Participants at the Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit in Boston, Massachusetts, 7–9 July 2011Wikipedia in education is far from a new idea: years of news stories, op-eds, and editorials have focused on the topic; and on Wikipedia itself, the School and university projects page has existed in various forms since 2003. Over the next six years, the page was rarely developed, and when it did advance there was no clear goal in mind.
Recent background
2009 marked a turning point in this narrative, when the Wikimedia Foundation launched the Public Policy Initiative (PPI) for 2010–11 with support from the Stanton Foundation. The pilot received relatively wide media coverage and was seen as highly successful in improving its target articles, on American public policy. This success emboldened the organizers to expand the pilot worldwide. The Cairo pilot appears to have met with greater success, but a second pilot in India ran into significant difficulties and ended in failure. The considerable community backlash from the debacle in India—including many calls for its closure—threw the program's future into doubt.
More recently, an Education Working Group has been formed to look at reforming the coordination of the US and Canada Education Programs and to organize an eventual transition to a fully volunteer-run system.
RfC on the next step
The working group is now attempting to move into a new phase with a request for comment seeking community consensus to form a Wikimedia thematic organization—an independent organization recognized by the WMF as supporting Wikimedia's mission in relation to a specific topic area. This would be a non-profit entity incorporated as a 501(c) in the United States. The scope of the proposed organization would focus solely on American and Canadian institutions and leave open the option of assisting collaborations with any WMF site. The aims of the thematic organization would be to "advance teaching and learning; (b) bring in new editors, from university students to professors to content experts outside academia; (c) improve the breadth, scope, documentation, and accuracy of Wikipedia articles; and (d) promote the flow of free information and knowledge."
Opinion split
The RfC, however, has partly developed into a referendum on the education program itself, with a split between working group members and educators supporting, and Wikipedia community members opposing. Mike Cline, a supporter, working group coordinator, and long-time English Wikipedia editor, strongly stated:
This RfC is about the future—the Future of the Wikimedia movement, Wikimedia Outreach and the US Canada Education Program. This RfC is not about, and should not be about the past. ... Those who have opposed this new organization to date, and indeed are calling for the elimination of the Education Program are focused on the past. ... [They] only cite the mistakes, the missteps and rarely give credit to the successes, to the good works by all sorts of ambassadors, students, faculty and WMF Education Program staff. ... I realize there have been missteps in the Education Program, but for opposers to characterize all the work done under [it] as a failure is not supported by the facts. ... Why is this partnership essential for the future of Wikipedia? If we truly believe in the mantra—the sum of all knowledge for the human race, and if we want to create an encyclopedia of world class quality and scope, we have to involve the Academic Community. It is doubtful we can continue robustly growing the encyclopedia without them.
Education professionals who support the program believe that without this form of outreach (assuming that professors will continue to assign their students to edit Wikipedia), their students will not receive the on-wiki interaction necessary for them or their articles to succeed. Theredproject commented that editing the site opened his students' eyes to the "questions of Free Culture, collaboration, and wikis." Ocaasi took a different approach, believing that the previous problems with the program have been addressed and that it deserves a "second chance" over one to two years to prove itself.
Opposers have largely focused on whether there is a need for the program. Fluffernutter commented that there is a "lack of evidence of any material benefit from the existence of the program. All signs I've seen have indicated that the program creates a lot of cleanup work for the community and very little in the way of useful content or new long-term contributors."
Other editors echoed her post: MER-C believes that the program "needs a massive haircut to bring it back to a scale where it is a net positive for the encyclopedia—i.e. similar to the Public Policy Initiative. Developing a formal, self-justifying bureaucracy around the program to further expand it is exactly the wrong way to go." At least one further oppose believed that spinning the program off from the WMF as planned would lead to less accountability for the program as a whole.
