become inactive, and the foundation's Grant Advisory Committee resolved to abandon fixed membership numbers altogether, it may still be decided that FDC members, who will number up to nine, might be replaced by alternate members if inactive for periods long enough to affect the workability of the body.
Topics like the concrete role of a community-elected ombudsperson to handle dispute resolution over the FDC’s work and details of the application papers will be discussed up until the final recommendations deadline to the WMF board on June 30.
Brief notes
Passing of an English Wikipedian: Philip Chalmers (User:Philcha), a recognized reviewer and the author of one featured and 42 good articles, died on June 4 after a long fight with brain cancer. As a tribute, a collaboration has been proposed to complete Philip's final article, Nematode.
ArbCom seeks new checkusers and oversighters: On June 6, the Arbitration Committee published a call for additional checkusers and oversighters, the user groups that deal with cases related to privacy policy. According to the process page, users may submit applications until June 15.
Italian Wikipedia protest reloaded: The Italian Wikipedia community has set up a site notice on all pages, including the main page, to emphasize that the parliamentary bill they protested against in October 2011 (Signpost coverage) is not off the table.
Wikidata logo contest: The community process to pick a logo for the Wikidata project, aiming at providing a central Wikimedia data repository (Signpost coverage), got off the ground on June 9. Details are in the German Wikimedia chapter's blog.
Wikivoyage to join Wikitravel proposal: On June 9, the general assembly of the German non-governmental organization running Wikivoyageunanimously voted in favor of joining the Wiki Travel Guide proposal to establish a Wikimedia-hosted travel guide wiki. This idea has been under review on Meta since April (Signpost coverage).
Berlin Hackathon videos: Additional videos from the Berlin Wikimedia Hackathon, covering Wikidata and lightning talks, have been published on vimeo.
Ibero-American Wikimedia Summit 2012: Representatives of Iberocoop entities and the WMF met in Santiago, Chile June 1–3 to discuss issues such as indigenous languages projects and educational outreach to Latin American universities.
The Guild of Copy Editors is accepting nominations for their fourth tranche of coordinators, who will serve a six-month term. For complete information, please have a look at the election page.
Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.
Seal of the Counter-Vandalism Unit
This week, we interviewed the Counter-Vandalism Unit. Unique among WikiProjects, the Counter-Vandalism Unit was created as a bot tied to an IRC channel tasked with identifying and reverting vandalism. Over time, the bot morphed into a WikiProject and gained the trappings of a para-military unit as a result of new members misunderstanding the origin of the CVU's name. After tense discussions about the project's scope and motivations, including several attempts to delete the project in 2006 and 2007, efforts were undertaken to reduce the militant language on the project's page and make the project more inviting to ordinary Wikipedians. Today, the project provides a variety of resources to editors seeking to curb vandalism on Wikipedia. Among these are an academy to teach strategies for detecting vandalism and dealing with vandals, various studies of vandalism, a list of tools and scripts, and a think tank which serves as a forum for ideas on how editors can better protect Wikipedia from vandalism. Included in this week's interview are Dan653, Waggers, Achowat, and the project's founder とある白い猫 (To Aru Shiroi Neko).
What motivated you to join the Counter-Vandalism Unit? How much of your time on Wikipedia is spent cleaning up vandalism?
Dan653:Achowat actually motivated me to join the Counter-Vandalism Unit (CVU). About 80% of my time is spent cleaning up vandalism, with the rest of my time spent working on the CVU, doing a little work on articles, archiving talk pages, adding coordinates to articles, and new page patrolling.
Waggers: A few years ago, before things like Cluebot had really got to grips with vandalism, it was pretty rife on Wikipedia. After trying to tackle it via pure recent pages patrolling it became clear to me that we needed a place to coordinate our efforts on tackling vandalism and I stumbled across the CVU. As well as providing a great place to discuss ideas and list useful tools, the CVU brand helped to make what is fundamentally a pretty dull cleaning-up task into something a bit more exciting.
Achowat: I'd like to think that my experience with Counter Vandalism is very similar to most editors whose first real contributions are anti-vandalism in nature: I used Wikipedia as a resource, realized how useful a tool it can be, and wanted to help. It seems easy enough "See something that doesn't belong, revert it". Over the next few months I had more experienced users direct me to WP:VANDAL, to the user talk templates at WP:WARN, and to WP:AIV. Other users helped me make the most of my time reverting vandalism, to make sure I had the most impact. To answer your second question, I don't spend as much time as I used to looking for vandalism. I've found other ways to be useful to the Encyclopedia, including helping other, newer counter-vandals "learn the ropes", as it were.
