Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-03-11/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-03-11/Traffic report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-03-11/In the media
The Wikimedia Foundation this week aborted a plan that would have seen version 5 of the Article Feedback tool (AFTv5) rolled out to all English Wikipedia articles (Editor-Engagement mailing list). As a result of fairly damning community feedback (see previous Signpost coverage), the extension, which adds a box to the bottom of articles asking for comments, will now only appear when the article has been added to a certain category. According to a revised release plan, the tool will continue to receive updates, though the focus will be on making it available to other wikis.
Together with last month's "undeployment" of the Moodbar extension and its associated Feedback dashboard, the move marks the end of the line for two of 2011's bigger projects. "As an experiment, Moodbar was a fair success", wrote the WMF's Brandon Harris on 6 February, "but we have come to the conclusion that it will require a fair chunk of development work (on the Feedback Dashboard side) to make it fully usable as a mechanism for new user engagement... [which will only now be as] part of the upcoming Flow initiative".
Despite the suggestion of a future revival of the Moodbar at a later date, the outcomes can only be demoralising from a developer standpoint: the Article Feedback tool was ultimately rejected despite an incredibly energetic community engagement campaign, and the Moodbar simply never took off, despite filling an even more obvious need. It would be tempting, then, to think that the English Wikipedia community rejects those tools that are seen to create burdens and embraces those that are seen to empower (the VisualEditor, Lua, Wikidata). However, the success of the Teahouse points to the dangers of drawing overhasty conclusions on this point. In any case, with AFTv5 almost entirely switched off, there will be much for WMF team leaders to ponder over the coming weeks.
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In late September, the Signpost published an independent analysis of code review times, an analysis it repeated in November. To the 23,900 changesets analysed the first time and 9,000 added in the revised edition, a further 20,000 have since been added. Across those 51,380 changesets, developers (human and bot) have contributed some 73,000 patchsets and 167,000 reviews. This report is designed to supersede the preceding analysis, bringing the analysis up-to-date in time for the first anniversary of the Git switchover. The methodology remains the same, though the list of WMF deployed extensions has been updated and changing Gerrit practice has required a slight revision to some figures; interested users should consult the preceding reports. As with all data, the possibility for error is always present, though the figures presented are robust at the margins.
The undeniable conclusion is that code review times have stabilised at a good but far from perfect equilibrium. The headline figure – median review time for a proposed change to WMF-deployed code – only crept up slightly after October's low of 2 hours, 20 minutes, reaching 3 hours, 29 minutes in January. Over the same period, the 75th percentile was unchanged at approximately 22 hours. Early indications for February suggest no great shift. Fears expressed a year ago that code review would grind to a halt once a pre-review system was brought in appear, then, to be unfounded, at least in aggregate terms.
Unfortunately, however, the composition of those aggregate times is also stable: staff get their patches reviewed 2 to 3 times quicker than volunteers (illustrated right). Even if staff write smaller patches – and there is no particular reason to think that they do – that multiple seems stubbornly high. All of the top five most prolific all-time first-reviewers for core code are staff; between them, they have provided 40% of the first-reviews over the last 12 months, though that figure is tracking downwards at a healthy rate. In total, staff have provided ~70% of first reviews for core code – also tracking downwards – a percentage which rises to ~80% if WMF-deployed extensions are also included (the all-time top 19 reviewers for such extensions all being staff). Thus, staff still do more of the reviewing and get their own code reviewed quicker: but at least more staff are now becoming proficient reviewers.
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/2013-03-11/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-03-11/Opinion
During March, three of the Wikimedia Foundation's grantmaking schemes on Meta will reach important crossroads; these will shape how both the editing communities and Wikimedia institutions handle the distribution of donors' money across the movement.
The volunteer-driven Finance Dissemination Committee (FDC) will be conducting its open-community review of chapter requests worth US$1.2 million, until the end of this month. The WMF had allocated $2.6 million for this round, so the remaining unspent funds (at least $1.4 million) will be moved to the Foundation's "rainy day" fund, independent of the actual recommendations of the committee to the WMF board.
The largest request in this second FDC round has been submitted by Wikimédia France, which has requested $747k after it obtained only about 10% of its previous request of $961k due to acknowledged management problems. A main theme will be the further development of the organization's track record of outreach in the French-speaking world, through the build-up of staff aiding international Wikimedia groups. The discussion on Meta currently centers around organizational changes like the rationales behind the planned increase from 5 to 15 paid employees.
Wikimedia Norway has requested $236k to fund a largely GLAM and institutional outreach-focused plan. To back up these programs, the chapter proposes to hire its first two paid staff and to set up an office in the nation's capital, Oslo. To date, a main topic in the discussion of the application is the amount of money the organization plans to spend on its first employees (huge salaries).
Wikimedia Hong Kong is the first Eastern Asian chapter to submit proposals to the FDC. The chapter requested roughly $212k to fund its first non-project-based annual plan. The organization proposes to hire paid full-time staff for the first time, and is requesting assistance to handle this year's Wikimania, which is partially funded by a separate $42K grant by the WMF. Both topics are debated on the related talk page.