This contrast in views begs the question: is the education program worth the effort? The WMF published a US–Canada results page a few days after Fluffernutter's oppose, detailing the effects of the education program on Wikipedia over the first half of 2012 and including detailed graphs of the changes in quality. As assessed by a volunteer group of Wikipedia editors, 87.9% of articles were improved by student editing. On a 26-point quality scale, the articles were improved on average by 2.94 points; only eight articles saw a decrease in quality, with the worst dropping by two points. The report notes that existing articles were usually improved from the equivalent of weak Start-class articles to strong Start-class or C-class articles. New articles fell into the same area.
Another supporting view has come from a previously published and highly publicized op-ed written by English Wikipedia editor and current working group member Mike Christie for the Signpost last December. There, Christie concluded that the education program was necessary, because "if we manage the influx of academic interest correctly, Wikipedia will acquire an institutional connection to academia that will be a source of new content for our articles and an intellectual resource to assist with long-term growth. Wikipedia does not need to beg for respectability any more; it is already widely used by academics as a starting point for research, and sometimes for more than that. We need to accept our respectability, and plan to learn from—and teach—the academic community."
Opposing arguments mainly stem from experiences with the Indian pilot. The most notable document produced after its closure was by consultant Tory Read, which the Signpost covered in January. The results were stunning: a quantitative analysis done simultaneously with the report showed that only 21% of student-produced content survived after the necessary clean-up. The report itself chronicled the failures in communication and scale; the Indian pilot was five times larger than the Public Policy Initiative. Wikipedians voiced their opposition on the talk page, such as Theo10011:
With the sole exception of [Frank Schulenburg, the Global Education Program director], there isn't a single person who designed and implemented this program that I would be confident about editing themselves. They barely know how to edit themselves, who to ask for help, or how, what is the right and wrong practice. ... they are not versed in the en.wp policies and general editing culture, they were hired as consultants by WMF. ... This is a really important point, when the students and CAs they are overseeing, have the same or more experience than them, that is likely to be a bad start. I honestly believe they need more experience and time to learn the ropes first, before they design and run any future iteration of the education program here.
Yet while the opposition stemming from the Indian pilot is based on solid facts, it does not account for modifications made to the program over the last year. The Working Group RfC is still open for comments from the community, and the Signpost welcomes comments on the Education Program as a whole on the talk page.
Ed. note: the author volunteered with the Education Program as an Online Ambassador in late 2010 and early 2011.
Arbitration Committee election preparations: The RfC concerning the December 2012 Arbcom election is in full swing. The issues concern the composition of the committee, the election itself, and the minimum support percentage required at the end of the election.
Core Contest winners: Prizes from the August 2012 Core Contest have been awarded to seven editors for their work on six different English Wikipedia articles. First place and a voucher for £75 went to Truthkeeper88 (talk·contribs) for polishing up The Alps, while second place and a voucher for £55 went to PumpkinSky (talk·contribs) and Gerda Arendt (talk·contribs) for Franz Kafka. Contest organizer Casliber stated, "our heartfelt appreciation [goes out] to everyone who rolled up their wiki-sleeves and got stuck into some core content work. We're sorry we couldn't award prizes to more folks."
Jimmy Wales marries: Wikipedia's well-known co-founder married Kate Garvey, a former aide to Tony Blair, on 6 October.
Freedom on the Net: Freedom on the Net 2012, a study looking at the degrees of internet freedom allowed in countries around the world, has been published. Estonia is currently ranked as having the greatest degree of internet freedom in the world. Wikipedia received attention mainly from the various languages' blackouts and the censorship threats they stemmed from (see previous Signpost coverage: Italian blackout, Russian blackout and follow-up, English blackout and follow-up).
Blog notes issues with link rot: GigaOM has published a piece by Matthew Ingram highlighting the issues with 'information decay', or the tendency for links to go bad as they are moved or deleted. It shows that the "disappearing web" has serious implications for Wikipedia article writers, especially for those writing about current events: Ingram noted a study from two American researchers which hypothesized that at least ten percent of online information disappears by a year after a major newsworthy event. After a year, .02 percent is lost per day.
