Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-08-13/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-08-13/Traffic report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-08-13/In the media
| “ | As I understood it, the big gotchas for Phabricator adoption are that Phabricator doesn't manage repositories – it knows how to poll a Git repo, but it doesn't have per-repo access controls or even more than a shallow awareness of what a repository is ... [consequently], it would still need some work to efficiently deal with hundreds of repositories, long-lived remote branches, and some of the other fun characteristics of Wikimedia's repos. | ” |
—WMF Deputy Director Erik Möller addressing code review tool Phabricator | ||
Three weeks into a month-long evaluation of code review tool Gerrit, a serious alternative has finally gained traction in the review process: Facebook-developed but now independently operated Phabricator and its sister command-line tool Arcanist.
Phabricator has long been considered a possible alternative to Gerrit, first appearing in discussions way back in February this year, prompting the Wikimedia Foundation to invite its lead developer to visit the WMF office in San Francisco and "sell" Phabricator to several key members of staff, including Deputy Director Erik Möller. That meeting occurred on August 6, reviving Phabricator as a contender for the role of Gerrit replacement.
A test project was quickly established; nevertheless, it is unclear whether lead platform architect Brion Vibber, who is heading the review, considers it a workable enough solution at present given concerns about its design paradigm (see quote box). Vibber this week suggested that despite the original cutoff date (August 10) having passed without Phabricator's credentials having been proven, the code review tool should continue to be reviewed and investigated on an ongoing basis for the immediate future.
Continuing our series profiling participants in this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) programme, whereby student developers are paid to contribute code to MediaWiki, the Signpost this week caught up with San Francisco–based student and amateur journalist Aaron Pramana, who took on the challenge of improving MediaWiki's watchlist feature.
| “ | For my project, I've been working with Wikimedia developer Alex Emsenhuber to give watchlists a revamp, adding features and improving the workflow of the watchlist for current and potential power-users. For many wiki editors, the watchlist is one of the most important features that the MediaWiki software has to offer. Many top ranked websites, from e-commerce sites like eBay to media sites like YouTube, have comparable features that help users track pages that interest them. It was my view that the watchlist should continue to evolve so that the MediaWiki software remains a potent tool for the collaborative exchange of knowledge. This project was designed to be an amalgamation of several smaller feature improvements which will make the watchlist more useful.
Thus far, the project has added watchlist grouping, permissions to make watchlists publicly viewable by other users, and a new raw watchlist page. Although these features are still at an early experimental phase, I would like to solidify the progress I've made up to this point and then solicit ideas from the greater Wikimedia community for a more detailed plan towards a possible Wikimedia deployment. The greatest challenge of the project has been assuming a scope of responsibility that is greater than a "typical" programming job. Every programming project I've participated in previously has emphasized specialization in one niche (e.g. one person does database work, another does UI design). However, GSoC teaches student developers to persevere independently and actively seek out help when needed, which are useful skills to have in the field. |
” |
Pramana added that after the GSoC project ends later this month, he'd love to solicit help from other interested developers, especially UI designers. Code for his project can be found on Gerrit; more human-readable updates also regularly find their way onto his blog.
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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 several weeks.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-08-13/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-08-13/Opinion
The Bangla language, also known as Bengali, is spoken by some 200 million people in Bangladesh and India. The Bangla Wikipedia has a very small community of just 10–15 very active editors, with another 35–40 as less active editors. The project faces particular challenges in being a small Wikipedia, and Dhaka-based WMF community fellow Tanvir Rahman is working to understand these challenges and develop strategies to improve small wikis that have strong potential to expand their editing communities (Signpost coverage).
During July 2012, Tanvir conducted an online survey of more than 1800 Bangla Wikipedia readers, a response over just two weeks that was beyond expectations; of these participants, 1107 answered all 29 questions. Like all online surveys, the advantage is the relatively large sample size, which increases statistical strength, although there is the likelihood of some self-selection bias. Of the 1107 completed surveys, 25% of the participants count themselves as editors of the project, and 75% as readers who had never edited the site; 81.2% were from Bangladesh, with 16.3% from India and 2.5% from other countries, including the US and the UK. The issues surveyed concerned readability, editing, help, and community support of the Bangla Wikipedia. The survey also provided the first-ever demographic information of volunteers editing this language project.
62.2% of participants are students, and this matches the largest age-range in the survey, of 16–26 years. The results have established that college and school students make up the largest group of readers and editors of Bangla Wikipedia, and that this group feels the project has been very useful for their studies. In Bangladesh, students usually have better internet access than the overall population, which may be a factor in this result. Ironically, it seems that the English Wikipedia plays an important role in promoting the Bangla Wikipedia, since most participants learned of the existence of the Bangla Wikipedia from the English Wikipedia's other languages links. Other sources include search engines, social networks, and newspaper reports on the project and outreach events (Signpost coverage).
