Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-28/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-28/Traffic report
| “ | Up until a week ago, here is something you could have learned from Wikipedia:
From 1640 to 1641 the might of colonial Portugal clashed with India's massive Maratha Empire in an undeclared war that would later be known as the Bicholim Conflict. Named after the northern Indian region where most of the fighting took place, the conflict ended with a peace treaty that would later help cement Goa as an independent Indian state. Except none of this ever actually happened. The Bicholim Conflict is a figment of a creative Wikipedian's imagination. It's a huge, laborious, 4,500 word hoax. And it fooled Wikipedia editors for more than 5 years. |
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This is how, on New Year's Day, the Daily Dot reported that a "massive Wikipedia hoax" had been exposed after more than five years. The article on the Bicholim conflict had been listed as a "Good Article" for the past half-decade, yet turned out to be an ingenious hoax.
Created in July 2007 by User:A-b-a-a-a-a-a-a-b-a, the meticulously detailed piece was approved as a GA in October 2007. A subsequent submission for FA was unsuccessful, but failed to discover that the article's key sources were made up. While the User:A-b-a-a-a-a-a-a-b-a account then stopped editing, the hoax remained listed as a Good Article for five years, receiving in the region of 150 to 250 page views a month in 2012. It was finally nominated for deletion on 29 December 2012 by User:ShelfSkewed—who had discovered the hoax while doing work on Category:Articles with invalid ISBNs—and deleted the same day. Of course, the Internet and Wikipedia being what they are, the article is still present on dozens of websites that had copied it from Wikipedia. It also remains included in a number of Wikipedia-based books available from Barnes & Noble.
The Daily Dot's report was quickly picked up by other publications: PC World, Yahoo News, then The Daily Mail, UPI and TechCrunch. Over the first two weeks of 2013, the story spread from publication to publication, from country to country, reaching all the way back to South Asia, where it was reported by the Times of India and the Indian Express, as well as Republika in Indonesia. Last of all, it arrived in Japan, with the Japanese TechCrunch site carrying a translation of the story.
The original article in the Daily Dot, written by chief reporter Kevin Morris, has to date received close to 1,000 tweets. On 18 January 2013, Morris followed up with another, far longer piece; titled "How vandals are destroying Wikipedia from the inside", it began with a review of the recent indefinite block of User:Legolas2186.
Legolas2186 was indefinitely blocked by administrator Georgewilliamherbert in the wake of the Bicholim conflict story, following a discussion at AN/I. Inactive since February 2012, he had in previous years written close to 100 GAs along with several FAs, including the Featured Article on Madonna. Subsequent sourcing investigations initiated by User:Binksternet however showed that Legolas2186 had an alarming tendency to falsify or invent quotes and sources, and the Madonna FA (promoted in 2010) was demoted as a result in 2012. It may be significant that Legolas2186 had received multiple warnings about adding unsourced information in 2009. As Morris said in the Daily Dot,
| “ | ... like his parallels in news media, Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, Legolas was weaving together a portfolio of success with a web of cleverly constructed lies, false sources, and invented quotes. An investigation led by an enterprising team of Wikipedia editors dug up dozens of fabrications perpetrated by Legolas, who was later banished from the site.
Legolas2186 is hardly the first hoaxster to fool Wikipedia. But his case shows the urgency with which the encyclopedia needs to modernize and adapt, as the editorial core it relies upon to fend off the Internet's unrelenting wave of trolls and liars grows ever smaller. |
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Morris consulted Doctor Charles Ford, a professor of psychology at the University of Alabama, to find out what might motivate a person to lie repeatedly. Emphasising that he was speaking generally, rather than about this specific editor, whom he did not know, Ford stated that compulsive lying is usually due to a learning disability, or narcissism. The ability to fool people might give a person an enhanced sense of power. Others, Ford said, genuinely feel that they are at the centre of the universe: "They then define what is real and not real."
Morris argues that Wikipedia's internal structure and communications tools are too decentralised and outdated, and that this "doesn't just slow down the discovery of hoaxes, it scares people away. And meanwhile, pranksters like Legolas strain the time the site's editors do have—all of which only exacerbates Wikipedia's unprecedented editorial crisis." While the number of articles has risen, the number of editors has dropped.
William Henderson on the Telegraph website chimed in on 23 January, explaining "Why we're about to discover more Wikipedia hoaxes". Henderson drew particular attention to the "tens or even hundreds of thousands of articles that no one is keeping an eye on".
On 25 January, even the Sun, a British tabloid, covered the topic with "Trickipedia", featuring its own run-down of Wikipedia hoaxes based on Wikipedia:List of hoaxes on Wikipedia.
The Los Angeles Times published an upbeat op-ed by Sue Gardner on 13 January 2013. Titled "Wikipedia, the people's encyclopedia", the piece celebrated the first 12 years of Wikipedia's existence, and the diversity of the more than 1.5 million people who have contributed to the Wikipedia project:
| “ | ... An encyclopedia is one of humankind's grandest displays of collaborative effort, and Wikipedia takes that collaboration to new levels, with contributors from pretty much every ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic background, political ideology, religion, sexual orientation and gender. The youngest Wikipedian I've met was 7, a boy in Tel Aviv who makes small edits to articles about animals and children's books. The oldest I've met was 73, a retired engineer who writes about the history of Philadelphia, where he's lived for half a century. | ” |
Gardner characterised Wikipedians as, "almost without exception, ... ridiculously smart, as you might expect of people who, for fun, write an encyclopedia in their spare time." Many of them are very young: "There's a recurring motif inside Wikipedia of preteen editors who've spent their lives so far having their opinions and ideas discounted because of their age, but who have nonetheless worked their way into positions of real authority on Wikipedia. They love Wikipedia fiercely because it's a meritocracy: the only place in their lives where their age doesn't matter."
Wikipedians are geeky, she said, and nine out of ten of them are male—Gardner's theory is it's because "some of the constellation of characteristics that combine to create a Wikipedian—geeky, tech-centric, intellectually confident, thick-skinned and argumentative, with the willingness and ability to indulge in a solitary hobby—tend to skew male." They also tend to live in affluent parts of the world.
Reviewing Wikipedia's strengths and weaknesses, Gardner stated that Wikipedia's fundamental ideals—neutrality, lack of judgment, verifiability—and many attentive eyes had made well-visited articles like the one on Obama neutral and accurate, while Wikipedia's articles on obscure topics were weakest—places "where subtle bias and small mistakes can sometimes persist for months or even years."
| “ | Since it was founded 12 years ago this week, Wikipedia has become an indispensable part of the world's information infrastructure. It's a kind of public utility: You turn on the faucet and water comes out; you do an Internet search and Wikipedia answers your question. People don't think much about who creates it, but you should. We do it for you, with love. | ” |
On 24 January 2013, the Daily Dot published an article on "The women of Wikipedia: Closing the site's giant gender gap", featuring interviews with Sarah Stierch and Joseph Reagle. The story was picked up the next day by feminist blog Jezebel, under the title "Wikipedia's editors are 91 percent male because citations are stored in the ball sack" (with illustration):
| “ | Wikipedia, the collaborative encyclopedia that's edited by you (if you're a dude), me (if I were a dude), and all the dudes you know, launched in 2001 and quickly became the place to find quick info on pretty much any topic under the sun. Remember writing research papers before Wikipedia? Man, we were all such chumps with our "books."
Despite being one of the most heavily visited sites on the web, women comprise just 9 percent of all Wikipedia editors. |
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The Daily Dot commented that according to researchers, Wikipedia's well-known gender gap is a "byproduct of established gender biases in society, the male-oriented aesthetics of technology, and Wikipedia's sometimes-abrasive culture. These factors have all coalesced to reinstitute a familiar pattern." This is all the more remarkable as there are many social media where women are actually in the majority.
Sarah Stierch said it's partly due to Wikipedia's software design, and its "cold, technical and argumentative" atmosphere: "It's aesthetically very masculine in its design. Its community, like so much of the early Internet, has been male dominated, and I think when a lot of people—men or women—look at Wikipedia these days, they see it as a source for information but have little interest or excitement in contributing to it." The traditional gender gap in higher education might also play a role, she added. "The average Wikipedia editor is a well-educated white male. Well-educated white males have been writing history and the story of the world since ancient times." Efforts to create a more inclusive community in Wikipedia would be helped if more women "came out" as women on the site, rather than staying gender-anomymous.
Joseph Reagle, whose study "'Free as in sexist?' Free culture and the gender gap" appeared recently in First Monday, warned, "The ideas of freedom and openness can be used to dismiss concerns and rationalize the gender gap as a matter of preference and choice. That is, 'if there are no women in our project, it must simply be their choice.' Women may have made a choice, but it was not based on whether they find the project interesting or have a contribution to make, but by the 'brogrammer' locker-room type of environment." According to Reagle, reducing the gap is important for Wikipedia as a whole: a male-dominated culture leads to more biased articles, and research has shown that the "collective intelligence of a group goes up with increased social sensitivity, conversational turn-taking, and female participation."
As reported in last week's "Technology Report", the WMF's data centre in Ashburn, Virginia ("eqiad") took over responsibility for almost all of the remaining functions that had previously been handled by their old facility in Tampa, Florida ("pmtpa") on 22 January. The Signpost reported then that few problems had arisen since handover. Unfortunately that was not to remain the case, with reports of caching problems (which typically only affect anonymous users) starting to come in.
The main bug driving anonymous users' difficulties, bug #44391 ("old revisions of pages are shown when not logged in and also revision history is outdated"), was finally declared fixed at around 05:00 UTC on 28 January, although only time will tell if further fixes will be needed. After the migration, other miscellaneous problems with the cache for images and other uploads (both originals and thumbnails) appear to worsen and new ones emerge, mixed up with them. WMF Director of Platform Engineering Rob Lanphier shared an update on the current situation.
The data centre in Tampa will continue to be maintained as a "hot failover", with servers in standby mode, ready to take over should the primary site experience an outage. Additionally, the Signpost understands that the Tampa data centre will continue to be used for image scaling in the short term, before that too is migrated to Ashburn.
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At least a dozen volunteer and staff developers and technically-inclined Wikimedians are making their way to European conference FOSDEM this weekend, records show. The Belgian-led conference brings together open-source developers and advocates from around the world.
Right after that, the WMF Language engineering team will be flying to India for a two-week marathon of MediaWiki development and internationalization outreach, including attendance at the 2013 GNUnify conference. WMF developers will also be staging their own workshops at the Quark '13 conference on February 1 and 2 and at the Pune LanguageSummit on February 12 and 13, aiming to better take advantage of the rapidly growing Indian software development scene, which is already one of the largest in the world.
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-28/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-28/Opinion
To many Wikimedians, the Khan Academy would seem like a close cousin: the academy is a non-profit educational website and a development of the massive open online course concept that has delivered over 227 million lessons in 22 different languages. Its mission is to give "a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere." This complements Wikipedia's stated goal to "imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge", then go and create that world.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the highly successful GLAM-Wiki (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) initiative has partnered with the Khan Academy's Smarthistory project to further both its and Wikipedia's goals.
Smarthistory started as a separate website that aimed to "emphasize the experience of looking at art by using unscripted conversations recorded in front of the work of art whenever possible, by incorporating numerous images and video, and by curating links to high-quality resources on the web." They joined the Khan Academy in October 2011 as a natural extension of their mission.
Collaboration between Smarthistory and Wikipedia was stimulated through the most unlikely forum, a Twitter conversation. According to Beth Harris, one of Smarthistory's co-founders, it started when she tweeted about the general public's tendency to almost exclusively go to Wikipedia instead of museums, if museums do not put their content online. Liam Wyatt, who is a pioneer in the GLAM-Wiki initiative, told the Signpost that he replied saying that the two could work together, even if Smarthistory's non-commercial Creative Commons license could not be changed to suit Wikipedia's more permissive CC-by-SA. Through subsequent emails, the idea of a limited collaboration developed.
Smarthistory shared with Liam a spreadsheet that juxtaposed Smarthistory's videos against their relevant Wikipedia articles. When this was posted on the cultural-partnerships-l mailing list, Peter Weis jumped in to wikify the spreadsheet and put it on-wiki, thus beginning the public partnership.
The Signpost asked Smarthistory's co-founders (Beth Harris and Steven Zucker) and Smallbones, who also played a major role in forming the project, what the goals of the Smarthistory–Wikipedia collaboration are, and where the results of this might be applied in other areas. From the Smarthistory side, Harris and Zucker are looking for a complement to the "critical, interpretive method that is central to our work"; they point out that Wikipedia's style and content meet that perfectly, fulfilling their goal. They said they are far from the only ones providing these sorts of open educational resources, and that there are many GLAMs out there with excellent text and video content that are ripe for collaboration. The problem, of course, is that not all GLAMs see the value in distributing their content around the Internet, though Harris and Zucker are confident that they will come around.
Smallbones, replying from the Wikipedian perspective, said that the project was about improving Wikipedia by using the reliable content uploaded by Smarthistory, and he hopes the project will move beyond simple {{external media}} links and will use Smarthistory as a reference within articles. To Smallbones, this is an especially important area in which to collaborate:
| “ | Reliability and expert opinion are especially important in art-related articles, where opinion and interpretation are always needed, but where ["no original research"] prevents an "ordinary editor" from offering his own interpretation. For example, while I may know that Grant Wood's American Gothic is a humorous, even mocking, painting, it can sometimes be amazingly difficult to go through the available academic literature (generally written for other academics) for a reference and find something so obvious to be clearly stated. Smarthistory gives us expert opinion with video that starts from the basics and moves through context, history, and interesting detail, all in 5 or 10 minutes. | ” |
There are pitfalls, though. Both Liam Wyatt and Smallbones told the Signpost that the challenge is to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. Wyatt said he made clear that there was "no 'deal' or promise to link" to any Smarthistory videos, and Smallbones said that even the potential of being seen as "spamming" the videos is something to watch. He believes that the way around this is to encourage participants to consider including a Smarthistory video as a citation in place of a [citation needed] tag, or as the referenced cornerstone of a new article.
Looking forward, Smallbones said that there is much relatively easy work left to do, and "anybody can take the basic concept of using Smarthistory resources and run with it as far as they want to go." Harris and Zucker expressed similar feelings, as they look for the collaboration to grow as they continue to produce new videos and essays each week. As this content is being translated into many different languages, they are hopeful that other Wikipedias will join the Smarthistory–Wikipedia collaboration.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-28/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-28/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-28/In focus
The Doncram case continues.
The case was filed in an attempt to remedy what was perceived as Doncram's continued unconstructive editing after the failure of previous community discussions and long-term blocks. (cf. SarekOfVulcan's statement)
In his response, Doncram stated that it was a combination of past encounters with other users, a host of ANI and AFD submissions, and perceived uncivil and bully-like behaviour directed at him that contributed to what he perceived as a "battleground atmosphere". He believes that the only way to remedy these issues is by addressing them through an arbitration case.
In light of the evidence present, among the remedies proposed in the workshop are those calling for a topic-ban or outright ban for Doncram, an interaction ban between Doncram and Orlady and SarekOfVulcan, and SarekOfVulcan's desysopping for "gross edit-warring". Workshop submissions and the posting of proposed decisions have been postponed until February 11. Evidence submissions have closed to all uninvolved parties. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-28/Humour