WMF to narrow its focus?: Sue Gardner, the executive director of the WMF, has published her planned recommendation for the WMF's October board meeting. Gardner hopes that by "ceas[ing] some activities (or possibly distribut[ing] them to other movement players)", the WMF will be able to "focus more tightly on high-priority activities that are central to its mandate and mission ... [making the WMF] somewhat less over-mandated and thinly stretched, and therefore better able to plan, predict and execute."
Wikimedia Travel Guide logo: Voting in the competition to design the new travel guide's logo begins on 12 October, but few images have been proposed.
Milestone: The Latin Wikipedia reached 80,000 articles this week. Latin is considered to be a dead language, but its status as the parent of the Romance languages—which are widely spoken in Western Europe, Quebec, Latin America, and Western Africa—and its role in Catholic Christianity—has ensured the survival of the language. It is still taught in some Western schools.
The Counter-Vandalism Academy has been drastically revamped, and is looking for experienced editors to help serve as trainers
Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.
Simón Bolívar was a Venezuelan military and political leader who played a key role in establishing Hispanic America's independence from the Spanish EmpireA stone sculpture of Laozi, a philosopher of ancient China best known as the author of the Tao Te ChingLeonhard Euler was a pioneering Swiss mathematician and physicist who introduced much of modern mathematical terminology and notation.Margaret Sanger was an American birth control activist, sex educator, and nurse whose efforts contributed to the landmark Supreme Court case which legalized contraception in the United StatesSuleiman the Magnificent was the tenth and longest-reigning Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, presiding over the apex of the empire's military, political and economic power.Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor and Nobel laureate, often credited as the inventor of radio.
On this day five years ago, the WikiProject Report debuted as a new Signpost column with an overview of WikiProject Biography. Today, we're celebrating two milestones: five years of the WikiProject Report and the tenth birthday of our first featured project.
WikiProject Biography is by far the largest WikiProject on Wikipedia, with over one million articles under the project's scope. As a comparison, WikiProject Biography is three times larger than Wikipedia's second largest project, and if WikiProject Biography were split into its 14 subprojects and work groups, it would still make the list of the 20 largest WikiProjects... four times.
Founded in October 2002 following earlydiscussions about how to format birth and death dates, WikiProject Biography served mainly as a place to collect links to discussions about style guides and naming conventions. By 2005, it had become a fully functional project with ten members, a weekly collaboration, and a growing number of subprojects. When we featured the project in 2007, it had grown to 400 members and published a newsletter. Today, the number of members is nearing 800, but the newsletter, collaborations, and many of the subprojects have lapsed into inactivity. We interviewed Kaldari, Road Wizard, and John Carter.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Biography? Have you contributed to any of the project's Featured or Good Articles?
Kaldari: I first became involved in WikiProject Biography around 2006, mainly due to my interest in Wikipedia 1.0. Many of the first articles I worked on were biographies, and I've always enjoyed working on them, partially due to their simplicity. Unlike other types of articles, they have a very well defined scope and a clear set of preferred sources (academic biographies). They also tend to be less contentious than other articles, with the obvious exception of current politicians. I've contributed to 2 Featured bio articles, Emma Goldman and Mary Wollstonecraft, and one Good bio article, Anne Dallas Dudley.
Road Wizard: I stumbled into the project in 2008 after working on politician biographies for another project I am involved with. As I was working on biographies anyway I thought that I might as well sign up and make it official. My main contributions to the project are giving initial assessments for articles, making suggestions on how to move the articles towards B-class and answering calls for assistance on the project's talk page. Hopefully I have contributed to good or featured articles but it would probably have been in the initial stages to start the editors off in the right direction.
John Carter: I have to say I don't know exactly what got me first involved to a degree with this project, because that was some time ago. I agree with Kaldari above that one of the main appeals of biographical articles is their relative simplicity. The subject area is in general much more clear-cut than many other articles. This is not saying that some biographies of disputed people from early history are not also at least a bit contentious (Jesus comes to mind), but the same holds true for most non-biographical articles related to those eras as well.