Wikimedia Czech Republic submitted a request to fund $14k for an office in the nation's capital, Prague, travel grants for volunteers, and a person to take care of paperwork. The office plan and how it fits into the strategic alignment are the main topics of conversations on the talk page.
The IEG, a scheme designed to empower individual and small groups of volunteers to tackle large and time-consuming structural community problems, is getting off the ground in March. The WMF published aggregated results in early March, in which the committee examined a wide thematic range of applications. The ideas ranged from $200 for a Chinese social media account to increase the visibility of Wikimedia in China, to a community-driven $30k outreach effort in Brazil. In this pilot phase, the IEG can distribute up to $100K for seven slots. The WMF will announce its decisions by end of this month, based on both the community review and committee evaluation.
The third scheme currently underway on Meta is an experiment called flow funding (FF). The idea is to empower selected volunteers—called flow funders—to decide decentralized funding requests by other volunteers of up to $2K, to bundle them, and to submit them to the WMF. While having a low global profile to date, the scheme's potential for COI, hands-on methods, and alleged risks of nepotism was the subject of considerable debate on the German Wikipedia. (German-speakers are used to a wide range of very well-financed but more bureaucratic funding opportunities by the three related chapters, in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, on top of the global schemes provided by the WMF on Meta.) The experiment runs until mid-2013; the English Wikipedia component is conducted by West.andrew.
Both the IEG and FF pilots and the FDC scheme will be re-evaluated after their current rounds; the ability to respond to community input in the grantmaking processes will be a key design component. The FDC community-review period runs until end of March, while the IEG projects will enter their next public stage in early April. FF can be perused case by case on the editing projects themselves. The two experimental schemes will not only have to perform well as such but will need to develop profiles distinctive from the two other WMF schemes for small and medium-sized requests, participation grants and the GAC-advised Wikimedia grants program.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-03-11/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-03-11/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-03-11/In focus
There has been little to report from the Arbitration Committee since the December elections, but the case schedule is now starting to pick up speed. There are three open cases. A final decision has been given in the Doncram case.
Shortly before the Signpost was published, arbitrator Hersfold published his resignation on the Arbitrator's noticeboard, saying in part:
| “ | It has been an honor serving with my fellow Arbitrators, the Functionaries, and the ArbCom Clerks, and I wish them all the best of luck. I also hope that they receive greater support from the community at large, so that they may better exercise the trust the community has placed in them for the good of the project as a whole; please remember that we are all volunteers working towards the same purpose, and while disagreements may arise, there is always time to stand back and attempt to understand one another. | ” |
Hersfold elaborated on his reasons for resigning on his talk page, stating that the recent outings of several editors led him to believe that there was an "increased risk of being harassed and outed [for administrators, and] it seems likely that that net will expand to include one or more arbitrators before too much longer, if action is not taken to stop it. I value my privacy and personal safety, and have an obligation to protect my family as well." This is Hersfold's second resignation from the committee, as he also resigned in May 2010.
This case, brought by SarekOfVulcan, involved a user-created script for creating new articles from an external database, subsequent interactions over the created article stubs, and challenges to content added from other databases by other users. The script, created for the National Register of Historic Places WikiProject, uses a database of National Register properties from the National Park Service to generate an infobox and categories for the start of an article.
Arbitrators passed three findings of fact regarding Doncram. 1) Doncram has been "uncivil", has "repeatedly made accusations of harassment or misbehavior", and has "continued to make such statements after dispute resolution fora have concluded otherwise". 2) Doncram has a history of repeatedly creating articles with notability issues. 3) Doncram has move-warred regarding titles. Two proposed remedies regarding Doncram were passed: that he be "placed under a general probation" and that he be "restricted from creating new pages" in article space.
The committee passed a proposed finding of fact regarding SarekOfVulcan: that "SarekOfVulcan has admitted to edit warring with Doncram in order to try to have Doncram blocked for an extended period of time." A proposed remedy was also passed regarding SarekOfVulcan: "For edit warring with Doncram, SarekOfVulcan is strongly admonished to behave with the level of professionalism expected of an administrator." Arbitrators voted 9–5 to desysop SarekOfVulcan, but the motion failed by one vote and the admonishment remedy was passed instead.
A proposal for an interaction ban between SarekOfVulcan and Doncram was enacted. "The question of how substantive the content of a stub must be before it can legitimately be introduced to the mainspace" was remanded to the community.
This case, brought by Mark Arsten, was opened over a dispute over transgenderism topics that began off-wiki. The evidence phase was scheduled to close March 7, 2013, with a proposed decision due to be posted by March 21.
This case, brought by Fram, involves allegations of an ongoing pattern of copyright violations in uploaded files, and in links to copyright-violating off-wiki pages. The case is complicated by the fact that a portion of the evidence has been deleted and can only be viewed by administrators. To address this, a select number of files were restored, with the contents visible via a template, for the duration of the case. A decision was scheduled for March 9, 2013.
This case was brought to the Committee by KillerChihuahua, who alleges the discussion over this American political group has degenerated into incivility. Evidence for the case is due by March 20, 2013, and a decision is scheduled for April 3, 2013.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-03-11/Humour