In a finding that will have a familiar ring to English Wikipedians, new users feel inhibited by the current lack of proper help pages and other technical issues. However, there the similarities end: while two-thirds of participants find Bangla Wikipedia useful, readers pointed out several limitations that need to be tackled. Like other small Wikipedias, a lack of information in articles is the most commonly raised issue for the Bangla Wikipedia. More than 700 responses included open suggestions for how to improve the project's readability.
The majority of participants say they know they can edit the Bangla Wikipedia, but only a quarter actually do edit. Most readers feel the need for a guideline on where to start editing; it appears that the current help-page system – where known at all to a reader – fails to provide convenient and useful help to newbies.
Bangla help and policy pages are mostly translated versions of English Wikipedia guidelines, although the actual editing environment in Bangla is much simpler than on the more developed English-language project. On the other hand, the English Wikipedia community and the WMF have recognised that the help pages on the English Wikipedia are deficient, and the system is currently subject to review and redesign (Signpost coverage).
The editing interface is the second major factor that Bangla participants feel holds them back. Many are unfamiliar with wikicode, and those who have learned how to use it are on their own thanks to the lack of useful documentation. Several participants expressed the hope that a Bangla version of Visual Editor might eventually solve this problem.
As Bangla is written in its own script, 17.5% of the participants mentioned that they don't know how to type Bangla in computers. Bangla script has 49 characters (not including hundreds of consonant conjuncts), which makes it more difficult to work in than in English. It's now possible to write Bangla using English with the phonetic keyboard layout, and this typing tool in turn is embedded in Wikipedia.
Bangladesh has more than 92 million mobile phone users, with an unknown number in the Indian state of West Bengal; 90% of the total internet users in Bangladesh gain access to the internet through mobile services. However, few people said they browse Wikipedia from mobile phones (typing Bangla into a mobile phone is a complicated affair).
56% of all participants said they would like to get help in editing, but don't know where they can ask for support from Bangla Wikipedia. A majority would prefer a step-by-step help environment, rather than traditional help pages. Newbies, the survey finds, shouldn't be expected to know much before starting to edit. People would also like help from Wikipedians online, so a mentorship program like the English Wikipedia's adopt-a-user could be of value.
Aside from basic help issues, 57% of the survey participants would like to help translate content from the English Wikipedia to Bangla, and 60% would like help for new content creation. The English Wikipedia is the biggest information source for other Wikipedias' translation activities, and it is often easier and less time-consuming to develop a Wikipedia by translating articles from English.
Almost all participants completed their university and college bachelor graduation; 11.8% were high-school graduates alone. (In Bangladesh, the home-country of most participants, high school is from grades 6–10, and college is grades 11 and 12.)
The gender gap is an issue on the Bangla Wikipedia: only 5.6% of participants are female, and just 21% of female respondents have edited the site. Of those who did not, after learning from the survey instructions that they can edit, most expressed interest in contributing. Women were particularly keen to have a step-by-step help system.
The survey findings will be a starting point for developing incremental help pages in Bangla, which will be intended to tackle the problems revealed by this survey. The starting point will be the translation of the help space from the English Wikipedia, with an eye to developments on that project towards simplification and greater effectiveness. It will aim to provide newbies and interested editors with an adequate help structure in line with the expressed preferences of the respondents. Discussion on the new help system is underway with the local community, and the help experiment is expected to go live next month.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-08-13/Serendipity
In a certain way, writing Wikipedia is the same everywhere, in every language or culture. You have to stick to the facts, aiming for the most objective way of describing them, including everything relevant and leaving out all the everyday trivia that is not really necessary to understand the context. You have to use critical thinking, trying to be independent of your own preferences and biases. To some extent, that's all there is to it.
Naturally, Wikipedians have their biases, some of which can never be cured. Most Wikipedians tend to like encyclopedias; but millions of people in the world don't share that bias, and we represent them rather poorly. I'm also quite sure that an overwhelming majority of Wikipedia co-authors are literate. Again, that's not true for everyone in this world. Yet we have other, less noticeable but barely less fundamental biases.
Wikipedia is a continuance not only for the ancient tradition of collections of human knowledge, but particularly the modern encyclopedic tradition that was most famously represented by Denis Diderot's great L'Encyclopédie. We share several beliefs with the philosophers of the Enlightenment. We believe that knowledge is good, and ignorance is not bliss. It's better to know, even if it's uncomfortable and you'd feel better shutting your eyes to the world around you. Otherwise, we'd have the Encyclopedia of All Things Good and Beautiful that would mention no pain, dangers, disease, or wars—nothing controversial, just the everlasting progress of humanity, with science and religion marching hand in hand towards the eternal sunshine of a splendid future. Yet we've chosen knowledge and, to some extent, maybe even truth. This means we have to acknowledge our social responsibility. After all, that's one of the sources of our aims to be objective and neutral.
In small cultures, languages, and societies, this means a lot more than in the big ones. Of course, in a big culture, your every mistake is read daily by thousands of people in many countries, some of who might possibly fix it. In a small culture, your mistakes most likely stay as they are until they're copied into every book on the topic.
And while talking about books, there are many fewer other dependable sources in small cultures than in big ones—no Britannica, no Larousse, no Brockhaus. In my first language, Estonian, three encyclopedias cover the whole alphabet: one was published before WWII, one during the Soviet times, and one started in USSR in 1980s, then changed its name and was finished in 2000s. It's possible there won't be another finished encyclopedia because it is just too costly to produce for a small market. Try to imagine: what would that mean for local Wikipedians? If you don't get it right, no one else will.
Wikipedia tends to take a special place in a small regional culture's media landscape. If there are few commercially successful publications, it is hard to find money for investigative journalism. Instead, the media tends to focus on quick online news that flicks by at an unbelievable rate. Such journalism is cheap to produce and cheap in its content: it doesn't create a balanced media field where every bias is levelled by competition. That means if you want to get a good overview of recent (or even not so recent) events, you either have to wait until someone publishes a good book on that theme, or turn to, well, Wikipedia. The accounts you give on socially and politically important themes in Wikipedia gain much more resonance in small cultures. Proportionally, their impact is much bigger in Estonian than in English.
The same is true just about every controversial subject. I doubt there will ever be lasting consensus on the English Wikipedia's talk page on Estonia about whether Estonia was occupied in 1940 or not. Now, try to imagine how the same events would be described in Estonian and in Russian. There is a faint possibility that a consensus can be reached about the description of controversial issues, but it would need a tremendous amount of diligent work and good will.
For every nation, there are controversial and hurtful subjects; these are not willingly recalled, like childhood memories of being abused or abusing others. A friend recently told me there are numbers and dates on the building blocks from which his house was built. Those blocks were made during World War II in a local concentration camp. Currently, all numbers are covered by plaster because his father doesn't want to see them.
That's understandable. Nobody does want to remember. But if we stick with our belief that it is better to know, we should acknowledge those memories. We have to write about parts of history that no one is proud of—about "unpopular" ethnic minorities, social problems that are not yet admitted. If the majority in a particular culture states that a certain issue is not worthy of an article, this might be the exact reason why we need to face it.
It's hard to write about the demise of the White Russian North-Western Army after WWI, or the expropriation of Baltic German estates in the Estonian Wikipedia. It must be quite difficult to give a balanced account of the Abyssinian campaign in Italian, and I can't imagine writing about Armenian Genocide in Turkish. But this does not mean it shouldn't be done. Quite on the opposite. We just have to be very careful about it.
That's where it's helpful to stick to policies that are designed with the community consensus in mind. Wikipedia is unique among all big encyclopedias in that its articles do not reflect the viewpoint of a certain expert or two. They're written by a motley crew with a colourful mix of views, luckily joined by the will to reach an understanding—or at least a balanced presentation of all important views on a subject. In some respects, we might say we can never reach objectivity, as only objects are objective; we are a community of subjects, and even if we reach a consensual decision, it will always be subjective. At any time disagreement might emerge. Indeed, if there are enough newcomers, they can raise a discussion and influence community to review the original decision. But the most important thing is the process: the habit of arranging the public meeting of the minds, the belief in the possibility of common ground, and the will to reach it. If we can make an example of that every day, teaching the societies around us, then we'll have succeeded.
The same goes for the big Wikipedias: every big society consists of smaller ones: people of a city block, pupils of a school class, customers in a coffee shop, town people, newspaper readers, philatelists. But these goals are much easier to reach in small societies, small cultures, and small languages. And if we don't do this, it may very well be that nobody does—noblesse oblige. To paraphrase Kipling, that’s the small Wikipedias' burden. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-08-13/In focus
A request for arbitration was filed late last week, ending the three-week long absence of pending cases.
Prioryman filed a request for arbitration concerning Youreallycan, alleging misconduct. In his arbitration request, Prioryman alleged that Youreallycan "has a persistent problem with personal attacks and edit-warring" and highlighted the latter's block record. He alleged that Youreallycan had made further personal attacks and engaged in edit-warring during the RfC/U, and on Prioryman's own user talk page, and requested that the Arbitration Committee resolve the matter. Youreallycan, however, noted that Prioryman had opened a request for comment on Youreallycan's conduct just a week previously. Other editors noted the same, with Collect commenting "Actions here while such an RfC/U is ongoing are premature, and may have the effect of being aimed more at harming an editor than of seeking a collegial and collaborative environment."
Discussion of the motion regarding annotation of changed usernames in case pages and the current requests for clarification and amendment has been inactive this last week. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-08-13/Humour