As Wikipedia's largest project, how does WikiProject Biography cope with the massive quantity of articles under its scope? Why do biographies make up such a large component of Wikipedia's articles?
Road Wizard: Why are there so many biographies? Every article on Wikipedia involves people in one way or another; if it is about a book then someone wrote it; if it is about a natural phenomenon then someone observed it. Biographies are a logical extension of the encyclopaedia - if you are reading about Pachelbel's Canon, curiosity would lead you to the question, "Who was Johann Pachelbel?" and the biography article is born.
John Carter: Road Wizard is basically right about why there are so many biographies. How the project deals with them is a bit of a question, in large part because of the huge number. Some groups of biographies, like those covered in the Actors and Filmmakers subproject, are actually fairly closely related in some sense and have significant overlap. Other groups, like the Royalty group, contain a lot of articles which aren't as clearly directly related, given that the royalty of Papua New Guinea and the UK really don't have a lot of direct relationship with each other.
The members of WikiProject Biography have identified 200 articles as core biographies. What is the purpose of this designation, how were the articles selected, and has there been a concerted effort to improve these articles? Are there any plans to change or expand the core biographies?
Kaldari:WP:COREBIO was a joint project between Wikipedia 1.0 and WikiProject Biography. The purpose was to choose the 200 most important biographies on Wikipedia so that we could prioritize which ones to improve for the offline release version of Wikipedia. Obviously creating such a list is fraught with problems. We studied numerous other published lists of "important people", and tried to keep the list balanced in terms of subject areas (history, philosophy, literature, sports, entertainment, science, etc.) and cultural representation. It took months to reach agreement, and in the end I don't think anyone was 100% happy with it (which might be a good sign). I think spending any more effort on refining the list would be a waste of time, as it would be far more useful to work on the actual articles. Only about half of them are B quality or higher, which is a travesty.
John Carter: I think one of the reasons for the selection of the core biographies was that these are biographies of people whose significance in human history is such that their biographies, and related subarticles, contain some of the most important information for any encyclopedia. The down side of that, of course, is that there can be, and sometimes are, serious disagreements about what is most significant about them, and thus what should be given the most weight in the articles. For example, Mohammed was a major political, philosophical and religious leader of a very large group, and it can be hard to determine what related material on his actions and impact deserves what degree of attention in that main article.
John Carter: Actually, so far as I have seen, we don't have that many of these as we used to. I think some people have begun to catch on about how we frown on that here. I'm thinking we may have gotten important enough that a lot of PR people and celebrities have learned that, ultimately, they might get some bad press for trying to do so. For some lesser-known individuals, of course, it could still be a problem, but I think most of the experienced editors around wikipedia in general more or less know some of the warning signs of COI editing.
What are some common concerns about biographies of living persons (BLP) that the project has handled in the past? How can editors, regardless of whether they're members of WikiProject Biography, ensure Wikipedia's biographies follow the BLP guidelines?
Road Wizard: When I first joined the project, BLP problems were a known issue but just one of many factors we had to deal with. Issues were raised at the project talk page and we would investigate. However, I think Wikipedia came under external pressure on a few badly handled BLP cases and consensus was formed to take a harder line on unreferenced BLP articles. Most of the problem cases we used to deal with are now either deleted before they reach us or are perhaps raised at Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard instead.
In terms of how editors can help to follow the BLP policy, the key is to always include citations to reliable sources. New editors are often upset that their contributions are deleted, but if they can follow those two guidelines then their text stands a much greater chance of retention.
Have you run into any strange experiences working on articles about people who disappeared or otherwise have an unknown date of death?
Road Wizard: I am not too sure what you are meaning by "strange experiences" - as far as I know I haven't been haunted while investigating the death of an article subject.
Back on a more serious note though, there is a big difference between modern and historical biographies. In modern times you can often pinpoint a person's death to a time of day due to the abundance of sources. For older biographies you are entirely dependent on how well the information was recorded in the few available sources - Charles Molyneux, 1st Earl of Sefton, for example, died sometime around late December 1794 or January 1795. I doubt that we will ever get a more precise date.