とある白い猫: This brings back memories. Counter Vandalism-Unit (CVU) grew out of my userspace. The name was originally intended to be the name of the script/bot that detected the vandalism where the "Unit" was the bot. I suppose this question can be rephrased to "What prompted CVU to be something people can actually join?". A lot of people asked if they could "Join" the unit hence the small user subpage list grew into the Wikiproject it is today. What this achieved is established a median to crowdsource individual users in dealing with vandalism rather than uncoordinated individual effort which is far more efficient. CVU has even spread to other projects.
How useful are the new pages and recent changes feeds in detecting and fighting vandalism? Has the project ever teamed up with any patrols or other WikiProjects?
Dan653: The new pages feed is not that useful in detecting and fighting vandalism as most vandalism that I come across is to an already established article. The recent changes feed was very useful in fighting and detecting vandalism until I received rollback rights and started to use Huggle. We are associated with the Recent changes and New Page patrol and we have absorbed Vandalism Studies.
Waggers: They're both very helpful, although as counter vandalism tools have become more advanced I tend to use the native special pages less. They're especially useful when coupled with other tools – most of my early counter vandalism efforts were a simple combination of Special:RecentChanges and WP:Popups. Like Wikipedia as a whole CVU is very much about collaboration, so we're proud to work alongside other wikiprojects and encourage our members to do so.
Achowat: New Page Patrolling, while they do see a fair amount of vandalism, is such a larger set of skills that, frankly, the New Page Patrollers are better at than we are. You need to be able to know when to speedy, when to PROD, when to AFD...when and which tags to add, if Googling would be useful. New Page Patrollers need to take articles that may not be perfect and work to perfect them. Countering vandalism is a whole different ball of wax. We need to be able to recognize that 1 edit, one change to one line, is either vandalism or not. It's less comparing apples to apples than it is comparing apples to suspension bridges. As for RCP: All RC Patrollers are counter-vandals, and most counter-vandals Patrol recent changes. The CVU has a niche, but it can't simply be a group of people who watch over new changes (that would be redundant to the work done at RCP). If CVU is to be successful, if it means to be a useful tool for the Encyclopedia, it needs to focus on something else. Since the CVU redesign and reorganization (which coincided with the Vandalism Studies merge), CVU has a number of 'divisions' ("Divisions", of course chosen because it's 'snappier' than 'Task Force', in much the same way 'Unit' is snappier than 'WikiProject'). The Think Tank, which aims to be a place of collaboration, a place where CVU members can discuss new ways to do what we do. The Academy, that works to train new counter-vandals. The Task Force, is still being tailored to the new vision of CVU, but hopefully it will serve as a "mailing list" for CVU users to, somehow (we're still working on the technical details), of high levels of vandalism. Vandalism Studies, which will be discussed below. We also maintain a Division for listing and keeping up with the new Tools and Scripts that may be developed to help us out with what we do. I realize I may have gone off on a bit of a tangent, so let me return to your final question. "Do we work with other WikiProjects?" The answer is "No, how could we?". Unlike other projects, we don't claim articles, so we don't have an article that we 'share' with another Project (in the way that, say, WPCanada and WPTrains could share "Railroading in Canada"). We'd like to work with as many people as possible, but our job (like RCP) is generally 1-editor;1-keyboard kind of work.
とある白い猫: I think NPP and RC patrol are a valuable asset to Wikipedia but I feel we as a community have grown too dependent and attached to them. NPP and RC patrol is a small fraction of the issues that needs to be addressed daily. And for the other point, I do not believe CVU ever was an independent entity. The scope of most WikiProjects are limited where they can afford to remain independent of other wikiprojects. The moment people were able to join CVU its scope was increased to include every page hence cooperation with other projects is by very nature unavoidable. Specific examples have bee given by other people so I needn't repeat what they said.
Do you use any tools or programs in your vandal-fighting duties? Are there any functions you wish were built directly into Wikipedia's interface to help in detecting and fixing vandalism?
Dan653: I mostly use Huggle and Twinkle, but I have tried Igloo, and STiki. I think the current functions do a good job in detecting and fixing vandalism, but an iOS version of Huggle would be great.
