After six years without creating a new class of content projects, the Wikimedia Foundation has finally expanded into a new area: travel. Wikivoyage was formally launched on 15 January—though without a traditional ship's christening—having started as a beta trial on 10 November. Wikivoyage has been taken under the WMF's umbrella on the argument that information resources that help with travel are educational and therefore within the scope of the foundation's mission.
The story of the new travel site is already complicated, having involved the migration of volunteer editors and content from two other sites. The first source is Wikitravel.com, which has about 25,000 destinations in English and coverage in 20 languages. It is owned by the company Internet Brands, which strongly objected to the proposal and took pre-emptive legal action against two of its volunteers in an attempt to stop the haemorrhaging of editors and admins (Signpost coverage). Wikitravel is still active, with some 500 edits a day, and appears to be continuing to sell advertising space. At least three active volunteer administrators remain, while 35 are listed at the English Wikivoyage—eight of them bureaucrats.
The second precursor to the foundation's travel site was the non-commercial German-led travel site that forked from Wikitravel in 2006, Wikivoyage, which has given its name to the WMF's site by vote and no longer exists as a separate entity. Until the WMF launch, this Wikivoyage had about 12,000 articles in German and was the largest travel-guide wiki in the German language. The new Wikivoyage also inherits the smaller Italian-language version, with 2,500 articles, as well as a Commons-like file-repository with about 29,000 files and a location database. The fork imported much of Wikitravel.com's English-language freely licensed content in the migration preparations.
Wikivoyage's reincarnation now has nine language versions—English, German, Italian, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Russian. Wikimedians are welcome to visit and join in the task of improving these projects.
For all its similarities to other foundation wikis, the English Wikivoyage is fundamentally different from the English Wikipedia in several respects. Wikipedians will immediately notice the language tends to be less formal in articles, the structure of articles is very different, and there is no policy on verification or original sources (footnotes and ref-tags are not a feature of the text). The informal register in which de.voy articles are written is one topic that has sparked debates on the German Wikipedia, prompted by the release of a detailed memorandum on the state of Wikivoyage written by Ziko, a senior German Wikipedian and chair of the Dutch Wikimedia chapter (basics in English).
Compared with the Wikipedia readership, visitors to Wikivoyage are likely to be younger and to be seeking up-to-date, highly changeable information of a relatively narrow scope; if "on the road", they tend to want access to that information instantly and in an easy-to-read form; if planning their travel, their needs are likely to be akin to those of most visitors to Wikipedia.
The Signpost has identified three issues of public interest, now that Wikivoyage is part of the Wikimedia family. The first is the sex tourism policy, which did not change significantly for many years. In the light of the BBC's recent shut-down of its Lonely Planet travel site after "posts that discussed topics related to paedophilia", the Signpost made inquiries about the apparent inadequacy of the English Wikivoyage policy. Shortly after, the policy was hurriedly strengthened against such possible behaviour. The policy had presented a neutral definition of "sex tourism" to include "sex with children"—an issue about which the rest of the policy had been silent. The recent change has added this explanation, in which the last statement is unverified, as far as the Signpost can determine: "Any information on that [sex with children] is against our policies and will be deleted on sight. Note that many Western countries have laws which allow prosecution of their citizens for this, even if the act takes place in another country. Also, the countries where it takes place are cracking down heavily on it."
The rest of the policy proceeds—as it did before the recent change—to express the site's attitude to sex tourism in terms of negative preference: "We prefer not to include sex tourism information on Wikivoyage", followed by a list of such negative preferences, including pricing information, locations, "quality information" on and tips for picking up prostitutes. But there appears to be a fuzzy line: "Descriptions of locations or areas where prostitutes may be found—so-called "red light districts"—may be useful to non-sex tourists." And "expressions like single males will be happy at this hotel should be avoided in favour of direct language".