What tools do users have to search, sort, and analyze biographical data? How does the project view the use of infoboxes, succession templates, and persondata?
Kaldari: Right now none of our metadata solutions are very elegant. We have infoboxes which tend to get overly bloated and crufty (see George Washington), persondata which is theoretically useful, but rarely actually used, and various other templates that encode metadata in numerous other non-standard ways. A few people have hacked together ways to use this data, but the results are somewhat unpredictable. For example, one guy used the influenced and influences parameters from Infobox philosopher to construct a graph of the relative importance and connectedness of all the philosophers in history.[1] Unfortunately, the data they used wasn't very reliable since the standards for what was included in these parameters varied considerably between articles and some articles didn't use philosopher infoboxes at all. I'm hoping that this situation will be rectified by the new Wikidata project, which should provide standardized ways to associate metadata with articles (even across different projects).
What are the project's most urgent needs? How can a new contributor help today?
John Carter: Clearly, it would help a lot if we had a bit more attention to the major articles, like the core biographies, and other biographical articles on the broader range of highly important biographies. I myself might like to see a contest start, maybe in the next month or so, to maybe work on those articles in the core group, with maybe allowing those who bring one of those articles up to a given degree of quality allowed to nominate another article to perhaps be included in a broader "core" group. If anyone likes that idea, or would like to propose any other contest-like efforts to get the content developed, I'm sure we would all like to see them. We always need editors reviewing the newer biographical articles to see which might have some BLP issues, and tagging them appropriately. Lastly, there are a rather huge number of extant biographical articles of all sorts, including biographies of living persons, which are in rather poor shape and could use improvement.
Next week's article should have a favorable reaction. Until then, experiment with old formulas in the archive.
A diagram of the stations on the Oslo Metro, one of Arsenikk's several featured lists on transportation in Norway.
On joining Wikipedia
My original interest in Wikipedia arose from reading about airlines, and especially destination lists—information I was not able to easily find elsewhere. I started adding some content on the Norwegian Wikipedia, but quickly switched to the English edition, largely because I found that the standards (especially referencing) are higher. I enjoy researching and writing full-length articles and enjoy the feeling of knowing an article is "complete". Wikipedia is largely a work in progress, and featured content allows the satisfaction that, at least in one small area, we are finished. The featured processes not only fix individual issues, but allows feedback on ways I am systematically wrong, which allows me to correct all future articles I write.
On featured lists
Featured list (FL) reviewers are nit-picky and it is necessary to keep track of a wide array of guidelines, styles, recommendations and common practice. The easiest part, although perhaps the most time-consuming, is filling in the tables. Once the general structure has been established, adding additional entries is often trivial. I find the atmosphere at featured list candidates (FLC) very welcoming and uplifting. Even though the purpose of the candidacy review is to provide criticism, I have never felt any negativity.
Except for station lists, my transport-related lists have been ground-breaking in the sense that I did not have an existing "template" FL to copy. This makes them much more difficult to compose, as a user-friendly and encyclopedic structure must be established while keeping in mind issues such as accessibility for the color-blind. At the same time, these were often lists where the FLC process contributed a great change in the list's structure, and thus the process was of the greatest value. Although considerably more work, such lists also give more satisfaction; it is in many ways similar to solving a puzzle. Someone else nominating a list using the same structure I "invented" gives a priceless feeling of humility.
For editors new to FLC, I would recommend starting off with a scope (topic) which has several existing lists. Look at the newest FLs and copy the structure. It is also important to read the criteria, the Manual of Style and other guidelines to understand the standards the article will be measured by. A featured list review should concentrate on the small issues rather than serve as a tutorial. For articles, I would strongly encourage taking the article to both good article and peer review before its candidacy, although this is rarely needed for lists. The featured process is first and foremost a place for article improvement, so take all feedback as constructive advice. Reviewing is an important part of the learning process; being able to assess and articulate feedback betters one's ability to refine one's own contributions.