Waggers: I do use a number of scripts and tools; things like Popups and Twinkle are essential. Huggle is brilliant and I used to use it a lot, but I moved away from the Windows OS a number of years ago and so haven't been able to use it. I now prefer things that work within the browser rather than needing to be installed as separate applications – I've recently started using Igloo, it has a lot of potential, and I sometimes use WP:LUPIN. What we really need now is something similar to Huggle or Igloo that can work on a smartphone.
Achowat: I do things by hand and, while that's slower, I think there are times where counter-vandals get a bad name by working too quickly. I don't mean to disparage the fine work semi-automated counter-vandals do, but I personally like the slower pace of undo and rollback allows me to better "Make one edit right, and then repeat it 45 times an hour"; even if it does mean that it's harder to "Make 45 edits an hour". The one technical function I'd like to see (a pipe-dream, I understand, since it would likely cost far more than its worth) is replacing "Show anonymous users"/"Show logged-in users" with a system that breaks it down by Confirmed or Autoconfirmed and "New users and IPs". That will help us take care of vandalism-only accounts much quicker than the current system does.
とある白い猫: I was going to present something about this on Wikimania 2012 but there just weren't enough slots. We live in an era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and AI can be utilized and perhaps even integrated to assists users find problematic edits. There is an international conference called CLEF which has a PAN workshop that has cutting edge research competing to be the best in Automated Vandalism Detection, Automated Author Identification (could be utilized to identify long-term abuse), Automated Plagiarism Detection (could be utilized to identify copyright violations).
How often do you encounter vandalism from IP users? How difficult is it to fight vandalism without biting newcomers? Have you ever been able to convert a vandal into a productive part of the community?
Dan653: Most of the vandalism I encounter is from IP users; "those that vandalized pages were overwhelmingly unregistered editors, who accounted for 96.77% of all vandalism edits" (Vandalism Studies). It is not difficult to fight vandalism without biting newcomers. I have not been able to convert a vandal into a productive part of the community, though I have tried.
Waggers: Certainly most vandalism comes from IP users; Educational IPs particularly seem to be a problem. At some point I think there may be a case for pre-emptive blocking of such addresses, but that seems a very harsh approach. Fighting vandalism without biting newcomers is easy – it's really just a case of using the user warning templates in the right order and engaging with the user if they try to explain what they're trying to do – but I'm frequently dismayed how often new users are reported to WP:AIV without having been given so much as a level 1 warning, or when their edits are clearly a misunderstanding rather than deliberate vandalism. I know I dropped a bit of a clanger when I first started editing and if I had been treated as harshly as some editors treat newcomers now, I probably would have given up back then.
Achowat: To add to Dan's comments, "Most vandalism comes from IPs, but most IP edits are not vandalism". We do a disservice to ourselves, to the editors behind the IPs, and to the encyclopedia itself when we paint all IPs as vandals. That being said, the current community-accepted User Talk templates at WP:WARN, I believe, do an amazing job at combating both vandals and keeping us from being too BITE-y. They're all of the format "Hey, welcome, it looks like your edits might be vandalism, please stop" – "Your edits appear to be vandalism, use the Sandbox if you want to experiment" – "If you continue your vandalism, we may block you" – "That's it, one more and we block you!". The benefit of the Templates (despite making sure that each counter-vandal says exactly what the community wants them to) is that each template allows time for the templated User to engage in a conversation. The IP-vandalism problem also makes it quite difficult to "see" that an editor has gone from vandal to editor. But there's a difference between a vandal and someone who has vandalized a page. And vandals are entirely incompatible with being productive. It's an issue of mindset. Wikipedia is a project that "fails in theory but works in practice". I'm typing this right now because I think that the Signpost promoting CVU will lead to greater participation in CVU and improve an encyclopedia that could care less if I lived or died. It takes a special kind of someone to do all the work that Wikipedians do, especially given that our only reward might be a picture of a star anchor. Vandals are people who maliciously and thoughtfully try to disrupt that goal, the goal of a free repository of all the world's information. No one like that could ever be turned. However, when issuing a {{uw-vandalism1}}, it's really quite hard to know what the person who made the edit you thought was vandalism was thinking. And we have rules about that sort of thing.
とある白い猫: It is a statistical fact that most vandalism comes from IP edits. This, however, does not mean all IP edits are problematic. It is important to remember that the vast majority of IP edits are intended to improve the wiki and are not vandalism. Patrolling IP edits requires care. Your vandals typically do not care about the site and will not be hurt no matter what you tell them. However, newbies do care a lot about the project and will quickly be completely alienated from the project if they are bitten. Bitten IPs can turn vandals as well.