Before the policy was changed, the Signpost asked several administrators and other editors for their views on the text, and presented a hypothetical situation in which visitors post questions or comments about the age of consent on the talk page of an article related to a particular country. Evan Prodromou is a bureaucrat on the English Wikivoyage and one of two founders of the original non-profit Wikitravel site in 2003. He told the Signpost, "We've never had problems with sex tourism specifically for children. We've had issues with differing expectations for readers on information about sex tourism for adult prostitutes in places where this is legal locally; thus the policy."
Mark Jaroski said: "Evan [Prodromou] came up with the original text of the sex tourism policy nearly 10 years ago. If you go over his notes on the talk page you can see that he was really uneasy about allowing this sort of material on the site at all, but at the same time recognizing that for some reason people do consider the red-light district in Amsterdam to be an legitimate tourist "attraction", for lack of a better term. In any case the point of the policy was to give potential contributors an unsubtle hint that they should crawl off to some other corner of the Internet and leave us alone.
"I think that the policy has always been played down to avoid making it higher-profile, [which might have inadvertently attracted] the attention of the very people we were trying to avoid having as contributors. That sort of thing does happen on the Internet after all. I suppose that if someone were to raise the point in the mainstream media that might well have the same effect of attracting those people, and that we might have to get rid of them again in somewhat stronger terms. I would like to think that that won't happen, but I figure we'll fight that battle when we have to, and not before."
Pashley told the Signpost: "That policy is tricky and has been extensively discussed on the talk page. There have been arguments for both a looser and a stricter policy. ... As I see it, the current version is sadly lacking and I have proposed a rewrite at Pashley/STP. That has not gained wide acceptance." Pashley says he knows of no instances on the site like the recent one on Lonely Planet.
Doc James, who played an important role in the creation of the new site, said, "I never knew that Wikivoyage had a policy on sex tourism before you mentioned it. We as a movement should take a stance against anything related to sex tourism and children as it is not only illegal but unethical. ... These policies need to clarified. There is some subtlety but there is also a very clear bright line: 'no discussion / content that promotes sex tourism with children'."
DerFussi, chairman of the German non-profit association that hosted Wikivoyage until November, told the Signpost: "Our sex policies are the same (en: and de:) in general. ... The community has an eye on all edits. I am not aware of any scenario like this. Discussion sites have never been used for discussions about having sex on a travel destination and the community and Wikivoyage would never accept this. The Wikivoyage sites are not a travel forum. I am going to check the rules on de: concerning using talk pages."
Jay Walsh, the foundation's senior director, communications, responded to our invitation to comment on the issue:
| “ | Wikivoyage falls under the Foundation's umbrella Terms of Use ... which is linked to from every single project page. Specifically, in the Terms of Use ... we state 'we warn editors and contributors that authorities may seek to apply other country laws to you, including local laws where you live or where you view or edit content.' We also state 'Soliciting personally identifiable information from anyone under the age of 18 for an illegal purpose or violating any applicable law regarding the health or well-being of minors.' Violating those laws is a violation of the Terms of Use, which is a responsibility of the community to ensure is upheld. Wikivoyage's editorial policies must operate within the Foundation's Terms of Use (as must all project contributors). We have no reason to believe that the policies of the project are not in accordance with the Foundation's Terms of Use. | ” |
The English Wikivoyage's copyright policy is that "fair use in Wikivoyage of works from other sources, with the exception of short quotes and excerpts of text, is not acceptable". We asked editors whether they are aware of any instances of plagiarism on the previous sites, or of its policing. Is there a need for a warning about copying slabs of text from copyrighted travel guides in the edit mode display?
Pashley said he's aware of many instances of plagiarism, "including quite a few I deleted myself and many more that other admins dealt with." Evan Prodromou pointed out that the "no fair use" policy dates back to the founding of Wikitravel (2003–04). The Creative Commons 1.0 license had some assertions about clear rights to the works, so I added the "be careful about fair use" stuff to the Wikitravel policies. It was mainly for Wikipedians. Wikipedia has gotten a lot [stricter] about "fair use", so this is less of an issue now. As for plagiarism from other guides: it's occasionally a problem, but it's usually easy to detect and correct."
Mark Jaroski said "our usual problem is that people copy their own promotional material into the wiki, and when questioned produce evidence of copyright ownership. Usually that language gets reverted, toned down, or rewritten in terms of our no-touting rule, rather than the copyright rule. In any case we've always tried for a more or less consistent tone, and that tone is not the same as the kind of promotional material that people tend to copy in. Meanwhile we've also made it clear that we don't want big chunks of material copied in from Wikipedia or anywhere else.
"Copying of user-submitted reviews from other travel sites is a lot harder to detect, but usually that kind of writing is too personal to match our style, so it gets noticed and reverted or reworked anyhow. We might need to do more to avoid that kind of thing in the future, but so far having enough eyes on RecentChanges has kept it manageable. Certainly we make it clear that copyright violations are not acceptable."
DerFussi told the Signpost that "plagiarism and copyright violations are not accepted and are deleted immediately under our deletion policy. People sometimes copy text from anywhere—mostly from—yes, Wikipedia. The WMF wikis don't have any technology to attribute articles properly (our old Wikivoyage wikis had this technology :) ). It seems even Wikipedians are not aware of this and copy text to us—and we delete it. Thanks for reminding us to put a warning to the edit page. The old wikis had these information, but they were not migrated by the WMF. We have to rewrite them."
A travel wiki is inevitably exposed to the risk of touting and product placement. Is this hard to police? Editors we asked admitted there is a problem, but do not doubt the site's ability to deal with it. For Evan, "it's tricky, but the community has gotten pretty good at it." Mark said, "we have a no-touting policy, and that pretty much covers us for product placement. That said the whole point of a travel guide is to let people know about commercial services like hotels and restaurants, so they are going to be in there, but we don't keep promotional language around as above. We also don't allow travel aggregators and booking agencies under the "other guides" rule, so that keeps us mostly covered."
For Pashley, "it is a perennial problem, but fairly easily dealt with given those policies and a community with enough people who keep track of articles they are interested in and/or check the "recent changes" page fairly often. The same goes for most other major problems: spam, a user page offering a hot young girl to escort men around Shanghai, other ads, plagiarism, libelous reviews, ... As long as we have enough people who will spend some time on janitorial work, those can be dealt with."
DerFussi told the Signpost: "We cannot avoid product placement completely. But the community has a good sense for it by just checking the edits. There are ideas for future features like being able to edit the restaurant and hotel sections [only] when you have 100 edits. On the previous German Wikivoyage site there were not that many problems with product placement. We removed the ones we had. But I am sure we will face it." He said there are signs to watch out for—these include obvious user names like ACCOR France, and users or anons who just place recommendations for hotels and restaurants in multiple articles (often of the same company), place just a single edit and disappear, write excessively positive comments, or position their recommendation on the top of a list.
DerFussi made a broader point that since forking in 2006, the English-language Wikitravel and the German-language Wikivoyage "did not talk with each other, and now they are reunited". Therefore, our policies may differ slightly and it will take a short time to grow back together again. ... One of our main future objectives is to coordinate the policies and work on the wikis and help the small language versions. An application as a thematic organisation is one step we can take. Another is to become a more international."
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On January 16, voting for the first round of the 2012 Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year contest will begin. Wikimedia editors with 75 edits on any one project are eligible to vote to select their favorite image featured in 2012.
This year will mark the seventh annual contest, which was originally started by Commons editor Alvesgaspar in late 2006. Since then, editor participation has expanded greatly and the contest has become an important part of the Commons calendar. The last contest was won by Heinrich Pniok, a German volunteer who submitted a photograph taken in Norway.
The 2012 Picture of the Year contest is organized by a small group of volunteers who are responsible for tasks like sorting images from the featured picture process, promoting the event, translating messages, and contacting the contest winners. In addition, a new script has been deployed to improve the voting experience. The tool allows voters to quickly and easily vote for the images of their choice, while checking the eligibility of voters.
Voting in the first round will run from from January 16 to January 30. Eligible editors can vote for as many of the 988 images featured in 2012 as they wish. The second round will start on February 7 to determine the winner among the finalists from the first round.
On January 15, the foundation launched its latest grant scheme, called Individual Engagement Grants (IEGs). The program, after going through a consultation period since mid-December 2012, aims primarily to empower individual volunteer grantees or small groups, working on structural and time-intensive problems of the editing communities.
The scheme works on an eight-step process, from applicants learning about the program to assessing whether they are comfortable with the framework, to finally reporting results on Meta. The second step, the application process, is open from January 15 to February 15 in this first round, and at the same time Meta is setting up a volunteer reviewer committee. Its membership is supposed provide feedback on, evaluate and finally make recommendations on the proposals.
Siko Bouterse and other supporting staff will be checking whether submissions fulfil the formal requirements. Community discussions of applications will be open until February 24. The day after, the committee will start considering both the proposals and their related discussions in making its final recommendations until the grantee announcement, scheduled for March 15.
Successful applicants will secure a grant for one of the maximum seven IEG pilots. They will gain access to US$5–30K to fund their efforts for 6–12 months, and are expected to file mid-point reports on Meta by July. A second round is planned to start on August 1. Volunteers interested in participating in the work of the related committee are invited to join it.
This week, we set off for the final frontier with WikiProject Astronomy. The project was started in August 2006 using the now-defunct WikiProject Space as inspiration. WikiProject Astronomy is home to 101 pieces of Featured material and 148 Good Articles maintained by a band of 186 members. The project maintains a portal, works on an assortment of vital astronomy articles, and provides resources for editors adding or requesting astronomy images. Since the 2010 reorganization of all space-related projects, WikiProject Astronomy has served as one of the primary outlets for space-enthusiasts, alongside WikiProject Spaceflight (interviewed in 2011) and WikiProject Solar System (interviewed in 2008 and 2011). This week's interview includes WikiProject Astronomy members StringTheory11, Keilana, Casliber, and Wer900.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Astronomy? Have you contributed to any of the project's Featured and Good Articles? Do you participate in any of WikiProject Astronomy's subprojects and task forces?
The fields of astronomy and spaceflight has been covered by a variety of WikiProjects over the years, prompting the reorganization and merging of astronomy subprojects on several occasions. How is the current assortment of astronomy subprojects faring? What can be done to increase communication and collaboration between all the subprojects?
There are 226 astronomy-related articles on Wikipedia's list of vital articles. Have there been any concerted efforts to improve these articles? Why do some vital articles receive greater attention than others?
Has the project made any progress creating requested astronomy articles? What are the greatest difficulties editors face when creating or expanding new articles about astronomy-related topics?
What are the project's most urgent needs? How can a new editor help today?
Anything else you'd like to add?
Next week, we'll get tongue-tied by a complicated project. Until then, feel free to conduct a discourse analysis in the archive.
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Comforting those grieving after the loss of a loved one is an impossible task. How then, can an entire community be comforted? The Internet struggled to answer that question this week after the suicide of Aaron Swartz, a celebrated free-culture activist, programmer, and Wikipedian at the age of 26.
Aaron wore many Internet hats during his life. At the age of just 14 he played a key role in the initial RSS specification. While still a teenager, he served on the RDF core working group at the World Wide Web Consortium, defined the RDF XML content type and founded Infogami, which quickly merged with the social news and entertainment website, Reddit. Around the same time, he was part of the team that started Creative Commons.
In 2006 he ran into controversy for downloading and posting the bibliographic metadata of every book in the Library of Congress, which was in the public domain but available only for a fee. A more serious controversy occurred in 2008 when he downloaded about 20% of the entire PACER database, which allows public access to public domain US federal court documents, although ironically this required users to pay a fee. By taking advantage of a pilot program offering free access at certain public libraries, Aaron was able to download nearly two million documents before his access was revoked. He posted these documents openly on the Internet, prompting an FBI investigation, but no charges were ever filed. In 2010, he co-founded the Internet activist organization Demand Progress, which played a central role in the protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), alongside Aaron's separate, personal contributions to the debate.
In July 2011, Aaron was charged with four felonies, three stemming from the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. At issue was his use of an automated program to download 4.8 million scholarly articles from JSTOR by deploying the network infrastructure of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (Signpost coverage). Ironically, Aaron did not disseminate any of the files, and after he handed over to JSTOR the copies he had made, the digital library settled "any civil claims [it] may have had".
| “ | It's beyond my pay grade to figure out how many years in prison that all [thirteen felonies] could be, when taking into account the complexities of sentencing law. Let's leave it at a large scary number. Enough to ruin someone's life. | ” |
| — Seth Finkelstein | ||
These felony charges could have sent Aaron to prison for 35 years and have fined him more than $1 million. Carmen Ortiz, the federal prosecutor overseeing the case, said "stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars." In September, the government added nine charges, moving the total from four to thirteen felonies, which could have put Aaron behind bars for more than 50 years, with a fine of $4 million dollars.
On January 9, Ortiz’s office rejected an arrangement that would have kept Aaron out of prison. Two days later, he was found dead in his New York apartment.
Obituaries were published in mainstream news outlets such as the Economist, NPR, Washington Post, The New York Times, Guardian, and BBC, and the websites of organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet Archive, the Open Knowledge Foundation, JSTOR and SPARC.
The most poignant tributes, however, came from those who knew Aaron. Three of the most prominent came from close friends, including Cory Doctorow, Quinn Norton, and danah boyd. boyd commented:
| “ | Many people want the heads of the key administrators who helped create the context in which Aaron took his life. I completely understand where they're coming from. But I also fear the likelihood that Aaron will be turned into a martyr, an abstraction of a geek activist destroyed by the State. Because he was a lot more than that—lovable and flawed, passionate and strong-willed, brilliant and infuriatingly stupid. It'll be easy for folks to rally cry for revenge in his name. But not much is gained from reifying the us vs. them game that got us here. There has to be another way. | ” |
Others recalled Aaron's humorous antics, such as the time he was interviewed by The New York Times for a story. The day it was published, he parodied a personal ad on his blog, asking readers: "Attention attractive people: Are you looking for someone respectable enough that they've been personally vetted by The New York Times, but has enough of a bad-boy streak that the vetting was because they 'liberated' millions of dollars of government documents? If so, look no further than page A14 of today's The New York Times."
In a tribute, The New York Times published recollections from their reporter who had been covering Aaron's case, John Schwartz. Schwartz (not related to Aaron) enjoyed his "obvious brilliance" and "cutting wit". Affectionately, he said, "I liked him. He was about the age of my daughter; I told him that my own father is Aaron Schwartz, so I felt funny talking with him. I then joked that if she hadn't been in a committed relationship at the time of our interviews, I might have tried to set them up. He smiled awkwardly at my old-guy gaffe."
Many people focused on what they perceived to be unjust charges against Aaron. His family said that Aaron's death was a "product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach." In a blog post written by Alex Stamos, the defense's expert witness said, "I know a criminal hack when I see [one], and Aaron's downloading of journal articles from an unlocked closet is not an offense worth 35 years in jail." Lawrence Lessig, a close friend of Aaron's, alleged prosecutorial misconduct, among other things, saying "Fifty years in jail, charges our government. Somehow, we need to get beyond the 'I'm right so I'm right to nuke you' ethics that dominates our time. That begins with one word: Shame. One word, and endless tears."
| “ | Aaron's insatiable curiosity, creativity, and brilliance; his reflexive empathy and capacity for selfless, boundless love; his refusal to accept injustice as inevitable—these gifts made the world, and our lives, far brighter. We're grateful for our time with him, to those who loved him and stood with him, and to all of those who continue his work for a better world. | ” |
| — Family and partner of Aaron Swartz | ||
Losing Aaron moved many Wikimedians on a deeply personal level. Aaron edited the English Wikipedia under the username Aaronsw, with more than 5,500 edits in ten years in a surprisingly wide range of topics, from biographies of living people to US legal cases and proposed legislation. He ran for the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees in 2006. This was just the time he had a significant effect on the way the community saw itself, in large part due to his blog post "Who Writes Wikipedia", that was translated into Japanese, Spanish, German, and French. The piece, which was part of a six-part series, was described last week by journalist Anne Sewell as a "landmark analysis of Wikipedia."
Part of "Who Writes Wikipedia" concerned a frequent talking point in Jimmy Wales' public addresses that Wikipedia operated on an "80–20 rule", where 80% of the writing, curating, and caretaking was being done by just 20% of the users. Aaron pointed out that by using edit counts Wales had discovered that the ratio was in fact worse than this—that more than 50% of all edits were made by 0.7% of users, and top 2% of users performed 73% of all edits. According to Wales, the remaining edits were done by minor contributors, the random people who came along to fix a typo or address a minor factual error.
Aaron questioned this premise, saying: "Wales presents these claims as comforting. Don't worry, he tells the world, Wikipedia isn't as shocking as you think. In fact, it's just like any other project: a small group of colleagues working together toward a common goal. But if you think about it, Wales's view of things is actually much more shocking: around a thousand people wrote the world's largest encyclopedia in four years for free? Could this really be true?"
Aaron went on to show that the direct opposite was true: that the 'core' group of Wikipedians—those who made the most edits to the site overall—actually added the least amount of content to the page. Aaron revealed that the problem lay in the methodology: the number of letters added, versus the quantity of edits.
Aaron's keenest insight into Wikipedia came near the end of his blog post:
| “ | If Wikipedia is written by occasional contributors, then growing it requires making it easier and more rewarding to contribute occasionally. Instead of trying to squeeze more work out of those who spend their life on Wikipedia, we need to broaden the base of those who contribute just a little bit. | ” |
Among several tributes from Wikimedians, Erik Moller, the Deputy Director of the WMF, wrote a Wikimedia Blog post, calling him an "extraordinary individual ... [and] beautiful person," and in an email to wikimedia-l said that Aaron was "an intense, passionate and focused intellectual who dedicated his life to changing the world for the better—and he did. It's a shocking loss and deeply sad that he left us so early, that he saw no other way."
Samuel Klein, a Wikipedian and WMF trustee, wrote a tribute on his blog. The Wikipedian, a blog run by William Beutler for non-Wikipedians, looked at Aaron's contributions to the Wikimedia movement, and other Wikipedians wrote their forms of remembrance on his Wikipedia user talk page.
As Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and an acquaintance of Aaron's, tweeted: "Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep."
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Aaron H. Swartz known as AaronSw on Wikipedia
Departed January 11, 2013 "I just can't believe someone so brilliant is gone so soon." /ƒETCHCOMMS/ This is an irreconcilable loss for humanity! We were fortunate to share his association, and as stewards, responsible to adopt his endeavors into our care, and conservancy. RIP (condolences) |
Continuing our recap of the featured content promoted in 2012, this week the Signpost interviewed three editors, asking them about featured articles which stuck out in their minds. Two, Ian Rose and Graham Colm, are current featured article candidates (FAC) delegates, while Brian Boulton is an active featured article writer and reviewer.
Ian Rose
It was a privilege to serve as a delegate at FAC in 2012, and view articles I might not have otherwise (though we're from the same place, I never knew there were so many varieties of banksia, for example). Restricting myself to nominations with which I was directly involved as a delegate, the article that remains uppermost in my mind is Lynching of Jesse Washington. The subject matter is important and disturbing, but presented in a dispassionate yet compelling manner. As a candidate, it was well prepared through a good article nomination and peer review, in which experienced FA writers participated. That the FAC still generated some detailed commentary was hardly surprising, but the discussion remained cool and collegial, and issues were resolved in a timely manner. For me it was one of many articles and FAC nominations in 2012 that did Wikipedia proud.
Graham Colm
As a delegate I read a broad variety of articles that otherwise would pass me by. So different in subjects, I found it impossible to choose a favourite from the treasures on last year's list. But I do have a favourite FAC: it was a joy to follow the reviews of Betelgeuse. I was deeply impressed by the thoroughness and knowledge of the reviewers and the timely and intelligent responses from the nominators. Focused and ever mindful of our readers, the team went through the article with a fine tooth comb, refining every fact and nuance of meaning as they went along. Of course, I love the article – about a beautiful star with a beautiful name – it is a product of gifted content creators and expert reviews.
Brian Boulton
From the year's many excellent FA promotions, with some difficulty I made a short list of two: Mary, Queen of Scots, nominated by DrKiernan, and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, nominated by Maria. Mary, Queen of Scots is an engrossing account of a tragic life; the article has particular resonance for me since I live not far from Fotheringhay. The writing is crisp and authoritative, a credit to the encyclopedia. But my final choice of personal favourite, narrowly, goes to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a beautifully written description of a work by a writer who would perhaps never have come to my notice but for WP. It exemplifies for me the ability of Wikipedia to extend one's knowledge and sensitivities in unexpected and delightful ways.
Three featured articles were promoted this week:
Four featured lists were promoted this week:
Twelve featured pictures were promoted this week:
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The opening of the Doncram case marks the end of almost 6 months without any open cases, the longest in the history of the Committee.
The case concerns Doncram's creation of masses of articles composed of unchecked content transferred from foreign databases and his perceived misrepresentation of legitimate criticism. The filer, SarekOfVulcan, notes that while he is a long-standing editor, he "has frequently run up against other editors relating to both the content and how he reacts when the content is challenged." When arbitrator Roger Davies asked the parties to "provide details of a [recent] arbitratable issue that the community has failed to resolve", SarekOfVulcan cited two instances:
| “ | See Architects of the National Park Service for his continuing to create lists with insufficient evidence for inclusion. Note Cbl62's edit summaries of "it's been 3 months since sourcing discussion began and still nothing to support these entries." Note particularly their exchange on Jan 4, where Doncram and Cbl62 disagree on a source.
Also note this AfD, where he declares "If this was userfied to my space, I would be inclined to return it to mainspace immediately, as it is an obviously valid, completely sourced article." |
” |
In November 2011, SarekOfVulcan noted on the administrators' noticeboard for incidents that Doncram created the Chambers Building article without substantive content. Snottywong described the report as "an immediate kneejerk [sic] ANI complaint [which] was uncalled for." In her reply, Elen of the Roads states that she originally blocked him
| “ | to stop him transferring the content of another database into Wikipedia without any check being made on the quality of what was being imported (there were a lot of problems with the other database). All the time. Without stopping. And endlessly abusing both the guy who wrote the script that he used, and anyone who tried to clean up the mess. | ” |
Orlady's statement says that her long-standing complaints include Doncram exhibiting "an attitude of article ownership", escalating minor disagreements into larger arguments, believing that he is exempt from policies and guidelines, and demonstrating "a pattern of personalizing interactions with others, including engaging in blisteringly vitriolic personal attacks against [her]."