Holkham National Nature Reserve (nom) by Jimfbleak. Holkham National Nature Reserve is England's largest national nature reserve, covering 3,900 ha (9,600 acres) and comprising a wide range of habitats. The reserve, also an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, was created in 1967; however, human settlement in the area dates back to the Iron Age. The reserve has over 100,000 visitors a year, endangering its wildlife and sand dunes.
La Coupole (nom) by Prioryman. La Coupole is a Second World War bunker complex in northern France which was built by Nazi Germany to launch V-2 rockets at London. The structure, built into the side of a disused chalk quarry, has a prominent concrete dome above it and was designed to prepare dozens of rockets daily. However, Allied bombings and later seizure ensured that construction was never fully completed. The complex is now used as a museum.
Pink Floyd (nom) by GabeMc. Pink Floyd were an English rock band that achieved international critical and commercial success with their progressive and psychedelic music. Formed in 1965, the group's first members were university students active in London's underground music scene. After experiencing several line-up changes the band saw their greatest successes in the 1970s. Pink Floyd began dissolving afterwards, although the members have occasionally reunited for sets.
Rhythm Killers (nom) by Dan56. Rhythm Killers is the second studio album by Jamaican musical duo Sly and Robbie. Released in 1987 on Island Records, the album reflected the duo's earlier cross-genre endeavors and incorporates contrasting musical elements and disparate styles. Rhythm Killers, promoted with two singles, was released to commercial acclaim and charted in four countries. Although on several "best albums" lists, it is currently out of print.
Manuel Marques de Sousa, Count of Porto Alegre (nom) by Astynax and Lecen. Porto Alegre (1804–1875) was an army officer, politician, abolitionist and monarchist of the Empire of Brazil. He began his military career at the age of seventeen, serving for more than 35 years before going into politics, eventually serving as Minister of War. After service in the Paraguayan war in the 1860s, he returned to politics.
H-58 (Michigan county highway) (nom) by Imzadi1979. H-58 is a county-designated highway in the US state of Michigan that runs east–west for approximately 69 miles (111 km) between the communities of Munising and Deer Park in the Upper Peninsula. The roadway was initially constructed in the late 1920s but required an Act of Congress to be paved through the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore; parts of the road remain unpaved.
Mereka Bilang, Saya Monyet! (nom) by Crisco 1492. Mereka Bilang, Saya Monyet! is an Indonesian drama film directed by Djenar Maesa Ayu and released in 2008. It follows a young writer who is dealing with the aftereffects of being molested as a child. Based on two of Ayu's short stories, most of the cast and crew were amateurs and film students. The film was a critical success, winning several awards and placing on two lists of the best films of 2008.
Frank Berryman (nom) by Hawkeye7. Berryman (1894–1981) was an Australian Army general. He joined the Army during the First World War, leading an unremarkable career until the Second World War; during the war he commanded troops in the Middle East and Pacific before ultimately serving as Australian Army representative at the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay. His post-war career saw him lead the military against a coal strike and manage the Royal Agricultural Society of New South Wales.
Archaeoindris (nom) by Maky. Archaeoindris fontoynontii is an extinct, giant lemur and the largest primate known to have evolved on Madagascar; its genus, of which it is the only member, may have gone extinct as recently as 350 BCE. The species was first described in 1909 based on subfossil fragmentary jaws; much of the bones of its lower body have not been discovered. The animal was likely as large as a gorilla.
Featured lists
Six featured lists were promoted this week:
Golden Spikes Award (nom) by Bloom6132. The Golden Spikes Award has been given annually to the best amateur baseball player in the United States since 1978. Recipients are judged to best exhibit and combine "exceptional on-field ability and exemplary sportsmanship". The most recent winner is Mike Zunino.
Christian Bale filmography (nom) by Tomica. The English actor Christian Bale has appeared in numerous motion pictures, television programmes, and advertisements since his debut in 1986. Although several of his roles were critically acclaimed, his breakout role is generally considered to be in 2000's American Psycho.
Train discography (nom) by Holiday56. The American pop rock band Train has released 9 albums, 3 extended plays, 25 singles, and 20 music videos. They made their debut in 1996 with an eponymous album, finding their greatest success in 1998 with Drops of Jupiter. Their most recent album, California 37, was released in April 2012.
300 win club (nom) by Muboshgu. In Major League Baseball, the 300 win club is the group of pitchers who have won 300 or more games. The frequency of this has varied over the ages as rules change, sometimes working in favour of the pitcher and sometimes in favour of the batter. The most recent member is Randy Johnson (2009).
List of aircraft operated by Braathens (nom) by Arsenikk. The Norwegian scheduled and charter airline Braathens opearted 118 aircraft of 15 types between its establishment as Braathens SAFE in 1946 and its merger with Scandinavian Airlines in 2004. Over half were variants of the Boeing 737.
LMFAO discography (nom) by Holiday56. The American electro and hip hop duo LMFAO have released two albums, one extended play, sixteen singles, and sixteen music videos. They made their debut with the EP Party Rock in 2008, which was rereleased as an album the following year. Their most successful album has been 2011's Sorry for Party Rocking.
Featured pictures
Five featured pictures were promoted this week:
Crew of STS-107 (nom; related article), created by NASA and nominated by Pine. STS-107 was the final mission of the Space Shuttle Columbia that ended with deaths of all of the shuttle's seven-member crew.
Sign painting (nom; related article) by Jjron. Sign painting is the act of using paint and brushes to create signs on 2- or 3-dimensional surfaces. As an art it is endangered by computer-generated signs.
Chinese pole acrobatics (nom; related article), created by Ludo29 and nominated by Alborzagros. Chinese poles are vertical poles on which circus performers climb, slide down and hold poses. They are generally between 3 and 9 metres (10 and 30 ft) in height and approximately 2 to 3 inches (5 to 8 cm) in diameter.
Endeavour silhouette (nom; related article), created by NASA and nominated by Pine. In this picture, Space Shuttle Endeavour appears to straddle the stratosphere and mesosphere, two parts of Earth's atmosphere; the orange-coloured part is the troposphere.
Space shuttle Endeavour appears to straddle the stratosphere and mesosphere
Wikimedia Labs now hosts 131 projects (up 11), has seen 241 instances created (up 27) and has 633 registered users (up 46).
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—Adapted from Engineering metrics, Wikimedia blog
The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for September 2012 was published this week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month (as well as brief coverage of progress on Wikimedia Deutschland's Wikidata project, phase 1 of which is edging its way towards its first deployment). Three of the seven headline items in the report have already been covered in the Signpost: problems with the corruption of several Gerrit (code) repositories, the introduction of widespread translation memory across Wikimedia wikis, and the launch of the "Page Curation" tool on the English Wikipedia, with development work on that project now winding down. The report also drew attention to the end of Google Summer of Code 2012, the deployment to the English Wikipedia of a new ePUB (electronic book) export feature, and improvements to the Wiki Loves Monuments app aimed at more serious photographers.
It was also a strong month for the Labs and Database Download projects (as detailed in previous editions of the Signpost) as well as the "Micro Design" team that seems to have received something of an ad-hoc consensus for its changes to the English Wikipedia's edit window (albeit with the promise of future fixes). OpenPath, external contractors working on a J2ME app (designed for low end mobile devices) presented their final app during the month, which was verified as working properly and is now awaiting improvements to its memory footprint before release.
By contrast, one of the big disappointments of the month was the unexpected difficulty in "closing out" the long-proposed swap in primary datacentre from the WMF facility in Tampa, Florida to its base in Ashburn, Virginia. Detailed in both the report and a followup post on the wikitech-l mailing list, that move, with its promise of better stability and expansion capability, is now scheduled for the new year. Progress on the VisualEditor (VE) was also strictly non-visual in September, (though it is worth noting for the benefit of regular readers that the current schedule only puts the first VE deployment in June 2013 in any case). By contrast, a deployment of the TimedMediaHandler is expected "soon", notes the report.