How often do you deal with trolls intentionally causing disruptions? What is the best way to handle a troll? Have you been involved in the process of blocking or banning such a user?
Dan653: I rarely deal with trolls, mostly vandals. The best way to deal with a troll is to let them know that what they are doing is wrong and can lead to a block. If they continue to troll I let an admin know. I have only dealt with three trolls, two of them involved in an edit war (they both got warnings) and one who was continually removing content (he was blocked indef). Including hir I have reported 35 users to AIV and 3 from RFPP, all of which have been blocked.
Waggers: Genuine trolls are a lot rarer than people think. A lot of people are labelled as trolls when they cause disruption – but often their intentions are pure; they're not being intentionally disruptive. The odd thing about trolls is they can come from anywhere – quite often from good, established users who get a bee in their bonnet and vent their frustration by disrupting the project somehow. I think that's a lot more common than someone coming along new to the project whose sole intention is to disrupt it – usually such users' edits are simple vandalism and easily dealt with. The important thing is always to start off by assuming good faith and asking the user to explain what they're doing. Give them a fair chance. But once it's clear they're a genuine troll, don't let them disrupt the project further by discussing them to death – block/ban swiftly and move on. As an admin I find the sheer length of discussions at WP:AN and WP:ANI can be quite frustrating when the conclusion seems fairly obvious.
Achowat: Waggers is 100% correct. Trolls aren't the kinds of people who disrupt Article space. Not anymore, they're too smart for that. A vandal will make his 4 vandalism edits, take and ignore each template, and get reported and blocked. A troll has bigger goals, and you find them on the Talk pages of controversial subjects: religion, politics, etc. They know that they can cause more anguish and torment by defending some fringe theory and demanding inclusion thereof than by starting an edit war over it or vandalizing the page. The community really needs to set a standard for how much Talk page trolling and how much incivility we're willing to accept (like we have with the "sufficient warning-AIV" system for vandalism). That, unfortunately, seems wholly out of the scope of CVU.
とある白い猫: While trolls are outside the scope of CVU, my advice would be resilience. Trolls may find ways of getting under your skin as much as you try to prevent it but in the end all that matters is resilience. Do not let trolls decide how you edit the wiki.
The Counter-Vandalism Unit recently absorbed the vandalism studies project. What is the intent of this project and how has its research been used to fight vandalism?
Dan653: The intent of the project is to conduct research related to unconstructive edits.
Waggers: It's a case of "know your enemy". The more we know about how, where, when and why vandalism happens, the easier it becomes to clean it up and, hopefully, prevent it happening in the first place. It's important we do that, but equally important that we deny recognition, so it's a tricky balance to get right.
Achowat: Waggers again makes a compelling point, but along with WP:DENY, we don't want to give them any ideas. It's a delicate balance, but it's important to have hard data when we talk about how best to handle disruption. Otherwise we rely on ol' wives tales about vandalism, which is never preferred to the actual numbers. (Addendum) Now that the Academy seems relatively self-sustaining, and since serious technical work is being put into revitalizing the Task Force, I imagine the next "Division" that we'll hope to revive is Vandal Studies. The last studies gave us good numbers, but they're frankly too old to be of use now. Wikipedia is significantly different than it was in 2007. I suspect by September a full study should be in the works, followed shorty (or, perhaps, preceded shortly) by a re-hash of the Obama article study with, perhaps, a Mitt Romney study, or the like. Really, we need to look to see if our information is still accurate. I would also like to see those studies expanded to include 1. What, if any, tools or scripts are anti-vandals using? 2. How effective is ClueBot NG at combating vandalism? 3. How effectively are vandals warned and reported? 4. Do recognized shared-IPs (including schools) have a dramatically higher or lower instance of vandalism than IPs in general?
とある白い猫: Knowledge comes from studying past behavior. Understanding and detecting the pattern will improve detection. AI-assisted tools may be a good improvement in detecting such patterns.
There is an academy at the Counter-Vandalism Unit intended to educate and coach vandal-fighters. How long has this initiative been around and what does the project hope to achieve with the academy? What are some basic lessons about vandalism every Wikipedian should know?
Dan653: The Academy has been around for a little over a month. The project hopes to give budding vandal fighters one-on-one coaching with an experienced vandal fighter. The project also teaches all enrollees to identify vandalism, recognize other kinds of disruptive editing, and how to warn and report those who persist in vandalism. Reading WP:Vandalism will give most Wikipedians a general knowledge about vandalism.
Waggers: I think the basic lessons about vandalism are really the same as the basic lessons about Wikipedia in general. Assume good faith, be bold, be civil, and maintain a neutral point of view. That last one may seem strange in a counter-vandalism context, but a lot of people report editors for vandalism when really it's just a difference of opinions that they need to resolve between them using reliable sources.
Achowat:WT:CVUA should give you the 'history' of the Academy, from the first suggestion on 25 January until its opening on 20 April. I'm not going to rehash what was said there, but if there are any questions about it, feel free to drop me a line. The Four Steps to counter-vandalism are the biggest thing that anyone who'd like to deal with vandals is.
とある白い猫: The intention in forming CVU was to be more of a learning grounds, particularly for users unfamiliar with dealing with vandalism. Anybody can revert vandalism, but efficiency can be greatly improved if people can be taught how to more effectively use tools and how to avoid biting newbies.
What are the Counter-Vandalism Unit's most urgent needs? How can a new member help today?
Dan653: To my knowledge the CVU has no urgent needs. A new member can help today by reverting vandalism, becoming an instructor, or enrolling in the academy.
Waggers: The CVU is one of those organisations that wishes it didn't have to exist. And thanks to things like Cluebot NG, thankfully the need for active (human) vandal-fighters and patrollers is waning. So the needs now are really about the long-term view. We're pretty good at handling vandalism now when it happens, but need to do much more about preventing it happening in the first place. Oh, and that smartphone version of Huggle/Igloo would be great if someone has the ability!
Achowat: The Biggest needs are those that aren't directly countering vandalism. There are enough people, and ClueBot, working counter-vandalism that if someone read this article and thought "How can I help?", there is diminishing returns on that person working the Recent Changes Queue. The biggest need right now is Vandalism Studies. We haven't had a study in over 5 years and, frankly, our information is likely to be wrong. It's hard to talk about taking that long-term view until we know what we're up against.
とある白い猫: What Wikipedia and CVU alike need is better tools that better analyze and help deal with vandalism and other unwanted content (spam, copyvios, etc). Breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence in the past 5 years in particular can lead to tools that can significantly improve efforts.
Anything else you'd like to add?
Waggers: In the past the CVU has had a somewhat mixed reputation, with accusations of people "playing cops and robbers" with vandals and the like. I really hope that this Signpost article serves to rectify some of that.
Achowat: The biggest initial thing you'll notice about the new CVU is the stripping of the paramilitary pretense we once assumed. We don't talk about "going into combat" and "blasting away vandals with our M1-Abrams Scripts". There have been 4 MFDs of CVU, and the paramilitary trappings always come up. Even people who don't mind the idea of a Counter-Vandalism WikiProject think that pretending we're fighting back the roving hordes that wish to do harm to our precious village is unnecessary. I, personally, think it is not only unnecessary, but also dangerous. We BITE, we assume bad faith, we come to think of any strings of numbers like an enemies flag. CVU is just a group of Wikipedians who want to see disruption kept to a minimum and give every Wikipedian the tools they need to be successful in that aim. As such, as part of the redesign of the CVU homepage (which was more about cleaning clutter, honestly) I personally chose to tone-down the language (you will no longer find references to fighting, combating, or eradicating vandals) and chose not to list some CVU UBXs that supported that mindset.
とある白い猫: CVU from its formation had been the target of significant negative sentiment due to the belief that it had a para-military structure. I think this pretense is unfair, as CVU never operated like a military body. To be blunt, I was never the commander-general, nor was anyone else for that matter. I wish people assumed more good faith towards CVU and I hope this Signpost coverage may alleviate some of the negative sentiment.
Next week, we'll interview some punks. Until then, rock out in the archives.
Pi (nom), by Noleander. The number pi, which is approximately equal to 3.14159, is represented by the Greek letter π; pi is an irrational number that is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Its digits are infinite and never repeat, leading people to calculate the numbers in pi to a high degree of precision; the current record is 10 trillion digits, although 40 are ample for almost all scientific purposes. It is found in numerous formulae in math and science.
Lynching of Jesse Washington (nom), by Mark Arsten. Jesse Washington, a young African-American man from Robinson, Texas, was sentenced to death in a trial for rape and murder. After the trial, he was mutilated and burned by a crowd of more than 10,000 people, who had a festive attitude during the lynching. The lynching received much coverage in both local and national newspapers; historians have noted that Washington's death curbed public support for lynchings.
