This week, we put our life in the hands of WikiProject Airlines. Starting in July 2005, the project has improved articles relating to airline companies, alliances, destination lists, and travel benefit programs. WikiProject Airlines has accumulated over 4,000 pages, including 4 Featured Lists and 26 Good Articles. There is a convenient template that keeps track of the project's announcements, upcoming Featured Articles on the main page, reassessments and reviews, requested moves, and articles nominated for deletion. The project is a child of WikiProject Aviation (see our 2010 interview), sister to WikiProject Aircraft (interviewed in 2011) and WikiProject Airports, and parent of the Defunct Airlines Task Force. We interviewed Compdude123.
In next week's special report, we'll see how WikiProjects can measure their workload and productivity. Until then, check out our previous specials in the archive.
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As of time of writing, twenty wikis (including the English, French and Hungarian Wikipedias) are in the process of getting access to the Lua scripting language, an optional substitute for the clunky template code that exists at present.
The deployments were announced on 15 February for 18 February (wikitech-l mailing list); consequently, most wikis are yet to decide upon policies towards template refactoring. Arguments in favour of a swift implementation cite the proven ability of Lua to reduce like-for-like rendering times (particularly on longer pages) when applied to heavily used templates. The language also allows more complex templates to be created and improves code readability. Arguments in favour of a more cautious approach centre on the propensity for templates to become ever more complex, obscuring their methods to the average user.
The CodeEditor extension is also being deployed, providing Lua developers with a range of proper debugging tools; both it and the Scribunto extension (which provides the basic Lua functionality) have been in testing for several months following initial demos at the 2012 Berlin Hackathon and Wikimania 2012. Lua scripts will be written in a new Module: namespace, being invoked (probably from the Template: namespace, though potentially directly) via a new #invoke: parser function.
gets 3D buildings and more
The WikiMiniAtlas is a built-in mapping gadget hidden behind the icon, that shows up on all articles with geographic coordinates attached. Overlaid on a basemap derived from OpenStreetMap data the WikiMiniAtlas (WMA) displays links to geocoded Wikipedia articles and Commons image thumbnails. It features a user interface that is translated into dozens of languages and can display coordinates from over 70 Wikimedia projects.
The latest feature in WikiMiniAtlas is solid 3D buildings at high zoom levels; examples include the Petronas Towers, Burj Khalifa, the Empire State Building and many more. This feature requires a browser with WebGL support (all modern browsers except Internet Explorer). For modern Internet Explorer a wireframe view acts as a fallback. For browsers that do not support the canvas element (older Internet Explorer versions and obsolete browsers) no buildings are shown (it should degrade gracefully). Building geometries are extracted from open source data released by the OpenStreetMap project.
In list articles such as the List of volcanoes in the United States all coordinates from the page are highlighted with blue dots on the map, with the dots being clickable to navigate the list (example). The WikiMiniAtlas also displays OSM object outlines through the WIWOSM project and embedded KML data. Thus the Navajo Nation article (video) is an example of the former and Mojave Desert is an example of the latter. Arbitrary outlines can be dragged across the map to allow for size comparisons; an example of such a comparison is that between Texas and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (video). And of course WikiMiniAtlas goes beyond earth, showing globes of the Moon, Mercury, Mars, Titan, Io, and Venus (example).
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.
On February 15, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) declared "victory" in its counter-lawsuit against Internet Brands (IB), the owner of Wikitravel and the operator of several online media, community, and e-commerce sites in vertical markets. Signpost readers will recall that IB is in turn owned by private equity investors Hellman & Friedman LLC, which bought the company in a US$640M deal. The lawsuit clears the last remaining hurdles for the WMF's new travel guide project, Wikivoyage.
In August 2012, Wikitravel contributors wished to create a new, non-commercial travel guide under the auspices of the WMF. The process began in April 2012, with significant segments of the Wikitravel contributors in support. Though the process bogged down in the following months, a request for comment on the matter gained 78% support for starting a Wikimedia-affiliated travel guide project. But IB indicated that it would not give up without a fight; there were several ominous warning signs, including the IB legal department's ultimatum to eight Wikitravel volunteer editors: "Please be advised that your recent actions communicating directly with members of Wikitravel could put you in violation of numerous federal and state laws. We strongly urge you to cease and desist all action detrimental to Wikitravel.org. If you persist in this course of conduct, you will potentially be a named defendant, and therefore liable for any and all resulting damages."
Things came to a head in September, when the company sued two volunteer editors, Doc James (James Heilman) and Wrh2 (Ryan Holliday), focusing on their encouragement of Wikitravel editors to fork and join a Wikimedia-run travel guide (see our special report: "Two Wikipedians may face jury trial"). Geoff Brigham, the WMF's general counsel, stated yesterday that in the lawsuit:
| “ | Internet Brands branded the proposed new site an 'Infringing Website' and claimed that the volunteers were acting 'for the benefit of the Wikimedia Foundation' to 'usurp' the community of users of Internet Brands' site and taking actions that included 'deliberately misleading statements, and Trademark infringement and violation of Internet Brands' intellectual property rights.' Internet Brands identified the 'Wikimedia Foundation, members of its Board, and other members of the Foundation' as potential 'co-conspirators' who were 'corrupt in this scheme'. | ” |
This lawsuit was dismissed in November.