Extension code review stable
CheckUser is one example of a WMF-deployed extension
Following on from the recent report on code review times for changes to core MediaWiki code, The Signpost can this week publish its own figures for the code review state of the many MediaWiki extensions in use on both Wikimedia wikis and elsewhere. Nevertheless, the figures for extensions are (relatively speaking) of inferior quality to those for core, given that approximately half of all extensions are not yet in Gerrit; some were late joiners (skewing the time series statistics) and some of those that are on Gerrit choose not to use its code review system on one or more branches. It is also necessary to exclude certain sets of "mass edits", although they do not greatly affect the aggregate figures in any case.
Despite these difficulties, it is still possible to gain a sense of how extensions are faring in a post-Gerrit world (correct as of 19 September). The headline figures, in particular, seem strong: the median patchset (of the 4823 sampled) waits 2 hours 30 minutes for a first review and 95% are reviewed within a week. Of those two figures, the median was stable across May, June, July and August, within the 95th percentile improving significantly over the period.
Despite a large disparity between WMF-authored and volunteer-authored code, the latter of which waits three times longer on average for its first review (whether or not the sample is limited to WMF-deployed extensions), patches for WMF-deployed extensions wait longer for their first review than patches to those extensions which have not been deployed to any WMF wikis. Such evidence lends tentative support to the notion that individuals are put off from reviewing WMF-deployed code for fear of giving an incorrect judgement. Naturally, there are many possible confounding variables to consider: the amount of new code included in every commit, for example, or the quality of the reviews themselves, all of which prevent a more insightful analysis.
In related news, discussions continue about refocussing WMF "20%" time from direct code review to skill sharing, the impact of which is expected to be overwhelmingly negative on all short-term indicators. That initiative is expected to focus on extensions with few active maintainers, contributors to which often struggle to find a proper reviewer.
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.
Partial outage: Wikimedia wikis suffered a partial outage on Sunday UTC, with readers unable to load some pages and editors in some cases unable to load any (wikitech-l mailing list). The problems were blamed on a problematic "fallback" image server which is already scheduled for imminent replacement (as of time of writing). In related news, the software on one of the servers responsible for rescaling images has been updated, suggesting that a more widespread upgrade (which typically improves image rendering times and the display of SVG graphics) could be on its way (also wikitech-l).
Skin list trim proposed: A reduction in the number of skins available for selection by users continued this week (gerrit changeset #25170). Although skins have rarely been removed from the list in the past, the increasingly outdated formatting of the older skins has caused continual problems for developers trying to accommodate all of them. "Half the time we add a feature or extension that happens to add a link somewhere we end up with a 'This doesn't work on legacy skins.' bug" explained Daniel Friesen, listing the Nostalgia, Standard, and CologneBlue skins as all either needing a significant rewrite or to be removed completely.
GitHub replication, read-only: MediaWiki code is now being replicated to the popular Git-based source code hosting service GitHub (wikitech-l). Replication allowing developers familiar with GitHub to get easier access to an up-to-date copy of MediaWiki code, which they can then "fork" and develop themselves. At the moment, there is no easy way to allow them to contribute back to central code review system Gerrit, effectively rendering the service read-only (manual copy-and-pastes excepted).
The Wikipedia dispute resolution process has been under fire for a lack of volunteers which causes backlogs. Your help is requested to discuss proposed changes to the dispute resolution process.
It is being proposed that Stewards take over for bureaucrats in their duty of closing requests for adminship so bureaucrats could focus on other areas of their duty. An alternative proposal would allow certain administrators to gain renaming ability to help bureaucrats to avoid allowing stewards to close requests.
Civility is one of the five pillars of Wikipedia yet there are issues regarding civil behavior. This discussion will attempt to resolve issues with civility and responses to those issues.
Before a new version of Pending Changes goes live, some more discussion is needed to work out the finer points of the process. This is the second request for comment about pending changes.
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