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The Wikidata client extension was successfully deployed to the Hungarian Wikipedia on 14 January, its team reports. The interwiki language links can now come from wikidata.org, though "manual" interwiki links remain functional, overriding those from the central repository. Although they are now little more than edit window clutter, members of the Hungarian Wikipedia community have been hesitant with regard to remove existing links, given that Wikidata-ignorant interwiki bots remain in operation, potentially re-inserting the "missing" links in the wikitext. Changes coming from Wikidata can also be seen in recent changes and in the watchlist, though they are hidden by default, marking an end to interwiki-link changes cluttering watchlists (announcement on huwiki (in Hungarian) and blog post (in English) on the Wikimedia Germany blog). Deployments to the Hebrew and Italian Wikipedias are planned for 30 January, and assuming all goes well – and communities remain receptive – the Wikidata client should have found its way onto English Wikipedia by the end of February and then onto other language Wikipedias in the following month. The Wikidata team welcomes feedback, either via the Contact the development team page on Wikidata, on #wikimedia-wikidata on IRC, or on the mailing list. In addition to Hungarian Wikipedia, the client is also enabled on test2wiki where interested users who do not speak Hungarian can test it.
Development of phase 2, relating to infobox-style data entries is progressing well, the Wikidata team reports, though again code review is likely to be a slow and arduous process and no deployment dates have yet been set. In related news, the 3 millionth Wikidata item was created on January 13: "List of mayors of Westdorpe", a large village in the Netherlands.
The Wikimedia operations team is busy preparing to switch over the master database servers and other key infrastructure to use the Ashburn, Virginia data centre as the primary data centre. The Ashburn data centre is already serving about 90% of traffic, but this is mainly the result of it hosting caching servers which serve pages for logged-out users, as well as images, JavaScript and CSS. When Wikimedians edit a wiki, the regeneration of the pages is still handled by master database servers in the Tampa data centre. The switchover is part of an ongoing project to enable redundancy for key infrastructure; in addition, the change in "primary" centre from Tampa to Ashburn revolved around the quality of the facilities at both locations.
CT Woo, the Foundation's Director of Operations, announced the change on the wikitech-l mailing list:
| “ | The team has scheduled the week of 22nd January, 2013 to perform the switchover. We are going to block a 8-hour migration window on the 22nd, 23rd and 24th. During those periods, 17:00 UTC to 01:00 UTC (9am to 5pm PST), there will be intermittent blackouts. ... We will make the final Go/No decision on 18th January. | ” |
In the event of an outage, Wikimedians can get updates on IRC in the #wikimedia-tech channel, or via Wikimedia's Twitter accounts @wikimedia or @wikimediatech (detailed server logs).
As the operations and core platform team are setting up new servers and infrastructure, they are taking it as an opportunity to also switchover to new deployment tools (git-deploy) and a new internal workflow for the regular code updates to the Wikimedia projects.
The Echo team held IRC office hours on January 8 where they discussed development progress on a Facebook-style notification system for editors. As previously reported, Echo, currently deployed on MediaWiki.org, provides notifications when someone edits your talk page, creates a link to an article you created, nominates it for deletion, adds maintenance tags, or reverts your edit. There will be a notifications "badge" at the top of the page, next to your user name, which can replace the "yellow" bar that users see now when you have a new talk page message. The team described how they have a "'user mention' notification in the works" which could work similar to Twitter mentions and notify you when someone mentions you on another page. The team welcomes feedback on the types of notifications to provide, although they initially have in mind new users, who are more likely to miss important events than established users. Echo may also provide a public notifications API that could be used by bots and scripts, the team said, though they, together with the community, would need to figure out how to balance ease of use of the tool while minimizing abuse and spamming with the notifications API.
Echo is available for testing on test2wiki. The Echo team plans on initial experimental deployment to English Wikipedia sometime next month (presumably of an opt-in nature). Interested editors can also stay informed and discuss with the Editor Engagement team about Echo and other projects on their new editor engagement mailing list.
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.