Soon after IB's action, though, the WMF countered with its own lawsuit, asking the court to declare that:
After clearing several hurdles and receiving a tentative ruling in the WMF's favor, the second lawsuit ended on 14 February in a negotiated settlement between the two entities. IB agreed to release the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikivoyage e.V., the not-for-profit operator of the original Wikivoyage, from "any and all claims related in any manner to the creation and operation of the travel wiki project" in return for the WMF's dismissal of the lawsuit. Brigham summed up the outcome at the end of his Wikimedia blog post:
| “ | The Wikimedia Foundation believes there is enough room for multiple travel sites to co-exist, and for community members to contribute to multiple sites in this area. Our Executive Director, Sue Gardner, outlined this perspective in a post to the original travel project discussion. We have stood by this belief from the beginning, and we believe that a successful, freely-shareable, non-commercial travel project will help support the overall quantity and quality of travel information on the web. ... It's now possible for the Wikivoyage community to continue their efforts to build a global free-knowledge travel site unhindered. We wish them the best of luck and look forward to working closely with the Wikivoyage community as the project grows and thrives. | ” |
Ryan Holliday, one of the two volunteers who were originally sued, commented:
| “ | I'm glad to finally be able to publicly thank the Wikimedia Foundation for their support. Throughout the ordeal I was amazingly impressed by the professionalism, hard work, and dedication of both WMF and Cooley [Cooley LLP, the law firm representing both Holliday and the WMF], and am enormously grateful that they stood up for their community members in this instance. Getting sued is something that no one ever wants to go through, particularly when you believe you are completely innocent of any wrongdoing, but the WMF's assistance made a very stressful ordeal much more bearable. Having seen how they operate and truly stand up for their mission of 'empowering and engaging people around the world to collect and develop educational content', I will be a lifelong supporter of this excellent organization. | ” |
moppenheim.com.
| External audio | |
|---|---|
 The in-depth interview with Sue Gardner broadcast by ABC on 15 February 2013 | |
| Shorter ABC interview broadcast on 13 February 2013 |
Sue Gardner's visit to Australia sparked a number of interviews in the Australian press. An interview published in The Daily Telegraph on 12 February 2013, titled "Data plans 'unnerving': Wikipedia boss", saw Gardner comment on Australian plans to store personal internet and telephone data.
The planned measure, intended to assist crime prevention, would involve internet service providers and mobile phone firms storing customer usage data for up to two years. Gardner commented:
| “ | The ability to store massive amounts of data and retain it for long periods of time ... is unnerving. ... It could be sold. It could be used for commercial purposes. We haven't yet figured out as a society how to use that information well and be responsible custodians of it, and that's really unnerving." | ” |
Voicing concerns about efforts to introduce government regulation of the internet, Gardner recalled the 2012 blackout of the English Wikipedia, saying: "Would I support them in doing it again? I would. I'm not sure we'd ever do it again, but I'd certainly be open to doing it again."
Gardner also discussed the deletion discussion concerning the Wikipedia article about the death of Melbourne ABC employee Jill Meagher (see Signpost coverage). An Australian female librarian had mentioned to her the possibility that male bias might have led to the article's being proposed for deletion, as "she felt that men were more likely to say that it was not a notable event. [She thought] there was a gender factor, which is really interesting."
Another interview appeared on ABC News on 13 February, under the headline "Wikipedia flush with funds, short on volunteers". Gardner discussed the financial health of the Wikimedia Foundation, which now had annual takings of $40 million—up from around 1 million in 2007—and a healthy cash surplus. She also touched on the editor decline:
| “ | We don't know how serious of a concern that should be. There's a school of thought which suggests that after you've written the article about Saturn and accounting and France, that you don't need as many editors as you used to—once you have a solid base of articles inside Wikipedia, really at that point you're just making small improvements and you're just keeping things up to date. I don't know if that's true or not—when I read Wikipedia I find lots missing and I think that there's lots of new material that wants to be added to Wikipedia that's not there yet. | ” |
The interview further covered Wikipedia's competition, third-world expansion, and how the availability of information online is changing the way people think.
An almost hour-long interview with Gardner, recorded in front of a live audience at the State Library of Queensland, was broadcast by the ABC on 15 February 2013, as part of the series "Conversations with Richard Fidler". Among the topics discussed in this in-depth interview were Wikipedia's origins, reliability and mission, its donor structure, its contributor demographics and the gender gap and their effect on Wikipedia content, the lack of editorial control of Wikipedia content by the foundation, contributor anonymity, censorship and handling of controversial content, the editor decline and the visual editor, as well as Gardner's personal background.
Two featured articles were promoted this week:
Nine featured lists were promoted this week:
Thirteen featured pictures were promoted this week:
