On November 24, a general assembly of Wikimedia Germany (WMDE) voted on the fate of the Wikimedia Toolserver, a central external piece of technical infrastructure supporting the editing communities with volunteer-developed scripts and webpages of various kinds that are assisting in performing mostly menial tasks.
The chapter set up the Toolserver in the Netherlands in 2005, and has funded its general budget, which has grown to €100k (US$130k), with some financial and technical assistance from the WMF and some financial assistance from European chapters ever since. However, in 2011 the foundation decided to create WikiLabs (also known as Wikimedia Labs) to perform various tasks, including an approximation of the Toolserver's functionality by mid-2013; as part of the plan, the foundation will wind down financial support for what would become at least partially redundant infrastructure.
After WMDE published its annual plan for the upcoming financial year, saying it will not continue to fund the Toolserver after a transitional period, a debate on the potential of WikiLabs to replace the older structure got traction. DaB, the long-serving "root" volunteer of the Toolserver, said he would resign by the end of the year unless sufficient funding is provided to handle the growing demands on the system. The chapter's management delivered what he saw as insufficient assurances and responded by publishing a proposal to the WMDE general assembly to guarantee future funding.
While the German Wikipedia community set up a survey to make its reliance on the Toolserver transparent to voters at the general assembly, the WMDE board, led by DerHexer, responded by outlining a significant amendment to DaB's proposal.
On November 24, the assembly voted and decided to go along with the changes to DaB's proposal. By this decision, it replaced the assurance to fund the Toolserver until a later general assembly can make a final decision based on the facts concerning what will by then be the established WikiLabs project during a six-month transitional period. During this time-window, WMDE seeks a binding statement by WMF until when and how the foundation's project is going to replace Toolserver functions. If the demand is not met, the chapter will work out a big-picture governance model to run its infrastructure beyond 2013. The text sponsored by DerHexer also replaced a concrete commitment—to both invest in five new servers and guarantee one full-time staffer—with relatively vague wording, saying that the chapter aims to ensure a "(nearly) trouble-free functionality for the Toolserver", but without specific financial or personnel commitments. Out of the chapter's 2400 members, who are largely not active on WMF projects, 24 supported the amended proposal and six voted against the changes (informal protocol).
Merlissimo, who administers several bots on the Toolserver, told the Signpost that his list of significant reasons why WikiLabs cannot replace the functionality of WMDE's infrastructure remains unaffected by the vote. Summing up his views the day after, DaB stated on the mailing list that he was "disappointed", emphazising that DerHexer's changes to his proposal are leaving open significant risks of ambiguity. He said he will announce next Sunday whether he will step down by year's end.
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
An open-access preprint[1] has announced the results from a study attempting to predict early box-office revenues from Wikipedia traffic and activity data. The authors – a team of computational social scientists from Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Aalto University and the Central European University – submit that behavioral patterns on Wikipedia can be used for accurate forecasting, matching and in some cases outperforming the use of social media data for predictive modeling. The results, based on a corpus of 312 English Wikipedia articles on movies released in 2010, indicate that the joint editing activity and traffic measures on Wikipedia are strong predictors of box-office revenue for highly successful movies.
The authors contrast their early prediction approach with more popular real-time prediction/monitoring methods, and suggest that movie popularity can be accurately predicted well in advance, up to a month before the release. The study received broad press coverage and was featured in The Guardian, the MIT Technology Review and the Hollywood Reporter among others. The authors observe that their approach, being "free of any language based analysis, e.g., sentiment analysis, could be easily generalized to non-English speaking movie markets or even other kinds of products". The dataset used for this study, including the financial and Wikipedia activity data is available among the supplementary materials of the paper.
A study[2] by researchers at Kyoto University presents a detailed assessment of the readability of the English Wikipedia against Encyclopedia Britannica and the Simple English Wikipedia using a series of readability metrics and finds that Wikipedia "seems to lag behind the other encyclopedias in terms of readability and comprehensibility of its content". The paper, presented at CIKM’12, uses a variety of metrics spanning syntactical readability indices (such as Flesch reading ease, the automated readability index and the Coleman–Liau index) as well as metrics based on word popularity (including the Dale–Chall readability formula and word frequency indices derived from Google News or the American National Corpus).
The authors prepared a corpus of matching articles for the purpose of comparison between the English and Simple English Wikipedia. The study did not perform a random selection of articles, but selected a sample based on the existence of a corresponding article in Simple Wikipedia. The findings of the first analysis indicate that Simple Wikipedia consistently outperforms the English Wikipedia on all readability metrics. Wikipedia also appears to contain on average more proper nouns than Britannica – which, the authors speculate, may be due to specific editorial policies. The second section of the paper measures readability for 500 articles for each one of eight topic categories selected from DBpedia (biology, chemistry, computing, economics, history, literature, mathematics, and philosophy).
The comparison indicates that articles in the computing category are the most readable by syntactical and familiarity measures. Biology and chemistry, on the other hand, seem to include the most difficult articles. The final section reviews the readability of Britannica articles, in particular comparing the readability of articles in the "introductory" class with that of Simple Wikipedia articles and the readability of "encyclopedia" class articles with that of Wikipedia articles. The findings indicate that Britannica outperforms Wikipedia in readability overall, while introductory articles outperform Simple Wikipedia articles. It should be noted that the comparisons were not performed on matched pairs and that the the criteria used to sample articles from Britannica were not specified.
A paper whose preprint was previously covered in this research report, and now published as a full research article in PLOS One,[3] found that the Simple English Wikipedia has a higher degree of complexity than the corpus of Charles Dickens' books when measured via the Gunning fog index, but is less complex than the British National Corpus, "which is a reasonable approximation to what we would want to think of as ‘English in general’". See also the September issue of this research report for a summary of a third readability study which had applied the standard Flesch Reading Ease test to the English and Simple English Wikipedias.
An article appearing in Information, Communication & Society[4] studies the discussion pages of English and German September 11 attacks articles, contributing to the ongoing debates on collaborative knowledge creation in the wiki Web 2.0 context, participation of experts and amateurs on Wikipedia, and, indirectly, reliability of Wikipedia. The article's research question, coming from the sociology of knowledge and social constructivism perspectives, asks to what degree Wikipedia's "anyone can edit" policy democratizes the production of knowledge, removing it from traditional hierarchies "between experts and lay participants". The term democratization here is used in the context of such theoretical concepts as wisdom of crowds, participatory culture, produsage and (more critically) the notions of cult of the amateur or digital Maoism. All of these refer to the fact that Wikipedia's editors are more often amateurs ("lay participants") than professionally recognized experts.
Using the grounded theory approach, the study focuses not on editors, but on their arguments. It finds that due to community-upheld Wikipedia policies such as Wikipedia:Reliable sources, dissenting opinions ("traditionally marginalized types of knowledge") such as various conspiracy theories are still marginalized or straight-out excluded; according to the author, this "did not lead to a ‘democratization’ of knowledge production, but rather re-enacted established hierarchies". The finding should be taken in a certain context; as the author notes, the article was written by amateurs ("lay participants"), who however decided to reproduce traditional knowledge hierarchies, relegating various conspiracy theories and similar points not backed up to reliable sources to obscurity on Wikipedia. The paper concludes that Wikipedia, like other encyclopedias, is prone to a "scientism bias", i.e. treating scientifically backed knowledge as "better" than knowledge coming from alternative outlets. This despite the "anyone can edit" motto of Wikipedia, the paper finds support for the argument that Wikipedia puts more stress on article quality than democratic participation, or in the words of the article: "Although laypeople apparently play a significant part in the text production, this does not mean that they favor lay knowledge. On the contrary, it is clearly elite knowledge of well-established authorities which is finally included in the article, whereas alternative interpretations are harshly excluded or at least marginalized."
Side-note: The study's use of a Firefox add-on Wired-Maker for content analysis rather ingenious, and applauds the mentioning of such a practical methodological tip in their paper.
At the Academy of Management conference in Boston, Dariusz Jemielniak presented a paper on Trust, Control, and Formalization in Open-Collaboration Communities: A Qualitative Study of Wikipedia [5]. It is built around a detailed description and interpretation of the Essjay controversy on the English Wikipedia in 2007 about the use of inaccurate credentials by active Wikipedian and administrator Essjay. The paper is framed in terms of the literature from organization theory on trust and control. Jemielniak argues that organization theory suggests that organizations must either be able or willing to trust participants or must rely on control systems which essentially obviate the need for trust. Using ethnographic data from Wikipedia, Jemielniak suggests that Wikipedia — and, perhaps, a series of similar computer-mediated "open-collaboration communities" — instead rely on a series of procedures and "legalistic remedies" which provide a previously untheorized alternative to traditional control systems used in organizations.
The working paper is the first in what Jemielniak suggests will be a series of papers based on a long-term participatory ethnographic study: over the past five years, Jemielniak has edited Wikipedia almost daily and is a steward on Wikimedia projects (as well as the chair of the Wikimedia movement's newly established Funds Dissemination Committee, and recently announced the committee's recommendations on funding requests by various Wikimedia organizations totaling US$10.4M). Jemielniak uses his own experience as well as detailed on-wiki records from conversations surrounding the Essjay affair to walk through the controversy and its implications in depth. He discusses how Wikipedians construct authority and initially reacted with indifference to the revelation that Essjay had used fake credentials, how this changed when new information about Essjay's use of his credentials came to light, how a series of proposals to prevent or respond to such issues in the future were raised, and how the community essentially decided to keep the status quo.
The paper paints a detailed, nuanced, and deeply informed portrait of Wikipedians' responses to the controversy and the ways in which trust and its relationships to authority and credentials are navigated in the project. The author suggests that the creation of rules and legalistic procedures allowed Wikipedians to walk the line between rejecting descriptions of authority per se while minimizing the effects of inaccurate descriptions of authority by suggesting that editors on Wikipedia should rely much more heavily on users' experience and on the degree to which particular contributions conform to Wikipedia's content guidelines.
A working paper by the same writer, presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology[6] gives an overview of Wikipedia's culture by reviewing the role of its norms, guidelines and policies.
Six featured articles were promoted this week:
One featured list was promoted this week:
Six featured pictures were promoted this week:
One featured topic was promoted this week:
River martin (nom) by Jimfbleak. A small swallow subfamily with just two species: one from Thailand is probably extinct, and the other in west Africa is little-studied.
Wikidata, the new "Wikimedia Commons for data" and the first new Wikimedia project since 2006, reached 100,000 entries this week. The project aims to be a single, human- and machine-readable database for common data, spanning across all Wikipedia projects, which will "lead to a higher consistency and quality within Wikipedia articles, as well as increased availability of information in the smaller language editions" while lowering the burden on Wikipedia's volunteer editors—whose numbers have stalled overall, and continue to dwindle on the English Wikipedia.
Wikidata is currently in the first of three phases. The site is currently only accepting interwiki links to different-language versions of a page. For example, the 100,000th entry, Cadier en Keer, has only a short description and four links to Wikipedia articles in English, French, Dutch, and Limburgish. The second phase will start the actual collection and storage of data, so that Cadier en Keer will contain basic statistics such as country, province, size, and population. It aims to supplement the infoboxes which many Wikipedias use to display this common data. The third phase will allow anyone to make lists and charts based on the statistics.
The project raised €1.3M (US$1.87M), for development from three major funders: half from Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen; a quarter from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, established by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore; and a final quarter from Google, who said that "[our] mission is to make the world's information universally accessible and useful ... we hope [Wikidata] will make significant amounts of structured data available to all." It has eight developers actively working on its infrastructure.
The fast growth of what Linux User & Developer calls "Wikipedia's Game-changer"—over 100,000 entries in one month, with over 800 active users—bodes well for the site so far. In time, Wikidata's overarching goals may seem lofty: one of the original funders stated that "Wikidata ... will transform the way that encyclopedia data is published, made available, and used by a global audience. [It] will build on semantic technology that we have long supported, will accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, and will create an extraordinary new data resource for the world."
Yet even detractors believe that Wikidata has a high potential for expanding human knowledge in the world: "a primary goal ... [is] to make information in Wikipedia much more understandable to artificial intelligence systems. In other words, Wikidata—if successful—is going to form the 'brains' of many future technologies and online platforms."
This week, we uncovered WikiProject Deletion Sorting, Wikipedia's most active project by number of edits to all the project's pages. This special project seeks to increase participation in Articles for Deletion nominations by categorizing the AfD discussions by various topic areas that may draw the attention of editors. The project was started in August 2005 with manual processes that are continued today by a bevy of bots, categories, and transclusions. The project took inspiration from WikiProject Stub Sorting and some historical discussions on deletion reform. As the sheer number of AfDs continues to grow, the project is seeking better tools to manage the deletion sorting process and attract editors to comment on these deletion discussions. We interviewed Frankie.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Deletion Sorting? Why do AfD discussions need sorting?
WikiProject Deletion Sorting is Wikipedia's most active WikiProject when ranked by changes made to articles (second when bots are excluded). Where do these edits come from? How does the project coordinate such enormous activity?
How is deletion sorting actually conducted? What templates, scripts, lists, and other tools are available to help sort AfD discussions?
{{subst:delsort|ListName}}. In addition to letting involved editors know that the debate has been sorted, this notice helps the closing administrator by telling them how long has the debate been advertised, which may take part in deciding whether to relist.
What kinds of editors tend to use the project's resources? Can new Wikipedians take part or is deletion sorting more appropriate for experienced users?
Anything else you'd like to add?
Next week, we'll take a stroll down the vast, unspoiled Yorkshire countryside. Until then, you can locate our previous reports in the archive.
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