Featured lists
Three featured lists were promoted this week.
Rihanna videography (nom), by Tomica. The Barbadian recording artist Rihanna has appeared in numerous music videos and films, including 35 music videos and several feature films. Several of her videos have been controversial for the artist "not being a good role model".
List of colleges and universities in Wisconsin (nom), by Ruby2010. The US state of Wisconsin is home to eighty-five colleges and universities which are recognised by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. The oldest extant institution is Nashotah House, while the largest is the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
List of Slovenian football champions (nom), by Ratipok. The Slovenian football champions are the winners of the highest league of association football in Slovenia, PrvaLiga. There have been 21 champions since the league was established in 1991; Maribor is the most successful team in the league.
Featured pictures
Three featured pictures were promoted this week.
Poeke Castle (nom; related article), created by MJJR and nominated by Tomer T. Poeke Castle is a castle near Poeke, Belgium, which dates back at least 900 years. The new featured picture is viewed from the north-east.
2010 G-20 Seoul summit (nom; related article), created by the Presidency of the Nation of Argentina and nominated by Tomer T. The 2010 G-20 Seoul Summit was a meeting of the G-20 heads of government, where they discussed the global financial system and the world economy. It took place on 11 and 12 November 2010.
Liocarcinus depurator (nom; related article), created by Lycaon and nominated by Tomer T. Liocarcinus depurator is a species of crab found in the North Sea, Atlantic Ocean, Mediterranean Sea and Black Sea that grows up to 50 millimetres (2.0 in) in width and 40 mm (1.6 in) long.
ArbCom resolved by motion to standardise the enforcement of "editing restrictions imposed by the committee, and to reduce the amount of boilerplate text in decisions." The following standard enforcement provision will be incorporated into all cases with an enforceable remedy that avoids case-specific enforcement provisions:
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Should any user subject to a restriction in this case violate that restriction, that user may be blocked, initially for up to one month, and then with blocks increasing in duration to a maximum of one year. Appeals of blocks may be made to the imposing administrator, and thereafter to arbitration enforcement, or to the Arbitration Committee. All blocks shall be logged in the appropriate section of the main case page.
ArbCom resolved to ensure that the community has adequate notice of proposed changes to the committee's processes and procedures, and opportunity to comment on proposed changes. The motion requires clerks to notify the community of all proposals for significant changes on the committee's formal motions page, and that they be advertised on the committee's noticeboard and administrators' noticeboard. Motions will be subject to standard voting procedure and will remain open for 24 hours before enactment.
Following his use of automated programs in contravention of sanctions, Rich Farmbrough has been blocked for 30 days from 6 June. The committee has resolved that to avoid future violations of any nature, Farmbrough is to:
clear all userspace .js pages associated with his accounts;
avoid pasting offline automated edits into an article;
make only manual edits; and
refrain from edits adjusting the capitalisation of templates (where current capitalisation is functional) and similar edits, as "these can create the appearance of automation".
The prohibition on his use of automation will remain unchanged until it is modified or removed by the Committee. The earliest date which he may appeal the automation prohibition is 15 January 2013. Checkuser will be used to verify his compliance with the prohibition, and if future breaches of the automation prohibition occur, "notwithstanding the standard enforcement provisions, he will likely be site-banned indefinitely with at least twelve months elapsing from the date of the site-ban before he may request the Committee reconsider."
The committee has lifted the indefinite ban of Lyncs from the Scientology topic. The ban was imposed after his successful siteban appeal last year. His appeal to have his interaction ban from Cirt and single-account restriction removed was unsuccessful in view of the limited number of edits the committee could review.
The case concerns alleged misconduct by Fæ. 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." MBisanz alleges that Fæ mischaracterises commentary about his on-wiki conduct as harassment and while Fæ has been mistreated off-wiki and possibly on, his violent responses to on-wiki commentary "has become the issue itself."
Evidence submissions close tomorrow, with proposed decisions due by 26 June. Due to the contentious nature of the case, arbitrator SirFozzie added a notice on the evidence subpage reminding users that he and other arbitrators and clerks will monitor the case. Clerks have been authorised to remove uncivil comments and accusations where there are no diffs to support them; the users responsible will receive a single warning. If further incidents occur, clerks may block the user for a period of time at their discretion. Users are reminded that no speculation is allowed, and submissions must be factual and to the point; where submissions contradict those of other editors, sufficient diffs must be provided.
The case concerns disruptive editing by GoodDay pertaining to the use of diacritics. GoodDay is topic banned from articles pertaining to the UK and Ireland, broadly construed, and is under the mentorship of Steven Zhang, the filing party. GoodDay believes that diacritics should not be used in articles as they are not part of English. Zhang notes that GoodDay can be uncivil and often removes comments by other editors from his talk page, citing harassment.
Evidence submissions closed on 5 June; most submissions concerned GoodDay's battleground behaviour and disruptive editing. proposed principles, findings of fact and remedies are currently being voted on. A statement about the scope and timetable of the case was made by drafting arbitrators Kirill Lokshin and AGK, reminding users seeking to make submissions that the purpose of the case is to examine GoodDay's conduct. Submissions must relate to whether or not his behaviour is contentious. AGK reminded users that "no examination will be made of the wider topic areas to which GoodDay makes contributions, except where necessary to establish if GoodDay's behaviour has been disruptive." The proposed decision of the case "will take into account GoodDay's treatment of his mentors' advice" and evidence unrelated to GoodDay's conduct will not be accepted.
The case was referred to the committee by Timotheus Canens, after TheSoundAndTheFury filed a "voluminous AE request" concerning behavioural issues in relation to Ohconfucius, Colipon, and Shrigley. The accused editors have denied his claims and decried TheSoundAndTheFury for his alleged "POV-pushing". According to TheSoundAndTheFury, the problem lies not with "these editors' points of view per se "; rather, it is "fundamentally about behavior".
Evidence submissions for the case will be accepted until 16 June, with a proposed decision to be made on 30 June.
As previewed last week, support for version six of the Internet Protocol (normally known by its initialism "IPv6") was enabled on Wikimedia wikis on June 6, hyped as World IPv6 Launch Day. IPv6 succeeds the widely-used IPv4 form that most people are familiar with, replacing the common IPv4 address (like 93.72.7.12) which can only provide 232 = 4,294,967,296 unique addresses with a longer 128-bit hexadecimal string (such as 2001:0:4137:9E76:247C:A71:833A:FA41).
The change, which is slowly being made by website providers around the world, will eventually allow for far more than 4.3 billion devices without introducing the potential for collateral damage occurring when an IPv4 address comes to represent many users (using NAT). By comparison, the Internet is projected to grow to 15 billion active devices by 2015; whereas this would have posed a problem under IPv4, IPv6 has been deemed sufficiently broad to offer the Internet almost unlimited room to grow.
While only a very small fraction of anonymous edits now come from IPv6 addresses, the June 6 deployment has caused significant disruption. Various scripts that are now being fed IPv6 addresses as input are either fully or partially broken due to the new format of the addresses. For example, Huggle was reported to choke on IPv6 address edits, and popups does not yet recognise IPv6 addresses as valid anonymous users. Various Toolserver scripts need updating as well, especially WHOIS and other IP address lookup tools regularly used by Wikimedians to counter disruption. Fixes to the German Wikipedia's vandal fighter community tool infrastructure, built and run by a small group of volunteer coders on behalf of the whole community, are expected to take weeks.
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I get that this was an exciting step for the engineers who got it done, and I tip my hat to all of them for pulling it off; from that sense it's been a successful implementation [but] I also get that at least 30% of WMF users on hundreds of projects – that's roughly how many use one or more gadgets, scripts or tools that didn't work after this switch – have now had their "editing experience" negatively affected, and that almost all of it could have been avoided with a month or two of notice.
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—English Wikipedian User:Risker. Responding, system administrator Ryan Lane asked whether that many tools had in fact been as badly affected as she had implied.
Even so, the disruption was considerably less than would have been experienced last year, when the Wikimedia Foundation had to drop out of World IPv6 Day because some parts of its database were not ready to accommodate IPv6 addresses. Indeed, this time around the issues seemed to have been successfully resolved by the World IPv6 Launch on June 6, if only just.
Despite the successful switch-on itself, the deployment has been far from uncontroversial: since June 6, there has been substantial criticism of how late in the day the Wikimedia Foundation seemed to resolve to take part in the launch event: right up until an announcement several days before, there had been numerous conflicting rumours about the WMF's participation, based on a few vague words by system administrators here and there. The lack of a Wikimedia Foundation listing at the World IPv6 Launch website further clouded the picture.
Unless extremely serious issues arise, it is planned that IPv6 will be enabled indefinitely. The new protocol poses a learning curve for administrators; at least three administrators on the English Wikipedia, for example confused IPv6 addresses with accounts on World IPv6 Launch day itself. It also poses a complication to CheckUser functionality. Fortunately, there is still time to learn, because IPv6 users present an extremely small minority (less than 0.7%) of editors on Wikipedia; the vast majority of IP and account blocks are still for IPv4 and will be for some time.
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.
"Last modified" extension deployed, disabled: The LastModified extension, which puts a "Last modified" timestamp in the top-right hand corner of an article, was briefly deployed on the English Wikipedia for a test set of articles. The extension aims to make a page's history and constantly updated nature more obvious to the casual reader; the human readable description (for example, "Last modified 2 minutes ago") will be linked to the history of an article to test whether it generates clickthroughs. The display could also serve as a warning that some information might be out of date, although bot edits are not currently filtered out when the display is generated. The extension was later disabled for overwhelming the Wikimedia API servers with requests (server admin log), preventing other API users such as anti-vandalism tools from functioning correctly for a short period.
1.20wmf4 deployed on remaining wikis, wmf5 in the pipeline: The last Wikimedia wikis (specifically non-English Wikipedias) were moved onto MediaWiki 1.20wmf4 this week (server admin log), ending its deployment cycle and beginning that of 1.20wmf5, which was successfully deployed to two test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 11. The 121 changes to MediaWiki core packaged with 1.20wmf5 including drastically increasing the IPv6 rangeblock limit to /19 in size and changing the display order for the recently separated login and create account links to put create account on the left and login (preceded by the existing icon) on the right. 180 further changes – those made to WMF-deployed extensions in the past fortnight – are also included. 1.20wmf5 will now be deployed in stages, hitting its final wikis on June 20. The stage that includes the English Wikipedia will be on June 18.
Wikipedia Mobile version redesign: The beginning of a substantive redesign of the Wikipedia Mobile Version was publicly announced this week (Wikimedia blog). Specifically, based on the feedback of the community members the Wikipedia mobile team is focusing on making the Wikipedia mobile version more user friendly. To this end, in the new design (beta version available) navigation options are now split between a main menu containing links to settings, the random article feature and nearby (a new feature based on the existing functionality on the Wikimedia Android and iOS apps) and an "Action Bar" which incorporates any features related to the article itself, such as the interwiki links. Making the announcement, WMF Mobile Product Manager Phil Inje Chang called for user feedback via either an associated MediaWiki page or via email at mobile-feedback-llists.wikimedia.org.
Fundraising engineer hired: Recent hire Adam Wight will start work at Wikimedia Foundation headquarters in San Francisco this week as a Fundraising Engineer (wikitech-l mailing list). He was involved in customizing open-source web services for non-profits at web development firm Giant Rabbit, and he is familiar with the CiviCRM system used to handle Wikimedia donations, which could prove vital in allowing him to more successfully support both the activities of the foundation and the other chapters, many of whom use the same software. Before joining here he was involved in the Atako Project (the first open-source Google Gadget directory); "Halfway Library", a project aimed at sharing and reviewing books; and "Prokaryote", an evolution/behaviour patterns simulator used in university and high school classrooms. More recently he has contributed to "Offline" extension for MediaWiki, and he is currently helping with a distributed wiki project "OneCommons". Wight's first official day was on May 31, but his first day at the San Francisco office will be on June 13.
Repo creation right: There was a long discussion this week on the wikitech-l mailing list about whether or not the right to create Gerrit repositories ("repos"; essentially stores of code for individual projects) should be extended to all WMF engineers to speed up the current development cycle. Responding, WMF developer and Gerrit expert Chad Horohoe explained that setting up a new repository is not just about choosing a name; rather, the creator must have some knowledge about the structure of user access permissions in Gerrit, plus a number of other related properties. Though a "Project Creators" group could be created to meet this need – Horohoe provided a a tutorial on how to create repositories for this purpose – there was concern about repo list clutter, given that deleting and renaming the repos is not possible at this moment. Nevertheless, there was also general support for the view that extended creation rights could decentralise Gerrit handling, making it more in-keeping with underlying version control system Git's own more distributive approach to contributions.
AvicBot2's 2nd BRfA, cleaning many sandboxes at regular intervals; At the time of writing, 18 BRFAs are active. As usual, community input is encouraged.
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